Home > Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity > Heydrich, Reinhard

[MARCH 7, 1904–JUNE 4, 1942]

SS officer and chief architect of the Final Solution

Tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, with chiseled features that reflected the Nazi "Nordic" ideal, Reinhard Heydrich was the second-most powerful person in the SS, subordinate only to Heinrich Himmler. He was intelligent and cynical, but not dogmatic. With ruthless ambition he managed the planning and execution of Hitler's Final Solution, the extermination of Europe's Jews during World War II.

Heydrich was born in Halle to an aristocratic family. Well educated and culturally sophisticated, he had displayed great promise as a violinist at a young age, but became a naval intelligence officer following his schooling. He was discharged from the navy in April 1931 and immediately joined the SS. Himmler entrusted him with the organization and leadership of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service or SD), the new intelligence branch of the SS.

Heydrich helped Himmler establish SS authority over the state police (Gestapo), first in Bavaria in 1933 and ultimately throughout the rest of Germany by the end of 1934. He played a key role in the brutal SS purge of the leadership of the SA, or Sturmabteilung, the military arm of the Nazi party, on June 30, 1934.

In June 1936 the SS unified all police forces in Germany under its authority. Himmler was named Reichsführer-SS und Chef der deutschen Polizei (Reichsführer-SS and Chief of the German Police). As Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (Chief of the Security Police and the SD), Heydrich became head of the Gestapo and Kripo (criminal police). He authorized the deportation of Jews from Austria after the Anschluss in March 1938 and had thousands of Jews arrested and transported to concentration camps during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9, 1938. Following the pogrom, Hermann Göring concentrated authority for Jewish emigration in the hands of the SS and authorized Heydrich to establish the Reichszentrale für jüdische Auswanderung (Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration) in Berlin on January 24, 1939. This office facilitated the forced emigration of Jews throughout Germany using brutal methods perfected by his subordinate, Adolf Eichmann, in Austria.

The creation of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office or RSHA) under Heydrich's direction in 1939 formally unified state and party secret police agencies (the Gestapo and SD). He took charge of the Einsatzgruppen (action squads) that supervised the relocation of Polish Jews to squalid, overcrowded ghettos and their inhuman treatment there, as well as the establishment of Judenräte (Jewish Councils) beginning in September 1939. He was also instrumental in plans to concentrate Polish Jews on reservations in the East (the Nisko and Lublin plans) in 1939 and European Jews in Madagascar in 1940. For the brutality of his methods, Heydrich soon became known as "the hangman."

Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen undertook the mass murder of Russian Jews and Soviet officials during Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union. On July 31, 1941, Göring charged him with the task of devising a Gesamtlösung (total solution) to the Jewish question in Europe. Although the origins of the decision to systematically murder all of the Jews of Europe are still debated, Heydrich was responsible for drawing up the plans for the Final Solution. He revealed these plans to party and state officials at a meeting he convened at Wannsee in Berlin on January 20, 1942, to enlist their cooperation.

In September 1941 Heydrich was named Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and appointed Protector later that year. Attacked by Free Czech agents in an ambush near Prague on May, 27, 1941, he died of his wounds seven days later. In retaliation the SS destroyed the nearby Czech village of Lidice and killed its entire male population.

Heydrich's ruthless quest for power, perhaps more than his anti-Semitism, resulted in the murder of millions of Jews and other victims, and, ultimately, his own violent death.

SEE ALSO Gestapo; Germany; Kristallnacht; SS; Wannsee Conference

Francis R. Nicosia