Reinhard Heydrich

Overview

Reinhard Heydrich was a senior SS official who instructed police nonintervention during Kristallnacht / Night of Broken Glass and later headed the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, creating institutional continuity between pogrom, coerced removal, and the later genocidal bureaucracy.

Current Profile

During the November 1938 pogrom, Heydrich told police not to protect Jewish families or prevent attacks on synagogues and cemeteries. These instructions made state inaction an operational form of participation while other officials prepared mass detention capacity.

At the beginning of 1939, a Central Office for Jewish Emigration was established under Heydrich to remove the remaining Jewish population from the Reich. The episode treats this as a decisive bureaucratic step: at the Wannsee Conference in 1942, Heydrich invoked the mandate as part of the institutional path from coerced emigration to coordinated extermination.

Key Characteristics

• He translated political persecution into police instructions and administrative procedure.
• He used nonprotection and selective restraint to enable violence while managing appearances.
• He centralized coerced Jewish emigration under SS authority.
• His later invocation of the mandate connected prewar removal machinery to genocidal coordination.

Evidence

• Police instruction: 410. The Nazis in Power: The Night of Broken Glass (Part 7) describes Heydrich’s order not to protect Jewish families or prevent attacks on Jewish sites.
• Central office: 410. The Nazis in Power: The Night of Broken Glass (Part 7) dates the Central Office for Jewish Emigration to early 1939 and places it under Heydrich.
• Institutional continuity: 410. The Nazis in Power: The Night of Broken Glass (Part 7) connects the office’s mandate to Heydrich’s opening of the 1942 Wannsee Conference.

Qualifications

This profile focuses on Heydrich’s role in the episode’s 1938–42 institutional sequence rather than his complete SS career. The source interprets the emigration office as a decisive step toward extermination; that does not mean every administrative detail or later method was fixed at the office’s creation.

What Changed

• Established Heydrich’s police-enabling role during Kristallnacht.
• Connected coerced-emigration administration to later genocidal coordination.

Relationships

• Kristallnacht / Night of Broken Glass - pogrom enabled in part by his police instructions.
• Adolf Hitler - political leader whose racial direction SS institutions implemented.
• Nazi Germany / 纳粹德国 - regime whose coercive apparatus he helped centralize.
• Rationalized State Violence / 理性化国家暴力 - concept describing the administrative scaling of persecution.
• The Holocaust / 犹太人大屠杀 - genocide linked institutionally to the later use of his 1939 mandate.