HHhH

by Laurent Binet

  So Heydrich’s direct rivals are, for the moment, of a lowlier kind. There is Alfred Rosenberg, minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories and the theorist behind the idea of colonizing these countries. There is Oswald Pohl, in charge of the organization of concentration camps, and—like Heydrich—the head of a “central office” (Haupt Amt, the HA in “RSHA”) within the SS. There is Hans Frank, the governor-general of Poland, Heydrich’s counterpart in Warsaw. And there is also Canaris, head of the Abwehr—Heydrich’s counterpart in the Wehrmacht. Having accumulated so many offices, Heydrich’s power is admittedly far superior to any of these men, taken one by one. But each has enough control over his own domain to prevent Heydrich really spreading his wings. Actually, looking at it that way, I should add Dalüge, head of the general police—another “central office” answering directly to Himmler in the hierarchy of the SS. His power is limited to ordinary police tasks, the maintenance of order and the enforcement of common law, but the Orpo, the Schupo, and the Kripo—while lacking the power and dark prestige of the Gestapo—are still police forces beyond Heydrich’s control.

  So the road is long. But Heydrich, as he has already amply demonstrated, is not a man easily discouraged.

  158

  I’ve come across this anecdote in lots of books: Himmler, attending an execution at Minsk, fainted when two young girls were shot just in front of him and he was spattered with their blood. Following this unpleasant scene he realized the need to find another method, less hard on the executioners’ nerves, for continuing the extermination of the Jews and other Untermenschen.

  But according to my notes, the end of this type of execution coincides with a similar realization on Heydrich’s part. He was also making an inspection visit, accompanied by his subordinate “Gestapo” Müller.

  The Einsatzgruppen always carried out their work in more or less the same way: they dug a gigantic ditch, and—having gathered together hundreds or even thousands of Jews (or other supposed opponents) from the surrounding towns and villages—lined them up at the edge of the ditch and machine-gunned them. Sometimes they made them kneel down so they could put bullets in the backs of their necks. But most of the time, they didn’t even bother to check whether everyone was dead, so some were buried alive. A few survived: sheltered beneath a corpse, half-dead themselves, they waited for nightfall before digging through the earth that covered them until they reached the surface. But such cases are the miraculous exceptions. Several witnesses have described seeing pits filled with bodies piled on top of one another and hearing the groans of the dying emitted by the seething mass. Afterward, the pits were filled in. Using such primitive methods, the Einsatzgruppen exterminated a total of about one and a half million people, the vast majority Jews.

  Heydrich attended quite a few of these executions, sometimes in the company of Himmler, sometimes Eichmann, sometimes Müller. One time, a young woman held out her baby so that he could save it. Mother and child were shot right in front of him. Heydrich, who was thicker-skinned than Himmler, did not faint. But the cruelty of the scene made an impression on him, and he wondered about the suitability of this method of execution. Like Himmler, he was worried about the effects of such scenes on the morale of his brave SS guards. Having voiced his doubts, he reached for his hip flask and swallowed a mouthful of slivovitz. Slivovitz is a Czech spirit distilled from plums—it’s very strong and, in the opinion of many Czechs, not very nice. Heydrich, who was a heavy drinker, must have picked up a taste for it after his arrival in Prague.

  However, it took him some time to conclude that the Einsatzgruppen were not the ideal solution to the Jewish question. Because in July 1941, when he undertook his first inspection with Himmler—at Minsk, where the two men arrived on the Reichsführer’s special train—Heydrich, just like his boss, could find no fault with the slaughter he witnessed. It must have taken several months for the two of them to understand that such a procedure implicated the Third Reich in a realm of barbarism likely to be condemned by future generations. They had to do something to remedy this. But the process of extermination was already so advanced that the only remedy they found was Auschwitz.

  159

  Surprisingly, in this dark and horrible period, the number of Czech marriages keeps rising. But there is a reason for this. In early 1942, compulsory work service applies only to single men. Suddenly, there is a marked increase in the number of Czech citizens marrying in haste. This does not escape the watchful eye of Heydrich’s secret services. So it’s decided that forced labor be extended to all male Czech citizens, with no exceptions. Thus tens of thousands of Czech workers, married and single, are sent to all four corners of the Reich to serve as manpower wherever they’re needed—which means everywhere, because German workers are being swallowed by the Wehrmacht in their millions. It’s not only Czechs either: the same law applies to the Poles, Belgians, Danes, Dutch, Norwegians, French, and others.

  This policy does produce some interesting side effects, though. In one of the many RSHA reports to land on Heydrich’s desk, we read:

  From various places in the Reich, where millions of foreign workers are employed, there is talk of them having sexual relations with German women. The danger of biological weakening is constantly rising. There are more and more complaints concerning young women of German blood seeking out Czech workers for amorous relations.

