103
From one of the high windows in the north tower of Wewelsburg Castle, Heydrich contemplates the plain of Westphalia. In the middle of the forest, he can just make out the huts and the barbed-wire fences of Germany’s smallest concentration camp. But his gaze is probably focused on the parade ground, where the troops of his Einsatzgruppen are being drilled. Operation Barbarossa will be launched within a week. Within two, these men will be in Byelorussia, in Ukraine, in Lithuania, and will be seeing action. They’ve been promised that they’ll be home again by Christmas, once their job is done. In reality, Heydrich has no idea how long this war will last. Within the Party and the army, everyone who knows about the operation is highly optimistic. The Red Army’s performances on the battlefield—mediocre in Poland, frankly rubbish in Finland—lead the Nazis to believe that the still-invincible Wehrmacht can achieve a rapid victory. Based on what he’s seen in the SD reports, however, Heydrich is more circumspect. The enemy’s forces—the number of their tanks, for example, or of their reserve divisions—seem to him to have been dangerously underestimated. But the high command of the armed forces has its own information service, the Abwehr, and it has chosen to ignore Heydrich’s warnings and to put its faith instead in the more encouraging conclusions of Admiral Canaris, Heydrich’s former boss. Heydrich, whose expulsion from the navy remains an unhealed wound, must be choking with rage. Hitler has declared: “The beginning of a war is always like opening a door onto a darkened room. You never know what’s hiding in there.” Implicitly, it is admitted that the SD’s warnings might not be baseless. But the decision to attack the Soviet Union has been taken, all the same. Heydrich watches with concern as the clouds gather over the plain below.
Behind him, he hears the voice of Himmler talking to his generals.
For Himmler, the SS is an order of knights. He considers himself a descendant of Henry the Fowler, the Saxon king who, by repelling the Magyars in the tenth century, laid the foundations of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, and who then spent most of his reign exterminating Slavs. With his claims to such a lineage, the Reichsführer needed a castle. When he found this one, it was a ruin. He had to bring four thousand prisoners from Sachsenhausen, nearly a third of whom died during the renovations. Now, however, it towers imperiously over the Alme, which flows through the valley. Its two towers and its dungeon, connected by battlements, form a triangle whose point, turned toward the mythical land of Thule, birthplace of the Aryans, represents the axis mundi, the symbolic center of the world.
Here in the heart of the dungeon, in a former chapel renamed Obergruppenführersaal, Himmler is holding a meeting that Heydrich has been unable to get out of. In the middle of this great circular room, the highest SS dignitaries are gathered around an enormous oak table. It is round and seats twelve, of course, because Himmler wanted to reproduce the symbolism of the Arthurian legend. But the Reich’s quest for the Grail in 1941 is a little different from Perceval’s. “The final confrontation between two ideologies … the need to seize new Lebensraum…” Heydrich knows this mantra by heart, as do all Germans at the time. “A question of survival … pitiless racial struggle … twenty to thirty million Slavs and Jews…” At this point Heydrich, who is fond of numbers, pricks up his ears: “Twenty to thirty million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and the problems of food supply.”
Heydrich does not let his irritation show. He stares at the magnificent black sun inlaid with runes on the marble floor. Military actions … problems of supply … could they be any more evasive? Heydrich is well aware that with certain sensitive subjects one must not be too explicit, but a moment always comes when you have to call a spade a spade—and it seems reasonable to think that this moment has now arrived. Otherwise, through a lack of clarity in their orders, there is a risk that the men will mess things up. And he is the one who’s responsible for this mission.
When Himmler ends the meeting, Heydrich hurries through corridors cluttered with suits of armor, coats of arms, and paintings. He knows that there are alchemists, occultists, and magi here working full-time on esoteric problems, but he pays no mind to any of this. Two days he’s been stuck in this lunatic asylum! He wants to get back to Berlin as soon as possible.
But outside the clouds are massing in the valley, and if he waits too long his airplane won’t be able to take off. They escort him to the parade ground, where he has the honor of reviewing the troops. He dispenses with the long speech and dashes past the assembled ranks, hardly even glancing at the gang of assassins chosen to go and exterminate subhumans in the East. There are nearly three thousand of them and they are turned out impeccably. Heydrich dives into the plane that idles at the end of the runway. It takes off just before the storm breaks. In the sudden downpour, the troops of the four Einsatzgruppen start to march.
104
In Berlin, there is no round table and no black magic. The atmosphere is bureaucratic, and Heydrich studiously writes his directives. Göring has asked him to keep them short and simple. On July 2, 1941, two weeks after the launch of Barbarossa, the following note is sent to SS commanders behind the front line:
“To be executed: all Komintern functionaries, Party functionaries, people’s commissars, Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State, other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, irregular soldiers, murderers, agitators).”
Simple indeed, but also quite cautious—curiously so. Why specify that Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State should be executed when all such functionaries were to be executed anyway, Jewish or otherwise? Heydrich didn’t know then how ordinary soldiers would react to the demands of his Einsatzgruppen. It’s true that the famous directive signed by Keitel on June 6, 1941, and thus approved by the Wehrmacht, authorizes the massacres, but officially this is limited to political enemies. In other words, Soviet Jews are targeted only because of their politics. The redundant meaning in this note is like a trace of one final scruple. Naturally, if the local people want to organize pogroms, that will be discreetly encouraged. But at the beginning of July, there is still no question of openly pursuing the extermination of Jews simply because they are Jews.
Two weeks later, swept along by the euphoria of their victories, this embarrassment will have disappeared. While the Wehrmacht routs the Red Army on all fronts, while the invasion progresses even more easily than the most optimistic forecasts, and while 300,000 Soviet soldiers are taken prisoner, Heydrich rewrites his directive. The main points are reprised, the list lengthened, and a few details added (former Red Army commissars are now included, for instance). And finally Heydrich replaces “Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State” with “all the Jews.”
105
Hauptmann Heydrich is on board a Messerschmitt 109 whose cabin is embossed with the initials RH in runic lettering: this is his private plane and it is flying over Soviet territory at the head of a formation of Luftwaffe fighters. Whenever the German pilots spot columns of slowly retreating Russian soldiers below, they swoop on them like tigers and, lining up the columns of men in their sights, massacre them with machine guns.