and Czech mass demonstrations the following month, the Nazi grip on
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Czech society began to tighten. The predicament of Jews, in particular,
deteriorated rapidly. Their persecution had begun immediately after the
German invasion, when the Nuremberg Laws were applied to Protectorate
Jews. Until September 1939 Czech Jews had still been able to emigrate,
but the outbreak of war closed all doors for Jewish émigrés. More repres-
sive laws followed in a process that was overseen by Heydrich’s Jewish
expert in Prague, Adolf Eichmann: as of 1940 Jewish identification cards
were stamped with a ‘J’; and in late August 1941 Neurath issued an order
that from 1 September that year onwards all Jews in the Protectorate over
the age of six had to wear a yellow star. Mirroring regulations introduced
earlier in the General Government, the star was to be sewn on the left
front of their clothing. Only Jews in privileged mixed marriages were
exempt.7
Alterations to German occupation policy affected the rest of society, too.
As soon as the war began, newspapers and posters across the Protectorate
announced that any act of resistance would result in a death sentence. In
November 1939, following a number of violent demonstrations in Prague
and other cities, the Nazis responded with the arrest of student protesters
and the closure of Czech universities, initially for a period of three years.
The wave of arrests swept up thousands of intellectuals, priests, Communists
Social Democrats and Jewish community leaders.8
The second year of the Nazi occupation thus constituted a radical break
from the comparatively lenient regime of 1939. It also marked a turning
point for the Czech resistance. Previously, resistance had been highly
fragmented. Apart from the Communist underground composed of the
remnants of the KSČ (the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia), three
democratic resistance groups formed shortly after the German invasion:
the Political Centre (Politické Ústředí or PÚ), the Committee of the
Petition ‘We Remain Faithful!’ (Petićní výbor ‘Vĕrni zůstaneme!’ or
PVVZ), and the Nation’s Defence (Obrana národa or ON). In addition,
sizeable sports associations such as the Sokol served as a reservoir for
recruitment into the underground resistance.9 Under the pressure gener-
ated by the mass arrests in the autumn of 1939 and the spring of 1940,
the three major non-Communist resistance organisations – PÚ, PVVZ
and ON – consolidated their ranks under the Central Leadership of
Home Resistance (Ústřední vedení odboje domácího or ÚVOD), which
served as the principal clandestine intermediary between the London-
based Czechoslovak government-in-exile and the resistance within the
Protectorate.10
It was only after the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June
1941 that resistance activities in the Protectorate, as in many other coun-
tries under Nazi rule, began to develop on a noticeable scale, as Neurath
R E I C H P R OT E C TO R
221
had to admit in a report to Hitler.11 In early September, resistance activi-
ties in the Protectorate culminated in a number of strikes and ‘work
slowly’ campaigns that triggered an average fall of 18 per cent in the
Protectorate’s industrial production. Telephone wires across Bohemia and
Moravia were cut, railway carriages set on fire, and the resistance organ-
ized a successful one-week boycott of the German-controlled Protectorate
press. Simultaneously, the number of Communist underground leaflets
distributed across the Protectorate rose dramatically from 377 in June
1941 to 3,797 in July, peaking at 10,727 in October.12
The leaflet campaign showed that the Communist resistance, most
adept at underground work, had overcome the involuntary paralysis
induced by the Hitler–Stalin Pact of August 1939. As a wave of strikes,
sabotage actions and assassinations of German military personnel swept
across various occupied countries in the late summer and autumn of 1941,
Hitler was convinced that only draconian punishment would prevent
opposition to German rule from spreading further. On 16 September he
called for ‘the most drastic means’ to be employed against any provocation,
while Keitel demanded that fifty to a hundred Communist hostages be
shot for every German soldier killed by partisans. Although military
commanders in Serbia, France, Belgium and Norway responded with
mass arrests, the shooting of hostages and other reprisals, acts of resistance
nonetheless continued on a worrying scale.13
From the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941,
Heydrich had been one of the most outspoken advocates of a ‘tough’
response to the challenge posed by indigenous resistance, ordering local
Sipo commanders to use ‘intensified interrogation methods’ (that is,
torture) to obtain information about ‘wire-pullers’. Simultaneously, he
issued an order that ‘hostile Czechs and Poles as well as Communists and
other scumbags must be transferred to a concentration camp for longer
periods of time’. In early September 1941, Heydrich flew to Norway,
where a strike wave had reached alarming proportions. He met with Reich
Commissioner Terboven, who shortly afterwards – on 10 September –
took his advice and imposed martial law in Oslo.14
In the Netherlands the commander of the Security Police, Wilhelm
Harster, also acted on Heydrich’s orders and undertook mass arrests
following the German attack on the Soviet Union. In September, he had
the conservative former Dutch Prime Minister Hendrikus Colijn arrested
on a charge of espionage.15 Also in September, Heydrich ordered the
arrest and shooting of members of the Ukrainian Organization of
Nationalists, whom, despite their firmly anti-Bolshevik stance, he consid-
ered to be a potential source of unrest in the rear of the rapidly advancing
Wehrmacht.16
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
The noticeable increase in resistance activities confirmed Heydrich’s
belief that the time was ripe for a more comprehensive assertion of SS
authority in the running of German-controlled Europe. On 18 September,
the same day that he and Himmler embarked on a three-day inspection
tour of the conquered Baltic territories, he submitted a far-reaching
proposal to Lammers, reminding him ‘that the securing of the Reich, the
protection of its frontiers . . . the combating of espionage and political
subversion, as well as the struggle against international crime’ were of
‘decisive importance’. For this reason, he included a draft Führer order
granting the SS further police competences in the General Government
and the Protectorate, as well as in the territories of Western Europe under
civil administration (Lorraine, Alsace, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and
Norway). The SS and police should henceforth assume responsibility for
all matters of ‘internal political security’ within the Nazi Empire, not
merely for matters of ‘police security’.17
Although the proposal was never put to Hitler for fear of provoking
severe conflict between the SS, Rosenberg and the heads of the civil and
military administrations in the occupied territories, it offers a revealing
glimpse into Heydrich’s strategic thinking. From very early on in his SS
career, Heydrich had realized that the best way of increasing his personal
powers and those of the SS more general y was to paint an overly dramatic
picture of the strength of opposition with which Nazism was confronted.
