Heydrich, Hitler’s Most Evil Henchman

By Charles Wighton

THE MAN WITH THE IRON HEART

Hitler called him “The man with the iron heart”—yet Reinhard Heydrich was utterly different from those other iron men who served the Führer. Gifted with intellect, charm and great courage, Heydrich used his outstanding talents to create the Nazi Security Service, the notorious SD (Sicherheitsdienst), thereby becoming one of the most powerful figures—perhaps the most evil influence of all—in Nazi Germany.

Charles Wighton, through unprecedented co-operation on both sides of the Iron Curtain, has had access to top secret Nazi Party files, to official sources in East Germany, to highly secret records in Czechoslovakia—and to the frank recollections of Heydrich’s widow. The result is a fascinatingly detailed revelation of the rise of this diabolical genius.

Through Heydrich’s racial campaigns, which gathered their own momentum after his death, six million Jews were murdered by 1945. And yet this son of a cultured, upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family, who became the real power behind Himmler, was himself blackmailed by the Führer for possessing non-Aryan blood.

In addition to clarifying this aspect of Heydrich’s astonishing career, the author throws new light, too, on “Plan Ost”, the blueprint for the extermination of thirty million Slavs, and on the mystery surrounding Heydrich’s assassination in 1942.

Here, then, is the full story of the man with the iron heart—Heydrich, Hitler’s most evil henchman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcole Publishing
• Release date: Jul 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787206809

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Text originally published in 1962 under the same title.

© Arcole Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

HEYDRICH

HITLER’S MOST EVIL HENCHMAN

CHARLES WIGHTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 4

ILLUSTRATIONS 5

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD 6

INTRODUCTION — TWENTY YEARS AFTER 8

CHAPTER ONE — CHILD OF MUSIC 14

CHAPTER TWO — THE NAVAL CADET 22

CHAPTER THREE — IN THE SS 28

CHAPTER FOUR — THE NAZIS TAKE OVER 38

CHAPTER FIVE — THE FIRST BIG ROLE 49

CHAPTER SIX — REAL POWER 59

CHAPTER SEVEN — PROFILE 69

CHAPTER EIGHT — TABLOID JOURNALIST 79

CHAPTER NINE — FOREIGN AFFAIRS 88

CHAPTER TEN — BLACKMAIL INCORPORATED! 97

CHAPTER ELEVEN — TARGET—THE GENERALS 106

CHAPTER TWELVE — FIFTH COLUMN 127

CHAPTER THIRTEEN — THE NIGHT OF THE BROKEN GLASS 135

CHAPTER FOURTEEN — OFFICIAL EXCUSE 142

CHAPTER FIFTEEN — THE REICHSICHERHEITSHAUPTAMT 148

CHAPTER SIXTEEN — APPRENTICESHIP IN MASS MURDER 153

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN — CONTACT WITH LONDON 160

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN — FIGHTER PILOT 168

CHAPTER NINETEEN — THE MADAGASCAR PLAN 175

CHAPTER TWENTY — MASS MURDER 179

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE — THE FINAL SOLUTION 188

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO — THE BUTCHER OF PRAGUE 194

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE — THE STICK AND THE CARROT 207

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR — THE MAN WITH THE IRON HEART 218

POSTSCRIPT 229

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 233

DEDICATION

TO THE PEOPLE OF LIDICE

ILLUSTRATIONS

Heydrich in Vienna, 1938

Heydrich in the courtyard of the Hradcany Castle

Himmler inspects a guard of honour

After the banquet in honour of the Reichsführer SS’s visit to Prague

Karl Hermann Frank and Baldur von Schirach with Heydrich in Prague

The dead villagers of Lidice and the camera that recorded the scene

The new village of Lidice

The museum at Lidice

The gun carriage bearing Heydrich’s body

Heydrich in conversation with President Hacha

The Heydrich memorial in Prague

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

WHATEVER the differences which today separate the peoples on either side of the Iron Curtain, one great emotion is shared by all—hatred of the Nazi terror which brought death to millions of innocent people.

This book owes its existence to that common emotion which far transcends political divisions, for it is as the result of quite exceptional co-operation and assistance from authorities on both sides of the Iron Curtain that it has been possible to piece together the story of Reinhard Heydrich, the supreme executive of that terror.

