HHhH: A Novel

by Laurent Binet

  In 1931 Heydrich is a navy lieutenant with the promise of a brilliant military career. He is engaged to a young aristocrat and his future is bright. But he is also an inveterate pussy hound, making endless sexual conquests and visits to brothels. One evening he brings home a young girl he’d met at a ball in Potsdam and who’d come to Kiel to pay him a visit. I don’t know for sure if she became pregnant, but in any case her parents demanded that he do his duty by her. Heydrich didn’t deign to respond, given that he was already engaged to Lina von Osten—whose pedigree was more suitable, and with whom, unlike the other one, he seemed genuinely in love. Unfortunately for him, the father of this young girl was Admiral Raeder himself, commander in chief of the navy. Raeder kicked up a huge fuss. Heydrich got bogged down in murky explanations that allowed him to exonerate himself in the eyes of his fiancée, but not of the military. He was court-martialed, disgraced, and finally booted out of the armed services.

  So in 1931, at the height of the economic crisis devastating Germany, the young officer with the brilliant future finds himself unemployed—one man among five million without work.

  Luckily for him, his fiancée hasn’t dropped him. A rabid anti-Semite, she pushes him to get in touch with a Nazi who is quite highly placed in a new elite organization with a growing reputation: the SS.

  April 30, 1931, the day Heydrich is ignominiously dumped from the navy—is this the day that seals the fate of Heydrich and his future victims? We can’t really be sure, not least since at the 1930 elections Heydrich declared: “Now old Hindenburg will have no choice but to name Hitler the chancellor. And then our time will come.” Leaving aside the fact that he was wrong by three years on Hitler’s nomination, we see here Heydrich’s political opinions in 1930, and can therefore suppose that even if he’d remained a navy officer, he would have ended up making a good career with the Nazis. Only perhaps not quite so monstrous.

  27

  Meanwhile, he goes back to his parents’ house and, we’re told, cries like a child for several days.

  Then he enrolls in the SS. But in 1931 being a foot soldier in the SS does not pay much. It’s practically voluntary work, in fact. Unless you climb the ladder.

  28

  There would be something comic in this face-to-face meeting were it not that it led to the deaths of millions. On one side, the tall blond in black uniform: horsey face, high-pitched voice, well-polished boots. On the other, a little hamster in glasses: dark brown hair, mustache, not very Aryan at all. It’s in this pathetic willingness to ape his master Adolf Hitler by growing a mustache that we see the physical link between Heinrich Himmler and Nazism, otherwise not immediately apparent—unless you count the various uniforms already put at his disposal.

  Against all racial logic, it’s the hamster who’s in charge. He is already a big wheel in a party poised to win the elections. Sitting across from this rodent-faced but increasingly influential little man, Heydrich tries to appear simultaneously respectful and self-assured. It’s the first time he’s met Himmler, the supreme leader of the organization to which he belongs. Heydrich has been recommended by a friend of his mother’s. He is applying to be chief of the intelligence service that Himmler wishes to create within the organization. Himmler hesitates. He prefers another candidate. He is unaware that this other candidate is an agent of the Republic sent to infiltrate the Nazi machine. So convinced is he by this man’s suitability for the job that he wanted to cancel his meeting with Heydrich. But when she discovered this, Lina put her husband on the first train to Munich. Thus it is that he turns up at the house of the ex–chicken farmer and future Reichsführer Himmler—the man who Hitler will soon refer to only as “my faithful Heinrich.”

  So Heydrich forces his presence on Himmler, who is consequently in rather a bad mood. And if Heydrich does not want to continue teaching rich sailors in Kiel’s yacht club, it’s in his interests to make a good impression very quickly.

  On the other hand, he does hold a trump card: Himmler’s remarkable incompetence in the domain of intelligence.

