The historian, Louis L. Snyder , has suggested: "The first inmates were Communists and Jews, but opposition to Nazi totalitarianism was so great that Socialists, Democrats, Catholics, Protestants, and even dissident Nazis were added to the camp population. Trade union leaders, clergymen, monks, pacifists, Jehovah's Witnesses - all were herded into the camps without trial and the right to appeal. As Michael Burleigh , the author of The Third Reich: A New History , has pointed out, Heydrich was important in the decision to expand the system in "Theodor Eicke built up a special guard formation called the Death's Head units, after the aluminum skull and cross-bones on the right collars Strictly separated from the camp internal administration, which handled prisoners on a daily basis, these units were dual-purpose: to guard the perimeters, and to act as a heavily armed auxiliary police force in the event of civil disturbances during wartime.
To that end, from onwards, Heydrich began assembling a card index on forty-six thousand people who would have to be immediately detained. Lina Heydrich claimed that her husband was hard on his staff: "In the morning, while being shaved, he worked at the new reports that had come in during the night After breakfast during the 30 minutes ride to the office this reading was continued.
He never let his staff had even a minute's rest, it was very hard and strenuous for them My husband never had time. He had lost the human measure. He always hurried his subordinates. He did not know any private or family life, and he did not estimate that of his fellow-workers. His life was the conditionless unconditional devotion to his task and that was what he expected from everyone.
It is claimed that Reinhard Heydrich developed a plan to damage the Red Army. According to one version Although this was understood in SD circles as an NKVD plant, Heydrich determined to use it, in the first place, against the German High Command, with whom his organization was in intense rivalry. Major V. Dapishev of the Soviet General Staff has claimed that the plot "originated with Stalin" as he wanted to purge the leadership of the armed forces.
There is evidence that Heydrich organized the forgery of a dossier containing an exchange of letters over a period of a year between members of the German High Command and Tukhachevsky.
Service argues that it was "the work of the German secret agencies on false passports and so on, it consisted of thirty-two pages and had attached to it a photograph on Trotsky with German officials The German security service got a genuine signature of Tukhachevsky from the secret agreement between the two High Commands by which technical assistance to the Soviet Air Force was arranged.
A letter was forged using this signature, and Tukhachevsky's style was imitated The German generals' signatures were obtained from bank checks. Hitler and Himmler were shown the dossier in early May, and approved the operation. Roy A. Medvedev , has argued in Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism that he is convinced that Heydrich arranged the forgery of the documents.
However, he points out: "It would be a mistake to think that these false accusations were the main cause of the destruction of the best cadres. They were only a pretext. The real causes of the mass repression go much deeper. Any serious investigation would have exposed the Nazi forgery against Tukhachevsky, but Stalin did not order an expert investigation.
It would have been even easier to establish the falseness of many other materials produced by the NKVD, but neither Stalin nor his closest aides checked or wanted to check the authenticity of these materials. Mikhail Tukhachevsky was found guilty of treason and executed on 11th June, It is estimated that 30, members of the armed forces were killed. This included fifty per cent of all army officers.
This attack, later called Crystal Night Kristallnacht , took place two days later. Bands of Nazis systematically destroyed 7, Jewish-owned stores. The pillage and looting went on through the night. Streets were covered with broken glass, hence the name Kristallnacht. Karl von Eberstein was the police president of Munich during these attacks on the Jewish community.
In a telegram sent to the State Police HQ of various cities under his control, he stated that "Anti-Jewish demonstrations" would occur with synagogues as their main target. The police were told to "do nothing to hinder the demonstrations". Eberstein also said in the telegram that "every effort will be made to arrest immediately as many Jews as the jails will hold, primarily healthy male and well-to-do adults of not too advanced age".
Heydrich chaired the meeting and also in attendance were fifteen leading Nazi bureaucrats, including Heinrich Muller , Adolf Eichmann and Roland Friesler. The conference was opened by Heydrich, who declared that he was the plenipotentiary for the "final solution of the Jewish question. He then reviewed the emigration problem. Heydrich admitted that there had been a plan to deport all Jews to the island of Madagascar but this had been abandoned after Operation Barbarossa.
After discussing the matter with Adolf Hitler it had been decided to evacuate all Jews to the east. The evacuees would be organized into huge labour columns.
He added that a majority would "fall through natural diminution". The survivors of this march would be dangerous because they had shown that they were strong and could in the future "rebuild Jewish life". Therefore they would be "regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development" and should be "treated accordingly. After this opening statement Adolf Eichmann gave the conference numbers of the Jews living in the occupied territories.
This included Nazi occupied territories in Eastern Europe 3,, , Germany , , Austria 43, , France , , Netherlands , , Greece 69, , Belgium 43, , Denmark 5, and Norway 1, Eichmann also provided details of the Jews living in countries that the Nazis hoped to have control over during the next few years.
At the end of the meeting the Wannsee Protocol was circulated in the ministries and SS offices about the Final Solution. However, these actions are merely to be considered as alternative possibilities, even though they will permit us to make all those practical experiences which are of great importance for the future final solution of the Jewish question.
The Jews should in the course of the Final Solution be taken in a suitable manner to the east for use as labor. In big labour gangs, separated by sex, the Jews capable of work will be brought to these areas for road building, in which task undoubtedly a large number will fall through natural diminution.
The remnant that is finally able to survive all this - since this is undoubtedly the part with the strongest resistance - must be treated accordingly, since these people, representing a natural selection, are to be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development, in case they should succeed and go free as history has proved.
In the course of the execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed from west to east. From that date the extermination of the Jews became a systematically organized operation.
It was decided to establish extermination camps in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec 15, a day , Sobibor 20, , Treblinka 25, and Majdanek 25, It has been estimated that between and around 18 million were sent to extermination camps. Of these, historians have estimated that between five and eleven million were killed. Lina Heydrich blamed her husband's relationship with Adolf Hitler for these decisions: "He required absolute obedience as he himself obeyed without questioning Orders from Hitler were obeyed absolutely.
My husband saw in him the one great man. I sometimes ask myself what his thoughts would have been if he had seen the bitter end. He thought him to be the one and only being who could lead the German nation to greatness and glory.
Five days later he announced that the SS intended to "Germanize the Czech vermin. These actions resulted in a new nickname, the "Butcher of Prague". Gubbins had no hesitation in agreeing, but decided to restrict the knowledge of the Czech approach, and above all of the identity of the probable target, to a very small circle Acts of terrorism fell within SOE's charter and, as a senior official of the Sicherheitsdienst , Heydrich was a legitimate target.
Moreover, in the last resort Benes and the Czech government were free to do what they liked in their own country without having to seek British approval. However, Gubbins pointed out to Moravec that an assassination of this sort was a purely political act which, even if unsuccessful, would result in wholesale reprisals for which, in his view, there was insufficient military justification.
This was the only Nazi leader that the Allies attempted to assassinate. They took this decision knowing that the German Army would take terrible retribution of the people of Czechoslovakia. Eden was especially opposed to this kind of action that he described as this "war crimes business". The two-man team, codenamed Anthropoid, parachuted into the Bohemian hills on 29th December The drop was over Nehvizdy, a village five miles south of Pilsen. He always used the same routes between his country estate at Hradcany Castle and the airport.
He always sat in the front seat of his powerful Mercedes car with Klein, the SS driver. Heydrich also did not use a bodyguard or armed escort. It was in the Holesovice suburb were Heydrich's car would have to slow for a right turn from Kirchmayer Blvd toward Troja Bridge and the center of Prague. Josef Valcik would be on the boulevard about yards from the turn, and he would flash a pocket mirror pretending to comb his hair when the victim came into sight.
