Hitler's Hangman (30 page)

their relations with the guards, was based on a system of graded punish-

ment for various offences, which ranged from denial of food to execution.

To dehumanize relations with prisoners, the guards’ behaviour was regu-

lated to maintain distance and eliminate human contact. The first of these

camps was Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin. In the summer of 1937

another camp, Buchenwald near Weimar, was built. It was followed in

May 1938 by Flossenbürg in Bavaria and then, in August – after the

Anschluss of Austria – by the Mauthausen concentration camp east of the

city of Linz. Neuengamme near Hamburg followed in December 1938

and the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, some 90 kilometres north of

Berlin, opened in May 1939.96

Unlike Himmler, who regularly visited the concentration camps,

Heydrich was rarely seen there. The only proven visit by Heydrich to

Dachau, for example, occurred in the late summer of 1938, when he met

another senior SS officer, the future Higher SS and Police Leader in the

occupied Soviet Union, Hans-Adolf Prützmann, for dinner in the camp.

The rarity of Heydrich’s concentration camp visits was at least partially

due to the fact that his power ended at the camp gates. While he could

decide who was interned and who was released, Himmler had in 1934

entrusted the supervision of camp life throughout the Reich to Theodor

Eicke, with whom Heydrich did not get on.97 This division of labour was

not only an essential part of Himmler’s leadership style – his conscious

decision to spread responsibility among several trusted SS officers – but

also a radicalizing factor in the escalating Nazi policies of persecution.

Heydrich, Eicke and other senior SS officers understandably sought to

please both Himmler and Hitler, and they increasingly discovered that the

best way to do so was through initiative and radicalism.

A Life of Privilege

While the Nazi police state was taking shape, Heydrich’s financial situa-

tion continued to improve to the extent that the family was able to afford

two houses: a family home in Berlin and a holiday house on Lina’s native

110

HITLER’S HANGMAN

island of Fehmarn. The 42,000 Reichsmarks required to build the house

in traditional North German style with a thatched roof and half-timbered

frame were provided through a private loan from Willy Sachs, a flam-

boyant industrial magnate with honorary SS membership and – just like

the architect, Gustav Rall – a personal friend of the Heydrich family.98

Construction work began in the spring of 1935, and in June that year the

Heydrichs celebrated the building’s completion in the presence of

Himmler and other SS friends and colleagues. Over the following years,

the Heydrichs were to spend almost all their summer holidays there.

In addition, a hunting tenancy was obtained in 1934, first at Parlow in

the Schorfheide forest north-east of Berlin in immediate proximity to

Hermann Göring’s country estate Karinhall; then, from 1936, in Stolpshof,

near Nauen in Brandenburg, where the SS maintained a small

concentration camp from which Heydrich recruited slave labourers for the

renovation of his hunting lodge.99

In February 1937, the Heydrichs left their rented Südende apart-

ment and purchased a 700-square-metre property for a family home in

Augustastrasse, not far from the picturesque shores of the Schlachtensee.

The new family home, in Lina Heydrich’s post-war description no more

than an ‘enlarged settlement house’, offered nine rooms over three floors,

with two of the rooms reserved for domestic servants. According to Albert

Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect, Heydrich’s house reflected his some-

what paranoid mindset, being equipped like a fortress with police guards

and alarm bells in every room. In the garden, Lina set up a playground for

the children and built a henhouse for animal cultivation.100

The house in Schlachtensee cost a further 49,000 Reichsmarks, 10,000

of which were were provided by Himmler’s ‘Special Fund Reich Leader

SS’. Despite the two private ‘loans’ from Sachs and Himmler (neither of

which was ever to be repaid), the Heydrichs were obviously able to pay

interest and instalments for a mortagage of 91,000 Reichsmarks and to

employ two domestic servants on a permanent basis.101

According to Heydrich’s 1936 tax declaration, he had earned 8,400

Reichsmarks the previous year, of which 1,200 RM could be offset as

wages for domestic servants of a high state official. In addition, he received

a 12,000 RM allowance as head of the Gestapo. The following year, his

base income rose to 9,000 RM – a small fortune when compared to the

average income of 2,000 Reichsmarks earned by a middle-ranked Gestapo

officer. By 1937, his income totalled 15,7279.59 RM.102 That Reinhard’s

salary was barely ‘sufficient to live on’, as Lina maintained after the war,

was therefore quite a remarkable exaggeration. The financial worries of

the first years of marriage, the permanent ‘relocation from rental accom-

modation to rental accommodation’ continually lamented by Lina, had

F I G H T I N G T H E E N E M I E S O F T H E R E I C H

111

clearly been overcome. And Heydrich’s salary continued to rise: in 1938,

he earned the considerable income of 17,371.53 RM, while simultane-

ously reducing the salary of his two domestic servants to a total of

550 RM per annum.103

The Heydrichs also benefited from Reinhard’s position in other ways.

During the Olympic Summer Games in 1936, for example, the family

received free box seats in the Olympic Stadium. They also enjoyed privi-

leged treatment during the Winter Games that had commenced in

Garmisch-Partenkirchen on 6 February 1936. A fleet of cars and drivers

was at Heydrich’s disposal, as well as a plane – during the war, indeed, two

planes. In addition to this, as of April 1934, Heydrich was a Prussian privy

counsellor, and from March 1936 a member of the Reichstag, which

brought with it an extra 6,000 RM a year.104

In the summer of 1937, the Heydrichs, without their children, went on

a harmonious holiday in the Mediterranean together. It was a sort of

delayed honeymoon and they spent it on a cruise ship, the
Milwaukee
,

which brought them to Italy, Greece, Tripoli, Tunisia and Carthage. All in

all, the Heydrichs were able to cultivate a lifestyle appropriate to their

elevated position within the political elite of the Third Reich.105

Their social relations mirrored this position. The Himmlers were

frequent guests at the Heydrich home, even though Lina and Margarete

Himmler did not get on. Much to Himmler’s and Heydrich’s dismay, the

two women could not stand each other. Their always tense relationship

repeatedly threatened to escalate throughout the 1930s as Margarete

Himmler energetically used her powers as the wife of the Reich Leader

SS, repeatedly trying to advise Lina on how to be a ‘proper’ Nazi wife.

