Profession and Vocation of Albert Speer

From the memoires of Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments for Hitler’s Nazi party. His book is entitled “Inside the Third Reich.” These are pages 12-21. It is very interesting to see the perspective of the "normal" German under the hypnotic influence of Hitler and how people responded to him. The chapters out of this book give a good insight into the character and influence of Hitler.

Profession and Vocation

I VERY NEARLY BECAME AN OFFICIAL COURT ARCHITECT AS EARLY AS 1928.

Aman Ullah, ruler of the Afghans, wanted to reform his country and was hiring young German technicians with that end in view. Joseph Brix, Professor of Urban Architecture and Road Building, organized the group. It was proposed that I would serve as city planner and architect and in addition as teacher of architecture at a technical school which was to be founded in Kabul. My wife and I pored over all available books on remote Afghanistan. We considered how a style natural to the country could be developed out of the simple existing structures, and the pictures of wild mountains filled us with dreams of ski tours. Favorable contractual conditions were worked out. But no sooner was everything virtually settled— the King had just been received with great honors by President Hindenburg— than the Afghans overthrew their ruler in a coup d'etat.

The prospect of continuing to work with Tessenow consoled me. I had been having some misgivings anyhow, and I was glad that the fall of Aman Ullah removed the need to make a decision. I had to look after my seminar only three days a week; in addition there were five months of academic vacation. Nevertheless I received 300 Reichsmark— about the equivalent in value of 800 Deutsche Mark* [$200] today. (All figures in DM do not take into account the 1969 revaluation of the mark. The reader can easily reckon the amounts in U.S. dollars by dividing DM figures by four.) Tessenow delivered no lectures; he came to the large seminar room only to correct the papers of his fifty-odd students. He was around for no more than four to six hours a week; the rest of the time the students were left in my care for instruction and correction.

The first months in particular were very strenuous for me. The students assumed a highly critical attitude toward me and tried to trap me into a show of ignorance or weakness. It took a while before my initial nervousness subsided. But the commissions for buildings, which I had hoped to spend my ample free time on, did not come my way. Probably I struck people as too young. Moreover, the construction industry was very slow because of the economic depression. One exception was the commission to build a house in Heidelberg for my wife's parents. It proved to be a modest building which was followed by two others of no great con- sequence-two garage annexes for Wannsee villas— and the designing of the Berlin offices of the Academic Exchange Service.

In 1930 we sailed our two faltboats from Donaueschingen, which is in Swabia, down the Danube to Vienna. By the time we returned, there had been a Reichstag election on September 14 which remains in my memory only because my father was greatly perturbed about it. The NSDAP (National Socialist Party) had won 107 seats and was suddenly the chief topic of political discussion.

My father had the darkest forebodings, chiefly in view of the NSDAFs socialist tendencies. He was already disturbed enough by the strength of the Social Democrats and the Communists.

Our Institute of Technology had in the meanwhile become a center of National Socialist endeavors. The small group of Communist architecture students gravitated to Professor Poelzig's seminar, while the National Socialists gathered around Tessenow, even though he was and remained a forthright opponent of the Hitler movement, for there were parallels, unexpressed and unintended, between his doctrine and the ideology of the National Socialists. Tessenow was not aware of these parallels. He would surely have been horrified by the thought of any kinship between his ideas and National Socialist views.

Among other things, Tessenow taught: "Style comes from the people. It is in our nature to love our native land. There can be no true culture that is international. True culture comes only from the maternal womb of a nation."  

Hitler, too, denounced the internationalization of art. The National Socialist creed held that the roots of renewal were to be found in the native soil of Germany.

Tessenow decried the metropolis and extolled the peasant virtues: The metropolis is a dreadful thing. The metropolis is a confusion of old and new. The metropolis is conflict, brutal conflict. Everything good should be left outside of big cities. . . . Where urbanism meets the peasantry, the spirit of the peasantry is ruined. A pity that people can no longer think in peasant terms." In a similar vein, Hitler cried out against the erosion of morals in the big cities. He warned against the ill effects of civilization which, he said, damaged the biological substance of the people. And he emphasized the importance of a healthy peasantry as a mainstay for the state.

Hitler was able to sense these and other currents which were in the air of the times, though many of them were still diffuse and intangible. He was able to articulate them and to exploit them for his own ends. In the process of my correcting their papers, the National Socialist students often involved me in political discussions. Naturally, Tessenow's ideas were passionately debated. Well trained in dialectics, these students easily crushed the feeble objections I could make, borrowed as they were from my father's vocabulary.

The students were chiefly turning to the extremists for their beliefs, and Hitler's party appealed directly to the idealism of this generation. And after all, was not a man like Tessenow also fanning these flames? About 1931 he had declared: "Someone will have to come along who thinks very simply. Thinking today has become too complicated. An un- cultured man, a peasant as it were, would solve everything much more easily merely because he would still be unspoiled. He would also have the strength to carry out his simple ideas."  To us this oracular remark seemed to herald Hitler.

Hitler was delivering an address to the students of Berlin University and the Institute of Technology. My students urged me to attend. Not yet convinced, but already uncertain of my ground, I went along. The site of the meeting was a beer hall called the Hasenheide. Dirty walls, narrow stairs, and an ill-kept interior created a poverty-stricken atmosphere. This was a place where workmen ordinarily held beer parties. The room was overcrowded. It seemed as if nearly all the students in Berlin wanted to see and hear this man whom his adherents so much admired and his opponents so much detested. A large number of professors sat in favored places in the middle of a bare platform. Their presence gave the meeting an importance and a social acceptability that it would not otherwise have had. Our group had also secured good seats on the platform, not far from the lectern.

Hitler entered and was tempestuously hailed by his numerous followers among the students. This enthusiasm in itself made a great impression upon me. But his appearance also surprised me. On posters and in caricatures I had seen him in military tunic, with shoulder straps, swastika armband, and hair flapping over his forehead. But here he was wearing a well-fitted blue suit and looking markedly respectable. Everything about him bore out the note of reasonable modesty. Later I learned that he had a great gift for adjusting— consciously or intuitively— to his surroundings.

As the ovation went on for minutes he tried, as if slightly pained, to check it. Then, in a low voice, hesitantly and somewhat shyly, he began a kind of historical lecture rather than a speech. To me there was something engaging about it— all the more so since it ran counter to everything the propaganda of his opponents had led me to expect: a hysterical demagogue, a shrieking and gesticulating fanatic in uniform. He did not allow the bursts of applause to tempt him away from his sober tone.

It seemed as if he were candidly presenting his anxieties about the future. His irony was softened by a somewhat self-conscious humor; his South German charm reminded me agreeably of my native region. A cool Prussian could never have captivated me that way. Hitler’s initial shyness soon disappeared; at times now his pitch rose. He spoke urgently and with hypnotic persuasiveness. The mood he cast was much deeper than the speech itself, most of which I did not remember for long.

Moreover, I was carried on the wave of the enthusiasm which, one could almost feel this physically, bore the speaker along from sentence to sentence. It swept away any skepticism, any reservations. Opponents were given no chance to speak. This furthered the illusion, at least momentarily, of unanimity. Finally, Hitler no longer seemed to be speaking to convince; rather, he seemed to feel that he was expressing what the audience, by now transformed into a single mass, expected of him. It was as if it were the most natural thing in the world to lead students and part of the faculty of the two greatest academies in Germany submissively by a leash. Yet that evening he was not yet the absolute ruler, immune from all criticism, but was still exposed to attacks from all directions.

Others may afterward have discussed that stirring evening over a glass of beer. Certainly my students pressed me to do so. But I felt I had to straighten things out in my own mind, to master my confusion. I needed to be alone. Shaken, I drove off into the night in my small car, stopped in a pine forest near the Havel, and went for a long walk.

Here, it seemed to me, was hope. Here were new ideals, a new understanding, new tasks. Even Spengler s dark predictions seemed to me refuted, and his prophecy of the coming of a new Roman emperor simultaneously fulfilled. The peril of communism, which seemed inexorably on its way, could be checked, Hitler persuaded us, and instead of hopeless unemployment, Germany could move toward economic recovery. He had mentioned the Jewish problem only peripherally. But such re- marks did not worry me, although I was not an anti-Semite; rather, I had Jewish friends from my school days and university days, like virtually everyone else.

A few weeks after this speech, which had been so important to me, friends took me to a demonstration at the Sportpalast. Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, spoke. How different my impression was: much phrase-making, careful structure, and incisive formulations; a roaring crowd whom Goebbels whipped up to wilder and wilder frenzies of enthusiasm and hatred; a witches' cauldron of excitement such as I had hitherto witnessed only at six-day bike races. I felt repelled; the positive effect Hitler had had upon me was diminished, though not extinguished.

Both Goebbels and Hitler had understood how to unleash mass instincts at their meetings, how to play on the passions that underlay the veneer of ordinary respectable life. Practiced demagogues, they succeeded in fusing the assembled workers, petites bourgeois, and students into a homogeneous mob whose opinions they could mold as they pleased. . . . But as I see it today, these politicians in particular were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences. Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler’s and Goebbels's baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme. To compensate for misery, insecurity, unemployment, and hopelessness, this anonymous assemblage wallowed for hours at a time in obsessions, savagery, license. This was no ardent nationalism. Rather, for a few short hours the personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. And Hitler and Goebbels threw them the victims. By lashing out at their opponents and vilifying the Jews they gave expression and direction to fierce, primal passions.

