Hitler's Hangman (68 page)

administration of northern France and Belgium and protector of Vichy

France.263 This appointment would, for the first time, have given the SS

dominance over a Western European (former) great power, a bastion in

the West to match the growing SS influence in the East. However, the

letter upon which this speculation is based was probably never written.264

It is true that in mid-May 1942, against the backdrop of a resurgence

of primarily Communist-led resistance activities across occupied Europe,

Heydrich promised both Bormann and Himmler that he would soon

present the Führer with a clear and concise dossier which would both

summarize his experiences in the reorganization of German occupation

policy in the Protectorate and include policy suggestions for other occu-

pied territories in Eastern and Western Europe. Of central importance

was Heydrich’s conviction that the partisan activities in Western and

Eastern Europe were intrinsically connected and that they therefore

required a co-ordinated approach – obviously under the auspices of the

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SS. A few days later, Heydrich was summoned to the Führer’s headquar-

ters. It is not known whether it was on this occasion that he intended to

present the Führer with a general policy document on the future of the

German occupation of Europe, since the documents that he may have

carried with him when he left for Rastenburg on 27 May have disap-

peared, probably for ever.265

Despite his obsession with matters of policing, Heydrich carelessly

neglected his own security in Prague, even though there were strong indi-

cations of a threat against his life. In March 1942, the Gestapo arrested a

musician during a routine patrol at Warsaw’s central railway station.

Although his papers were in order and showed him to be a ‘German musi-

cian’ on his way to Prague, his over-sized, brand-new suitcase aroused

suspicion. In a secret compartment, the Gestapo agents found a sniper’s

gun equipped with telescopic sights and a silencer. After days of brutal

interrogations, the man cracked and confessed to being a Russian agent

sent by Moscow to assassinate Heydrich.266

This was not the only warning. An SD report of 18 April 1942 which,

as usual, was sent to Heydrich and other leading figures of the occupation

regime, recorded rumours about ‘parachutists who have already landed in

the Protectorate and have already committed acts of sabotage, strikes in

large factories, an assassination attempt on the acting Reich Protector

himself etc.’267

Even if Heydrich had not heard of the Warsaw incident or read the

alarming report, it seems unlikely that none of his subordinates would

have alerted him to the rumours of a potential assassination threat.

Heydrich must have been warned, but he failed to respond adequately to

the threats with enhanced security measures. Although he began to wear

a bullet-proof vest, he continued, much to the dismay of his wife and

Himmler, to drive through Prague in an open car without a security

escort.268

Albert Speer, when he visited Heydrich in Prague in December 1941,

had been surprised by Heydrich’s lack of interest in his personal safety:

‘Heydrich, whose entire house in Berlin was linked by alarm bells (even in

the toilet) to the surrounding police stations’ and whose cars were

‘equipped with replacement number plates, with pistols in front of each

seat and sub-machine guns in front of those riding in the rear seats – that

same Heydrich was travelling in contravention of the regulations he had

himself drawn up for the protection of leading personalities of state and

party’.269 As acting Reich Protector Heydrich regarded his personal secu-

rity as a political matter. He categorically refused an escort on the grounds

that it would damage German prestige and create the impression that he

feared the Czechs. As long as he retained the psychological initiative,

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277

he would not be attacked – a fateful miscalculation, as it turned out. On

the morning of 27 May 1942, Heydrich set out on his trip to visit Hitler.

He would never get further then the hairpin curve in Liběn where his

assassins were already waiting for him.

C H A P T ER I X

✦

Legacies of Destruction

On 9 June 1942, the body of Reinhard Heydrich was laid to rest

in one of the most elaborate funeral ceremonies ever staged in the Third

Reich. Over the previous two days, his coffin had been exhibited in the

courtyard of Prague Castle, where tens of thousands of ethnic German

and Czech civilians – some voluntarily, some ‘encouraged’ by the Nazi

authorities – filed past to pay their final respects. The coffin was then

transported to the Mosaic Room of the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin,

where, to the solemn notes of the Funeral March from Richard Wagner’s

Twilight of the Gods
, the entire leadership of the Third Reich bid a final

farewell to Heydrich.1

The spectacle was carefully stage-managed by Goebbels’s Propaganda

Ministry in an attempt to portray Heydrich as the ‘ideal Nazi’, a heroic

martyr of the Nazi cause whose qualities offered an example to all

Germans. Press reports about the funeral and the deceased were subjected

to strict censorship and prescribed terminology, emphasizing his death as

the ultimate sacrifice in a life-and-death struggle for the Greater German

Reich. In accordance with these instructions, Nazi papers praised

Heydrich as a ‘Nordic man’ of the ‘finest racial quality’ – a member of the

new racial ‘aristocracy of the nation’, who had fallen ‘victim to those

dark forces that flourish only in the twilight of the ambush’. His death,

it was said, ‘is an admonition and an obligation. We honour his memory

by living and acting in the way we may assume he would have wanted

us to.’2

Himmler himself, in his funeral speech of 9 June, set the tone for how

Heydrich was to be remembered: as a Nazi martyr and an impeccable SS

man, ‘an ideal always to be emulated, but perhaps never again to be

achieved’. With his ‘healthy, simple and disciplined lifestyle’, his ‘unbending

spirit’ and his ‘noble’ and ‘decent’ character, Heydrich was a role model

who would ‘inspire future generations’. As a man of ‘irreplaceable, unique

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279

abilities, combined with a character of the rarest purity and a mind of

penetrating logic and clarity’, he had been rightly

feared by the sub-humans, hated and slandered by Jews and other

criminals . . . whatever measures and actions he took, he always

approached them as a National Socialist and as an SS man. From the

deepest reaches of his heart and his blood, he felt, understood and real-

ized the worldview of Adolf Hitler. He seized all the tasks he was

charged with from his fundamental comprehension of a genuine racial

worldview and from the knowledge that the purity, security and defence

of our blood is the supreme law.3

Fol owing Himmler’s eulogy, a visibly moved Hitler mounted the stage

and added his authority to the celebration of an exemplary Nazi life: ‘He

was one of the best National Socialists, one of the strongest defenders of the

German Reich, one of the greatest opponents of al enemies of the Empire.

