elementary school-teacher, certainly not a man of violence. I could not for the life of me see anything outstanding or extraordinary about this middle-sized, youthfully slender man in gray S.S. uniform. Under a brow of average height two gray-blue eyes looked out at me, behind glittering pince-nez, with an air of peaceful interrogation. The trimmed moustache below the straight, well-shaped nose traced a dark line on his unhealthy, pale features. The lips were colorless and very thin. Only the inconspicuous, receding chin surprised me. The skin ofhis neck was flaccid and wrinkled. With a broadening of his constant, set smile, faintly mocking and sometimes contemptuous about the corners of the mouth, two rows of excellent white teeth appeared between the thin lips. His slender, pale, and almost girlishly soft hands, covered with blue veins, lay motionless on the table throughout our conversation.â
Chapter 3
Heydrich and the S.D.
Willy hoettl, alias Walter Hagen, an intelligent but rather prolix Lieutenant Colonel in the S.D., a prosecution witness at Nuremberg, and the author of a book on the German Secret Service, has contributed largely to the confused impression of Himmler by attributing all his remarkable achievements to Reinhard Heydrich. He makes the common mistake of confusing power with dynamism.
Dynamism Heydrich had in plenty. It is scarcely open to doubt that he used Himmlerâs inoffensive person and hesitant ways as a camouflage for his own highly purposeful activities. It is still less open to doubt that Himmler frequently used Heydrich when Heydrich thought he was using Himmler. This is not to say that superficially at least Heydrich was not a stronger man than Himmler, or that he did not conceive highly dangerous ambitions sooner than Himmler. But it is permissible to doubt very strongly indeed the assumption so often canvassed by surviving members of the S.S. that Heydrich, had he lived, would have one day become the new German Fuehrer. He would certainly have tried it on. But Himmler would as certainly have seen to it that before he succeeded he would have broken his neck.
The only thing interesting about Heydrich was the extreme to which he carried certain traits widely admired in Germany, when presented with some moderation, but not attractive to others. He was very young, very handsome, save that his eyes were too close-set; an outstanding example of that blond mixture of effeminacy and toughness which may be observed in any Teutonic night club. He had immense drive, which was liable to carry him too far;total ruthlessness in the attainment of his own ends, which were wrapped up in personal ambition; no active enjoyment of cruelty except sometimes, perhaps, almost as an afterthought; and a devilish sense of humour. Vain as a peacock, but mockingly aware of his own vanity, clever, perhaps too clever by half, and contemptuous of the clumsiness of most of his colleagues and superiors, he nevertheless could be clumsy in his use of force and, unlike Himmler, was liable to overreach himself. He was dynamite, like a character in an American gangster story; and in the S.S. he was able to canalize his nihilism into a constructive purpose.
He had started life as a naval officer and, at the age of twenty-six, with a promising career before him, was cashiered by Admiral Raeder for getting the daughter of a dockyard superintendent into trouble and taking an unusually independent line about it. The girl was his official fiancée, but he had had enough of her and told her outraged father that the engagement was off: no self-respecting Naval officer, he pointed out, could conceivably marry a girl who was prepared to give herself away so easily. Plenty of cads, however, have lived and died without becoming mass executioners; and this disreputable incident in Heydrichâs life seems to be made too much of by German writers as a formative incident. It is rather a typical incident in a character already