To fulfil his responsibilities, Heydrich commuted between Berlin and
Prague by train or plane, at least twice and often three times a week.57 He
used the frequent trips to Berlin not only to preside over important
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233
RSHA meetings, but also to maintain close contact with Goebbels and
other powerful Nazis.58 Of these contacts, the most influential in relation
to Heydrich’s occupation policies was Dr Herbert Backe, the State
Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Economics and, from May 1942
onwards, Minister of Food. Backe, who had come to Germany as a refugee
in the wake of the Russian Revolution, was one of the few people with
whom Heydrich entertained a close personal friendship. As so often in
Heydrich’s life, this friendship was based less on strong mutual sympathy
than on shared ideological beliefs and the conviction that compromises on
ideology were a sign of cowardice. Their children often played together
while the adults frequently invited each other for dinner parties at their
homes in Berlin. The close family ties would even outlast the violent
deaths of Heydrich and Backe in 1942 and 1947 respectively. When
Heydrich’s son, Heider, studied engineering in Hanover in the early
1950s, he lived with Backe’s widow, Ursula.59
Backe profoundly shaped Heydrich’s thinking about the economic
dimension of German occupation policy. For both men, economic reorgani-
zation was inseparably intertwined with the question of race. The ‘lesser’ races
of Europe were to be subjugated to Germany’s needs. More than anyone else,
Backe was conscious of the disparity between Germany’s growing need for
food supplies to feed the home population, the army and a vast number of
POWs and forced labourers, and the increasingly scarce resources at its
disposal. He played a key role in devising the so-cal ed hunger plan in the
spring of 1941; that is, the plan to engineer an extraordinary mass famine in
Eastern Europe with the aim of kil ing off the entire urban population of the
western Soviet Union, thereby removing up to 30 mil ion ‘useless mouths’
from the food chain. Backe’s ideas for the East were entirely compatible with
those of the SS leadership, articulated in the General Plan East of the same
year, which envisaged massive ethnic cleansing and resettlements in the
occupied territories, coupled with an extensive slave-labour programme
through which Jews and Soviet POWs would be worked to death in the
construction of new infrastructure in the East.60
For the rest of Europe, Backe envisaged a German-dominated
Grossraumwirtschaft
, a multinational self-sufficient European economy
with Germany at its heart. The gold standard and the liberal free-market
economies of the post-Versailles order were to be replaced by barter trade
and production planning on a continental scale in an extension of the
German trade policy of the 1930s. The geo-political idea of a broad,
German-led economic sphere in Central Europe was not new, and had
been promoted by Friedrich Neumann and other liberal nationalists in the
early 1900s, as well as by Carl Schmitt, the leading right-wing constitu-
tional theorist of the 1930s. But men like Backe merged this older idea
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with the modern theory of race, giving the call for German economic
superiority a new justification and purpose.61
To achieve his aims, Backe advocated the creation of a tariff-free zone
in the occupied and ‘affiliated’ territories, including the Balkans, where
German economic penetration had intensified throughout the 1930s.
Trade agreements were negotiated in 1939 and 1940 with Romania and
Hungary, which brought vital raw materials under the control of the Third
Reich. Economic plans for the Balkans were to be the first step in an even
more ambitious plan to set up the entire European continent as a single
market which would be able to compete with the United States and Japan
in the post-war global order.62
Such ideas impacted strongly on Heydrich’s thinking about the economic
imperatives of occupation policy in the Protectorate as wel as German-
control ed Europe more general y. The New Order, as Heydrich and other
leading Nazis envisaged it, demanded a stronger economic integration of
the Protectorate into the Greater German sphere of influence, involving a
division of labour with Germany. Czech industry was to be encouraged to
export to South-east Europe, while the German exports would focus on
the West. Economic imperialism was thus a crucial element of Nazi empire-
building. For this purpose, on 17 December 1941, Heydrich convened
the first international economic conference of the German Südost-
Europa-Gesel schaft, a Vienna-based society founded by the city’s Gauleiter,
Baldur von Schirach. It engaged in economic research on Eastern Europe
with the long-term objective of forcibly integrating the South-eastern
European economies into the German power bloc. Heydrich liked to think
of himself as a ‘mediator between the Reich and the south-eastern regions’
of Europe, and made sure that he was perceived as such in the Reich.63
In the presence of the Reich Economics Minister, Walther Funk,
Heydrich highlighted the urgent necessity of designing the future
economic order of a ‘united Europe’: ‘In assessing the tasks of the
Bohemian-Moravian economy as part of the economy of the Reich, one
arrives at the conclusion that this space meets the best possible require-
ments both for the cultivation of relations with the south-eastern regions
and the development of the New East.’ The Protectorate was to serve as
an ‘important bridge between the Reich and the south-east’ – an idea that
had been promoted by Sudeten German leaders since the mid-1930s. ‘For
the first time in the history of Europe,’ Heydrich continued, ‘the vast
resources of the East, which have previously served only as a tool of
destruction, will now be utilized positively and for the good of the New
Europe.’ No concrete policies were agreed on at the conference and, like
most other plans for the future of Europe, the implementation of major
initiatives was postponed until after the war’s end.64
R E I C H P R OT E C TO R
235
If, publicly, Heydrich talked about European reconstruction, German
pragmatism and the economic wellbeing of the entire European conti-
nent, his immediate concerns lay elsewhere, namely in how best to exploit
occupied Europe’s economic potential for winning the war. Throughout
his time in Prague, he remained mindful of wartime needs and the special
role of Bohemia’s armaments industry for the German war effort, although
at times leading Nazis in Berlin worried that he would prioritize ideology
over pragmatic considerations. Göring, for example, felt obliged to remind
Heydrich that he considered the weapons produced by Škoda to be ‘the
very best and at times superior to our own’. Regardless of all ‘necessary
actions against the management of the Škoda factories’, he urged Heydrich
not to forget their vital importance for the German war effort.65
Heydrich did take economic necessities into consideration. The vital
importance of increasing production dictated his relations with the Czech
working classes. Shortly after his arrival in Prague, he told Nazi officials
in the Protectorate that he was determined to ‘give the Czech worker the
chow he needs’ in order to undertake work for the German war effort.