He has died as a martyr for the preservation and protection of the Reich.’

Hitler then posthumously decorated Heydrich ‘with the highest award in

my gift, the highest stage of the German Order’, an honour special y created

for those who had rendered exceptional service to party and Fatherland.4

As Hitler left the funeral ceremony, gently patting the cheeks of

Heydrich’s two sons on his way, the coffin was transported from the New

Reich Chancellery to the Invaliden cemetery, originally founded in the

nineteenth century as a resting place for Prussia’s military elite. Heydrich’s

body was buried alongside the graves of Scharnhorst, Moltke and other

eminent generals from Germany’s past.5

But Heydrich was by no means forgotten after 9 June. On the contrary:

it was only after his assassination, and as a result of the extensive news

coverage of his state funeral, that he became a household name both in the

Reich and international y. On the day of his death, Hitler added Heydrich

to the ‘honorary list of the Fal en of the Nazi Movement’ and arranged for

the 6th SS Infantry Division, currently fighting the Red Army on the

Eastern Front, to be named after him. In the Protectorate, a special-issue

postage stamp bearing a picture of Heydrich’s death mask was released on

the first anniversary of his assassination. Streets and squares in eighteen

Protectorate cities and towns were renamed in his honour. Heydrich’s light

was to shine beyond Germany, as the
Germanische Leithefte
, the journal for

non-German SS volunteers, demonstrated when it celebrated Heydrich as

a reincarnation of the legendary Norwegian king Sverre Sigurdsson, who

had led a successful anti-Church rebel ion in the late twelfth century. The

journal even advocated the inscription of a rune-shrine commemorating

Sigurdsson for use on Heydrich’s grave: ‘Here he lies who was the

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

ornament of kings, the pil ar of faith, courage and honour, example and

paragon, invincible heroic spirit, defender of the Fatherland, guardian of

the national heritage, the terror of his foes, his people’s fame and glory.’6

Heydrich’s elevation to a martyr in the Nazi pantheon of fallen heroes

was the culmination point of the by then well-established Nazi cult of the

dead, which exalted death for party and Fatherland as the logical end to a

fulfilled and meaningful life. The purpose of the Nazis’ cult of the fallen

warrior was to unite the German
Volksgemeinschaft
in an unshakeable

determination to fight on. The SS in particular saw death as an ongoing

obligation for the living, an obligation to continue the struggles of the

fallen. The violent death of a hero was never in vain, but rather a model

for the wider SS community to emulate. As Heydrich’s former deputy in

Prague, Karl Hermann Frank, declared, Heydrich had set an example in

more ways than one: he had shown the world both ‘how to live and how

to die’ as a German hero, the latter of which was to become increasingly

important during the last two years of the Second World War.7

While Heydrich’s body was being laid to rest in Berlin, the Nazi leader-

ship sought revenge for what Goebbels described in his diary as the ‘irre-

placeable’ loss of ‘the most radical and most successful persecutor of all

enemies of the state’.8 The atmosphere in Berlin can only be described as

murderous. ‘Nothing can prevent me from deporting millions of Czechs

if they do not wish for peaceful coexistence,’ an infuriated Hitler screamed

at Czech President Hácha after the funeral. Wartime needs no longer

concerned him. The assassins had to be found immediately or the Czech

population would face unprecedented consequences.9 Immediately after

his meeting with Hitler on 9 June, Karl Hermann Frank telephoned

Horst Böhme, head of the Security Police and SD in the Protectorate, to

convey the Führer’s order for an immediate act of retaliation: the complete

annihilation of the Bohemian village of Lidice, including the murder of

all of its male inhabitants and the deportation of all women to a concen-

tration camp. The children – if Germanizable – were to be sent to foster-

parents in the Reich.10 Böhme could hardly have been surprised by this

order, for he was the one who had suggested Lidice as a possible target for

retaliation in the first place. On the day of Heydrich’s funeral, he had

phoned Himmler in Berlin to report that the assassins had allegedly

received support from the village’s inhabitants. Himmler, in turn, informed

Hitler, who decided that Lidice was to be razed to the ground.11

Lidice, a small village with around 500 inhabitants located north-west

of Prague in the industrial district of Kladno, had first aroused the suspi-

cion of the Gestapo in late autumn 1941, when a captured Czech

parachutist testified that two families living in Lidice, the Horáks and

Stříbrnýs, had served as contact points for resistance fighters dropped into

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281

the Protectorate. The story was probably made up, but the Gestapo chose

to believe it, partly because two of the sons of these families, Josef Horák

and Josef Stříbrný, had fled the country in 1939 and joined the Czech

Brigade in Britain.12

In early June 1942, while Heydrich was stil in hospital and his fate

uncertain, Lidice appeared again on the radar of the German authorities