HHhH

A train pulls into the station. In the immense hall of Victoria Station, Colonel Moravec waits on the platform, accompanied by a few other exiled compatriots. A man gets off the train: a serious-looking little man with a mustache and a receding hairline. It’s Benes, the former president who resigned the day after Munich. But today— July 18, 1939, the date of his arrival in London—he is above all the man who declared, the day after Hacha’s surrender, that the First Czechoslovak Republic still existed, in spite of the attack it had suffered. “The German divisions,” he said, “swept up the concessions torn from us by our enemies and by our allies in the name of peace, justice, and good sense, the gentle reasons invoked at the time of the 1938 crisis. Now the Czechoslovak territory is occupied. But the Republic is not dead. It will continue to fight, even from beyond its own borders.” Benes, seen by Czechoslovak patriots as the only legitimate president, wants to form a provisional government-in-exile as quickly as possible. A year before the Appeal of June 18, Benes is a bit like a combination of de Gaulle and Churchill. The spirit of the Resistance is in him.

Unfortunately, it is not yet Churchill who guides the destiny of Britain and the world but the vile Chamberlain, a man whose spinelessness is equaled only by his blindness. He has sent a lowly Foreign Ministry employee to welcome the former president. And the pen pusher’s welcome is not particularly warm either. Barely is Benes off the train before he is notified of the conditions of his exile: Great Britain agrees to grant him political asylum only on the express condition that he promises to refrain from all political activity. Benes, who is recognized as the de facto head of the liberation movement both by his friends and his enemies, takes the insult with his customary dignity. He, more than anyone else, will have to put up with Chamberlain’s contemptuous stupidity—and he will do it with absolutely superhuman stoicism. If for this reason only, his historical reputation is almost more imposing than de Gaulle’s.

94

It’s now fourteen days since the SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Alfred Naujocks arrived incognito in the little town of Gleiwitz, on the German-Polish border in German Silesia. The operation has been meticulously planned; now he waits. Heydrich called him yesterday at midday to ask him to check the final details with “Gestapo” Muller, who came in person, and who is staying in the neighboring village of Oppeln. Muller is supposed to provide him with what they call the Konserve (“canned goods”).

It’s 4:00 a.m. when the phone rings in his hotel room. He answers, and is told to call back to Wilhelmstrasse. At the other end of the line, Heydrich’s shrill voice tells him: “Grandmother is dead.” This is the signal: Operation Tannenberg can begin. Naujocks rounds up his men and goes to the radio station that he plans to attack. But before the action starts, he must give each member of the expedition a Polish uniform. He must also receive the Konserve: a prisoner expressly freed from a concentration camp. This man, too, is dressed as a Polish soldier—unconscious but still alive, although Muller, following orders, has given him a lethal injection.

The attack begins at 8:00 a.m. The employees are easily neutralized, and a few gunshots are fired in the air as a matter of form. The Konserve is left lying across the doorway, as evidence of the Polish attack, and it is almost certainly Naujocks who finishes him off with a bullet in the heart (a bullet in the back of the neck smacks too much of execution, and a bullet in the head risks delaying identification), even if he will never admit it at his trial. Now they have to broadcast the speech in Polish, prepared by Heydrich. One of the SS guards, chosen for his linguistic abilities, is given the job of reading it out. The trouble is that no one knows how to work the radio. Naujocks gets a bit panicky, but in the end they manage to transmit it. The announcement is read out in a feverish Polish. It’s a short speech declaring that Poland, provoked by Germany, has decided to launch an attack. The transmission lasts less than four minutes. In any case, the transmitter is not powerful enough and, save for a few small border towns, nobody hears it. Who cares? Naujocks does, having been warned beforehand by Heydrich: “If you fail, you die. And me, too, perhaps.”

But Hitler has what he needs, and he couldn’t care less about the technical difficulties. A few hours later he makes a speech to the Reichstag deputies: “Last night, Polish soldiers opened fire for the first time on German soil. This morning, Germany retaliated. From now on, bombs will be met by bombs.”

The Second World War has just begun.

95

It is in Poland that Heydrich unveils his most devilish creation. The Einsatzgruppen are special SS troops, made up of SD and Gestapo members, whose job is to clean up the zones occupied by the Wehrmacht. Each unit is given a little booklet containing the necessary information: in tiny characters, on extrathin paper, is a list of all those who must be liquidated as the country is occupied. Not only Communists but also teachers, writers, journalists, priests, industrialists, bankers, civil servants, merchants, wealthy farmers… everyone of any note. Thousands of names are listed, with their addresses and telephone numbers, plus a list of known acquaintances—in case these subversive elements attempt to take refuge with parents or friends. Each name is accompanied by a physical description and sometimes even a photo. Heydrich’s information services have already achieved an impressive level of efficiency.

However, this meticulousness is probably a bit superfluous considering the behavior of the troops, who shoot first and ask questions later. Among the first victims of the Polish campaign are a group of Scouts, aged twelve to sixteen. They are lined up against a wall in the market square and shot. The priest who sacrifices himself to perform their last rites is also executed. Only afterward do the Einsatzgruppen take care of their real objectives: the merchants and local notables, who are, in their turn, lined up and shot. Essentially, the work of the Einsatzgruppen—a detailed written account of which would take up thousands of pages—can be summed up in three terrible letters: etc. Until they reach the USSR, at least: at that point, even et cetera’s suggestion of infinity will not be enough.

96

It’s incredible. Almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there—at the center of everything.

On September 21, 1939, he sends a personally signed letter to all the relevant services about the “Jewish problem in the occupied territories.” This letter concerns the roundup of Jews into ghettos, and orders the creation of Jewish councils—the infamous Judenrate—under the direct authority of the RSHA. The Judenrat is undoubtedly inspired by Eichmann’s ideas as Heydrich saw them applied in Austria: the key is to make the victims collaborate in their own murder. Despoiled yesterday, destroyed tomorrow.

97

On September 22, 1939, Himmler’s creation of the RSHA becomes official.

The RSHA—the central office of Reich security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt)—brings together the SD, the Gestapo, and the Kripo in one monstrous organization whose powers are beyond imagining. The head of this organization, nominated by Himmler, is Heydrich. Espionage, political police, and criminal police, all placed in the hands of one man. They may as well just have named him officially “the most dangerous man in the Third Reich.” In any case, this quickly became his nickname. Only one police force is not controlled by him: the Ordnungpolizei, the uniformed police whose task is to maintain order, is given to a nobody called Daluge, directly answerable to Himmler. It is a trifle compared with the rest, but Heydrich, in his thirst for power, is not the type of man to ignore