Hitler's Hangman (71 page)

sion, she had ‘the SS man Ilmer beat our comrade Adolf Neumann . . .

until his back drew blood, only because Neumann was unable to run

with his fully laden trolly’. Jewish slave labourers who failed to show

adequate respect were spat at or beaten by Lina. In January 1944, the

Jewish forced labourers were deported to extermination camps and

replaced by fifteen female Jehovah’s Witnesses from the women’s camp in

Ravensbrück.50

The Heydrichs’ eldest son, Klaus, died in a car accident in 1943 and was

buried in the garden of the country estate.51 More blows were to fol ow: in

December 1944, Heydrich’s younger brother, Heinz Siegfried, who worked

for the army propaganda journal
Panzerfaust
on the Eastern Front,

committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. It is possible that his

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suicide was partly triggered by his knowledge of his brother’s crimes, and by

his fear that the Gestapo might discover his own involvement in helping

Jews to escape from the Third Reich. There are at least two confirmed cases

in 1943–4 in which Heinz Siegfried prevented the deportation of Jews

personal y known to him by providing them with forged exit visas.52 In

reality, however, the main reason for his suicide appears to have been signif-

icantly less heroic: Heydrich’s only surviving son, Heider, maintained after

the war that Heinz Siegfried decided to commit suicide because he was

facing a court martial for theft and corruption.53

Lina and her children continued to live in Jungfern-Breschan until

April 1945, when they shared the fate of hundreds of thousands of ethnic

German refugees fleeing from both the advancing Red Army and the

much feared retribution of their long-suppressed non-German neigh-

bours. Hard-pressed for time, Lina had to leave behind nearly all of her

possessions, but she did rescue her husband’s blood-stained SS uniform

which has remained in the hands of her son until now. The Heydrich

family escaped to rural Bavaria only days before the end of German rule

over the Protectorate.54 Reinhard Heydrich’s mother, Elisabeth, who had

moved in with the Heydrichs after her son’s death, also left Jungfern-

Breschan in the spring of 1945 and escaped to her native town of Dresden,

where she was caught up with thousands of other refugees in the Allied

bombings of 13–15 February, which turned the city into smouldering

rubble. She survived the firestorms, but, deprived of any family assistance,

the once prosperous and proud Elisabeth Heydrich met an end similar to

that of many other helpless elderly refugees: she starved to death in the

final days of the Third Reich.55

While the world around her was collapsing, Lina was more fortunate

than others. Shortly after Germany’s unconditional surrender, which the

Heydrich family experienced as refugees in Bavaria, Lina moved back to

her native island of Fehmarn on the Baltic coast, where her parents were

able to offer her shelter. An attempt by the Beneš government in 1947 to

have her extradited from the British occupation zone in Germany and

tried in Prague was rejected by the British military administration. By

now, the logic of the early Cold War dictated that good relations with the

emerging West German state were of greater relevance in the fight against

international Communism than the demands of a former Czech ally

about to be absorbed into Stalin’s Eastern European empire.56

The German authorities, too, turned a blind eye to the Heydrich case.

Lina never stood trial for the maltreatment of her slave labourers in

Jungfern-Breschan. On the contrary, in the context of the so-called

de-Nazification process, she was officially cleared and allowed to retake

possession of her financial assets and house on Fehmarn, which had been

L E G AC I E S O F D E S T RU C T I O N

291

temporarily confiscated by the British army in 1945. It was here that Lina

ran a small pension and restaurant, the Imbria Parva, in which former SS

officers frequently met for reunions and exchanged memories of the ‘good

old days’. In 1956 and 1959, Lina also won a series of court cases against

the Federal Republic that had previously denied her pension rights. After

the trial, and despite extensive evidence about her late husband’s role

in the Holocaust, the Federal Republic was forced to pay her the widow’s

pension of a German general killed in action, roughly equivalent to that

of a retired minister president.57 Well subsidized by the German taxpayer,

Lina never expressed regret or remorse for her husband’s deeds and

publicly declared that she dreamed of him ‘almost every night’.58 As if to

mock the state prosecutor and the left-wing press, which had strongly

criticized the court’s verdict, she entitled her memoirs, published in the

1970s,
My Life with a War Criminal
. She died in August 1985, full of

disgust for a society that failed to acknowledge her family’s sacrifices for

the cause of German greatness.

Throughout the later stages of her life, Lina denied her husband’s

responsibility for the brutal persecution of Nazi Germany’s political

enemies, his crucial involvement in the Holocaust and his deep commit-

ment to the bloody unweaving of Europe’s ethnicities. Reinhard Heydrich,

so she claimed, was a victim of historical circumstances, of a life condi-

tioned by violence and wars, in which men like him were forced to make

difficult decisions in order to serve their country. Lina may have been right

in stressing that Heydrich was a product of specific historical circum-

stances, of political and cultural structures that were larger than him. But

to argue that he was a victim was an insult to the millions of people

directly afftected – often in the most cruel ways imaginable – by the delib-

erate decisions Heydrich, Himmler and Hitler took out of deep ideolog-

ical conviction. It also unduly downplays individual agency and

responsibility within the polyocratic jungle that was the Third Reich.

