Himmler and Heydrich: Hitler’s Lieutenants

NY Times ^ | January 6, 2012 | JACOB HEILBRUNN

[iowamark]

In June 1942, Thomas Mann, who was living in exile in California, delivered a commentary on a German-language BBC radio program that decried the sanguinary actions of the Third Reich in avenging the assassination of the leading SS official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. After Heydrich’s elaborate funeral ceremony at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler screamed at the Czech president, Emil Hacha, “Nothing can prevent me from deporting millions of Czechs if they do not wish for peaceful coexistence.” It wasn’t an idle threat. “Since the violent death of Heydrich,” Mann lamented, “terror is raging everywhere, in a more sickly, unrestrained fashion than ever before. . . . An entire town, that supposedly sheltered the perpetrators, is massacred and razed.” Indeed, to honor Heydrich and help create what Hitler referred to as “Germany’s Garden of Eden” in the East, the Nazis chose the code name “Aktion Reinhard” for the extermination of two million people, most of whom were Jewish, in the General Government of Poland by the end of 1943.

None of Hitler’s paladins did more to realize the Final Solution than Heydrich and his superior Heinrich Himmler, who ran the SS and the Gestapo. This pair worked assiduously to expand their influence from modest beginnings to the establishment of the most powerful and fearsome security apparatus in the Nazi empire. Now two supremely enlightening biographies, Peter Longerich’s “Heinrich Himmler” and Robert Gerwarth’s “Hitler’s Hangman,” show how they did it. Longerich is a professor of history at the University of London and the author of several books on the Holocaust. Gerwarth is the director of the Center for War Studies at University College Dublin...

[Yorlik803]

Heydrich didnt have Jewish Blood. The rumor was spread by a student of Heydrich father who flunked him. They sued the man and he lost. The SS did something like three investigations and found nothing amiss in his bloodline.
Heydrich and Himmler were very close. Heydrich was the loyal hatchet man that Himmler needed.
Both were cold blooded SOB and rightfully deserve their places in hell.

[TheOldLady]

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[jmacusa]

No I meant exactly what I said as per the research I did. The SD was a kind of Military Police within the SS and it was Heydrich who ran it. He had a massive file of index cards of nearly everyone in the SS. The average German wasn’t his real concern. The real power lay in who it was in the hierarchy he could get something on.

[AlmaKing]

Certainly. What does that have to do with my opinion that folks have an obsession with Nazism, whether they are conservatives or liberals?

[dfwgator]

Operation Daybreak....they actually have the full movie on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkwVGqqqSGE