Allow me to correct some errors here:
Yes. The text is not wholly false, but it is methodologically very bad: it mixes correct institutional facts with sensational anecdotes, unattributed memoir material, physical caricature, and confident psychological claims. The result is not “a profile of Heydrich” so much as a collage of hostile tropes, Schellenberg/Lina-style anecdote, pop-history simplification, and fandom-like character notes.
The strongest criticism is this: the text repeatedly treats “this has been said about Heydrich” as equivalent to “this is known about Heydrich.” Emotionally effective narrative motifs start replacing source hierarchy and factual control. Things that “sound true” can become accepted because they fit a known narrative grammar, not because the underlying event is documented.
1. The text skeleton: partly correct, but flattened
The opening paragraph is the most factually solid part, although even there it is sloppy.
Heydrich did head the SD and then the RSHA; the RSHA brought together the SD and the Security Police, which included the Gestapo and Kripo. USHMM describes the RSHA as created in September 1939 and led initially by Heydrich; it formalized the relationship between the SD and the Security Police. Source
It is also correct that the RSHA was central to the Holocaust, including deportations, Einsatzgruppen deployment, and the Wannsee Conference. USHMM explicitly says the RSHA coordinated forced emigration/deportations, developed poison-gas killing methods, deployed Einsatzgruppen, and hosted Wannsee.
But the phrase “he commanded the Einsatzgruppen units as a whole” needs nuance. Organizationally, yes, the Einsatzgruppen were under RSHA/Heydrich authority. But operational command in occupied territories was not simply “Heydrich personally ordered every round-up and shooting.” There were Einsatzgruppen commanders, Higher SS and Police Leaders, army interfaces, local initiatives, and shifting chains of command. So the claim is not false, but it compresses a complex machinery into a cartoon chain: Heydrich → murder squad → shootings.
Likewise, “second in command to Himmler” is broadly defensible only in the SS-police-security sphere. It should not be read as “formal number two of the entire SS in every administrative, economic, Waffen-SS, camp, and police matter.” He was Himmler’s crucial deputy in security and police power, not simply a universal vice-Himmler.
Also: “Obbergruppenfuhrer” is misspelled. It should be SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei. Calling it simply “the SS equivalent of General” is imprecise; in many rank equivalency charts it corresponds more closely to a senior general rank, often lieutenant-general level, depending on context.
2. Wannsee: the flattening risks a common misconception
The text says he used his plane to get to the Wannsee Conference. That may come from dramatizations or anecdotal tradition, but the important correction is conceptual: Wannsee did not “decide” the Holocaust. The House of the Wannsee Conference states explicitly that it would be incorrect to say the murder of European Jews was decided there; the meeting coordinated implementation and involved ministries and party offices in a policy already decided at a higher level. Source
The protocol itself has Heydrich opening the meeting by saying that Göring had put him in charge of preparations for the “Final Solution” and that the purpose was to clarify fundamental questions and coordinate the agencies involved.
So a more accurate formulation would be:
Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference as head of the Security Police and SD, using it to assert RSHA leadership over the coordination of deportation and murder policy across Reich ministries and occupied administrations.
That is different from a vague villain prose.
3. Salon Kitty / brothel material: high contamination risk
This is one of the weakest parts of the text.
There probably was an SD-linked espionage operation around Salon Kitty, and Schellenberg’s memoirs are a key source for the microphone story. But the evidentiary situation is messy. A review of The Madam and the Spymaster notes that much of the famous Salon Kitty story is “largely unsubstantiated,” that later mythmaking drew heavily from Schellenberg and sensationalized 1970s treatments, and that many primary-source gaps remain. Source
Another article says postwar reports linked the brothel to SD informants and that Schellenberg claimed it was wired, but it also notes that little is actually known and that SD involvement remains obscure. (Also stated in the Nancy Dougherty book).
Heydrich/Schellenberg used Salon Kitty for intelligence.
–> Plausible, but source dependent.
