Hitler's Hangman (63 page)

mented by Himmler in the Ukraine, notably in the region around

Zhytomyr, in the summer of 1942.160

Heydrich quickly appointed his director of choice, the radical Sudeten

German SS officer Ferdinand Fischer, who had served in the Prague SD

office since 1939.161 Fischer spent the fol owing months expel ing the owners

of targeted properties – not only Jews, but also beneficiaries of the Czech

land reforms of the 1920s and 1930s, as wel as aristocrats who had declared

their loyalty to the Czech Republic on 17 September 1938 – making room

for some 6,000 German settlers, particularly from Bessarabia, the Bukovina,

Dobruja, Transylvania, South Tyrol and the Sudetenland.162 By the spring of

1942, the Land Office in Prague administered almost eighty confiscated

estates with 46,000 hectares of land. Over 11,000 hectares of land were to be

added in the next eighteen months. By May 1942, more than 15,000

Protectorate inhabitants had been displaced from their homes.163

Heydrich’s settlement policies illustrate the unrealistic and even fantas-

tical nature of Nazi Germanization plans: the SS expropriated huge

amounts of land, but finding Germans willing to farm it was a far greater

challenge. In October 1940, Germans made up just 3.5 per cent of the

Protectorate’s population and few wished to join them. Instead of the

150,000 ethnic Germans Heydrich hoped to resettle in the Protectorate,

fewer than 6,000 actually decided to move there during the Second World

War.164 Heydrich and Himmler had set out to address the largely imagined

problem that Germany was a ‘people without space’, but what they

effectively did was to create spaces without people. Heydrich, however, was

not easily deterred: conscious that Germany did not have the necessary

population surplus to populate the vast conquered territories, he argued

that, for the time being, it would suffice to have a German ‘master class’ to

supervise the otherwise ‘leaderless workers’ of Czech origin.165

In order to further his aim of Germanization, Heydrich put trusted SS

men in charge of research centres in Prague, many of whom had influenced

or directly participated in racial testing in Poland and regions further east.166

His racial experts descended, almost unimpeded, upon forced labourers,

schoolchildren and, final y, the general population. One of his first acts as

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

255

Reich Protector was to correct ‘shocking mistakes’ in the Protectorate’s

previous Germanization policies. Neurath and the
Oberlandräte
, Heydrich

fumed, had al owed ‘racial y imperfect and asocial elements’ to become

Germans, pointing to the roughly 20,000 Czechs – 6,000 in Prague

alone – who had suddenly ‘remembered’ their German heritage when the

Nazi occupation began. The legal German community was ful of what

Heydrich cal ed ‘margarine Germans’: people whose sole reason for changing

citizenship was to obtain higher food rations and other privileges.167

Appalled by the ‘fact’ that a high percentage of Czech ‘riff-raff ’ had

obtained German citizenship, Heydrich ordered his racial experts to retest

all
previously successful candidates for German citizenship in April 1942.

Men in white coats were to rerun classification panels to decide which of

the Czechs they stripped and measured were ‘re-Germanizable’. Persons

deemed ‘incapable of re-Germanization’ were to have their citizenship

revoked. Even before then, Race and Settlement Office officials had begun

to review ‘questionable’ citizenship applications in October, and in the

spring of the next year Heydrich ordered that the agency’s racial experts

resolve all cases not yet decided – 12,368 in total at the end of 1941. As

in incorporated Poland, however, inconsistency, bureaucratic rivalries and

individual intransigence remained. In Iglau only 10 per cent of the appli-

cants received German citizenship following the SS’s intervention; in

Pilsen 78 per cent passed into Germandom.168

In February 1942, two weeks after the Wannsee Conference, Heydrich

announced to Protectorate officials a ‘new way’ of advancing the

Germanization process: seventeen- and eighteen-year-old Czechs would be

gathered into labour camps where they would be subjected to racial tests.169

Inspired by policies implemented in occupied Poland in 1939 and 1940, he

insisted that those ‘capable of becoming Germans’ would be assigned to

work in the Old Reich where they would be ‘re-educated’ as Germans. This

would have the added benefit of providing German industry and agriculture

with cheap labourers who – unlike other slave labourers of more question-

able racial stock – would pose no ‘racial danger’ to the German
Volk
. The

unGermanizable youth, and perhaps their families, would be shipped to

Siberia, where they could serve as ‘supervisors for the eleven mil ion Jews of

Europe’. In order to avoid an ‘unnecessary rocking of the boat’ for the dura-

tion of the war, Heydrich proposed ‘for the time being’ a ‘non-brutal,

non-violent’ way of implementing his Germanization policy in the

Protectorate: he would al ow the deportees to bring their families with

them, thus accelerating the speed of the region’s ethnic cleansing.170

Although Heydrich remained very conscious of wartime demands, he

insisted that the imperative of racial ideology would guide Nazi policies

in the Protectorate as soon as the military situation al owed for the

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

deportation of racial y undesirable Czechs. While the Jews were marked

for immediate extermination, other racial y undesirable Czechs would suffer

deportation as soon as possible. Fol owing Heydrich’s comments to their

logical conclusion, the Czechs may wel have been just months away from

the type of deportations Europe’s Jews were facing in the spring of

1942.171 Heydrich’s solution to the ‘Czech question’ was thus part of a

wider Nazi discourse on what to do with unGermanizable Slavs across

Eastern Europe. According to SS population planners’ estimates, at

least 40 million people inhabited the target regions for Germanization,

more than 30 million of whom were considered racially undesirable.

