Hitler's Hangman (26 page)

its people from its tireless enemies. But how exactly did these ideas and

concepts translate into actual policies of persecution?

The Jews

The publication of Heydrich’s articles in the
Schwarze Korps
was directly

connected with the ‘second anti-Semitic wave’, which the Nazi Party

initiated in the spring of 1935 and which would ultimately lead to

the promulgation of the Nuremberg Laws in September of that year.

Following a temporary easing of anti-Semitic violence, a wave of appar-

ently spontaneous local actions against Jewish property spread across the

Reich.30 While Heydrich sympathized with the overall aim of these

actions, namely to terrify the Jews into emigration, he disagreed with the

open brutality that was sure to antagonize a majority of the German

population and trigger foreign hate propaganda against the Third Reich.

Up to this point, Heydrich had given surprisingly little thought to the

Jews. To be sure, Germany’s Jews had found themselves in the firing line

from the very moment Hitler acceded to power on 30 January 1933.

Continuing and intensifying a pattern all too familiar from the weeks

before Hitler was appointed chancellor, SA and Hitler Youth members

attacked Jewish individuals and shops. Within a few weeks, the regional

Gauleiters had taken up the campaign, supporting organized attacks on

Jewish businesses all over Germany. A national, government-sponsored

boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 was followed by a purge of

the civil service.31

During the first two years of the Third Reich, neither the Gestapo nor

the SD played a prominent role in Nazi anti-Jewish policies. The persecu-

tion of political opponents, above all Communists and Social Democrats,

initially seemed more pressing to Heydrich than the Jewish problem.32

The Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish policies in the first two years of the Third

Reich instead emerged as a result of a subtle interplay between Nazi Party

activists and the legislative machinery, notably the Interior Ministry. The

party, represented by Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann, as well as a

number of particularly anti-Semitic Gauleiters such as Joseph Goebbels

in Berlin and Julius Streicher in Nuremberg, launched ‘grassroots actions’

against Jews, such as the 1 April 1933 boycott and the anti-Jewish riots

that erupted in the spring and summer of 1935. Under the pretext of

removing the reason for justified popular anger, the Interior Ministry

could then react with legal measures designed to restrict the freedom of

the Jewish minority even further. The Gestapo, by contrast, played no

major role in the boycott of Jewish businesses on 1 April 1933 or in the

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

93

subsequent anti-Semitic legislation that led to the dismissal of thousands

of Jewish civil servants.33

This is not to suggest that Heydrich was indifferent to the Jewish ques-

tion. Ever since he joined the SS, he had proved himself to be an eager

ideological pupil of Himmler, and he regularly expressed his hatred

toward Jews, both in public and in private. According to his wife, Reinhard

became ‘deeply convinced that the Jews had to be separated from the

Germans. In his eyes the Jews were . . . rootless plunderers, determined to

gain selfish advantage and to stick like leeches to the body of the host

nation.’34 Such views were unquestionably influenced both by his wife and

by Nazi propaganda, which consistently portrayed Jews as parasites who

had accumulated riches during the war and the subsequent economic

crisis, while Aryan Germans had died on the front or suffered from the

post-war inflation. If the Aryan German was characterized by heroism

and the willingness to sacrifice himself for the greater good of the nation,

the Jews were ciphers for greed and economic gain.35

There was therefore nothing particularly new or original about

Heydrich’s anti-Semitism. He subscribed to standard Nazi ideas as articu-

lated in
Mein Kampf
and earlier works of racial anti-Semitism such as

Paul de Lagarde’s influential
German Writings
(1878), Houston Stewart

Chamberlain’s
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899) and Alfred

