Hitler's Hangman (24 page)

family tended to refer to Reinhard Heydrich’s elevated position in the new

regime whenever they bought groceries and alcohol on credit. Violations

of the agreement would absolve Heydrich from his obligation to make the

voluntary payments.125

The fact that no signed copy of the agreement exists in Heydrich’s

personal files and that Heydrich’s parents never moved to Munich suggests

that his parents rejected their son’s proposal, which presumably accelerated

the final collapse of the once flourishing Halle Conservatory. On

26 December 1935, Bruno Heydrich informed the Halle authorities that

his Conservatory had closed down for good.126 If anything, the constant

trouble with the Conservatory and his increasingly tense relationship with

his family in Halle encouraged Reinhard to distance himself further from

his past life. His visits to Halle stopped altogether and he did not see his

parents, now living in a tiny rented flat in one of the city’s working-class

districts, until the summer of 1938 when Bruno lay dying. Heydrich did

not return to his hometown after his father’s funeral in late August of that

year, but he continued to make infrequent financial contributions to his

B E C O M I N G H E Y D R I C H

83

mother’s living expenses. It was only after Reinhard’s death in 1942 that

Elisabeth Heydrich was invited back into the family home, presumably to

mind her grandchildren. For Reinhard, by contrast, the future looked very

bright indeed in the summer of 1934. After nearly three years of profes-

sional uncertainty and constant relocations to short-term rental accom-

modation, he was now in a position to afford a generous flat in Berlin’s

affluent suburb of Südende. Heydrich’s income was also sufficient to

employ a housemaid. At the end of this highly successful year, on 28

December 1934, Heydrich’s wife gave birth to their second son, Heider.127

C H A P T ER I V

✦

Fighting the Enemies of

the Reich

In Search of New Enemies

If the outcome of the Röhm putsch had proven to be a thorough

success for Heydrich’s SD and the political police apparatus, it also aroused

the suspicion of influential individuals who worried that the SS was

becoming too powerful – in particular, the conservatives in the military and

rival Nazis like Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, whose overall authority

over the German police was gradually undermined by Himmler and

Heydrich.

Although the military had emerged from the Röhm purge with some

complacency, tensions soon developed between it and the SS. While

Heydrich viewed the conservatives in the army as ideologically unreliable,

the military resented the murder of some of its generals during the purge.

By the end of 1934, Heydrich and Himmler had convinced themselves of

the imminence of a military coup, and their agents assembled evidence to

support this belief. They focused their suspicions on the military’s own

espionage department, the Abwehr, which Heydrich considered deeply

unreliable, and on General Werner von Fritsch, the Commander-in-Chief

of the army.1

Heydrich’s attitude towards the Abwehr, and the murky area of foreign

espionage more general y, was crucial y shaped by his reading of Walter

Nicolai’s book,
Geheime Mächte
, first published in 1923. In his comparative

study of intel igence operations during the Great War, Nicolai as head of

Imperial Germany’s military intel igence service essential y blamed the

Reich’s defeat on the lack of an intel igence agency capable of competing with

similar institutions in France and Britain. Unlike its enemies, Germany had

not developed co-ordinated intel igence services against its wartime enemies.

The independently operating military intel igence lacked guidance from the

political leadership, which did not understand its needs or support it.

F I G H T I N G T H E E N E M I E S O F T H E R E I C H

85

What Germany needed was statesmen with the necessary determination to

pursue national interests and a central, political y directed espionage service to

uphold that policy. Nicolai emphasized that minorities, especial y Jews, and

the international y operating Churches represented threats to national secu-

rity, a view with which Heydrich enthusiastical y agreed.2

Heydrich’s critical attitude towards the Abwehr was also shaped by

his ambition to control al political intel igence-gathering agencies in

Germany. To date, Abwehr and police responsibilities were inextricably

linked in two areas. The first was espionage and sabotage, which the

Gestapo handled as crimes against the state and against property. Since no

clear line separated political crimes that concerned the military from those

that did not, the military Abwehr had always worked closely with the

political sections of the criminal investigation police involved in those

cases, the so-cal ed Abwehr police or counter-espionage police. The two

organizations shared information, but in matters primarily concerning the

military the police had to accept Abwehr authority. The second problem

grew from the Defence Ministry’s lack of a militarized police establish-

ment like that of other European states. Since the Abwehr had neither the

authority nor the means to undertake searches and arrests in the civil sector,

it had to rely on the civil police – even in cases that were clearly military-

defence matters. If relations between the police and the Abwehr had been

relatively smooth in the Weimar period, it was because the police had

known their place. This balance of power fundamental y changed under

Heydrich, whose continuous efforts to broaden his own area of responsi-

bility at the expense of the Abwehr led to repeated clashes in late 1934.3

Tensions between the SS and the military reached a climax in late

December 1934 when Himmler and Heydrich launched an attack on

Fritsch, whom they accused of planning a military putsch against the

Führer. Hitler intervened in an attempt to de-escalate the conflict and

both sides subsequently made concerted efforts to ease the tensions. In a

statement made in January 1935, Heydrich regretted ‘the poisoning of the

relationship’ between the Reichswehr as ‘bearer of the arms of the nation’