Kitty Schmidt was coerced
–> Often repeated, but not cleanly documented
Heydrich personally “visited brothels as a habit”
–> Not plausibly documented
Heydrich went off with a girl and ordered microphones off
-> Anecdotal, probably memoir/sensational-literature territory
Therefore Heydrich was “lecherous” –> Argumentative leap
This is a perfect example of evidence laundering: a story enters through memoir, becomes sex-spy folklore, then gets retold as personality evidence.
4. Physical description: caricature disguised as observation
The “Aryan archetype” paragraph is rhetorically suspicious.
Blond, blue-eyed, tall: broadly consistent with common descriptions. But “6’4” is likely exaggerated; many sources give him around 191 cm, roughly 6’3, and even that varies. “Bird chest,” “oddly wide hips,” “sharp glimmering eyes,” “goat-like laugh,” “nasally voice” are not neutral facts. They are physiognomic characterization. In fact, he was 187 centimetres tall, as documented by medical records.
This is not necessarily useless — hostile descriptions can preserve real impressions — but it should be labelled as witness-description / hostile memoir / literary portrait, not objective data.
It also contradicts itself rhetorically. It says he “mostly fit the archetypical Aryan,” then immediately tries to deform him physically: bird chest, wide hips, asymmetry, goat laugh. That is not analysis. That is anti-iconography: first raise the idealized Nazi image, then spoil it bodily. Very common in demonizing portrayals.
5. Hobbies: mostly plausible, but the interpretation is overdriven
Fencing, violin, riding, flying, and hunting are all broadly plausible or documented. The problem is the hunting quotation.
“Heydrich much enjoys shooting… because he must make a kill…”
may come from a hostile or postwar recollection. It is not impossible as an observation, but it is psychologizing: it translates a hobby into a moral diagnosis. The text then uses it as if it reveals essence: “he must kill.” That is exactly the kind of narrative shortcut that should raise alarms.
A better historian’s formulation would be:
Some hostile recollections portray Heydrich’s hunting as intensely competitive and bound up with control or dominance; without corroboration, this should be treated as characterization rather than proof of sadistic compulsion.
6. Flying: partly true, partly mangled
He was a trained pilot and did fly with the Luftwaffe. His aircraft was hit over Soviet territory in July 1941, and he had to land and get back/rescued. The broad event is real: his Bf 109 was hit by Soviet fire near the Dniester/Yampil area, he landed behind or near enemy lines, avoided capture, and was later forbidden or stopped from such missions.
“He had his own plane which he used to get to the Wannsee Conference and fly recreationally.”
This needs qualification. “Own plane” can mean private, assigned, personal-use, liaison aircraft, or dramatized shorthand. It should not be stated baldly without identifying the aircraft, ownership status, and source. And using it “to get to Wannsee” is a detail that needs direct proof, not assumption from a filmic image of Heydrich flying into Berlin.
7. Gregor Strasser: plausible anecdote, but not cleanly handled
The Strasser passage is another example of a true atrocity wrapped in melodramatic certainty.
Gregor Strasser was killed during the Röhm purge/Night of the Long Knives, and Heydrich and Himmler were involved in the broader conspiracy and purge machinery. USHMM says Himmler and Heydrich conspired with Göring to persuade Hitler to eliminate Röhm and planted rumors/evidence of a coup threat. Source
The “Let the swine bleed to death” line is widely repeated, but it is still anecdotal. It should be attributed, not simply narrated as camera-visible fact. Also, the text says “SD cell,” which is probably imprecise; the usual accounts place Strasser in Gestapo custody/headquarters context, not simply “an SD cell.”
So: possible, famous, damning — but still should be source-labelled.
8. “He created the concentration camp system” is wrong
This is one of the clearest factual failures.
Heydrich did not create the concentration camp system. Early camps emerged in 1933; Dachau was central under Himmler/Eicke, and the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps developed under Theodor Eicke. Heydrich/RSHA/SiPo/Gestapo were deeply involved in arrests, Schutzhaft, deportations, and later exterminatory policy, but “created the concentration camp system” is too broad and wrong.
Heydrich’s police-security apparatus supplied victims to the camp system and integrated police intelligence, repression, and deportation into SS terror policy; he did not personally create the camp system as such.
