Hitler's Hangman (11 page)

al y disappeared to the front. By June 1915, some 80 per cent of the boys

in the highest grade had volunteered for the army while those left behind

in the lower grades eagerly awaited the time when they could fol ow their

example. Like most boys of his age, Reinhard must have regarded the war

as a distant adventure game from which the Germans would inevitably

emerge as the victors – a belief fostered by the enormously popular penny

dreadfuls that sold in mil ions, notably to teenage boys.42

While the war raged on in Eastern Europe and the distant fields of

Flanders and northern France, the Conservatory’s economic fortunes

began to decline slowly but steadily. Due to the outbreak of the war,

student enrolment stagnated and then began to shrink. By the end of

1914, Bruno Heydrich had to sack nine of his teachers, but continued to

stage a number of public concerts and performances of the Patriotic Men’s

Singing Society of 1914, which he had founded upon the outbreak of war.

His wife Elisabeth contributed to the national cause, too, by running a

knitting class at the Conservatory, where Halle’s middle-class wives and

mothers produced clothing – mainly scarves and socks – for their soldier

husbands, sons and brothers at the front.43

By 1915 the economic effects of war started to encroach on the

Heydrichs’ everyday life. Restrictions on food supplies and other essential

goods became increasingly apparent. Germany had imported 25 per cent

of its food supplies before 1914 and the British naval blockade effectively

cut the country off from all imports. The problem was amplified by the

lack of work-horses and able-bodied men on farms, and food production

26

HITLER’S HANGMAN

accordingly decreased by 30 per cent during the war. Bread rationing

began in 1915 and the following year meat rationing was introduced. The

pre-war average daily nutritional intake was 2,500 calories, which declined

by more than half during the war.44 For the first time in their lives, the

Heydrich children experienced hunger, particularly during the Turnip

Winter of 1916. At the same time, real wages fell, especially those of the

middle classes, many of whom also lost their savings and were no longer

able to afford a musical education for their children. The Heydrichs’ holi-

days, too, became less exclusive. During the war, Reinhard spent his

annual summer vacation in the Düben heath between the towns of Torgau

and Dessau, where his parents rented a cottage from a local forester. After

the Second World War, the forester’s son, Erich Schultze, recalled that he

and Reinhard passed their time reading history books and acquiring a

rudimentary knowledge of Russian by talking to the prisoners of war

working the local fields. According to Schultze, he and Reinhard also

worked their way through the original French version of Charles Seignobos’

Histoire de la civilisation
, which they discussed in French, or at least

attempted to do so.45

While the war on the Western Front stagnated and the French troops

were defending Verdun with unexpected tenacity, the Heydrich family in

1916 eagerly awaited the publication of
Hugo Riemanns Musik-Lexikon
, the

most complete and widely used German encyclopaedia of music and musi-

cians at the time, which was due to appear that summer with an entry on

Bruno Heydrich’s life and work.46 Anticipation turned to anger and frustra-

tion when the copy final y arrived. On opening Riemann’s encyclopedia, the

family discovered an entry suggesting that Bruno was a Jewish composer

and that his last name was ‘actual y Süss’.47 Heydrich was not a particularly

political man, but the insinuation that he was a Jew – potential y damaging

in a Protestant city ripe with latent anti-Semitism – prompted him to sue

the encyclopaedia’s editors for libel. As the lawsuit in 1916 revealed, the

original entry on Heydrich (without the ‘damaging’ insinuation) had been

altered by Martin Frey, a former pupil of Heydrich’s who had been expel ed

from the Conservatory, in a targeted act of revenge. Frey had arranged the

alteration through a relative on the dictionary’s editorial team in order to

harm Bruno Heydrich’s reputation in the Hal e community.48 After the

facts had been established, Bruno won the court case and the mention of his

al eged Jewish background was removed from the next edition of the ency-

clopaedia. But the rumours did not disappear. Instead they gained further

currency after it became publicly known that Hans Krantz, one of

Reinhard’s maternal uncles in Dresden, was married to a Jewish woman

from Hungary cal ed Iza Jarmy. At school, Reinhard’s schoolmates began to

tease him and his brother Heinz Siegfried by cal ing them ‘Isi’ or ‘Isidor’.49

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

27

Throughout the war years, the Heydrichs placed a great deal of impor-

tance on denying these rumours, threatening those who repeated them

with libel actions. Yet their own personal relations with the Jewish citizens

of Halle – who numbered no more than 1,400 in 1910 – were quite

normal and there is no evidence to suggest that Bruno Heydrich’s attitude

towards the Jews was hostile. On the contrary, Jews sent their sons and

daughters to Heydrich’s Conservatory; Bruno rented out the cellar of the

school as a storage space to a local Jewish salesman; and his eldest son,

Reinhard, became friends with the son of the cantor of the Halle Jewish

community, Abraham Lichtenstein.50

The Heydrich scandal of 1916 is therefore indicative less of Bruno’s

own racist beliefs than of a general climate of mounting anti-Semitism.

