Hitler's Hangman (66 page)

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reading a constant stream of historical literature on the subject. Wallenstein’s

refusal to join the rebellious Bohemian and Moravian nobility during

the Thirty Years’ War and his decision to serve Emperor Ferdinand II

instead provided a model for Bohemia’s loyalty to the Reich. On Sundays,

Heydrich made several trips to Friedland, Wallenstein’s duchy. He

also visited Mĕlník, where he saw the grave of St Ludmila (Wenceslas’s

grandmother) and showed great interest in the excavations at Prague

Castle which were carried out by the staff of the German University of

Prague.222

Heydrich regarded the repression of indigenous cultures in occupied

Europe as an essential precondition for the creation of a flourishing

German culture in the East. This included a policy of ‘intellectual sterili-

zation’, permitting the local population no more than basic vocational

training. According to Heydrich, vocational experience and cultural

Germanization had to be the goals of the Czech education system. In the

autumn of 1941, he ordered that Czech history lessons at school were to

be cancelled in favour of German classes.223

Heydrich’s ‘educational policy’ was very much in line with Himmler’s

view, articulated in May 1940, that schooling for the local population in

the occupied territories should be reduced to ‘simple arithmetic up to 500

at most; writing one’s name; a doctrine that it is divine law to obey the

Germans and to be honest, industrious and good’.224 In February 1942,

Heydrich further announced that he intended to ‘strike violently’ at

the heart of the Czech teaching establishment, which he saw as the

‘training corps of the opposition’, and threatened that he would drastically

reduce the number of Czech secondary schools. Czech youth, he noted

bitterly, had for too long been misled by its ‘thoroughly chauvinistic

teachers’.225

The collaborationist press echoed the view that education was an

unnecessary luxury for the majority of the Czech population. On 1 May

1942, Labour Day, the widely circulated paper
České slovo
commented:

‘The fact that we have at present 70,000 secondary school pupils is

economically unbearable.’ Boys in secondary education, the paper argued,

should leave school immediately in order to become apprentices and

attend professional schools after training.226 The aim of these measures, as

a British Intelligence Report pointedly remarked, was to turn Czech

youths ‘into a race of slaves which the
Herrenvolk
system requires’.227

Heydrich pursued a similar policy line towards the universities. He

announced that the Czech University in Prague, which according to the

University Act of 1920 had assumed the sole legal succession of the

former Charles University and had been ‘temporarily’ closed after student

unrest in 1939 during which nine students had been shot and 1,200

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

arrested, would never reopen. Henceforth, the German University of

Prague, 73 per cent of whose academic staff consisted of Nazi Party

members, would be the only remaining university in Prague. ‘The oldest

university of the Reich’ should, Heydrich insisted, ‘not only maintain a

status worthy of its historical tradition’ but also serve as a ‘pathbreaking’

institution for a new form of academia that ‘infuses scholarship with the

völkisch
necessities’ of the New Age.228

In institutional terms, the university was to work closely with a new and

independent educational foundation, later called the Reinhard Heydrich

Foundation. The purpose of the foundation was to undertake research on

the ‘
völkisch
, cultural, political and economic conditions of Bohemia and

Moravia as well as the peoples in the Eastern and South-eastern European

region’.229 Overall, the Heydrich Foundation comprised eight institutes

occupying the buildings of the dissolved Czech University. The directors

of the institutes simultaneously served as professors at the German

Charles University so that a close link between the university and the

foundation could be guaranteed.230

The foundation was a key element of Heydrich’s long-term vision for

the Protectorate’s place in Nazi Germany’s academic landscape, which he

outlined to Bormann in May 1942. He flagged two principal political

tasks for future academic scholarship in the Protectorate: first, to conduct

research into the history of Bohemia and Moravia; and secondly, actively

to pursue scholarship on the re-Germanization of South-eastern Europe

more generally.231 In essence, the Reinhard Heydrich Foundation was to

conduct scientific studies that would facilitate the Germanization of the

region. With regard to the intended denationalization and depoliticiza-

tion of the population, so-called
tschechenkundliche
(Czechological) studies

were conducted in order to demonstrate the centuries-old positive

German influence on the region.232

But Heydrich’s cultural imperialism, aimed at undermining and eventu-

ally eradicating Czech culture, was by no means limited to academia. It

was also to be applied to the field of architecture. When, on 4 December

1941, Albert Speer visited Heydrich in Prague in order to negotiate future

contingents of Czech slave labourers to be sent to the Old Reich, they also

discussed the architectural future of Prague. One of Heydrich’s aims was

to turn Prague into a thriving German city, the gateway of the New Nazi

Empire into the Balkans and the occupied East. After a two-hour sight-

seeing tour of the city, Heydrich and Speer contemplated a variety of

architectural plans for the post-war rebuilding of Prague as a German city,

including the construction of new German university buildings and a

German opera house as well as a new German government complex

around the castle. Furthermore, the city was to be encircled by a major

R E I C H P R OT E C TO R

269

ring road that would link up with the German autobahn system. In archi-

tectural matters, too, Speer found Heydrich to be refreshingly straight

forward:

There was no comparison with all those Gauleiters, who indulged in

their hobby-horses, plans that were technically or architecturally impos-

sible, perhaps an old dream from their youth or their wives’ fantasies,

which they obstinately stuck to . . . By contrast, Heydrich was uncom-

plicated. He had only a few objections to my suggestions, all of which

showed his sensible approach to the problem. If his objections were

impractical for technical reasons, he was prepared to be convinced of this

instantly.233

While he attempted to undermine and eventually eradicate Czech

culture and national identity, Heydrich emerged as a patron of German

arts. Particularly in the field of music, he energetically pushed for cultural

Germanization. Under the aegis of Heydrich, Prague celebrated the 150th

anniversary of Mozart’s death on 5 December 1941 with considerable

pomp – including the renaming of Smetana Square as Mozart Platz, a

number of elaborate Mozart exhibitions and guest performances by the

Vienna State Opera.234 Heydrich also planned the establishment of a

permanent opera in Prague in 1943–4, a plan supported by Goebbels but

which, despite personal discussions between Heydrich and the Reich

Finance Minister, had to be postponed for war-related reasons.235

In October 1941, Heydrich became patron of the German Philharmonic

Orchestra and reopened the German Concert Hall in Prague, the

Rudolfinum, founded in the nineteenth century, but converted into the

Czech Chamber of Deputies after the Great War. At the festive opening

of the newly renovated Rudolfinum on 16 October, to which Heydrich

had invited the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra to perform Beethoven’s

Ninth Symphony, he reiterated his firm conviction that culture and poli-

tics were inseparably intertwined, a point he sought to underline by

pointing to the history of the Rudolfinum itself. Heydrich recalled that

Anton Bruckner had played the organ here, but noted sadly that after

1918 musical life had become ‘Czechified’ and had therefore ‘degenerated’.

After twenty years of darkness, the Rudolfinum was now once more a ‘site

of German art’.236

The opening of the Rudolfinum gave Heydrich an opportunity to

reflect on his cultural policies in the Protectorate. After urging those

engaged in cultural work ‘always to act as German artists in the spirit of

the Reich’, he pledged that, as a professed admirer of the arts, he would

provide German artists with all ‘the inspirational and material conditions

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

they need for their work’. He then reminded his audience of the close

interconnection between ‘art and politics, race and character’ and

the particular relevance of the arts for ‘the soul and the heart of our

people’. ‘Historical periods of true greatness and true inner meaning’, he

observed, ‘have always prompted a flourishing of true art and genuine

ability.’ Times of ‘cultural and ideological decline’, on the other hand, were

historical periods in which Jewry thrived. It was the Jews, Heydrich

insisted, who had ‘injected the Czech people with the madness of inde-

pendent statehood and made it blind to . . . their self-evident belonging to

the Reich’.237

Heydrich also wanted to start a new cultural tradition by establishing

Prague’s ‘Cultural Week’ as ‘a festive manifestation of German power’.

This was to be a week-long display of German cultural achievements,

particularly in the field of music, which he considered a source of spiritual

recreation ‘in great times of struggle’. He firmly believed that such

a display of cultural superiority, coupled with the political message of

abandoning Slavic influences in the Protectorate, would have ‘the greatest

impact on the Slav; it testifies to our power and culture and eases

the integration of the racially desired part of the [Czech] population’.238

As patron of the festival, Heydrich opened the first concert on 15 May

1942: Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony performed by the German

Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague and their head conductor Joseph

Keilberth, with whom Heydrich occasionally played ‘house music’ in

his country mansion. Shortly thereafter, he and Lina attended a concert

given by the famous Leipzig Thomaner-Choir, during which the

choirboys, much to their delight, sang Bach’s motets in Hitler Youth

uniforms.239

On the evening of 26 May 1942, the night before his assassination, an

event of special emotional relevance to Heydrich was staged in the

Wallenstein Palace: a violin concerto composed by Heydrich’s father,

Bruno. As a special tribute to his father – whom he had treated

rather disdainfully and unsympathetically between 1931 and his death in

1938 – he had engaged a quartet of former employees of the Halle

Conservatory who played those pieces from Bruno’s opera
Amen
that

celebrated its hero figure, Reinhard. One of the opera’s more memorable

pieces, ‘Reinhard’s Crime’, was wisely omitted by the musicians. Visibly

touched by the event, Heydrich displayed his softer side: he invited the

Oberlandräte
and several senior civil servants and their wives to join him

for a surprise banquet at the fashionable Hotel Avalon where he greeted

his guests with unusual friendliness, kissing the ladies’ hands and presenting

himself as a ‘master of etiquette, entertaining, interested in everyone, a

charming conversationalist’.240

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271

The Rise of Resistance

The winter of 1941–2 marked the end of the German Blitzkrieg strategy

in the East, the United States’ entry into the war and a general rise in

resistance activity in the occupied territories. At this point, Heydrich was

forced to acknowledge that the realization of his Germanization goals had

receded into the distant future. As he admitted in a report to Hitler in

mid-May 1942, the situation in the Protectorate had ‘stiffened’ as a result

of recent reductions in rations, British air strikes against Pilsen and the

infiltration of a growing number of enemy agents. He also conceded that

the ‘military successes of the Reich’ were viewed ‘with scepticism’ by the

Czech population, but assured the Führer that there was no cause for

serious concerns, adding that he was merely waiting for an ‘appropriate

moment to strike swiftly, thus underscoring the fact that the Reich is still

able to strike and that my clemency is not a sign of weakness’.241