Every Wednesday, she invited the wives of the higher SS leaders for after-

noon coffee in her house in Berlin Dahlem and made it very clear that she

would take offence if the invitation was declined. In response, Lina delib-

erately scheduled her gym classes for the wives of senior SS officers for the

same day. According to Frieda Wolff, the wife of Himmler’s personal

adjutant, Margarete even urged her husband to pressurize Heydrich into

a divorce, an idea Himmler rejected.106

Heydrich’s ascent in the Nazi hierarchy also meant that he was

frequently invited to official receptions in the Reich Chancellery, where he

first came into direct contact with Hitler. However, Heydrich’s relation-

ship with Hitler was never as close and personal as that with Himmler: as

a Nazi official of the second tier, Heydrich had no right to report directly

to Hitler prior to his appointment as acting Reich Protector in 1941 – a

right reserved for cabinet ministers and the influential Regional Party

Leaders or Gauleiters. Personal encounters prior to the outbreak of the

Second World War were thus confined to large official receptions in

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Berlin and Munich. Later, during the war, Heydrich met with Hitler at

his Bavarian mountain retreat, the Berghof, and his military headquarters

in East Prussia, the Wolf ’s Lair. In her memoirs, Lina recalled her first

encounter with Hitler during a birthday reception in Berlin. Hitler stood

in the reception hall greeting his guests and, when the Heydrichs

presented themselves, he stretched out both hands and said: ‘What a

beautiful couple. I am most impressed!’107 It was not only Heydrich’s

Aryan appearance that impressed Hitler, but also his unshakeable loyalty,

proven during the Röhm putsch of 1934, and his untiring activism in

securing the Nazi regime from all political enemies. When Hitler

famously called Heydrich ‘one of the best National Socialists’ and ‘one of

the greatest opponents of all enemies of the Reich’ at his funeral in June

1942 it was no idle compliment. By the late 1930s Hitler would believe

enough in Heydrich’s loyalty and ‘talents’ to hand him responsibility for

the politically sensitive issue closest to his heart: the war against the Jews.

Heydrich and Hitler rarely interacted on a social level, but their ‘profes-

sional’ relationship was close. It was marked both by Heydrich’s uncom-

promising loyalty towards his Führer and by Hitler’s reciprocal trust in

Heydrich’s ability to implement the most radical initiatives of the Nazi

regime’s increasingly violent policies.

In 1937 Wilhelm Canaris and his family moved to Berlin-Schlachtensee

and again became the direct neighbours of the Heydrichs. Reinhard and

Erika Canaris revived their string quartet, and the families invited each

other to evening meals, as well as taking horse rides together in the

Grunewald forest. The professional disputes between Canaris and

Heydrich during the negotations over the Ten Commandments of 1935

do not seem to have damaged their otherwise friendly relationship.108

The seemingly harmonious family life, captured in several photographs

taken in the 1930s was, however, deceptive. Heydrich confided to Karl

Wolff, Himmler’s personal adjutant, that Lina’s constant complaints about

his absences and her unfounded suspicions concerning his infidelity were

annoying him.109 Lina, too, indicated after the war that her marriage was

in deep crisis in the later 1930s. As a result of her husband’s constant

absences, she practically lived alone with her children, repeatedly accusing

her husband of having affairs with other women. According to some post-

war testimonies, Heydrich indeed sought diversion from his domestic

problems in extramarital affairs. Lina apparently knew about his sexual

adventures, maintaining after the war that there were always ‘other women

in my marriage’ and that her husband was keen on ‘anything in a skirt’.110

Whether or not Heydrich accompanied the young head of the SD’s

department IVE (domestic espionage) chief Walter Schellenberg on

frequent all-night forays through Berlin bars and brothels such as the

F I G H T I N G T H E E N E M I E S O F T H E R E I C H

113

SS-run Salon Kitty in Berlin, as Schellenberg maintained after 1945, is

impossible to establish.111 What is certain, however, is that the Heydrich

marriage after 1937 was in severe trouble, partly because of Heydrich’s

constant and often unexplained absences, and partly because of his suspi-

cion that Lina’s friendship with Schellenberg was more than just platonic.

It was not the first or last time that such rumours emerged, and, apart

from Schellenberg, Lina Heydrich is said to have had affairs with the Nazi

painter Wolfgang Willrich and with Werner Best’s successor in the

RSHA, Wilhelm Albert.112

Schellenberg and Lina had become close, if not intimate, friends

shortly after they first met at a state function in 1935. Lina always main-

tained that she merely used the handsome and recently divorced

Schellenberg to arouse her husband’s jealousy. But there is some reason to

doubt her version of events. According to Schellenberg, a drunken evening

with Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller and Heydrich took a dramatic turn

when the latter told Schellenberg that his drink had been poisoned. Only

after a confession concerning the nature of his relationship with Lina did

Heydrich produce an antidote. In order to avoid further tensions with his

boss, Schellenberg stopped seeing Lina altogether.113

Despite, or perhaps because of, these marital problems, Lina gave birth

to their third child and first daughter, Silke, on Easter Sunday 1939. She

said after the war that Reinhard ‘idolized’ his little daughter from the day