9. “Forced Jews to have Jewish councils with cynical joy”: overstatement
Jewish councils/Judenräte were part of German occupation policy and ghetto administration. Heydrich/RSHA policy is relevant here, but “with cynical joy” is pure interior-state language unless tied to a specific source. It turns administrative cruelty into mind-reading.
The policy can be condemned without inventing emotional certainty.
10. Walter Schellenberg material: very dangerous source base
The text leans heavily on Schellenberg-like anecdotes: dinners, “mufti,” games with Lina, sexual jealousy, kicking under the table, practical concern, cat-and-mouse, clever drunk, Russian beer incident, poisoning Otto Strasser.
Schellenberg is useful, but he is also self-serving. He had every incentive after the war to portray himself as brilliant, endangered, reluctantly involved, and personally interesting to Heydrich. So whenever the text uses Schellenberg material to create a psychologically intimate Heydrich, the evidentiary rating should drop.
The claim that Heydrich spent weeks or months entrapping Schellenberg over Lina is especially suspicious. It may preserve something — jealousy, surveillance, social testing — but it reads like memoir-drama. “He never rested until a subordinate was in his power” is not a fact; it is literary villain construction.
11. Otto Strasser poisoning: plausible operation, bad wording
The claim that Heydrich ordered Schellenberg to track down Otto Strasser and poison him refers to real anti-Strasser operations, but the description “liquid poison that burns the skin of those it comes too close to” is garbled and sensational. It sounds like botulinum toxin or another assassination-toxin story transformed into pulp detail. This needs exact sourcing.
Do not accept it unless these can be answered:
4. Which operational file?
5. Was the plan ordered, proposed, tested, or merely claimed later by Schellenberg?
Without that, it is anecdote dressed as operational history.
12. Gleiwitz / “let go of an officer” is confused
“He also let go of an officer who disobeyed one single order to head the fake an attack from Poland…”
seems to refer to the Gleiwitz incident / Operation Himmler. The wording is nearly incoherent. Heydrich was involved in organizing false-flag operations around the Polish invasion, but this sentence does not clearly identify the officer, the order, or what “let go” means. It is unusable as written.
It piles up stories from different genres — institutional history, memoir, gossip, physical description, operational anecdote — and lets quantity simulate proof.
USHMM-type institutional facts, Schellenberg memoir anecdotes, Lina-related domestic material, pop-history descriptions, and hostile quotes are all presented at the same evidentiary level.
“He must make a kill,” “with cynical joy,” “lecherous,” “loved to play cat and mouse,” “never rested until…” These are interpretations, not facts.
Moral adjectives replacing analysis.
“Cruel,” “lecherous,” “manipulative,” “nefarious” may or may not be fair moral descriptors, but the text uses them as organizing categories before proving them.
Institutional guilt is mixed with personality gossip. Heydrich’s role in genocide is real and central; that does not automatically validate every story about brothels, jealousy, or body oddities.
The writer clearly wants a coherent monster: sexually predatory, physically uncanny, socially sadistic, intellectually brilliant, murderous, jealous, and theatrical. Some parts may be true. But the total portrait is too neat.
What is actually safe to say?
A tighter, source-clean version would be:
Reinhard Heydrich was one of the central SS-police figures of the Nazi regime: head of the SD, chief of the Security Police and SD, and head of the RSHA from 1939 until his death. The RSHA coordinated major components of Nazi repression and Holocaust policy, including deportations, Einsatzgruppen operations, and the bureaucratic coordination represented by the Wannsee Conference. Heydrich was feared for his intelligence, ambition, administrative effectiveness, and access to compromising information. Many postwar accounts also portray him as cold, suspicious, manipulative, and socially predatory, but these personality claims often derive from memoirs and hostile recollections and must be separated from well-documented institutional responsibility.
The text is not reliable as historical analysis. It is a character dossier built from unranked fragments. The worst problem is not that it condemns Heydrich; the worst problem is that it does so lazily. It takes real institutional responsibility — which is already severe enough — and dilutes it with poorly sourced villain folklore.
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