The Sportpalast emptied. The crowd moved calmly down Potsdamer Strasse. Their self-assurance fed by Goebbels's speech, they challengingly took up the whole width of the street, so that automobile traffic and the streetcars were blocked. At first the police took no action; perhaps they did not want to provoke the crowd. But in the side streets mounted squads and trucks with special patrols were held in readiness. At last the mounted police rode into the crowd, with raised truncheons, to clear the street.  Indignantly, I watched the procedure; until that moment I had never witnessed such use of force. At the same time I felt a sense of partisanship, compounded of sympathy for the crowd and opposition to authority, take possession of me. My feelings probably had nothing to do with political motives. Actually, nothing extraordinary had happened. There had not even been any injuries.

The following day I applied for membership in the National Socialist Party and in January 1931 became Member Number 474,481.

It was an utterly undramatic decision. Then and ever afterward I scarcely felt myself to be a member of a political party. I was not choosing the NSDAP, but becoming a follower of Hitler, whose magnetic force had reached out to me the first time I saw him and had not, thereafter, released me. His persuasiveness, the peculiar magic of his by no means pleasant voice, the oddity of his rather banal manner, the seductive simplicity with which he attacked the complexity of our problems— all that bewildered and fascinated me. I knew virtually nothing about his program. He had taken hold of me before I had grasped what was happening.

I was not even thrown off by attending a meeting of the racist Kampfbund Deutscher Kultur (League of Struggle for German Culture), although I heard many of the aims advocated by our teacher Tessenow roundly condemned. One of the speakers called for a return to old- fashioned forms and artistic principles; he attacked modernism and finally berated Der Ring, the society of architects to which Tessenow, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Scharoun, Mendelsohn, Taut, Behrens, and Poelzig belonged. Thereupon one of our students sent a letter to Hitler in which he took exception to this speech and spoke with schoolboyish ardor of our admired master. Soon afterward he received a routine letter from party headquarters to the effect that National Socialists had the greatest respect for the work of Tessenow. We laid great weight on that. However, I did not tell Tessenow at the time about my membership in the party.* (After 1933 all the accusations made against Tessenow at this meeting, as well as his connection with the publisher Cassirer and his circle, were cited as incriminating. He became politically suspect and was barred from teaching. But thanks to my privileged position, I was able to persuade the Minister of Education to have him reinstated. He kept his chair at the Berlin Institute of Technology until the end of the war. After 1945 his reputation soared; he was elected one of the first rectors of Berlin's Technical University. "After 1933, Speer soon became a total stranger to me," Tessenow wrote to my wife in 1950, "but I have never thought of him as anything but the friendly, good-natured person I used to know.")

It must have been during these months that my mother saw an SA parade in the streets of Heidelberg. The sight of discipline in a time of chaos, the impression of energy in an atmosphere of universal hopelessness, seems to have won her over also. At any rate, without ever having heard a speech or read a pamphlet, she joined the party. Both of us seem to have felt this decision to be a breach with a liberal family tradition. In any case, we concealed it from one another and from my father. Only years later, long after I had become part of Hitler’s inner circle, did my mother and I discover by chance that we shared early membership in the party.

Quite often even the most important step in a man’s life, his choice of vocation, is taken quite frivolously. He does not bother to find out enough about the basis and the various aspects of that vocation. Once he has chosen it, he is inclined to switch off his critical awareness and to fit himself wholly into the predetermined career.

My decision to enter Hitler's party was no less frivolous. Why, for example, was I willing to abide by the almost hypnotic impression Hitler's speech had made upon me? Why did I not undertake a thorough, systematic investigation of, say, the value or worthlessness of the ideologies of all the parties? Why did I not read the various party programs, or at least Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century?

As an intellectual I might have been expected to collect documentation with the same thoroughness and to examine various points of view with the same lack of bias that I had learned to apply to my preliminary architectural studies. This failure was rooted in my inadequate political schooling. As a result, I remained uncritical, unable to deal with the arguments of my student friends, who were predominantly indoctrinated with the National Socialist ideology.

For had I only wanted to, I could have found out even then that Hitler was proclaiming expansion of the Reich to the east; that he was a rank anti-Semite; that he was committed to a system of authoritarian rule; that after attaining power he intended to eliminate democratic procedures and would thereafter yield only to force. Not to have worked that out for myself; not, given my education, to have read books, magazines, and newspapers of various viewpoints; not to have tried to see through the whole apparatus of mystification— was already criminal. At this initial stage my guilt was as grave as, at the end, my work for Hitler. For being in a position to know and nevertheless shunning knowledge creates direct responsibility for the consequences— from the very beginning.

I did see quite a number of rough spots in the party doctrines. But I assumed that they would be polished in time, as has often happened in the history of other revolutions. The crucial fact appeared to me to be that I personally had to choose between a future Communist Germany or a future National Socialist Germany since the political center between these antipodes had melted away. Moreover, in 1931, I had some reason to feel that Hitler was moving in a moderate direction. I did not realize that there were opportunistic reasons for this. Hitler was trying to appear respectable in order to seem qualified to enter the government. The party at that time was confining itself— as far as I can recall today— to denouncing what it called the excessive influence of the Jews upon various spheres of cultural and economic life. It was demanding that their participation in these various areas be reduced to a level consonant with their percentage of the population. Moreover, Hitler's alliance with the old-style nationalists of the Harzburg Front led me to think that a contradiction could be detected between his statements at public meetings and his political views. I regarded this contradiction as highly promising. In actuality Hitler only wanted to thrust his way to power by whatever means he could.

Even after joining the party I continued to associate with Jewish acquaintances, who for their part did not break relations with me although they knew or suspected that I belonged to this anti-Semitic organization. At that time I was no more an anti-Semite than I became in the following years. In none of my speeches, letters, or actions is there any trace of anti-Semitic feelings or phraseology.

Had Hitler announced, before 1933, that a few years later he would burn down Jewish synagogues, involve Germany in a war, and kill Jews and his political opponents, he would at one blow have lost me and probably most of the adherents he wonafter 1930. Goebbels had realized that, for on November 2, 1931, he wrote an editorial in the Angriff entitled "Septemberlings" concerning the host of new members who joined the party after the September election of 1930. In this editorial he warned the party against the infiltration of more bourgeois intellectuals who came from the propertied and educated classes and were not as trustworthy as the Old Fighters. In character and principles, he maintained, they stood abysmally far below the good old party comrades, but they were far ahead in intellectual skills: "They are of the opinion that the Movement has been brought to greatness by the talk of mere demagogues and are now prepared to take it over themselves and provide it with leadership and expertise. That's what they think!"

In making this decision to join the accursed party, I had for the first time denied my own past, my upper-middle-class origins, and my previous environment. Far more than I suspected, the "time of decision" was already past for me. I felt, in Martin Buber's phrase, "anchored in responsibility in a party." My inclination to be relieved of having to think, particularly about unpleasant facts, helped to sway the balance. In this I did not differ from millions of others. Such mental slackness above all facilitated, established, and finally assured the success of the National Socialist system. And I thought that by paying my party dues of a few marks a month I had settled with my political obligations.

How incalculable the consequences were!

The superficiality of my attitude made the fundamental error all the worse. By entering Hitler's party I had already, in essence, assumed a responsibility that led directly to the brutalities of forced labor, to the destruction of war, and to the deaths of those millions of so-called un- desirable stock— to the crushing of justice and the elevation of every evil. In 1931 I had no idea that fourteen years later I would have to answer for a host of crimes to which I subscribed beforehand by entering the party. I did not yet know that I would atone with twenty-one years of my life for frivolity and thoughtlessness and breaking with tradition. Still, I will never be rid of that sin.

Suicides in the Weimar Republic

Part 1 of 4

The Weimar Background

I

On 27 December 1918, just a few weeks after Germany’s defeat, the scientist Richard Semon shot himself, wrapped in a German Imperial flag, in his Munich study. He was allegedly depressed by the German defeat.¹Justifying one’s suicide with reference to the defeat of 1918 was common among nationalist men in the war’s immediate aftermath, reflecting despair at Germany’s failure. In a similar case, Karl, the older brother of Baldur von Schirach, the later leader of the Hitler Youth, shot himself in November1918. Allegedly, as Baldur von Schirach wrote in his autobiography in which he tried to justify why he became a Nazi, Karl committed suicide because he did not want to ‘survive Germany’s misfortune’.² For these suicides, the German defeat, the revolution of 1918, and the shift from a largely authoritarian monarchy to a seemingly chaotic republic amounted to a vast upheaval of traditional norms and values. Their known world had ceased to exist. Here was suicide presented as an act of patriotism, reflecting the military tradition of shooting oneself to maintain one’s honour.

After 1918, contemporaries generally believed that times of general uncertainty, political disorder, and socio-economic hardship inevitably led to rising suicide levels. This obsession with rising suicide rates helped undermine the stability of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar background is crucial to an understanding of Nazi attitudes towards suicide in the Third Reich. The Nazis and other extremist political parties attacked the Weimar Republic by pointing to the high suicide rates. But not only extremist parties shared the belief that Weimar Germany was doomed with record suicide levels. Popular newspapers and ordinary people increasingly shared this notion. In order to understand how this assumption gradually turned into a mantra, we need to begin with a brief analysis of suicide levels and their contemporary perceptions. Then we will turn to various discourses on suicide and finally to individual acts of suicide.

At the turn of the century, newspapers began to link suicide with urbanization and modernization. Newspaper articles on suicide had carried headlines such as ‘Tragedy in the Big City’ or ‘Defeated in the Struggle for Survival’.³ Many thought that the defeat and revolution of 1918 and the Versailles Treaty had overthrown the existing order.