  In German, Nachrichtenoffizier means “transmission officer,” while Nachrichtendienstoffizier means “intelligence officer.” It’s because Himmler, notoriously ignorant about all things military, makes no distinction between these two terms that Heydrich—who used to be a transmission officer in the navy—is sitting opposite him today. In fact, Heydrich has practically no experience of intelligence. And what Himmler is asking him to do is nothing less than to create within the SS an espionage service that can compete with the Abwehr of Admiral Canaris, Heydrich’s old navy boss. Now that he’s here, Himmler expects him to outline his vision for the project. “You have twenty minutes.”

  Heydrich does not want to be a sailing instructor all his life. So he concentrates hard and gathers together everything he knows about the subject. This is limited mainly to what he’s remembered from the English spy novels he’s been reading for years. What the hell! Heydrich has figured out that Himmler knows even less about intelligence than he does, so he decides to bluff. He sketches out a few diagrams, taking care to use lots of military terms. And it works. Himmler is impressed. Forgetting his other candidate, the Weimar double agent, he hires the young man for a salary of 1,800 marks per month, six times more than he’s been earning since being kicked out of the navy. Heydrich is going to move to Munich. The foundations of the sinister SD are laid.

  29

  SD: Sicherheitsdienst, the security service. The least-known and the most sinister of all Nazi organizations. Including the Gestapo.

  To begin with, though, it’s just a small, underfunded agency: Heydrich keeps his first files in shoe boxes, and has only half a dozen agents. But already he’s got into the spirit of intelligence work: know everything about everyone. Without exception. As the SD extends its web, Heydrich will discover that he has an unusual gift for bureaucracy, the most important quality for the management of a good spy network. His motto could be: Files! Files! Always more files! In every color. On every subject. Heydrich gets a taste for it very quickly. Information, manipulation, blackmail, and spying become his drugs.

  Add to this a rather childish megalomania. Having got wind that the head of the British intelligence service calls himself M (yes, like in James Bond), he decides in all seriousness to call himself H. It is in some ways his first proper alias, before the great era of nicknames: “the Hangman,” “the Butcher,” “the Blond Beast,” and—this one given by Adolf Hitler himself—“the Man with the Iron Heart.”

  I don’t believe that “H” ever became a popular nickname among his men (they preferred the more graphic “Blond Beast”). There were too many eminent Hs above him, creating the risk of some regrettable mix-ups: Heydrich, Himmler, Hitler … he must have dropped this childish affectation himself, out of prudence. But H for Holocaust … that might very well have worked as the title of a bad biography.

  30

  Natacha flicks through the latest issue of Magazine littéraire, which she kindly bought for me. She stops at the review of a book about the life of Bach, the composer. The article begins with a quote from the author: “Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, ‘Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking’?” She smiles as she reads this to me.

  I don’t immediately grasp the full meaning of the phrase and, faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk! Then I ask her to pass me the magazine and I reread the sentence. I am forced to admit that I would quite like to possess this kind of detail about Heydrich. Natacha laughs openly: “Oh yes, I can just see it: Heydrich used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking!”

  31

  In the imagination of the Third Reich’s sycophants, Heydrich has always exemplified the Aryan ideal—because he was tall and blond and he had fairly delicate features. In the more gushing biographies he is generally described as a handsome man, a charming seducer. If they were honest—or less blinded by the dark fascination they fee
l for everything to do with Nazism—they would see, by looking more closely at the photos, not only that Heydrich was no oil painting but that he also had certain physical traits that are hardly compatible with the demands of Aryan classification: thick lips, admittedly not without a certain sensuality, but of a type that might almost be described as negroid, and a long prominent nose that could easily pass as hooked if it belonged to a Jew. Add to this a pair of large and fairly stuck-out ears and a long face generally agreed to look a bit horsey, and you obtain a result that, while not necessarily ugly, falls way short of Gobineau’s ideal.*

