Was Heydrich Jewish?
http://hnn.us/articles/1023.htmlWhen 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.
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smart...stjc/chap8.htmHeydrich was actually a deeply split personality. This menacing figure with its apparently well-knit, compact inhumanity concealed a nervously irritable individual, subject to secret anxieties and continually plagued by tension, bitterness and self-hatred. His cynicism, the sign of complex weakness and vulnerability, alone betrayed what his elastic youthfulness concealed. His hardness and imperviousness were founded less in a tendency to sadistic brutality, as is popularly believed, than in the forced absence of conscience of a man who lived under continual constraint. For Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was besmirched by an indelible stain and in a melancholy state of 'mortal sin'; he had Jewish ancestors.
He tried to destroy all the evidence. As soon as he was in a position to do so, he had an the documents brought to him from register offices and church records, but he was unable to prevent enemies and rivals, to whom such knowledge meant real power, from getting hold of documentary evidence of his racially impure parentage. Martin Bormann's much-feared secret card-index was never found after the war, nevertheless Bormann's personal file on Heydrich, which included his family tree has been preserved. This family tree goes back only one generation on his mother's side and omits the name, parentage and place of origin of his grandmother. After an investigation ordered during 1932 and 1933 by Gregor Strasser, at the instigation of Rudolf Jordan, the Gauleiter of Halle-Merseburg, a report was submitted by the information office of the NSDAP centre in Munich. However, it dealt only with the parental line, since Jordan's suspicions were based primarily on the fact that the father, Bruno Richard Heydrich, an exceptionally gifted and versatile musician and founder of the First Halle Conservatory for Music, Theatre and Teaching, was described in Riemann's musical encyclopedia of 1916 as 'Heydrich, Bruno, real name Suss'. The report came to the conclusion that the name 'Suss' was not incriminating and that Bruno Heydrich's son, born on 7th March 1904, was free from any Jewish blood.
Nevertheless, rumours continued, and up to 1940 Heydrich had repeatedly to bring legal action for racial slander. As Chief of the Political Police, he won with ease, but this did not spare him the tormenting consciousness of racial inadequacy. Hitler and Himmler also knew of the doubt of Heydrich's pedigree, and took advantage of them in their own way, with a characteristic mixture of opportunism and blackmail. They received the first hints soon after the unemployed naval officer, who had been cashiered after a court-martial at the end of 1930 for an affair with a young girl, joined the SS. Whereas Himmler, with the bigoted simple-mindedness of the strict believer, seemed at first in favour of expelling Heydrich, Hitler decided after a long private conversation, as reported by Himmler, 'that Heydrich was a highly gifted but also very 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.' 'That,' said Himmler, self-confidently adding his own comment, 'was in fact the case.'
However, Himmler saw this relationship in his own biased way, and like everything he said about Heydrich after the latter's death, the above words bear traces of his attempt to wipe from his memory the inferiority and even fear he felt for years on end towards his own subordinate; for Heydrich was certainly too cold and controlled for emotional acts of submission and not made for either blindness or obedience. Nevertheless he had to pay all his life for the fact that his ambition had carried him into an elite Aryan order. He became entangled in the contradiction between his origins and the demands of ideology, and his destructive dynamism is only to be understood in terms of constant attempts to burst out of the trammels of a situation where he repeatedly faced ultimately insoluble problems. 'He suffered constantly,' Himmler said. 'He never really found peace; something was always upsetting him. Often I've talked to him and tried to help him, even against my own convictions, pointing out the possibility of overcoming Jewish elements by the admixture of better German blood, citing himself as a case in point. For the time being, it is true, he was very grateful to me for such help and seemed as if liberated, but nothing was any use in the long run.'
http://www.ourcivilisation.com/smart...note2/3011.htmNotes for The Face Of The Third Reich by Joachim C. Fest
There is a photocopy of this report at the Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (Institute of Contemporary History) in Munich. See also Charles Wighton, Heydrich, Hitler's Most Evil Henchman. Particulars of Heydrich's antecedents and more on his attempt to blur the details of his background are to be found in Walter Hagen's (i.e. Wilhelm Hotti's) book The Secret Front. Though the facts are sometimes not quite reliable, the book is extremely valuable for Hagen's personal observations. He was evidently the first not simply to look upon Heydrich as a sadistic monster but to show himself at pains to uncover his complex character.
Hagen further reports that Heydrich removed the gravestone of his grandmother Sarah Heydrich from the Leipzig cemetery and had set in its place a new stone with the more harmless inscription 'S. Heydrich'; the bill for this is said to have been in the Berlin Adjutancy until 1945. This is based of course on the supposition that Heydrich's so-called admixture of Jewish blood came not from his mother's but from his father's side. But this is at variance with Heydrich's family tree. According to it the alleged Sarah Heydrich was actually named Ernestine Wilhelmine, nee Lindner. After the early death of her first husband she had married a certain Robert Suss in Meissen. Just as Heydrich's father, as a result of this union, was at times called Bruno Heydrich-Suss, and, since the name had a Jewish ring, was widely known as 'Isidor Suss' among his colleagues, so possibly his mother was called by the name 'Sarah'. In that event this name would of course not have appeared in any circumstances on the gravestone. The author is indebted to the Berlin pianist Helmut Maurer for the information that Bruno Heydrich was called Isidor Suss by his colleagues in Halle. Maurer, who was at that time in Canaris's department as a 'civilian employee of the Wehrmacht High Command', emphasized in a memorandum that he had obtained copies of incriminating documentary evidence about Heydrich's descent as late as 1940 from the Registry Office for Civil Marriages in Halle. But Maurer also says that if his memory serves him rightly, Heydrich had Jewish blood on his father's side. Maurer's statement further contradicts Hagen's claim that Heydrich had early on got rid of all compromising evidence of his antecedents. This discrepancy will probably never be cleared up. In fact, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Heydrich had tried by the means at his disposal to remove all incriminating documents from church and registry offices. See also the result of the research which Robert M. W. Kempner undertook in Nuremberg and recorded in his book Eichmann und Komplizen.
In an inaugural dissertation at the Free University of Berlin in 1967, 'Heydrich und die Anfange des SD und der Gestapo (1931-1935)', Shlomo Aronson disputes that Heydrich was of Jewish descent at all. The evidence and references he presents are not unpersuasive, though the author is not at the moment in a position to verify them.
The meaning and substance of the foregoing attempt at an interpretation of Heydrich's personality, however, are not affected by the dispute about his origins. It is beyond dispute reinforced by Aronson's addition of numerous pieces of evidence, that Heydrich attributed Jewish forebears to himself or at least was by no means certain of his antecedents. According to information from Heydrich's sister-in-law, Frau Gertrud Heydrich, he was teased about his alleged Jewish origin even as a schoolboy, constantly felt a strong need for racial compensation, which found expression in belonging to nationalist anti-Semitic circles, and finally, was considered 'more or less a Jew' in the Navy, as one of his Navy comrades later declared. Evidently assuming that his father was a Jew, Heydrich invented as a defence against his comrades the story that his father had been a foundling who was brought to Draden by gypsies, where, appearing as a musical prodigy, he was subsequently co-opted by the director of the Dresden Conservatory into his family. Even today friends and former comrade of Heydrich are convinced of his Jewish antecedents. For this and other similar information, see Aronson, Heydric.
Historically it is no doubt important to know whether or not proof exists of Heydrich's alleged Jewish descent From a psychological standpoint, on the other hand, for the purpose of interpreting his personality, it is of less importance whether Heydrich did in fact have Jewish forebears or whether he and the people around him assumed that he had, i.e., thought it possible. Felix Kersten's Memoirs have so far stood up to all checks. They leave no doubt that Himmler considered Heydrich's Jewish descent established fact. Even if this was a misconception, it does not alter any consideration or conclusion stated here.
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Originally Posted by Phlegethon
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