The Story of the Dreaded Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was born as the second of three children on March 7, 1904 in Halle an der Saale. His father was a versatile musician, opera singer, and composer who founded the First Halle Conservatory for Music, Theater, and Teaching in 1899 and was director of it. Reinhard also played the violin excellently and, in addition to high school, attended the conservatory classes for piano, cello, and composition.

After graduating from high school in 1922, the young Heydrich joined the Reichsmarine voluntarily. However, an affair with a young girl ended his military career. He joined the SS and met Heinrich Himmler, who commissioned him to set up an SS intelligence service, later the Security Service (SD).

As Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand man, with whom he silently occupied the most important control points of the police and administration from 1933, Heydrich linked the traditions of the German bureaucracy with the goals and methods of the National Socialist worldview and power politics. He did not embody the racial dogmatic or the revolutionary type but was a cold, unscrupulous, and rational power engineer.

Optically Ideal – But Rumors About the Origin

In purely physical terms, Heydrich was tall and blond, in line with the ideal of National Socialist ideas. At Christmas 1931, he married Lina von Osten, the daughter of a village schoolmaster on Fehmarn. The marriage had four children. Heydrich was also an ambitious, competitive athlete. As a pilot with a high number of “Feindflügen” (Combat Sortie), he was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. His high intelligence and his simultaneously inhuman and factual-perfectionist manner made him appear dangerous and yet indispensable. On the other hand, he spoke in a remarkably thin, high-pitched voice and fought against inferiority complexes and self-hatred. These were rooted not only in the termination of the officer career but also in ongoing rumors about Jewish ancestors. Until 1940 he was repeatedly compelled to go to trial for alleged racial defamation.

Rapid Career

After 1933 Heydrich quickly rose to become one of the most powerful German politicians. In March 1933, he took over the management of the Bavarian Political Police, in April 1934 the Prussian Secret State Police Office, and was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer in June 1934. When he was appointed head of the Security Police (Sipo), the 32-year-old was subordinate to the SD as well as the Secret State Police (Gestapo) and the criminal police from 1936. As a result of the further merging of the SS and police in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), a labyrinth of countless reports, Heydrich was finally at the top of the power hierarchy from September 1939. Formally he was still subordinate to Himmler, but, as Hermann Göring observed, “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.”

Heydrich, Head of the Largest Organized Mass Murder in Modern History

However, Heydrich’s name is primarily associated with the Wannsee Conference and the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” In July 1940, Heydrich was appointed representative for the “Total Solution to the Jewish Question,” He had increasingly adapted practical implementation of anti-Jewish measures to the Gestapo from 1938/39. In this position, he headed an inter-ministerial conference on January 20, 1942, at the Wannsee in Berlin. His main purpose was to coordinate the ministries and the highest Reich authorities to implement the “Final Solution” and organize it across Europe. In his new role, Heydrich devoted himself to searching for perfect solutions with emotional indifference and thus became the initial leader of the largest organized mass murder in modern history.

Attack on the “Butcher of Prague”

Heydrich’s last political station took him as Hitler’s governor in autumn 1941 to the capital of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Against the background of his open terror against the population, he was soon known as the “Butcher of Prague.” On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in a narrow street curve near the Prague city limits. Two Czech partisans threw a hand grenade under his car and seriously injured Heydrich. Although he still managed to jump out and empty his magazine, eight days later, Heydrich succumbed to his wounds and thus became the most important representative of the Nazi regime who fell victim to an attack. This attack, planned and prepared by Czechoslovak circles in exile in England, resulted in unprecedented brutal acts of revenge and persecution by the National Socialists. The assassins Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik holed up in the crypt of a church and killed themselves.

The National Socialists were looking for retaliation. Residents of the little village Lidice, near Prague, were suspected of being connected with the assassination attempt on Heydrich. No evidence was found, but the village was razed to the ground in one night.

On June 10, 1942, the German occupiers shot all 173 men in Lidice. Most of the women were murdered in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and many of the children were gassed in the Kulmenhof extermination camp. In Prague, the trial court imposed 936 death sentences, Lidice was razed to the ground, and other places also fell victim to German acts of destruction.

Not only Heydrich himself had apparently at least tended to aim at the “Leadership” of the German Reich, but Heydrich was also seen as a potential successor to Hitler for others. Ultimately, however, there was only the characterization of Heydrich, as Hitler himself put it in his commemorative speech: “The Man with the Iron Heart.”