  32

  The Heydrichs, newly installed in a nice apartment in Munich that Lina loves (I admit it, I ended up buying her book, and I’ve had it indexed by a young Russian student who grew up in Germany—I could have found a German, but it’s fine this way), have prepared a meal fit for a king. This evening, Himmler is coming to dinner, along with another eminent guest: Ernst Röhm, head of the SA. He looks like a pig, with his round belly, his big head, his little deep-set eyes, his thick neck ringed with a roll of fat, and his mutilated nose turned up like a snout—a souvenir of the First World War. Proud of his soldier’s manners, Röhm is also in the habit of behaving like a pig. But he’s the head of an irregular army of more than 400,000 Brownshirts and it’s said that he’s on first-name terms with Hitler. In the eyes of the Heydrichs, therefore, he is perfectly commendable. And in fact, it’s a very merry evening. They laugh a lot. After a delicious meal cooked by the lady of the house, the men feel like having a smoke and a nightcap. Lina brings them matches and goes down to the cellar to find some brandy. Suddenly, she hears an explosion. She rushes upstairs and realizes what’s happened: in her excitability at serving these eminent guests, she mixed up the ordinary matches with the exploding New Year’s matches. Hilarity ensues. All that’s missing is the canned laughter.

  33

  Gregor Strasser is an old friend of Hitler’s. A member of the NSDAP since its inception, he runs the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Berlin newspaper he set up when he got out of prison in 1925. Because of his prestige and position, certain matters are deferred to him. There is a dispute that cannot be settled by the local Party section. In 1932, accusing an SS officer is not without risks, even for a high-ranking Nazi, and the Schutzstaffel’s growing reputation invites caution. This is why the Gauleiter of Halle-Merseburg prefers to hand over this delicate matter to Strasser: in an old edition of a musical encyclopedia, there is an entry on “Heydrich, Bruno, real name Süss.”

  So Himmler’s new protégé might be the son of a Jew! Gregor Strasser, probably wishing to prove that he is still a man to be reckoned with, orders an inquiry. Does he want to take the scalp of this rising star? Does he feel the need to polish his own reputation, now going dull within the party he helped to found? Is it a genuine fear of seeing the Jewish virus infect the heart of the Nazi machine? In any case, a report is sent to Munich and it lands on Himmler’s desk.

  Himmler is dismayed, of course. He has already sung the praises of his young recruit to the Führer, and he fears for his own credibility if the accusation is proven. He follows the Party’s inquiry with great attention. The suspicions concerning the paternal branch of Heydrich’s family must have been abandoned fairly quickly: the name Süss belonged to Heydrich’s grandmother’s second husband, so there is no direct genetic link—and anyway the man wasn’t Jewish, despite his surname. Then again, the inquiry may have led to doubts over the purity of the maternal branch. Due to a lack of evidence, Heydrich ends up being officially exonerated. But Himmler wonders if it wouldn’t be better to get rid of him anyway, because he knows that from now on Heydrich will remain at the mercy of rumors. On the other hand, Heydrich’s activities in the SS have already made him, if not indispensible, at least very promising. Unsure of what to do, Himmler decides to seek the advice of the Führer himself.

  Hitler summons Heydrich, with whom he converses privately for a long time. I don’t know what Heydrich says to him, but after this meeting, the Führer’s mind is made up. He tells Himmler: “This man is extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily dangerous. We would be stupid not to use him. The Party needs men like him, and his talents will be particularly useful in the future. What’s more, he will be eternally grateful to us for having kept him and he will obey us blindly.” Himmler is vaguely disturbed to have at his command a man who can inspire such admiration in the Führer, but he agrees all the same: he is not in the habit of disputing his master’s opinion.

  So Heydrich has saved himself. But he has lived through the nightmare of his childhood once again. What strange fate allows him to be accused of being Jewish, he who is clearly such a perfect incarnation of the Aryan race in all its purity? His hatred for that cursed people grows ever stronger. In the meantime, he writes down the name of Gregor Strasser.