Since 1945 the name of Heydrich has become almost a synonym for all that was evil in Nazi Germany, yet the man himself remains one of the great mysteries of the Hitler period. Despite repeated references to him in the post-war memoirs of former Nazis, and other works on Hitler’s Germany, little has become known until now of his mind or his motives.

With the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960-61 interest in Heydrich revived—as the man behind Eichmann. And the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy of Lidice provides the opportunity to show that Heydrich, in addition to being the master exterminator of the Jews, had been selected by Hitler to liquidate 30,000,000 Slavs.

For the help and co-operation which I have received in preparing this biography of Heydrich I should like to thank the following:

Dr. James Beddie, of the U.S. State Dept., Director of the U.S. Document Centre, Zehlendorff, Berlin, and his staff.

Officials of the British Embassy, Bonn.

The historians of the Bundesarchiv, Koblenz, Germany.

Officials of the Bundespress and Informationsamt, Bonn.

Dr. Anton Hoch and his colleagues of the Institut feur Zeitgeschichte, Munich.

Frau Lina Heydrich, Fehmarn, Schleswig-Holstein.

Dr. Hans-Bernd Gisevius, Berlin-Dahlem.

Herrn Klatte and Spering and their staff in the archives dept. of Der Spiegel, Hamburg.

The Director, World War II Records Division, Alexandra, Va„ U.S.A.

Mr. David Landor, Director of the Israeli Govt. Press Office, Jerusalem, and Mr. Unna of the Israeli Embassy, London.

Mrs. Wolff and Dr. Kahn of the Wiener Library, London.

Dr. Vaclav Kral, of the Historical Division of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechoslovakia.

Mr. Eduard Klar and his colleagues of the Czechoslovak Foreign Office, Prague.

Mr. Jaromir Johannes of the Czechoslovak Embassy, London.

Mr. John Peet, German Democratic Report, Berlin (East).

Officials of the German Unity Committee, Berlin (East).

INTRODUCTION — TWENTY YEARS AFTER

TWO decades have passed since Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret police and Hitler’s viceroy in the Czech Protectorate, was assassinated on the orders of the British Secret Service.

On 4 June, 1942 he died from internal injuries received a week earlier when his open car was struck by a bomb thrown in Prague by Czech parachutists dropped from an R.A.F. bomber. The British chose well. At one blow their bomb destroyed one of the three or four key men of the Third Reich—and almost certainly the most evil figure in modern history.

Six days later, as a reprisal for the attack on Heydrich, the Czech village of Lidice with all its adult male population was destroyed on the personal order of Adolf Hitler. Its women were scattered through the Nazi concentration camps, where many of them perished. Its children disappeared—most of them for ever.

Lidice had no connection with the attack on Heydrich. It had not sheltered his assailants or given them succour. Its selection was due to nothing more than the muddled confusion of the local Gestapo. To Hitler and the thugs who had survived Heydrich that was unimportant. One Czech village was as good as another—for Hitler’s aim was to give a final warning to the turbulent Czechs. When on 1 July, 1942 an official report stated that the name of Lidice has been wiped out for ever Hitler believed he had attained his aim.

The atrocity perpetrated amid the pleasant rolling countryside north-west of Prague was, by Nazi standards, on a minor scale compared to the mass extermination plans contrived and launched by Heydrich in the last months of his life. Perhaps 400 men, women and children died—against the 6,000,000 Jews exterminated by Heydrich’s orders for the Final Solution, and the 30,000,000 Slavs whom he had planned to destroy had he been given the time.

Yet the destruction of Lidice and its people, by grinning SS men—recorded for posterity by Nazi photographers and film cameramen—achieved the exact opposite of what Hitler intended. As news of the destruction of the Czech village and its people reached the free world the story of its terrible fate fortified the resolves of free peoples everywhere to fight on until Hitler and Heydrich’s henchmen were destroyed.

