Hitler's Hangman (35 page)

Hitler confident that he could go further in his expansionist policies.

After the feeble reaction of the western European powers to the remilita-

rization of the Rhineland and the annexation of Austria there seemed no

reason why the takeover of the Sudetenland should not go ahead.77

Heydrich and his staff accordingly began feverishly preparing an oper-

ation plan for the Sipo and the SD in the future occupied areas. The plan

envisaged that ‘where possible, the SD will follow directly behind the

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

invading troops and secure, analogously to its duties in the Reich, all

aspects of political life.’ In order to fulfil this task, they immediately set up

an arrest list for German emigrants and Czech ‘enemies of the state’,

notably Communists, Social Democrats, Jews, politicizing priests, sabo-

teurs and members of Otto Strasser’s Black Front – a revolutionary and

anti-capitalist splinter group formed after Strasser’s expulsion from the

Nazi Party in 1930.78

By the late summer of 1938, war between Germany and Czechoslovakia

seemed imminent and both governments initiated a general mobilization.

In September, Heydrich approved the formation of two task forces

(
Einsatzgruppen
), subdivided into eleven
Einsatzkommandos
, to be

deployed from Dresden and Vienna in order to ‘safeguard’ the newly

conquered territories by arresting those deemed politically dangerous.79

War was narrowly avoided at the end of September 1938 when – much

to the horror of most Czechs and their government under Edvard Beneš

– Britain, France and Italy agreed to Germany’s annexation of the

Sudetenland in return for Hitler’s assurances that he would go no further.

The Czechoslovak government was not consulted on the matter, but had to

capitulate to international pressure, leaving Beneš no other option but to

resign in protest.80 Simultaneously, Heydrich instructed the
Einsatzgruppen

that their brief for the arrest of ‘undesirables’ would apply only to the

Sudetenland, although future deployment in the rest of Czechoslovakia

remained a possibility.81

On 1 October, only one day after Edouard Daladier, Neville

Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler had signed the Munich

Agreement, the Wehrmacht marched across the border into Czechoslovakia

and annexed the Sudetenland, where cheering crowds of ethnic Germans

greeted the advancing troops.82 The two SS
Einsatzgruppen
, 863 men

in total, participated in the campaign as planned. Political opponents,

whose names were collected on a ‘special arrest list’, were to be detained

immediately. At the same time, Heydrich, referring to previous experi-

ences in Austria, called for ‘the strictest discipline’, allowing for ‘no harass-

ment’, ‘abuse’ or ‘unnecessary killings’. It was important that his police

units ‘act forcefully and with clear objectives’ but ‘in a decent manner’.83

Just what Heydrich meant by ‘decent’ became evident over the following

weeks, as the Gestapo and the fanatical volunteers of the Sudeten German

Freikorps arrested between 10,000 and 20,000 vaguely defined Czech

and German ‘enemies of the Reich’ and expelled numerous Czechs across

the new German border. Some 7,000 of those arrested were sent to

concentration camps in the Reich, notably to Dachau where 2,500 Czechs

and German émigrés were interned. Although the majority of the

internees were released over the coming months, Heydrich explicitly

R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R

133

excluded Communists and other radical opponents of the Nazi state from

release.84

Knowing what fate would await them under German rule, many people

fled the Sudetenland while they still could. An estimated 20,000–30,000

Jews, the vast majority of the Jewish community in the Sudetenland,

rushed to the remaining Czechoslovak territories, along with more than

160,000 Czechs and thousands of German anti-fascists.85 The fate of

those who remained showed that the others had been wise to leave: in

November 1938, the violence of the Kristallnacht pogrom spread to the

Sudetenland, and those Jews who remained were subjected to beatings

and looting of their property. By May 1939, the number of Jews in the

Sudetenland had declined to fewer than 2,000.86

The predominantly German-speaking areas of western and northern

Bohemia, northern Moravia and southern Silesia – now renamed as the

Reichsgau Sudetenland – were added to the Greater German Reich.

While the Western Allies grossly misinterpreted the Munich Agreement

as, in the famous words of Chamberlain, a chance for ‘peace for our time’,

the Nazi leadership regarded Munich as no more than a temporary

setback to their plans for invading the rest of Czechoslovakia.87 Occupying

the rest of the Czechoslovak state would provide Nazi Germany with

additional strategic bases in the north of Bohemia from which to attack

Hitler’s next victim, Poland, and would also bring major economic

resources into the Reich. Furthermore, the Czechoslovak army’s large

stocks of advanced military equipment would help alleviate bottlenecks in

German military supplies.88

The opportunity to make good the enforced compromises of the

Munich Agreement was provided by the rapid deterioration of relations

between Czechs and Slovaks over the issue of financial resources. On

14 March 1939 the Slovak parliament proclaimed the country’s inde-

pendence. Confronted with the imminent dissolution of his state, the

President of Czechoslovakia, Emil Hácha, a conservative Catholic and

former Supreme Court judge, who had become president following

Edvard Beneš’s resignation, travelled to Berlin to meet Hitler.89 Ruthlessly

bullied by the Führer and threatened with an imminent attack of German

bombers on Prague, the elderly, sick Czech President agreed to the estab-

lishment of a German protectorate over his country.90

Only two hours later, at six in the morning of 15 March, German

troops crossed the Czech border and reached Prague by nine, despite

heavy snowfalls. The Czech army, demoralized and under orders not to

interfere, remained in its barracks. On the evening of the invasion, Hitler

arrived in Prague. Heydrich was with him when the swastika was raised

over Hradschin Castle. The following morning, Ribbentrop announced on

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Prague radio a decree drafted by the State Secretary of the Ministry of the