Rena Fafek, Gabcik's girlfriend, would be driven through the turn ahead of the big Mercedes and signal by wearing a hat or not whether the team had to deal with two cars or just one. Just after the Anthropoids got the signals: Valcik flashed his mirror, and the lady partisan came through the turn bareheaded. As the unsuspecting Germans followed, a streetcar clanged up from the Troja Bridge to a transfer point on the boulevard.
Klein had to slow further for a couple of indecisive pedestrians, then he slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a man who darted into the street. Nothing happened! Kubis then stepped forward a threw lobbed a grenade at the car. Heydrich was taken to the local hospital, where he underwent an emergency operation. The wound in his side did not appear to be life-threatening, but was full of debris - bits of metal and car upholstery to include cloth, leather, and horsehair near the spleen.
Heydrich was reported to be recovering well, but developed blood poisoning and died of septicemia on 4th June Karl Frank, Secretary of State for of Bohemia and Moravia, offered a reward of 10 million Czech crowns for the arrest of those involved in the assassination.
He also stated: "Whoever shelters these criminals, provides them with help, or, knowing them, does not denounce them, will be shot with his whole family. The Gestapo began rounding up suspects and they were sent to Mauthausen concentration camp. The seven men involved in the assassination hid in the church of St Cyril and St Methodius in Prague. They were betrayed by Karel Curda. Inside were more than a hundred members of the Czech Resistance Movement. The men held out for three weeks until he Germans stormed the church on 18th June All the men inside were either killed or committed suicide.
Four priests were executed on 3rd September for helping the fugitives, and another Czechs were condemned to death at another trial that month for aiding the assassins. Another Czechs were condemned to death for aiding the assassination plot. As Jacques Delarue , the author of The Gestapo has pointed out: "Heydrich's death was the signal for the most bloody reprisals.
More than three thousand arrests were carried out, and courts-martial at Prague and Brno pronounced 1, death sentences A gigantic operation was unleashed against the Resistance and the Czech populace.
An area of 15, square kilometers and 5, communes was searched and persons shot on the spot Until the end the Nazis harassed the Czech people without ever managing to break their resistance.
It had been calculated that , people passed through the prison of Brno alone, of whom only 50, were liberated, the others having been killed or sent to the slow death of the concentration camps. In all, , Czechs were deported to the camps; only 75, emerged alive. In retaliation for the assassination of Heydrich, Kurt Daluege ordered the destruction of the village of Lidice.
The village was razed to the ground and its male inhabitants were murdered. The women were sent to a Concentration Camp in Ravensbueck. Thousands of Czech people were also deported to other concentration camps in Austria and Germany as a result of Heydrich's death. This has been proved, although the villagers denied that they had cooperated. The attitude of the population with regard to the crime has also manifested itself by other acts hostile to the Reich. For example, underground literature, stocks of weapons and ammunition have been found as well as the existence of a transmitting set, and an illegal depot containing large quantities of rationed food.
All the men of the village have been shot. The women have been deported to concentration camps and the children sent to appropriate houses for their education. All the buildings of this village have been razed to the ground and the name of the village removed from the land registers. Membership of the SS meant joining an elite organisation explicitly modelled on an ahistorical version of religious orders, such as the Teutonic Knights or the Jesuits, whose dedication to a higher idea was admired in these otherwise anti-clerical circles.
As SS membership became a mass affair, including every physically prepossessing farmboy, the SD regarded itself as "an elite within the elite", with unrevealed truths requiring incremental induction. Here it is impossible to postpone consideration of the SS leadership, for the ethos was Himmler's mind projected on an institutional canvas, while the operational style largely derived from Heydrich.
The Nazi leadership have become overly familiar, albeit as a galere of grotesques rather than as gods in ancient or pagan pantheons. Since the 'school masterly' Himmler and the 'blond beast' Heydrich have acquired their own character attributes and mythologies, we need to divest them of respectively bizarre beliefs and putative Jewish ancestry, the stuff of cliche, to grasp how they created one of the most awesome and efficient concentrations of police power mankind has known.
