Reinhard Heydrich was born on March 7, 1904, into an ordinary middle-class family. His father, Richard, was an opera singer and composer. The young Heydrich played the violin and took part in sports such as fencing and swimming.
His father was not very political but was staunchly nationalistic, with great reverence for the state and the Kaiser. After Germany's defeat in World War I, Richard Heydrich struggled as the country's economy worsened. Post-war Germany was filled with right-wing and left-wing revolutionary groups.
At 15, Reinhard reportedly joined one of the many Freikorps, right-wing paramilitaries made up of former soldiers. These groups fought communist revolutionaries in the streets, though it is unlikely the 15-year-old Heydrich actually fought.
After finishing his education, Heydrich did not follow in his father's footsteps. Instead, he joined the German Navy in 1922. During his training, rumors circulated that he was of Jewish ancestry, a rumor that followed him for some time and cast doubt on his loyalty to Germany.
Many in post-war Germany blamed Jews for the country's defeat in World War I. Heydrich nevertheless rose through the ranks, becoming a communications officer and reaching the position of first lieutenant.
During his time in the Navy, Heydrich had a number of affairs with women, promising to marry them. One such woman's father, a high-ranking naval officer, took offense that Heydrich had promised to marry his daughter before announcing his actual engagement. For acting in a manner unbecoming of an officer, Heydrich was dishonorably discharged.
The woman Heydrich had actually proposed to was named Lina von Osten. She soon found work for her unemployed fiancé. Lina was already a member of the Nazi Party when she met Heydrich, and her brother was also a member of a Nazi paramilitary group called the Sturmabteilung, or SA.
Through her connections, Heydrich obtained an interview for a position working under the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. At the time, the SS was only a small bodyguard unit, but Himmler wanted to grow the organization.
Himmler thought Heydrich had worked in the intelligence services. During the interview, Heydrich inflated his own experience and secured a position in the fledgling SS with the task of setting up an intelligence service. This would become known as the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD.
After Hitler's appointment as chancellor of Germany in January 1933, Heydrich was tasked with gathering blackmail and information on the Nazis' political opponents. Such actions helped the Nazis limit their opponents and slightly increase their share of the vote in March 1933.
Heydrich and Himmler sought to consolidate power by taking control of the Bavarian police force and taking over the Gestapo from Hermann Göring. All the while, the terror apparatus of the Nazi regime was coming into being, notably the concentration camps, starting with a camp at Dachau.
Mass arrests of communists, trade unionists, and social democrats were carried out, with many ending up in these camps. Some 20,000 people were arrested in the early months of the regime, rounded up by the SA and identified by Heydrich's ever-growing secret police force.
As the Nazi Party consolidated power and normalized itself with the German establishment, the question of the SA's power was a constant concern. At over 2 million strong at its peak, it outnumbered the German Army and presented itself as a revolutionary force.
Its leader, Ernst Röhm, had even suggested that the Army be replaced with the SA. But other leading Nazis realized they needed to keep the German establishment on side. Heydrich, Himmler, Göring, and Joseph Goebbels plotted the destruction of the SA and its leadership, with the SD drawing up lists of those to be eliminated.
Evidence of Röhm's plan to supplant Hitler was fabricated by the SS. The SS then played a key role in the executions and arrests during what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. The outcome was a reduction in the SA's power and the rise of the SS as the key organization within the Nazi regime.
Heydrich, as Himmler's right-hand man, continued his meteoric rise through the Nazi power structures. Following the murder of a German diplomat by a Jewish teenager in Paris, Heydrich played a crucial role in the subsequent pogrom known as the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht.
Thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed and looted, and hundreds were killed by apparent spontaneous acts of violence carried out by ordinary German citizens. In reality, much of the violence was carried out by Nazi Party members or SA members, both in and out of uniform.
Behind the scenes, Heydrich coordinated the violence with the Gestapo, SD, and police. He ordered members of his police forces to break into synagogues and obtain the archives and information held on Jews in Germany. Some 20,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, many of whom were murdered.
Heydrich had again shown his organizational capabilities, the reach of his security apparatus, and his desire to eliminate the Jews. One of his key philosophies was that the Nazi regime faced a number of internal threats, the main threat being that posed by Jews.
From 1939, the SD and the police were formally linked together and placed under Heydrich's command. People could be arrested on the basis that they might commit a crime, often ending up in concentration camps framed as being placed in protective custody.
Thousands were arrested and detained. Homosexuals, Roma, and religious people who opposed the Nazi regime were all targeted to rid the Nazis of any internal threat. But the key threat identified by the Nazi Party was the Jews, both within Germany and without, in what they termed Judeo-Bolshevism.
Some of the first attempts to deal with the Jewish question involved the forced expulsion of Jews from Austria, a program headed by Heydrich's SD. The man in charge of this office was an SS lieutenant named Adolf Eichmann, who would go on to play a major role in organizing the logistics of the Holocaust.
Eichmann and the SD oversaw the expulsion of Austrian Jews, who were sent to Jewish ghettos in Poland. This was a way to concentrate Jews before deciding how they would be dealt with, while removing them from society. From these ghettos, Jews would ultimately be transported to various concentration camps built to house them until death.
Heydrich was impressed with Eichmann's initiative, elevating the lieutenant through the ranks. Eichmann became his right-hand man. The Einsatzgruppen was another group created by Himmler and Heydrich.
The Einsatzgruppen were mobile units of fanatical Nazis who operated behind the German Army, carrying out massacres of Jews, Slavs, and communists. They were used in Austria, following the invasion of Poland, and at the start of World War II.
In what was termed the Intelligenzaktion, tens of thousands of Polish immigrants were identified, rounded up, and executed. Teachers, lawyers, members of the establishment, religious leaders, and intellectuals were targeted as a means to destroy the Polish national identity and reduce the chance of any meaningful resistance movement.
A list of some 61,000 people was prepared before the invasion, but in all around 100,000 people were murdered. This was a sign of the methods to come, notably in how the Jews were dealt with by the Nazi regime. The methods employed against the Polish intelligentsia would be used again in 1941 during the invasion of the Soviet Union.
The Nazi goals of creating a vast living space in the East and the destruction of Judeo-Bolshevism would be met with the invasion. Heydrich, like many Nazis, believed that Jews and communism were biologically linked and that the destruction of the Jewish people would also destroy communism.
Again, the Einsatzgruppen followed behind the German Army, with their logistical support. They were tasked with the destruction of all partisan forces and Communist Party members. Jews, however, were classed as partisans regardless of their affiliation, age, or gender.
Children, the elderly, men, and women were all rounded up, transported to often pre-dug graves, and shot. Those who were not massacred would be concentrated into ghettos while it was decided just what would be done with them. In the first six months from the start of the invasion of the Soviet Union, anywhere from 800,000 to 1 million people were massacred by Heydrich's Einsatzgruppen.
As Nazi forces pushed east and more and more Jews were swept up in the advance, the methods employed to deal with the Jews were deemed insufficient. The manpower, resources, and physical effort on those carrying out the massacres were seen as too high a cost.
When Himmler visited a mass execution of Jews near Minsk in August 1941, he vomited at the site. More convenient methods of execution were ordered. Previous experiments with gas vans, where at first the mentally ill were sealed into the back of vans with exhaust fumes pumped in, proved to be the solution that would be employed.
Heydrich was tasked with coming up with the final answer to the Jewish question. In January 1942, 15 of the highest-ranking Nazi officials attended the Wannsee Conference, with Heydrich playing a lead role. The purpose of this meeting was to come up with a final solution to the Jewish question, meaning just how the Nazis would eradicate the Jewish people in Europe.
The meeting was filled with euphemistic terms about how the Jews would be dealt with. Adolf Eichmann, who attended and took notes, recorded that the 11 million Jews of Europe would be worked until they would fall out by natural means, which meant worked to death. The remainder, deemed the strongest in terms of natural selection, would be murdered.
It was in 1942 that steps were made to establish not only concentration camps but death camps. The now-infamous gas chambers were established in places like Treblinka and Auschwitz. This systematic murder of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and all those the Nazis declared had no place in their world was possible in no small part due to Reinhard Heydrich.