Lidice shall live Again! The cry taken up by Scots miners a few weeks after the massacre echoed round the world. Villages in far-off lands—in Mexico, in the United States and elsewhere—were renamed Lidice. And in many countries mothers named their daughters after what had once been an obscure Bohemian mining community. Everywhere on both sides of what is now the Iron Curtain Lidice committees sprang up. Many still exist today, determined that the terrible thing which happened at Lidice shall not be forgotten.

Today Lidice lives again. The Czech Government has built a new model village on the hillside to the west of the mass grave where the men of Lidice lie. The grave with its great cross is a thing of beauty, marked by the enormous rose garden largely created through the efforts of a British committee drawn from every walk of public life in the United Kingdom. Within sight of the grave live the women who survived, with their children and their grand-children who never knew the jackboot of the Nazi oppressor.

Twenty years after Heydrich’s death in the streets of Prague his shadow still looms dark over the undulating Czech countryside. Heydrich is dead—and buried in what is now East Berlin—but his henchmen still live and flourish. Hundreds of the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst, and the Einsatzgruppen thugs and murderers, who destroyed millions on Heydrich’s orders, are once again in positions of authority in Western Germany. Many of them were professional policemen drawn from the cities and provinces of the Third Reich. Today they are still police officers distributed far and wide throughout the ostensibly re-educated police forces of the German Federal Republic.

How many of Heydrich’s thugs now hold senior appointments in the West German police force is difficult to estimate, for the majority of German policemen are decent democratic officials with as great an abhorrence of murder as their kind in any other western country. But until comparatively recently there were certainly several hundred of Heydrich’s henchmen in key posts—with at least 200 in the rich Ruhr province of North Rhine-Westphalia. All served in one or other of the murder-and-terror gangs which exterminated at least 1,000,000 Russians, Poles, Jews and others during Hitler’s four years’ campaign in the East. Their continued presence in German public service is an affront to democrats everywhere. But to the survivors of Lidice, and the Czech people as a whole, the continuance in West German public life of two in particular of Heydrich’s close associates is a special affront; they are

1. Dr. Bernhard Wehner. Head of the Mordkommission (Murder Commission) rushed to Prague after Heydrich’s death, Wehner ruthlessly tracked down and eventually destroyed the two gallant Czech patriots who made the attack and their British-trained comrades in a pitched battle in the Greek Orthodox Church in Prague. Wehner, one of Heydrich’s most trusted secret policemen, also headed the Commission which rounded up the anti-Nazi German conspirators responsible for the bomb attack on Hitler on 20 July, 1944. While this book was being written he was still a police officer in Düsseldorf—despite the comment of a West German court that his political burden was such that it was doubtful whether he should enjoy the protection of the court.

2. Ex-Obergruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth. The wonder boy of the SS who shot up from sergeant major to general in less than two years, Reinefarth was sent to Prague just after Lidice as Chief of the Ordnungspolizei, and until early in 1943 he carried out the reprisals against the Czech Resistance. Reinefarth later gained international notoriety for the brutality and terror with which he suppressed the Warsaw rising in autumn 1944. For the past ten years, despite repeated protests from Germany and abroad, he has been Bürgermeister of the pleasant North Sea holiday island of Sylt. For some years he has also been an M.P. in the Schleswig-Holstein Provincial Parliament where local officials successfully blocked attempts at legal action. In the late autumn of 1961, however, as a result of growing protests from the German trade unions and left-wing parties, the judicial authorities of the half-Nazi province of Schleswig-Holstein at last took steps to deprive Reinefarth of his parliamentary immunity as a prelude to legal action. The reason for this sudden reversal of policy was given as the discovery of new evidence on Reinefarth’s past in Nazi files. The files had been available to all—except apparently the Schleswig-Holstein authorities—for at least a decade.

Hundreds of other cases of Heydrich’s henchmen holding key posts in the German police, in public life and in big business during recent years and months could be cited. Their names in most cases mean little—except to the Czech, Russian, French, Dutch, Israeli, Polish and Norwegian survivors of the massacres they perpetrated.

But the most sensational case of Heydrich’s murder-men in the West German police centres round the area of Recklinghausen in the north of the Ruhr. There in the early summer of 1941—as in other parts of the Third Reich—police officers and men from the towns of Recklinghausen, Bottrop and Bochum were formed into what was officially designated as Battalion 316, a section of the Special Service Groups which were to gain international notoriety as Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen.

