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LIKE SHERLOCK HOLMES, Heydrich plays the violin. (He plays it better than does the fictional detective, however.) Also like Sherlock Holmes, he conducts criminal inquiries. Except that where Holmes seeks the truth, Heydrich just makes it up.
In other words, when the Nazi leaders are – for once – ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Führer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honour and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes.
It would be advisable to deprive the Jews of their means of survival – and not only in the economic sphere. There should be no future for them in Germany. Only the old generation should be allowed to die here in peace – not the young ones. Hence the incitement to emigrate. As for the means, street-fighting anti-Semitism should be rejected. You don’t kill rats with a revolver, but with poison and gas.
Daladier, former defence minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defence not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week – one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art.
Esther Brum liked this
‘You had to choose between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour. You will have war.’
Raoul Hilberg sees in this ‘policing point of view’ the prism through which Heydrich views both his job and German society: the entire population is considered a sort of auxiliary police force, responsible for surveying and reporting any suspect behaviour among the Jews. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, which will take the German army three weeks to crush, proves Heydrich right: you can’t trust those Jews. He also knows, of course, that germs do not racially discriminate.
HHhH,’ they say in the SS: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich – Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich),
In silence, Göring dates and signs what will become for history the Ermächtigung: the authorization. Heydrich can’t suppress a contented grin. He tidies away the precious paper in his briefcase. It’s July 31, 1941, and we are present at the birth of the Final Solution. Heydrich will be its principal architect.
On October 2, 1941, the officer in charge of the Einsatzgruppe at Babi Yar wrote in his report: ‘Sonderkommando 4a, in collaboration with group staff and two commandos of Police Regiment South, executed 33,771 Jews in Kiev on September 29 and 30, 1941.’
I READ A brilliant book set against the backdrop of Heydrich’s assassination. It’s a novel written by a Czech, Jiří Weil, entitled Mendelssohn Is on the Roof. The title is taken from the first chapter, which reads almost like a joke. Some Czech workmen are on the roof of the Opera House in Prague in order to take down a statue of Mendelssohn, the composer, because he’s a Jew. The order has come directly from Heydrich, recently named Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and a connoisseur of classical music. But there’s a whole row of statues on the roof, and Heydrich hasn’t specified which is
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The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.
Esther Brum liked this
DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING you’re told – especially when the Nazis are telling you. They tend to be wrong in one of two ways. Either, like big fat Göring, they are guilty of wishful thinking, or – like Goebbels Trismegistus (called ‘the human loudspeaker’ by Joseph Roth) – they lie shamelessly for propagandist ends. And quite often they do both at the same time.
‘Our worth should be measured by our aspirations more than our works.’
On February 4, 1942, Heydrich gives a speech that interests me because it concerns my own honourable profession: It is essential to sort out the Czech teachers because the teaching profession is a breeding ground for opposition. It must be destroyed, and all Czech secondary schools must be shut. The Czech youth must be torn away from this subversive atmosphere and educated elsewhere. I cannot think of a better place for this than a sports ground. With sport and physical education, we will simultaneously guarantee their development, their education, and their re-education.
THIS IS WHAT I think: inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, in the words of my brother-in-law, with whom I’ve discussed all this: It’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.
cities change faster, alas, than men’s memories.
Gabčík and Kubiš are less scrupulous than Camus’ Just Assassins,1 but that’s because they are real people, both greater and more flawed than any fictional character.
History is the only true casualty: you can reread it as much as you like, but you can never rewrite it.
