Free Hitler's Hangman by Robert. Gerwarth Page A

to develop an insatiable appetite for
    crime fiction and spy novels, many of them serialized in newspapers.
    Detective novels from Britain and the United States – from Sherlock
    Holmes to Nick Carter and Nat Pinkerton – were a huge success in
    Germany and they captured the imagination of the young Heydrich.
    Throughout the war and the 1920s, he maintained his keen interest in the
    genre and put his expertise to good use when he first met Himmler in
    1931. Neither of the two men had any idea of how to set up an espionage
    service, but Heydrich used the knowledge gained from detective and spy
    novels to impress Himmler to the extent that he offered him the job of
    creating an SS intelligence agency: the future SD.40
    War and Post-war
    In the summer of 1914 – when the Heydrichs were spending their annual
    holiday on the Baltic coast – the family’s well-ordered world was deeply

    YO U N G R E I N H A R D
    25
    shaken by a momentous event: on 28 June the Austrian heir apparent,
    Franz Ferdinand, was shot in Sarajevo, aggravating an international crisis
    that soon culminated in the First World War. Popular enthusiasm for war
    in August 1914 was limited and the Heydrichs were no exception.
    Although confident that the war would be won, Bruno and his wife were
    fully aware that it also brought with it economic uncertainties for the
    future of the Conservatory.41
    The ful implications of the events surrounding him were difficult to
    comprehend for the young Reinhard Heydrich. As a ten-year-old at the
    outbreak of the Great War, he was part of the war youth generation – too
    young to be sent to the front as a soldier, but old enough to experience the
    war consciously as a decisive event in his personal life and in the history
    of his country. Even though no immediate family member had to take to
    the field, the war was omnipresent: newspapers and posters bombarded the
    home front with glorified reports on the progress of the military campaigns,
    photographs of prominent generals and decorated alumni of the school
    adorned the classrooms, and teachers announced the latest victories in
    school assemblies. Meanwhile, the older boys in Reinhard’s school gradu-
    al y disappeared to the front. By June 1915, some 80 per cent of the boys
    in the highest grade had volunteered for the army while those left behind
    in the lower grades eagerly awaited the time when they could fol ow their
    example. Like most boys of his age, Reinhard must have regarded the war
    as a distant adventure game from which the Germans would inevitably
    emerge as the victors – a belief fostered by the enormously popular penny
    dreadfuls that sold in mil ions, notably to teenage boys.42
    While the war raged on in Eastern Europe and the distant fields of
    Flanders and northern France, the Conservatory’s economic fortunes
    began to decline slowly but steadily. Due to the outbreak of the war,
    student enrolment stagnated and then began to shrink. By the end of
    1914, Bruno Heydrich had to sack nine of his teachers, but continued to
    stage a number of public concerts and performances of the Patriotic Men’s
    Singing Society of 1914, which he had founded upon the outbreak of war.
    His wife Elisabeth contributed to the national cause, too, by running a
    knitting class at the Conservatory, where Halle’s middle-class wives and
    mothers produced clothing – mainly scarves and socks – for their soldier
    husbands, sons and brothers at the front.43
    By 1915 the economic effects of war started to encroach on the
    Heydrichs’ everyday life. Restrictions on food supplies and other essential
    goods became increasingly apparent. Germany had imported 25 per cent
    of its food supplies before 1914 and the British naval blockade effectively
    cut the country off from all imports. The problem was amplified by the
    lack of work-horses and able-bodied men on farms, and food production
    26
    HITLER’S HANGMAN
    accordingly decreased by 30 per cent during the war. Bread