Was Reinhard Heydrich Jewish?

A reader requested that I cover the not infrequent claim that Reinhard Heydrich – one of the principal and easily the most famous of the leaders of the SS after Heinrich Himmler himself – was of partial jewish ancestry. I had been wanting to cover Heydrich for a while because of the frequency of the claim, but I had put it off because the biographical literature surrounding Heydrich is in many ways larger than that surrounding Himmler himself.

The claim that Heydrich was of jewish origin is a facile one and frequently made by early writers on the Third Reich as well as some early biographers. A representative example is offered by Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel in their 1965 biography of Heinrich Himmler when they write that:

‘It was not until after the death of Heydrich that Himmler, still carefully shielding himself behind Hitler, admitted to Kerstein that the hold they had on Heydrich was knowledge that there was Jewish blood in his family; Hitler had decided that the knowledge and ability Heydrich possessed were best kept active in the service of Party, while the need to atone in their eyes for the taint in his blood would this Nordic officer a more valiant persecutor of the Jews than any so-called pure-blooded Aryan. It pleased both Hitler and Himmler to make Heydrich their principal agent against the race to which in some part they imagined he belonged. Read Machiavelli said Himmler in conclusion. A few days later he added that Heydrich had always suffered from a sense of inferiority, that he had been ‘an unhappy man, completely divided against himself, as often happened with those of mixed race.’ (1)

The problem with their claim is readily apparent when noting that their source is Himmler’s long-time friend and masseuse Felix Kerstein who is repeating unsubstantiated second-hand gossip that he claims Himmler told him. This is not good evidence, but Kerstein is not the basis of these claims since as Gunther Deschner writes in his 1981 biography of Heydrich:

‘The fantastic tale-spinning which the figure of Heydrich has provoked is, again, hardly surprising, though its inclusion in studies of the period calls into question the reliability of a number of authors. Some renowned historians accepted at face value rumours spread by several Nazi leaders alleging Heydrich to be of Jewish origin, the ‘split’ personality is automatically produced as the motive for his obsession with power; the ‘stigma of Jewish origins’ is called in to explain Heydrich’s compliance with Hitler and Himmler and provide the motivation for his excessive zeal in the planned extermination of the Jews. Thus, Heydrich himself is made a victim of the racial theories of the Third Reich. Many writers are given to shoddy attempts at psychoanalysis coupled with exaggeration on the level of the tabloid press, a wholly unsuitable approach to the subject.’ (2)

Deschner is taking aim at those who adopted rumours as if they were facts and also notes that the origins of many of these rumours come from the NSDAP itself as was the case with both Heydrich’s fellow senior National Socialist leaders Joseph Goebbels (3) and even Adolf Hitler himself. He correctly points out that the use of Heydrich’s alleged ‘jewish ancestry’ as a ‘reason’ for Heydrich’s ‘push for the Holocaust’ is simply absurd albeit a very emotionally satisfying if cheap argument for many writers with it being repeated as recently as the documentary series ‘The SS’.

However, let’s get into the facts, shall we?

Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was born on 7th March 1904 in Halle an der Saale. (4)

His father was Richard Bruno Heydrich, who was the founder and director of a private school of music and dramatic arts. (5)

Bruno Heydrich was born to a poor family in 1865 in the Saxon town of Leuben (6) and his origins were decidedly working class. (6) His father (Reinhard’s grandfather) was Karl Julius Reinhold Heydrich, who was born in Arnsdorf in 1837 and a carpenter by trade whose work life was decidedly irregular hence he was very poor. (7) Karl Heydrich’s wife was Ernestine Wilhelmine Linder – born at Lommatzsch in 1840. (8) Karl Heydrich died in 1875 of tuberculosis when Bruno was twelve. (9)

None of these individuals were jewish and there is no evidence they were such.

Reinhard Heydrich’s mother was Elisabeth Anna Amalia Krantz who married Bruno Heydrich in December 1897; she was the daughter of Hofrat Eugen Krantz, Director and founder of the Royal Conservatoire in Dresden. (10) And her mother was Maria Antonie Mautsch from a business family in Bautzen. (11) Krantz was raised a strict Roman Catholic and Bruno Heydrich was forced to convert from Evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism in order to marry her. (12)

This was no small thing as Deschner explains:

‘At that time Halle already had more than one hundred thousand inhabitants; out of these barely a thousand were registered as Jews, thus forming less than one per cent of the population. Ninety-four per cent of the population were Evangelical; the Catholics, numbering approximately five thousand, therefore constituted the second minority. Reinhard Heydrich belonged to this minority from birth. Two conversions had turned the Heydrichs from the Evangelical to the Catholic Church. On his marriage to the Catholic Maria Antoine Mautsch Reinhard’s maternal grandfather, Hofrat Professor Krantz, had changed his faith. In the subsequent generation the Evangelical Bruno Heydrich gave in to the wishes, indeed demands, of Reinhard’s mother, Elisabeth Krantz, and was converted to Catholicism. Young Reinhard was thus brough up in an atmosphere of consciously maintained Catholicism. His very father was instrumental in making him an outsider.’ (13)

Deschner’s point here is that the Krantz family were converts from Evangelical Protestantism to Roman Catholicism themselves and were not jews, but also that in converting to Roman Catholicism to marry Reinhard’s mother Elisabeth Bruno Heydrich was making no small social sacrifice.

