“Hello! Finished?… Good, now throw it all in the Oder.”
“Hello!… What?… At his tennis club? He was playing tennis?… He jumped over the hedge and disappeared in the woods? Are you fucking with me?… You comb the woods and you find him!”
“Hello!… What do you mean, ‘another’? What do you mean, ‘the same name’?… The first name too?… All right, bring him here, we’ll send him to Dachau while we find the right one.”
“Hello!… Where was he last seen?… The Adlon Hotel? But everyone knows the waiters work for us, that’s idiotic! He said he wanted to give himself up?… Very well, go back and wait at his house, then send him to us.”
“Hello! Let me speak to the Reichsführer!… Hello? Yes, it’s done … Yes, that too … It’s happening now … It’s done … And where are you with number one?… The Führer refuses? But why?… You must convince the Führer!… Talk about his morals! And all the scandals that we’ve had to suppress! Remind him of the trunk left behind at the brothel!… Understood, I’ll call Göring now.”
“Hello? Heydrich speaking. The Reichsführer tells me that the Führer wants to spare the SA Führer!… Naturally, under no circumstances!… You must tell him that the army will never accept it! We have executed Reichswehr officers: if Röhm doesn’t die, Blomberg will refuse to back the operation!… Yes, there you go, a question of justice, absolutely!… Understood, I’ll wait for your call.”
An SS guard enters. He looks worried. He approaches Heydrich and bends down to speak in his ear. They both leave the room. Five minutes later, Heydrich returns, alone. His face reveals nothing. He goes back to answering calls.
“Hello!… Burn the body! Send the ashes to his widow!”
“Hello!… No, Göring won’t let us touch him … Leave six men at his house … Nobody enters and nobody leaves!”
“Hello!…” et cetera.
At the same time, he methodically fills out little white sheets of paper.
This goes on all weekend.
Finally, he gets the news he’s been waiting for: the Führer has given in. He will give the order to execute Röhm—his oldest accomplice, and the head of the Sturmabteilung. Röhm may be godfather to Heydrich’s eldest son but he is above all Himmler’s direct superior. By decapitating the SA leadership, Himmler and Heydrich liberate the SS, which becomes an autonomous organization answerable only to Hitler. Heydrich is named Gruppenführer, a rank equivalent to major general. He is thirty years old.
39
Gregor Strasser is eating lunch with his family on Saturday, June 30, 1934, when the doorbell rings. Eight armed men are here to arrest him. Without even giving him time to say goodbye to his wife, they take him to Gestapo headquarters. He is not interrogated but finds himself locked in a cell with several SA men who crowd around him excitedly. They are reassured by his prestige as an old companion of the Führer, even if he hasn’t exercised any political power in months. He does not understand why he is here with them, but he knows the mysteries of the Party well enough to fear its arbitrary, irrational side.
At 1700, an SS guard comes to take him to an individual cell with a large window in the roof. Alone in his cell, Strasser does not know that the Night of the Long Knives has begun, but he can guess what’s going on. Should he fear for his life? True, he’s a historical figure in the Party, linked to Hitler by the memory of past struggles: they were, after all, in prison together after the Munich putsch. But he knows too that Hitler is not a sentimental man. And even if he can’t grasp how he could be considered a threat comparable to Röhm or Schleicher, one must take the Führer’s boundless paranoia into account. Strasser realizes he will have to play his cards cleverly if he wants to save his neck.
He is thinking this when he feels a shadow pass behind his back. With an old fighter’s instinct, he understands he is in danger and ducks at the very moment that a gun is fired. Someone has reached through the window and shot at him from point-blank range. He ducks, but not fast enough. He collapses.
Facedown on the cell floor, Strasser hears the bolt of the door slide open, then the sound of boots around him, the breath of a man bending over his neck, and voices:
“He’s still alive.”
“What shall we do? Finish him off?”
He hears the click of a pistol being loaded.
“Wait, I’ll go and ask.”
A pair of boots moves away. A moment passes. The boots return, accompanied. Heels snap to attention at the entry of the new arrival. Silence. And then this falsetto voice that he would recognize anywhere, and which sends a final chill down his spine.
“He’s not dead yet? Let him bleed like a pig.”
