Hitler's Hangman (13 page)

appeared one year before Heydrich finished school and was devoured by a

whole generation of young German readers.73 A third conceivable influ-

ence may have come from Heydrich’s childhood friend, Erich Schultze,

with whom he had spent his wartime holidays in the Düben heath.

Schultze had already joined the navy as an officer cadet in 1921.74

34

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Whatever the decisive childhood influence, young Reinhard had certainly

been brought up in a country in which the military in general and the navy

more specifical y enjoyed great prestige as custodians of the empire’s

national security and guarantors of Germany’s future destiny, a perception

cultivated in school textbooks of the late Wilhelmine period.75 The appeal

of a soldierly existence remained untarnished after 1918, particularly to

those young men who had no first-hand experience of trench warfare with

which to compare the heroic images conjured up by the glorifying war

movies and penny dreadfuls of the early Weimar years. Not only did the

world of the military offer security and structure in increasingly insecure

and seemingly disordered times, but the fantastical figure of the heroic front

soldier, the violent ‘new man’ whose strict and defiant military bearing

distinguished him from the despised images of an effeminate Berlin dandy

or a shabby-looking Bolshevik revolutionary, exerted a powerful influence

on young German men in the 1920s as a role model.76

Yet the German navy, once the pride and joy of German nationalists,

was perhaps more tainted by the odium of treason than any other branch

of the military: it was in Kiel in 1918 that the November Revolution

began with a mutiny of German sailors against their officers’ orders to put

the Imperial Fleet to sea for a final showdown against the Royal Navy.

Only after the apparently ‘heroic’ self-sinking of the Imperial High Seas

Fleet in Scapa Flow in 1919 – a successful attempt to prevent the

surrender of German warships to Britain – had the navy’s reputation been

restored to such an extent that it once more represented an attractive

career option for the sons of patriotic middle-class families. It was the

popular wartime image of the naval officer – daring, adventurous, self-

controlled and attractive to women – that appealed to Heydrich, rather

than the grim and underwhelming reality of a naval force reduced by the

Versailles Treaty to 15,000 men and a handful of dated battleships and

cruisers.77

The Heydrich family’s attitude towards Reinhard’s career choice was

ambivalent. While his mother was ‘very proud’ that Heydrich wanted to

become a naval officer, his father found it difficult to accept that his musi-

cally talented son would not take over the family business.78 Despite his

father’s objections, Heydrich began his service as a naval cadet in Kiel on

1 April 1922, together with dozens of other cadets of ‘Crew 22’ (named

after the year of the intake). The cadet training commenced with six

months of harsh basic training aboard the battleship
Braunschweig
,

followed by three months on the sailing vessel
Niobe
. It ended with service

on the cruiser
Berlin
between July 1923 and March 1924. On 1 April

1924, Heydrich was promoted to senior midshipman and sent for officer

training to the Mürwick Naval College near Flensburg.79

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

35

According to post-war testimonies of Heydrich’s fellow cadets, unques-

tionably tainted by their determination not to appear to have been close

to a war criminal, Heydrich remained an isolated loner throughout his

time in Kiel and ‘had no friends among the crew’.80 While it is true that

Heydrich found it difficult to adjust to the new environment, the reasons

for his outsider status remain unclear. Some former crew members

emphasized his shyness, his unusual physical appearance and his inability

to cope with the physical demands of the training as explanations.

‘Heydrich’s appearance was of remarkable disharmony,’ one of his crew

colleagues remembered after the Second World War.

His limbs somehow did not fit together. A long, narrow, and much too

small head sat on a long neck, with short blond hair, a long nose,

mistrustful squinting eyes, that stood very close together, and a small

mouth, whose gaping lips he usually pinched together. A long upper

body with almost apelike arms sat over a deep, broad pelvis, a husky

build with rounded, unmuscular legs . . . He appeared gangly, somewhat

soft and effeminate.

Even Heydrich’s learning abilities, so the same fellow officer recalled, were:

average at best. Scholarship and thoroughness were never his thing.

