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
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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