We can this see that neither the Heydrich nor the Krantz family were jewish in origin so then how did the rumours of his Jewishness start?

Well, that’s where things get really quite interesting.

In the first instance the rumours of jewishness were Bruno Heydrich’s own fault because his own behaviour as a decent actor and inveterate comic caused people to think he was a jew (14) even if Bruno was hurt by the claim and the resultant snobbery as Calic relates:

‘Bruno Heydrich, Reinhard’s father, was a music teacher and composer. During the years he lived in Halle, near Leipzig, he earned a certain reputation for himself, but the satisfaction it gave him was marred by the disdain inflicted on him because many of the people who knew him believed he was at least partly Jewish.’ (15)

And Deschner clarifies:

‘His nature was more that of an actor than of a musician; in the course of normal conversation, he would imitate comic figures, among these the Jews. He would repeatedly slip into the tones of an ‘Isidor’ as the Jews were then known in the local Halle dialogue. As a result of his excellent mimicry and his black hair he was often taken for a Jew.’ (16)

Which resulted in the situation where:

‘The rumours current in Halle that the director of the conservatoire, Bruno Heydrich, so clever at imitating Jews, was in fact a Jew himself, his classmates would run after the tall, lanky blond with jeers of ‘Isi, Isi’. The Heydrich family was to deny all such insinuations, even in a jubilee brochure published by the conservatoire. However, it appears that the cry of ‘Isi’ at school was brought to an end only when the younger brother, Heinz Siegfried, resorted to threats with a knife.

However, the intentions behind this catcalling were certainly worse than the effects. The Heydrichs laid a great deal of importance on denying the rumour, yet their own relations with the Jewish citizens of Halle were quite normal. Jews sent their sons and daughters to Heydrich’s conservatoire; they belong to the social acquaintance of the Heydrichs and were frequent visitors at their home.’ (17)

This naturally stuck with the Heydrich family with Reinhard Heydrich suffering from the rumour well in the 1920s:

‘One of Heydrich’s fellow crewmen reported the following story to an Israeli historian, of which the outcome was apparently Heydrich’s even greater isolation from his colleagues. When he was on leave in Halle a student made fun of Heydrich by referring to his supposed Jewish origins with the words, ‘Just look at the little yid “Suss” in his naval uniform.’’ (18)

‘His Nordic appearance gave rise to ‘blond Siegfried’; the rumour about his Jewish background, also current in naval circles, resulted in ‘blond Moses’, ‘White Moses’ and finally ‘Moses Handel’.’ (19)

‘Even when his naval colleagues called him ‘the white Jew’, Heydrich defended himself, mostly unsuccessfully, by adopting an anti-Semitic stance, according to fellow midshipman Lebram.’ (20)

This last comment by Mario Dederichs – that Heydrich may have been attracted to ‘anti-Semitic politics’ precisely to prove the rumour that he was a jew wrong – is certainly possible in that Heydrich may have secretly feared he was really part jewish and his father was lying, (21) but yet it seems unlikely given Bruno’s constant and ferocious denials of his jewishness with a letter to the Halle city authorities in 1922 being one explicit example of such. (22)

This however leaves out the influence of both Bruno Heydrich’s increasing personal anti-Semitism that began during the First World War which Reinhard Heydrich would have certainly been at least somewhat influenced by (23) (despite Bruno possibly being a Freemason) (24) and the role of Reinhard Heydrich’s mentor Wilhelm Canaris in pushing him towards Volkisch anti-Semitic nationalism during the early 1920s. (25) Heydrich joined the ‘Deutscher Schutz und Trutzbund’ in 1922 (26) and was attempting to secretly join the NSDAP as early as 1922-1923. (27)

Yet Bruno Heydrich pretending to be a jew called ‘Isidor’ as a bit of fun during carnival isn’t really where the strongest element of the claim lies.

As Graber explains:

‘One day in the early 1900s the clerk idly surveyed the papers on his counter. For the first time he noticed the name of the payee on the money order Herr Heydrich had just signed. The draft of money, some 300 marks – a not inconsiderable sum in those days – was made out in favour of Frau Heydrich-Suess. The clerk turned the name over in his mind. Suess? Surely that was a Jewish name? He thought about it some more, and then everything seemed to come together. Herr Dirktor Heydrich had, once settled in Halle, conveniently lopped off the second half of his name, thereby hoping to obscure his Jewish origin.

