Czech and German police organizations guarded railway lines. Heydrich
made it perfectly clear to the Protectorate government that he would
respond ‘drastically’ to all future acts of sabotage against railway lines or
telecommunications facilities and that he would make the entire popula-
tion of the affected area ‘liable with their heads’.39
The arrests which fol owed Heydrich’s arrival did not spare the
Protectorate government, long regarded by the Gestapo as a nest of traitors
and spies for the British. Heydrich’s lesson to the Czechs began at the top
with the arrest of the Prime Minister, Alois Eliáš, who had indeed served
as ÚVOD’s principal contact in the Protectorate government. Heydrich
had known of Eliáš’s communications with the underground movement for
some time, but Hitler had decided that ‘the reckoning with the resistance
movement and the compromised Czech leaders’ would have to wait until
after Germany’s immininent victory in the war against the Soviet Union.40
Eliáš’s arrest was one of the most visible indicators of a radical reversal
of German occupation policy under Heydrich. The German People’s
Court, hastily summoned from Berlin to Prague, wasted little time in
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229
sentencing him and Prague’s mayor, Otakar Klapka, to death. Heydrich
proudly reported to Bormann that he had staged a ‘fair’ trial and had
forced Eliáš to sign a declaration condemning resistance activities. More
importantly, Eliáš’s declaration, published on the front pages of the
collaborationist press throughout the Protectorate, culminated in an
unlikely rejection of Czech claims to an independent state and nation-
hood: ‘I think it is impossible for political, economic, and social reasons
that our small people of 7½ million, surrounded by German living space,
will ever be able to exist as an independent state.’41
After the trial, president Hácha pleaded with Heydrich to spare Eliáš’s
life. Heydrich rejected this request and repeatedly urged Hitler to have
Eliáš executed as soon as possible. Hitler decided otherwise: for the time
being, Eliáš was to remain in prison as a hostage in order to keep Hácha
and the rest of the Czech government under control.42 With ÚVOD’s
leaders arrested and Eliáš a hostage, Hácha had two options: to resign in
protest or to remain in office, thereby acknowledging Heydrich’s terror
regime as legitimate. On the day of Eliáš’s arrest, Hácha prepared a letter
of resignation. Heydrich had anticipated Hácha’s move and met with him
in the afternoon of 28 September. Fearing that Hácha’s resignation would
further encourage the resistance, Heydrich professed to regret the repres-
sive measures he had been forced to introduce ‘with a bleeding heart’ and
assured the elderly President that Czech autonomy would remain
untouched.43 Hácha stayed in office and embarked on a policy of collabo-
ration designed to spare the Czech people further bloodshed. Driven by
the desire to prevent greater evil, on 4 December he denounced Beneš on
Prague radio, accusing the exiled President of stirring up trouble at a safe
distance with no thought of the consequences. Czechoslovak BBC broad-
casts from London responded by calling Hácha a traitor, to which the
beleaguered President replied: ‘Mr Beneš does not see, as I do, the tears of
the mothers and wives who address their desperate pleas to me because
their sons and husbands fell into disaster after having been seduced by
deceptive radio broadcasts. He is in a position to permit himself illusions,
to build castles in the air, and to paint alluring pictures of the future . . .
For us, there is no way but to face reality with resolution and to act soberly
in accordance with bare facts.’44 Heydrich was jubilant. The Protectorate
government, he remarked joyfully in a speech to Nazi leaders, had finally
burned all bridges between Prague and London.45
Heydrich’s emergency measures were aimed not only against the
Protectorate government and Czech underground, but also against black-
marketeers, who were officially held responsible for the food shortages
which plagued the Protectorate. Heydrich tried to capitalize on public
resentment of the black market to discredit the resistance. The under-
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
ground and black-marketeers – the ‘hyenas of the home front’ – were
accordingly designated ‘enemies of the Czech people’. Of the 404 death
sentences handed down by the martial law courts in the first few months
of Heydrich’s rule, 169 were for alleged economic crimes. In pursuit of
illegal traders, Heyrich executed ethnic Germans as well as Czechs. This
apparent even-handedness concealed his real aim, which was to increase
Czech agricultural production for the Nazi war effort. The attack on the
black market was accompanied by a recount of grain and livestock, which
successfully relied on the impact of the terror to produce an accurate
return. Farmers were promised amnesty for past evasions, but faced death
or deportation for further cheating.46
Although paling in comparison to events in Poland, the speed and
viciousness of Heydrich’s new regime of terror and repression were
unprecedented in the history of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich
considered his terror measures to be unavoidable: as a Slav, ‘the Czech . . .
is more dangerous and must be handled differently’ from Aryan peoples.
‘The Nordic, Germanic man can be either convinced or broken – the
Czech, Slavic man is very difficult to convince . . . And the consequence of
this is that we must constantly keep our thumb on him so that he always
remains bent, so that he will obey us and co-operate.’47
In late October 1941, however, the first wave of terror officially subsided
for ‘optical reasons’. In order to give the outward impression of the
Protectorate’s complete pacification, the summary courts temporarily
ceased to impose death penalties, although the SS secretly continued
to carry out executions at Mauthausen concentration camp.48 On
29 November Heydrich went further in his propagandistic policy of
‘postive gestures’ by suspending the state of emergency in all regional
districts of the Protectorate with the exception of Prague and Brünn.