In 1932, he had deliberately used the exaggerated notion of a Nazi move-
ment undermined by spies and traitors to build up his SD; in the mid-
1930s, when the Communist movement in Germany was largely
suppressed, he developed the idea of largely invisible enemies of Nazism
whose power could be broken only by a significant SS police formation
with extra-legal means. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he
instrumentalized the widespread fear of partisans to extend continuously
his brief of fighting an il usive network of broadly defined enemies.
Now that concern about the intensification of resistance in the occupied
territories was growing within the Nazi leadership and among senior
military figures, he used the same argument: only the SS had the experi-
ence and determination to fight resistance activities effectively before they
could escalate on a truly threatening scale. Heydrich’s track-record in
combating the enemies of the Reich both at home and abroad undoubt-
edly contributed to the decision of Martin Bormann, a party hardliner
who had emerged as head of the Party Chancel ery after Rudolf Hess’s
flight to Scotland in May 1941, to recommend him to the Führer as an
appropriate candidate to serve as acting Reich Protector in Bohemia and
Moravia where strikes and ‘work slowly’ campaigns had begun to under-
mine the German war effort.
R E I C H P R OT E C TO R
223
Heydrich was well informed about the deteriorating situation in the
Protectorate through the regular reports he received from the Gestapo
and SD offices in Bohemia and Moravia. The information gathered by his
agents and transmitted to Berlin, where it was summarized and collated
for the Nazi leadership, helped to create the impression that Neurath was
no longer in control of the situation. Although there is no hard evidence
to suggest that Heydrich actively pursued Neurath’s replacement and his
own nomination as Reich Protector, he certainly pressed for a consider-
able extension of SS responsibilities in the Protectorate, thus, in effect,
undermining Neurath’s position.18
Concerned about the declining productivity of the Czech armaments
industry and the resistance activities outlined in the SD reports, Hitler
decided to replace Neurath in late September 1941. On Bormann’s
recommendation, the Führer ordered Neurath, the Higher SS and Police
Leader in the Protectorate, Karl Hermann Frank, and Heydrich to join
him at his military headquarters, the Wolf ’s Lair near Rastenburg in East
Prussia. Here he disclosed his decision that Neurath would be sent on
indefinite ‘sick leave’ and Heydrich would be dispatched to Prague in his
stead. Hitler’s decision implied more than an exchange of personnel: it
reflected his determination to replace Neurath’s restraint and ‘unsuc-
cessful’ occupation policy in the Protectorate with a campaign of terror.19
The second, and in many ways related, reason for Heydrich’s appoint-
ment was Hitler’s reversal on the issue of Jewish deportations from the
Reich. As late as mid-August 1941, he had made it clear that these depor-
tations could take place only after the defeat of the Soviet Union.
However, from the second week of September, and presumably encour-
aged by major Wehrmacht breakthroughs on the Eastern Front that
would soon lead to the encirclement of Leningrad and the fall of Kiev, the
Führer was prepared to revise his decision.20
After Hitler had turned down Heydrich’s proposal for the complete
deportation of Jews from the Reich and the Protectorate in August, the
RSHA began to work on a proposal for a partial evacuation during the
war – a wave of deportations that would primarily affect those Jews living
in the larger cities.21 Such a proposal was more agreeable to Hitler in mid-
September, when military advances on the Russian front made the east-
ward deportations possible and when increasing pressure from the Reich’s
Gauleiters to turn their fiefdom’s into ‘Jew free’ zones, thus easing the
housing problem created by Allied bombings of German cities, also made
deportations politically desirable. On 18 September Himmler informed
Arthur Greiser in the Warthegau that it was Hitler’s expressed wish ‘that
the Old Reich and the Protectorate be emptied and freed of Jews from
west to east as quickly as possible’. As a ‘first step’, Himmler continued,
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
the Jews would be deported into occupied Poland before moving them
‘further east next spring’. Some 60,000 Jews from the Old Reich and the
Protectorate would thus have to be interned in the Łódź ghetto, in the
annexed Warthegau, over the winter.22
When Heydrich met with Goebbels at the Führer headquarters on the
day of his appointment as acting Reich Protector, Goebbels expressed
similar sentiments and emphasized that ‘in the end’ the Jews of the Reich
would be ‘transported into the camps that have been erected by the
Bolsheviks. These camps were built by the Jews, so what could be more
fitting than populating them with Jews?’ Goebbels also confirmed in his
diary on the same day that the ‘Führer is of the opinion that the Jews are