Hitler's Hangman (44 page)

Heydrich’s terror on the home front. But the outbreak of war also changed

the destiny of other groups that the Nazi leadership considered racially

inferior or unfit. Just prior to the outbreak of the war, on 1 September,

Hitler authorized a special euthanasia programme, the so-called T4

Aktion. Run by the party Chancellery and Hitler’s personal physician,

Dr Karl Brandt, but aided by the RSHA’s technical staff, T4 was designed

to select and kill physically or mentally handicapped children and adults.

Until August 1941, approximately 70,000 disabled Germans were

murdered, providing Heydrich’s technical staff with an expertise in mass

killings that they would put to use against Russian POWs and Jewish

civilians over the following years. Concern about potential unrest on the

home front led to the official halt of the euthanasia killings in August

1941, although the murder of disabled people continued in a more covert

way throughout the war.117

The outbreak of war also impacted profoundly on the fate of Germany’s

roughly 26,000 Gypsies. Suspect because of their lifestyle, they had been

subjected to constant harassment and social exclusion ever since the Nazis

came to power. In the second half of the 1930s, anti-Gypsy policies escalated

further, leading to mass arrests in 1938 and to Heydrich’s announcement

that further measures would be introduced shortly to guarantee the ‘racial

separation of the Gypsies from the German people’.118

On the outbreak of war, Heydrich banned Gypsies from plying their

itinerant trades, thus deliberately undermining their sole means of making

a living. In pursuit of a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Gypsy Question’, Heydrich

informed his senior staff on 21 September 1939, and again at the end of

January 1941, that the Gypsies would be deported alongside the Jews

from Germany to Eastern Poland. This order was swiftly implemented: by

late April 1940, some 2,500 Gypsies had been sent to the General

Government.119

The murders, expulsions and arrests that were carried out by Heydrich’s

men both in Germany and in the newly occupied territories during

the early months of the Second World War testified to the radicalizing

impact of war on Nazi policies of persecution. For Heydrich and his

closest collaborators, the increasing brutality with which enemies of the

state were suppressed, expelled and often murdered was necessitated and

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justified by the historic battle with Germany’s internal and external

enemies on which the Nazis had just embarked. Even if systematic mass

murder remained the exception rather than the rule in Heydrich’s

handling of political and ethnic enemies in late 1939 and early 1940, he

and the Nazi leadership as a whole had crossed an important line on the

slippery path to genocide.

C H A P T ER V I I

✦

At War with the World

Into the West

On 9 April 1940, after more than six months of inactivity on the

Western Front, the Wehrmacht staged a surprise attack on neutral

Denmark and Norway. It did so primarily in order to pre-empt a much

feared British military intervention in Scandinavia, as well as to secure

coastal ports for German submarine operations and the ice-free harbour

of Narvik for vital iron-ore transports from Sweden. Both Copenhagen

and Oslo fell into German hands that same day. Unlike the Danish,

however, who surrendered within two hours of the German invasion, the

Norwegians fought back staunchly until they were eventually forced to

surrender two months later.1

From the very beginning of the military attacks, it was clear to the SS

leadership that these campaigns would differ substantially from the war

against Poland. The people of Northern Europe, both Hitler and Alfred

Rosenberg emphasized in their writings and speeches, were to play an

important role in the future Germanic Empire. A regime of sheer terror

would be detrimental to these interests. While Himmler and Heydrich

shared these beliefs, they were nonetheless disappointed to learn that in

Western Europe – unlike in Poland – the army would be allowed to run a

more traditional military occupation regime, which would necessarily

undermine vital SS interests.2 The excessive violence of Heydrich’s

Einsatzgruppen
and the
Selbstschutz
during the Polish campaign was at the

heart of the army’s refusal to accept any SS involvement during the mili-

tary assault on Western Europe. Heydrich noted in an uncharacteristically

understated letter to Kurt Daluege that regarding ‘fundamental issues

pertaining to the combating of enemies of the state’ an ‘entirely different

opinion’ prevailed among the ‘senior commanders of the army’ from that

held within the RSHA.3 By late March, a frustrated Heydrich told his

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senior staff members that the planned participation of
Einsatzkommandos