Here some of the obsessions cited to illustrate this moralising little creep's weirdness make sense within his own dim terms of reference - except he did not confine his prurient sententiousness to how much his men drank or smoked, although that was surely bad enough.
Moralising interventions in the marital affairs of his subordinates were an example of how the watchers were watched, not to speak of the information assembled on each SS man up to and including Heydrich by eugenic and racial vetting stretching back to or This was leverage, for somewhere or other there was bound to be a weak link, whether racial or eugenic, in the 'clan' pedigree.
How could there not be, when one filled tooth was enough to prohibit admission? Even those of unimpeachable ancestry and impressive physique were not yet home and dry.
Himmler insisted that the SS equivalent of livestock breeders cast an instinctive eye over the candidate, in search of subjective character defects. Suspicious watchfulness was also part of a personal and institutional desire to create fear. While the SD attempted to cultivate a friendly face, to facilitate delation, the SS deliberately sought to make others shudder.
As Himmler said in "I know there are many people who fall ill when they see this black uniform; we understand that and don't expect that we will be loved by many people. The Security Service itself had its origins in reports early in that the Nazi Party had been infiltrated by its enemies.
Himmler established the Security Service to investigate the claims, and put the business in the hands of a man who subsequently became perhaps more universally and cordially feared and disliked than any other leading figure in the Nazi regime - Reinhard Heydrich. Born in into a highly cultured middle-class family - his father was an opera singer, his mother an actress - Heydrich was an accomplished violinist, who, contemporaries reported, played with feeling, often weeping as he did so.
Tall, slim, blond, his striking good looks marred for some only by his narrow face and small, close-set eyes, he also became an expert swordsman who excelled at fencing. Joining a Free Corps at the age of sixteen, he enlisted as an officer cadet in the navy in and had become a lieutenant by , working in the signals department. His future in the armed forces had seemed assured.
But Heydrich also found it easy to make enemies. The sailors disliked his abrupt, overbearing manner and mocked his high, almost falsetto voice.
His numerous affairs with women got him into trouble with his superiors when the father of one of his girlfriends, a director of I. Farben and a friend of Admiral Raeder, head of the navy, complained; not only was the girl pregnant, but at the naval court of honour summoned to hear the case, Heydrich tried to pin the blame for the conception on her, causing general outrage amongst the officers and leading to his being cashiered from the navy in April Marrying his new girlfriend, Lina von Osten, who held strong Nazi convictions and had family connections with the SS chief in Munich, Karl Baron von Eberstein, Heydrich found new employment in the SS and was immediately set to work rooting out infiltrators.
So thorough was he at this task that he convinced Himmler that the Security Service needed to widen the scope of its activities to become the core of a new German police and surveillance force. His intrusive investigations aroused the hostility of a number of old Nazis, including the Regional Leader of Halle-Merseburg, who riposted with the malicious allegation that Heydrich had Jewish ancestry in his blood.
An investigation ordered by Gregor Strasser, Reich Organization Leader of the Nazi Party at the time, came to the conclusive finding that the allegations were untrue, though they continued to dog Heydrich for the rest of his career and have surfaced periodically since his death as well.
None of this stopped Heydrich's meteoric rise to power within the SS. Unsentimental, cold, efficient, power-hungry and utterly convinced that the end justified the means, he soon won Himmler over to his ambitious vision of the SS and its Security Service as the core of a comprehensive new system of policing and control.
Already on 9 March , the two men took over the Bavarian police service, making the political section autonomous and moving SS Security Service personnel into some of the key posts. However, Mark M. Boatner III has argued that Himmler had made his decision "not realizing he had been in signals, not naval intelligence.