As well as playing a key role in the planning of the Holocaust, Heydrich was appointed deputy Reich protector of German-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, the territory of then Czechoslovakia. He was sent to heavy-handedly deal with the Czech resistance to the Nazi occupation.
The Czech resistance and the government in exile sought to disrupt the Nazi occupation and established themselves among the Allies. When Heydrich arrived, he established martial law and executed a number of resistance fighters. Thousands were arrested and massacred.
Czech culture was suppressed in favor of Germanic culture. Brutal violence and rewards for compliance were used to cement Nazi rule, but the goal from the very start was to pave the way for the displacement of Czechs to be replaced with ethnic Germans.
But for all his high-ranking status and crucial role in the Nazi state, Heydrich was incredibly complacent and arrogant about his own safety. He had flown as a fighter pilot during the Nazi invasion of Norway until he was banned from flying by Himmler after he crashed his plane behind enemy lines.
During his time in Prague, he often rode in an open-topped car with no security save for his driver. This was despite Himmler's express orders to take his security seriously after witnessing firsthand his lax attitude. Heydrich posed a tempting target for the Czech government in exile, eager to prove themselves legitimate to the Allies while striking a blow to the Nazi oppressors.
Working with the British, Operation Anthropoid was launched to assassinate Heydrich. Czech soldiers were trained by the British, supplied with Sten guns and grenades, and dropped into Prague in December 1941. The two men heading the operation were Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík.
They studied Heydrich's routine, the route his car would take, and where it would be best to launch an attack. The location selected was a hairpin bend on a road to his headquarters. This would mean Heydrich's car would crawl at a slow speed, allowing the assassins to strike.
On May 27, 1942, the Czech assassins took up their positions and waited for Heydrich to arrive. As the car approached, Gabčík took aim with his Sten submachine gun, but the gun jammed. Rather than escaping, Heydrich ordered his driver to stop the car so he could stand up and shoot them with his sidearm.
Meanwhile, Kubiš was able to make his way to the car unnoticed and threw a modified grenade designed to explode on impact. The grenade landed near the rear wheel of the car. The explosion tore through the right rear fender, and shrapnel from the grenade, car, and seat ripped through Heydrich's spleen, diaphragm, and lung.
As the assassins fled, Heydrich was transported to a local hospital. The attack was met with outrage and dismay from the Nazi leadership, with both Himmler and Hitler's personal doctors dispatched to help with his recovery. Attempts were made to save Heydrich, and despite signs of improvement, he died on June 4, 1942.
The cause of death is thought to have been sepsis, believed to have been caused by a horse hair that became lodged inside Heydrich. The hair in the upholstery of the car seat would have been shot into Heydrich during the explosion, leading to his death.
While Heydrich was buried with full honors, the people of Czechoslovakia faced huge reprisals. Hundreds were massacred in the town of Lidice, a town thought to be home to many of the Czech Army in exile. As many as 5,000 people were murdered in response to Heydrich's death.
As for the assassins, they went into hiding, but as the Nazis threatened to massacre even more civilians, it became increasingly difficult to remain hidden. The location of a number of resistance safe houses was given to the Gestapo, who in turn carried out raids.
In a grim example of the methods employed to locate the assassins, a 17-year-old was shown the severed head of his own mother. This was done to break his resolve and reveal the location of the resistance fighters responsible.
Eventually, the assassins and a number of Czech resistance fighters were located hiding at the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius in Prague. All were either killed in the attempt to arrest them or took their own lives.
The death of Heydrich did not stop the Nazis from continuing their plans to exterminate millions of Jews. The year of Heydrich's death saw the largest number of people murdered during the Holocaust, as Operation Reinhard was in full swing.
The plan for the destruction of the Jewish people was outlined in the Wannsee Conference and bore its architect's name long after his death. His close companion Adolf Eichmann would continue Heydrich's work, organizing much of the industrial-scale genocide.
Heydrich was ambitious and ruthless. He is arguably the man most responsible for what one thinks of when discussing Nazis. He played a crucial role in creating the oppressive police state, oversaw the rise of the SS, and was tasked with deciding just how Hitler's goals in the destruction of the Jewish people were to be implemented. The crimes and the victims of Reinhard Heydrich are many and ought never to be forgotten.