Rosenberg’s
Myth of the Twentieth Century
(1930). If race rather than

religion provided the rationale for Nazi anti-Semitism, the various

elements of the negative anti-Semitic stereotype that had accumulated

since the second half of the Middle Ages were adopted almost in their

entirety by the Nazis. The only significant addition was the accusation that

Jews were responsible for the threat of the spread of Bolshevism. With

little regard for logical consistency, the traditional stereotype of Jews as

parasitical usurers was supplemented by a new image of Jews as subversive

revolutionaries determined to destroy capitalism and overturn the social

order. The Jews were thus a rootless, international force, seeking to under-

mine Germany from both within and without through the agencies of

international Bolshevism, international finance capital and Freemasonry.36

Heydrich’s own hatred of Jews was not shaped by an intensive study of

the classic texts of European anti-Semitism, even if he did read the forged

Protocols of the Elders of Zion
and Hans Günther’s
Rassenkunde des

Deutschen Volkes
of 1922. He was much more conditioned by his immer-

sion in a milieu that firmly believed in racial anti-Semitism. As Werner

Best observed, his boss’s strength lay in ‘firmly applying the theoretical

and doctrinaire assertions about enemies of the state that came from

Hitler and Himmler’. In this policy area, as in all others, Heydrich proved

to be a man of deed, not of ideas or theories.37

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

Heydrich’s behaviour with regard to the Jewish question was character-

ized by a flurry of activity that intensified after 1935. Unlike Himmler,

who hardly ever mentioned the Jews in his speeches before 1938,

Heydrich became increasingly convinced that the Jews were at the centre

of a complex network of enemies that confronted the Third Reich.38 In

search of new enemies and faced by a wave of anti-Semitic violence in

1935, Heydrich argued that while the racial legislation of 1933 had indeed

restricted the direct influence of Jewry in Germany, it was insufficient to

control permanently the ‘tenacious’ and ‘determined’ Jews: ‘The introduc-

tion of the Aryan legislation has not banished the threat of Jewry against

Germany. The expedient Jewish organizations with all their connections

to their international leadership continue to work for the extermination of

our people along with all its values.’ Neither the economic, the academic

nor the cultural life of Germany had been fully purged of the Jews, giving

them plenty of opportunities to expand their areas of influence.39

For Heydrich, this threat was closely linked to what he regarded as a

misguided notion of humanism that was widespread in Germany: the

Jew’s ‘work is made easier by the fact that there still are
Volksgenossen
(the

Churches even promote this attitude) who only accept the Aryan legisla-

tion under pressure and do not grasp its racial foundations. Today, only

two years after the Nazi revolution, parts of the German people are

beginning to become indifferent towards the Jew; meanwhile the Jew

relentlessly pursues his eternally unchanging goal: world domination and

the extermination of the Nordic peoples.’40

Until 1935, the role of Heydrich’s political police apparatus was

confined to the surveillance of Jewish organizations and the execution of

new anti-Semitic legislation.41 However, Heydrich soon displayed his

characteristic impatience and was no longer prepared to wait for new laws

and regulations. Instead he began to introduce his own police measures.

In January 1935, for example, he ordered that returning émigrés should be

interned, a directive that he clarified in March 1935: ‘All persons who have

left the Reich following the National Socialist revolution for political

reasons, both Aryans and non-Aryans,’ were to be regarded as émigrés and

interned in concentration camps. Women were to be deported separately

to the Moringen concentration camp.42 From August 1935 onwards, the

regional Gestapo head offices had to keep detailed registers of Jews living

in their respective areas of responsibility.43

As he implemented anti-Jewish police measures, Heydrich quickly

advanced to become the central figure in SS Jewish policy. His position

was further enhanced in July 1936 when Göring appointed him to direct

the Foreign Currency Investigation Agency (
Devisenfahndungsamt
).44

Over the coming years, this new authority would allow Heydrich to

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

95

pursue real and alleged violations of foreign currency regulations, particu-

larly when these ‘crimes’ were committed by Jews who stood under ‘suspi-

cion of emigration’. In such cases he was authorized to confiscate Jewish

savings preventively. Heydrich’s appointment as head of this agency was

the first of a number of similar authorizations by Göring that would

provide Heydrich with the tools for the persecution of Jews over the

coming years. This established two competing chains of command with

respect to Nazi anti-Jewish policies that would remain largely unchanged

until Heydrich’s death in June 1942: one from Hitler to Heydrich via

Himmler and one from Hitler to Heydrich via Göring. While this second

chain of command effectively undermined Himmler’s authority over

Heydrich, it never seems to have led to a rivalry between the two men – or

at least there is no hard evidence for such a rivalry, apart from the ques-

tionable post-war memoirs of Walter Schellenberg and Felix Kersten.45

When it came to persecuting the Jews, both the Gestapo and the SD

were primarily concerned with promoting emigration activities and

preventing al ‘assimilationist’ activities on the part of German Jews. ‘The

aim of Jewish policies must be the emigration of al Jews,’ an internal SD

memorandum for Heydrich suggested in May 1934. In order to create the

necessary pressures to induce ‘voluntary’ emigration, the policy document

continued, the ‘Jews are to have their opportunities to live in this country

reduced – and not only in economic terms. Germany has to be a country

without a future for Jews, in which the older generation wil die off in their

remaining positions, but in which young Jews are unable to live so that the

attraction of emigration is constantly kept alive. The use of mob anti-

Semitism [
Radau-Antisemitismus
] is to be rejected. One does not fight rats

with guns but with poison and gas. The damage incurred by crude

methods, especial y the foreign policy implications, is disproportionate to

the success rate.’46

The reference to poison and gas should not be misinterpreted as a road

map for the Holocaust. While the document’s language was redolent with

metaphors of plague and parasites, its key argument was that the problem

should be resolved as quietly as possible, ideally through incentivized

emigration. In contrast to noisy anti-Semitic party leaders such as Joseph

Goebbels or Julius Streicher, Heydrich’s Jewish experts promoted a more

sober (but ultimately no less radical) strategy against the Jews – a strategy

that explicitly included humiliation, expropriation and expulsion in order

to achieve its goal of a Jew-free Europe. Systematic mass murder was,

however, still beyond the conceivable in the 1930s, even for Heydrich and

his anti-Jewish think-tank within the SD.47

The memorandum of May 1934 suggested that Zionist organizations

openly promoting emigration to Palestine should be given preferential

96

HITLER’S HANGMAN

treatment over assimilationist organizations, which argued that German

Jews should weather the Nazi storm and stay in their homeland.

Heydrich’s own view on the assimilationists had altered since 1933. As

late as March 1934, Heydrich’s Bavarian Political Police had given

permission to the nationalist Reich Association of Jewish Veterans to

continue its work under certain conditions.48 Ten months later, in January

1935, Heydrich changed his mind on the matter and instructed the

Gestapo that the ‘activities of Zionist youth organizations’ were ‘in line

with the aims of the National Socialist state leadership’ while assimila-

tionists should be treated with ‘severity’.49

Heydrich further expanded on the policy of differentiated treatment in