Heydrich’s is the last human voice he will hear before dying. Well, when I say “human” …
40
Fabrice comes to visit, and talks to me about the book I’m writing. He’s an old university friend who, like me, is passionate about history. This summer evening we eat on the terrace and he talks about my book’s opening with an enthusiasm that is encouraging. He fixes on the construction of the chapter about the Night of the Long Knives: this series of telephone calls, according to him, evokes both the bureaucratic nature and the mass production of what will be the hallmark of Nazism—murder. I’m flattered but also suspicious, and I decide to make him clarify what he means: “But you know that each telephone call corresponds to an actual case? I could get almost all the names for you, if I wanted to.” He is surprised, and responds ingenuously that he’d thought I’d invented this. Vaguely disturbed, I ask him: “What about Strasser?” Heydrich going there in person, giving the order to let him suffer a slow death in his cell: that, too, he thought I’d invented. I am mortified, and I shout: “But no, it’s all true!” And I think: “Damn, I’m not there yet…”
That same evening, I watch a TV documentary on an old Hollywood film about General Patton. The film is soberly entitled Patton. The documentary consists essentially of showing extracts from the film, then interviewing witnesses who explain, “In fact, it wasn’t really like that…” He didn’t take on two Messerschmitts that were machine-gunning the base, armed only with his Colt (but no doubt he would have done, according to the witness, if the Messerschmitts had given him time). He didn’t make such-and-such a speech before the whole army but in private, and besides, he didn’t actually say that. He didn’t learn at the last moment that he was going to be sent to France, but had in fact been informed several weeks in advance. He didn’t disobey orders in taking Palermo, but did so with the backing of the Allied High Command and his own direct superior. He certainly didn’t tell a Russian general to go fuck himself, even if he didn’t much like the Russians. And so on. So, basically, the film is about a fictional character whose life is strongly inspired by Patton’s, but who clearly isn’t him. And yet the film is called Patton. And that doesn’t shock anybody. Everyone finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic, or adding coherence to the narrative of a character whose real path probably included too many random ups and downs, insufficiently loaded with significance. It’s because of people like that, forever messing with historical truth just to sell their stories, that an old friend, familiar with all these fictional genres and therefore fatally accustomed to these processes of glib falsification, can say to me in innocent surprise: “Oh, really, it’s not invented?”
No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of “inventing” Nazism?
41
You’ll have gathered by now that I am fascinated by this story. But at the same time I think it’s getting to me.
One night, I had a dream. I was a German soldier, dressed in the gray-green uniform of the Wehrmacht, and I was on guard duty in an unidentified landscape, covered with snow and bordered by barbed wire. This background was clearly inspired by the numerous Second World War video games to which I’ve occasionally been weak enough to become addicted: Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Red Orchestra …
Suddenly, during my patrol, Heydrich
himself arrived to perform an inspection. I stood to attention and held my breath while he circled me with an inquisitorial air. I was terrorized by the idea that he might find fault with me. But I woke up before anything else happened.
To tease me, Natacha often pretends to worry about the impressive number of books on Nazism that line the shelves of my apartment, and the risk of ideological conversion she thinks I’m running. To join in the joke, I never fail to mention the innumerable tendentious—if not openly neo-Nazi—websites that I come across while researching on the Internet. It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.
But I must, once more, bow down before the limitless and nefarious power of literature. Because this dream proves beyond doubt that, with his larger-than-life, storybook aura, Heydrich impresses me.
42
Anthony Eden, the British foreign minister, listens in stunned silence. The new Czech president, Edvard Beneš, is displaying a staggering confidence in his ability to resolve the question of the Sudeten Germans. Not only does he claim to be able to contain Germany’s expansionist desires, but, what’s more, to do so alone—in other words, without the help of France and Great Britain. Eden doesn’t know what to make of this speech. “I suppose that to be Czech in days like these, one must be an optimist,” he says to himself. It is still only 1935.
43
In 1936, Major Moravec, head of the Czechoslovak secret services, takes his colonel’s exam. One of the hypothetical questions reads: “Czechoslovakia is attacked by Germany. Hungary and Austria are also hostile. France has not mobilized her army and the Petite Entente is probably unworkable. What are the military solutions for Czechoslovakia?”
Analysis of the subject: with the Austro-Hungarian Empire having been carved up in 1918, Vienna and Budapest are now naturally eyeing up their former provinces—that is, Bohemia-Moravia, which had been an Austrian dependancy, and Slovakia, which had been under Hungarian control. Moreover, Hungary is led by a fascist ally of Germany, Admiral Horthy. A badly weakened Austria, meanwhile, is having trouble resisting the calls from both sides of the German border for the country to be united with its Germanic big brother. The agreement signed by Hitler, which promises that he won’t intervene in Austrian affairs, is not worth the paper it’s written on. If there was ever a conflict with Germany, therefore, Czechoslovakia would also find itself pitted against the two heads of the fallen empire. The Petite Entente, agreed to in 1922 by Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia to protect one another from their old Austro-Hungarian masters, is not the most convincing of strategic alliances. And France’s reluctance to keep its commitments to its Czech ally if a conflict arises has already been made clear. So the hypothetical situation proposed in the exam is completely realistic. Moravec’s response is only five words long: “Problem unsolvable by military means.” He passes with flying colors and becomes a colonel.
44
If I were to mention all the plots in which Heydrich had a hand, this book would never be finished. Sometimes in the course of my research I come upon a story that I decide not to relate, whether because it seems too anecdotal, or because there are details missing and I’m unable to fit the pieces of the puzzle together, or because I find the story questionable. Sometimes, too, there are several contradictory versions of the same story. In certain cases, I allow myself to decide which version is true. If not, I drop the story.
I had decided not to mention Heydrich’s role in the fall of Tukhachevsky. First of all, because his role struck me as secondary, even illusory. Next, because Soviet politics in the 1930s doesn’t really have much to do with the main flow of my story. Finally, I suppose, because I was afraid of getting involved on another historical front: the Stalinist purges, Marshal Tukhachevsky’s career, the origins of his dispute with Stalin … all of this called for both learning and meticulousness. The danger was that it would drag me too far from my subject.
