Reinhard Heydrich - Role in The Holocaust

Role in The Holocaust

Historians regard Heydrich as the most fearsome member of the Nazi elite; Hitler called him "the man with the iron heart". He was one of the main architects of the Holocaust during the early war years, answering only to, and taking orders from, Hitler, Göring, and Himmler in all matters that pertained to the deportation, imprisonment, and extermination of Jews.

Heydrich was one of the organisers of Kristallnacht, a pogrom against Jews throughout Germany on the night of 9–10 November 1938. Heydrich sent a telegram that night to various SD and Gestapo offices, helping to coordinate the program with the SS, SD, Gestapo, uniformed police (Orpo), SA, Nazi party officials, and even the fire departments. It talks about permitting arson and destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues, and orders the taking of all "archival material" out of Jewish community centres and synagogues. The telegram ordered that "as many Jews – particularly affluent Jews – are to be arrested in all districts as can be accommodated in existing detention facilities ... Immediately after the arrests have been carried out, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted to place the Jews into camps as quickly as possible." Twenty-thousand Jews were sent to concentration camps in the days immediately following; historians consider Kristallnacht the beginning of the Holocaust.

When Hitler asked for a pretext for the invasion of Poland in 1939, Himmler, Heydrich, and Heinrich Müller masterminded a false flag plan code-named Operation Himmler. It involved a fake attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz on 31 August 1939. Heydrich worked out the operation plan and toured the site, which was about four miles from the Polish border. Wearing Polish uniforms, 150 German troops carried out a group of attacks along the border. Hitler used the ruse as an excuse to launch his invasion.

On 21 September 1939 Heydrich sent out a teleprinter message on the "Jewish question in the occupied territory" to the chiefs of all Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police. It contained instructions on how to round up Jewish people for placement into ghettos, called for the formation of Judenräter (Jewish councils), ordered a census, contained Aryanization plans for Jewish-owned businesses and farms, and discussed other measures. The Einsatzgruppen followed the army into Poland for this purpose. Later, in the Soviet Union, they were charged with rounding up and killing Jews via firing squad and gas vans. By the end of the war, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered over one million people, including over 700,000 in Russia alone.

"... the planned total measures are to be kept strictly secret ... the first prerequisite for the final aim ("Endziel") is the concentration of the Jews from the countryside into the larger cities." – Heydrich, September 1939

"By order of the Reichsführer-SS, residency without possession of an identification card is punishable by death" – Heydrich, November 1939

On 29 November 1939 he sent out a cable regarding the "Evacuation of New Eastern Provinces", describing details of the deportation of people by railway to concentration camps, and giving guidance surrounding the December 1939 census, which would be the basis on which those deportations were performed. In May 1941, Heydrich drew up regulations with Quartermaster general Eduard Wagner for the upcoming invasion of the Soviet Union that ensured that the Einsatzgruppen and army would cooperate in murdering Soviet Jews.

On 10 October 1941 Heydrich was the senior officer at a meeting in Prague that discussed deporting 50,000 Jewish people from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to ghettos in Minsk and Riga. Also discussed was the taking of 5,000 Jewish people from Prague "in the next few weeks" and handing them over to the Einsatzgruppen commanders Arthur Nebe and Otto Rasch. The creation of ghettos in the Protectorate was planned, which resulted in the construction of Theresienstadt, where 33,000 people would eventually die. Tens of thousands more would pass through the camp on their way to their deaths in the East. In 1941 Himmler named Heydrich as "responsible for implementing" the forced movement of 60,000 Jewish people from Germany and Czechoslovakia to the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto in Poland.

On 20 January 1942 Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which he presented to the heads of a number of German Government departments a plan for the deportation and transporting of 11 million Jewish people from every country in Europe, to be worked to death or killed outright in extermination camps.

Under suitable direction, the Jews should be brought to the East in the course of the Final Solution, for use as labour. In large labour gangs, with the sexes separated, the Jews capable of work will be transported to those areas and set to road-building, in the course of which, without doubt, a large part of them ("ein Großteil") will fall away through natural losses. The surviving remnant, surely those with the greatest powers of resistance, will be given special treatment, since, if freed, they would constitute the germinal cell for the re-creation of Jewry. — from Heydrich's speech at the Wannsee Conference, January 1942