HISTORY: HEW STRACHANreviews Hitler's Hangman: The Life of HeydrichBy Robert Gerwarth Yale University Press, 336pp. £20
AFTER HEINRICH HIMMLER, Reinhard Heydrich did most to shape the SS and to use it to “radicalise” the Nazi occupation of conquered Europe. Bent on centralising the authority of the “new order”, he used the law pre-emptively, not least to remove those who were politically and racially undesirable. It is a life story that should give academics nightmares. Heydrich himself did not go to university, but two-thirds of his colleagues in the Reichssicherheitsamt (RSHA) did, and fully a third had doctorates. So those who perverted the ethical assumptions that underpin the law’s functions were themselves mostly lawyers, although some – not least those charged with deciding who was fit for “Germanisation” and who was “cleansed” – were social anthropologists.
Heydrich had entered the German navy in 1922, and like most of his subordinates he came from a secure middle-class family: his father was a musician and composer, and he was brought up a Catholic. Explaining how he and others like him became mass murderers seems to defy comprehension. He was not brutalised by service in the First World War, as he and most others in the SS were too young to have fought in it. He was dismissed from the navy just as the slump was denying ambitious young men job opportunities. By joining the SS rather than any other Nazi organisation, and by earning the backing of Himmler, he ensured that his promotion was swift. In September 1941 he was appointed Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia (today’s Czech Republic). His power was cumulative: he shed none of the other offices he had acquired as he had ascended the greasy pole of Nazi bureaucratic politics.
Robert Gerwarth resists the easy conclusion that Heydrich was simply a careerist. The letter that Heydrich wrote to his wife to be opened in the event of his death in the war reveals a committed ideologue. Instead Gerwarth argues that what historians have characterised as the “polycratic chaos” of Nazi administration allowed a ruthless individual like Heydrich to shape the regime he served. He turned Hitler’s rhetoric from abstract ideas into concrete effects, radicalising their import as he made them reality.
The key question is how far “Hitler’s hangman” – the title was given him by one of his betes noires, the exiled Thomas Mann – was the author of the “final solution”, the extermination not just of the Jews but also of Gypsies, disabled Germans, communists and, potentially, all peoples in Europe incapable of “Germanisation”. Gerwarth is a scrupulous scholar, for whom even the notorious Wannsee conference, which Heydrich chaired in January 1942, fails to provide the direct proof of the decision to proceed to what we now call the Holocaust.
Before the war Heydrich had sought to force Jews to emigrate from Germany, and about half of them had done so. At this stage the Nazi machine was brutal and murderous but not genocidal. As the German empire expanded between 1938 and 1941, however, with its borders stretching (as Gerwarth puts it) from the Atlantic to the Ukraine and from the Arctic to the Sahara, so it added more Jews to its domain faster than it could remove them. Moreover, the war effectively closed its frontiers, denying the Jews the opportunity to escape through migration. In the twisted logic that demanded a “final solution” to the Jewish question, the Nazis were running out of options. Plans to push the Jews into the amorphous “east” stalled, as the German invasion of the Soviet Union did so in December 1941.
The war therefore foreclosed on some of the options that Heydrich, with his passion for order, system and centralisation, had previously entertained. But it opened out others. For the invasion of Poland, Heydrich had formed SS Einsatzgruppen, or task forces, to follow in the immediate wake of the Wehrmacht’s advance, their task the elimination of Poland’s aristocrats, Catholic priests and (of course) Jews. The army resisted this intrusion into its area of authority and for the conquest of the west in 1940 managed to minimise the role of the SS. But in June 1941, the two forces brokered a demarcation of roles that gave the SS a free hand in its exercise of “special responsibilities”. As Gerwarth makes clear, German ambitions required its army both to feed off the land and to send resources back to the Reich, with Heydrich accepting that such policies could mean the death by starvation of 30 million Russians. The Wannsee conference may not have left a conclusive record, but the subsequent death rate alone, Gerwarth says, points to a pan-European policy for the elimination of the Jews from that moment on.
Heydrich and Himmler acknowledged the psychologically destabilising effects of demanding that their elite become mass murderers. The task, Heydrich said, required hard men, ready to do awful things to create what he defined as a better world. And that was how he saw himself. He was a keen sportsman, finding time to represent Germany as a fencer in a match against Hungary in December 1941. He was a qualified pilot, flying combat missions in the Norwegian campaign and in the battle of Britain. He was even shot down behind Russian lines in July 1941.
Clearly he did not lack personal courage. The fact that he disregarded his own security instructions left him exposed to the attack coordinated by the British Special Operations Executive and the Czech resistance on May 27th, 1942. It cost him his life, so confirming his elevation to the Nazi Valhalla. It also cost the lives of thousands of Czechs rounded up in the Nazi retaliation, which razed the villages of Lidice and Lezaky, and which crushed the Czech resistance for the rest of the war.
To write a truly splendid biography of a truly evil man is a remarkable achievement. Gerwarth develops a rounded picture of a personality who set out to establish a centralised SS state. He displays enough empathy for his subject not exactly to evoke sympathy (fortunately) but to make the seemingly incomprehensible comprehensible.
Hew Strachan is Chichele professor of the history of war at the University of Oxford