The story gained wide currency. Eventually it reached the ears of the authorities in the large Saxon towns of Dresden and Leipzig, and in a Musical Director (a sort of musical Who’s Who of the time) the entry relating to Bruno read, “Heydrich, Bruno; actually Heydrich-Suess.” The damage was done, and the suspicion that Bruno Heydrich was Jewish – i.e., had something to hide – was fortified. What was worse and even more difficult to understand was Bruno Heydrich’s habit of mimicking the speech patterns of Eastern European Jews at social gatherings at Halle. This he did to the vast enjoyment of his audience and to the great detriment of his career. Clearly a cheap laugh was more important to him than the advancement of his status.

It was not long before the effects of these rumors were felt by the Heydrich children. A story has been recounted that Heinz, Reinhard’s younger brother, was once called a “dirty Jew” by some schoolmate. Heinz advanced on his tormenter with a knife and thus put paid to any harassment to which he might have been subjected had he not reacted so aggressively. But when Reinhard was taunted with being Jewish, he simply sulked or piped in his high-pitched staccato voice about the unfairness of it.  This is all the more difficult to understand since he had the reputation of being aggressive and unruly.’ (28)

However, as Graber goes on to explain this was actually a mistaken assumption by the postal clerk:

‘There was not a grain of truth in the gossip about the Jewish ancestry of Bruno Heydrich. His father had died when he was twelve, and his mother had married a Protestant locksmith named Gustav Robert Suess. Even if Gustav Suess had been a Jew, there was a no blood relationship with Bruno. Nonetheless, while the musical authorities of Saxony were pleased to invite Bruno Heydrich to act as external examiner in state musical examinations, they refused to allow him either to call himself a professor (despite the fact that he employed several professors at his academy) or to append the words “recognized by the state” on his letterhead. There is no doubt that Heydrich’s supposed Jewish origin played a significant part in this.’ (29)

To summarise Heydrich’s paternal grandmother Ernestine Wilhelmine Linder remarried a much younger man (nine years older than Bruno; so he couldn’t have been his ‘real father’ before someone tries to make that argument) named Gustav Robert Suess in 1878 and had five daughters with him with Bruno Heydrich being Suess’ stepson. (30) The fact that Suess wasn’t in fact jewish or a jewish convert to Protestantism or from a family of such (31) explains both Bruno Heydrich’s fanatical denials of any jewish ancestry and also why the rumour had such currency in the first place because of a mistaken identification since Suess is a common jewish surname in German but not exclusively so.

It also neatly explains where the rumour around Halle that Bruno Heydrich’s ‘real name’ was ‘Isidor Suess’ (32) comes from in that ‘Isidor’ was the common jewish carnival character he frequently impersonated and ‘Suess’ was his non-jewish (but jewish sounding) stepfather’s surname.

So, while Bruno Heydrich certainly befriended and hung around with jews before the First World War (33) he wasn’t actually jewish in the slightest despite what people then and still to this day like to claim.

So, no Reinhard Heydrich wasn’t of jewish ancestry in any way, shape or form and there is absolutely no evidence of such.

References

(1) Roger Manvell, Heinrich Fraenkel, 1965, ‘Heinrich Himmler’, 1st Edition, Mentor: London, p. 92

(2) Gunther Deschner, 1981, ‘Reinhard Heydrich: A Biography’, 1^st Edition, Stein and Day: New York, p. 9

(3) On Goebbels’ alleged Jewishness see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/did-joseph-goebbels-have-jewish-ancestry

(4) Deschner, Op. Cit., p. 13

(5) Ibid.

(6) G. S. Graber, 1981, ‘The Life and Times of Reinhard Heydrich’, 1st Edition, Robert Hale: London, p. 3

(7) Eduoard Calic, 1985, ‘Reinhard Heydrich: The Chilling Story of the Man who Masterminded the Nazi Death Camps’, 1^st Edition, William Morrow and Company: New York, p. 17

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Deschner, Op. Cit., p. 14

(11) Ibid., p. 15

(12) Ibid., pp. 15; 18; Graber, Op. Cit., pp. 6-7

(13) Deschner, Op. Cit., p. 20

(14) Mario Dederichs, 2006, ‘Heydrich: The Face of Evil’, 1^st Edition, Greenhill Books: London, p. 38

(15) Calic, Op. Cit., p. 15

(16) Deschner, Op. Cit., p. 15

(17) Ibid., p. 20

(18) Ibid., p. 26 also see Graber, Op. Cit., p. 24

(19) Deschner, Op. Cit., p. 25

(20) Dederichs, Op. Cit., p. 38

(21) Graber, Op. Cit., p. 12

(22) Ibid., p. 14; Dederichs, Op. Cit., p. 37

(23) Calic, Op. Cit., p. 26

(24) Deschner, Op. Cit., p. 17

(25) Dederichs, Op. Cit., p. 38

(26) Graber, Op. Cit., p. 13; Calic, Op. Cit., p. 29

(27) Dederichs, Op. Cit., p. 38

(28) Graber, Op. Cit., pp. 8-9

(29) Ibid., pp. 10-11

(30) Calic, Op. Cit., p. 17; Dederichs, Op. Cit., p. 37

(31) Graber, Op. Cit., pp. 10-11

(32) Calic, Op. Cit., p. 21

(33) Dederichs, Op. Cit., p. 38