Hitler’s dictatorship was backed by millions of Germans who often

enthusiastically supported the Nazis’ dystopian fantasy of a Jew-free,

German-dominated Europe, but few – if any – made a more direct and

personal contribution to its murderous implementation than Reinhard

Heydrich. It was Heydrich who – in close co-ordination with Hitler,

Himmler and Göring – devised Nazi Germany’s operative policies of

persecution against the Jews between 1938 and 1942, a murderous task

which, once achieved, was to be followed by the even more extensive

project of Germanizing the conquered territories.

Yet Heydrich’s path to virtually unlimited power in persecuting and

murdering Nazi Germany’s enemies in the Reich and its occupied terri-

tories was anything but straightforward. His youth in the shadow of war

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

and revolution, his family’s social decline and his first career in the

staunchly nationalist Weimar navy many have made him susceptible to

right-wing politics, but his conversion to Nazism came only in 1931, after

the abrupt and unexpected end of his military career. Without the exis-

tential crisis prompted by his dismissal from the navy and the simultane-

ously growing influence of his fiancée and her family of committed Nazis,

Heydrich may never have joined the SS as a staff officer.

But if desperation for a second career in uniform and a desire to please

his fiancée and her family were dominating factors in Heydrich’s decision

to apply for a position in the SS, he quickly came to endorse Nazism in

its most extreme form. In order to succeed in a new working environment

in which radicalism was rewarded, he fully subscribed to the SS’s ethos of

ruthless efficiency and decisiveness. His determination to make up for the

serious ‘imperfections’ of his earlier life – such as his belated conversion to

Nazism and the persistent rumours about his Jewish ancestry that led to

a humiliating party investigation in 1932 – also helps to explain his swift

transformation into a model SS man.

By the mid-1930s, Heydrich had successfully reinvented himself as one

of the most radical proponents of Nazi ideology and its implementation

through rigid and increasingly extensive policies of persecution. He was

never a man of ideas – he was no dystopian visionary like Hitler or

Himmler – but he was a highly talented organizer of terror, who combined

a rare perceptiveness of human weakness with an ability to surround

himself with very capable technical and administrative staff who compen-

sated for his own lack of experience in police and intelligence work. By

rewarding initiative and penalizing those who showed insufficient commit-

ment, he created a terror apparatus whose radicalized staff and work ethos

differed fundamentally from that of other Nazi and state institutions in its

ideological drive and commitment.

Increasingly, Heydrich’s mentality or worldview was unimpeded by the

moral standards of bourgeois European society. The only ethical criteria

that should influence conduct – or so he convinced himself – pertained to

the welfare of the Aryan people and the good of the future Greater

German Reich. The fate of non-Aryans was simply not a factor to be

taken into consideration when making or implementing policy. The reali-

zation of Hitler’s utopian society, so he firmly believed, required the ruth-

less and violent exclusion of those elements deemed dangerous to German

society, a task that could best be carried out by the SS as the uncompro-

mising executioner of Hitler’s will. Only by cleansing German society of

all that was alien, sick and hostile could a new ‘national community’ and

‘better world’ emerge – a world dominated by a racially purified German

people.

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293

Heydrich’s willingness to use violence in realizing this vision was partly

a result of his personal circumstances. Ever since the First World War, he

had lived in a world surrounded by, and suffused with, violence: he had

experienced war and revolution as a teenager, only to enter the military

and subsequently join the SS, whose primary purpose consisted in

violently suppressing political enemies. Nonetheless, the cleansing mecha-

nisms envisaged by Heydrich radicalized dramatically between 1933 and

1942, partly in response to new political circumstances after the outbreak

and escalation of war in 1939 and partly as a result of his rapid ascent in

the SS hierarchy and the intoxicating sense of historic opportunity that

gripped him after the outbreak of the Second World War. While the mass

extermination of Jews seemed inconceivable even to Heydrich before the

outbreak of war in 1939, his views on the matter altered significantly over

the following two and a half years. A combination of wartime brutaliza-

tion, frustration over failed expulsion schemes, pressures from local

German administrators in the occupied East and an ideologically moti-

vated determination to solve the Jewish problem once and for all led to a

situation in which he perceived systematic mass murder to be both

feasible and desirable.

It is of course a matter of speculation how Heydrich’s career would have

progressed had he survived the assassination attempt of May 1942. There

is little doubt that, for the short time the Third Reich had left, the

mounting pressure of resistance in occupied Europe strengthened those

within the Nazi movement who, like Heydrich, advocated a tough and

radical response to resistance organizations. There is similarly no question

that he would have wholeheartedly supported the further escalation of

genocidal policies in the occupied East and the violent suppression of the

German resistance in July 1944. Yet, as was the case with his rise, his fall,

too, would have been conditioned by developments and events beyond his

control. Had he survived the assassination attempt of May 1942, Heydrich’s

life would have ended either in suicide in 1945 or at the War Criminals’

Tribunal in Nuremberg, where his conviction as a mass murderer and

perpetrator of crimes against humanity is beyond doubt.

Such a verdict would have reflected the fact that Heydrich was far more

than a career-orientated desk perpetrator in the Nazi dictatorship. He

played a decisive role in developing and promoting the notion of an illu-

sive conglomerate of political and racial enemies that could be defeated

only by an ever-expanding terror apparatus that was unconfined by any

laws. As the executor of Nazi terror policies and the final solution until

1942, he was intimately involved in all crucial decision-making processes