Observers pointed to rising suicide levels from the mid-1920s onwards. ‘Our country has been hit by an alarming suicide epidemic, which has reached a climax that has to be stopped by every means ... This is yet another representation of the enormously tragic fate of the German Volk.’⁴ Thus the Catholic Kolner Tageblatt claimed on 17 November 1925. Generally, contemporary observers not only blamed the defeat of 1918, the inflation and the Versailles Treaty for the increasing suicide levels, but also the impact of modernity and secularization.

Things were getting worse and suicide rates rose. The following 1925 article in Der Berliner Westen, a local paper, was typical:

In greater Berlin ... the terrible suicide epidemic ... is consistently causing casualties ... and it can be safely assumed that our people have not yet become    so brutalized and indifferent, despite war and bloodshed, mass murder, and revolution that voluntary death does not move people and genuine philanthropists to help ... Misery is great, and voluntary death persists. Each hour of failure makes us guilty, since other people’s suffering, even if caused by themselves, is a concern for everyone ...⁵

Acts of suicide should thus have prompted other Germans to help each other and strengthen their sense of community to prevent others from killing themselves. The statistics, however, suggested that this did not happen or, if it did, it did not work. Suicide rates carried on rising. The general rise, however, concealed wide variations between different age groups, and within these, between men and women.

During the First World War, the suicide rate dropped. According to Durkheim, wars have a lower suicide rate, since almost everyone is drawn into the war effort. This mobilization prompts a higher degree of social integration.⁶ Some argued that during the war, the state authorities in charge of registering suicides did not have the necessary staff resources to do so adequately. Writing in 1940, at a time when many Germans glorified the experience of the First World War, the psychiatrist Hans W Gruhle dismissed this claim and commended the ‘great communal experience’ of the war.⁷ Of course, during the war, front-line soldiers could easily commit suicide by exposing themselves to enemy fire, and such cases would not be recorded as suicide. This might offer a partial explanation as to why suicide levels fell during the war. Nevertheless, the rise from 1917 to 1919 and then 1921 is still striking, but we cannot say with complete certainty that the war alone really led to lower suicide levels.

A detailed study of suicide compiled by the municipal statistical office of Frankfurt am Main in 1932 revealed that suicide had become a more common way of dying since the end of the First World War. In 1913, only 1.15 per cent of all deaths in Germany had been suicides. But in 1931, 2.5 per cent of all deaths were suicides. August Busch, the author of this study, explained this rise with reference to a drop in other causes of death, such as tuberculosis, in the city, so that the usefulness of this particular measure is questionable.⁸

Female levels were much lower than male levels. However, throughout the Weimar years, female suicide rates were much higher than they had been in 1913. Male rates only began to rise significantly above pre-war levels in the final years of the Republic, despite a slight jump in 1926. More than 2 million young men had died on the battlefields and in the trenches, so elderly people, generally more prone to commit suicide than young people, formed a higher proportion of the general population.⁹ With the deaths of so many young men, the surplus of women in the population increased.

The unemployed were more likely to kill themselves than others, many commentators thought.¹⁰ In particular, unemployed men, especially fathers of families, were more likely to commit suicide than single women without a job. For men with families, unemployment did not just mean the simple loss of earnings. It had much wider social ramifications. Jobless fathers of families felt unable to fulfill their role as breadwinners for their families.

Such men thought that they had failed to conform to social expectations about what it meant to be a man.¹¹ In this devastating situation, many men committed suicide. Since the winter of 1925–6, unemployment figures had been rising, and for the rest of its existence, the Weimar Republic suffered from high unemployment. From 1929 millions of Germans were unemployed. The existing system of support could not cope, not even after crisis relief (Krisenunterstutzung) for those ineligible for unemployment relief (Erwerbslosenfursorge) was introduced in 1926. Most of the long-term unemployed thus had to rely on welfare relief, paid by local authorities, which was substantially lower than unemployment benefits. These cuts in welfare provision created a feeling of hopelessness and despair and prompted, as we will see, many welfare recipients to threaten to commit suicide. Victimization was a widespread feeling in Weimar Germany. Ordinary people saw themselves as victims of insufficient welfare provisions and the political and economic uncertainty, while their need for welfare support constantly rose at the same time.¹²

Of course, unemployment alone does not explain suicidal behaviour.¹³ Nevertheless, it seems obvious that it must have been a factor in the rising suicide rates of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1932, the medical doctor Karl Freudenberg argued that the overall suicide rate had not increased since 1918 as a result of the inflation and mass unemployment, but rather because of the different age structure, with more elderly people living in Germany, and a lower birth rate.¹⁴ Freudenberg commented on the suicide rate among the male population of employment age: ‘Despite the especially adverse conditions, the suicide rate is thus hardly higher than in 1913 ... This should prove that the main reasons for suicide do not lie in the environment.’¹⁵ A breakdown of suicide levels by age and sex surely invalidates this argument.

The following statistical analysis presents a broad survey of the quantitative extent of suicide in Weimar Germany. It furthermore enables us to identify potential distortions of suicide rates by commentators like Freudenberg and their reasons for deliberate misinterpretations of suicide rates. While conceding that many suicides were due to economic problems, an article in the liberal Berliner Tageblatt on 29 January 1932 concluded, based on a recent survey by the Berlin Statistical Office, that ‘these tragic reactions to a desperate economic situation have not increased so much in the years of crisis as is commonly assumed’.¹⁶ A closer analysis of suicide by age and sex yields some further conclusions. The more advanced the age, the higher the suicide rate.¹⁷ Suicide rates among young women did not increase significantly under the Weimar Republic: indeed they even fell slightly down to 1924. Although female suicide rates were higher than they had been before the war, they did not seem to be much affected by the ups and downs of the Weimar economy, except perhaps at the very end.¹⁸

Among 15- to 30-year-olds, both male and female rates were relatively consistent with pre-war levels. The lack of increasing rates among 15- to 30-year olds may conceal an increase among those in the twenties (a more precise generational breakdown is unfortunately not available). Rates were generally very low among adolescents. Young men’s energies may have been galvanized up to 1923 by crime and street violence in a general context in which political activity was on the rise among the young, although they probably did not affect a majority of them.

The increase in suicide levels in 1924 among young men was most probably due to the deflationary economic reforms that had brought the inflation to an end and the resulting sharp rise in unemployment. It became suddenly much more difficult to find a job.¹⁹ Men of working age had a higher suicide rate in 1924 and thereafter because of unemployment. Women’s suicide rates were higher in the 15- to 30- age bracket during the inflation, when women’s domestic role of finding food and shopping had come under considerable pressure, and jumped in 1923 when this role became almost impossible to fulfill. In 1924, the economic deflation and the consequent rise in unemployment for men coupled with the mass dismissal of female ‘double-earners’ had an almost equally severe effect. The great majority of young women still worked and earned wages only before they got married, so this age-group was especially vulnerable. Rising levels of suicide towards the end of the Republic may well have reflected rising female unemployment levels.²⁰

Suicide rates in the age group 30–60, where most men were working, or expected to work, and most women were bringing up children, or were engaged in the part-time, casual labor market, or both, were somewhat higher among those aged 30–60 than among 15- to 30-year olds in the early 1920s but became a great deal higher during the Great Depression.

Rates among men rose in 1924, leveling off in 1926–7, and after a small decline, increased again from 1929 onwards. This correlates neatly with the rise in unemployment during the post-inflationary stabilization, the years of relative prosperity from 1925 to 1928, and the sharp rise in unemployment from 1929. The mass unemployment from 1929 until 1932 is clearly behind the rise in rates among 30- to 60-year olds. So huge was unemployment that older dependents were now suffering too. Suicide rates of males at working age were substantially lower than in 1913 until the mass unemployment of the Great Depression in 1930. From 1924 to 1931, suicide rates of females at working age were much higher than in 1913 due to the rise in female employment and subsequent unemployment. Suicide rates also increased among women of working age, reflecting female employment patterns and a new understanding of gender roles. The female unemployment rate rose, though not as sharply as among men, during the Great Depression.²¹ This was also a difficult time for housewives, with the husband or father often unemployed, and economic crisis hitting the household.

Suicide rates in the age bracket 60–70 were generally two to three times higher than those in the age group 30–60; the gap narrowed during the Great Depression but was still substantial. The same pattern, though less marked than among the younger age groups, is noticeable here too, namely a decline in the ‘good years’ of the Weimar economy and a rise during the Great Depression. The same factors were probably at work here too—unemployment and living standards. Many of the people behind these statistics (those 65 and younger) were still of working age and were hit by unemployment, perhaps more severely than younger people as companies tended to make elderly, rather than young people, redundant. Women were hit particularly hard. Female pensioners were affected badly by the inflation of 1923, when many lost their assets and during the Great Depression when the government cut pensions.

Among those aged 70 and above, where almost everybody was a pensioner or a dependent, suicide rates rose sharply during the inflation. This rise most probably reflected the severe economic difficulties this caused for these people, with savings and pensions losing all value. The suicide rate here in 1923 was extraordinarily high among men in particular. Here too there was a decline in the mid-1920s and then a rise in the Great Depression years, though by no means as striking as that of the inflation.

