Heydrich was the Nazi spymaster who set up the Berlin brothel called Salon Kitty. This was used to spy on foreign diplomats and other important people.
Heydrich used a fake sex scandal to destroy the non-Nazi army chiefs.
Heydrich started World War II with his staged raid on a border radio station in which murdered concentration camp victims were dressed in Polish uniforms.
Heydrich convened and chaired the Wannsee Conference; he was the mastermind of the Holocaust.
Bryan Mark Rigg is the author of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (University Press of Kansas, 2002).
Rigg wrote:
When Heydrich was a child in Halle, neighborhood children made fun of him, calling him "Isi" (Izzy), short for Isidor, a name with a Jewish connotation. This nickname upset Heydrich. When he served in the navy, many of his comrades believed he was Jewish. Some called him the "blond Moses." Others who lived in Halle have claimed that everybody believed that his father, the musician Bruno Heydrich, was a Jew. Half-Jew Alice Schaper nee Rohr, who took piano lessons from Bruno, claimed, "We all knew he was Jewish. ...He looked just like a typical Jew." In town, Bruno was called Isidor Suess behind his back. With such rumors going around, it was not surprising that Heydrich felt continually burdened by these allegations, especially when he served as an SS general.
One will never know whether Heydrich was truly of Jewish descent unless more documents are found, but it is possible that Himmler and Hitler may have believed he was. In the early 1930s, according to Himmler's masseur Felix Kersten (if he can be believed), Hitler had told Himmler, "Heydrich was a highly gifted but also dangerous man, whose gifts the movement had to retain. Such people could still be used so long as they were kept well in hand and for that purpose his non-Aryan origins were extremely useful; for he would be eternally grateful to us that we had kept him and not expelled him and would obey blindly."
According to Speer, Hitler often used flaws of men in positions of authority to control them. In this case, Heydrich's possible flaw was "Jewish ancestors." Heydrich often took those who claimed he was Jewish to court for slander. He did so as late as 1940 and sent another man to a concentration camp. Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, presumably had a large dossier on Heydrich's Jewish past and threatened to reveal what he had if the SS tried to infringe on Abwehr activities. Heydrich was definitely haunted by stories of his Jewish past.
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Heydrich used a fake sex scandal to destroy the non-Nazi army chiefs.
Heydrich started World War II with his staged raid on a border radio station in which murdered concentration camp victims were dressed in Polish uniforms.
Heydrich convened and chaired the Wannsee Conference; he was the mastermind of the Holocaust.
Bryan Mark Rigg is the author of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (University Press of Kansas, 2002).
Rigg wrote:
When Heydrich was a child in Halle, neighborhood children made fun of him, calling him "Isi" (Izzy), short for Isidor, a name with a Jewish connotation. This nickname upset Heydrich. When he served in the navy, many of his comrades believed he was Jewish. Some called him the "blond Moses." Others who lived in Halle have claimed that everybody believed that his father, the musician Bruno Heydrich, was a Jew. Half-Jew Alice Schaper nee Rohr, who took piano lessons from Bruno, claimed, "We all knew he was Jewish. ...He looked just like a typical Jew." In town, Bruno was called Isidor Suess behind his back. With such rumors going around, it was not surprising that Heydrich felt continually burdened by these allegations, especially when he served as an SS general.
One will never know whether Heydrich was truly of Jewish descent unless more documents are found, but it is possible that Himmler and Hitler may have believed he was. In the early 1930s, according to Himmler's masseur Felix Kersten (if he can be believed), Hitler had told Himmler, "Heydrich was a highly gifted but also dangerous man, whose gifts the movement had to retain. Such people could still be used so long as they were kept well in hand and for that purpose his non-Aryan origins were extremely useful; for he would be eternally grateful to us that we had kept him and not expelled him and would obey blindly."
According to Speer, Hitler often used flaws of men in positions of authority to control them. In this case, Heydrich's possible flaw was "Jewish ancestors." Heydrich often took those who claimed he was Jewish to court for slander. He did so as late as 1940 and sent another man to a concentration camp. Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, presumably had a large dossier on Heydrich's Jewish past and threatened to reveal what he had if the SS tried to infringe on Abwehr activities. Heydrich was definitely haunted by stories of his Jewish past.
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