Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (1904–1942) was a main architect of the Holocaust. In his short life, he was the active agent behind the Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht; he was the instrumental machine behind the Night of the Long Knives whereby the assassination of Ernst Röhm led to the rise of the elite of the Reich: the SS. He created the Einsatzgruppen to follow behind the German army and shoot political enemies—even including women with their babies in arms—because first and foremost the political enemies of the Reich were Jews.
By 1941, before the introduction of death camps, half a million Jews had been exterminated by Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen—it was called the Holocaust of Bullets. Under Himmler, Heydrich formed the SD, the Sicherheitsdeints, which provided intelligence to the SS and the Reich. All the German security services were united in one unit called the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Service, of which Heydrich became the Director. The RSHA included the Gestapo and the ICPC, now known as Interpol. Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, which streamlined the process that moved Jews to the east for extermination. His organizational skills and attention to minutiae struck fear into even Hitler himself, who wondered what secrets Heydrich might know about him and in the end use against him to gain power.
He was known as the Hangman, the Blond Beast, the Young Evil God of Death, but while his nicknames were terrorizing, he had a human side. He came from a musical family and was enormously talented at the violin, so much so that his plaintive music could being tears to his eyes and the eyes of his audience. He was secretly derisive of Himmler’s descent into occultism. He, himself, had silly ideas at times, such as the development of an SS brothel where he could scheme to collect secrets from the clients. He was so enamored of spy novels, he once asked his subordinates to refer to him as C, perhaps referring to the habit within the British Navel Intelligence Division to refer to their chief as such, a practice that long preceded the Ian Fleming novels. Foibles aside, however, he was powerful, intelligent, and supremely destructive—personally instrumental in the murder of some twelve million souls.
Much has been written about Heydrich’s assassination in Prague, but the man himself remains a sphynx. Even so, his thinking and directorship is alive and well today in many groups and individuals throughout the world. As George C. Browder wrote in Hitler’s Enforcers, the SD was to “remain a flexible instrument for all eventualities.” There is certainly a history of this. Interpol flourished under Heydrich’s Gestapo and has now spent decades trying to rid itself of its Nazi past. SS Officer Paul Dickopf was its president till 1972, and while Interpol was aware of his Nazi rank, they disregarded it as his work record with the SD was “incomplete.”
Of course it was.
Heydrich’s methods of intelligence gathering included keeping individual cards on persons until he accumulated thousands of them. In order to keep track of Jews and other undesirables in the Third Reich, this progressed to the hiring of IBM and its punch-card system. We may not know all the persons that Heydrich saw murdered, but we do have a pretty good idea of how many thanks to his exactitude. He haunts to this day. As he told Hans Gisevius, the German diplomat and military intelligence officer, “I can pursue my enemies even from the tomb.” I don’t think he was lying.