In pursuance of the Hitler-Heydrich plan to destroy the Slavs and exterminate the Jews Battalion 316 went to the East Front immediately Hitler attacked Russia on 22 June, 1941. Three weeks later the Ruhr policemen celebrated their arrival in White Russia by slaughtering 6,000 Jews like cattle in the streets of Bialystok—and left the corpses where they fell.

With such a start the Recklinghausen policemen soon gained a high reputation in Heydrich’s Reichsicherheitshauptamt in Berlin from where the murder groups were directed. For a year Battalion 316 was one of Heydrich’s key formations in the slaughter of Russians, and Jews. Even they wearied, however, of mass murder. After Heydrich’s death the Ruhr policemen were posted to the West where they exercised their talents for several months against the members of Resistance movements in France and the Low Countries.

With German reverses in Russia in the summer of 1943 Battalion 316 could not be permitted to vegetate in the West. Once again the Ruhr policemen were posted to Russia. Battalion 316 remained there till the end. Its total victims will never be known. They were certainly numbered in tens of thousands.

Came 1945 and the British and American re-education of the West German police. Four years later a West German government was set up in Bonn. In due course the officers and men of Battalion 316 returned home—and resumed their police duties amid the coal mines and the steel works. Some were somewhat delayed, however; they were only able to rejoin the democratic police after being repatriated from Soviet prison camps as a result of the Adenauer-Krushchev repatriation agreement of 1955.

The facts of Battalion 316’s activities in the East were a matter of common record resulting from the British and American interrogation of the major officers of the Einsatzgruppen. The German authorities in Bonn, however, and particularly the Federal Ministry of the Interior—where the Minister Dr. Gerhard Schroeder (German Foreign Minister since November, 1961) was somewhat inhibited owing to his own equivocal Nazi past—turned a blind eye.

The men of Murder Battalion 316 continued to serve faithfully, hunting petty criminals and chasing errant motorists on the Ruhr autobahn.

The West German T.U.C., however, and particularly the union representing the police, made repeated protests. Nothing happened—until a press conference held in Communist East Berlin in January, 1961, where the whole story was revealed. The proof of what otherwise might very well have been regarded overseas as nothing but yet another outburst of the often juvenile Ulbricht propaganda came a few hours later. That same evening an authoritative West German news source announced that the former commanding officer of Battalion 316 had been relieved of his post in the Bochum police. Soon afterwards another police officer who had been one of his principal deputies in Russia was also sent on leave. Later in 1961 both were reported to be living quietly in retirement on substantial pensions.

Other members of Battalion 316 at the same time were still serving in the Ruhr towns. Since then they have disappeared from the public eye. But it is not only in the Ruhr that such things have happened in recent years. A high official of the Personnel Department of North Rhine-Westphalia, infuriated at the attacks on the Ruhr police, hit back: Why should only we be attacked? What about the Bundeskriminalamt (the Federal C.I.D. office in Wiesbaden) and the Sicherungsgruppe (Security group) in Bonn itself, where there are former top members of the SS who were involved in shootings and other crimes—and yet no one has complained? His allegations proved all too true when at the end of 1961 some of the many ex-SD men who took refuge in General Reinhard Gehlen’s Secret Service were found to be Russian double spies.

Further north the local newspaper in the Volkswagen factory town of Wolfsburg made a naïve revelation: "About half the senior officials of the Lower Saxony provincial police are not former members of the SS." The inference is obvious—and alarming.

For long the Bonn administration—with the equivocal figure of Dr. Hans Globke, the man who wrote the commentary on Hitler’s anti-Jewish legislation as Chancellor Adenauer’s Permanent Secretary of State—ignored protests from inside and far beyond Western Germany. Eventually, however, the continuous campaign of protest from the German T.U.C. and the Social Democratic opposition against the Nazis in the police and the judiciary forced the Bonn authorities to act more circumspectly.

Concern began to become marked—about foreign reaction if not about the Nazis—when it was discovered that the British Secret Service on high orders from Whitehall had established that a prima facie case of murder or other serious crime could be brought against at least seventy ex-Nazi judges still serving in West German courts.

