Free Hitler's Hangman by Robert. Gerwarth Page B

rationing
    began in 1915 and the following year meat rationing was introduced. The
    pre-war average daily nutritional intake was 2,500 calories, which declined
    by more than half during the war.44 For the first time in their lives, the
    Heydrich children experienced hunger, particularly during the Turnip
    Winter of 1916. At the same time, real wages fell, especially those of the
    middle classes, many of whom also lost their savings and were no longer
    able to afford a musical education for their children. The Heydrichs’ holi-
    days, too, became less exclusive. During the war, Reinhard spent his
    annual summer vacation in the Düben heath between the towns of Torgau
    and Dessau, where his parents rented a cottage from a local forester. After
    the Second World War, the forester’s son, Erich Schultze, recalled that he
    and Reinhard passed their time reading history books and acquiring a
    rudimentary knowledge of Russian by talking to the prisoners of war
    working the local fields. According to Schultze, he and Reinhard also
    worked their way through the original French version of Charles Seignobos’
    Histoire de la civilisation , which they discussed in French, or at least
    attempted to do so.45
    While the war on the Western Front stagnated and the French troops
    were defending Verdun with unexpected tenacity, the Heydrich family in
    1916 eagerly awaited the publication of Hugo Riemanns Musik-Lexikon , the
    most complete and widely used German encyclopaedia of music and musi-
    cians at the time, which was due to appear that summer with an entry on
    Bruno Heydrich’s life and work.46 Anticipation turned to anger and frustra-
    tion when the copy final y arrived. On opening Riemann’s encyclopedia, the
    family discovered an entry suggesting that Bruno was a Jewish composer
    and that his last name was ‘actual y Süss’.47 Heydrich was not a particularly
    political man, but the insinuation that he was a Jew – potential y damaging
    in a Protestant city ripe with latent anti-Semitism – prompted him to sue
    the encyclopaedia’s editors for libel. As the lawsuit in 1916 revealed, the
    original entry on Heydrich (without the ‘damaging’ insinuation) had been
    altered by Martin Frey, a former pupil of Heydrich’s who had been expel ed
    from the Conservatory, in a targeted act of revenge. Frey had arranged the
    alteration through a relative on the dictionary’s editorial team in order to
    harm Bruno Heydrich’s reputation in the Hal e community.48 After the
    facts had been established, Bruno won the court case and the mention of his
    al eged Jewish background was removed from the next edition of the ency-
    clopaedia. But the rumours did not disappear. Instead they gained further
    currency after it became publicly known that Hans Krantz, one of
    Reinhard’s maternal uncles in Dresden, was married to a Jewish woman
    from Hungary cal ed Iza Jarmy. At school, Reinhard’s schoolmates began to
    tease him and his brother Heinz Siegfried by cal ing them ‘Isi’ or ‘Isidor’.49

    YO U N G R E I N H A R D
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    Throughout the war years, the Heydrichs placed a great deal of impor-
    tance on denying these rumours, threatening those who repeated them
    with libel actions. Yet their own personal relations with the Jewish citizens
    of Halle – who numbered no more than 1,400 in 1910 – were quite
    normal and there is no evidence to suggest that Bruno Heydrich’s attitude
    towards the Jews was hostile. On the contrary, Jews sent their sons and
    daughters to Heydrich’s Conservatory; Bruno rented out the cellar of the
    school as a storage space to a local Jewish salesman; and his eldest son,
    Reinhard, became friends with the son of the cantor of the Halle Jewish
    community, Abraham Lichtenstein.50
    The Heydrich scandal of 1916 is therefore indicative less of Bruno’s
    own racist beliefs than of a general climate of mounting anti-Semitism.
    Although Jews were no longer subject to discriminatory legislation in
    Imperial Germany,