Himmler established the Security Service to investigate the claims. At first Reinhard Heydrich had few resources to carry out his work. According to Andrew Mollo , the author of To The Death's Head: The Story of the SS : "On a kitchen table, with a borrowed typewriter, a pot of glue, scissors and some files, Heydrich, now leader of the Security Service Leiter des Sicherheitsdienstes , aided by his landlady and some out-of-work SS men, began to gather information on what the Nazis referred to as the 'radical opposition'.
Top of the list were the political churches, Freemasons, Jews and Marxists. A titillating side-line was homosexuality and 'mattress affairs' both inside and out of the Nazi Party.
Heydrich then toured the SS regional commands throughout Germany, and on his return began to recruit men of his own age and background into the SD. In contrast to the typical Nazi 'Lumpenpack' Heydrich sought bright young university graduates whose career prospects had been dimmed by depression.
It was these young intellectuals from good families who were to give the SD its peculiar character. Lina Heydrich gave birth to three children over the next few years: Klaus 17th June, , Heider 23rd December, and Silke 9th April, During this period he became a senior figure in the Gestapo and continued to work closely with Heinrich Himmler. Another colleague, Walter Schellenberg who was able to observe both men at work has pointed out that Heydrich was the "hidden pivot around which the Nazi regime revolved He was far superior to all his political colleagues and controlled them as he controlled the vast intelligence machine of the SD.
Even with me he expressed no kind word, no word of tenderness". Lina Heydrich found life with Reinhard Heydrich difficult: "The most characteristic trait was that he Reinhard Heydrich was a man of few words.
He never talked about something or discussed something just for the love of talk. Every word had to have a concrete meaning, or purpose, had to hit the point.
Therefore he never said even one word more than necessary My husband was vain. He hated nothing more than to be dressed inadequately. That did not apply to his wife. She might have worn the most impossible dresses, he thought them all right. Michael Burleigh , the author of The Third Reich: A New History , has argued that Heydrich was important in the decision to expand the concentration camp system in "Theodor Eicke built up a special guard formation called the Death's Head units, after the aluminum skull and cross-bones on the right collars Strictly separated from the camp internal administration, which handled prisoners on a daily basis, these units were dual-purpose: to guard the perimeters, and to act as a heavily armed auxiliary police force in the event of civil disturbances during wartime.
To that end, from onwards, Heydrich began assembling a card index on forty-six thousand people who would have to be immediately detained. Lina Heydrich claimed that her husband was hard on his staff: "In the morning, while being shaved, he worked at the new reports that had come in during the night After breakfast during the 30 minutes ride to the office this reading was continued. He never let his staff had even a minute's rest, it was very hard and strenuous for them My husband never had time.
He had lost the human measure. He always hurried his subordinates. He did not know any private or family life, and he did not estimate that of his fellow-workers.
His life was the conditionless unconditional devotion to his task and that was what he expected from everyone. Heydrich chaired the meeting and also in attendance were fifteen leading Nazi bureaucrats, including Heinrich Muller , Adolf Eichmann and Roland Friesler.
The conference was opened by Heydrich, who declared that he was the plenipotentiary for the "final solution of the Jewish question. He then reviewed the emigration problem. Heydrich admitted that there had been a plan to deport all Jews to the island of Madagascar but this had been abandoned after Operation Barbarossa. After discussing the matter with Adolf Hitler it had been decided to evacuate all Jews to the east.
The evacuees would be organized into huge labour columns. He added that a majority would "fall through natural diminution". The survivors of this march would be dangerous because they had shown that they were strong and could in the future "rebuild Jewish life".
Therefore they would be "regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development" and should be "treated accordingly. After this opening statement Adolf Eichmann gave the conference numbers of the Jews living in the occupied territories. This included Nazi occupied territories in Eastern Europe 3,, , Germany , , Austria 43, , France , , Netherlands , , Greece 69, , Belgium 43, , Denmark 5, and Norway 1, Eichmann also provided details of the Jews living in countries that the Nazis hoped to have control over during the next few years.