Interior, Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, which declared that the newly conquered

Czech lands were henceforth to be known as the Reich Protectorate of

Bohemia and Moravia.91

The new leaders quickly established their rule and ensured domestic

peace, thanks to the by now well-rehearsed SS-engineered political terror

that once again aimed to eliminate existing and potential enemies while

frightening the rest of the population into submission. Heydrich once

again mobilized two
Einsatzgruppen
, which had already gathered on the

German–Czech border on 13 March, before the meeting between Hácha

and Hitler had even taken place. Immediately after the German invasion,

a curfew was imposed in Prague. As the diplomat George Kennan,

watching from the American Embassy, observed that night, ‘Prague’s

streets, usually so animated, are now completely empty and deserted.

Tomorrow, to be sure, they would fill with life again, but it would not be

the same life that had filled them before; and we were all acutely conscious

that in this case, the curfew had indeed tolled the knell of a long and

distinctly tragic day.’92

While Kennan bemoaned the death of democratic Czechoslovakia,

Heydrich’s men were already busy confiscating files in the occupied terri-

tory. Shortly thereafter, within the framework of the so-called
Aktion

Gitter
(Operation Grid), they began arresting hundreds of Communists

and German émigrés. By May they had detained a total of some 6,000

political enemies, around 1,500 of whom the Gestapo deported to

concentration camps within the Reich. It would not be until 1 September

that the Security Police’s legal status in the Protectorate of Bohemia and

Moravia was established by law. In the meantime, Heydrich’s men exer-

cised an unrestricted tyranny for nearly six months.93

By the summer of 1938, Heydrich had every reason to be confident

about the future. Not only had he set up a highly successful repression

apparatus in the previous years and assumed the leading role in the perse-

cution of Jews in Nazi Germany. The Anschluss of Austria, the annexation

of the Sudetenland and the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia had also

demonstrated his ability to master new challenges outside the territory of

the Reich. As his responsibilities increased further over the coming

months, so too would his determination to carry them out with ruthless

energy and extreme violence.

Tannenberg

Following the occupation of Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia and

Moravia, Nazi Germany began to send more conciliatory signals to

R E H E A R S A L S F O R W A R

135

London, but behind the rhetoric of peace, German preparations for war

accelerated. The formerly German Baltic town of Danzig – a free city

under international administration since the conclusion of the 1919

Paris Peace accords – had been a bone of German–Polish contention

ever since, and bilateral relations deteriorated further in the late 1930s.

As intended, the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia had bolstered

Germany’s military capabilities and provided the Wehrmacht with impor-

tant military bases for the planned attack on Poland. Furthermore, by

the last week of August, the signing of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, with its

secret protocol dividing Eastern Europe into German and Soviet spheres

of influence, smoothed the way for the Nazi invasion of western Poland.

Despite his militant anti-Communism, Heydrich welcomed the pact,

because he wrongly believed that it would now be impossible for Britain

to enter into a conflict with Nazi Germany without also having to

declare war on the Soviet Union, which would occupy the eastern half of

Poland.94

Heydrich’s Gestapo and SD had prepared for war against Poland since

the spring of 1939. In early May, Heydrich received orders from Hitler via

Himmler for his forthcoming tasks in Poland. The Security Police would

‘neutralize’ centres of potential resistance and destroy those classes of

society thought to be carriers of Polish nationalism. In the SD Main

Office, a special desk was set up to process all matters relating to

‘Germandom in Poland’ and to establish a card index carrying the names

of those who should be targeted once war broke out.95 The card index was

used to compile a ‘special arrest list’, which carried the names of some

61,000 Poles to be arrested or killed immediately. It included the names

of Poles who had fought in one way or another against ethnic German

Poles during the troubles in Upper Silesia after the First World War,

nationalist politicians, Communists, Freemasons, Jews and leading

Catholic clerics. Heydrich insisted on being personally informed of new

developments on a daily basis.96

The codename for the operation was Tannenberg – a name that curi-

ously invoked memories of both the fifteenth-century defeat of the

Teutonic Knights at the hands of Polish and Lithuanian troops and the

German victory over Russian armies in the Battle of Tannenberg in

August 1914. Rather than celebrating the Teutonic Knights’ defeat, the

name reflected a romanticized reading of the medieval past: inspired by a

mythologised past, the Nazis saw themselves
re
conquering land that the

German knights had won, settled and lost many centuries before. Only

this time their motivation would be guided not by Christian missionary

zeal but by an eminently modern idea: the commitment to the ‘science’

of race.97

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Exhausted by his exertions in the preceding month, Heydrich took a

holiday and headed for Fehmarn. Private film footage from these days

shows a seemingly untroubled Heydrich relaxing by playing sports and

gardening.98 While he was enjoying the fresh air of the Baltic Sea, his

deputy in Berlin, Werner Best, selected the leaders of the individual

Einsatzkommandos
from the ranks of the Security Police and the SD.99

Before Heydrich left for his holiday, he had convened a meeting in his