Hitler's Hangman (59 page)

the German war effort. From the beginning of the Second World War, the

Germans had begun to step up the conscription of labour in the occupied

territories. Some thirty thousand Czech workers signed up to go to the

Old Reich within the first month of the occupation. Far more were

needed and coercion became increasingly likely after the outbreak of war

in September 1939.76

By the summer of 1941, there were indeed some 1.7 million forced

civilian labourers and 1.3 million POWs living in the Third Reich. After

the invasion of the Soviet Union, the swift capture of some 3 million

POWs, as well as the acquisition of vast territories with huge labour

reserves, produced both major economic opportunities and corresponding

risks for Germany. As the regime believed that the apparently imminent

victory would ensure access to as many foreign workers as it required, it

made no plans to use Russian POWs as labourers. Indeed Hitler actively

blocked their deployment in the Reich. The end of the war was expected to

bring a rapid demobilization of the Wehrmacht, easing Germany’s labour

shortages once and for all. But this was a risky policy. Should the war not

go as predicted, Germany would face enormous difficulties: the mobiliza-

tion for Operation Barbarossa had already left a record number of unfilled

vacancies in the home economy and the increasing number of military

deaths required further workers to be sent to the front. Between May 1938

and May 1942, conscription caused the civilian workforce to shrink by 7.8

million. Only in October 1941 did Hitler finally relent and authorize the

comprehensive exploitation of Soviet POWs inside Germany, by which

time for most of them it was far too late. Having killed 2 million Russian

POWs through calculated neglect in the winter of 1941–2, the Nazis now

began to feel a desperate need for forced labourers.77

Following Heydrich’s arrival in Prague, the recruitment of Czech slave

labourers, thus increased dramatically, not so much because Heydrich was

keen to see more ‘foreigners’ of ‘questionable racial stock’ in the Old

Reich as because, by the autumn of 1941, army commanders, economic

planners and other top Nazi leaders realized that Soviet defeat would not

come as quickly as they had hoped. The domestic economy required more

labourers to allow the German war effort to function at even higher

capacity.78

In December 1941 Albert Speer, the soon-to-be Reich Minister for

Armaments and Munitions, visited Prague and obtained from Heydrich

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

a promise to send an additional 15,000 Czech construction workers to the

Reich. Despite Heydrich’s ‘reputation for cruelty and unpredictability’,

Speer was pleasantly surprised by his host, noting that he was ‘very polite,

not all arrogant in his manner, and above all very self-assured and prac-

tical’. It was the latter quality above all others that impressed Speer.79 But

ideology, Heydrich insisted, could not be abandoned altogether. He hated

the idea that Germany’s reliance on foreign workers might become

permanent. War had produced an absurd situation: Germany, fighting for

economic autarky and racial purity, had become more ethnically diverse in

terms of its labour force than it had ever been before (or has been since).

Heydrich hoped that ultimately Germany’s labour needs could be satisfied

by ‘Germanic peoples’ and the assimilation of those ‘fit for Germanization’.

Just before Speer’s visit to Prague, he presided over a Reich Security Main

Office meeting in Berlin that laid out plans for the segregation and

policing of foreign workers in Germany, noting that ‘While all agree that

the economic aspects are relevant and pressing, we must resist any attempt

to defer racial and
völkisch
-political questions until after the war has

ended, since it is uncertain how long the war may continue.’80

Despite Heydrich’s insistence on the primacy of ideology over pragma-

tism, the pressure for Czech labourers continued to increase. In late March

1942, Hitler named the Gauleiter of Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, plenipoten-

tiary-general for the mobilization of foreign workers, a role complemen-

tary to that of Speer’s and designed to feed the ever-growing manpower

needs of Speer’s factories. Although privately sceptical about the racial

value of many of the foreign labourers that were to be forcibly recruited,

Heydrich fel into line. In May 1942, he announced the introduction of

compulsory labour service for al Czech men, and a Protectorate decree of

the same month made al able-bodied Protectorate inhabitants over the

age of fourteen subject to labour mobilization and assignment to factories

in Germany. In the next four months, 40,000 names were added to the

rol s.81 ‘In Prague,’ an informer reported to London in late May 1942, ‘the

once crowded cafés are almost empty; in the restaurants, people gobble up

their meals and hurry away as quickly as they can. The growing lack of

manpower in Germany has led to systematic raids on such places: al visi-

tors, especial y women, who are unable to prove that they are ful y

employed in war work, are taken immediately to Gestapo headquarters and

sent to forced labour camps in Germany.’82

Apart from pursuing his dual short-term aim of eradicating the resist-

ance and exploiting the Protectorate’s economic potential through a

combination of terror, forced recruitment of labourers, incentives and

propaganda, Heydrich was also determined to increase the efficiency of the

German occupation regime. He wanted a smal but effective bureaucracy,

R E I C H P R OT E C TO R

239

run by a combination of reliable Reich and Sudeten Germans and their

Czech underlings, that was able to strengthen the Nazis’ control over every

aspect of socio-economic, political and cultural life in the Protectorate.