  I suppose Heydrich pulls a face when he reads this. Screwing foreigners has never bothered him, personally. But for Aryan women in heat to mate with those filthy subhumans… that surely must disgust him. It’s also an added reason not to trust women in general. There is no danger that Lina would ever do such a thing—not even to avenge her husband’s infidelities. Lina is a true German, of pure and noble blood, who would kill herself rather than go to bed with a Jew, a black, a Slav, an Arab, or anyone of an inferior race. Not like those shameless bitches who don’t deserve to be German. He’d send the whole damn lot to a whorehouse, quick as you like, or to those Aryan breeding grounds, those stud farms where the young blond women line up to mate with SS stallions. Let them complain then.

  I wonder how the Nazis reconciled their racial doctrine with the Slavs’ beauty: not only are the prettiest women on the continent to be found in eastern Europe, but on top of that they’re often blond and blue-eyed. Anyway, when Goebbels had his affair with the gorgeous Czech actress Lida Baarova, he didn’t ask too many questions about her racial purity. He probably thought her beauty made her suitable for Germanization. When you consider the physical degeneracy of most of the Nazi high command—and Goebbels, with his clubfoot, is a prime specimen—you have to laugh at this idea of “weakening the race” that so exercised them. It’s different for Heydrich. He’s no brown midget: his appearance marks him out as a true Germanic standard-bearer. Did he believe this? I think so. People are always quick to believe whatever suits and flatters them. I think of what Paul Newman said: “If my eyes should ever turn brown, my career is shot to hell.” I wonder if Heydrich thought the same thing.

  160

  Once again, I’ve chanced upon a work of fiction relating to Heydrich. This time, it’s the made-for-TV movie of Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, shown in France as Twilight of the Eagles. The lead role is played by Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor famous for his immortal performance as the replicant in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Here, he plays an SS officer working for the Kripo.

  The story takes place in the 1960s. The Führer still rules Germany. Berlin has been rebuilt according to Albert Speer’s plans, and the resulting city is a stylistic mix of Baroque, Art Nouveau, and Futurist. The war against Russia rumbles on, but the rest of Europe is under Third Reich domination. There is, however, a thaw in relations with the United States. Kennedy is about to meet Hitler to sign a historic agreement. In this fictional history, it’s the father, Joseph Patrick—rather than his son, John Fitzgerald—who has been elected president. And JFK’s father never hid his Nazi sympathies. So, as in other “What if…?” stories, an a
lternative history is built upon a hypothesis: in this case, that Germany won the war and Hitler’s regime endured.

  In the plot of Fatherland, Nazi dignitaries are being murdered; with the help of a female American journalist (in Germany to cover Kennedy’s visit), the SS inspector played by Rutger Hauer discovers the link between these murders. Bühler, Stuckart, Luther, Neumann, Lange… all were present at a mysterious meeting that took place twenty years before—at Wannsee, in January 1942, organized by Heydrich himself. In the 1960s Heydrich has taken Göring’s place as Reichsmarshall, and is more or less the regime’s number two. Afraid that the agreement with Kennedy might be compromised if the truth ever comes out, Hitler intends to make everyone who attended the meeting permanently disappear. Because it was at this meeting, on January 20, 1942, that the Final Solution was officially ratified by all the relevant ministers. Here, led by Heydrich, the Nazis planned the extermination by gas of eleven million Jews.

  However, one of the participants does not want to die. Franz Luther, who represented Ribbentrop on behalf of the Foreign Ministry, has irrefutable proof of the genocide of the Jews and he intends to offer it to the Americans in exchange for political asylum. Because the world is unaware of the genocide: officially, Europe’s Jews have been deported—to Ukraine, where the proximity of the Russian front makes it impossible for any international observer to go and verify their presence. Just before being murdered, Luther contacts the American journalist, who manages in extremis—as Hitler is about to welcome Kennedy amid great pomp—to deliver the precious documents to the American president. The meeting between Kennedy and Hitler is canceled, the United States goes back to war against Germany, and the Third Reich ends up collapsing, twenty years late.

  In this fiction, the Wannsee Conference is in some way the crucial moment of the Final Solution. Now, it’s true that the decision wasn’t made at Wannsee. And it’s also true that Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen had already killed hundreds of thousands of Jews on the Eastern Front. But it was at Wannsee that the genocide was rubber-stamped. No longer need the task be given, more or less on the quiet (if you can really talk of killing millions of people “on the quiet”), to a few death squads; now the entire political and economic infrastructure of the regime is at their disposal.

  The meeting lasted barely two hours. Two hours to settle what were essentially legal questions: What should be done with half-Jews? And with quarter-Jews? With Jews who’d been decorated in the First World War? With Jews married to German women? Should these men’s Aryan widows be compensated by giving them a pension? As in all meetings, the only decisions that are really made are those decided beforehand. In fact, for Heydrich, it was just a question of informing all the Reich ministries that they were going to have to work together with one objective in mind: the physical elimination of all Europe’s Jews.