In the late spring of 1960, with the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann by the Israeli agents in Argentina, reluctantly and belatedly the German authorities were spurred to action. Some of the more notorious criminals were arrested—largely as a result of the activity of determined anti-Nazi German officials such as the Public Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, Generalstaatsanwalt Dr. Bauer. A still larger number were prematurely retired on generous pensions paid by the German taxpayer.

Other action taken included:

1. A list published in the middle of 1961 by the Federal Agency for the Prosecution of War Crimes showing that more than 900 war crimes involving several thousand persons—many of them policemen—were being investigated.

2. Legislation passed about the same time by the Bonn Parliament calling on incriminated judges to retire. If they did so by 30 June, 1962, they would receive full pensions.

Despite these tardy measures—more than a decade after the establishment of the West German Government—all too many of Heydrich’s henchmen still hold high posts in the Bonn Republic. At a German Evangelical Church conference in Western Germany at the end of 1961 a woman lawyer of the Federal War Crimes Agency at Ludwigsburg revealed the difficulties of trying to bring even the minor Nazi war criminals to justice. It was impossible she said to use normal West German police channels because high-ranking officers were often former accomplices of the wanted men. And even when they were traced it was equally difficult to find public prosecutors and judges willing to take any action.

Soon after these serious disclosures the Ministry of Justice for the province of Württemberg-Baden announced that disciplinary action was being started against the woman lawyer because she was not authorized officially to make these disclosures. Evidence that the spirit of Heydrich still pervades many German police and legal authorities received sensational proof at about the same time when a Yugoslav business man was arrested in Munich. He was held in prison on a charge that he had shot two German soldiers while serving as a Tito partisan in his own country during the war.

There was an immediate international outcry in every country which had struggled under the Nazi jackboot. The unfortunate Yugoslav was released. The explanation that it was all due to a bureaucratic blunder was difficult to swallow. There was evidence to suggest that at least some former Nazi officials were involved.

The Times of London voiced the feelings of all outraged Resistance fighters from Paris to Prague, and from Oslo to Belgrade:

It is natural, stated The Times, "that the Germans should chafe at the suspicion with which they are often regarded. Their past is a heavy burden which even the most impeccable behaviour would take time to lighten.

"What worries observers who wish them well is not so much that the past might be repeated but that it is not fully understood—that its reality fails to impinge, which increases the chafing and carries risks for the future. Worries like this are fed by the astonishing arrest of Mr. Vracaric, a Yugoslav business man said to have killed two Germans who were occupying his country during the war.…

The incident will be seized upon by those anxious to prove that Germany has not really changed. It is also a reminder that the past history of some members of the legal profession should have disqualified them from holding their posts.

The comment about the Nazi judges can be applied with doubled emphasis to Heydrich’s policemen still in the German police force.

That is certainly the view of the Czechs mourning the dead of Lidice after twenty years. It is shared by millions of other Slavs who know from the Nazi documents in possession of their governments that these men had been selected to exterminate them under the barbarous Hitler-Heydrich General Plan Ost.

The very real fears of the Czechs and the other Slavs have nothing to do with Communism. They have suffered from the Germans over the centuries—and they fear that once again they will be the victims of a new Grossdeutschland (Greater Germany) policy.

That is one of the most important single factors in the present East—West conflict.

It is not surprising, therefore, when the West German Government spokesmen are permitted to make repeated chauvinistic demands for the return of the Sudetenland—it has never been German except after Munich—that the Czechs believe, quite mistakenly, that the Bonn Government with British and American support is preparing a new Drang Nach Osten; and that Heydrich’s former subordinates in the German police are part of that plan.

The story of the life and deeds of their former master Reinhard Heydrich which follows is a warning of what could happen again.

CHAPTER ONE — CHILD OF MUSIC

MUSIC was both a favoured art and a distinguished profession in the Germany of Wilhelm II when on 7 March, 1904, a son was born to Bruno Heydrich, Director of the Music Conservatorium in the Saxon town of Halle-on-the-Saale. The third floor bedroom where the child came into the world was part of the Director’s maisonnette which shared with the Conservatorium the drab four-storey building at Gutchenstrasse 20. The cries of the newly born mingled with the sounds of his father’s students practising in the large hall behind.

