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Heydrich has always been reticent about his birth and youth: it is possible that this man with the viciously Nordic head had a Jew for father. He was born at Halle to a musical-academy director, listed in an old musical directory as "Bruno Richard Heydrich (properly Suss)." Suss is a common Jewish name in Germany.
Too young for the war, Heydrich joined a radical and terrorist youth organization after the peace, was reputed at 15 a proficient killer. He joined the Navy as a cadet, won several promotions as an officer, was cashiered when a drunken brawl over a woman reached the courts. Then he entered the Nazi movement, looked about for a chance to rise. A chance appeared—blackmail. Learning that a Prussian official named Koch was in correspondence with the dissident Gregor Strasser, Heydrich courted Koch's wife and stole the letters. Armed with these, he extorted a recommendation to Himmler, who gave him a post with the Munich Elite Guard. Thereafter his rise was rapid. Just before the war insiders estimated that Heydrich grafted $150,000 a year, spent it mostly on women, horses, a twelve-room apartment on Berlin's Kurfurstendamm.
Such is the man who now confronts Europe's rebellious millions. Last summer Der Henker stated his theory of police work: "The complete understanding of the opponent in his fundamental intellectual element, complete understanding of and police inquiry into his organization and its leading personalities, and finally the systematic opposition, crippling, destruction and abolition of this opponent by the Executive power."
The Degradation. The New Order has degraded and brutalized the captive nations of Europe, but the first nation the New Order captured was Germany. The numbing sickness of conquest has infected Germany, too. Nine years of incessant, pulverizing propaganda, liberally sprinkled with lurid obscenities concerning the private lives of Jews and others not in Nazi favor, have so poisoned and fevered the German mind that the filth-on-the-air technique has been turned against certain Nazi officials by such mysterious enemies as "The Chief," who operates an outlaw radio station somewhere in or near Germany and tells of the private vices of his victims with salacious gusto.
Suffering themselves from such methods, the people who produced Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and Einstein are in danger of becoming as brutalized as their captives. For those people who still, thanks to their fortitude or their good fortune, remain outside the Nazi web, the lesson is painfully clear.
* Cracked one English-speaking Russian: "The Germans are losing their generals von by von."