Head of the Nazi Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police; Sipo), the SD (Sicherheitsdienst; Security Service), and, later, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office; RSHA); key person in planning and executing the anti-Jewish policies of the Third Reich
Heydrich was born in Halle, a provincial Saxon town, to a family of musicians. His father was an opera singer and the director of a conservatory. In his youth Heydrich was exposed to his father's cult of Richard Wagner, his mother's stern discipline, and the worship of the authority of the state and its rulers. He was also exposed to a (false) suspicion that he was partly of Jewish origin. Frustrated by the rules of civil society, Heydrich, who initially had regarded the Nazi party with contempt, was introduced by a family friend to Heinrich Himmler. Himmler made him an intelligence officer and entrusted him in 1931 with the organisation of the SS espionage and surveillance apparatus, the SD. Freed from the restraints of navy discipline and the civil code of behaviour, and benefiting from his threatening mien and "Aryan" look, Heydrich gave full rein to his ruthlessness, cynicism, and ambition, combining them with loyalty to his new masters. Inquiry into his alleged Jewish ancestry showed the rumour to be false, but his superiors capitalised on the suspicion, which guaranteed his loyalty. As SD chief, Heydrich was entrusted with the information-gathering, blackmail, and intrigue needed to establish Himmler's control over the secret state police (Gestapo) during the first years of the Nazi regime. He was assisted by able administrators such as Carl Albrecht Oberg. At the same time, Heydrich became executive director of the Bavarian political police, the nucleus of the Gestapo system under Himmler. The SD, together with the Gestapo, of which he later became executive director, was instrumental in establishing the Nazi terror apparatus and executing the leaders of the SA (Sturmabteilung; Storm Troopers) on June 30,1934.
In 1936 Heydrich was made chief of the Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), retaining separate control over the SD. As Gestapo chief, Heydrich had unlimited power to confine to concentration camps "enemies of the Reich," among them Jews. He encouraged competition between the SD and the Gestapo, which under his aegis vied with each other to execute Hitler's Jewish policies. They also competed with other party elements, under Joseph Goebbels's influence, and with the SA. SD functionaries such as Adolf Eichmann were encouraged to implement "solutions" to the "Jewish question," such as the assembly-line deportation organised primarily for Jews in Austria and Czechoslovakia. When war broke out in 1939, Heydrich was in charge of the Einsatzgruppen. In a special ordinance of September 21, 1939, he ordered them to carry out the ghettoisation and concentration of Polish Jews and the establishment of Judenrate (Jewish councils). He then unified the Gestapo and SD within the framework of the newly established RSHA, giving ruthless SD functionaries such as Eichmann complete executive power in their anti-Jewish actions. Heydrich was instrumental in such schemes as the Nisko and Lublin plan and the proposed mass deportations to Madagascar (see Madagascar plan). In 1941, prior to Hitler's assault on the Soviet Union, Heydrich concluded, apparently on Hitler's order, an agreement with the army high command securing military assistance for the Einsatzgruppen in Russia. Heydrich ordered the latter to implement the "special tasks" of immediate annihilation of the Jews and Soviet officials in the Russian areas soon to be occupied. On July 31 of that year, Goering, possibly on Heydrich's initiative, charged him with the "final solution of the Jewish question" in the entire German sphere of influence in Europe. To carry out this task, Heydrich required the co-operation of the Reich's ministerial agencies, and to this end he convened a meeting of top officials at Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, on January 20, 1942, to confirm the program for the planned extermination. Late in 1941, Heydrich was rewarded for his anti-Jewish terror and extermination campaign by being appointed acting governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Attacked by Czech resistance fighters in an ambush near Prague, Heydrich died of his wounds on June 4, 1942. In retaliation, five days later the Germans destroyed the Czech village of Lidice and killed all its male inhabitants.