After all, he insisted, ‘there is no point in me bludgeoning the Czech and
using all efforts and police power to make him go to work if he does
not . . . have the physical strength required to do his work’. Heydrich
announced on 2 October that the Führer had approved his proposal for
‘an increase in the fat rations for Czech workers by around 400 grams’ – an
‘impressive amount’. He insisted, however, that the increase in food
rations had to be coupled with an unambivalent message to the Czech
population: ‘you stay quiet – or otherwise it may well happen that your
rations are reduced again. These are things one has to deal with in a
psychologically appropriate way.’66
In keeping with this directive, the Protectorate press credited Heydrich
with the increase in fat rations for workers introduced on 27 October
1941, but emphasized that the Reich Protector’s gesture of ‘good faith’ had
yet to be matched by any signs of Czech loyalty.67 Three days before, on
24 October, Heydrich received a trade-union delegation at Prague Castle
and expressed his ‘sincere’ interest in the Czech workers’ needs by prom-
ising to improve living standards. This was matched by a carefully orches-
trated shop-floor campaign in more than 500 Czech factories during
which pre-selected labour representatives were encouraged to voice their
economic grievances. In the following weeks, fat and tobacco rations were
increased for certain categories of labourers and 200,000 pairs of shoes
were distributed free through works councils. As Heydrich admitted to
his staff, the aim was ‘the depoliticization of the Czech population’, a
policy which aimed to encourage the individual to focus ‘on his job and
his material needs’.68
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HITLER’S HANGMAN
The compliance with workers’ demands – from improved working
conditions to increased rations of food and tobacco – was portrayed by
the Nazi propaganda machine as a form of serious and well-intended
rapprochement, a gesture of Heydrich’s good faith and his determination
to fight black-marketeers and war profiteers on behalf of the ordinary
Czech worker. On the day of Heydrich’s meeting with carefully chosen
labour representatives, for example, food confiscated from black-
marketeers was distributed in the canteens of armaments factories.69 The
results that Heydrich reported back to Berlin after these measures had
been carried through seemed impressive: gross industrial production
during his rule over the Protectorate rose by 23 per cent. Moreover, his
‘grain action’ of late autumn 1941 – a large-scale police operation against
the black market – resulted in the late reporting of 560,000 previously
concealed pigs and 250,000 tonnes of grain.70
Other measures adopted by Heydrich to pacify the Protectorate were
deliberately aimed at politically dividing the Czech population by
corrupting some of them into compliance.71 Free entrance to football
matches was offered on May Day 1942. Furthermore, Heydrich redesigned
the formerly Czech-run National Union of Employees to mirror the
German Labour Front. Its ‘Strength through Joy’ campaign, using equip-
ment and property confiscated from the Sokol, organized sports events,
movies, plays, concerts and musicals in order to boost their work ethic.72
Further propaganda measures introduced by Heydrich were intended to
convince the Czech population that they were living through a time of
decisive struggle, in which they had to decide between a Bolshevik Europe
and a National Socialist Europe. To facilitate that decision, Heydrich
brought to Prague from Vienna the exhibition ‘Soviet Paradise’, which
opened on 28 February 1942.73 Displaying photographs taken during the
early months of Operation Barbarossa, the exhibition portrayed the
appal ing living conditions in the Soviet Union and the apparent misery
that Bolshevism had brought to the peoples of Eastern Europe. The
message was unambiguous, as an article in the col aborationist newspaper
Der Neue Tag
noted: ‘The Czech labour representatives have been given the
opportunity to see the sad state of affairs in the Bolshevik “Workers’
Paradise” with their own eyes. They can now see for themselves just how
fortunate Bohemia and Moravia are to have been protected from the
horrors of Bolshevism by the intervention of the German Wehrmacht.’74
During the four-week showing of the exhibition, it was visited by approxi-
mately half a mil ion people including Emil Hácha, the Minister of
Education, Emanuel Moravec, and indeed Heydrich’s future assassins, Josef
GabČík and Jan Kubiš, who had been parachuted into the Protectorate in
December and now spent their days wandering around the Czech capital.75
R E I C H P R OT E C TO R
237
Another of the key challenges for Heydrich was to step up the recruit-
ment of Czech slave labourers, desperately needed to alleviate the increas-
ingly serious bottlenecks created by the conscription of almost every
able-bodied German man into the armed forces, without depriving the
Protectorate economy of its potential to continue its vital contributions to