Hitler's Hangman (10 page)

providers and heads of their own household.25

Only four months after Reinhard’s birth, in the summer of 1904, the

Heydrichs moved into a significantly larger home. The swell of new

students and the resulting space shortage had forced Bruno Heydrich to

look for new premises. In July 1904, Bruno Heydrich’s Conservatory for

Music and Theatre moved from two separate buildings in Marienstrasse

to Poststrasse, one of the more salubrious districts of Halle’s city centre.

This neighbourhood, with its grand-looking buildings, offered a perfect

environment for the Heydrich family business, entirely focused on the

educational and representational needs of the middle-class community.

The new Conservatory also provided a spacious home for the owner’s

family and offered a larger number of classrooms and musical instruments,

as well as its own rehearsal stage.26

Young Reinhard clearly benefited from the musical talents of his

parents. As the eldest son, he would one day inherit the Conservatory, a

professional destiny that required rigorous musical training from an early

age. Even before starting primary school in 1910, he had learned musical

notation; he could play Czerny’s piano études perfectly and had begun

violin lessons. His father encouraged his musical interests and in 1910, at

the age of only six, Bruno and his son attended an exceptional musical

highlight in the Halle City Theatre: a staging of the
Ring of the Nibelung

with the Bayreuth cast. The passion for romantic music, and for the

mythical world of Wagnerian opera in particular, would remain with

Reinhard for the rest of his life – a passion he shared with the future

Führer of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler.27

The Heydrich family’s daily life ran according to precisely determined

and consistently maintained rules. Elisabeth Heydrich took both religious

education and active participation in church life extremely seriously.

Two conversions had turned the Heydrichs from the Protestant to the

Catholic Church. On his marriage to the Catholic Maria Antonie

Mautsch, Reinhard’s maternal grandfather Eugen Krantz had converted

from Protestantism. In the subsequent generation, the Protestant Bruno

Heydrich gave in to his wife’s demands and converted to Catholicism.

This was not an easy decision in an overwhelmingly Protestant society.

Religion, always an important force in German life, had acquired a new

and heightened significance since the foundation of the German Empire

in 1871. The Kulturkampf – Bismarck’s unsuccessful attempt to break

political Catholicism during the late 1870s and early 1880s through the

22

HITLER’S HANGMAN

persecution and arrest of hundreds of Catholic priests for using the pulpit

‘for political ends’ – left a bitter legacy of mutual suspicion between

Protestants and Catholics.28

By the time of Heydrich’s birth, however, the intensity of confessional

antagonism was on the wane. At grassroots level, there was a tendency in

popular Catholicism to move away from the insular culture of the 1870s

towards an ostensibly patriotic attitude designed to counter the accusation

that the main allegiance of German Catholics lay with Rome and not the

Reich. Yet religion remained an important aspect of Heydrich’s early life.

While Protestant church attendance rates dropped significantly in the

early twentieth century, the secularization process was less dramatic for

the Catholic Church where observance was much more resilient.29 The

Heydrichs were part of this resilient Catholic milieu. Elisabeth, a pious

Catholic, led the children in their evening prayers and on Sundays the

whole family attended Mass. Reinhard served as an altar boy in the local

Catholic church.30 His consciously maintained Catholicism was one of

the few oddities in his early life, particularly when measured against

his radically anti-Catholic stance in the 1930s: it made him a member of

a tiny minority in the overwhelmingly Protestant city of Halle. According

to a census of 1905, 94 per cent of Halle’s 170,000 inhabitants

were Protestants. The Catholic community, by contrast, had just over

7,000 members.31

Another oddity of his childhood, considering his obsession with bodily

fitness in subsequent years, was his physical frailty. As a child of slender

and relatively small stature with a weak constitution and a susceptibility

to illness, Reinhard was encouraged by his parents to take up every kind

of physical exercise from an early age: swimming, running, football,

sailing, horse-riding and fencing. Heydrich’s life-long passion for sport

began here.32 The family’s summer vacations were usually spent on the

picturesque coast of the Baltic Sea, in the swanky seaside town of

Swinemünde on the island of Usedom. For the Heydrich children this was

surely the most exciting time of the year. They spent their holidays sight-

seeing, taking walks and enjoying boat excursions and days on the beach.33

Meanwhile the Conservatory continued to flourish: by 1907 it counted

a total of 250 fee-paying pupils and the number of employees rose to nine-

teen. Just one year later, in 1908, the Conservatory had 300 pupils, enough

to prompt the Heydrichs to consider a further enlargement of their busi-

ness.34 In April 1908 – Reinhard had just turned four – the Heydrichs

moved again, this time into a much larger and grander purpose-built house

in Gütchenstrasse, in which Reinhard was to spend most of his childhood

and adolescence. The three-storey house in an exclusive, status-conscious

location near the City Theatre testified to the increasing wealth of the

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

23

family, generated by Elisabeth’s income from the Dresden Conservatory

and Bruno’s ever-expanding Hal e Conservatory, which, by 1911, reached

a record high of 400 pupils and employed twenty-seven permanent

teachers.35 ‘The house’, a schoolfriend of Reinhard’s remembered after the

war, ‘gave the impression of prosperity: grand wood-panel ed rooms, a lot

of silver dishes, the finest porcelain.’ In the courtyard building, there was a

large music chamber where regular soirées and concerts were given and

schoolfriends celebrated Reinhard’s birthday parties.36

A contemporary architecture critic conveyed just how large and well

appointed the Heydrich family home really was:

The Conservatory is located in leafy surroundings in the spacious three-

storey wing of a splendid new building by Jentzsch & Reichardt in

Gütchentrasse. The building houses a number of bright, friendly class-

rooms, nearly all of them looking out on to the green gardens, a waiting

room, an administration office and everything that makes up a modern

school building. But the Conservatory’s main attraction is the splendid

hall on the ground floor, which has seating for 300 people. Spacious,

bright and airy, it provides an extremely pleasant summertime abode

to the many friends and sponsors, who have been coming to the

Conservatory’s performances for years in order to follow the progress of

Heydrich’s pupils. The hall, with its tasteful electrical lighting system

and its ingeniously painted decorations, makes one imagine to be in one

of those nice little private princely theatres that charm visitors in castles

here and there . . .37

Given Bruno’s economic success and social ambitions, it had always

been clear that his eldest son would attend high school. Secondary

schooling at the time was reserved for a small, privileged and overwhelm-

ingly male elite. In the early 1900s, some 90 per cent of German pupils

never went beyond primary school. Of the fortunate 10 per cent attending

all-boys secondary schools, some 66 per cent continued their education in

the humanist
Gymnasien
which ended with the
Abitur
, the school-leaving

certificate qualifying them to attend university. The remaining 34 per cent

attended the
Oberrealschule
, a slightly less academic institution whose

leaving certificate did not qualify its pupils for university.38

When the time came for Reinhard to go to secondary school, his parents

decided to send him to the local
Reformgymnasium
, a relatively new institu-

tion that embodied the scientific optimism of the dynamic, future-oriented

German Empire. The
Reformgymnasium
was designed to reconcile the

characteristics of the classical
Gymnasium
– with its emphasis on a rounded

humanist education and training in Latin and ancient Greek – with the

24

HITLER’S HANGMAN

modern educational requirements of the early twentieth century. As

with the majority of the new polytechnical universities in the German

Reich, the
Reformgymnasium
had its origins in the technological zeal

and enthusiasm of the late nineteenth century, which in turn helped

to foster Germany’s leading role in the so-called second industrial revolu-

tion based on technological innovation. By the time Heydrich started

secondary school, Germany had become Europe’s industrial powerhouse,

internationally dominant in the fields of chemistry, physics and engi-

neering. Bruno Heydrich’s decision to send his eldest son to a

Reformgymnasium
was therefore not only the result of Reinhard’s good

grades, but also a tribute to the technological and scientific optimism of

the era. The
Reformgymnasium
was modern in yet another sense. While the

vast majority of German schools at the time were denominational, the

Reformgymnasium
was not affiliated to any religious persuasion. In 1906,

no fewer than 95 per cent of Protestant and 91 per cent of Catholic

children were educated in schools of their own confession. Reinhard

Heydrich’s educational experience was therefore exceptionally modern and

forward-looking in more than one sense.39

In addition to the main scientific subjects taught at German high

schools – chemistry, physics and mathematics – great emphasis was placed

on German literature and culture as well as on modern languages: French

was taught from the first form onwards, Latin from the lower-fourth, and

English was introduced in the lower-fifth. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given

his cultured family background, Reinhard Heydrich’s performance at

school was above average. His results in science subjects were particularly

outstanding and his career ambition as a teenager was to become a

chemist. Simultaneously, he began to develop an insatiable appetite for

crime fiction and spy novels, many of them serialized in newspapers.

Detective novels from Britain and the United States – from Sherlock

Holmes to Nick Carter and Nat Pinkerton – were a huge success in

Germany and they captured the imagination of the young Heydrich.

Throughout the war and the 1920s, he maintained his keen interest in the

genre and put his expertise to good use when he first met Himmler in

1931. Neither of the two men had any idea of how to set up an espionage

service, but Heydrich used the knowledge gained from detective and spy

novels to impress Himmler to the extent that he offered him the job of

creating an SS intelligence agency: the future SD.40

War and Post-war

In the summer of 1914 – when the Heydrichs were spending their annual

holiday on the Baltic coast – the family’s well-ordered world was deeply

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

25

shaken by a momentous event: on 28 June the Austrian heir apparent,

Franz Ferdinand, was shot in Sarajevo, aggravating an international crisis

that soon culminated in the First World War. Popular enthusiasm for war

in August 1914 was limited and the Heydrichs were no exception.

Although confident that the war would be won, Bruno and his wife were

fully aware that it also brought with it economic uncertainties for the

future of the Conservatory.41

The ful implications of the events surrounding him were difficult to

comprehend for the young Reinhard Heydrich. As a ten-year-old at the

outbreak of the Great War, he was part of the war youth generation – too

young to be sent to the front as a soldier, but old enough to experience the

war consciously as a decisive event in his personal life and in the history

of his country. Even though no immediate family member had to take to

the field, the war was omnipresent: newspapers and posters bombarded the

home front with glorified reports on the progress of the military campaigns,

photographs of prominent generals and decorated alumni of the school

adorned the classrooms, and teachers announced the latest victories in

school assemblies. Meanwhile, the older boys in Reinhard’s school gradu-