Reinhard Heydrich
Senior SS and police official in Nazi Germany who headed the Reich Security Main Office and chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, a principal architect of the Holocaust. He was assassinated in Prague in 1942.
Biography
Reinhard Heydrich was born in Halle an der Saale in 1904 into a musical family; his father ran a conservatory there. As a teenager after the First World War he joined a Freikorps unit and nationalist groups. In 1922 he entered the German navy as a cadet and became a signals officer, but in 1931 he was dismissed for conduct unbecoming an officer after breaking off an engagement.
He joined the Nazi Party and the SS that year, and Heinrich Himmler put him in charge of a new SS intelligence service, which became the SD. In April 1934 he also took over the Gestapo, and with Himmler he prepared the purge of the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives. Over the following years he built the security police into a tool of terror, helped organise the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, and planned the staged Gleiwitz attack used as a pretext for invading Poland.
From September 1939 he headed the Reich Security Main Office, which combined the Gestapo, criminal police and SD. He created the Einsatzgruppen that murdered Polish elites and later Jews and others in the occupied Soviet Union, and in January 1942 chaired the Wannsee Conference that coordinated the genocide of Europe's Jews. He was also president of the International Criminal Police Commission.
In September 1941 Heydrich was sent to Prague as acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where he cracked down hard on Czech resistance. On 27 May 1942 he was attacked by Czech and Slovak soldiers trained in Britain in Operation Anthropoid, and he died of his wounds on 4 June. In reprisal the Germans destroyed the villages of Lidice and Ležáky.