Although Jews were no longer subject to discriminatory legislation in

Imperial Germany, unofficial discrimination against them continued

when it came to access to social interaction and to eminent positions in

the state bureaucracy or the upper ranks of the military. Anti-Semitism in

Imperial Germany was widespread, but probably no more than in France

or East-Central Europe, and it was not a clearly defined, internally

consistent system of beliefs. Rather, it was a loose cluster of stereotypes

drawn from a broad range of traditions that could be mixed in varying

proportions. Racist anti-Semitism, the driving ideological force in

Heydrich’s later life, remained the affair of a small minority on the

extreme fringes of German politics, and no lobby group focusing single-

mindedly on the ‘Jewish question’ ever became an electoral success in

Imperial Germany. But expressions of hostility towards Jews could be

found across the political spectrum as well as in public statements from

the Protestant and Catholic Churches. For the young Reinhard Heydrich,

the accusation of being a half-Jew was a nuisance, but, although it may

have made him hostile towards those spreading the rumours, it certainly

did not turn him into a racist anti-Semite.51

Far more devastating than the rumours about Heydrich’s Jewish

ancestry was the news that the war was lost. German propaganda had

suggested right up until the autumn of 1918 that victory was in sight and

the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which formalized Germany’s victory

over Russia in the spring of 1918, encouraged people to believe that the

defeat of Britain and France was only a matter of time.52 The signing of

the armistice in November 1918 therefore came as a major blow and an

unwanted surprise that shattered the hopes and expectations of many

Germans. The suddenness of the Allied victory only months after the

beginning of the initially successful German spring offensive of 1918

contributed to a situation in which many Germans refused to believe that

their army had been defeated. Instead, a powerful myth gained currency

28

HITLER’S HANGMAN

across the country: the so-called stab-in-the-back legend, according to

which Germany’s undefeated armed forces had been betrayed by unpatri-

otic revolutionaries on the home front. The stab in the back had a powerful

resonance in German culture, not least because the hero figure of the

popular Nibelung saga, Siegfried, was slain from behind – a theme that

was taken up in Wagner’s
Ring
and Bruno Heydrich’s opera
Amen
.

Although a majority of Germans initially welcomed the end of the

war and the end of the imperial system, the mood quickly changed when

the revolution radicalized in late 1918 and early 1919, giving rise to shat-

tering political upheavals and a pervasive apocalyptic mood. Two months

after Germany’s defeat, the extreme left-wing revolutionary Spartakists

attempted to seize power in Berlin. The uprising failed and on the evening

of 15 January 1919 its main leaders, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg,

were arrested and murdered by Freikorps soldiers. Yet the revolutionary

threat continued, notably in Bremen, Munich and the industrial heart-

lands of Western and Central Germany.53

By the end of February 1919, the revolutionary wave reached Heydrich’s

home town of Hal e. Hitherto, Bruno Heydrich had not been a particularly

political man – loyal to the Kaiser, national-liberal in outlook but never

affiliated with any particular party. His politicization began with the

German defeat and the subsequent revolution: in early 1919, he became a

member of the German Nationalist People’s Party (DNVP), a party with a

staunchly anti-democratic, monarchist agenda. He had become political,

and the momentous political changes that occurred in Hal e in the spring of

1919 could not have failed to impact on his fourteen-year-old son Reinhard.

On 23 February 1919 the Central German Miners’ Conference

convened in Halle and proclaimed a general strike against the Provisional

Reich government in Weimar. The already tense situation deteriorated

further when the anti-Communist citizens of Halle responded with a

counter-strike: local businessmen closed their shops, thereby cutting the

city off from all food supplies. Postal services ceased to operate and

policemen, doctors, teachers and other civil servants refused to work. The

general strike reached its climax on 27 February, when three-quarters of

the factories and mines of Central Germany were picketed. That same day,

Halle experienced the largest political demonstration in its history: up to

50,000 workers demanded the resignation of the Reich government, the

imposition of workers’ councils and the nationalization of Germany’s

industrial plant. Concerned about the growing unrest in Halle – close to

the city of Weimar where the deputies of the Constituent National

Assembly had gathered to draft a new republican constitution – the Social

Democratic Defence Minister, Gustav Noske, ordered a Freikorps unit,

composed of demobilized ex-soldiers and student volunteers, to ‘recapture’

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

29

the city of Halle. Its commanding officer was Major General Georg

Maercker, a staunchly conservative former colonial officer who had partic-

ipated in the murderous colonial campaigns against the Herero and Nama

in German South-West Africa before fighting on the Eastern and

Western Fronts in the First World War.54

For Reinhard Heydrich, the experience of a feasible revolutionary threat

in his home town reinforced perceptions of living through a momentous

era of tangible and existential threats. Both at home and at school, the

example of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 featured prominently in

discussions about the future fate of the German Reich. Rumours about

atrocities committed by Bolsheviks against the former Russian elites

emanated from the East and were quickly projected on to the situation in

Germany itself. The pervasiveness of such rumours can be explained only

by considering the broader context of the Russian Revolution and the

subsequent civil war that cost the lives of up to 3 million people. The

successful consolidation of power by a determined revolutionary minority

of Russian Bolsheviks during the winter of 1917–18 injected a potent new

energy into the world of politics, which resulted in the emergence of

equally determined counter-revolutionary forces, for whom the violent

repression of revolution, and more especially of revolutionaries, constituted

their overriding goal.55

As Maercker was gathering his Freikorps troops south of Halle, the

situation escalated further when one of his officers, Lieutenant Colonel

Klüber, entered the city in civilian disguise on a reconnaissance trip. When

Klüber was discovered by revolutionary soldiers, he was attacked and

beaten before being thrown into the River Saale and killed by a gunshot