HHhH

everything he knows about the subject. This is limited mainly to what he’s remembered from the English spy novels he’s been reading for years. What the hell! Heydrich has figured out that Himmler knows even less about intelligence than he does, so he decides to bluff. He sketches out a few diagrams, taking care to use lots of military terms. And it works. Himmler is impressed. Forgetting his other candidate, the Weimar double agent, he hires the young man for a salary of 1,800 marks per month, six times more than he’s been earning since being kicked out of the navy. Heydrich is going to move to Munich. The foundations of the sinister SD are laid.

29

SD: Sicherheitsdienst, the security service. The least-known and the most sinister of all Nazi organizations. Including the Gestapo.

To begin with, though, it’s just a small, underfunded agency: Heydrich keeps his first files in shoe boxes, and has only half a dozen agents. But already he’s got into the spirit of intelligence work: know everything about everyone. Without exception. As the SD extends its web, Heydrich will discover that he has an unusual gift for bureaucracy, the most important quality for the management of a good spy network. His motto could be: Files! Files! Always more files! In every color. On every subject. Heydrich gets a taste for it very quickly. Information, manipulation, blackmail, and spying become his drugs.

Add to this a rather childish megalomania. Having got wind that the head of the British intelligence service calls himself M (yes, like in James Bond), he decides in all seriousness to call himself H. It is in some ways his first proper alias, before the great era of nicknames: “the Hangman,” “the Butcher,” “the Blond Beast,” and—this one given by Adolf Hitler himself—“the Man with the Iron Heart.”

I don’t believe that “H” ever became a popular nickname among his men (they preferred the more graphic “Blond Beast”). There were too many eminent Hs above him, creating the risk of some regrettable mix-ups: Heydrich, Himmler, Hitler… he must have dropped this childish affectation himself, out of prudence. But H for Holocaust… that might very well have worked as the title of a bad biography.

30

Natacha flicks through the latest issue of Magazine litteraire, which she kindly bought for me. She stops at the review of a book about the life of Bach, the composer. The article begins with a quote from the author: “Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, ‘Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking’?” She smiles as she reads this to me.

I don’t immediately grasp the full meaning of the phrase and, faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk! Then I ask her to pass me the magazine and I reread the sentence. I am forced to admit that I would quite like to possess this kind of detail about Heydrich. Natacha laughs openly: “Oh yes, I can just see it: Heydrich used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking!”

31

In the imagination of the Third Reich’s sycophants, Heydrich has always exemplified the Aryan ideal— because he was tall and blond and he had fairly delicate features. In the more gushing biographies he is generally described as a handsome man, a charming seducer. If they were honest—or less blinded by the dark fascination they feel for everything to do with Nazism—they would see, by looking more closely at the photos, not only that Heydrich was no oil painting but that he also had certain physical traits that are hardly compatible with the demands of Aryan classification: thick lips, admittedly not without a certain sensuality, but of a type that might almost be described as negroid, and a long prominent nose that could easily pass as hooked if it belonged to a Jew. Add to this a pair of large and fairly stuck-out ears and a long face generally agreed to look a bit horsey, and you obtain a result that, while not necessarily ugly, falls way short of Gobineau’s ideal. [2]

32

The Heydrichs, newly installed in a nice apartment in Munich that Lina loves (I admit it, I ended up buying her book, and I’ve had it indexed by a young Russian student who grew up in Germany—I could have found a German, but it’s fine this way), have prepared a meal fit for a king. This evening, Himmler is coming to dinner, along with another eminent guest: Ernst Rohm, head of the SA. He looks like a pig, with his round belly, his big head, his little deep-set eyes, his thick neck ringed with a roll of fat, and his mutilated nose turned up like a snout—a souvenir of the First World War. Proud of his soldier’s manners, Rohm is also in the habit of behaving like a pig. But he’s the head of an irregular army of more than 400,000 Brownshirts and it’s said that he’s on first-name terms with Hitler. In the eyes of the Heydrichs, therefore, he is perfectly commendable. And in fact, it’s a very merry evening. They laugh a lot. After a delicious meal cooked by the lady of the house, the men feel like having a smoke and a nightcap. Lina brings them matches and goes down to the cellar to find some brandy. Suddenly, she hears an explosion. She rushes upstairs and realizes what’s happened: in her excitability at serving these eminent guests, she mixed up the ordinary matches with the exploding New Year’s matches. Hilarity ensues. All that’s missing is the canned laughter.

33

Gregor Strasser is an old friend of Hitler’s. A member of the NSDAP since its inception, he runs the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Berlin newspaper he set up when he got out of prison in 1925. Because of his prestige and position, certain matters are deferred to him. There is a dispute that cannot be settled by the local Party section. In 1932, accusing an SS officer is not without risks, even for a high-ranking Nazi, and the Schutzstaffel’s growing reputation invites caution. This is why the Gauleiter of Halle-Merseburg prefers to hand over this delicate matter to Strasser: in an old edition of a musical encyclopedia, there is an entry on “Heydrich, Bruno, real name Suss.”

So Himmler’s new protege might be the son of a Jew! Gregor Strasser, probably wishing to prove that he is still a man to be reckoned with, orders an inquiry. Does he want to take the scalp of this rising star? Does he feel the need to polish his own reputation, now going dull within the party he helped to found? Is it a genuine fear of seeing the Jewish virus infect the heart of the Nazi machine? In any case, a report is sent to Munich and it lands on Himmler’s desk.

Himmler is dismayed, of course. He has already sung the praises of his young recruit to the Fuhrer, and he fears for his own credibility if the accusation is proven. He follows the Party’s inquiry with great attention. The suspicions concerning the paternal branch of Heydrich’s family must have been abandoned fairly quickly: the name Suss belonged to Heydrich’s grandmother’s second husband, so there is no direct genetic link—and anyway the man wasn’t Jewish, despite his surname. Then again, the inquiry may have led to doubts over the purity of the maternal branch. Due to a lack of evidence, Heydrich ends up being officially exonerated. But Himmler wonders if it wouldn’t be better to get rid of him anyway, because he knows that from now on Heydrich will remain at the mercy of rumors. On the other hand, Heydrich’s activities in the SS have already made him, if not indispensible, at least very promising. Unsure of what to do, Himmler decides to seek the advice of the Fuhrer himself.