Heydrich Got the Best High School Education

Reinhard Heydrich was very lucky – he was one of the privileged 10% boys (girls were a different matter entirely) who went to a high school after attending a primary one.

In Germany at the time, secondary schooling at the time was reserved for a small, privileged and overwhelmingly male elite. In the early 1900s, some 90 per cent of German students never went beyond primary school.

Of the fortunate 10 per cent attending all-boys secondary schools, about 66% continued their education in the humanities-oriented Gymnasien which ended with the Abitur, the school-leaving certificate qualifying them to attend university. The remaining 34% cent attended the Oberrealschule, a slightly less academic institution whose leaving certificate did not qualify its students for university.

However, when the time came for Reinhard Heydrich to go to secondary school, his parents (something tells me that it was his mother) decided to send him to the local Reformgymnasium, a relatively new (and thus modern) institution that embodied the scientific optimism of the dynamic, future-oriented German Empire.

The Reformgymnasium was designed to combine the time-tested classical Gymnasium – with its emphasis on a comprehensive education in the humanities and training in Latin and ancient Greek – with education in “hard sciences” required to excel in the science- and technology-oriented early twentieth century.

The Reformgymnasium was modern in yet another sense. While the vast majority of German schools at the time were denominational, the Reformgymnasium was not affiliated to any religious organization (or faith).

At the time, 95% of Protestant and 91% of Catholic children were educated in schools of their own confession. Reinhard Heydrich’s educational experience was therefore exceptionally modern and forward-looking in more than one sense.

I would say, exceptionally secular – and it had a far more profound influence on Reinhard Heydrich’s subsequent life. Years spent in the Reformgymnasium moved him sufficiently away from the Holy Roman Catholic Church for him to subsequently embrace National-Socialism (a quasi-religion of sorts) and then to leave Catholic Church altogether, converting to Gottgl;ubig faith.

In addition to the main scientific subjects taught at German high schools – chemistry, physics and mathematics – great emphasis was placed on German literature and culture as well as on modern languages.

French was taught from the first year onwards, Latin from the lower-fourth, and English was introduced in the lower-fifth. To that Reinhard Heydrich later allegedly added Russian.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, given his cultured family background, Reinhard Heydrich’s performance at school was well above average. His results in science subjects were particularly outstanding. So, not surprisingly, his career ambition as a teenager was to become a chemist.

And he became one (of sorts) – it was Reinhard Heydrich who in August of 1941 came up with the idea of “Holocaust by Gas” – murdering millions of Jews under German control by poison gas (CO and hydrogen cyanide) in mobile and stationary gas chambers.

However, not everything was rosy for him during his years in Reformgymnasium. Young Reinhard was shy, insecure, and was frequently bullied for his high-pitched voice and rumoured Jewish ancestry.

His athletic achievements took care of bullying (no one would want to mess with an accomplished fencer) … unfortunately, the rumors of his Jewish ancestry were a much bigger problem.

As many rumors, these had nothing to do with reality. Reinhard’s paternal grandmother, Ernestine Heydrich, after the sudden death of her husband Carl (he was just 37), married a Protestant locksmith, Gustav Robert S;ss, who was thirteen years her junior and just nine years older than her eldest son Bruno.

In subsequent years, it was S;ss’s Jewish-sounding family name that would fuel speculation about Heydrich’s non-Aryan ancestry, even though S;ss himself was neither Bruno’s father nor of Jewish descent.

Total BS (pardon my French) … but, alas, perceptions are the only reality. Worse, these rumors increased after Reinhard’s maternal uncle Hans Krantz married a Hungarian Jewess named Iza Jarmy. Surprisingly, even several otherwise distinguished historians bought into this nonsense.

As it often happens (and given the generally anti-Semitic environment where he grew up), Reinhard Heydrich developed highly negative attitude towards everything and anything Jewish.

This negativity by itself did not make Reinhard Heydrich into a serial mass murderer of Jews (it took far more than that) but it did make a not insignificant contribution to this deadly transformation.