There was also a religious divide of German suicide rates. In Bavaria, largely Protestant areas such as Middle Franconia had substantially lower rates than Catholic districts, such as Upper Bavaria. Probably trying to prevent people from comparing Bavarian suicide levels to others, the Bavarian Statistical Office did not publish suicide rates, but only absolute numbers. This makes a comparison to other Lander impossible. Some comparative material is available in the national statistics however. Protestant Saxony’s suicide rates were almost twice as high as Catholic Bavaria’s. Saxony was one of the most densely populated and most heavily industrialized German states and had traditionally carried very high suicide rates.²² Gruhle’s monograph on suicide offers some revealing numbers for Bavaria. From 1919 until 1921, there were 19.6 suicides per 100,000 of the population in Middle Franconia, similar to national levels. Only 27.01 per cent of the Mid-Franconian population was Catholic. In Upper Bavaria, with a 91.06 per cent Catholic population, on the other hand, there were only 16.8 suicides per 100,000 at the same time. Presumably, Munich suicides made up the largest proportion of Upper Bavarian suicides. Indeed, in 1922, 136 of the 251 Upper Bavarian suicides took place in Munich. Contemporaries saw big cities, as noted earlier, as creating a suicidal environment.²³ Furthermore, Gruhle noted: ‘In the countryside, it is much easier to conceal suicides and to pretend accidents and illness, while in cities, the statistical registration of suicide is more exact.’²⁴

Were Catholic suicide rates generally lower than Protestant rates? In Baden, a confessionally mixed area (38.2 per cent of Badeners were Protestant and 58.4 per cent Catholic), the average suicide rate for the years 1927 to 1935 was 31.2 per 100,000 for Protestants and a mere 18 for Catholics. Protestant levels broadly reflected the national average, while Catholic rates were substantially below it.²⁵ Protestant areas thus carried higher suicide rates than Catholic areas. The Catholic proscription against suicide was so strong that it either prevented Catholics from killing themselves or prompted relatives and doctors to conceal suicides.

Rural areas generally displayed lower suicide rates than towns. In the rural Buchen district of Baden, the average suicide rate for the years 1926 to 1935 was 10.3 per 100,000. The corresponding rate for the heavily industrialized and urban Mannheim district was 32.7.²⁶ Gruhle analyzed suicides in Prussian towns and concluded that the denser the population, the greater the suicide levels. In 1924, Berlin’s suicide rate was 45.4, while the average Prussian town with a population of 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants had an average suicide rate of 22 per 100,000.²⁷ This rate still exceeded rural suicide rates. Gruhle blamed cities for causing higher suicide rates because of ‘industrialization, more conflict and the dissolution of traditional milieus (church) and ... dubious, morally unstable persons’.²⁸ His statement reflected the anti-modern and anti-urban sentiment many contemporary observers shared, above all if they were writing in the Third Reich like Gruhle. Yet suicide rates were higher in towns than in villages. In villages, religious affiliations were generally greater than in cities, which might have prevented people from killing themselves.²⁹

Official suicide levels rose in the Weimar Republic. Amidst the ubiquity of public suicide discourses (discussed below), authorities may well have been more inclined to report suicides than they had been before 1918. However, the available evidence suggests that Weimar authorities largely used the same bureaucratic practices when compiling suicide rates as they had done in Imperial Germany.³⁰ The increase was therefore a real one. Female suicide levels rose considerably. Socio-economic factors clearly did matter. Suicide statistics reflected these changes, which affected people’s everyday lives. This rather detailed statistical analysis has identified broader motivations for suicide like socio-economic change and unemployment. Yet these statistics hardly shed light on people’s personal motivations for killing themselves.

Ernst Rohm Biography

Ernst Rohm

[Ernst Julius Röhm, (Munich November 28, 1887 – July 2, 1934) was a homosexual German army officer and Nazi leader. He was a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung ("assault battalion"; SA), the Nazi Party militia, and later was SA commander. In 1934, he was executed on Hitler's orders.]

QuotesIn a fascinating read of 204 well documented pages, the authors of The Pink Swastika track down the facts behind the homosexual movement’s current claims for Nazi-victim status. Divided into seven parts, the story opens as the new Nazi party is founded in the smoky din of the Bratwurstglockl, “a tavern frequented by homosexual roughnecks and bully-boys....a gay bar,” favored by Hitler’s closest comrade, Captain Ernst Rohm. Almost every biography of Hitler reports that Rohm was a flagrant homosexual and the only man Hitler called by the familiar “du.”
Hitler’s beloved Storm Trooper Chief and founder of the Brown Shirts, the authors note, had a “taste for young boys." Almost as close to Hitler as Rohm was Rudolph Hess, known for his dress-up attire as “‘Black Bertha’” in the gay bars of pre-war Berlin”. In fact, Mein Kampf was dedicated to Hess while Hitler was in prison. The Pink Swastika reports that Hitler was given power by a homosexual gang, a gang says Dr. Carroll Quigley, President bill Clinton’s college teacher and mentor, that subverted Germany’s free elections by underhanded and brutal strategies. THE PINK SWASTIKA AND HOLOCAUST REVISIONIST HISTORY by Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D.

Many of the highest-placed leaders in the Nazi party, including Hitler, Roehm, Forster, von Schirach and almost all of his bodyguards were gay. Hitler surrounded himself with homosexuals and even retrieved Roehm from Bolivia, making him Deputy Fuhrer. This knowledge enabled outside countries like Britain and ideologies like the Freemasons to control Hitler, his high command and his bodyguards. Hitler and his band of merry bandits became puppets with wooden strings. In this way, any foreign society can be destroyed with a leader hiding their sexuality. Hitler, Roehm, Forster and von Schirach took part in destroying their own societies while enjoying the power it gave them. Hitler was a double agent prime minister. He worked for a foreign country (Britain) and a foreign ideology (the Freemasons). The formula proved so effective it is still used today, in politics and the media, especially with TV personalities, radio announcers, prime ministers and presidents, both male and female. Hitler was a British Agent by Greg Hallett p.65

With Roehm's backing, Hitler became the first president of the party in 1921 (ibid.:21) and changed its name to the National Socialist German Worker's Party. Soon after, Rossbach's Storm Troopers, the SA, became its military arm. In his classic Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, author William Shirer describes Roehm as "a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar- faced professional soldier...[and] like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual"
......Betraying his roots in the "Butch" faction of the German "gay rights" movement, Roehm viewed homosexuality as the basis for a new society. Louis Snyder writes that Roehm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behavior pattern of high repute...he flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted that his cronies do the same. What was needed, Roehm believed, was a proud and arrogant lot who could brawl, carouse, smash windows, kill and slaughter for the hell of it. Straights, in his eyes, were not as adept in such behavior as practicing homosexuals" (Snyder:55). "The principle function of this army-like organization," writes historian Thomas Fuchs, "was beating up anyone who opposed the Nazis, and Hitler believed this was a job best undertaken by homosexuals" (Fuchs:48f). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

The Community of the Special (CS) asserted that male homosexuality was the foundation of all nation-states and that male homosexuals represented an elite strata of human society. The CS fashioned itself as a modern incarnation of the warrior cults of ancient Greece. Modeling themselves after the military heroes of Sparta, Thebes and Crete, the members of the CS were ultra-masculine, male-supremacist and pederastic (devoted to man/boy sex).
....One of the keys to understanding both the rise of Nazism and the later persecution of some homosexuals by the Nazis is found in this early history of the German "gay rights" movement. For it was the CS which created and shaped what would become the Nazi persona, and it was the loathing which these "Butches" held for effeminate homosexuals ("Femmes") which led to the internment of some of the latter in slave labor camps in the Third Reich. The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

The "Butch" homosexuals of the CS transformed Germany. Their primary vehicle was the German youth movement, known as the Wandervogel (Rovers or Wandering Youth).
....Rising spontaneously in the 1890s as an informal hiking and camping society, the Wandervogel became an official organization at the turn of the century, similar to the Boy Scouts. From early on, however, the Wandervogel was dominated and controlled by the pederasts of the CS. CS co-founder Wilhelm Janzen was its chief benefactor, and its leadership was rife with homosexuality. In 1912, CS theorist Hans Blueher wrote The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon which told how the organization was used to recruit young boys into homosexuality.
....During World War I, the greatest hero of the German youth movement was Gerhard Rossbach. Described by historian Robert G. L. Waite as a "sadist, murderer and homosexual," Rossbach was "the most important single contributor of the pre-Hitler youth movement" (Waite,1969:210). More importantly, Rossbach was the bridge between the Wandervogel and the Nazi Party.
....Rossbach's adjutant was Edmund Heines, noted for his ability to procure boys for sexual orgies. Ernst Roehm, recruited by Rossbach into homosexuality, later commanded the Storm Troopers for the Nazis, where they were more commonly known as the SA (an acronym for Sturmabteilung). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

While Adolf Hitler is today recognized as the central figure of Nazism, he was a less important player when the Nazi machine was first assembled. Its first leader was Ernst Roehm. Homosexual historian Frank Rector writes that "Hitler was, to a substantial extent, Roehm's proteg�" (Rector:80). Roehm had been a captain in the German army. Hitler had been a mere corporal. After World War I, Roehm was highly placed in the underground nationalist movement that plotted to overthrow the Weimar government and worked to subvert it through assassinations and terrorism. In The Order of the Death's Head, author Heinz Hohne writes that Roehm met Hitler at a meeting of a socialist terrorist group called the Iron Fist and "saw in Hitler the demagogue he required to mobilize mass support for his secret army" (Hohne:20). Roehm, who had joined the German Worker's Party before Hitler, worked with him to take over the fledgling organization. With Roehm's backing, Hitler became the first president of the party in 1921 (ibid.:21) and changed its name to the National Socialist German Worker's Party. Soon after, Rossbach's Storm Troopers, the SA, became its military arm. In his classic Nazi history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, author William Shirer describes Roehm as "a stocky, bull-necked, piggish-eyed, scar- faced professional soldier...[and] like so many of the early Nazis, a homosexual" The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

