Hitler's Hangman (28 page)

of ‘rational’ anti-Semitism which corresponded with Heydrich’s own

convictions.63

During Polkes’s visit to Berlin in the early spring of 1937, Eichmann

met with him on several occasions and, although Eichmann’s SD

membership remained secret, Polkes was certainly aware that a Nazi

official was sitting opposite him. Polkes explained the position of the

Zionists in Palestine and offered to provide new information on the

assassination of Wilhelm Gustloff, the chief organizer of the Swiss Nazi

Party, if the Nazis were prepared to make Jewish emigration from

Germany to Palestine easier. Eichmann’s report on Polkes’s visit was

presented to Heydrich, who decided that Eichmann should continue

the dialogue with Polkes and travel to the Near East. Heydrich made

it clear, however, that he would take no official responsibility for this

journey should any information about the arrangements become publicly

known.64

On 26 September 1937, Eichmann and Herbert Hagen started out on

their journey and reached Haifa on 2 October. The trip proved disap-

pointing. When Eichmann met Polkes on 10 and 11 October, the latter

was unable to provide any information on the Gustloff assassination and

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

101

merely promised to make further enquiries. As far as emigration to

Palestine was concerned, he denounced newly arrived German emigrants

as ‘work-shy’ and claimed that they were constantly planning to leave

the country again. He nevertheless maintained that the Zionists ‘were

pleased with Germany’s radical Jewish policies . . . because they ensured

the growth of the Jewish population in Palestine to such an extent that it

was fairly certain that in the near future Jews would outnumber Arabs in

Palestine’.65

Hagen and Eichmann left Egypt on 19 October without having

achieved their objective. Despite a lengthy report prepared for Heydrich

of over fifty pages, it was clear that their trip had failed. No concrete

agreements had been reached with the Zionists concerning the emigra-

tion of German Jews. Despite the failure of the trip, however, Hitler

himself endorsed the SD’s policy line. According to a note written by the

Foreign Office and dated January 1938, the Führer restated his position to

Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Nazi Party’s Foreign Policy Office, that

the emigration of Jews to Palestine should be accelerated.66 This was a

considerable victory for Heydrich. In spite of Eichmann’s and Hagen’s

failed visit to the Middle East, the SD was confident enough not only to

propose its own independent solution to the Jewish emigration problem

but also to attempt to put such a proposal into practice. The SD’s demand

to participate at ministerial level in the discussions on Jewish policies was

now taken seriously.67

Five years after Hitler’s ascent to power, the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies

appeared to have been successful. Government departments had pushed

ahead with the legal exclusion of Jews from public life, and special legisla-

tion for Jews had been drafted and implemented in ever finer detail. The

expulsion of Jews from the economy had made considerable progress and

more and more Germans of Jewish descent decided to leave the Third

Reich.68 Yet although the significant stream of emigrants continued to

diminish the Jewish community in Germany, Hitler’s reversal of foreign

policy in early 1938, which would soon lead to the Anschluss of Austria

and the occupation of the Sudetenland, would bring more Jews
into
the

Reich than had left since 1933. The policy of forced emigration did not

end in 1938, but it had clearly reached its limits. More radical approaches,

or so it seemed to Heydrich after 1938, were required to resolve Germany’s

growing Jewish problem.

The Churches

Aside from the Communists and Jews, Heydrich’s particular hatred in

the 1930s was devoted to the Catholic Church; and he pursued the

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

persecution of Catholic clergymen with an enthusiasm that exceeded even

that of Himmler.69 Brought up in a devout Catholic family and having

served as an altar boy in his childhood, Heydrich repeatedly emphasized

that he was opposed not to spirituality itself, but rather to the Church as

a ‘political institution’, which had lent support to different ‘unpatriotic’

parties since the foundation of the Reich in 1871. In that sense, he was

anti-clerical rather than anti-religious. Pointing to the example of the

Church’s resistance to the Law for the Prevention of Herditarily Diseased

Offspring of July 1933, Heydrich maintained that this tradition of

political agitation had continued after Hitler’s seizure of power. As former

Catholics, both Himmler and Heydrich knew that the creation of a ‘supe-

rior’ German race would necessarily involve the violation of Catholic

dogma on abortion, contraception, sterilization and other aspects of the

reproductive process. The Christian idea of marriage would ultimately have

to be abandoned in favour of polygamy – al owing for the fertilization of

more Aryan women – and a racial y driven conception of human partner-

ships that would al ow for divorce for the infertile and racial y unfit. The

Catholic Church’s opposition to Nazi population policy led Heydrich to

the view that instead of ‘being a deferential intermediary between God

and Man’ and serving a kingdom that ‘is not of this world’, the Catholic

Church, guided from Rome, was determined to conquer ‘a worldly power

position’ and sow ‘disharmony’ among the German people.70

At least in this respect, there were parallels between Heydrich’s percep-

tions of Jews and Catholics. Like the Jews, he accused the Catholics of

forming more than just a confession, and both seemed to represent some-

thing alien within the German body politic. But while Catholics could be

good members of the people’s community if they refrained from ‘Roman’

