Himmler’s relationship with Heydrich during the first year of the war became deeply involved. When Himmler had first appointed Heydrich to the S.S., they had both been young men, Himmler thirty-one years old and Heydrich twenty-seven. Even now, at the beginning of the war, Himmler was still not yet forty and Heydrich thirty-five. The closer observers of these two very different men, such as Gisevius, Kersten and Höttl, differ very little in their assessment of Heydrich.1 To Höttl, who worked for Heydrich and later for Schellenberg on the forgery of passports and banknotes, Himmler was a mediocrity in comparison with Heydrich, who had little use for his commander’s obsessions, racial or otherwise, and rapidly learned how to exploit the power delegated to him. In the end, according to Höttl, he undermined Himmler’s position to such an extent that he achieved direct access to Hitler and, had he lived, might well in 1943 have been appointed Minister of the Interior by the Führer in order to break, or counterbalance, the power accumulated by Himmler. However, Heydrich’s position in relation to Himmler was weakened, not strengthened, when in September 1941 Hitler, without consulting Himmler, appointed him Deputy Reich Protector in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was instructed to master that unhappy country, which was proving rebellious under the comparatively weak rule of Reich Protector Neurath, who had been Hitler’s Foreign Minister before the appointment of Ribbentrop. Neurath was forced to leave matters entirely in the hands of Heydrich.
Heydrich’s gradual movement towards comparative independence came during the first two years of the war. Himmler, who was never a man for immediate action, delegated to him an increasing number of the monstrous tasks required by Hitler, and even tolerated a situation in which Heydrich reported direct to the Führer or to Goring. Himmler, it must always be remembered, was a sick man who from 1939 to the end of his life could only find relief from his physical and psychological tensions through Kersten’s expert massage.
It is a profound mistake to underestimate Himmler, the very mistake, in fact, which allows such apparently insignificant men as he to win extensive power in politics or industry. Behind the rimless pince-nez, the trim and correct moustache, the receding, obstinate chin, and the narrow, sloping shoulders there was a man of passionate beliefs, whose attitude to power was not to luxuriate in it like Goring, or to fulfil the ambitions of an orator and political demagogue like Goebbels, but to realize a self-conceived, Messianic mission on behalf of the Germanic race.
But with his particular temperament and poor physique, he never could become a man of action. There can be no doubt that he always wanted to prove himself in this way; he saw himself as a uniformed policeman and soldier, even as a commander in the field, but he lacked both the mental and physical stamina for these things, and in the end he only made himself ridiculous. But by that time Heydrich was dead. During the years preceding 1939, while the S.S. was being developed, and during the first two years of the war, it was Heydrich who was astute enough to supply Himmler with ideas and the means to carry them out, becoming his alter ego until the point was reached when he was able to break free and make his own bid for power, serving directly under Hitler.
According to his long-suffering wife, Lina Heydrich, who was as ardently Nazi as Magda Goebbels and like her enjoyed attending smart parties given for smart Nazi wives, her husband would come home cursing the stupidity and waste of time which Himmler’s racial and other beliefs imposed on the administration of the S.S. Once he had seized power over Himmler, he did not fail to let him see the contempt he had for all this crazed mythology. For Heydrich it was not the theory but the practice that mattered; as he saw it, there was no need for elaborate theories on which to base the obvious necessity to persecute all those whose mere existence impeded ‘Aryan’ dominance. But whatever open differences there were between Heydrich and Himmler, Heydrich was always careful to keep their formal relationship unimpaired.
According to Gisevius, who for a brief period worked under him, Heydrich was ‘diabolically clever’, keeping himself always in the background and using roundabout ways to achieve his aims. His methods of terrorism were kept as secret as possible. He had a ‘peculiarly murderous bent’, teaching his men ‘the by-laws of applied terror’, one of which was, as Gisevius put it, to ‘pass the buck’. He practised his oppression always in the name of discipline, justice, or the needs of being a good German, leaving it to Himmler to preach the more high-flown doctrines that in the end led to the same oppression of the same people. In all the Nazi leadership, as Gisevius points out, it was the experts in violence who rose to the top: ‘The dominant trait of all of them was brutality. Goring, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich… thought and felt only in terms of violence.’ Schellenberg, who served Heydrich and Himmler for twelve years, has left the best description there is of Heydrich:
‘When I entered his office Heydrich was sitting behind his desk. He was a tall, impressive figure with a broad, unusually high forehead, small restless eyes as crafty as an animal’s and of uncanny power, a long, predatory nose, and a wide, full-lipped mouth. His hands were slender and rather too long — they made one think of the legs of a spider. His splendid figure was marred by the breadth of his hips, a disturbing feminine effect which made him appear even more sinister. His voice was much too high for so large a man and his speech was nervous and staccato, and though he scarcely ever finished a sentence, he always managed to express his meaning quite clearly.’
According to Schellenberg, Heydrich became the ‘hidden pivot around which the Nazi regime revolved’, and his keen intelligence and forceful character guided the development of the whole nation:
‘He was far superior to all his political colleagues and controlled them as he controlled the vast intelligence machine of the S.D… . Heydrich had an incredibly acute perception of the moral, human, professional and political weaknesses of others, and… his unusual intellect was matched by the ever-watchful instincts of a predatory animal… He operated on the principle of “divide and rule,” and even applied this to his relations with Hitler and Himmler. The decisive thing for him was always to know more than others… and to use this knowledge and the weakness of others to render them completely dependent on him, from the highest to the lowest… Heydrich was in fact, the puppet-master of the Third Reich.’
His only failing, according to Schellenberg, who both admired and feared Heydrich, was his ungovernable sexual appetite, which he indulged without caution or restraint.