Betraying his roots in the "Butch" faction of the German "gay rights" movement, Roehm viewed homosexuality as the basis for a new society. Louis Snyder writes that Roehm "projected a social order in which homosexuality would be regarded as a human behavior pattern of high repute...he flaunted his homosexuality in public and insisted that his cronies do the same. The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

The favorite meeting place of the SA was a "gay" bar in Munich called the Bratwurstglockl where Roehm kept a reserved table (Hohne:82). This was the same tavern where some of the earliest formative meetings of the Nazi Party had been held (Rector:69). At the Bratwurstglockl, Roehm and associates-Edmund Heines, Karl Ernst, Ernst's partner Captain Rohrbein, Captain Petersdorf, Count Ernst Helldorf and the rest-would meet to plan and strategize. These were the men who orchestrated the Nazi campaign of intimidation and terror. All of them were homosexual

Indeed, homosexuality was all that qualified many of these men for their positions in the SA. Heinrich Himmler would later complain of this: "Does it not constitute a danger to the Nazi movement if it can be said that Nazi leaders are chosen for sexual reasons?" (Gallo:57). Himmler was not so much opposed to homosexuality itself as to the fact that non- qualified people were given high rank based on their homosexual relations with Roehm and others. For example, SA Obergruppenfuhrer (Lieutenant General) Karl Ernst, a militant homosexual, had been a hotel doorman and a waiter before joining the SA. "Karl Ernst is not yet 35," writes Gallo, "he commands 250,000 men...he is simply a sadist, a common thug, transformed into a responsible official" (ibid.:50f). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

This strange brand of nepotism was a hallmark of the SA. By 1933 the SA had grown far larger than the German army, yet the Vikingkorps (Officers' Corps) remained almost exclusively homosexual. "Roehm, as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops," writes historian H.R. Knickerbocker, "had surrounded himself with a staff of perverts. His chiefs, men of rank of Gruppenfuhrer or Obergruppenfuhrer, commanding units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, were almost without exception homosexuals. Indeed, unless a Storm Troop officer were homosexual he had no chance of advancement" (Knickerbocker:55).................For a monthly salary of 200 marks he kept Roehm supplied with new friends, his main hunting ground being Geisela High School Munich; from this school he recruited no fewer than eleven boys, whom he first tried out and then took to Roehm" (Hohne:82). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

In 1945 a Jewish historian by the name of Samuel Igra published Germany's National Vice, which called homosexuality the "poisoned stream" that ran through the heart of Nazism. (In the 1920s and 30s, homosexuality was known as "the German vice" across Europe because of the debaucheries of the Weimar period.) Igra, who escaped Germany in 1939, claims that Hitler "had been a male prostitute in Vienna at the time of his sojourn there, from 1907 to 1912, and that he practiced the same calling in Munich from 1912 to 1914" (Igra:67). Desmond Seward, in Napoleon and Hitler, says Hitler is listed as a homosexual in Viennese police records The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.

Joseph Goebbels Biography

Joseph Goebbels

(1897-1945)

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Master propagandist of the Nazi regime and dictator of its cultural life for twelve years, Joseph Goebbels was born into a strict Catholic, working-class family from Rheydt, in the Rhineland, on 29 October 1897. He was educated at a Roman Catholic school and went on to study history and literature at the University of Heidelberg under Professor Friedrich Gundolf, a Jewish literary historian renowned as a Goethe scholar and a close disciple of the poet Stefan George.

Goebbels had been rejected for military service during World War I because of a crippled foot - the result of contracting polio as a child - and a sense of physical inadequacy tormented him for the rest of his life, reinforced by resentment of the reactions aroused by his diminutive frame, black hair and intellectual background. Bitterly conscious of his deformity and fearful of being regarded as a "bourgeois intellectual," Goebbels overcompensated for his lack of the physical virtues of the strong, healthy, blond, Nordic type by his ideological rectitude and radicalism once he joined the NSDAP in 1922.

The hostility to the intellect of the "little doctor," his contempt for the human race in general and the Jews in particular, and his complete cynicism were an expression of his own intellectual self-hatred and inferiority complexes, his overwhelming need to destroy everything sacred and ignite the same feelings of rage, despair and hatred in his listeners.

At first Goebbels's hyperactive imagination found an outlet in poetry, drama and a bohemian life-style, but apart from his expressionist novel, Michael: ein Deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblattern (1926), nothing came of these first literary efforts. It was in the Nazi Party that Goebbels's sharp, clear-sighted intelligence, his oratorical gifts and flair for theatrical effects, his uninhibited opportunism and ideological radicalism blossomed in the service of an insatiable will-to-power.

In 1925 he was made business manager of the NSDAP in the Ruhr district and at the end of the year was already the principal collaborator of Gregor Strasser, leader of the social-revolutionary North German wing of the Party. Goebbels founded and edited the Nationalsozialistischen Briefe (NS Letters) and other publications of the Strasser brothers, sharing their proletarian anti-capitalist outlook and call for a radical revaluation of all values. His National Bolshevik tendencies found expression in his evaluation of Soviet Russia (which he regarded as both nationalist and socialist) as "Germany's natural ally against the devilish temptations and corruption of the West."

It was at this time that Goebbels, who had co-authored the draft programme submitted by the Nazi Left at the Hanover Conference of 1926, called for the expulsion of "petty-bourgeois Adolf Hitler from the National Socialist Party." Goebbels's shrewd political instinct and his opportunism were demonstrated by his switch to Hitler's side in 1926, which was rewarded by his appointment in November of the same year as Nazi district leader for Berlin-Brandenburg.

Placed at the head of a small, conflict-ridden organization, Goebbels rapidly succeeded in taking control and undermining the supremacy of the Strasser brothers in northern Germany and their monopoly of the Party press, founding in 1927 and editing his own weekly newspaper, Der Angriff (The Attack). He designed posters, published his own propaganda, staged impressive parades, organized his bodyguards to participate in street battles, beer-hall brawls and shooting affrays as a means to further his political agitation.

By 1927 the "Marat of Red Berlin, a nightmare and goblin of history" had already become the most feared demagogue of the capital city, exploiting to the full his deep, powerful voice, rhetorical fervour and unscrupulous appeal to primitive instincts. A tireless, tenacious agitator with the gift of paralysing opponents by a guileful combination of venom, slander and insinuation, Goebbels knew how to mobilize the fears of the unemployed masses as the Great Depression hit Germany, playing on the national psyche with "ice-cold calculation."

With the skill of a master propagandist he transformed the Berlin student and pimp, Horst Wessel, into a Nazi martyr, and provided the slogans, the myths and images, the telling aphorisms which rapidly spread the message of National Socialism.

Hitler was deeply impressed by Goebbels's success in turning the small Berlin section of the Party into a powerful organization in North Germany and in 1929 appointed him Reich Propaganda Leader of the NSDAP. Looking back many years later (24 June 1942), Hitler observed: "Dr. Goebbels was gifted with the two things without which the situation in Berlin could not have been mastered: verbal facility and intellect.. . . For Dr. Goebbels, who had not found much in the way of a political organization when he started, had won Berlin in the truest sense of the word."

Hitler had indeed cause to be grateful to his Propaganda Leader, who was the true creator and organizer of the Fuhrer myth, of the image of the Messiah-redeemer, feeding the theatrical element in the Nazi leader while at the same time inducing the self-surrender of the German masses through skilful stage management and manipulation. A cynic, devoid of genuine inner convictions, Goebbels found his mission in selling Hitler to the German public, in projecting himself as his most faithful shield-bearer and orchestrating a pseudo-religious cult of the Fuhrer as the saviour of Germany from Jews, profiteers and Marxists.

As a Reichstag deputy from 1928, he no less cynically gave open voice to his contempt for the Republic, declaring: "We are entering the Reichstag, in order that we may arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its arsenal. We shall become Reichstag deputies in order that the Weimar ideology should itself help us to destroy it."

Goebbels's deeply rooted contempt for humanity, his urge to sow confusion, hatred and intoxication, his lust for power and his mastery of the techniques of mass persuasion were given full vent in the election campaigns of 1932, when he played a crucial role in bringing Hitler to the centre of the political stage. He was rewarded on 13 March 1933 with the position of Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which gave him total control of the communications media - i.e. radio, press, publishing, cinema and the other arts.

He achieved the Nazi 'co-ordination' of cultural life very quickly, astutely combining propaganda, bribery and terrorism, "cleansing" the arts in the name of the volkisch ideal, subjecting editors and journalists to State control, eliminating all Jews and political opponents from positions of influence. On May 10, 1933 he staged the great ritual "burning of the books" in Berlin, where the works of Jewish, Marxist and other "subversive" authors were publicly burned in huge bonfires.

He became a relentless Jew-baiter, demonizing the stereotyped figure of the "International Jewish Financier" in London and Washington allied with the "Jew-Bolsheviks" in Moscow, as the chief enemy of the Third Reich. At the Party Day of Victory in 1933, Goebbels attacked the "Jewish penetration of the professions" (law, medicine, property, theatre, etc.), claiming that the foreign Jewish boycott of Germany had provoked Nazi "counter-measures."

Goebbels's hatred of the Jews, like his hatred of the privileged and clever, stemmed from a deep-rooted sense of inferiority and internalization of mob values; at the same time it was also opportunist and tactical, based on the need to create a common enemy, to feed popular resentment and to mobilize the masses.

