The young man who came down to Waldtrudering was of impressive appearance. He was tall and blond, blue-eyed and Nordic, with a model physique that corresponded exactly to Himmler’s conception of what an S.S. man should be. His eyes, in fact, were of a peculiar lightness, piercing and hypnotic. Although there was some mistake in his records (he had been a code and signals officer in naval Intelligence, not an Intelligence officer), his handsome bearing and assurance of manner made an immediate impression on Himmler, whose diffidence of nature always made him nervous when he had to deal with men of a capacity greater than his own. In order to assert himself, Himmler set Heydrich a written test, like a schoolmaster sizing up an over-bright pupil; first he described to him the kind of Intelligence service he had in mind, and then invited Heydrich to outline on paper how he would set about organizing it. He gave him twenty minutes to complete the project, and Heydrich seized this chance to impress still further a man whose limitation of character he could already sense. Himmler read the paper and offered him a post on his personal staff as head of an entirely new department in the S.S., the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) or Security Service.
During the next ten years Heydrich was to create a network of power which was eventually to threaten not only his master but every other member of the Nazi leadership, including Hitler himself. This cold and brutally handsome man, three and a half years younger than Himmler, was the son of a distinguished teacher of music, who had once been a performer in opera and came, like Himmler’s mother, from a musical family. Heydrich’s second name was Tristan, and he had begun his own musical studies at an early age. He became an outstanding violinist, but his musical talents did not prevent him undergoing the strict training given to schoolboys at the school in Halle, where the family lived. He was brilliant at school, and it seemed that he could have succeeded equally well in an academic or musical career. He was also a skilled athlete and a notable fencer. His mother, who was a strict Catholic, brought her son up in the Catholic faith; scepticism, however, seems to have developed fairly early in his cold and cruelly intelligent nature, and the traditional faith of his family in German nationalism led him at the age of sixteen to join the nationalist Free Corps movement that spread throughout Germany after the First World War. He decided to abandon a career in music and train to become an officer in the Navy.
His character was already well developed. He was alert, filled with a nervous energy, restless, hard-working, strong-willed and intolerant. His lean face was hard and ruthless, and he had grown over six feet tall. As a naval cadet he soon mastered the technicalities of navigation and he charmed the wife of Commander Canaris, the First Officer of the training cruiser on which he was stationed, by playing to her on the violin. He was invited by Frau Canaris to form a quartet for the performance of chamber music. Meanwhile, his energetic mind turned to the study of languages, and he rapidly gained a fair knowledge of English, French and Russian. He also began to develop his lifelong taste for philandering. In 1926 he was promoted lieutenant, and in 1928, at his own request, he was made a signals and radio officer stationed at Kiel. Here one night at a ball held just before Christmas in 1930 he met a beautiful girl of nineteen, Lina Mathilde von Osten, who was as blonde as himself. Within three days they had become engaged, in spite of the fact that a scandal arose because another blonde girl, the daughter of a prominent industrialist, claimed he was in love with her and she with him. The industrialist, who, unfortunately for Heydrich, was a friend of the Grand Admiral Raeder, used his influence to have Heydrich dismissed the service when he refused to break his official engagement and marry the other girl. He was required to resign his commission in April 1931, and his fiancée insisted on maintaining her engagement to him in spite of the opposition of her parents now that he was disgraced.4
Heydrich took his dismissal very badly. He wept, the only time he ever did so in Lina’s presence. He could think of no future for himself outside the services. But Lina von Osten had other ideas. She was a passionate Nazi, whose conversion had started when at the age of sixteen she had first heard Hitler speak at a meeting in Kiel. She knew all about the S.S., and believed that in this movement there should be a place for so talented and handsome an officer as her unemployed lover. He responded to her enthusiasm and joined the Party, and it was her resolution that eventually persuaded him to make the contact with Eberstein that led to his visit to Himmler in June.5
Himmler, though in many respects a weak man, was nevertheless astute and calculating. Throughout his career as head of the S.S. he surrounded himself with men who in one way or another compensated for whatever was lacking in his own nature, while at the same time ensuring that they remained his servants. He used their strength, their brutality, or their intelligence to fulfil his purpose for him in whatever portion of his total plan it suited him to place them. Since, unlike Goring or Goebbels, he preferred to hover in the background out of the public eye, except on those formal occasions when it was necessary for him to be seen alongside the other leaders, he was not averse to letting his subordinates act as his agents while he kept out of sight, the spider silently operating at the centre of his web. But in Heydrich Himmler met a man who became his match. Heydrich was quick to realize the intentions of the Reichsführer S.S. and to exploit them for his own purposes, while carefully posing in his presence and that of others as a dutiful subordinate. Yet a kind of dubious, mutual respect existed between the two men which amounted in Himmler’s case to a form of affection; they shared the same negative ideals, though in nature and temperament they could not have been more diverse. For the next ten years, however, they were to be bound together, each man the other’s evil genius, until Heydrich’s assassination in 1942 suddenly removed him at a time when, in the estimation of many who knew him well, he was preparing to supersede Himmler and even outbid Hitler for power during this final period, for the Führer’s leadership was undermined by his own obsessions and threatened by the intrigues of his subordinates.
In June 1931, at the age of twenty-seven, Heydrich gladly accepted this minor post in the S.S. in which an increasing number of men of officer rank and even of aristocratic background were enlisting. He took up his duties in Munich officially on 10 August, and by Christmas had been promoted to the rank of a major in the S.S. At the same time, on 26 December, he married his resolute fiancée Lina von Osten, who was then only twenty years old. Major Heydrich’s salary was RM 180 a month, or about £15,6 and from the start he began the patient and methodical compilation of secret information on the private lives of men and women inside and, when it was likely to prove useful, outside the Party as well. By the end of the year he had assembled a small staff of helpers, and in 1932 (during a period of which, April to July, the S.A. and S.S. organizations were, officially at least, disbanded by the German government), Himmler used Heydrich’s skill and experience to help him reorganize the whole movement. In the summer Heydrich was promoted a colonel and given the title of Chief of the Sicherheitsdienst, but by then his influence was spread throughout the service, and he founded for Himmler an S.S. Junkerschule,7 an elite leadership school at Bad-Toelz in Upper Bavaria.
By now the S.S. was a substantial force. Although the original 280 men whom Himmler found under him in January 1929 had increased by January 1931 to only 400 enlisted members, supplemented by some 1,500 part-time recruits, there were by the time the Brüning government disbanded the S.A. and the S.S. in April 1932 as many as 30,000 S.S. men. The organization, however, still remained nominally a part of the S.A.