Hácha and his government, Heydrich insisted, had to understand that the

Germans were here to stay and that their future fate was inextricably

linked to the Third Reich. Heydrich wanted to force them to acknowledge

this ‘fact’ through ‘actions’ rather than through rhetorical assurances of

loyalty from possible ‘traitors’ and ‘saboteurs’ within the ranks of the

Protectorate government.83 To that end, a November decree al owed

Heydrich to discharge or transfer ‘political y unreliable’ civil servants,

regardless of age. He also began personal y to censor Hácha’s public

speeches. In only a matter of months Hácha and those around him had

become little more than Czech-speaking executors of Nazi policies.84

Heydrich wanted to go even further. He intended to restructure the

Protectorate government in such a way as to give him total control over

all of its actions. While planning for the administrative reform began in

the Reich Protector’s Office, the Heydrichs spent the Christmas of 1941

at their hunting lodge in Stolpshof near Nauen, less than forty kilometres

west of Berlin, spending the nights deer-stalking. Heydrich’s mind was

elsewhere. Too many tasks were awaiting him in the new year and he was

anxious to return to work: he even worked on the restructuring of ministe-

rial salaries on Christmas Eve 1941.85

On 19 January 1942, after months of intensive planning, a new

Protectorate government was put in place. Following instructions that

Heydrich had received from Hitler during their meeting at the Wolf ’s

Lair in October 1941 and further discussed with the head of the Reich

Chancellery, Hans Lammers, during a meeting in Munich on 9 November,

the number of Czech ministries was reduced to seven, each of which

became directly responsible to the Reich Protector’s Office. The role of the

council of ministers, headed by Jaroslav Krejćí as minister president, was

confined to the practical implementation of Heydrich’s orders.86

Much to the dismay of his Czech colleagues, SS-Oberführer Walter

Bertsch was appointed head of the newly created Ministry of Economy

and Labour. Bertsch served – in Heydrich’s own words – as his ‘informer

within the government’. Since Bertsch was a Reich German who

pretended to speak no Czech, government dealings had henceforth to be

conducted in German.87 Another important innovation was the establish-

ment of the Office for People’s Enlightenment, responsible for the press,

theatre, literature, art and film. This office was subordinate to the newly

named Minister of Education, Emanuel Moravec, a former Czech legion-

naire and political pragmatist, who was frequently referred to by the

government-in-exile as the ‘Czech Quisling’ and who was known for his

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

weekly pro-Nazi radio addresses. Moravec was not an admirer of Heydrich

or his methods, but he was astute and opportunistic enough to recognize

that his future career depended on Heydrich’s goodwill.88 Heydrich in

turn considered Moravec’s appointment vital since he believed that the

Czechs would be more receptive to Nazi propaganda if it came from one

of their fellow citizens. Leaving nothing to chance, he nonetheless kept a

tight control over Moravec’s activities.89

In his address to the newly established Protectorate government on

19 January 1942, one day before flying to Berlin to chair the Wannsee

Conference, Heydrich prided himself on having ‘made up with a firm

hand for what the Czech government has failed to do in 2½ years’. He

also stated that the future work of the Protectorate government would be

reduced to two principal tasks: the day-to-day running of the Protectorate

administration and, perhaps more importantly, ‘the difficult task’ of intro-

ducing a ‘correct and unambivalent education of [the Czech] youth’ in the

spirit of Germanization. Heydrich concluded by stressing that the era of

autonomous ‘ministerial decisions, which hinder practical, active govern-

ance and leadership, is definitively over’.90

Two of Heydrich’s most important short-term objectives in the

Protectorate had thus been achieved: Bohemia and Moravia had been

pacified and the Protectorate government had been brought into line. In

return for the new government’s pledges of loyalty, Heydrich lifted martial

law in Prague and Brünn and released some Czech students from the

concentration camps in which they had been incarcerated since 1939. The

Czechs were shown that collaboration paid.

Heydrich’s administrative reforms constituted a radical reorganization

of German occupation policy in the Protectorate, a reorganization that

explicitly aimed at the ‘disempowerment’ of the Protectorate government

while at the same time retaining the façade of Czech autonomy that

Hitler had guaranteed in March 1939. Since the Führer had insisted in

private conversations with Heydrich that this façade should be upheld,

Heydrich opted for a strategy of ‘liquidating the autonomy from within’.91

As he explained to senior members of his staff in Prague, this would not

happen overnight. Instead, he aimed for ‘a gradual and inconspicuous

dismantlement of Czech autonomy’, which would avoid any unnecessary

outrage among the civilian population.92 In the meantime, Heydrich told

Bormann, he would ‘order the Czechs to carry out all measures that could

incite bitterness, while transferring the implementation of those measures

that will have a positive impact to the Germans’.93

Heydrich’s plans to undermine Czech autonomy were to be kept

‘strictly confidential’.94 Instead, Nazi propaganda and the collaborationist

press were instructed to represent his administrative reform as an impor-

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241

tant correction to the misguided historical path which the ‘egotistical and

ambitious class’ of Czech intellectuals, spurred on by the Western ‘pluto-

cratic powers and – in the guise of so-called pan-Slavism – the Bolshevik

forces’ of the East, had followed between 1918 and 1938. The Protectorate

press followed Heydrich’s instructions and depicted the administrative

reform as an attempt to
strengthen
Czech autonomy.95

Heydrich also moved energetically to eliminate administrative drag in

the Protectorate in an attempt to introduce a more efficient administra-

tion. The administration of the Protectorate, he quickly realized, clearly

required too much manpower: one Reich official for every 790 Czechs. In

France, by contrast, the ratio was 1:15,000. Reducing the number of

German officials would have two positive side-effects: first it would free

up a large number of German administrators for military service on the

Eastern Front, and second, since Heydrich was to decide who would stay

and who would leave, he could reshape the administration according to his