Heydrich Got into Knowledge Mining in High School

However, Reinhard Heydrich’s subsequent life was defined not by what he learned in the classroom, but by his extracurricular activities. More specifically, by what he read during his leisure time.

Simultaneously, he began to develop an insatiable appetite for crime fiction and spy novels, many of them serialized in newspapers. Detective novels from Britain and the United States – from Sherlock Holmes to Nat Pinkerton – were a huge success in Germany and they captured the imagination of the young Heydrich.

Throughout the war and the 1920s, he maintained his keen interest in the genre and put his expertise to good use when he first met Himmler in 1931. Neither of the two men had any idea of how to set up a domestic intelligence service, but Heydrich used the knowledge obtained from detective and spy novels to impress Himmler to the extent that he offered him the job of creating an SS intelligence agency: the future SD.

Which proves beyond the reasonable doubt that Reinhard Heydrich was, indeed, a genius – even at an early age (in high school!) he managed to mine knowledge from an unlikely source (fiction books!) and then use this knowledge not only to create from scratch one of the best intelligence services (SD).

But also, to successfully manage both the political police (Gestapo) that he ran directly from 1934 to 1939 and criminal police (Kripo) amalgamated first into SiPo (Security Police) and then into RSHA.