in the western campaigns had been ‘called off ’.4

Seemingly deprived of the ability to play an active role in the invasion

of Western Europe, Heydrich opted for a ‘heroic’ gesture and asked

Himmler for permission temporarily to join the Luftwaffe on the

Norwegian front. Heydrich had been passionate about flying long before

the outbreak of war. From 1935 onwards, he had trained as a sports pilot

and repeatedly participated in aerobatic flight shows. But his ambitions

went further. During the summer of 1939, usually at dawn before work,

he trained to become a fighter pilot at the pilot school in Werneuchen

near Berlin and then at Staaken airport until he successfully passed his

examination. On 12 September 1939, he carried out his first combat

mission as a turret gunner over Poland. 5

Both in private and in public, Heydrich had repeatedly expressed his

frustration that as ‘political soldiers’ on the home front he and his men

were deprived of the ‘good fortune’ to serve and die for Germany.6 He

must have been insistent in his pleas to join the fighting, for contrary to

earlier orders forbidding him to endanger his life by flying planes

Himmler gave his permission and on 14 April 1940 Heydrich arrived

in Oslo as a vaguely disguised air force captain. He stayed with

Fighter Squadron 77 for a total of four weeks, flying attacks on

retreating Norwegian troops, socializing with his fellow officers, and

playing card games until late at night. For Heydrich, who had grown

up in a world permeated by heroic tales of bloodshed and had spent

the better part of the 1920s in the German navy without ever witnessing

any real fighting, the front experience was the fulfilment of a long-held

adventurous dream that had previously been denied to him twice: first

by his late birth in 1904 and then again by his dismissal from the navy

in 1931.7

On 5 May, he reported to Himmler that he was well and that the front

experience was both ‘interesting and instructive’. Himmler quickly

responded, expressing his fatherly concern: ‘I think of you often and hope

that you are well and again wish you much luck and all the best! Let me

hear from you on a daily basis if at all possible.’ Himmler’s concern

was not unfounded: on 13 May 1940 Heydrich’s Messerschmitt 109 over-

shot the runway at Stavanger on takeoff. While Heydrich suffered only

a minor hand injury, the plane itself was completely destroyed. The

following day, he returned to his desk in Berlin sporting a front-line bar

in bronze – awarded after twenty combat missions – and an Iron Cross

second class.8

The real purpose of Heydrich’s visit to Norway, however, was not to

indulge his passion for flying, but rather to orchestrate the first wave

AT W A R W I T H T H E W O R L D

175

of arrests of political opponents in Oslo and other Norwegian cities. On

20 April, shortly before Hitler’s appointment of Josef Terboven as Reich

commissioner for Norway, Himmler received Hitler’s consent to install a

higher SS and police leader in Norway and to send an SS task force into

the country.9 Heydrich, jubilant over Hitler’s unexpected change of mind,

ordered the immediate dispatch of an
Einsatzgruppe
under Dr Franz

Walter Stahlecker, one of his most trusted men who had previously been

in charge of the Security Police in Prague.10

Stahlecker arrived in Oslo on 29 April with around 200 Security Police

and SD men who were subsequently sent to Norway’s larger cities: Oslo,

Bergen, Trondheim, Kristiansand and Stavanger. Heydrich instructed the

commando leaders that the mission ahead of them was
not
an expedition

into ‘enemy territory’. He emphasized instead that Norway ‘has been

placed under the protection of the German Reich, and it can expect that

all measures taken by the Security Police will remain solely within a

framework that is absolutely essential for securing the war effort’. While

enemies of the Reich were to be neutralized, he continued, this task was

to be carried out ‘with the utmost skilfulness and tact’. Both officers and

NCOs would be ‘ruthlessly and strictly prosecuted’ should they act in

violatation of these instructions.11

While Heydrich was still recovering from his minor injury received

when his plane overshot the runway at Stavanger, the Wehrmacht had

already launched its large-scale attack on France and the Benelux coun-

tries. Success was anything but certain. Memories of the protracted stale-

mate on the Western Front during the Great War were still vivid, and

Germany’s opponents substantially outnumbered the Wehrmacht in

troops and equipment. Yet thanks to poorly marshalled opposition, some

inspired strategic decisions, high morale and luck, German troops deliv-

ered a crushing blow. The Netherlands surrendered in only four days;

Belgium in eighteen. France lasted scarcely a month.

Heydrich, in common with most German generals, was surprised by

the swiftness of the military advance and quickly realized that immediate

action was of the essence if his SD was to play any role whatsoever in the

occupation regimes in Western Europe. Following Hitler’s hasty appoint-

ment of the Austrian Nazi politician Arthur Seyss-Inquart as Reich

commissioner of the occupied Netherlands on 18 May, Himmler managed

to appoint a higher SS and police leader: the Austrian Heimwehr veteran

Hanns Albin Rauter. Hans Nockemann, who had arrived in Amsterdam

immediately after the Dutch surrender, became Heydrich’s commander of

the Security Police and the SD in the Netherlands.12

Heydrich was nevertheless dissatisfied. The instalment of Rauter and

Nockemann in late May 1940 had occurred ‘too late’ to combat political

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opponents and émigrés effectively in the occupied territories of the West,

since the military Abwehr had ‘failed to obtain relevant information on

the political émigrés’. Had the State Police been deployed during the

campaign, documents of relevance could have been secured that were now

presumably lost for ever.13

The situation in Belgium, Heydrich quickly realized, was even less

favourable. Although Himmler had pleaded with Hitler to install a

civilian Reich commissioner rather than a military occupation regime,

Hitler ignored his wishes and the Wehrmacht managed to stay in charge

of the occupation for almost the entire war. The military administration

in Brussels was also responsible for Luxembourg and northern France

(Pas de Calais and Nord). The whole territory, with a population of some

12 million people, was run by a conservative general, Baron Alexander von

Falkenhausen, whose close relations with members of the German resist-

ance would subsequently lead to his arrest in July 1944. In the first weeks

of the occupation, Falkenhausen and the energetic chief of the military

administration, Eggert Reeder, successfully managed to fend off the SS

leadership’s advances into their sphere of influence. Despite his honorific

SS membership, Reeder permitted Heydrich only a tiny foothold in

Brussels where Heydrich’s protégé, Max Thomas, was installed as head of

the Security Police and the SD for Belgium and France. Thomas struggled

to exert much influence on German occupation policies in Belgium in the

face of opposition from the military administration.14

In France, the most significant prize of the Wehrmacht’s Western

campaign, the situation was no different. The military administration that was

set up after the French defeat in the summer of 1940 was unwil ing to grant

the RSHA any influence on occupation policy. Fol owing the armistice on

22 June, a smal Security Police and SD contingent under the command