Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich was the operational architect of the Holocaust. As head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) from September 1939, he commanded the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the SS intelligence service, and through them the central administrative machinery of the killing programme. He chaired the Wannsee Conference. He gave the orders that shaped the Einsatzgruppen operations in the occupied Soviet territories. He died on 4 June 1942 of wounds sustained in an assassination by Czech parachutists trained by the British Special Operations Executive. He was 38. By the time he died he had set in motion the operation that would murder six million people.

What he ordered

Heydrich issued the operational instructions that took the Holocaust from local pre-war persecution to systematic continental killing. In September 1939, immediately after the German invasion of Poland, he issued the Schnellbrief, the express letter, to the Einsatzgruppen commanders in occupied Poland, instructing them to concentrate Polish Jews into ghettos in major cities for what he called the final solution to come. The letter, dated 21 September 1939, is the earliest surviving document in which the phrase Endlösung appears in operational SS use.

In May 1941 he issued the operational guidelines for the Einsatzgruppen units about to follow the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union. The guidelines listed categories of person to be killed on sight: Soviet political officers, Jews in party or state positions, and the wider Jewish population at the discretion of the unit commander. By July 1941 Heydrich had verbally extended the guidelines to include all Jewish men of military age, then all Jewish men, then by August 1941 women and children. The escalation was issued by Heydrich and Himmler jointly, with Heydrich providing the formal operational direction. Around 500,000 Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen in the second half of 1941 alone. The operation was Heydrich’s.

The 31 July 1941 commission

On 31 July 1941, Hermann Göring signed the document that authorised Heydrich to make all necessary preparations for an overall solution to the Jewish question across all German-influenced territory. The document had been drafted by Heydrich himself and presented to Göring for signature. Heydrich had written the formal commission for his own operation. The letter is the central paper authorisation of the Holocaust at the cabinet level. Heydrich kept his copy. It surfaced after the war in captured RSHA files.

The Wannsee Conference

Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 to communicate the killing policy to the senior civil servants of the Reich ministries that would have to implement it. He chaired the meeting. The minutes, drafted by Eichmann under his instruction, list the Jewish populations of every European country including Britain, Ireland and Sweden, totalling around eleven million people, all of whom were intended to be killed. Heydrich made clear that the policy had been settled at the top of the regime and that the meeting was about coordination, not decision. He used the language of the resettlement euphemism throughout but expected, and got, the participants’ understanding of what the policy actually meant.

Heydrich invited the attendees to lunch and brandy after the meeting. Eichmann recorded later, at his Israeli trial in 1961, that the post-meeting conversation had been a frank discussion of which killing methods would be most efficient. Heydrich was at the centre of the discussion. The Wannsee Protocol, the surviving copy of the minutes, is one of the most damning documents of the Holocaust, and Heydrich’s name is on it as the chair.

Bohemia and Moravia

From September 1941 Heydrich was Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in addition to his RSHA duties, effectively the German governor of the Czech protectorate. He used the position to test the methods of mass deportation. He oversaw the rapid clearing of the Czech and Moravian Jewish communities to the Theresienstadt transit camp and from there to the killing sites in occupied Poland. Around 80,000 Czech Jews were deported under his authority. The operation became the model for the deportations from elsewhere in Western Europe that began in 1942.

His treatment of the non-Jewish Czech population was equally ruthless. He had around 400 Czechs executed and several thousand sent to concentration camps in his first weeks in the post. The brutality earned him the nickname the Butcher of Prague. The Czech government in exile in London, with British support, decided he had to be killed.

The assassination

On 27 May 1942, Czech parachutists Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, trained by the Special Operations Executive, attacked Heydrich’s open-topped Mercedes at a hairpin bend in the Prague suburb of Libeň. Gabčík’s Sten gun jammed. Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade against the side of the car. The grenade fragments and pieces of the car’s upholstery wounded Heydrich in the lower back and the spleen. He underwent surgery and seemed to be recovering before dying of septicaemia on 4 June 1942.

The German reprisal was immediate. The villages of Lidice and Ležáky were destroyed. Around 1,300 Czech civilians were murdered. The two assassins and several other Czech resistance fighters were tracked down to the crypt of the Cyril and Methodius Church in Prague, where they killed themselves to avoid capture. Operation Reinhard, the killing of around 1.7 million Polish Jews at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, was named in his memory and ran for the next eighteen months under his lieutenants.

What it adds up to

Heydrich did not live to see the full operation he had set in motion. He had built the bureaucracy, written the orders, chaired the meeting at which the policy was communicated to the senior civil service, and supervised the operational debut of the Einsatzgruppen. Around three quarters of the Holocaust death toll occurred after he was already dead, but the apparatus that produced those deaths had been designed and commissioned by him. The man Hitler called the Man with the Iron Heart was, after Himmler, the most operationally consequential figure in the killing of European Jewry.

See also

Sources

  • Robert Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich, Yale University Press, 2011
  • Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution, Metropolitan Books, 2002
  • Heydrich Schnellbrief to Einsatzgruppen, 21 September 1939
  • Göring authorisation to Heydrich, 31 July 1941
  • The Wannsee Protocol, US National Archives
  • USHMM: Reinhard Heydrich