  34

  I don’t know when exactly it happens, but I tend to think it’s during these years that Heydrich decides upon a slight modification in the spelling of his first name. He drops the t from the end: Reinhardt becomes Reinhard. It sounds tougher.

  35

  I’ve been talking rubbish, the victim of both a faulty memory and an overactive imagination. In fact, the head of the British secret service at this time was called “C”—not “M” as in James Bond. Heydrich too called himself “C,” and not “H.” But it’s not certain that, in doing so, he wished to copy the British: the initial more probably referred to der Chef.

  While I was checking my sources, however, I came upon this statement, disclosed to I don’t know whom, but which shows that Heydrich had a very clear idea of his job: “In a modern totalitarian system of government, the principle of state security has no limits. Therefore whoever is in charge must aim to gather a degree of power almost without restraints.”

  You can accuse Heydrich of many things, but you can’t say he didn’t keep his promises.

  36

  April 20, 1934, is a significant date in the history of the Schutzstaffel: Göring surrenders the leadership of the Gestapo, which he created, to the two heads of the SS. Himmler and Heydrich take possession of the magnificent headquarters on Prinz Albrecht Strasse in Berlin. Heydrich chooses his office. He moves in. Sits down at his desk. Gets to work straightaway. He places some paper in front of him. Takes his pen. And starts making lists.

  Obviously, Göring isn’t happy to give up the leadership of his secret police, already one of the jewels in the crown of the Nazi regime. But it’s the price he must pay to win the support of Himmler against Röhm: the petit bourgeois of the SS worries him less than the left-leaning agitator of the SA. Röhm likes to brag that the National Socialist revolution is not finished. But Göring doesn’t see things that way: they’ve got the power, their only task now is to keep it. Heydrich undoubtedly subscribes to this point of view too, even if Röhm is godfather to his son.

  37

  Berlin hums with conspiracy as a document circulates the city. It’s a typewritten list. Neutral observers are stunned by the carelessness with which this sheet of paper is passed around in the cafés, going from hand to hand under the eyes of waiters whom everybody knows to be informers in the pay of Heydrich.

  It is nothing less than the blueprint of a hypothetical ministerial cabinet. In this future government, Hitler remains chancellor but the names of Papen and Göring vanish. In their place appear those of Röhm and his friends—Schleicher, Strasser, Brüning.

  Heydrich shows the list to Hitler. The Führer, who likes nothing more than having his paranoid tendencies confirmed, chokes with rage. However, the heterogeneity of the coalition leaves him puzzled: Schleicher, for example, has never been counted among the friends of Röhm, whom he despises. Heydrich retorts that General von Schleicher has been seen deep in conversation with the French ambassador—proof that he is part of the plot.

  In fact, the disparate couplings of this strange coalition show above all that Heydrich still needs to refine his knowledge of internal politics. Because he’s t
he one who has drawn up and distributed this list. The prevailing principle behind it is very simple: he has, naturally enough, written down the names of his enemies, along with the enemies of his two masters, Himmler and Göring.

  38

  From outside, the imposing gray stone building reveals nothing. At most you might guess at an unusual activity in the movements of the silhouettes that enter and exit. But inside this SS hive there is frenzied agitation: men run in all directions, shouts echo in the great white hall, doors slam on every floor, telephones ring endlessly in offices. At the heart of the building and of the unfolding drama, Heydrich plays what will become his greatest role—that of the killer bureaucrat. Around him are tables, telephones, and men in black who dial and hang up. He takes all the calls.

  “Hello! He’s dead?… Leave the corpse where it is. Officially, it’s suicide. Put your gun in his hand … You shot him in the back of the neck? Well, never mind, that doesn’t matter. Suicide.”

  “Hello! It’s done?… Very good … The woman too?… All right, you’ll say that he was resisting arrest … Yes, the woman too!… That’s right, she tried to intervene, that will work fine!… The servants?… How many?… Take their names, we’ll deal with them later.”