When the dossier is ready, Heydrich assigns one of his men to sell it to the NKVD. This meeting gives rise to a wonderful spying double cross: the Russian buys the fake dossier from the German, whom he pays with fake rubles. Each thinks he’s fooling the other, each is fooled in turn.
Eventually, Stalin gets what he wants: evidence that his most serious rival is planning a coup d’état. Historians disagree over how much importance should be given to Heydrich in this affair, but it should be noted that the dossier was sent in May 1937, and that Tukhachevsky was executed in June. For me, the closeness of the dates strongly suggests a link between cause and effect.
So, in the end, who fooled whom? I think Heydrich served Stalin’s interests, in allowing him to get rid of the only man capable of eclipsing him. But this man was also the most able to lead a war against Germany. The total disorganization of the Red Army, caught off guard by the German invasion of June ’41, would be the final aftermath of this murky story. But you can’t really say it was Heydrich’s masterstroke. Rather, Stalin shot himself in the foot. All the same, when Stalin begins a series of unprecedented purges, Heydrich is exultant. He is perfectly happy to take all the credit for this state of affairs.
45
I am thirty-three, considerably older than Tukhachevsky was in 1920. Today is the anniversary of the assassination attempt on Heydrich—May 27, 2006. Natacha’s sister is getting married, but I’m not invited to the wedding. Natacha called me a “little shit.” I don’t think she can bear me anymore. My life is in ruins. I wonder if Tukhachevsky felt this bad when he realized that he’d lost the battle, when he saw his army routed and understood that he had failed miserably. Did he believe he was finished, done for, washed up? Did he curse fortune, or adversity, or those who’d betrayed him? Or did he curse himself? Anyway, I know he bounced back. That’s encouraging, even if it was only to be crushed fifteen years later by his worst enemy. The wheel turns: that’s what I tell myself. Natacha doesn’t return my calls. I am in 1920, standing before the trembling walls of Warsaw, and at my feet, indifferent, flows the Vistula.
46
That night, I dreamed that I wrote the chapter about the assassination, and it began: “A black Mercedes slid along the road like a snake.” That’s when I understood that I had to start writing the rest of the story, because the rest of the story had to converge at this crucial episode. By pursuing the chain of causality back into infinity, I allowed myself to keep delaying the moment when I must face the novel’s bravura moment, its scene of scenes.
47
Imagine a map of the world, with concentric circles closing in around Germany. This afternoon, November 5, 1937, Hitler reveals his plans to the army high command—Blomberg, Fritsch, Raeder, Göring—and to his foreign minister, Neurath. The objective of German politics, he reminds them (although I think everyone’s understood by now), is to ensure the safety of Germany’s racial identity, to guarantee its existence, and to aid its development. It is therefore a question of living space (the famous Lebensraum) and it is here that we can begin to trace the circles of the map. Not from the narrowest to the widest, to take in at a single glance the Reich’s expansionist aims, but from the widest to the narrowest, focusing ruthlessly on the ogre’s first targets. For reasons he never bothers to explain, Hitler decrees that the Germans have the right to a bigger living space than other races. Germany’s future depends entirely on the solution to this problem. Where can this space be found? Not in some distant colony in Africa or Asia, but in the heart of Europe (he traces a circle around the Old Continent), in the immediate neighborhood of the Reich. So the circle encompasses only France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland—plus Lithuania, if we remember that the top of Germany at the time extended from Danzig to Memel and bordered the Baltic countries. So Hitler’s question was this: Where can Germany obtain the greatest profit for the lowest price? France was ruled out because of its presumed military power and its links to Great Britain—and Holland and Belgium, too, due to their strategic importance for the French. Mussolini’s Italy was naturally excluded straightaway. An eastward expansion toward Poland and the Baltic countries would create a premature conflict with the Soviet Union. Switzerland was saved as usual, less by its neutrality than by its role as the world’s piggy bank. The circle is therefore retraced and moved above a zone reduced to two countries: “Our first objective must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West.” As we see, no sooner has he targeted his “first objective” than Hitler is thinking of widening the circle.
Apart from Göring and Raeder, both of whom were genuine Nazis, Hitler’s audience is shocked by his plans—literally so in the case of Neurath, who suffers several heart attacks in the days that follow the unveiling of this brilliant scheme. Blomberg and Fritsch—respectively, the war minister and commander in chief of the armed services, and commander in chief of the army—protested with a vehemence wholly inappropriate in the Third Reich. In 1937, the old army still believed that it could sway the opinions of the dictator it had, imprudently, helped to seize power.
They didn’t understand Hitler at all. But they soon would. And Blomberg and Fritsch would pay dearly for their education.
Not long after this stormy conference, Blomberg married his (much younger) secretary. To his displeasure, and perhaps to his surprise, it was revealed that his wife was a former prostitute. And to make the scandal as great as possible, nude photos of her were passed around government circles. Though Blomberg bravely refused to divorce, he was forced to resign his post. Relieved of all military responsibility, he remained faithful to his wife till the end—that’s to say, until 1946 in Nuremberg, where he died in detention.
As for Fritsch, he was the victim of an even more indecent plot, skillfully conducted by Heydrich.
