Hitler's Hangman (8 page)

of enemy propaganda. Hitler, however, was furious and threatened to send

SS-General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, head of SS anti-partisan

warfare on the Eastern Front, to Prague. Bach-Zelewski, Hitler insisted,

would ‘happily wade through a sea of blood without the least scruple.

The Czechs have to learn the lesson that if they shoot down one man,

he will immediately be replaced by somebody even worse.’ By the end of

the meeting, however, Frank had managed to talk Hitler down. For the

time being, the Führer rescinded his order for the indiscriminate killings

of 10,000 hostages, but insisted that the assassins had to be captured

immediately.37

Before his departure from Prague, Frank had imposed martial law over

the Protectorate. Anyone providing help or shelter for the assassins, or

even failing to report information on their whereabouts to the police, was

to be killed along with their entire families. The same fate awaited those

Czechs over sixteen years of age who failed to obtain new identification

papers before midnight of Friday, 29 May. Anyone found without proper

papers on Saturday was to be shot. Railway services and all other means

of public transportation ceased. Cinemas and theatres, restaurants and

coffee houses were closed. The Prague Music Festival was interrupted. A

curfew was established from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. and in accordance with

Hitler’s directive a reward of 10 million crowns for the capture of the

assassins was announced. The Protectorate government, keen to distance

itself from the assassination, pledged to double the reward.38

Over the course of the afternoon, the head of the German Order Police,

Kurt Daluege, was ordered by telephone to assume the post of acting

Reich Protector and to hunt down the assassins with all means at his

disposal.39 Fearing that the assassination attempt might be the signal for

a more general uprising in the Protectorate, Daluege immediately

unleashed one of the largest police operations in modern European

history. Prague was completely sealed off by the German police and army.

Gestapo units, reinforced by contingents from the Order Police, the

SS, the Czech gendarmerie and three Wehrmacht battalions – more

than 12,000 men in total – began to raid some 36,000 buildings in search

of the assassins.40 Yet although scarcely a single house was left unexam-

ined, the police operation failed to deliver the desired results. Around

500 people were arrested for minor offences unrelated to the assassination

attempt, but despite a vast number of hints (and false allegations) provided

by the Czech and German population, the perpetrators were not

apprehended.41

While the civilian population in the Protectorate was holding its breath

in fear of reprisals, Beneš was ecstatic, even though the outcome of the

D E AT H I N P R AG U E

13

assassination attempt remained uncertain. He immediately sent out a

radio message to Bartoš, their principal contact on the ground: ‘I see that

you and your friends are full of determination. It is proof to me that the

entire Czech nation is unshakeable in its position. I assure you that it is

bringing results. The events at home have had an incredible effect [in

London] and have brought great recognition of the Czech nation’s resist-

ance.’42 Yet it was far from certain at this stage that Heydrich would

succumb to his injuries. On 31 May, Himmler visited him in his hospital

room in Prague. The wounded man’s condition improved steadily and they

were able to have a brief conversation.43 Two days later, however, an infec-

tion in the stomach cavity set in. Had penicillin been available in Germany

in 1942, Heydrich would have survived. Without it, his fever got worse

and he slipped into a coma, giving rise to renewed fears in Berlin that

he might die. On 2 June, Goebbels reflected on Heydrich’s worsening

condition in his diary and added: ‘The loss of Heydrich . . . would be

disastrous!’44

A similar view prevailed in Britain: ‘If Heydrich should not survive

the attempt or if he is invalided for some appreciable time, the loss for the

Nazi regime would be very serious indeed. It can safely be said that next

to Himmler, Heydrich is the soul of the terror machinery . . . The loss of

the “master mind” will have serious consequences.’45 On 3 June Heydrich’s

condition deteriorated further. The doctors were unable to combat his

septicaemia, his temperature soared and he was in great pain. The

following morning, at 9 o’clock, Heydrich succumbed to his blood infec-

tion. Hitler’s ‘hangman’, as Thomas Mann famously called him in his BBC

commentary the following day, was dead.46

C H A P T ER I I

✦

Young Reinhard

The Heydrich Family

Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was born on 7 March 1904 in

the Prussian city of Hal e on the River Saale.1 His names reflected the

musical background and interests of his family: his father, Bruno Heydrich,

was a composer and opera singer of some distinction who had earned nation-

wide recognition as the founding director of the Hal e Conservatory, where

his wife, Elisabeth, worked as a piano instructor. In naming their first-born

son, they took inspiration from the world of music that surrounded them:

‘Reinhard’ was the name of the tragic hero of Bruno’s first opera,
Amen
,

which had premiered in 1895; ‘Tristan’ paid tribute to Richard Wagner’s

opera
Tristan and Isolde
; and ‘Eugen’ was the name of his late maternal

grandfather, Professor Eugen Krantz, the director of one of Germany’s most

acclaimed musical academies, the Royal Dresden Conservatory.2

Reinhard’s birth coincided with a period of rapid change and boundless

optimism in Germany. Under Bismarck and Wilhelm II, Imperial

Germany had become the powerhouse of Europe: its economic and mili-

tary might was pre-eminent, and its science, technology, education and

municipal administration were the envy of the world. But the modernity

associated with Wilhelmine Germany also had its darker sides, notably a

widespread yearning to become a world power whose influence could

match its economic and cultural achievements. Imperial Germany, the

country of Heydrich’s birth, is therefore best described as Janus-faced:

political y semi-authoritarian with a leadership prepared to enhance the

country’s international standing through reckless foreign policy adven-

tures, but cultural y and scientifical y hyper-modern.3

Reinhard’s father, Bruno Heydrich, was a beneficiary of the almost

uninterrupted economic boom that had fundamentally transformed

Germany since 1871, the time at which the German nation-state had

YO U N G R E I N H A R D

15

emerged from a diverse collection of kingdoms, grand duchies, princi-

palities and free cities in Central Europe after three victorious wars

against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870–1). Born in

February 1863 into a Protestant working-class family in the Saxon village

of Leuben, Bruno experienced austerity and economic hardship in early

life. The path of his parents, Ernestine Wilhelmine and Carl Julius

Reinhold Heydrich, led from Leuben, where Carl worked as an impover-

ished apprentice cabinetmaker, to the city of Meissen, internationally

renowned for its porcelain manufactory, where the family resided from

1867 onwards. Upon his early death from tuberculosis in May 1874 at the

age of just thirty-seven, Carl Julius left behind three sons and three

daughters aged between three and thirteen.4

Carl Heydrich’s early death left his family in an economically desolate

situation. With no inheritance to speak of, Bruno’s mother was forced

to accept odd jobs to earn a living for herself and her six children.

Bruno Heydrich later recalled a ‘difficult, sorrowful youth’, during which

he was compelled to play the dual role of ‘breadwinner and educator’

for his younger siblings, particularly after his elder brother, Reinhold

Otto, died of consumption at the age of nineteen. Finding it hard to

feed her children, Ernestine Heydrich searched for a new provider and

in May 1877 she married a Protestant locksmith, Gustav Robert Süss,

who was thirteen years her junior and just nine years older than her eldest

son Bruno. In subsequent years, it was Süss’s Jewish-sounding family

name that would fuel speculation about Heydrich’s non-Aryan ancestry,

even though Süss himself was neither Bruno’s father nor of Jewish

descent.5

Given his modest family background, Bruno’s decision to embark on

the career of a professional musician was unusual and required consider-

able talent and motivation. The professional musician, trained specifically

to perform in concert halls and operas, was a relatively recent phenom-

enon in Germany: the first full-fledged music conservatory in Germany,

Felix Mendelssohn’s establishment in Leipzig, dated back only to 1843;

and the Berlin Philharmonic, soon the epitome of the serious music

ensemble, was founded in 1882. A musical education was also costly and

Bruno’s mother had no money to spare. But Bruno was not easily deterred.

At the age of twelve, while still at school in Meissen, he began to play first

the violin and the tenor horn, and then the double bass and tuba. The

hobby soon turned into a much needed source of revenue as he and his

younger brother Richard supplemented the family income by singing at

local fairs. Bruno’s gift as a singer did not go unnoticed and by the age of

thirteen he was already performing as a soloist in public concerts with the

Meissen Youth Orchestra.6

16

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Bruno’s talent and determination led to recognition from beyond the

small Meissen community: in April 1879, he won a scholarship for a

three-year degree in composition and singing at the prestigious Royal

Dresden Conservatory, Saxony’s finest establishment for musical educa-

tion, which was directed by his future father-in-law, the Royal Councillor

Professor Eugen Krantz.7 In July 1882, Bruno graduated from the

Dresden Conservatory with the highest honours and began to play the

contrabass in the Meiningen and Dresden court orchestras. Guest

performances as Lyonel in Friedrich von Flotow’s comic opera
Martha
at

the Court Theatre in Sondershausen (1887) and in the title roles in

Lohengrin
in Weimar (1889) and
Tannhäuser
and
Faust
in Magdeburg

(1890) were followed by engagements as a heroic tenor in Stettin, Kolberg,

Aachen, Cologne, Halle and Frankfurt, and then on the international

stages of Antwerp, Geneva, Brussels, Vienna, Prague and Marienbad.

Heydrich’s success was considerable, but not sufficient to sustain a viable

career as a professional tenor, particularly since he continued to support

financially his mother and her four daughters, one of whom was the

product of her second marriage. Even so, his early success secured him an

invitation to Bayreuth, where, in the summer of 1890, he sang excerpts

from
Lohengrin
,
Parsifal
,
Die Meistersinger
and
Rienzi
for Richard

Wagner’s widow, Cosima. In Wagner’s festival theatre, built in 1871 on

the green hills just outside the small Franconian town of Bayreuth,

Heydrich might have had the major breakthrough of his career, but his

dream of an engagement at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival was not to be.

He was never asked back.8

Bruno Heydrich’s failure to secure employment in Bayreuth has

contributed to the misleading post-war assessment that he was ‘a second-

or third-class musician’, an assessment that has been unduly influenced by

his son’s criminal career in the Third Reich.9 The head conductor of the

New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Bruno Walter, who met Bruno

Heydrich in Cologne in the mid-1890s and who, as a German Jew, had

been forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933, stated after the war that

Reinhard’s father had a ‘charmless, no longer entirely fresh voice’, and

that he was regarded as a ‘questionable character’ among colleagues.

‘The Nazi executioner Reinhard Heydrich’, Walter added, ‘was the

appalling son of this man and, when I read about that sadist, I often think

of the mediocre singer with the ugly voice . . . who was chosen by fate to

sire a devil.’10

Walter’s post-war assessment, clouded by Reinhard Heydrich’s crimes

in the Third Reich, stands in stark contrast to contemporary estimations

of Bruno’s talents, which suggest that he enjoyed high prestige among his