and the SS as ‘the bearer of the ideology in the state and the party’. The

tensions of the past few months, so he claimed, had been the work of

Germany’s internal and external enemies who spread false rumours and

incited hatred in order to weaken the Reich.4

The situation was further improved on 1 January 1935 by the appoint-

ment of a new head of the military Abwehr, Heydrich’s former navy

training officer and personal friend Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris, who was

executed by the SS in Flossenbürg concentration camp four weeks before

the end of the war because of his alleged involvement in the attempted

assassination of Hitler by Claus von Stauffenberg, was still a supporter of

86

HITLER’S HANGMAN

Nazism at the time. Like Stauffenberg and many other of the 1944

conspirators, he was an arch-conservative nationalist who had welcomed

the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933 and applauded German expan-

sionism throughout the 1930s, before the extreme criminality of the Nazi

regime became apparent to him during the Second World War.5 The

Heydrich and Canaris families had become neighbours upon Canaris’s

arrival in Berlin and they spent much time together. Contrary to subse-

quent rumours, their relationship was close.6 On 17 January, Heydrich

and Canaris met for a three-hour conference to resolve the problems that

had previously overshadowed relations between the political police and

the Abwehr. The outcome was a ten-point agreement – the famous Ten

Commandments – which specified the future division of labour between

the Abwehr, the Gestapo and the SD. According to this agreement,

Heydrich recognized the Abwehr’s sole responsibility for military espio-

nage and counter-espionage as well as for control and protection of mili-

tary installations. In return, Canaris acknowledged the SD’s competence

in cases of industrial espionage and the gathering of intelligence in border

areas around the Reich. He also accepted the Gestapo’s sole responsibility

for combating political crimes within the Reich. At least for the next few

years, the working relations between the Abwehr, the SD and the Gestapo

were good, and both Heydrich and Canaris sincerely sought to maintain

efficient co-operation.7

The tensions that persisted between the SS and the Ministry of the

Interior during the mid-1930s were in many ways more difficult to

resolve. Despite the strategically important victory that Himmler and

Heydrich had achieved during the Röhm putsch, the SS was still not in

full control of the German police. Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick,

who remained Himmler’s nominal superior, continued to argue that the

newly established tools of repression under SS control – notably, the

concentration camps – were merely temporary tools, created during and

for the seizure of power, and that they needed to be placed back under

strict government supervision as soon as the political situation calmed

down. By 1935, when the Communist underground had been largely

destroyed and its key personnel imprisoned, he decided that the time was

ripe to dismantle the SS’s extra-legal tools of repression and to return to

legal means of fighting political crimes.8

Himmler and Heydrich, by contrast, tried to extend police power

precisely at the time when the Nazi state was seemingly running out of

enemies to arrest. To achieve a further expansion of SS power, they had to

sell the idea of a permanent police state. In that sales campaign, the major

thrust was against the contention that the extraordinary political police

and concentration camp system was only a temporary response to a state

F I G H T I N G T H E E N E M I E S O F T H E R E I C H

87

of emergency.9 The issue was not fully resolved until 17 June 1936, when

Hitler formally appointed Himmler as chief of the German police.

Himmler’s appointment marked an important watershed in the history of

the Third Reich, in terms both of centralizing the previously federal

German police in his hands and of merging a paramilitary party organiza-

tion, the SS, and a traditional state instrument, the police, thus creating an

apparatus of political repression that was run by radical Nazi ideologues.

Himmler now commanded the two most important executive organs of

repression in the Third Reich, the SS and the police, which was unified

under a single command for the first time.
De jure
he remained subordi-

nate to Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, but in the
de facto
hierarchy of

the Third Reich Himmler was now answerable only to Hitler.10

Himmler’s appointment as chief of the German police also had direct

consequences for the thirty-two-year-old Heydrich: on 20 September

1936, his Gestapo headquarters in Berlin formally assumed control over

the political police forces in all German states, thus creating a nationwide

ministerial agency authorized to operate throughout the Reich. In addi-

tion, all criminal police and border police forces in Germany – no fewer

than 9,000 men – were to be merged with the Gestapo under Heydrich’s

command to form a new institution: the so-called Security Police

(Sicherheitspolizei or Sipo). This was not just an administrative act that

more than doubled the number of men under Heydrich’s command. The

primary reason for the union of criminal and political police forces lay in

Heydrich’s and Himmler’s conviction that questions of habitual crimi-

nality and political crimes could not be separated. Criminality had become

a political and racial issue, as Heydrich increasingly considered deviant

criminal behaviour to be an indication of ‘bad blood’. Since Heydrich also

remained – in the Nazi fashion of accumulating offices – chief of the SD,

his joint command over that organization and Sipo gave him control over

the two agencies responsible for most of the atrocities committed in

Germany and occupied Europe over the following years.11

The victory of the SS in the power struggle with the Reich Interior

Ministry was primarily the result of Hitler’s decision to favour a more

open-ended definition of Nazism’s enemies, a definition to which

Heydrich had crucially contributed and which went far beyond the perse-

cution of the political opposition that is typical of all dictatorships. In late

1934, Himmler and Heydrich came to the conclusion that the justifica-