At the height of his power, Reinhard Heydrich was called “The Butcher of Prague,” “The Hangman,” and “The Man with the Iron Heart.” He reveled in the notoriety.It would be easy to classify Heydrich as just another Nazi murderer.
But he was involved in plots that set him apart from all the other killers.
Heydrich was a natural schemer.He appears this high in our ranking because he is credited with engineering one of the most extraordinary intelligence coups of the war, ranking with “Enigma” (the cracking of the German secret code) and “Magic” (the cracking of the Japanese secret code). Heydrich did not break any codes; he broke the Red Army command, and he did it without firing a single shot. The plot hinged on the German belief that Joseph Stalin (Number 4) was paranoid. It involved a scenario that would have been turned down as a script for Mission Impossible. But it worked. Though it took place before World War II began, it influenced Soviet defenses.
Joining the Nazi Power Structure
Reinhard Heydrich was born in Halle, Germany, in 1904. As a young man, he joined the navy but was cashiered out. Sources do not agree on the reason; either he was suspected of homosexuality or he impregnated a girl and refused to marry her. Heydrich was also suspected of having Jewish blood. This is particularly interesting, because he would later be in charge of the Final Solution to exterminate, among others, Jews and homosexuals.
In 1931, Heydrich joined the Nazi Party. That year he met Heinrich Himmler (Number 65), who asked him to set up an intelligence unit.Adolf Hitler (Number l) came to power in January 1933, and, from that point on, there were a great deal of secret jobs for Heydrich. He was intimately involved with Himmler and others in the 1934 “Blood Purge” plot, during which a number of top Nazi officials were declared enemies of Hitler and murdered.
Framing a Russian Marshal
If the Führer had been worried about internal security in the Third Reich, the question of external security now became a matter of concern. In the Soviet Union, Hitler learned, a Red Army marshal named Mikhail Tuchachevsky had apparently read Mein Kampf and believed that Hitler would attack Russia when he was strong enough. Some Red Army officers supported launching a preventive strike against Nazi Germany before Hitler got too strong.
How should Germany handle this threat? Historians still argue about who did what to whom. Documents dating back to December 1936 credit Heydrich with the plot that succeeded. The idea was a frame-up, which only a paranoid such as Stalin would believe: forge papers to suggest that Tuchachevsky was dealing with the Germans in a plot to overthrow Stalin.
Here is how Heydrich explained it to his aides: Photocopies of these documents will be sold to the Russians at a high price, and we will make it appear that they have been stolen from the files of the SD [Security Service of the Nazi Party]. We will also create the impression that we are investigating the German side of the conspiracy.... Stalin will break Tuchachevsky, because he will receive this dossier through his own Secret Service and will be convinced that it is authentic.
The plan was successful beyond the wildest dreams of the plotters. For Stalin did more than just break Tuchachevsky. Between 1937 and 1938, thousands of senior Red Army officers were shot for treason following a wave of show trials. Tuchachevsky was executed in June 1937.
The intelligence coup did two things for Hitler. First, it averted the threat of a preventive war by the Soviet Union. Second, it crippled the Red Army until a new cadre of officers could be created.
Kristalnacht and the Final Solution
In November 1938, during a 24-hour period, the Nazis unleashed a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms throughout Germany and Austria that became known as Kristalnacht (“The Night of the Broken Glass”). Heydrich was in the middle of the chaos. A year later, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, he organized the destruction of Jewish communities and the extermination of Jews in Poland.
He ruthlessly Nazified Czechoslovakia, where he earned his reputation as “The Butcher of Prague,” staging a police blitz in which Czech men, women, and children were killed in large-scale public executions.
So good a butcher was he that Hitler personally chose him to implement the Final Solution to the Jewish “problem” in Europe. He and Adolf Eichmann (Number 9l) and assorted bureaucrats met in Wannsee on January 20, 1942, to plan for the rounding up, transporting, and killing of all European Jews.
However, Heydrich’s time was running out. Although sources do not agree, at the request of either the Czech government-in-exile in England or English officials, British intelligence parachuted two agents into Czechoslovakia to assassinate Heydrich. He was ambushed outside of Prague and his car was bombed. Heydrich was critically wounded and died on June 4, 1942.
Hitler’s response was savage. Some 800 young Czech men were rounded up and shot. Thousands of Jews were shipped out of the Resienstadt “model” concentration camp and shipped east to the death camps. The town of Lidice, where the assassins had been harbored, was wiped off the map: Its men and older boys were killed, its women and children sent to concentration camps. The town was burned to the ground. It was a terrible price for the Czech people to pay for the death of their tormenter. But the Czechs were aroused by the savagery of the Nazi oppressors, and a surge of resistance rose across the land. This resistance would continue and intensify throughout the rest of the war.
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