For five years Goebbels chafed at the leash as the Nazi regime sought to consolidate itself and win international recognition. His opportunity came with the [Kristallnacht] Crystal Night pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, which he orchestrated after kindling the flame with a rabble-rousing speech to Party leaders assembled in the Munich Altes Rathaus (Old Town Hall) for the annual celebration of the Beer-Hall putsch. Later, Goebbels was one of the chief secret abettors of the "Final Solution," personally supervising the deportation of Jews from Berlin in 1942 and proposing that Jews along with gypsies should be regarded as "unconditionally exterminable."

He combined verbal warnings that, as a result of the war, "the Jews will pay with extermination of their race in Europe and perhaps beyond" with careful avoidance in his propaganda material of discussing the actual treatment of the Jews, i.e., any mention of the extermination camps. Goebbels's anti-Semitism was one factor whichbrought him closer to Hitler, who respected his political judgement as well as his administrative and propagandist skills. His wife Magda and their six children were welcome guests at the Fuhrer's Alpine retreat of Berchtesgaden. In 1938, when Magda tried to divorce him because of his endless love affairs with beautiful actresses, it was Hitler who intervened to straighten out the situation.

During World War II relations between Hitler and Goebbels became more intimate, especially as the war situation deteriorated and the Minister of Propaganda encouraged the German people to ever greater efforts. After the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender, Goebbels turned this to advantage, convincing his audience that there was no choice except victory or destruction. In a famous speech on February 18, 1943 in the Berlin Sportpalast, Goebbels created an atmosphere of wild emotion, winning the agreement of his listeners to mobilization for total war. Playing adroitly on German fears of the "Asiatic hordes," using his all-pervasive control of press, film and radio to maintain morale, inventing mythical "secret weapons" and impregnable fortresses in the mountains where the last stand would be made, Goebbels never lost his nerve or his fighting spirit.

It was his quick thinking and decisive action on the afternoon of July 20, 1944, when he isolated the conspirators in the War Ministry with the help of detachments of loyal troops, which saved the Nazi regime. Shortly afterwards he achieved his ambition to be warlord on the domestic front, following his appointment in July 1944 as General Plenipotentiary for Total War.

Given the widest powers to move and direct the civilian population and even to redistribute manpower within the armed forces, Goebbels imposed an austerity programme and pressed for ever greater civilian sacrifice. But with Germany already close to collapse, it was too late to accomplish anything beyond further dislocations and confusion. As the war neared its end, Goebbels, the supreme opportunist, emerged as the Fuhrer's most loyal follower, spending his last days together with his family, in the Fuhrerbunker under the Chancellery. Convinced that the Nazis had finally burnt all their bridges and increasingly fascinated by the prospect of a final apocalypse, Goebbels's last words on dismissing his associates were: "When we depart, let the earth tremble!"

Following the Fuhrer's suicide, Goebbels disregarded Hitler's political testament, which had appointed him as Reich Chancellor, and decided to follow suit. He had his six children poisoned with a lethal injection by an SS doctor and then himself and his wife Magda shot by an SS orderly on May 1, 1945. With characteristic pathos and egomania he declared not long before his death: "We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals."

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Source: Wistrich, Robert S. Who's Who in Nazi Germany, Routledge, 1997. USHMM photo.

The History Place's Biography of Rudolf Hess

Rudolf Hess - Biography

In brief: Rudolf Hess (1894-1987), Deputy Führer and considered to be the number 3 man in Hitler's Germany after Göring. Hess was a somewhat neurotic member of Hitler's inner circle best known for his surprise flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941 in which he intended to negotiate peace with the British, but which resulted in his capture and long term imprisonment.

Rudolf Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, April 26, 1894, the son of a prosperous wholesaler and exporter. He did not live in Germany until he was fourteen. He volunteered for the German Army in 1914 at the outbreak of World War One, partly to escape the control of his domineering father who had refused to let him go to a university but instead persuaded him into an unwanted career in the family business.
In World War One, Hess was wounded twice, then later became an airplane pilot. After the war, Hess joined the Freikorps, a right-wing organization of ex-soldiers for hire, involved in violently putting down Communist uprisings in Germany.
At the University of Munich, Hess studied political science and came under the influence of the Thule Society, a secret anti-Semitic political organization devoted to Nordic supremacy. Hess was also influenced by Professor Karl Haushofer, a former general whose theories on expansionism and race formed the basis of the concept of Lebensraum (increased living space for Germans at the expense of other nations).
After hearing Adolf Hitler speak in a small Munich beer hall, Hess joined the Nazi Party, July 1, 1920, becoming the sixteenth member. After his first meeting with Hitler, Hess said he felt "as though overcome by a vision."
At early Nazi Party meetings and rallies, Hess was a formidable fighter who brawled with para-military Marxists and others who often violently attempted to disrupt Hitler's speeches.
In 1923, Hess took part in Hitler's failed Beer Hall Putsch in which Hitler and the Nazis attempted to seize control of Germany. Hess was arrested and imprisoned along with Hitler at Landsberg prison. While in prison, Hess took dictation for Hitler's book, Mein Kampf, and also made some editorial suggestions regarding Lebensraum, the historical role of the British Empire, and the organization of the Nazi Party.
After his release from prison in 1925, Hess served for several years as Hitler's personal secretary in spite of having no official rank in the Nazi Party. In 1932, Hitler appointed him Chairman of the Central Political Commission of the Nazi Party and SS General as a reward for his loyal service. On April 21, 1933, he was made Deputy Führer, a figurehead position with mostly ceremonial duties.
Hess was a shy, insecure man who displayed near religious devotion, fanatical loyalty and absolute blind obedience to Hitler. In 1934, Hess gave a revealing speech stating - "With pride we see that one man remains beyond all criticism, that is the Führer. This is because everyone feels and knows: he is always right, and he will always be right. The National Socialism of all of us is anchored in uncritical loyalty, in the surrender to the Führer that does not ask for the why in individual cases, in the silent execution of his orders. We believe that the Führer is obeying a higher call to fashion German history. There can be no criticism of this belief."
One of his most visible tasks was to announce the Führer at mass meetings with bellowing, wide eyed fanaticism, as seen in the Nazi documentary, Triumph Of The Will.
Although often rewarded by Hitler for his dogged loyalty, Hess was never given any major influence in matters of state due to his lack of understanding of the mechanics of power and his inability to take any action on his own initiative. He was totally and deliberately subservient to his Führer.
He was granted titles such as Reich Minister without Portfolio, member of the Secret Cabinet Council, and member of the Ministerial Council for Reich Defense. In 1939 Hess was even designated to be Hitler's successor after Göring.
But over time, his limited power was further undermined by the political intrigue of the top Nazis around Hitler who were constantly scheming for personal power. Hess had only one desire, to serve the Führer, and thus lacked the will to engage in self serving struggles for power and lost out primarily to his subordinate and eventual successor, Martin Bormann. As a result, Hitler gradually distanced himself from Hess.
Hoping to regain importance and redeem himself in the eyes of his Führer, Hess put on a Luftwaffe uniform and flew a German fighter plane alone toward Scotland on a 'peace' mission, May 10, 1941, just before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Hess intended to see the Duke of Hamilton, who he had met briefly during the Berlin Olympics in 1936.
With extra fuel tanks installed on the Messerschmitt ME-110, Hess, an expert flier, made the five hour, 900 mile flight across the North Sea and managed to navigate within 30 miles of the Duke's residence near Glasgow, Scotland. At 6,000 feet Hess bailed out and parachuted safely to the ground then encountered a Scottish farmer and told him in English, "I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton."
Hess wanted to convince the British Government that Hitler only wanted Lebensraum for the German people and had no wish to destroy a fellow 'Nordic' nation. He also knew of Hitler's plans to attack the Soviet Union and wanted to prevent Germany from getting involved in a two-front war, fighting the Soviets to the east of Germany, and Britain and its allies in the west.
During interrogation in a British Army barracks, he proposed that if the British would allow Nazi Germany to dominate Europe, then the British Empire would not be further molested by Hitler. He insisted that German victory was inevitable and even threatened that the British people would be starved to death by a Nazi blockade around the British Isles unless they accepted his generous peace offer.
But Hess also displayed signs of mental instability to his British captors and they concluded he was half mad and represented only himself. Churchill, realizing this, and somewhat infuriated by his statements, ordered Hess to be imprisoned for the duration and treated like any high ranking POW.
Hess was declared insane by a bewildered Hitler, and effectively disowned by the Nazis. His flight ultimately caused Hitler and the Nazis huge embarrassment as they struggled to explain his actions.
During his years of British imprisonment, Hess displayed increasingly unstable behavior and developed a paranoid obsession that his food was being poisoned. In 1945, Hess was returned to Germany to stand trial before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.
In the courtroom, he suffered from spells of disorientation, staring off vacantly into space and for a time claimed to have amnesia. In periods of lucidity he continued to display loyalty to Hitler, ending with his final speech - "It was granted me for many years to live and work under the greatest son whom my nation has brought forth in the thousand years of its history. Even if I could I would not expunge this period from my existence. I regret nothing. If I were standing once more at the beginning I should act once again as I did then, even if I knew that at the end I should be burnt at the stake�"
In spite of his mental condition, he was sentenced to life in prison. The Soviets blocked all attempts at early release. He committed suicide in 1987 at age 92, the last of the prisoners tried at Nuremberg.

Copyright © 1996 The History Place All Rights Reserved

The History Place Biography of Reinhard Heydrich

SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich

In brief: Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) was second in importance to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization. Nicknamed "The Blond Beast" by the Nazis, and "Hangman Heydrich" by others, Heydrich had insatiable greed for power and was a cold, calculating manipulator without human compassion who was the leading planner of Hitler's Final Solution in which the Nazis attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe.