Perhaps he picked up on things quickly, but he was too superficial to

process what he had learned and to organize it properly. However, it

would be unfair merely to attribute shrewdness to him. His intelligence

. . . was based on logical thinking, consistent behaviour and an instinct for

treating others in a way that was advantageous to himself, in recognizing

opportunities for himself, in anticipating the wishes of his superiors and

in his adaptability.81

Considering Heydrich’s life-long passion for sport, it seems highly

unlikely that an inability to cope with the physical demands of the

training was the key reason for his outsider status.82 Heydrich had been

an active sportsman for many years before he joined the navy. He was a

member of a gymnastic association in Halle, an active swimmer and a

team member of his high school’s rowing club. Furthermore, he had taken

up fencing in his early childhood and practised daily during his time in

the navy. Moreover, he was a devoted sailor, winning the Baltic Sea

championships in a twelve-foot dinghy in 1927 and the North Sea

championships in the same class one year later.83

It is more likely that Heydrich’s role as an outsider among the crew

members was at least partly a result of his educated middle-class background,

36

HITLER’S HANGMAN

particularly his musical proclivities and his inclination to play the violin

on board whilst off-duty, a pasttime that seemed oddly out of place in

the masculine world of the navy.84 His father had given him a violin as a

parting gift when he left for Kiel and Heydrich practised on it in solitude

whenever he found the time. His musical inclinations repeatedly made him

the target of ridicule. During his basic training in Kiel, for example, a non-

commissioned training officer from West Prussia frequently woke him at

night and forced him to play the Tosel i Serenade on his violin. Many years

later, Heydrich recal ed these humiliating incidents when making conde-

scending comments regarding the racial inferiority of the West Prussians

with their ‘Polish-infested’ blood.85

Two further reasons for Heydrich’s oddball status at the beginning of

his officer training need to be considered. By embarking on a naval career,

he had entered one of the most staunchly right-wing milieus in Weimar

Germany, a milieu in which officers and NCOs compensated for the

‘shameful’ naval mutiny in Kiel in 1918 by taking an aggressively nation-

alistic stance. The naval officer corps not only played a decisive role in the

Freikorps violence against Communist insurgents in 1919 and 1920, but

also provided a recruiting ground for many of the right-wing terrorists

that formed the infamous Organisation Consul, responsible for the assas-

sinations of prominent Weimar politicians such as Matthias Erzberger

and Walther Rathenau. Within this general climate of right-wing

extremism, or so some of his naval colleagues testified after the war,

Heydrich appeared oddly apolitical. If indeed he had flirted with right-

wing extremism in 1918, he seems to have lost interest by 1922. When

one of his fellow cadets, Ernst Werner Techow, participated in the murder

of Foreign Minister Rathenau in the summer of 1922, Heydrich disap-

pointed his roommates by displaying no interest in the case. Neither was

the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 – hotly discussed among his

fellow naval officers and the German population at large – of any concern

to him. If anything, so his fellow cadet Hans Rehm testified after the war,

Heydrich was considered a liberal by his colleagues and shunned for that

very reason.86 Interestingly enough, his future wife Lina gave a similar

assessment of his early lack of interest in politics. After the war, Lina

maintained that ‘politically he was clueless . . . He regarded all parties,

particularly the Nazi Party, with arrogance and considered politics itself to

be vulgar. In this connection he acted very much the snob and regarded

his naval career as the most important thing. The rest didn’t count.’87

Perhaps even more important for his outsider status than his apparent

indifference to politics was the re-emergence of rumours about his alleged

Jewish family background. ‘In our class’, one fellow officer cadet recalled,

‘Heydrich was more or less regarded as a Jew because another crew

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

37

comrade from Halle told us that his family was actually called “Süss” and

that this was widely known in Halle.’ Over the following years, his fellow

cadets would call Heydrich the ‘white Jew’ or ‘white Moses’. In order to

counter the rumours, Heydrich maintained that he had been a member of

the anti-Semetic German Nationalist Protection and Defiance League in

Halle – an organization that rejected Jews as members and which had

been abolished after the Rathenau assassination in 1922. Although prob-

ably untrue, the claim seems to have improved Heydrich’s standing among

his peers.88

Heydrich’s position further improved after a two-month stint on the

sailing vessel
Niobe
in the summer of 1923, after which he was transferred

to the cruiser
Berlin
. It was here, on the
Berlin
, that Heydrich met and

befriended the future head of Nazi Germany’s military intelligence

agency, Wilhelm Canaris, then the first officer on board. Canaris impressed

the young Heydrich with his military experience: as a navigating lieu-

tenant aboard the small cruiser
Dresden
during the Battle of the Falklands

in 1914 he had managed to escape from internment in Chile in 1915

before returning home to Germany. Canaris in turn instantly warmed to

the shy young man with musical inclinations and he became Heydrich’s

mentor over the coming years. From 1924 onwards, he frequently invited

Heydrich to his house in Kiel, where Reinhard and Canaris’s wife, Erika,

played the violin together in a private string quartet and often entertained

members of Kiel’s social establishment.89

Heydrich also played music outside the Canaris household. According

to Hertha Lehmann-Jottkowitz, a student at the Kiel Institute for Global

Economics in the later 1920s, she first met Heydrich when he played the

violin at the home of a mutual friend and amateur cellist. Lehmann-

Jottkowitz remembered Heydrich as an extremely sensitive violinist who

displayed a tenderness and sentimentality that deeply impressed his audi-

ences. In conversation he gave the impression of being a ‘superficial sailor’

who had little to contribute to discussions, but he was completely trans-

formed once he started playing the violin or discussed musical subjects.90

The final component of Heydrich’s officer training was a six-month

stint on the
Schleswig-Holstein
, the flagship of the German North Sea

Fleet. In the summer of 1926, he went on a training cruise through the

Atlantic and into the Western Mediterranean, visiting Spain, Portugal

and the island of Madeira, where he apparently caused a minor scandal in

the Officers’ Mess when a British officer’s wife refused to accept his invita-

tion to dance with him.91 Following the completion of his training aboard

the
Schleswig-Holstein
, Heydrich was promoted to second naval liutenant.92

After his promotion, he appears to have received more recognition from

his colleagues and was less frequently the butt of jokes. His comrade and

38

HITLER’S HANGMAN

roommate on the
Schleswig-Holstein
, Heinrich Beucke, recalled that

after his promotion Heydrich ‘developed significantly . . . His superiors

frequently gave him recognition and good evaluations. He was obliging

and showed that people could rely on him . . . With every sign of recogni-

tion, his zeal increased, and so did his arrogance . . . Ambition was

undoubtedly Heydrich’s strongest characteristic. He wanted to accom-

plish something and others were supposed to be amazed.’93 His childhood