Reinhard Heydrich was the chief planner of the Holocaust, Eichmann's direct commander and chairman of the Wannsee Conference. He began his career as an officer in the Nazi secret police and managed to be accepted into the Air Force at a relatively old age to become a fighter pilot, combining the pilot's career with being Hitler's most vicious executioner, who saw him as his possible successor.
At the beginning of the war he was regularly on the line between his squadron at the front and his offices in Berlin. In his role as Deputy Himmler, he controlled all the German secret police, led by the Gestapo. In addition, at the end of 1941, he was also appointed the cruel governor of Czechoslovakia, a position he managed to perform by regularly skipping between Berlin and Prague in a light airplane which was at his disposal and flying it himself.
Despite his excellence, Heydrich was characterless and complicated, stuttering and nervous, quick-reacting, lacking in social skills, who felt like a wolf in a pack of wolves. He saw obedience to command as a supreme value and combined it with intoxication of power and lust for promotion. He was haunted by employment and excellence, in part because of his Jewish background which he sought to hide. He had medals of heroism in battle along with medals for sporting achievements. In addition, he was an obsessive violinist and a talented pen man who wrote a regular column in an important magazine. His arrogance was at odds with him and he was killed in Prague in the open limousine he used for dily transportation, in the spring of 1942.
The boy Heydrich was a member of one of the many militias that operated in Germany after the First World War. In 1922 he enlisted to the Navy. Early in his military career he was a signaling officer on ships. He joined the Nazi party in 1931. Himmler asked him to be the head of his SS intelligence office.
At the time it was still an insignificant mechanism and Himmler was preparing to make it a major organization. Heydrich became his partner. They succeeded and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, the SS gradually took over the German police. In 1935 the young General Heydrich commanded all areas of the huge secret police service in Nazi Germany. Heydrich and his office were officially subordinate to Himmler. But in practice, from the beginning of the collaboration among them, he was more dominant.
He wanted to develop himself and advance in other areas. That same year, through Goering, he was transferred to the Air Force Reserve Corps and in time received the rank of Major. He arranged for himself a position in a combat squadron outside Berlin. By the beginning of World War II he had became, despite his age, one of the excellent pilots in the German Air Force. He acquired his skills as a pilot by leaving his home in the summer at four in the morning, driving at high speed in his official car to his fighter squadron and training hour after hour before the others woke up. He then returned to the Central Ministry of Defense.
The personalities of Goering and Heydrich had many common lines, which enabled cooperation between them. They were the heads of the most prestigious mechanisms that created extremist Nazism, the Luftwaffe and the SS. Both were powerful and influential, but constantly feared for the loss of their prestige and status. They strived for a common leadership and realized that in order to do so they had to expand their popular support base in the party, by radicalizing positions on racial and anti-Semitic policies. The dynamics of their relationship played an important role in the creation of the Holocaust. The reader between the short lines of the infamous order from Goering to Heydrich, sees that it was based on previous understandings between two people who thought and acted similarly.
Heydrich played a multidisciplinary role in the short campaign against Poland. He concocted the intelligence plots that preceded it, commanded the SS storm units that brutally took over the population on the front lines, flew fighter airplanes in numerous operational sorties and organized the implementation of racial policy.
For Heydrich, the shift from peace to war was also significant as the number one expert on the secret police apparatus. On September 27, 1939, Hitler signed the decree defining the tasks of the "Central Office of the Reich Security" headed by Heydrich. The office integrated the Gestapo, the secret police, and the intelligence system of the Nazi party. Heydrich first appeared in the eyes of the German public as a central figure, with a position equivalent to that of a minister in the government.
On January 30, 1940, Heydrich convened a staff meeting of the Central Office of the Reich Security. Eichmann was the chief technical adviser at the meeting. Heydrich gave sharp, quick and clear instructions that another four hundred thousand Jews should be expelled from western Poland, in as short a time as possible. The expulsions, death marches and mass killings in gunfire, immediately went into high gear.
In September 1941, immediately after he was appointed governor of Czechoslovakia, Heydrich sent 60,000 Jews to his colleague Arthur Greiser, governor of southwestern Poland. It was followed by a letter to Greiser from Heinrich Himmler, their joint commander, stating: '' The Fuhrer wants the territories annexed to the Reich to be clean and purified of Jews, as soon as possible. As a first step I will try to send this year as much as I can, all the Jews from the Old Reich and its protected countries first to the territories in the East which were annexed in 1939. This spring, they will send them further east to Russia. "
Greiser ordered to deal with the "overcrowding''. He obtained Himmler's consent to the extermination of all Jews incapable of forced labor. His commands began to address the problem by experimenting with mass extermination by gas trucks, at a facility in the town of Chelmno near Lodz, which became the first mass extermination facility as part of the final solution.
Heydrich continued to be an active pilot. As governor of Czechoslovakia, he began daily flights between Berlin and Prague every forty-eight hours, using two light airplanes made available to him. On January 20, 1942, he summoned all the representatives of the relevant government ministries to outline the "Final Solution" plan at Wanssee conference. On the morning of the conference he flew from Prague to Berlin, a distance of 280 kilometers, in about two hours.
The Japanese airstrike on Pearl Harbor, a few weeks earlier, considered one of the greatest and most successful in history, was for him a source of inspiration at just the right time. It was a great opportunity for him as a pilot to boast and enforce his personality. Heydrich's main goal at the conference was to ensure the commitment of the various authorities in Germany regarding the final solution plan. The second reason was running a show off his arrogance.
At the beginning of the conference he mentioned the authority that Goering had delegated to him and went on to say that, as part of the final solution, the Jews should be transferred, without geographical restrictions and under proper management, to labor units in the East. Those who will be able to work will be led in long marching columns to work. As a result, a large portion of them will be eliminated because of natural reasons. Those who will eventually survive will die after a short period of hard labor.
Most of those present in the sitting room agreed to his plan without hesitation. The representative of the Ministry of Justice even transferred the punitive powers of the Jews from his office to Heydrich. In doing so, the Jews lost all meaning in terms of the law. The sitting in the presence of Heydrich lasted only nineteen minutes. He then left the place. The remaining attendees continued to chat and process the details.
The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague was carried out on May 27, 1941 by a squad of the Czech underground. It was a few days before Battle of Midway, the aerial-naval battle in the Pacific Ocean between the United States and Japan, which was another important turning point in the war. Most of his activity as the planner of the "Final Solution" took place during the six months between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway.
Hitler and Himmler received the news of his assassination as a direct hit on them. They initiated an unprecedented response action on a large scale. It was named, after him, "Operation Reinhard". The construction of the extermination facilities in Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek and Sobibor, which had progressed slowly till then, gained immediate momentum. Most of the Jews of Poland were murdered in these facilities, between the spring and autumn of 1942.