48
Like Sherlock Holmes, Heydrich plays the violin. (He plays it better than does the fictional detective, however.) Also like Sherlock Holmes, he conducts criminal inquiries. Except that where Holmes seeks the truth, Heydrich just makes it up.
His mission is to compromise General von Fritsch, the commander in chief of the army. Heydrich doesn’t need to be head of the SD to know that Fritsch has anti-Nazi feelings: he has never made any secret of them. At a military parade in Saarbrücken, in 1935, he was heard openly and sarcastically abusing the SS, the Party, and many of its most eminent members. It would probably be quite easy to implicate him in a plot.
But Heydrich has something more humiliating in mind for the old baron. Knowing how proud and touchy the Prussian aristocracy are when it comes to their moral rectitude, he decides to compromise Fritsch, as he did Blomberg, in a sex scandal.
Unlike Blomberg, Fritsch is a confirmed bachelor. This is Heydrich’s starting point. In cases of this kind, the angle of attack is obvious. In order to put together the dossier, Heydrich calls on the Gestapo’s “department for the suppression of homosexuality.”
And guess what he discovers? A shady individual, known to the police as a blackmailer of homosexuals, claims to have seen Fritsch, in a dark alley near Potsdam Station, having sex with a certain “Jo the Bavarian.” Unbelievably, this story appears to be true, except for one minor detail: the Fritsch in question is not the general, but someone else with the same surname. To Heydrich, this is of little importance. He finds out that this second Fritsch is a retired cavalry officer—a soldier, then—which will help add to the confusion, even more so as the blackmailer, encouraged by the Gestapo, is ready to identify whoever Heydrich wants him to.
Heydrich has imagination, and it’s a useful quality in his job. But in order to work properly, this type of plot also requires an attention to detail that Heydrich doesn’t really demonstrate here. Still, he almost gets away with it.
In the chancellery offices, before Göring and Hitler himself, Fritsch finds himself face-to-face with the blackmailer. This latter is, by all accounts, utterly
degenerate, and the haughty baron does not even deign to respond to the accusations against him. Unfortunately, covering oneself in one’s dignity is not the kind of attitude that goes down well in the higher echelons of the Third Reich. Hitler demands Fritsch’s immediate resignation. Up to this point, everything is going to plan.
But Fritsch refuses. He asks to be court-martialed. And suddenly Heydrich is in a very delicate position. A court-martial entails a preliminary inquiry led not by the Gestapo but by the army itself. Hitler hesitates. He has no more desire than Heydrich for a full and proper trial, but he is also a little fearful of the reactions of the old military class.
Within a few days, the situation has been turned on its head: not only has the army discovered the truth, but it has managed to pull the two key witnesses—the blackmailer and the retired cavalry officer—from the claws of the Gestapo. Heydrich’s plan fizzles out completely. His fate is now hanging by a thread: if Hitler agrees to the trial, his trickery will be exposed in broad daylight, which will lead at the very least to Heydrich’s dismissal—and the end of all his ambitions. He will find himself more or less where he was in 1931, after his discharge from the navy.
Heydrich is not very happy at this prospect. The icy killer is now the terror-stricken prey. His right-hand man Schellenberg recalls how one day in the office, during this crisis, Heydrich asks for a gun. The head of the SD has his back to the wall.
But he is wrong to doubt Hitler. In the end, Fritsch is put on sick leave: no resignation, no trial. It’s simpler this way, and his problems are solved. All the same, Heydrich did have a trump card up his sleeve: his interests were the same as Hitler’s, because the latter had decided to take control of the army himself. In other words, Fritsch would have had to be eliminated, come what may—it was the Führer’s unshakable will.
February 5, 1938—a prominent headline in the Völkischer Beobachter:
“All power concentrated in the hands of the Führer.”
Heydrich needn’t have worried.
The trial does finally take place, but, in the meantime, the balance of power has shifted irrevocably: after the incredible euphoria provoked by the Anschluss, the army bows down before the genius of the Führer, and stops making trouble. Fritsch is acquitted, the blackmailer is executed, and the whole affair is forgotten.
49
Hitler never joked about morals. Since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, it is officially forbidden for a Jew to have sexual relations with an Aryan. The crime is punishable by a prison sentence.
But, amazingly, only the man can be prosecuted. It was evidently Hitler’s wish that the woman, whether Jewish or Aryan, should not be at the mercy of the law.
Heydrich, more Catholic than the pope, doesn’t see it that way. This discrimination between men and women offends his sense of equity (although only when the woman is a Jew, of course). So in 1937 he gives secret instructions to the Kripo (criminal police) and the Gestapo that, in the event of any German man being found guilty of sleeping with a Jew, the woman would automatically be arrested and sent discreetly to a concentration camp.
In other words, when the Nazi leaders are—for once—ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Führer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honor and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes.
50
A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss. Austria has finally “decided” to be “reunited” with Germany. It’s the first step in the birth of the Third Reich. It is also Hitler’s first conjuring trick, soon to be repeated: conquering a country without meeting any resistance.