politics, this option was never available to Germany’s Jews. The presump-

tion among anti-Semites like Heydrich that Jewishness retained an indis-

soluble core of ethnic otherness, whereas political Catholicism was an

illness that could be cured, set the Jewish predicament apart.71

Heydrich left the Catholic Church in 1935, but had already described

himself as
gottgläubig
– a believer, but not a member of a Christian

denomination – as early as 1933.
Gottgläubigkeit
– Himmler’s preferred

expression of spirituality – came with a whole set of neo-pagan and alle-

gedly ancient Germanic rituals: instead of the Christian baptism, newborn

babies of SS parents were given a ‘name dedication’ ceremony representing

acceptance into the wider SS family. The
Eheweihe
(marriage consecra-

tion) replaced the Christian wedding, and Easter was substituted by

celebrations of the midsummer solstice, which symbolized the victory of

light over darkness. Yet, even within the SS, only a minority subscribed to

this new belief system: by 1938, only 21.9 per cent of SS members

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103

described themselves as
gottgläubig
, whereas 54 per cent remained

Protestant and just under 24 per cent Catholic. Whether Heydrich

followed the neo-pagan rituals out of conviction or merely to please

Himmler is unknown, although Lina Heydrich maintained after the war

that in private she and her husband often made fun of Himmler’s

obsession with neo-paganism.72

Himmler himself rarely intervened in the anti-Church measures adopted

by the Gestapo and the SD, largely leaving this policy area to Heydrich. In

the early years of the Third Reich, Heydrich’s Gestapo and SD primarily

focused their anti-clerical surveil ance and persecution on the Catholic

Church, which posed a greater chal enge to Nazism than the largely

compliant Protestant Church.73 But Heydrich had to act careful y. In the

summer of 1933, in return for the ‘voluntary’ self-dissolution of the Centre

Party, the Third Reich and the Vatican had signed the Reichskonkordat,

guaranteeing the continued existence and religious freedom of the Catholic

Church in Nazi Germany. Neither the Gestapo nor the SD could be seen

to act in open violation of these accords. Germany remained a deeply

Christian country and public opinion mattered to Hitler.74

Time and again, however, Heydrich and other influential anti-Church

hardliners such as Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess and Martin Bormann

sought to challenge the status quo and to undermine the Church’s

position by linking individual priests with homosexuality, Communism

and paedophilia. Shortly after the seizure of power in Bavaria, for example,

Heydrich moved against three priests who had expressed concern over

the treatment of inmates in Dachau concentration camp. In late

November, following an investigation, they admitted spreading ‘atrocity

stories’ and were arrested. Searches of their quarters turned up the inevi-

table ‘extensive Marxist literature’ and other circumstantial evidence asso-

ciating them with Communism, all of which was duly publicized.

Heydrich used the case publicly to paint a picture of a Communist-

infiltrated priesthood and to argue for a political police force capable of

fighting such a menace.75

Heydrich was not the only former altar boy fighting the Catholic

Church. Convinced that one had to know the enemy in order to fight him,

he appointed a Catholic priest, Albert Hartl, to run the SD’s Church

department. Hartl, a long-time Nazi sympathizer, formally joined the SD

in 1934 as a full-time officer after his position in the Catholic Church had

become untenable when it became known that he had denounced a fellow

priest to the Nazi authorities.76

In 1935 the Nazi state staged a series of trials against members of

various Catholic orders, accusing them of international money laundering

and immoral – that is, homosexual and paedophile – practices. Heydrich’s

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

apparatus provided the ‘evidence’ in most of these cases. The investigations

of foreign currency offences were systematically expanded in March

1935; both the Gestapo and the SD were heavily involved in searches of

monasteries and confiscated documents that could serve as evidence in the

subsequent trials. By the end of 1935, some seventy clerics had been

convicted in thirty trials on the basis of this material.77

The alleged sexual offences committed by Catholic clerics and order

members were of even greater propagandistic use for the Nazi regime.

Ever since 1935, Heydrich’s SD had played a central role in confiscating

and assembling material intended to prove the supposed homosexuality of

clerics. In 1935 the Gestapo set up a special task force within its depart-

ment for the handling of homosexual offences. Extensive investigations

led to a wave of trials that – with a brief interruption during the 1936

Olympic Games – continued until the summer of 1937.

These trials sought to destroy the reputation of the Catholic Church

and primarily targeted priests, monks, lay brothers and nuns working in

primary and secondary schools. A simultaneous press campaign launched

by Joseph Goebbels sought to persuade parents not to expose their

children to the likely risk of sexual abuse at religious schools. One noto-

rious and widely publicized trial in 1936 concerned the Franciscans of

the Rhineland town of Waldbreitbach, who were accused of systematically

abusing the children placed in their trust. Adults and schoolchildren

alike were encouraged to read the lurid accounts of abuse and sexual

mayhem that were allegedly at the heart of Franciscan activity. In

several cities, newspaper stands were purposely lowered so that adoles-

cents could read salacious and pornographic stories accompanied by

cartoons in Nazi newspapers. All in all, 250 trials were undertaken against

allegedly homosexual clergymen and order members, during the course of

which over 200 Catholic order members (particularly laymen) were

convicted.78

In the spring of 1937, the Nazis’ attacks on the Catholic Church eased.

The papal encyclical
Mit brennender Sorge
(‘With Burning Anxiety’) of

March 1937, in which Pope Pius XI expressed his deep concern about

violations of the 1933 Church agreement by the Nazi authorities, ended

all illusions within the Nazi Party that the Catholic Church would tamely

submit to the Nazi regime. Furthermore, the imminent readjustment of