Laurent Binet - HHhH

When Himmler ends the meeting, Heydrich hurries through corridors cluttered with suits of armor, coats of arms, and paintings. He knows that there are alchemists, occultists, and magi here working full-time on esoteric problems, but he pays no mind to any of this. Two days he’s been stuck in this lunatic asylum! He wants to get back to Berlin as soon as possible.

But outside the clouds are massing in the valley, and if he waits too long his airplane won’t be able to take off. They escort him to the parade ground, where he has the honor of reviewing the troops. He dispenses with the long speech and dashes past the assembled ranks, hardly even glancing at the gang of assassins chosen to go and exterminate subhumans in the East. There are nearly three thousand of them and they are turned out impeccably. Heydrich dives into the plane that idles at the end of the runway. It takes off just before the storm breaks. In the sudden downpour, the troops of the four Einsatzgruppen start to march.

In Berlin, there is no round table and no black magic. The atmosphere is bureaucratic, and Heydrich studiously writes his directives. Göring has asked him to keep them short and simple. On July 2, 1941, two weeks after the launch of Barbarossa, the following note is sent to SS commanders behind the front line:

“To be executed: all Komintern functionaries, Party functionaries, people’s commissars, Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State, other radical elements (saboteurs, propagandists, irregular soldiers, murderers, agitators).”

Simple indeed, but also quite cautious—curiously so. Why specify that Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State should be executed when all such functionaries were to be executed anyway, Jewish or otherwise? Heydrich didn’t know then how ordinary soldiers would react to the demands of his Einsatzgruppen. It’s true that the famous directive signed by Keitel on June 6, 1941, and thus approved by the Wehrmacht, authorizes the massacres, but officially this is limited to political enemies. In other words, Soviet Jews are targeted only because of their politics. The redundant meaning in this note is like a trace of one final scruple. Naturally, if the local people want to organize pogroms, that will be discreetly encouraged. But at the beginning of July, there is still no question of openly pursuing the extermination of Jews simply because they are Jews.

Two weeks later, swept along by the euphoria of their victories, this embarrassment will have disappeared. While the Wehrmacht routs the Red Army on all fronts, while the invasion progresses even more easily than the most optimistic forecasts, and while 300,000 Soviet soldiers are taken prisoner, Heydrich rewrites his directive. The main points are reprised, the list lengthened, and a few details added (former Red Army commissars are now included, for instance). And finally Heydrich replaces “Jews occupying positions in the Party or the State” with “all the Jews.”

Hauptmann Heydrich is on board a Messerschmitt 109 whose cabin is embossed with the initials RH in runic lettering: this is his private plane and it is flying over Soviet territory at the head of a formation of Luftwaffe fighters. Whenever the German pilots spot columns of slowly retreating Russian soldiers below, they swoop on them like tigers and, lining up the columns of men in their sights, massacre them with machine guns.

Today, however, what Heydrich sees below him is not a column of foot soldiers but a Yak. The Soviet plane’s plump silhouette is easily recognized. In spite of the enormous number of enemy planes destroyed on the ground by German bombers at the beginning of the offensive, the Soviet air force has not been completely eliminated, and there are still pockets of resistance: this Yak is proof of that. But the German planes are obviously superior, both in quality and quantity. No Soviet fighter in the current situation can hope to hold its own against the Me109. Imperious and vain, Heydrich orders his squadron to remain in formation. He wants to give his men a demonstration by shooting down the Russian plane on his own. He descends to the Yak’s height and glides along in its vapor trail. The Yak’s pilot hasn’t seen him. The object of the maneuver is to get closer to the target so that he can open fire at a distance of about five hundred feet. The German plane is much faster. The gap closes. When he can clearly make out the Russian’s tail in his sights, Heydrich shoots. The Yak beats its wings like a terror-stricken bird. But the first salvo hasn’t touched it, and in truth the pilot is not terror-stricken. He sends the plane into a dive. Heydrich tries to follow, but his turn is hopelessly wide in comparison. That idiot Göring claimed Soviet aviation was obsolete, but in that, as in almost all the Nazis’ assumptions about the Soviet Union, he was wrong. Admittedly, the Yak doesn’t measure up to the German fighters in terms of speed, but its relative slowness is balanced by an astonishing maneuverability. The little Russian plane keeps descending while continuing to twist and turn ever more tightly. Heydrich follows but can’t fix the enemy in his sights. It’s like a hare being pursued by a greyhound. Heydrich wants to claim a victory and paint a little plane on the fuselage of his aircraft, so he persists. What he doesn’t realiae is that the Yak, while constantly changing direction to evade his pursuer’s salvos, is not flying randomly but heading toward a precise location. Only when the explosions echo all around him does Heydrich understand: the Russian pilot has led him over a Soviet antiaircraft battery and he—the imbecile—has thrown himself into the trap.

A violent impact shakes the cabin. Black smoke pours from the tail. Heydrich’s plane crashes.

Himmler looks like someone’s just smacked him in the face. The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull. He’s just heard the news: during an air battle over the Berezina, Heydrich’s Messerschmitt 109 has been shot down. If Heydrich is dead, it is of course a terrible loss for the SS: brilliant man, dedicated colleague, et cetera. But the real worry is if he’s still alive: that could spell catastrophe. Because the plane crashed behind Soviet lines. Himmler imagines having to inform the Führer that his security chief has fallen into enemy hands. That would not be a pleasant meeting. He makes a mental inventory of all the information Heydrich possesses that is likely to interest Stalin. The answer makes him dizzy. And then there are things Heydrich knows of which the Reichsführer is unaware. Politically, strategically, if Heydrich talks, the consequences could be incalculable. Himmler can’t even begin to measure the potential magnitude of the disaster. Behind his little round glasses and his little mustache, he is sweating.

To tell the truth, that isn’t even the most urgent problem. If Heydrich is dead or a prisoner of the Russians, the absolute priority is to get hold of his dossiers. God only knows what they might contain, and about whom. All his files must be seized, in his office and at his home. To deal with Prinz Albert Strasse, he must warn Müller, who looks after the RSHA, along with Schellenberg. For Heydrich’s home, deal politely with Lina, but everything must be searched. Meanwhile, as Heydrich is reported missing, the only thing to do is wait. Go see Lina, to prepare the ground, and send orders to the front that he must be found, dead or alive.

One might reasonably ask what the hell the head of the Nazi secret services was doing in a German fighter plane above a Soviet combat zone. The answer is that, along with his SS duties, Heydrich was a reserve officer in the Luftwaffe. In readiness for the war, he had taken flying lessons, and when the invasion of Poland began, he absolutely wanted to answer the call of duty. As prestigious as his post as head of the SD was, he regarded it as a bureaucrat’s job—and since the country was at war, he had to behave like a true Teutonic Knight: he had to fight. Thus he found himself, first of all, as a machine gunner in a bomber. But unsurprisingly he wasn’t keen on this secondary role, so he took command of a Messerschmitt 110 on reconaissance flights over Great Britain, and then of a Messerschmitt 109 (the German equivalent of the Spitfire) in which he broke an arm taking off during the Norwegian campaign. I got hold of a slightly hagiographic book that describes admiringly how he flew planes with his arm in a sling. Afterward, he fought in battles against the RAF.