I don’t know why Bruno Heydrich, the father, was anti-Semitic. What I do know, however, is that he was considered to be a very funny man. He was a barrel of laughs, apparently, the life and soul of the party. His jokes were so funny that everyone thought he must have been a Jew. At least this argument couldn’t be used against his son, who was never renowned for his great sense of humor.
20
Having lost the war, Germany is now a prey to chaos and, according to a growing proportion of the population, the Jews and the Communists are leading it into ruin. The young Heydrich, like everyone else, makes a vague show of defiance. He enrolls in the Freikorps, a militia that wishes to take over from the army by fighting everything to the left of the extreme right.
These Freikorps, paramilitary organizations dedicated to the struggle against Bolshevism, have their existence rubber-stamped by a Social Democrat government. My father would say there was nothing surprising about that. According to him, the Socialists have always been traitors. Joining forces with the enemy would be second nature to them. He has tons of examples. In this case, it was indeed a Socialist who crushed the Spartacist uprising and had Rosa Luxemburg executed. By the Freikorps.
I could give details of Heydrich’s involvement in the Freikorps, but that seems unnecessary. It’s enough to know that, as a member, he was part of the “technical relief troops,” whose duty was to prevent factory occupations and to ensure the smooth running of public services in the event of a general strike. Already this acute sense of duty toward the State!
The good thing about writing a true story is that you don’t have to worry about giving an impression of realism. I have no need for a scene featuring the young Heydrich during this part of his life. Between 1919 and 1922, he is still living in Halle (Halle-an-der-Saale, I’ve checked) with his parents. During this time, the Freikorps spread all over the place. One of them came from the “white” navy brigade led by the famous Captain Erhardt. His insignia was a swastika and his battle song was entitled “Hakenkreuz am Stahlhelm” (“Swastika on a Steel Helmet”). For me, that sets the scene better than the longest description in the world.
21
So it’s the Depression: unemployment devastates Germany, times are hard. The young Heydrich had wanted to be a chemist, while his parents had dreamed of making him a musician. But in times of crisis, the tried and tested option is the army. Fascinated by the exploits of the legendary Admiral von Luckner—a family friend who nicknamed himself “the Sea Devil” in an eponymous, bestselling, self-glorifying autobiography—Heydrich enlists in the navy. One morning in 1922, the tall young blond man appears at the officers’ school in Kiel carrying a black violin case, a gift from his father.
22
The Berlin is a German navy war cruiser whose second-in-command is Lieutenant Wilhelm Canaris—First World War hero, ex–secret agent, and future Wehrmacht head of counterintelligence. His wife, a violinist, organizes musical evenings on Sundays in their quarters. A place becomes free in her string quartet, and the young Heydrich, serving on the Berlin, is invited to join. He plays well and his hosts, unlike his comrades, appreciate his company. He becomes a regular at Frau Canaris’s musical evenings, where he listens, deeply impressed, to his boss’s stories. “Espionage!” he says to himself. And no doubt he begins to daydream.
23
Heydrich is a dashing officer of the Kriegsmarine and a fearsome swordsman. His swashbuckling reputation wins his comrades’ respect, if not their friendship.
That year, there is a fencing tournament in Dresden for German officers. Heydrich competes with the saber, the most brutal of weapons. It’s his specialty. Unlike the foil, which touches only with the point, the saber cuts and thrusts with its sharp edge, and its blows, like lashes from a whip, are infinitely more violent. The physical engagement between two men using sabers is also more spectacular. All of this suits the young Heydrich perfectly. But that particular day he takes a beating in the first round. Who is his opponent? I haven’t been able to find out. I imagine a left-hander: quick, clever, dark-haired. Perhaps not Jewish—that would be a bit much—but maybe a quarter Jewish. A fencer who’s not easily impressed, who shies away from direct combat, who provokes his opponent with feints and parries. Heydrich remains the favorite, however, and although he gets more and more worked up—his blows missing his man and hitting only thin air—he still manages to catch up his opponent’s score. But at the end of the bout, he loses his temper. Striking too vigorously, he is parried, and allows a riposte that touches him on the head. He feels the other’s blade strike his helmet. He is out in the first round. In a rage, he smashes his saber on the ground. The judges reprimand him.
24
The first of May, in Germany as in France, is Labor Day, the origins of which go back to a decision of the Second International, made in tribute to a great workers’ strike that took place on May 1 in Chicago in 1886. But it’s also the anniversary of an event whose importance was not realized at the time, whose consequences would be incalculable, and that is for obvious reasons not celebrated anywhere: on May 1, 1925, Hitler founded an elite body of troops, originally intended to protect his safety. A bodyguard made up of overtrained fanatics corresponding to strict racial criteria. This was the “protection squadron,” the Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS.
In 1929 this special guard is transformed into a genuine militia, a paramilitary organization led by Himmler. After the Nazis take power in ’33, Himmler gives a speech in Munich in which he declares:
“Every state needs an elite. The elite of the National Socialist state is the SS. It is here that we maintain, on the basis of racial selection, allied to the requirements of the present time, German military tradition, German dignity and nobility, and German industrial efficiency.”
25
I still don’t have the book that Heydrich’s wife wrote after the war, Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher (“Living with a War Criminal” in English, although the book has never been translated). I imagine it would be a mine of information, but I haven’t been able to get my hands on it. It is an extremely rare work, and the price on the Internet is generally between 350 and 700 euros. I suppose German neo-Nazis, fascinated by Heydrich—a Nazi such as they would hardly dare to dream of—are responsible for these exorbitant prices. I did find it once for 250 euros and wanted to commit the folly of ordering it. Happily for my budget, the German bookshop that had put it up for sale didn’t accept payment by card. I would have had to go to my bank’s local branch. The mere prospect of this, a profoundly depressing one for any normal person, persuaded me not to take the transaction any further. Anyway, given that my German is no better than the average French twelve-year-old’s (although I did do it for eight years in school), it would have been a risky investment.
So I should do without this book. But I’ve reached the point in the story where I have to recount Heydrich’s first meeting with his wife. Here more than for any other section, that extremely rare and costly tome would undoubtedly have been a great help.
When I say “I have to,” I do not mean, of course, that it’s absolutely necessary. I could easily tell the whole story of Operation Anthropoid without even once mentioning Lina Heydrich’s name. Then again, if I am to portray Heydrich’s character, which I would very much like to do, it’s difficult to ignore the role played by his wife in his ascent within Nazi Germany.
At the same time, I’m quite happy not to write the romantic version of their affaire de coeur, which Mrs. Heydrich would not have failed to give in her memoirs. I prefer to avoid the temptations of a soppy love scene. Not that I refuse to consider the human aspects of a being such as Heydrich. I’m not one of those people who’s offended by the film Downfall because it shows us (among other things) Hitler being nice to his secretaries and affectionate with his dog. I naturally suppose that Hitler could, from time to time, be nice. Nor do I doubt, judging by the letters he sent to her, that Heydrich fell genuinely in love with his wife from the moment he met
her. At the time, she was a young girl with a pleasant smile, who could even have passed for pretty—far from the hard-faced evil shrew she would become.
But their first meeting, as told in a biography clearly based on Lina’s memoirs, is really too kitsch: at a ball where she dreads being bored the whole evening because there aren’t enough boys, she and her friend are approached by a black-haired officer, accompanied by a shy blond young man. She falls in love instantly with the shy one. Two days later, there’s a rendezvous at the Hohenzollern Park in Kiel (very pretty, I’ve seen photos) and a romantic lakeside walk. A date at the theater the next evening—then to a rented room, where, I imagine, they sleep together, even if the biography remains discreet on this point. The official version is that Heydrich arrives in his best uniform, they have a drink after the play, share a silence, and then suddenly, without warning, Heydrich proposes marriage. “Mein Gott, Herr Heydrich, you don’t know anything about me or my family! You don’t even know who my father is! The navy doesn’t allow its officers to marry just anyone.” But as it’s also made clear that Lina had got hold of the keys to the room, I suppose that either before or after the proposal, that very evening, they consummated their relationship. It turns out that Lina von Osten, from an aristocratic family fallen on slightly hard times, is a very suitable match. So they get married.
It’s not a bad story. I just don’t feel like doing the ballroom scene, and even less the romantic walk in the park. So it’s better for me not to know more of the details; that way, I won’t be tempted to share them. When I happen upon the materials that allow me to reconstruct in great detail an entire scene from Heydrich’s life, I often find it difficult not to do it, even if the scene itself isn’t particularly interesting. Lina’s memoirs must be full of such stories.
So, in the end, maybe I can do without this overpriced book.
All the same, there is one thing about the meeting of the two lovebirds that intrigued me: the name of the dark-haired officer who accompanied Heydrich was Manstein. First of all, I wondered if it was the same Manstein who would later direct the Ardennes offensive during the French campaign, who we would find afterward as an army general on the Russian front—in Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Kursk—and who would lead Operation Citadel in 1943, when the Wehrmacht’s task was to deal with, as best they could, the Red Army counterattack. The same Manstein too who, to justify the work of Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen on the Russian front, would declare in 1941: “The soldier must appreciate the necessity for the harsh punishment of Jews, who are the spiritual bearers of the Bolshevik terror. This is also necessary in order to nip in the bud all uprisings, which are mostly plotted by Jews.” The same, finally, who would die in 1973—meaning that, for one year, I lived on the same planet as him. In truth, it’s unlikely: the dark-haired officer is portrayed as a young man, whereas Manstein, in 1930, was already forty-three. Perhaps someone from the same family, a nephew or a distant cousin.
At eighteen Lina was, as far as we know, already a firm believer in Nazism. According to her, she was the one who converted Heydrich. Yet certain clues lead us to believe that even before 1930 Heydrich was politically well to the right of most soldiers, and strongly attracted by National Socialism. But obviously the “woman behind the famous man” version is always more appealing…
26
It’s risky to try to determine the moments when a person’s life is changed forever. I don’t even know if such moments exist. Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt wrote a book, La Part de l’autre, in which he imagines that Hitler passes his art diploma. From that instant, his destiny and the world’s are completely altered: he has a string of affairs, becomes a promiscuous playboy, marries a Jewish woman with whom he has two or three children, joins the Surrealists in Paris, and ends up a famous painter. At the same time, Germany fights a small war with Poland and that’s all. No Second World War, no genocide, and a Hitler who is nothing like the real one.
Fictional gimmicks aside, I doubt whether one man’s destiny can determine a nation’s, never mind the whole world’s. Then again, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone else as utterly evil as Hitler. And the art exam probably was a decisive factor in his personal destiny, since after this failure Hitler ended up a tramp in Munich—a period during which he would develop a fatal resentment toward society.
If you wanted to find a key moment of this kind in Heydrich’s life, it would undoubtedly occur the day in 1931 when he took home what he believed was just another girl. Without her, everything would have been very different—for Heydrich, for Gabčík, Kubiš, and Valčík, as well as for thousands of Czechs and, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of Jews. I won’t go so far as to suggest that without Heydrich the Jews would have been spared. But the incredible efficiency he demonstrated throughout his Nazi career allows us to think that Hitler and Himmler would have had trouble coping without him.
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.”
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