Early Years
Born in the German city of Halle, near Leipzig on March 7, 1904, Reinhard Eugen Tristan Heydrich was raised in a cultured, musical environment. His father founded the Halle Conservatory of Music and was a Wagnerian opera singer, while his mother was an accomplished pianist. Young Heydrich trained seriously as a violinist, developing expert skill and a lifelong passion for the violin.
As a boy, he lived in an elegant home with his family enjoying elevated social status. But young Heydrich also suffered as the target of schoolyard bullies, teased about his very high pitched voice and his devout Catholicism in the mostly Protestant town. He was also beaten up by bigger boys and tormented with anti-Jewish slurs amid rumors of Jewish ancestry in his family.
At home Heydrich's mother believed in the value of harsh discipline and frequent lashings. As a result, Heydrich was a withdrawn, sullen boy, unhappy, but also intensely self-driven to excel at everything. As he grew he excelled at academics and also displayed natural athletic talent, later becoming an award winning fencer.
Too young to serve in World War One, after the war at age 16 Heydrich teamed up with the local Freikorps, a right-wing, anti-Semitic organization of ex-soldiers involved in violently opposing Communists on the streets. Young Heydrich was also influenced by the racial fanaticism of the German Völk movement and its belief in the supremacy of the blond haired, blue eyed Germanic people which he resembled. He took delight in associating with these violently anti-Semitic groups to disprove the persistent, but false rumors regarding his possible Jewish ancestry.
The German defeat in World War One brought social chaos, inflation and economic ruin to most German families including Heydrich's. In March of 1922, at age 18, Heydrich sought the free education, adventure and prestige of a Naval career and became a cadet in the small, elite German Navy.
Once again, however, he was teased. Heydrich was by now over six feet tall, a gangly, awkward young man who still had the high, almost falsetto voice. Naval cadets took delight in calling him "Billy Goat" because of his bleating laugh and taunted with "Moses Handel" because of rumored Jewish ancestry and his unusual passion for classical music.
But the intense, driven Heydrich persevered and rose by 1926 to the rank of second lieutenant, serving as a signals officer attached to Intelligence under Wilhelm Canaris. The teasing and taunting soon gave way to resentment over the extraordinary arrogance of this young man who was already dreaming of becoming an admiral.
Heydrich also developed great interest in women and pursued sex with the same self-driven desire for achievement he applied to everything else. He had many sexual relationships and in 1930 was accused of having sex with the unmarried daughter of a shipyard director. According to popular Nazi legend, as a result of his refusal to marry her, Heydrich was forced by Admiral Erich Raeder to resign his Naval commission in 1931 for "conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman."
With his Naval career wrecked, his fiancé, Lina von Osten, an enthusiastic Nazi Party member, suggested he join the Nazi Party and look into the SS organization which at that time served mainly as Hitler's personal bodyguard and had about 10,000 members.
Joins Nazi Party and the SS
In 1931, at age 27, Heydrich joined the Nazi Party and became a member of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite organization of black-coated young men chosen on the basis of their racial characteristics.
An interview was soon arranged with the new SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, who was seeking someone to build an SS intelligence service. During the interview Himmler posed a challenge to Heydrich by asking him to take 20 minutes and write down his plans for a future SS intelligence gathering service. Himmler was impressed by Heydrich's Aryan looks, his self-confidence, and diligent response to the challenge and gave him the job.
Heydrich proceeded to create the intelligence gathering organization known as the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), or SS Security Service.
It began in a small office with a single typewriter. But Heydrich's tireless determination soon grew the organization into a vast network of informers that developed dossiers on anyone who might oppose Hitler and conducted internal espionage and investigations to gather information down to the smallest details on Nazi Party members and storm trooper (SA) leaders.
Heydrich also had a taste for gossip and maintained folders full of rumors and details of the privates lives and sexual activities of top Nazis, later resorting to planting hidden microphones and cameras.
Heydrich's ruthless diligence and the rapid success of the SD earned him a quick rise through the SS ranks - appointed SS Major by December, 1931, then SS Colonel with sole control of the SD by July of 1932. In March of 1933, he was promoted to SS Brigadier General, though not yet 30 years old.
The only stumbling block occurred as the old rumors surfaced about possible Jewish ancestry on his father's side of his family. Heydrich's grandmother had married for a second time (after the birth of Heydrich's father) to a man with a Jewish sounding name.
Both Hitler and Himmler quickly became aware of the rumors which were spread by Heydrich's enemies within the Nazi Party. Himmler at one point considered expelling Heydrich from the SS. But Hitler, after a long private meeting with Heydrich, described him as "a highly gifted but also very dangerous man, whose gifts the movement had to retain...extremely useful; for he would eternally be grateful to us that we had kept him and not expelled him and would obey blindly."
Thus Heydrich remained in the elite Aryan order but was haunted by the persistent rumors and as a result developed tremendous hostility toward Jews. Heydrich also suffered great insecurity and some degree of self loathing, exampled by an incident in which he returned home to his apartment after a night of drinking, turned on a light and saw his own reflection in a wall mirror then took out his pistol and fired two shots at himself in the mirror, uttering "filthy Jew!"
Dachau Founded
Following the Nazi seizure of power in January, 1933, Heydrich and Himmler oversaw the mass arrests of Communists, trade unionists, Catholic politicians and others who had opposed Hitler. The total number of arrests were so high that prison space became a problem. An unused munitions factory at Dachau, near Munich, was quickly converted into a concentration camp for political prisoners.
Once inside Dachau, prisoners were subjected to harsh military style treatment and beatings. Stealing a cigarette could bring 25 lashes. Other punishments included suspension from a pole by the wrists, incarceration in a stand-up cell or dark cell, and in some cases death by shooting or hanging.
The gates at Dachau bore the cynical slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work sets you free). Political prisoners who survived the 11 hour workday and meager amounts of food were frightened and demoralized into submission, then eventually released. After Dachau, large concentration camps were opened at Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, and Lichtenburg.
By April 1934, amid much Nazi infighting and backstabbing, Himmler assumed control of the newly created Secret State Police (Gestapo) with Heydrich as his second in command actually running the organization.
Night of the Long Knives
Two months later, in June, Himmler and Heydrich, along with Hermann Göring, successfully plotted the downfall of powerful SA chief Ernst Röhm by spreading false rumors that Röhm and his four million SA storm troopers intended to seize control of the Reich and conduct a new revolution.
During the Night of the Long Knives Röhm and dozens of top SA leaders were hunted down and murdered on Hitler's orders, with the list of those to be murdered drawn up by Heydrich. As a result, the SA Brownshirts lost much of their influence and were quickly overtaken in importance by the black-coated SS.
In June of 1936, all of the local police forces throughout Germany along with the Gestapo, the SD, and the Criminal Police, were placed under the command of SS Reichsführer Himmler, who now answered only to Hitler.
By 1937, any remnants of civilized notions of justice were thrown out as the police, especially the Gestapo, were placed above the law with unlimited powers of arrest. Anyone could be taken into Schutzhaft (protective custody) for any reason and for any amount of time without a trial and with no legal recourse.
A dictate from Hitler in October of 1938 stated: "All means, even if they are not in conformity with existing laws and precedents, are legal if they subserve the will of the Führer."
Criticizing the Nazis or even making a joke could land one in a concentration camp, never to be seen again. Some arrests were made under suspicion that a person might commit a crime in the future. The average German could trust no one as anyone, even a family member, might be an informant working with the SD or Gestapo.
"We know that some Germans get sick at the very sight of the (SS) black uniform and we don't expect to be loved," said Himmler.
All over Germany, Heydrich's SD and Gestapo agents used torture, murder, indiscriminate arrests, extortion and blackmail to crush suspected anti-Nazis and also to enhance the immense personal power of Heydrich, now widely feared throughout Germany.
Many top Nazis even feared meeting him or being in his presence during the few official gatherings he attended. With his murderous glare, Heydrich could frighten even the most hardened Nazis.
Heydrich preferred to operate behind the scenes. He generally avoided publicity and was rarely seen in public, unlike Himmler. Photos of Heydrich usually show him peering suspiciously into the camera.
Heydrich was also a friendless man whose only companions were senior SS subordinates who accompanied him during drinking bouts and womanizing at a few favored night spots. Those few women who resisted his advances could likely expect a visit from the Gestapo.
International Espionage
Heydrich was a master of intrigue and pulling strings behind the scenes, sometimes on an international scale. His exploits included involvement in prodding Soviet leader Stalin into conducting a purge of top Red Army generals in 1937 by supplying evidence to Soviet secret agents of a possible Soviet military coup against Stalin.
In Germany, Heydrich had a hand in the downfall of two powerful, traditionalist German Army generals who had expressed opposition to Hitler when he announced his long range war plans in November, 1937. War Minister, Werner von Blomberg and Commander in Chief of the Army, Werner von Fritsch, were disgraced by framed-up attacks on their personal character and forced out, thus eliminating their influence. Following their dismissal, Hitler himself assumed the position of commander in chief of the German Army.
Soon afterward, Hitler looked to increase the size of the German Reich at the expense of other nations, first targeting Austria then Czechoslovakia.
In Austria, Himmler and Heydrich worked behind the scenes to encourage pro-Nazis there to spread unrest and commit sabotage.
Following the Nazi annexation of Austria in March, 1938, the SS rushed in to round up anti-Nazis and harass Jews. Heydrich then established the Gestapo Office of Jewish Emigration, headed by Austrian native, Adolf Eichmann. This office had the sole authority to issue permits to Jews wanting to leave Austria and quickly became engaged in extorting wealth in return for safe passage. Nearly a hundred thousand Austrian Jews managed to leave with many turning over all their worldly possessions to the SS. A similar office was then set up back in Berlin.