At the end of the meeting the Wannsee Protocol was circulated in the ministries and SS offices about the Final Solution. However, these actions are merely to be considered as alternative possibilities, even though they will permit us to make all those practical experiences which are of great importance for the future final solution of the Jewish question.
The Jews should in the course of the Final Solution be taken in a suitable manner to the east for use as labor. In big labour gangs, separated by sex, the Jews capable of work will be brought to these areas for road building, in which task undoubtedly a large number will fall through natural diminution.
The remnant that is finally able to survive all this - since this is undoubtedly the part with the strongest resistance - must be treated accordingly, since these people, representing a natural selection, are to be regarded as the germ cell of a new Jewish development, in case they should succeed and go free as history has proved. In the course of the execution of the Final Solution, Europe will be combed from west to east.
From that date the extermination of the Jews became a systematically organized operation. It was decided to establish extermination camps in the east that had the capacity to kill large numbers including Belzec 15, a day , Sobibor 20, , Treblinka 25, and Majdanek 25, It has been estimated that between and around 18 million were sent to extermination camps.
Of these, historians have estimated that between five and eleven million were killed. Lina Heydrich blamed her husband's relationship with Adolf Hitler for these decisions: "He required absolute obedience as he himself obeyed without questioning Orders from Hitler were obeyed absolutely.
He watched demonstrations, strikes, and street battles in Halle during the last year of the war and the revolutionary chaos that followed.
Reinhard Heydrich earned his high school diploma in the spring of Instead of fulfilling his father's hopes that he would make a career in music Heydrich was a gifted violinist , he enlisted in the German navy on March 30, , less than a month after his 18th birthday. As a naval officer, Heydrich specialized in signals and communications. He left the daughter of a senior naval officer to whom he had promised marriage for another woman, Lina von Osten, whom he would later marry.
A military court of honor, scandalized by his disrespectful behavior during his hearing, found him to have dishonored the officer corps of the Reich Navy and compelled him to resign his commission in April His new bride was a fanatical National Socialist. At that time, Himmler was seeking to create an internal intelligence service for the Nazi Party. Himmler was so impressed by Heydrich's proposals that he brought him into the SS in August and tasked him with developing the Security Service Sicherheitsdienst ; SD.
By January , the SD under Heydrich's leadership had become the most significant intelligence agency within the Nazi Party. In June , the party Deputy Chief Rudolf Hess named it the sole agency authorized to gather political intelligence inside the Third Reich.
When Himmler was appointed commander of the Bavarian political police detective force on April 1, , he appointed Heydrich his deputy. Himmler and Heydrich centralized the political police departments of Germany into the Gestapo.
Under Heydrich, the Security Police and the SD was the primary agency responsible for intelligence analysis and executive measures in suppressing numerous internal and external enemies of the Nazi state. The SD established intelligence departments to study the alleged long-term plots of each of the Reich's enemies:. The Gestapo arrested these political opponents and, where deemed appropriate, incarcerated them in concentration camps using the police authority granted by an order of Protective Custody Schutzhaftbefehl.
The Kripo investigated so-called non-political criminal acts and behavior. Kripo officers arrested those whose alleged criminal or anti-social behavior was deemed dangerous to the Reich.
Analogous to the Protective Arrest Order, the Kripo used a Protective Detention Order Vorbeugungshaftbefehl as the instrument of indefinite arrest and incarceration. Heydrich and Himmler had a shared view both of the identity of the long-term enemies of the German race and of the measures to be taken against them. These "visible" opponents included:. As Heydrich explained in April , racially conscious Germans must realize that. To be absolutely safe, the Nazis had to destroy the members of the so-called Jewish race, whose genetic makeup created the basis for such thinking, as well as the Slavic and Asiatic leadership classes, whose heredity incorporated a propensity to follow that Jewish leadership.
This office aimed to facilitate the forced emigration of Jews from Austria and to finance those operations by extorting funds from wealthier members of the community. In the wake of the pogrom they implemented the first roundup of Jews—nearly 30, —simply because they were Jewish.
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