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Basilisk. To combat rebellion in Europe, it seemed logical that Germany should choose its bloodiest man. Reinhard Heydrich is six feet tall, lean, trim, yellow-haired, 37. He is pale, thin-nosed, thin-lipped. His features might be those of a great brutalitarian or a great ascetic. He is no ascetic. Within the Gestapo he has a fancy nickname, "The Green Basilisk." Most Germans call him simply der Henker (the Hangman).
At the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin, Hangman Heydrich has a spacious, bare-walled office with a big desk for himself, comfortable chairs, a sofa and cigarets for visitors. Foreign diplomats who used to visit him there, to plead or protest for fellow nationals, found him polite, attentive, even affable. But they noticed one thing about him—he never smiled.
Heydrich managed to keep his name out of the papers until three or four years ago. He stood in the shadow behind the lurid light of Heinrich Himmler, head of all the German police. Himmler's top man for the uniformed police is General Kurt Daluege; for the Gestapo, Heydrich. But Heydrich is much more powerful than Daluege, and he might, if it came to a test, prove more powerful even than Himmler. He knows everything that Himmler knows and he has spies everywhere, even in the lairs of his closest associates. For the time being all three of the police chiefs work in harmony, often against the Army, which hates them and which has, they believe, deliberately sacrificed some of their best SS (Elite Guard) troops at the front. The Army blames Heydrich for persuading Himmler to persuade Hitler to attach a Gestapo man to every Army unit from a battalion up.
Up Gestapo. In the hidden strife between the Army and the Gestapo, which stands for the Nazi Party generally, the Gestapo was on top last week. The number of purged generals was reported to be 100 or more,* and though Hitler had been forced to reinstate the three biggest vons (Bock, Runstedt, Leeb) in Russia to mount his spring offensive, he had gone out of his way to decorate Elite Guard heroes. The Army cabal was quiescent. Score one for Reinhard Heydrich. Himmler took the credit.
Himmler has been portrayed by some as a sadistic weakling, a fretful schemer who rose to power through loyalty to Hitler. A onetime official of the Berlin Gestapo, now a refugee in England, described the situation thus: "Without him [Heydrich], Himmler would be just a senseless dummy. . . . Heydrich is young and intelligent, brutal, despotic and merciless. He uses Himmler cleverly. . . . Himmler shines while Heydrich works. Himmler betrays loyalties and friends, Heydrich annihilates them."
Up Henker. This may have been the animadversion of a man who hated them both. But Reinhard Heydrich is the man of brains and the man of action of the Geheime Staatspolizei, better and more darkly known as the Gestapo.
Most of the execution warrants for the Blood Purge of June 30, 1934 were signed in the clear, steady hand of Reinhard Heydrich. Sending two of his lieutenants to keep tabs on the Munich murders, Heydrich supervised the Berlin end of the massacre, found time to take personal care of Gregor Strasser, firebrand adherent of the Roehm rebels.