This included a staggering 80 per cent of the Polish population, 64 per

cent of Belorussians, 75 per cent of Ukrainians and half of the Czechs.

Even within the inner circle of SS population planners, the exact fate

of these unwanted Slavic populations remained uncertain. In early

September 1941, the head of the Central Resettlement Office in Posen,

Rolf Heinz Höppner, wrote to Adolf Eichmann enquiring about the

fate of those who were not Germanizable. He noted that ‘it is essential

that we are totally clear from the outset about what is to be done in

the end with those displaced populations that are undesirable for the

Greater German settlement areas. Is the goal to secure for them perma-

nently some sort of subsistence, or should they be totally eradicated?’172

Heydrich clearly favoured the latter option, hoping to eradicate all

undesirable populations from the German
Lebensraum
at any cost, but

neither he nor Himmler had the power to make such a far-reaching deci-

sion without consulting the highest authority in Nazi Germany. On the

crucial question about the fate of millions of non-Germans in Eastern

Europe, Heydrich and Himmler were still keenly awaiting Hitler’s final

decision.

Holocaust

Whereas, according to Heydrich, roughly half of the Czech population

would emerge from the ethnic engineering process of the coming years as

Germans, the ultimate aim for the Protectorate’s Jewish population was

fundamentally different: the goal of Nazi anti-Jewish policies was imme-

diate exclusion, then deportation and, ultimately, extermination.

Unsurprisingly, Heydrich’s arrival in Prague led to a decisive radicaliza-

tion of anti-Jewish policies in the Protectorate. As of 29 September 1941,

Jews in mixed marriages with Czech partners, who had previously been

exempted from wearing the yellow star, had this exemption revoked. All

synagogues were closed and non-Jews who continued to interact socially

with Jews were threatened with protective custody.173 At one of his first

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

257

press conferences at Prague Castle, Heydrich told the assembled journal-

ists of his ‘fundamental belief ’ that:

‘Judaism poses a racial and spiritual danger to the peoples. The experi-

ences of Germany and, for those who are reasonable, the experiences of

the Protectorate as well, confirm this view. The Reich’s objective will and

must be not only to eliminate the influence of Judaism within the

peoples of Europe but, to the extent to which this is possible, to resettle

them outside of Europe. All other measures are . . . stages on the path to

this final aim. I have decided to pursue these stages in the Protectorate

as consistently and as quickly as possible. The first step in the immediate

future will be the concentration of Jewry in a town or in part of a

town . . . as a collection point and transitional solution for the already

initiated evacuation. The first 5,000 Jews will leave the Protectorate over

the course of the coming weeks. It goes without saying that the Jews

who have parasitically engaged in black-marketeering, illegal butchering

etc will be led to work in an orderly way that serves the community . . .

For those who, for oppositional reasons or due to a lack of under-

standing, believe that they must continue to have open or secret dealings

with the Jews or express sympathy for them, I reserve the right to apply

the previously outlined measures to them as well.174

The next day, 6 October, Heydrich demanded that the Protectorate

government immediately dismiss or retire all ‘Jewish half-breeds and

public officials with Jewish relatives’ who had previously been exempted

from persecution. Exceptions, such as Jewish
Mischlinge
who had already

been public officials before 1914 and had served in the First World War,

required the explicit approval of Heydrich himself.175

In the spring of 1942, Heydrich further extended his policies

against the ‘half-breeds’, ordering that all
Mischlinge
who had obtained

Reich citizenship under Neurath’s ‘lax’ regime were to undergo ‘proper’

racial testing. Another decree prohibited Protectorate nationals from

marrying Jews, while first-degree
Mischlinge
could marry Czechs

only with the permission of the Ministry of the Interior. The Protectorate,

under Heydrich’s aegis, was therefore among the first of the

occupied territories to screen Jewish
Mischling
and to revoke their

German citizenship if they were considered an ‘unwanted population

addition’.176

On Heydrich’s orders, the director of the Central Office for Jewish

Emigration in Prague, Hans Günther, presented a statistical survey on the

preparations for the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ in the Protectorate

in early October 1941. According to this report, just over 118,000 Jews (as

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

defined by the Nuremberg Laws) had been living in the Protectorate at

the beginning of the German occupation in March 1939. Of this number,

nearly 26,000 had emigrated by 1 October 1941. Due to the low birthrate

in the same period, only 88,105 Jews were still living in the Protectorate

at the time of Heydrich’s arrival in Prague.177

Between late 1941 and the autumn of 1944, the German authorities

deported almost 74,000 Jews from the Protectorate to Theresienstadt,

sixty kilometres north-west of Prague. Theresienstadt served as a transit

camp for Protectorate Jews on their way to various killing sites in Eastern

Europe, particularly, from 1942 onwards, to Auschwitz. Of the 82,309

Jews deported from the Protectorate during the war, the Germans and

their Ukrainian, Baltic and Russian collaborators killed approximately

77,000 men, women and children. Only 14,000 Protectorate Jews survived

the end of the Second World War.178

Heydrich was determined to solve the Protectorate’s ‘Gypsy problem’ in

a similar fashion. In the months leading up to his arrival in Prague, police

had rounded up hundreds of ‘wandering Gypsies’ or ‘tramps’, suggesting

that ‘Gypsy’ was stil primarily considered a criminal, rather than racial,

category that included a whole array of asocials. Upon his arrival, Heydrich

inserted racial criteria into the definition of ‘Gypsy’, hence widening the net

for persecution. In October 1941, Heydrich noted that he wished to ‘evac-

uate’ al Gypsies living in Bohemia and Moravia.179 The fol owing spring