The new baby, who had one brother and one sister, was christened Reinhard Tristan Eugen. The first name was his mother’s choice. The second was chosen by his father because Tristan had been his favourite role as a Wagnerian Heldentenor in the lesser German opera houses before he settled down in Halle as a teacher and a composer of some note. The third name, Eugen, was that of the child’s maternal grandfather, no less a personality in the world of Teutonic music than Hofrat (Royal Councillor) Professor Dr. Eugen Krantz, director of the world-renowned Royal Conservatorium of Music in Dresden, the Saxon capital city.

His ancestry on both sides suggested that the young Reinhard was a child of music, and indeed in the years to come he provided further proof for the theory that great musical ability is often hereditary. He grew up to be a violinist of international concert standard, a chamber music artist of great distinction, and a useful pianist and singer.

The facts of his ancestry, however, had an importance far beyond the theories of musical inheritance. Three decades after his birth the information locked in the innermost armoured safe of the Nazi leadership formed the basis of rumour, intrigue and cloak and dagger operations.

From a study of the top secret Ahnenliste (Ancestry List) kept by Hitler’s grey eminence Martin Bormann, which the author has been permitted to inspect in the closely guarded U.S. Document Centre in West Berlin, something very near to the complete truth can be established. According to the List, which was an essential for every member of the Nazi Party, and still more for its leaders, the father of Heydrich was the son of a Saxon carpenter, Karl Julius Heydrich, who later became a piano constructor in his native village of Slamen near Spremberg, and of Ernestine Wilhelmine Lindner, born in the village of Lommatsch in 1840.

The baptismal names of this paternal grandmother are of great importance in view of rumours widely circulated among the Nazi upper echelons that her name was Sarah Heydrich, and that Sarah Heydrich was a Jewess.

Heydrich’s paternal grandfather died comparatively young and the grandmother was married for a second time in 1877 in the town of Meissen to an estate owner’s son called Robert Suess. This second marriage proved the basis for some, at any rate, of the rumours about Heydrich’s ancestry, for after this second marriage Heydrich’s father Bruno was sometimes known as Bruno Heydrich-Suess. In the 1916 edition of the well-known Riemann’s Musiklexikon Reinhard Heydrich’s father, by this time a well-known composer with three operas to his credit, was described as Bruno Heydrich—otherwise known as Suess.

This entry, subsequently altered at the request of the Heydrich family, formed the basis of a secret inquiry ordered in 1932 by the then head of the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, Gregor Strasser, the bitterest enemy of Adolf Hitler. In June, 1932, as can be seen in the secret files in the U.S. Document Centre, Gregor Strasser received a letter marked Very Confidential from the Nazi Gauleiter of Halle-Merseburg:

I hear a whisper, reported the Gauleiter, that in the Reich Leadership is a member with the name Heydrich, whose father lives in Halle. It is possible that the father is a Jew.

The Gauleiter then proceeded to quote the reference in the music dictionary—apparently taking the view that the name Suess was Jewish. He suggested to Gregor Strasser that the Nazi Party Personnel Department might care to make a check on Heydrich—by that time beginning to be a key figure in the leadership of the still embryonic SS of Heinrich Himmler. The Gauleiter enclosed with his letter certain files from the local Nazi Party office in Halle.

As early as 1932 Gregor Strasser had begun to realize the importance of the young officer whom Himmler had introduced into the SS. He took immediate action. It was a delicate operation, for it meant that the Nazi Party leadership was spying on the man whom Himmler had already chosen as head of the Nazi Party Secret Police—the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD for short. The inquiry, therefore, was carried on most discreetly. It lasted a considerable time, and it was not until nearly a year later, after the Nazis had come to power in 1933, that a report was made.

This stated that according to an enclosed Ancestry List Heydrich ...is of German origin and free from any taint of blood—Jewish or coloured...Lying rumours about the family, continued the report, to the effect that they were formerly known as Suess came from the fact that the father of Oberleutnant Heydrich was known colloquially as Isidor Suess and that led to a belief that the family was of Jewish descent.