  I have in front of me a list distributed by Heydrich to all the participants at the conference that details the number of Jews to be “evacuated,” country by country. The list is divided in two parts. The first includes all the countries of the Reich, among which we notice that Estonia is already judenfrei, while the Government General (that is, Poland) still has more than two million Jews. The second part, giving an idea of how optimistic the Nazis still were in early 1942, brings together the satellite countries (Slovakia: 88,000 Jews; Croatia: 40,000 Jews) and allied countries (Italy, including Sardinia: 58,000 Jews), but also neutral countries (Switzerland: 18,000; Sweden: 8,000; Turkey: 55,500; Spain: 6,000) or even enemies (the only two remaining in Europe at this time: the USSR—already invaded to a great extent—with five million Jews, more than half of them in occupied Ukraine; and Britain, with 330,000 Jews, which was a long way from being invaded). So the plan was that every country in Europe would be forced or persuaded to deport its Jews. The total was written at the bottom of the page: more than eleven million. The mission would be half accomplished.

  Eichmann has described what happened after the conference. The ministerial representatives having left, he and Heydrich were alone with “Gestapo” Müller. They moved through to an elegant wood-paneled drawing room. Heydrich poured himself a brandy, which he sipped while listening to classical music (Schubert, I believe), and the three men each smoked a cigar. According to Eichmann, Heydrich was in an excellent mood.

  161

  Raul Hilberg died yesterday. He was the leader of the “functionalists,” those historians who believe the extermination of the Jews was not premeditated but dictated by circumstances. This school of thought is in direct opposition to the “intentionalists,” who maintain it was all clearly and definitely planned from the beginning—that is, from the writing of Mein Kampf in 1924.

  To mark Hilberg’s death, Le Monde published extracts from an interview he gave in 1994, in which the broad outlines of his theory are recapitulated:

  I believe that the Germans did not know, at the beginning, what they were doing. It’s as if they were driving a train whose general direction was toward a growing violence against Jews, but whose precise destination was uncertain. Let’s not forget that Nazism was more than a political party: it was a movement that had to keep going forward, without ever stopping. Confronted with a completely unprecedented task, German bureaucracy didn’t know what to do. And that’s where Hitler’s role is important. Someone at the top had to give the green light to the naturally conservative bureaucrats.

  One of the intentionalists’ main pieces of evidence is this phrase of Hitler’s, taken from a public speech made in January 1939: “If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Conversely, the most revealing clue in support of the functionalists is that, for a long time, the Nazis were genuinely seeking out territories to which they might deport the Jews: Madagascar, the Arctic Ocean, Siberia, Palestine. On more than one occasion, Eichmann even met with some militant Zionists. But the hazards of war would force them to abandon all these plans. Most notably, the transportation of the Jews to Madagascar could not take place until the Germans had control of the seas—in other words, until the war with Great Britain was over. The search for more radical solutions would finally be precipitated by the turning of the war in the East. Even if they didn’t admit it, the Nazis knew their eastern conquests were in peril. They did not fear the worst—because nobody in 1942 imagined that the Red Army would one day invade Germany and penetrate all the way to Berlin—but the powerful Soviet resistance forced them to acknowledge that they might lose the occupied territories. Consequently, they had to move quickly. So it was, one thing leading to another, that the Jewish question took on an industrial dimension.

  162

  A freight train screeches to a halt. At the end of the tracks is a gate surmounted by a tower, with a brownstone wing on either side. Above, you hear the cawing of crows. The gate opens. You are now entering Auschwitz.

  163

  This morning, Heydrich receives an indignant letter from Himmler. It concerns some five hundred young Germans arrested by the Hamburg police because they were fans of swing, that degenerate foreign dance accompanied by Negro music.

  I will oppose any half measures in this matter. All the ringleaders are to be sent to a concentration camp. First of all, these youths will get a good thrashing there. They will stay in the camp quite a long time—two or three years. Obviously they will no longer have the right to study. Only through brutal actions can we stop the spread of these dangerous Anglophile trends.

  Heydrich will actually deport about fifty of these youngsters. Just because the Führer has entrusted him with the historic task of getting rid of every single Jew in Europe does not mean he’s going to neglect his other duties.

  164

  Goebbels’s diary, January 21, 1942:

  Heydrich has now installed his new government of the Protectorate. Hacha has made the
declaration of solidarity with the Reich that was requested of him. Heydrich’s policy in the Protectorate is truly a model one. He mastered the crisis there with ease. As a result, the Protectorate is now in the best of spirits, quite in contrast to other occupied or annexed areas.

  165

  Hitler is giving another of his interminable political soliloquies to a servile, silent audience. His diatribe touches on the situation in the Protectorate:

  The Czechs were taking Neurath for a ride! Another six months of that regime and production would have fallen by twenty-five percent! Of all the Slavs, the Czech is the most dangerous—because he’s a worker. He is disciplined, methodical; he knows how to conceal his intentions. But they will knuckle down now because they know we are violent and merciless.

  It’s his way of saying that he is very pleased with the job Heydrich is doing.

  166

  Not long afterward, Heydrich goes to see Hitler in Berlin. So Heydrich finds himself in the presence of the Führer—or perhaps it’s the other way around. Hitler declares: “We will clean up the Czech mess if we stick to a consistent policy with them. A lot of Czechs have Germanic origins, so it’s not impossible to re-Germanize them.” This speech, too, is a way of complimenting Heydrich on his work. The Blond Beast is—along with Speer (though for very different reasons)—the colleague Hitler most respects.