When Himmler's SS became independent of the SA after the purge of SA chief of staff Ernst Röhm and the top SA leadership on June 30-July 2, 1934, Heydrich took command of the Gestapo while remaining chief of the SD. Himmler and Heydrich centralized the political police departments of Germany into the Gestapo. When Himmler was appointed commander of the Bavarian political police detective force on April 1, 1933, he appointed Heydrich his deputy. Formation of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) In June 1934, the party Deputy Chief Rudolf Hess named it the sole agency authorized to gather political intelligence inside the Third Reich. By January 1933, the SD under Heydrich's leadership had become the most significant intelligence agency within the Nazi Party.
Himmler was so impressed by Heydrich's proposals that he brought him into the SS in August 1931 and tasked him with developing the Security Service ( Sicherheitsdienst SD). At that time, Himmler was seeking to create an internal intelligence service for the Nazi Party. Heydrich was introduced to SS chief Heinrich Himmler in Munich by a family friend. Creating a Nazi Party Intelligence Service His new bride was a fanatical National Socialist. A military court of honor, scandalized by his disrespectful behavior during his hearing, found him to have dishonored the officer corps of the Reich Navy and compelled him to resign his commission in April 1931.
He left the daughter of a senior naval officer to whom he had promised marriage for another woman, Lina von Osten, whom he would later marry. Instead of fulfilling his father's hopes that he would make a career in music (Heydrich was a gifted violinist), he enlisted in the German navy on March 30, 1922, less than a month after his 18th birthday.Īs a naval officer, Heydrich specialized in signals and communications. Reinhard Heydrich earned his high school diploma in the spring of 1922. He watched demonstrations, strikes, and street battles in Halle during the last year of the war and the revolutionary chaos that followed. As his family struggled economically, Heydrich, still in his teens, was attracted to racist ( völkisch) nationalism. He was the director of the music conservatory in Halle, which he had founded in 1901.ĭuring World War I and its aftermath, Bruno Heydrich could barely keep the conservatory open due to economies imposed by the war. His father, Bruno Heydrich, was an opera singer. Reinhard Heydrich was born on March 7, 1904, in Halle an der Saale, 20 miles northwest of Leipzig, in the German state of Saxony. While still chief of the RSHA, Heydrich served as Acting Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from 1941 until 1942. The RSHA was the SS and police agency most directly concerned with implementing the Nazi plan to murder the European Jews during World War II.