The news spreads like wildfire across the continent. In London, Colonel Moravec wishes to return urgently to Prague, but it’s impossible to find a flight. He manages to take off for France but ends up in The Hague, from where he decides to complete his journey by train. The train is a fine way to travel, of course, but there is a slight problem. To reach Prague, he must cross Germany.
Unbelievably, Moravec decides to risk it.
So for several hours on March 13, 1938, the head of the Czechoslovak secret services is traveling through Nazi Germany by train.
I try to imagine the journey. Naturally, Moravec attempts to be as discreet as possible. He speaks German, admittedly, but I’m not sure that his accent is beyond suspicion. Then again, Germany is not yet at war, and the German people—though heated up by the Führer’s speeches about the Jewish international conspiracy and the enemy within—are not yet as alert as they will later become. But, taking no chances, when Moravec buys his ticket he doubtless chooses the friendliest-looking clerk. Or better still, the most half-witted.
Once he was on the train, I suppose he sought out an empty compartment, and that he sat down either:
next to the window, so he could discourage anyone who attempted to begin a conversation by turning his back and pretending to admire the countryside, all the while watching the compartment’s reflection in the glass
or
next to the door, so that he could watch all the comings and goings in the corridor.
Let’s put him next to the door.
What I do know is that he believed—aware, and perhaps quite proud, of his own importance—that the Gestapo would pay a great deal of money to know who the German railway was transporting that day.
Each movement in the carriage must have been a test of nerves.
Each time the train halted in a station.
Eventually, a man boarded the train and sat down in his compartment. Soon, it was full of suspicious-looking people. Poor men, families—those wouldn’t have worried him too much. But also some better-dressed men.
A man without a hat, perhaps, passes in the corridor, and this detail intrigues Moravec. He remembers from his journeys as a student in the USSR that they had told him how, in that country, any man in a hat must be either a member of the NKVD or a foreigner. In which case, what does it mean in Germany to be hatless?
I suppose there were changes of train, connections to be made, hours of waiting, and all the added stress they bring. Moravec hears newspaper vendors yelling out their headlines in hysterical, triumphant voices. He must surely buy several more tickets, if only to conceal for as long as possible his final destination.
And then … the customs barrier. I presume that Moravec had a fake passport, but I don’t know what nationality it was. And, in fact, he might not have had a fake passport, because he’d been in London on a mission conducted with the agreement of the British authorities. Before London, he’d spent a few days in the Baltic countries, where I believe he went to see his local counterparts. So he didn’t need a false identity, and perhaps hadn’t prepared one.
Perhaps, after all, his passport being in order, the customs officer—having conscientiously examined it, during those special seconds in a life when time seems to stop—had simply given it back to him.
Anyway, he made it through.
When, at last, he got off the train and stood upon his native soil, free from danger, he surrendered himself to an immense wave of relief.
Much later, he would say that this was the last pleasant feeling he would experience for a long time.
51
Austria is the Reich’s first acquisition. The next day, the country becomes a German province and 150,000 Austrian Jews suddenly find themselves at Hitler’s mercy.
In 1938, no one is really thinking about exterminating them. The idea is to encourage them to emigrate.
In order to organize this emigration of Austrian Jews, a young SS sublieutenant, appointed by the SD, is sent to Vienna. He quickly gets to grips with the situation and he’s full of ideas. The one he’s most proud of—if we trust what he would later say at his trial, twenty-two years later—is the idea of the conveyor belt: in order to be allowed to emigrate, the Jews must put together a thick dossier made up of many different documents. Once the dossier
is complete, they report to the Jewish Emigration Office, where they place their documents on a conveyor belt. The real aim of this process is to strip them of all their possessions as quickly as possible, so that they do not leave the country before having legally transferred everything they own. At the end of the conveyor belt, they retrieve their passport from a basket.
Fifty thousand Austrian Jews will thus escape Hitler’s trap before it closes on them. In a way, this solution suits everyone at the time: the Jews can think themselves lucky to get out in one piece, while the Nazis get their hands on a great deal of loot. Heydrich, in Berlin, considers the operation a success. And for some time yet, the emigration of all the Reich’s Jews is seen as a realistic solution, the best response to the “Jewish question.”
As for the young lieutenant who does such a good job with the Jews, Heydrich will make a note of his name: Adolf Eichmann.
52
It’s while he’s in Vienna that Eichmann invents the method that will form the basis of all the Nazis’ politics of extermination and deportation. This involves seeking the victims’ active cooperation. The Jews are always invited to make themselves known to the authorities, and in the vast majority of cases—whether for emigrating in 1938 or for being sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz in 1943—this is exactly what they do. Without this, the Nazis would have had to deal with insurmountable demographic problems, and no policy of mass extermination would really have been possible. There would still undoubtedly have been countless crimes, but everything suggests that we would not be talking about genocide.
Neither Heydrich nor Eichmann can suspect that 1938 is paving the way for 1943, even if—with characteristic intuition—the former immediately sees in the latter a talented bureaucrat, whom he can turn into a valuable assistant. And although the eyes of Nazi Germany begin now to turn toward Prague, Heydrich and Eichmann have no idea what roles they will play in that city.
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