Reinhard Heydrich died and went to hell.
"Hello," said the Devil. "We've been getting quite a few of you Gestapo men lately. I understand there will be more, too, before long. But you were supposed to be the toughest guy in Europe. Millions of people hated you. You were a big shot.
What in the world happened to you?" "Heil Hitler," said Heydrich. "It was the Czechs who did it, the yellow democratic curs. They bombed my car last week, outside Prague, while I was on my way back to Berlin to tell the Fuhrer (Heil Hitler!') that Czecho-Slovakia had at last been Germanized. Two men bombed me and then shot up my spine with tommy guns, the contemptible, bicycling plutocrats—Heil Hitler!" "Come, come," said the Devil. "Let's forget the 'Heil Hitler' business for a while. Remember we're all sons of bitches here. Now just tell me what you did in Czecho-Slovakia." "Yes, your Satanic Majesty," said Heydrich, eagerly. He patted his trimly cut blond hair, moistened his lips and rubbed his hands. "You will be pleased at what I did. But, of course, my being named Gestapo Commissar General of all German Occupied Territory in May was only a promotion for what I had done before." The Devil pawed at the sulphurous earth with a cloven hoof. At last he said: "Go ahead then; start from the beginning." "Well, I killed my first man," Heydrich said, "when I was 15—fighting the Reds and the Republicans in the streets of my home town of Halle in Saxony. That was in 1919. I'm 38 now. Then I got into the Navy and for a while I was a spy, but the Navy threw me out. I got drunk and there was a woman. . . . And then I joined up with the Nazis. The rest was easy."
"Yes," said the Devil, "my agents told me. I've heard how you slaughtered the Socialists in East Prussia, and the first thing you knew you had a budget of $150,000 a year and lots of women and a big car. But I must say you paid off. It was you, wasn't it, who killed Gregor Strasser? And you who did the stool-pigeoning in the blood purge that sent Roehm and those other friends of Hitler down here in 1934?"
"Heinrich Himmler gets the credit for that," Heydrich said. "He's No. 2 Nazi now and head of all the German police. But I was the one who did it. I built up the spy system, even in the Army. And I've been the butcher boy. Ask the Poles about me, or the French saboteurs, or the Dutch and the Belgians and the Norwegians. We've shot or hanged more than 400,000, not counting all who die in tue concentration camps. There's a rhyme in Germany which goes: 'Himmler der Heuchler, Heydrich der Henker' which means 'Himmler the Hypocrite, Heydrich the Hangman.' The countries we've conquered will remember me, the swine."
"No doubt, no doubt," said the Devil. "But what is going to happen to that madhouse up there when more & more of you get killed?"