As Hitler turned his attention toward Czechoslovakia, Heydrich encouraged the Nazification of ethnic Germans to spread political unrest in the area bordering Germany (the Sudetenland). On October 1, 1938, under the threat of German invasion, the Czech government gave up the Sudetenland to Hitler.
Kristallnacht
On November 9/10, 1938, Kristallnacht occurred with the first widespread attacks on Jews and mass arrests throughout the Reich. On Heydrich's order, 25,000 Jewish men were sent to concentration camps.
In January of 1939, Heydrich helped destabilize Czechoslovakia by inciting unrest in the eastern province of Slovakia and also sent in a sabotage squad to cause panic.
In March, after representatives of France and England failed to challenge him at Munich, Hitler gambled and sent in the German Army to 'protect' Czechoslovakia from the crisis which the Nazis themselves had deliberately created.
Behind the Army, the SS rushed in - the pattern now established - with the SS always following the German Army into conquered lands. And by now, nearly a hundred concentration camps of various sizes had sprung up throughout the Reich.
On September 1, 1939, World War Two began with the Nazi invasion of Poland. As a prelude to the invasion, Heydrich had engineered a fake Polish attack on a German radio station at Gleiwitz, Germany, a mile from the Polish border, thus giving Hitler an excuse for military retribution.
RSHA
After the invasion of Poland, Heydrich was given control of the new Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) which combined the SD, Gestapo, Criminal Police, and foreign intelligence service into an enormous, efficient, centralized organization that would soon terrorize the entire continent of Europe and conduct mass murder on a scale unprecedented in human history.
In Nazi occupied Poland, Heydrich vigorously pursued Hitler's plan for the destruction of Poland as a nation. "...whatever we find in the shape of an upper class in Poland will be liquidated," Hitler had declared.
First Einsatz Groups
Heydrich then formed five SS Special Action (Einsatz) Groups to systematically round up and shoot Polish politicians, leading citizens, professionals, aristocracy, and the clergy. Poland's remaining people, considered by the Nazis to be racially inferior, were to be enslaved.
German-occupied Poland had an enormous Jewish population of over 2 million persons. On Heydrich's orders, Jews who were not shot outright were crammed into ghettos in places such as Warsaw, Cracow, and Lodz. Overcrowding and lack of food within these walled-in ghettos led to starvation, disease, and the resulting deaths of half a million Jews by mid 1941.
Invasion of Soviet Union
After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June, 1941, Heydrich organized four large SS Einsatz groups (A,B,C,D) to operate in the Soviet Union with orders stating "... search and execution measures that contribute to the political pacification of the occupied area are to be undertaken." As a result, all Communist political commissars taken into custody were shot along with suspected partisans, saboteurs, and anyone deemed a security threat.
As the German Army continued its advance deep into Soviet territories and the Ukraine, the Einsatz groups followed, now aided by volunteer units of ethnic Germans who lived in Poland, and volunteers from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Ukraine.
"The Führer has ordered the physical extermination of the Jews," Heydrich told his subordinate Adolf Eichmann, who later reported that statement during his trial after the war.
Mass Murder of Jews
The Einsatz groups now turned their attention to the mass murder of Jews. At his trial in Nuremberg after the war, Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D, described the method...
"The unit selected would enter a village or city and order the prominent Jewish citizens to call together all Jews for the purpose of resettlement. They were requested to hand over their valuables and shortly before execution, to surrender their outer clothing. The men, women, and children were led to a place of execution, which in most cases was located next to a more deeply excavated antitank ditch. Then they were shot, kneeling or standing, and the corpses thrown into the ditch."
Einsatz leaders kept highly detailed records including the daily numbers of Jews murdered. Competition even arose as to who posted the highest numbers. In the first year of the Nazi occupation of Soviet territory, over 300,000 Jews were murdered. By March of 1943, over 600,000 and by the end of the war, an estimated 1,300,000.
Einsatz Execution Photos - An Eyewitness Account of Einsatz Executions
In the city of Minsk, Heinrich Himmler witnessed Einsatz Group B conduct an execution of 100 persons, including women, and became visibly ill. After nearly fainting, he frantically yelled out for the firing squad to quickly finish off those who were only wounded.
After this Himmler ordered the Einsatz commanders to employ a more humane method of extermination by using mobile gas vans. These trucks fed their exhaust into a sealed rear compartment containing 15 to 25 persons, usually Jewish women and children. However this method was judged unsatisfactory due to the small numbers killed and the subsequent unpleasant task of having to remove the bodies.
Another Nazi extermination program, euthanasia of the sick and disabled in Germany, provided the SS with a better opportunity to experiment. At Brandenburg in Germany a former prison was converted into a killing center where the first experiments with gas chambers took place. They were disguised as shower rooms, but were actually hermetically sealed chambers connected by pipes to cylinders of carbon monoxide. The drugged patients were led naked to their deaths in the gas chamber. The killing center included a crematorium where the bodies were taken for disposal. Families were then falsely told the cause of death was medical such as heart failure or pneumonia.
The head of the euthanasia program, SS Major Christian Wirth, used the technical knowledge and experience gained at Brandenburg and the five other euthanasia killing centers to construct a pilot gas chamber plant at Chelmno in occupied Poland, to be used for Jews.
On July 31, 1941, on Hitler's order, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring issued an order to Heydrich instructing Heydrich to prepare "a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question."
Wannsee Conference
As a result, on January, 20, 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution in which the Nazis would attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe and the Soviet Union, an estimated 11,000,000 persons.
"Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west," Heydrich bluntly stated.
The minutes of that meeting, taken by Adolf Eichmann, have been preserved but were personally edited by Heydrich after the meeting using the coded language Nazis often employed when referring to lethal actions to be taken against Jews.
Complete minutes of the Wannsee Conference
"Instead of emigration, there is now a further possible solution to which the Führer has already signified his consent - namely deportation to the east," Heydrich stated when referring to mass deportations of Jews to ghettos in Poland then on to the planned gas chamber complexes at Belsec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Heydrich also took cynical delight in forcing the Jews themselves to partially organize, administer, and finance the Final Solution through the use of Jewish councils inside the ghettos which kept lists of names and assets.
By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon B (hydrogen cyanide) began at Auschwitz in occupied Poland, where extermination was conducted on an industrial scale with estimates running as high as three million persons eventually killed through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and burning.
Protector of Czechoslovakia
In September of 1941, the ever-ambitious Heydrich had achieved favored status with Hitler and was thus appointed Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in former Czechoslovakia and set up headquarters in Prague. Soon after his arrival, he established a Jewish ghetto at Theresienstadt.
He also established a successful policy of offering incentives to Czech workers, rewarding them with food and privileges if they filled Nazi production quotas and displayed loyalty to the Reich. At the same time, Heydrich's Gestapo and SD agents conducted a brutal crackdown of the Czech resistance movement.
SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich was by now a supremely arrogant young man who liked to travel between his country home and headquarters in Prague in an open top green Mercedes car without an armed escort as a show of confidence in his intimidation of the resistance and successful pacification of the population.
Attacked by Czechs
On May 27, 1942, as his car slowed to round a sharp turn in the roadway it came under attack from Free Czech agents who had been trained in England and brought to Czechoslovakia to assassinate him. They shot at Heydrich then threw a bomb which exploded, wounding him. He managed to get out of the car, draw his pistol and shoot back at the assassins before collapsing in the street.
Himmler rushed his own private doctors to Prague to help Heydrich, who held on for several days, but died on June 4 from blood poisoning brought on by fragments of auto upholstery, steel, and his own uniform that had lodged in his spleen.
In Berlin, the Nazis staged a highly elaborate funeral with Hitler calling Heydrich "the man with the iron heart."
Meanwhile the Gestapo and SS hunted down and murdered the Czech agents, resistance members, and anyone suspected of being involved in Heydrich's death, totaling over 1000 persons. In addition, 3000 Jews were deported from the ghetto at Theresienstadt for extermination. In Berlin 500 Jews were arrested, with 152 executed as a reprisal on the day of Heydrich's death.
Liquidation of Lidice
As a further reprisal for the killing of Heydrich, Hitler ordered the small Czech mining village of Lidice to be liquidated on the fake charge that it had aided the assassins.
In one of the most infamous single acts of World War Two, all 172 men and boys over age 16 in the village were shot on June 10, 1942, while the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. Ninety young children were sent to the concentration camp at Gneisenau, with some taken later to Nazi orphanages if they were German looking.
The village of Lidice was then destroyed building by building with explosives, then completely leveled until not a trace remained, with grain being planted over the flattened soil. The name was then removed from all German maps. Photos of Lidice
For months after Heydrich's death, Heinrich Himmler hesitated on appointing a successor, finally settling on Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a trained lawyer (and alcoholic) who possessed little of his predecessor's skills for intrigue. Thus after Heydrich's death, Himmler's personal power vastly increased as he took over many of Heydrich's duties.
The Final Solution plans begun by Heydrich were further developed under Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, and Eichmann, with the help of SS subordinates, Nazi bureaucrats, industrialists, scientists, and people from occupied countries.
Until the end of war in 1945, Jews were transported from all over Europe to killing centers such as Auschwitz where they were exterminated, along with gypsies, homosexuals, priests, prisoners of war, and ultimately persons of every nationality, religious faith, and political persuasion.
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