WI Heydrich lives?

EMTSATX

Banned
For those of you that have Amazon Fire they are showing "Anthropoid" which is a dramatization of the assignation of Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia.

First it is claimed that he was the " number 3 man in the Reich after only Hitler and Himmler." OK, that has never been my understanding. I have understood he was a "pet" of Hitler's and perhaps, the second in command of the SS. I know he was the head of the SD.

So, any TL I have read on here is a) he still gets killed (I am thinking about @galveston bay TL) b)or becomes Fuhrer alarm Turtledoves "in the presence of my enemies"

My question is this: if he survives longer, does it change anything? I know he was on his way to promotion in France. Does anything change?

I mean the man was personally not afraid to go into combat. He flew planes (not super well.) But, he was not a military or tactical leader. So, I see no positive gain.

Put him in charge in the East (politically) and how much more brutal can it get? I am not sure anything changes at all except the Israeli's hang him later on, for his role in the final solution.

So if he lives does It change anything at all?
 
Honestly I doubt it. The massacres in Czechoslovakia that were carried out as reprisals for his death wouldn't have happened with whatever butterflies that entailed. It's hard to see how he could make the Reich more brutal.

My guess is that everything just proceeds as IOTL.
 
First it is claimed that he was the " number 3 man in the Reich after only Hitler and Himmler." OK, that has never been my understanding. I have understood he was a "pet" of Hitler's and perhaps, the second in command of the SS. I know he was the head of the SD.

He was the one that established the Nazi identification system, completed the prominence of the SS, became head of Interpol, and basically ran the intelligence and police systems.

My question is this: if he survives longer, does it change anything? I know he was on his way to promotion in France. Does anything change?

I would say he would have managed to not bungle up German intelligence the way everyone else did, and probably would have worked with Speer to squeeze even more out of Europe. All that extra efficiency will be bloody important.
 

EMTSATX

Banned
@Obergruppenführer Smith OK, so let's say he figures out that ADM. Cannaris is at the very least incompetent if not a traitor. He takes over intelligence. I think the problem is basically every spy in England was a double agent and who ever was involved with the red orchestra.
 
@Obergruppenführer Smith OK, so let's say he figures out that ADM. Cannaris is at the very least incompetent if not a traitor. He takes over intelligence. I think the problem is basically every spy in England was a double agent and who ever was involved with the red orchestra.
Frankly, I believe that Reinhard knew Canaris was playing a game, but didn't intervene due to both his personal relationship and the necessity of competition.
 
Probably not markable changes. Heydrich would commit suicide soon after he is captured, hanged or fled to Argentina. But even in Argentina he would be even bigger target for Mossad than Eichmann.
 
Heydrich will probably be given more security over the Reich, especially in occupied territories. I heard plenty of sources that indicate that Hitler planned to assign Heydrich on a very important task, and they lead to a high position in Occupied France. So I'd guess he'd be Governor-General of Occupied France. And there'd likely be brutal reprisals for any activity by the French Underground. Another speculation is that there may be more casualties in the Holocaust than in OTL. In the Wannsee Conference, it was estimated that Auschwitz alone was capable of executing 60,000 Jews a day, but Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, later testified that he could kill a maximum of 10,000 Jews every 24 hours, but Auschwitz would usually kill only 2,000 Jews a day. OTL, Himmler and Eichmann generally didn't care of the setback because it was still higher than the kill-count in Treblinka and Sobibor, but Heydrich was an exceptional pragmatist. He'd likely be less forgiving and pressure Hoess into draining Auschwitz's resources in order to meet the deadline. In addition, he'd be a serious threat to the July Plotters because of his tight control on security.

I'm actually working on a TL if Hitler and other Nazis stood trial at Nuremberg. And in this TL, Heydrich actually survives and his actions actually mirror what I described above. I'll leave a link to it below. I hope this contributes to the discussion.

Link: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...rnate-history-of-the-nuremberg-trials.388924/
 
Hydrich was the brains of the operation, from the bombing of the radio station that the Nazis used as an excuse to invade Poland to planing the logistics of the Holocaust that was him.
Hydrich's importance to the internal politics of the Reich can not be underestimated, the Nazis kept blackmail files on everybody, Rinheart Hydrich was in charge of those files.
 

Deleted member 94680

Isn't this the POD of Fatherland, by Robert Harris?

One of them. He survives the '42 assassination (attempt, I suppose in this TL) and becomes head of the SS. IIRC it's mentioned Himmler has died in an accident (implied not to be). Militarily, the Wehrmacht succeed in Case Blue and cut the Soviets off from their oil fields in the Caucasus. They also figure out Enigma has been cracked, and I think that's meant to be down to Heydrich, but I'm not sure.
 
If he survives and is promoted in France does that mean Paris is burned to the ground before the Allies make it there in 44?
 

Deleted member 94680

If he survives and is promoted in France does that mean Paris is burned to the ground before the Allies make it there in 44?

Possibly. There's more chance there will be a lot of hanged Frenchmen meaning there will be no need to burn Paris.

Heydrich being in charge of the German security services will gut the resistance
 

Geon

Donor
If Heydrich lived I see two things.

First, the French Resistance has a much harder time of it as Heydrich brings his characteristic ruthless efficiency to fighting the resistance. When the Allies invade in 1944 Heydrich orders Paris destroyed out of sheer spite.

Secondly, I don't see Heydrich surviving the war. Either by enemy activity (partisans) or his own hand he will deny the Allies the chance to try him.
 
My read of Heydrich was that he was the next generation of Nazi, he was not married to the ideology or Hitler, in fact I feel he was the logical outcome of Hitler's "rat fight" methodology, an unscrupulous man who would put Hitler in a gas chamber if he faltered, Heydrich would potentially rise to take the Nazi Germans into a brutally logical order not dissimilar to how the USSR became dominated by the generation raised on Communism rather than fighting in the revolution, ideology became a façade, they pursued power alone and nothing stood between them and its exercise save other power players. But would he save the Third Reich from ruin? I doubt it. Hitler is still the lever puller and has all the switches crisscrossed. Heydrich is the best bogeyman to wank the surviving Third Reich, a truly vile specimen but not crazy, dangerous in that too clever sort of way.
 

Deleted member 94680

Why would his methods be so successful?

"Heydrich came to Prague to enforce policy, fight resistance to the Nazi regime, and keep up production quotas. He viewed the area as a bulwark of Germandom and condemned the Czech resistance's "stabs in the back". Heydrich started his rule by terrorising the population: 92 people were executed within three days of his arrival in Prague. Their names appeared on posters throughout the occupied region. Almost all avenues by which Czechs could express the Czech culture in public were closed. According to Heydrich's estimate, between 4,000 and 5,000 people were arrested by February 1942. Those who were not executed were sent to a concentration camp. In March 1942, further sweeps against Czech cultural and patriotic organisations, the military, and the intelligentsia resulted in the practical paralysis of Czech resistance. Although small disorganised cells of Central Leadership of Home Resistance survived, only the communist resistance was able to function in a coordinated manner (although it also suffered arrests). The terror also served to paralyse resistance in society, with public and widespread reprisals against any action resisting the German rule." Wikipedia page on Heydrich, edited for brevity.

He did it Prague with less men, resources and money. Therefore IMO he could do it in France as well.
 
He did it Prague with less men, resources and money. Therefore IMO he could do it in France as well.

It's important to note that Heydrich made sure there were carrots to the sticks, unlike most of the brutish fellow Nazis. While the actual carrots were meager, the fact they existed and were proclaimed publicly had a big affect on perception.
 
Top