Hitler's Hangman (21 page)

to him than the grim reality that confronted inmates behind the closed

walls of the camps.75

The most prominent victim of Heydrich’s first wave of persecution in

Bavaria was the Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann. Closely observing the

dramatic political developments in Germany, Mann, who had left for a

reading tour of Holland, Belgium and France shortly after Hitler’s

appointment as chancellor, decided to extend his stay abroad by a few

months until the situation at home had stabilized. As a non-Jewish, liberal

conservative, he should have had little to fear, but he had attacked the

Nazis in a number of public speeches and articles in the early 1930s and

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wisely decided to be cautious. In late April, his house in Munich was

raided by Heydrich’s political police. His cars, bank accounts and private

possessions were confiscated.76

On 12 June Heydrich went even further. In a letter to State Commis-

sioner von Epp, he demanded that upon his return to Munich Mann should

be placed in protective custody in Dachau, since the author was ‘an enemy

of the national movement and a fol ower of the Marxist idea’. As evidence,

Heydrich stated that Mann had cal ed for a general amnesty for al the

revolutionaries of 1918. Moreover, he insisted that Mann’s masterpiece,
The

Magic Mountain
(1924), contained a ‘glorifying passage’ on Jewish ritual

slaughter. In sum, Heydrich concluded, the writer’s ‘unGerman, anti-Nazi,

Marxist and Jew-friendly attitude provided the reason for decreeing protec-

tive custody against Thomas Mann, which could not be carried out so far

due to the absence of the accused. However, by order of the ministries al of

his assets were confiscated.’ When Epp enquired which ministries had

authorized this step, Heydrich did not respond. By this time the SS had

already developed into a largely autonomous force in Bavaria. Shortly there-

after, Heydrich employed the same arguments when he applied to have

Mann stripped of his German citizenship, a procedure completed in 1936

after the SD chief’s renewed request. Mann and Heydrich would never

meet, but remained connected in deep enmity. It was Mann who after

Heydrich’s assassination in 1942 issued one of the first obituaries on the

BBC, condemning him as one of Hitler’s most appal ing henchmen.77

The Thomas Mann case was an atypical example of Nazi persecution.

Unlike most middle-ranked Communist or Social Democratic Party

functionaries, Mann was financially independent and of sufficient inter-

national reputation to continue his career in exile without major disrup-

tions. At the same time, however, the case was paradigmatic both of

the increasing persecution of writers classified as unGerman and of the

gradual expansion of terror in order to encompass more and more broadly

defined enemy groups. In Bavaria, for example, the vast majority of the

more than 5,000 people arrested between March and June 1933 were

Communists and Social Democrats, but the target groups were soon

extended. In June, Himmler and Heydrich ordered the arrest of leading

functionaries of the conservative Bavarian People’s Party (BVP) in order

to force the party to dissolve itself. After this had been achieved and the

BVP functionaries had been set free again, Bavaria still had 3,965 persons

in protective custody, including 2,420 in Dachau as of August 1933. One

year later, in June 1934, the number was further reduced to 2,204 people

in SS custody, more than half of them in Dachau.78

Himmler and Heydrich had needed less than a year to create an effec-

tive system of terror in Bavaria. Towards the end of 1933, their ambition

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71

grew and they began to seek control over the political police formations

in the other states outside Bavaria. Germany was a federal country with

independent political police forces of varying sizes in each state, and the

task of assuming control over them required patience and tactical skill.

During the autumn of 1933 and the summer of 1934, the political police

in most of the states were gradually brought under SS control.79 In this

process Himmler made good use of his negotiation skills and his personal

contacts with local Nazi leaders to place trusted allies in key positions in

the states’ political police forces. The political police branches in most

German states were tiny and their gradual takeover by the SS attracted

little attention from the SS’s political rivals. It was also helpful that the SS

was widely regarded as a disciplined elite organization loyal to the Nazi

Party leadership. The success of the SS in Bavaria in efficiently and quietly

fighting the political opposition was now seen as a model for Germany as

a whole, a model that was preferable to the uncoordinated and often spon-

taneous outbursts of SA violence that alienated Hitler’s conservative

coalition partners.

During these weeks and months, Heydrich accompanied Himmler on

several trips across Germany, recruiting new staff and negotiating

with political decision-makers. He made sure that the SS men appointed

by Himmler as heads of the local political police forces were simultane-

ously recruited into the SD, enabling Heydrich to access the political

information gathered by the local police commanders. Already in the

spring of 1934, seven of the eleven heads of the political police forces

in the individual German states were members of the SD. Heydrich

recruited a large number of staff members who would share and some-

times even shape his professional path and political beliefs over the

following years.80 In September 1933, for example, he met Dr Werner

Best, who would have a lasting intellectual influence on him. Born in

1903, Best had studied law and became a judge in the Weimar Republic.

