Heydrich's Inferno

Reinhard Heydrich died and went to hell.

"Hello," said the Devil. "We've been getting quite a few of you Gestapo men lately. I understand there will be more, too, before long. But you were supposed to be the toughest guy in Europe. Millions of people hated you. You were a big shot.

What in the world happened to you?" "Heil Hitler," said Heydrich. "It was the Czechs who did it, the yellow democratic curs. They bombed my car last week, outside Prague, while I was on my way back to Berlin to tell the Fuhrer (Heil Hitler!') that Czecho-Slovakia had at last been Germanized. Two men bombed me and then shot up my spine with tommy guns, the contemptible, bicycling plutocrats--Heil Hitler!" "Come, come," said the Devil. "Let's forget the 'Heil Hitler' business for a while. Remember we're all sons of bitches here. Now just tell me what you did in Czecho-Slovakia." "Yes, your Satanic Majesty," said Heydrich, eagerly. He patted his trimly cut blond hair, moistened his lips and rubbed his hands. "You will be pleased at what I did. But, of course, my being named Gestapo Commissar General of all German Occupied Territory in May was only a promotion for what I had done before." The Devil pawed at the sulphurous earth with a cloven hoof. At last he said: "Go ahead then; start from the beginning." "Well, I killed my first man," Heydrich said, "when I was 15--fighting the Reds and the Republicans in the streets of my home town of Halle in Saxony. That was in 1919. I'm 38 now. Then I got into the Navy and for a while I was a spy, but the Navy threw me out. I got drunk and there was a woman. . . . And then I joined up with the Nazis. The rest was easy."

"Yes," said the Devil, "my agents told me. I've heard how you slaughtered the Socialists in East Prussia, and the first thing you knew you had a budget of $150,000 a year and lots of women and a big car. But I must say you paid off. It was you, wasn't it, who killed Gregor Strasser? And you who did the stool-pigeoning in the blood purge that sent Roehm and those other friends of Hitler down here in 1934?"

"Heinrich Himmler gets the credit for that," Heydrich said. "He's No. 2 Nazi now and head of all the German police. But I was the one who did it. I built up the spy system, even in the Army. And I've been the butcher boy. Ask the Poles about me, or the French saboteurs, or the Dutch and the Belgians and the Norwegians. We've shot or hanged more than 400,000, not counting all who die in tue concentration camps. There's a rhyme in Germany which goes: 'Himmler der Heuchler, Heydrich der Henker' which means 'Himmler the Hypocrite, Heydrich the Hangman.' The countries we've conquered will remember me, the swine."

"No doubt, no doubt," said the Devil. "But what is going to happen to that madhouse up there when more & more of you get killed?"

"Watch what we do to the Czechs," said Heydrich. "We killed 82 of them the first four days after I got hurt. And we'll kill hundreds more. We'll kill them or they'll kill us. There must be no Czecho-Slovakia left, no one left in Europe who opposes the German Reich. You might have thought it was an old-fashioned idea to round up hostages and shoot them by the hundreds when one of the conquerors is killed. It isn't. It's effective, and after a while it becomes pleasant, too, whether the hostages are Jews or not." "That reminds me," said the Devil.

"What about that man, Jesus Christ? I offered Him the whole world from a moun tain top one time and he turned me down.

I've never quite gotten over that. Do they still talk about Him?" "Democrats, Christians, fools, they do," said Heydrich. "We don't believe in Him.

Priests and preachers told us we'd end up in hell, but we didn't believe that either." "And how do you like hell?" asked the Devil. "I still remember when those two poets, Vergil and Dante, came through.

Dante wrote a wonderful account of it." Devil Bedeviled. "Well," said Heydrich, and a crafty look appeared in his lizard-green eyes, "I would like to make a few suggestions. That old fool, Charon, at the river Acheron. He batted me one with his oar when I protested that he should have a special boat reserved for members of the Master Race. What democratic weaknesses are these! And your centaurs with bows & arrows, and your beds of hot sand and serpents and wasps! What you need here are tanks and flamethrowers and soft-nosed bullets. And why do you maim heretics, and bury gluttons in mud and traitors up to their necks in ice? Why, every man in the Party would be caught in your tortures -- and they are your own best disciples. They steal and lie and become traitors if need be, but only because they are strong and others are weak." "Enough," cried the Devil, losing his temper. "You fool. Heydrich! I am old and I know sin. It is punishable and some times it is an art. But you are not even subtle. You and the men like you are only nasty little boys who like to pull the wings off birds. You wouldn't understand my hell. Not even in the seventh circle, where I might send you to struggle everlastingly against drowning in the river of blood.

You have created your own rivers of blood and your own hell." Flames spurted from the Devil's nostrils and lightning crackled from his horns.

"Beelzebub!" he roared at his right-hand man. "Get this unsufferable nitwit out of here. Put a few adders and a serpent or two into his belly to gnaw where the bullets shattered his spine. Then send him back to his hell on earth. . . ." And that is the reason why the conquered people of Europe, the "silent people" who suffer and wait and hope for liberation, first heard last week that Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi hangman, had been killed in Czecho-Slovakia; then, later, that he was not dead but would be hopelessly crippled. Heydrich might still die, but the reason he kept on living for awhile was simply that hell would not have him.

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