Hitler's Hangman (65 page)

were completed and ful y operational by the spring of 1942.

The idea of systematically murdering the Jews in occupied Poland

gained further impetus when, in March 1942, the SS managed to gain

complete control over anti-Jewish policies in the General Government.

Compromised by a serious corruption scandal in the spring of that year,

General Governor Hans Frank conceded complete authority over all

policing matters and questions of Germanization in the General

Government to the local higher SS and police leader, Friedrich-Wilhelm

Krüger, thus strengthening the hand of the SS vis-à-vis the civilian

authorities. Himmler, Heydrich and their men on the ground – Krüger

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and Globocnik – would use their new powers to include Jews from all

parts of occupied Poland in the killing process.203

Shortly before the murders were decisively extended at the beginning of

May 1942, Heydrich and Himmler met seven times in three different places

within the space of a week: their first meetings took place in Berlin on 25,

26 and 27 April, fol owed by long conversations in Munich on 28 and

30 April, and then in Prague on 2 May, a meeting for which Himmler made

a special journey. This series of intense discussions was framed by two longer

meetings between Himmler and Hitler, which took place on 23 April and

3 May. No records of these meetings have survived the war, but the chro-

nology of the events of the fol owing weeks suggests that it was during these

meetings that Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich decided on the framework for

the implementation of a pan-Europan programme of systematic destruction

that was to be carried out from May 1942 onwards.204

Cultural Imperialism

If the realization of the Nazis’ Germanization project was based on a

historically unprecedented programme of racial stock-taking, theft, expul-

sion and murder, Germanization, as understood by Heydrich, meant far

more than racial tests and extermination. Murder and resettlement were

only the preconditions for the creation of a racially ‘purified’ utopia, a

German empire that would dominate the New Europe for the next thou-

sand years. As Heydrich pointed out in mid-December 1941: ‘While

under the blows of Germany and her allies a degenerate world is being

crushed, perishing in the chaos which it has created, a New Order is

appearing behind the fronts of our soldiers, an order whose structures are

already becoming clearly visible.’205

The ful integration of the Protectorate into this New Order required the

complete Germanization of the Protectorate’s cultural life and the eradica-

tion of indigenous Czech and Jewish culture. This was the task of

Department IV of the Reich Protector’s Office, a department designed to

co-ordinate and direct the Protectorate’s cultural life, from theatres and

cinemas to radio programmes and the press.206 The aim of Department IV,

under the leadership of Baron Dr Karl von Gregory, was thus the indoctri-

nation of the Protectorate’s Czech population in order to create a suitably

pro-German atmosphere. In theory, these developments should have

enabled the administration to dominate the Protectorate’s cultural economy

through the imposition of censorship and propaganda. In practice, inter-

agency disputes, personality clashes and a chronic shortage of personnel

meant that these policies were never coherently enforced and cultural

resistance within the Czech population persisted. Until Heydrich’s arrival

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in Prague, Department IV had subordinated cultural Germanization to the

smooth flow of war-related production.207 Once Heydrich took charge, this

policy changed abruptly. Accusing Gregory of being unable to implement

a comprehensive cultural Germanization plan for the Protectorate, Heydrich

replaced him with one of his trusted associates, SS-Sturmbannführer

Martin Paul Wolf, a former high-school teacher and a close friend of

Heydrich’s favourite academic in Prague, Karl Valentin Mül er.208

Heydrich’s cultural imperialism was a fundamental assault on the fertile

cultural world of late Habsburg and interwar Prague, a world of high

international standing in literature, music and the arts. Before the German

invasion, the multicultural city, with its diverse German, Jewish and Czech

influences, had been associated with such acclaimed artists as the expres-

sionist Oskar Kokoschka (who lived in Prague between 1934 and 1938),

the composer Leoš Janáćek (1854–1928), and the novelists Franz Kafka

(1883–1924) and Max Brod (1884–1968), all of whom the Nazis consid-

ered to be prime examples of ‘degenerate’ art. The purging of Prague’s

cultural diversity was a key component of Heydrich’s Germanization

strategy, a strategy that aimed, in Goebbels’s words, at the
Verreichlichung

(incorporation into and adaptation to the Reich) of cultural life in the

Protectorate. Shortly after Heydrich’s arrival in Prague, he and Goebbels

began to negotiate the cultural and propaganda policies in the Protectorate

with the aim of formulating a coherent strategy, while at the same time

securing Heydrich’s right to a final decision on all cultural matters in the

Protectorate.209 Within two weeks, a comprehensive eighteen-page agree-

ment had been elaborated, outlining new initiatives to guarantee total

German control over radio programmes, movie theatres and film produc-

tion companies, as well as a gradual increase of German-speaking

programmes on Czech radio. All of these measures were to be achieved

through the expropriation of the few remaining cultural facilities in Czech

hands as well as by strengthening centralized control by Heydrich’s office

in Prague.210 Furthermore, Heydrich hoped that by conducting cultural

and political affairs exclusively in German, the Czech language would be

‘reduced to the private sphere’ before eventually becoming extinct.211

One of his most important tasks in the Protectorate, Heydrich believed,

was to revive German cultural traditions that had been ‘suppressed’ in the

‘Jewified’ Czechoslovak Republic since its foundation after the Great War.

In order to underscore the idea of Bohemia and Moravia’s historical

affiliation with the Reich, he mined the quarry of the past to ‘prove’ that

the region had enjoyed peace and prosperity only when it aligned with

Germany against the barbarian hordes of the East. One of the historical

reference points most favoured by Heydrich was St Wenceslas, patron

saint of the Czechs, who, he claimed, had turned against the Slav world

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265

and recognized ‘the historical destiny of this area and its eternal involvement

with the Reich’. In his inaugural speech at Prague Castle, Heydrich

argued that the Nazis should ‘increasingly emphasize the idea of St

Wenceslas’ who ‘must not be depicted as a patron saint of the Czechs’, but

as ‘the man who recognized that the Czech people could exist only within

the German space’. He urged his associates to convey this message from

‘the right psychological angle’: ‘When the Czechs celebrate St Wenzel,

then they are demonstrating that he was right. That is what we can exploit

historically.’212 Nazi propaganda, assisted by a large number of collabora-

tionist newspapers, constantly reiterated the centuries-old connections

and interdependencies between Bohemia and the Reich.213

The visit that Heydrich and Hácha paid to the Bohemian Crown Jewels

on 19 November 1941 was very much in line with this policy of historical

appropriation. Soon after his arrival in Prague, Heydrich demanded that

Hácha formally acknowledge that the Protectorate was now an ‘integral

part’ of the Reich through a historically symbolic gesture. The ceremony

took place in the Wenceslas Chapel inside the Cathedral of St Vitus at

Prague Castle, where Hácha handed Heydrich the seven keys to the

Coronation Chamber on a velvet cushion. ‘The Coronation Insignia’,

Hácha declared, ‘are the symbol of Bohemia and Moravia’s loyalty to the

Reich.’ Heydrich accepted the gift and returned three of the seven keys to

Hácha as a ‘token of trust and a reminder of your responsibilty’ as ‘guar-

antor of Bohemia’s loyalty’.214

Heydrich believed that the symbolically charged event in St Vitus’

Cathedral ‘ended centuries-old uncertainties’. After being exposed to

influences and population transfers from both the Slavic and the Germanic

worlds, ‘Wenceslas, recognizing historical necessity, had once and for all

thrown in his lot with the Reich and turned against the East. The rebels

who, under the leadership of his brother Boleslav, took up arms against the

statesmanlike policy of Wenceslas, failed to recognize the historical

destiny of this area and its eternal involvement with the Reich. They over-

threw Wenceslas and his policy, murdered the king and attempted to

establish this space as a bastion against the West.’ But Bohemia’s German

destiny, Heydrich maintained, could not be altered. Hácha’s acceptance of

the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was there-

fore ‘a decision in the true spirit of the Wenceslas tradition’.215

Heydrich’s efforts at rewriting history did not go unnoticed in London,

where intelligence reports commented on his ‘extremely clever historical

argument, purporting to prove that the Czech nation has always been

most prosperous at periods when the German influence was strongest,

and that the Protectorate owing to its geographical position cannot exist

otherwise than as an integral part of the German living space’.216 Heydrich

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also claimed that his actions against the Czech resistance were in line with

the Wenceslas tradition: ‘The rebels against the Reich during the days of

September and October of this year were brought to justice because

they failed to grasp the Wenceslas tradition and reverted to ancient

Eastern habits by stabbing the Reich in the back in order to convert a

bastion against the East once more into a bastion against the West.’ What

they had overlooked, Heydrich argued, was that the leadership of the

Reich and indeed the larger part of the Protectorate’s inhabitants had

learned ‘the lessons of history’. ‘The Wenceslas tradition’, he concluded,

was therefore a permanent reminder that ‘Bohemia and Moravia will only

ever be strong with the Reich, and that it will remain forever weak without

it.’217 The ‘stab in the back’ myth was a recurrent theme in Heydrich’s

speeches. Time and again, he claimed that the Bohemian heartland of the

Reich had ‘plunged a knife into the back’ of German unity – a tradition that

had begun with Marbod, who had refused to participate in Arminius’ ‘war

of liberation’ against the Romans in ad 9, and which had continued through

to the Defenestration of Prague and the Thirty Years’ War in the seven-

teenth century up until the present day when some Czechs, engaged in

il egal resistance activities, were trying ‘to attack the Reich from behind

during its decisive fateful battle against Bolshevism’.218 Only ‘on the day

when the banner of the new Reich was raised on the roof of this house’,

Heydrich declared elsewhere, ‘was the baneful development that ensued in

the days of the Prague defenestration overcome for al time. We are now

entering an era of construction, leaving the centuries that stood in the

shadow of Münster and Osnabrück [the treaties that ended the Thirty Years’

War] behind us like a bad dream . . . Through the events of 1938 and 1939

the terrible condition into which Central Europe had fal en has been

eliminated.’219

Although obviously important from a political point of view, these

historical interpretations were more than propaganda for Heydrich. He

firmly believed that Bohemia and Moravia were historically part of the

Reich – a conviction that he shared with the German deputy mayor of

Prague, Josef Pfitzner, a former professor of medieval and Eastern

European history at the German University of Prague, whose arguments

about Bohemia and Moravia’s long-standing historical ‘connections’ with

the Reich, put forward in his widely read book
Das tausendjährige Prag

(1940), profoundly influenced Heydrich’s historical perceptions.220

Indeed, Heyrich developed a new passion for the history of Bohemia,

often reading popular history books, historical novels and biographies on

his sofa in Jungfern-Breschan until the small hours of the morning.221Apart

from Wenceslas, he was particularly interested in Albrecht von Wallenstein

(1583–1634), the supreme commander of the Imperial army until 1634,

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