In 1930 he joined the Nazi Party in Hessen and directed its legal depart-

ment in his spare time. When, in 1931, the authorities were supplied with

the so-called Boxheim documents, which indicated that Best had made

plans for a Nazi coup, he was dismissed from his judgeship. After the

Nazis’ rise to power, he became head of the police in Hessen where he

oversaw the first arrests of political opponents, but personal differences

with the new Nazi State Commissioner of Hessen, Jakob Sprenger, led to

his dismissal in September 1933. It was in this situation that he met

Heydrich for the first time.81

After the war, Best recalled his first encounter with Heydrich, a recol-

lection that showed how far the latter had developed since 1931 when

Wolff had described him as an ‘insecure youth’:

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Heydrich was tall, of higher stature than most of his subordinates. He

appeared slender, while at the same time a certain width, particularly in

the hips, gave him a powerful, hefty touch. The narrow, long face beneath

the blond hair was dominated by the powerful aquiline nose and the

closely set blue eyes. These eyes often stared coldly, probing and

distrustful, frequently disconcerting others through a flickering restless-

ness . . . He immediately articulated his opinions and intentions with a

remarkable forcefulness and thus left others no choice but either to

agree and submit to his will or to undertake a counterattack for which

few had the courage. In this way, Heydrich immediately forced everyone

to position themselves as his friend or foe. . . . The forcefulness of his

demeanour and behaviour certainly left a lasting impression . . . He

frequently expressed his dissatisfaction towards his subordinates in

exceedingly tempestuous forms and with intentionally hurtful remarks.

On the other hand, when he was satisfied – particularly when a person

who had originally resisted him finally submitted to his will – he could

display the greatest friendliness and positively charm his counterpart.

But his behaviour was always characterized by an unconcealed subjec-

tivity and by the impetuous determination to assert himself at every

moment and at any cost.82

Best was considerably more intellectual than Heydrich and was often

surprised by his boss’s lack of interest in larger philosophical questions.

‘During a journey’, Best recalled, ‘we were talking about what we would

do if for any reason we were suddenly forced to leave the public service.

While I talked about studying areas of knowledge I had not previously

had time for, such as philosophy or history, Heydrich declared that he

would devote himself entirely to sport.’83 Because of his intellectual

superiority and Heydrich’s inexperience in legal and policing matters,

Best exercised a powerful influence on his superior throughout the

1930s, acquainting him with theories that appeared to support Heydrich’s

own value system. Through Best, Heydrich learned more about ‘heroic

realism’, a notion propagated by Ernst Jünger and other prominent right-

wing intellectuals in the 1920s and early 1930s. While it had originally

emerged as a ‘coping mechanism’ deriving from the lost world war and

from the right-wing critique of the Weimar Republic, heroic realism

exerted a particular fascination on those members of the younger genera-

tion who had not been able to fight as soldiers themselves and who had

thus not been permitted to prove themselves in battle.84

In Best’s worldview, ideas emanating from hereditary biologists, demog-

raphers and racial hygienists merged with other ideological constructs of

the extreme right. Heydrich’s strength, so Best observed, was to translate

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73

these abstract ideas and doctrines into actual policies and to apply

them rigorously. For Heydrich and Best, life was a constant struggle, a

permanent state of emergency, in which the enemy was to be fought

mercilessly, not out of cruelty or hatred, but out of the ‘objective’ biological

necessity of winning the struggle of peoples for the survival of the

fittest.85

This struggle demanded toughness, both towards oneself and towards

others. It demanded the suppression of emotions and the cultivation of

callousness, hardness and mercilessness towards all opponents. By being

hard in the present, so they believed, they would be kind to the future.

Unconditional toughness set one apart from those who had no stomach

for the life-and-death struggle for Germany’s survival. The keyword

‘sobriety’ was used to propagate an ideal of cold, pragmatic ideological

soldiers whose actions would no longer be guided by irrational emotions,

an attitude which also helped to conceal moments of social inadequacy or

uncertainty.86

Over the coming years, such attitudes and beliefs would meld into a

whole catalogue of ‘virtues’, which became aspirational for the SS as a

whole and which Heydrich himself genuinely tried to live by. It was

Himmler’s intention that ideals such as honour, loyalty, obedience,

decency and camaraderie should guide the behaviour of his SS men.

Drawn from the standard vocabulary of authoritarian movements, these

virtues gained special meaning in Nazi Germany, as they were increasingly

deprived of their wider content. For the SS members, loyalty, for example,

referred solely to their relationship with Adolf Hitler. This loyalty formed

the core of a special code of honour that distinguished SS men from all

others. A breach of loyalty was the gravest offence an SS man could

commit and automatically resulted in a loss of honour. Camaraderie

bound the organization together and made it into a unit in which conflicts

and petty jealousies were unacceptable.87

Guided by such principles, Heydrich began to develop his characteristic

leadership style, one which even his closest associates described as

‘despotic’.88 He often behaved more impulsively than the cautious

Himmler and frequently bullied his way through problems. Even when

among close colleagues, Best observed, Heydrich ‘approached people in

that enquiring, distrustful way which immediately struck everyone as his

dominating characteristic’, thus creating a permanently ‘tense atmosphere

full of mistrust and friction’. Throughout his life, he found it difficult to

accept criticism, and within his immediate working environment he did

not tolerate it at all. Aided by a phenomenal memory for detail, he often

liked to intimidate his conversation partners by reminding them of things

they had once said and long forgotten. In the most accurate post-war

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characterization of Heydrich’s leadership style, Werner Best maintained