Between 30 November 1941 and 27 May 1942, Nazi authorities announced
only thirty-three executions. Still, as one London informant reported,
‘people [kept] clear of any public actions, associational life, discussions and
conversations, and the majority [avoided] relations altogether . . . [All
Czechs are] gritting their teeth.’49
Governing a State
Between 1939 and 1941, Heydrich was primarily concerned with policing
the newly conquered territories under German control rather than with
the problem of how they were to be governed. He had come to Prague as
a political novice, well versed in the in-fighting of competing Nazi agen-
cies, but with a merely theoretical knowledge of the challenges involved in
running an occupied territory.
R E I C H P R OT E C TO R
231
To be sure, the SS leadership more generally had given increasing
thought to the future of the German Empire after the invasion of the
Soviet Union. A 1941
Festschrift
for Heinrich Himmler, for example,
sheds some light on the possible future governance of the Nazi Empire.
The most intellectually sophisticated contribution to the volume was an
essay written by Heydrich’s former deputy Dr Werner Best, now in charge
of the civil administration of occupied France. Best proposed four ways of
administering the diverse territories of occupied Europe in accordance
with Nazi principles: one was what he called ‘co-operative’, with Denmark
being the best case study of a ‘racially valuable’ country run without much
interference from the Foreign Ministry. A second category was ‘supervi-
sory’. The examples here were France, Belgium and the Netherlands,
where German officials were currently working through the existing
national civil service, while maintaining a strong military presence. The
third was a ‘ruling’ occupation, as in the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia, where the German reshaping of the local bureaucracy was much
greater and Nazi police agencies had to remain more watchful for threats
to German interests. Best’s fourth and final category was ‘colonial’: the
General Government and the territories further east served as key exam-
ples for communities where the ‘inferior’ civilization level of the inhabit-
ants required the occupiers to take up the burden of government for the
sake of ‘order and health’.50
From Heydrich’s point of view, Best’s proposals had two serious flaws.
First, by arguing that some non-Germans should essentially be allowed to
police themselves, it gave the SS – the key agency concerned with policing
and security – no entry-point into Western Europe. This was something
with which Heydrich could most definitely not agree. Secondly, Best had
merely proposed a theoretical framework for German occupation regimes
after the war’s end and offered no advice on the actual running of the
Protectorate. Heydrich therefore had to improvise. The learning curve was
steep, but, characteristically, he immersed himself in his new task with
relentless energy, usually working more than fifteen hours a day and hiring
and firing three adjutants within his first week in Prague for being unable
to keep up with his demands.51
During his first three months in Prague, Lina hardly saw her husband,
who returned only infrequently to Berlin.52 Whatever precious time he
had left outside the office, he invested in sport, one of his great passions.
Even in Prague, he kept up his ambitious training schedule. In September
1941, he commenced training for an international sabre-fencing competi-
tion between Germany and its ally, Hungary, which took place in early
December. The Hungarian team, internationally dominant throughout the
1930s, was almost impossible to beat and the German team had been
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
substantially weakened: the 1940 national champion, Georg Frass, had
fallen on the Eastern Front, and the leading German sabre fencer of the
time, Josef Losert, could not be released from the Russian campaign.
Heydrich volunteered to step into the breach. As expected the Hungarians
won the competition with great ease, but obviously had no desire to offend
the head of Nazi Germany’s terror apparatus: Heydrich won all three of
his bouts.53
Heydrich’s family life improved when, in early January 1942, Lina and
their children moved to Prague. As wife of the acting Reich Protector,
Lina could now live the kind of lifestyle she had always considered her
due. Food was more plentiful than in Berlin and she had an army of serv-
ants at her command, but she never warmed to the idea of living in Prague
Castle with its ornamental rooms and impersonal furnishings. After three
months, she grew tired of living in a ‘museum’ and urged Reinhard to find
her a more family-friendly home that offered more privacy. There was ‘too
much history’ surrounding her in Prague Castle, she complained.54
At Easter 1942, the Heydrich family moved to the luxurious manor
house of Jungfern-Breschan (Panenské Břežany), some twenty kilometres
north of the capital. The white neo-classical mansion had thirty rooms
and was surrounded by a seven-hectare garden, leading to 125 hectares of
dense, shady forest and a little village. The property had been confiscated
from its Jewish owner, the sugar manufacturer and renowned art collector
Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, shortly after the German invasion. As the
summer residence of Heydrich’s predecessor in Prague, the building had
been completely redecorated and refurbished. When the Heydrichs
decided to use the house as their primary residence, central heating was
installed to allow the family to stay in the manor house during the winter,
and slave labourers from Theresienstadt concentration camp were brought
in to build a swimming pool in the garden. Lina was delighted with the
result and felt that Reinhard had finally provided his ‘princess’ with an
appropriate home.55
But Heydrich was rarely home. Apart from his commitment to sport,
his responsibilities as head of the Reich Security Main Office and his
co-ordination of the final solution, he was now involved in all matters of
governance in Prague: from increases in ministerial salaries of members of
the Protectorate government and the appointment of individual chairs at
the German University in Prague to the renovations and excavations at
Prague Castle, and the question of the political reliability of individual
engineers working at the Škoda factories.56