The report then dealt in detail with the stepfather Suess and pointed out that in fact he was not a Jew but a Lutheran. The report concluded with the statement: As a consequence I am satisfied that the charge that the family Heydrich is of Jewish origin, or earlier bore another name, is incorrect.

The Ancestry List or chart enclosed with the report is nevertheless a sensational document, for it completely ignores the existence of Heydrich’s maternal grandmother and her forbears. The chart showed that Reinhard Heydrich’s mother was Elisabeth Maria Anna Amalie Krantz, daughter of Hofrat Professor Krantz of Dresden, but No. 7 on the chart—the place for Heydrich’s maternal grandmother—is left completely blank, and in the next row of this confidential Nazi document his mother’s grandparents are equally ignored.

The mysterious missing grandmother was the wife of Hofrat Professor Dr. Krantz and must have been a fairly well-known figure at the court of the King of Saxony. It is impossible to believe that a Nazi Party secret investigator in the years 1932-33 was unable to find out anything about this lady.

The implication of the missing grandmother is clear. The Nazi inquisitor into the Aryan blood of Reinhard Heydrich found out all too much about this grandmother and her forbears—certainly much too much to be inserted even into the confidential Party file on the Chief of the Sicherheitsdienst.

It is inconceivable that Gregor Strasser—and his sinister successor Martin Bormann who inherited the party personal files from him—would have allowed such an omission to go unchallenged, but there is no handwritten annotation on the Ancestry List to explain the missing details—although such annotation often exists in other files.

From an examination of these Nazi Party records, now in Berlin, it is evident that Martin Bormann had another and yet more secret set of files containing information which could not be included in the normal Party archives. These files were in his panzerschrank (armoured safe). There can be little doubt that Martin Bormann held secret evidence that the maternal grandmother of Reinhard Heydrich was either Jewish or had at least Jewish blood. The surname of this mysterious grandmother was Mautsch, and Heydrich’s widow, Frau Lina Heydrich, has informed the author that she was the one who brought the money into the family.

It would appear to be distorted versions of these facts which formed the basis for the rumours—well-known both to senior members of Heydrich’s own SD and their bitter enemies of the Abwehr, the Military Secret Service—that Heydrich had a Jewish grandmother called Sarah.

The former SD officer Dr. Willy Hoettl, who gave evidence at Nuremberg and is now the director of a fashionable boarding school in Austria, has claimed that the rumour was started by a master baker from Heydrich’s home town of Halle. Heydrich during the ‘thirties started an action against the baker and won, but the case went to Appeal. During the hearing of the appeal the higher court was informed that all records relating to the period of Heydrich’s birth in 1904—both in the civil registration office and in the church books—had disappeared. According to one version the documents were stolen on Heydrich’s orders by one of his most trusted SD men. Similar allegations were made by another man some time later. He disappeared into a concentration camp.

According to some stories, the gravestone alleged to bear the name Sarah Heydrich disappeared from the cemetery at Meissen near Leipzig and was replaced by another gravestone bearing the inscription S. Heydrich. The account for the new stone is alleged to have been found among Heydrich’s private papers after his assassination. That may well be true, but, whatever Heydrich’s manipulations with ancestral gravestones, there was clearly, on evidence of the Nazi Ancestry List, never a grandmother called Sarah Heydrich.

The lawyer who appeared for the Halle master baker in the slander action brought by Heydrich became (according to Hoettl) an Abwehr officer at the outbreak of war in 1939 and immediately revealed all he knew to Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr. That Canaris knew there was something queer about Heydrich is certain, for various former Abwehr officers told the author some years before this book was contemplated that Canaris knew that Heydrich was quarter Jewish.

According to these subordinates of Canaris, the Abwehr chief obtained documentary proof—no doubt the same as was in Bormann’s panzerschrank. During one of his many visits to Spain he deposited the incriminating documents with a trusted Spanish friend and instructed him that should he, Canaris, die at Heydrich’s hands, the documents were to be sent to the New York Times. Canaris is then alleged to have returned to Berlin—and told Heydrich what he had done.

Some confirmation of this would appear to be given by the late Walter Schellenberg, the former subordinate and quasi-crony of Heydrich who, towards the end of the war, largely took