History has shown, no person is irreplaceable

By Dominic Odipo

He was born Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich on the 7th of March, 1904 and on the 4th of June, 1942 he died of wounds which had been inflicted by a cohort of Czech and Slovak nationalists in an earlier assassination attempt.

At the time of his death, he was only 38 years old but had already risen from a private to a full general in the Nazi paramilitary security service, the SS.

By the beginning of 1942, his vast power in Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich had been formally encapsulated into three main working titles: SS- Gruppenfuhrer, Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and Director of the Reich Security Main Office.

As Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia he was effectively the military dictator of the area generally known today as the Czech Republic with his headquarters in Prague.

In the political and security pecking order of the day, General Heydrich was effectively the fourth most powerful man in Nazi Germany by the end of 1941.

He reported to and received his orders form only three men; The German Fuhrer himself, Adolf Hitler, Reichmarshall Hermann Goring and SS chief, Heinrich Himmler.

In January, 1942 Heydrich chaired one of the most notoriously significant meetings ever held in Nazi Germany. At a villa in Wannsee, just outside Berlin, 15 of Nazi Germany’s top officials met to formalise plans for the total extermination of all the Jews of Europe.

Summing up from the chair towards the end of the meeting, Heydrich said: “From Vladivostok to Belfast, from Lapland to Libya, no Jews. Not one.” Almost all of the men who were seated at the table applauded when he came to the end of this terrifying statement.

Heydrich is generally recognised today as having been one of the darkest and most fearsome figures of Nazi Germany — darker even than Hitler himself.

By the tender age of only 38, he had already acquired a string of choice nicknames. Among these were the Hangman, The Blond Beast, The Butcher of Prague and the Young Evil God of Death. Hitler himself used to refer to him admiringly as “The Man with the Iron Heart.”

After his death in 1942, Colonel Aldolf Eichmann, his deputy for Jewish affairs, proceeded to carry out the Final Solution to the Jewish problem that had been agreed to at Wannsee under Heydrich’s chairmanship.

More than six million Jews were murdered within this Heydrich master plan, which was so effectively executed by Eichmann who now considered the extermination of all Jews in Europe a matter of honour in memory of his departed chief.

But what was this Butcher of Prague, this Hangman like as a person? First, he was born into a staunchly Roman Catholic family with a great passion for music, which readily seeped into him.

Music became a part of his everyday life and he developed a great passion for the violin, the king of musical instruments.

He was extremely intelligent and generally excelled not only in schoolwork but in every task he was assigned afterwards, including the organisation of the highly successful Berlin Olympics of 1936.

On the side, he developed into a notorious womaniser and, over the years, got involved in numerous affairs though he remained married and ended up with four children.

Mere vermin?

Within three days of his arrival in Prague as the virtual military dictator of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich ordered the execution of about 100 Czechs, who were presumed to be opposing the German occupation of their country. In a speech delivered shortly afterwards, he declared that he was going to “Germanise this Czech vermin.”

To his highly intelligent mind, the Czechs, and even more so the Jews, were no more than vermin.

Two days before his death in Prague, Heydrich recited a part of one of his father’s operas to Himmler who had travelled from the city of Berlin to see him:

“The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns himself. We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.”

Shortly after his death, in obvious reference to his arrogant habit of driving alone in an open roof Mercedes convertible without a bodyguard, Hitler told his high command: “That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic.”

Heydrich, this Hangman, this Blond Beast, was the only man whom Hitler ever referred to in public as “irreplaceable.”

What lessons can we draw from the brief but brutal life of Reinhard Heydrich? At least four.

First, some of our most visible and effective leaders could be very dark leaders at heart, capable of acting very brutally or very inhumanly when their core interests or beliefs are threatened. We should not judge our leaders merely by what they look like or say – but by what they do.

Second, merely because a man is highly intelligent does not mean he will not engage in highly odious or inhuman actions or behaviour.

Third, to be able to kill off or destroy another group of persons, you must first be convinced that that group is vermin, insects, animals or something of the sort.

In your mind, you must totally dehumanise that group.

And, finally, “we all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.”

The writer is a lecturer and consultant in Nairobi.

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