All the same, I have imagined a scene, just for the pleasure of it: we see the young General Tukhachevsky contemplating the rout of the Bolshevik army at the gates of Warsaw. It’s 1920. Poland and the USSR are at war. “The Revolution will step over the corpse of Poland!” declared Trotsky. It has to be said that in allying itself with Ukraine, in dreaming of a confederation that would also include Lithuania and Byelorussia, Poland was threatening the fragile unity of the nascent Soviet Russian state. On the other hand, if the Bolsheviks wanted to take the revolution to Germany, they were bound to go through the region.
In August 1920, the Soviet counterattack led the Red Army to the gates of Warsaw, and Poland’s fate looked sealed. But the young nation’s independence would last another nineteen years. What Poland was unable to do in 1939 against the Germans, it did that day against the Russians: it pushed them back. This is the “miracle at the Vistula.” Tukhachevsky is defeated by an unparalleled strategist—Józef Piłsudski, the hero of Polish independence, and nearly thirty years Tukhachevsky’s senior.
The two armies are more or less equal in numbers: 113,000 Poles against 114,000 Russians. Tukhachevsky, however, is certain of victory. He sends the main body of his forces north, where Piłsudski has fooled him into believing that there is a concentration of troops. In fact, Piłsudski attacks in the south, from behind. It is here that this tributary episode joins the main flow of my story. Tukhachevsky calls for reinforcements from the 1st Cavalry—led by the no-less-legendary General Budyonny—who are fighting on the southwest front to take L’viv. Budyonny’s cavalry is formidable, and Piłsudski knows that this intervention might turn the battle against him. But then something unbelievable happens: General Budyonny refuses to obey orders, and his army remains at L’viv. For the Poles, this is without doubt the real miracle at the Vistula. For Tukhachevsky, however, defeat is bitter, and he wants to understand why it happened. He doesn’t have to search far: the political commissar of the southwestern front, under whose authority Budyonny is operating, has decided that the capture of L’viv is a matter of prestige. There is no question of him sending away his best troops, even if it is necessary to avoid a military disaster, because he knows that the disaster is not his responsibility. Never mind that the fate of the war depends upon it. The personal ambitions of this commissar have often taken precedence over all other considerations. His name is Joseph Dzhugashvili, though he is better known by his nom de guerre: Stalin.
Fifteen years later, Tukhachevsky succeeds Trotsky as head of the Red Army, while Stalin succeeds Lenin as head of state. The two men hate each other, they are at the pinnacle of their power, and they disagree over political strategy: Stalin seeks to delay a conflict with Nazi Germany, while Tukhachevsky advocates going to war now.
I wasn’t aware of all this when I saw the Eric Rohmer film Triple Agent. But I decided to study the question seriously when I heard the main character, General Skoblin, an eminent White Russian exiled in Paris, say to his wife: “Do you remember? I told you that in Berlin I went to see the head of German intelligence, a certain Heydrich. And you know what I didn’t want to tell him? Things about Comrade Tukhachevsky, whom I met secretly in Paris during his trip to the West for the funeral of the king of England. Oh, of course, he didn’t open his heart to me, but from what he said I was able to make certain deductions. The Gestapo must have got wind of this meeting; Heydrich questioned me, I answered evasively, he gave me an icy look, and that’s how we left it.”
Heydrich in a Rohmer film! I still can’t get over it.
After this bit of dialogue, Skoblin’s wife asks:
“And this Mr. Heydrich, why does he want this information?”
“Well, it’s in the Germans’ interests to compromise the head o
f the Red Army, especially as they already know he’s out of favor with Stalin … at least, that’s what I assume.”
Skoblin goes on to deny any links with the Nazis, and this, too, seems to be Rohmer’s view, even if the director takes great care to stress the ambiguity of his character and politics. But I struggle to believe that Skoblin went to the trouble of meeting Heydrich in Berlin just to tell him nothing.
It seems to me more likely that Skoblin went to see Heydrich to inform him that a plot against Stalin had been hatched by Tukhachevsky, but that in doing so, Skoblin was acting on behalf of the NKVD—in other words, for Stalin himself. Why? To spread the rumor of the plot in order to make people believe an (apparently unfounded) accusation of high treason.
Did Heydrich believe Skoblin? I don’t know, but either way he saw the opportunity of eliminating a dangerous enemy of the Reich: to remove Tukhachevsky in 1937 is to decapitate the Red Army. He decides to feed the rumor. He knows that such an affair is a matter for Canaris’s Abwehr, as it’s a military question. But, intoxicated by the sheer scale of his project, he manages to convince Himmler and Hitler to give him control of the operation. To carry it out, he calls on his best hired man, Alfred Naujocks, who specializes in dirty work. For three months, Naujocks will create a whole series of forgeries aimed at compromising the Russian marshal. He has no difficulty finding his signature: all he has to do is look through the archives of the Weimar Republic. Back then, when diplomatic relations between the two countries were more friendly, many official documents had been signed by Tukhachevsky.
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