Hitler's Hangman by Robert. Gerwarth

that stood very close together, and a small
    mouth, whose gaping lips he usually pinched together. A long upper
    body with almost apelike arms sat over a deep, broad pelvis, a husky
    build with rounded, unmuscular legs . . . He appeared gangly, somewhat
    soft and effeminate.
    Even Heydrich’s learning abilities, so the same fellow officer recalled, were:
    average at best. Scholarship and thoroughness were never his thing.
    Perhaps he picked up on things quickly, but he was too superficial to
    process what he had learned and to organize it properly. However, it
    would be unfair merely to attribute shrewdness to him. His intelligence
    . . . was based on logical thinking, consistent behaviour and an instinct for
    treating others in a way that was advantageous to himself, in recognizing
    opportunities for himself, in anticipating the wishes of his superiors and
    in his adaptability.81
    Considering Heydrich’s life-long passion for sport, it seems highly
    unlikely that an inability to cope with the physical demands of the
    training was the key reason for his outsider status.82 Heydrich had been
    an active sportsman for many years before he joined the navy. He was a
    member of a gymnastic association in Halle, an active swimmer and a
    team member of his high school’s rowing club. Furthermore, he had taken
    up fencing in his early childhood and practised daily during his time in
    the navy. Moreover, he was a devoted sailor, winning the Baltic Sea
    championships in a twelve-foot dinghy in 1927 and the North Sea
    championships in the same class one year later.83
    It is more likely that Heydrich’s role as an outsider among the crew
    members was at least partly a result of his educated middle-class background,
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    HITLER’S HANGMAN
    particularly his musical proclivities and his inclination to play the violin
    on board whilst off-duty, a pasttime that seemed oddly out of place in
    the masculine world of the navy.84 His father had given him a violin as a
    parting gift when he left for Kiel and Heydrich practised on it in solitude
    whenever he found the time. His musical inclinations repeatedly made him
    the target of ridicule. During his basic training in Kiel, for example, a non-
    commissioned training officer from West Prussia frequently woke him at
    night and forced him to play the Tosel i Serenade on his violin. Many years
    later, Heydrich recal ed these humiliating incidents when making conde-
    scending comments regarding the racial inferiority of the West Prussians
    with their ‘Polish-infested’ blood.85
    Two further reasons for Heydrich’s oddball status at the beginning of
    his officer training need to be considered. By embarking on a naval career,
    he had entered one of the most staunchly right-wing milieus in Weimar
    Germany, a milieu in which officers and NCOs compensated for the
    ‘shameful’ naval mutiny in Kiel in 1918 by taking an aggressively nation-
    alistic stance. The naval officer corps not only played a decisive role in the
    Freikorps violence against Communist insurgents in 1919 and 1920, but
    also provided a recruiting ground for many of the right-wing terrorists
    that formed the infamous Organisation Consul, responsible for the assas-
    sinations of prominent Weimar politicians such as Matthias Erzberger
    and Walther Rathenau. Within this general climate of right-wing
    extremism, or so some of his naval colleagues testified after the war,
    Heydrich appeared oddly apolitical. If indeed he had flirted with right-
    wing extremism in 1918, he seems to have lost interest by 1922. When
    one of his fellow cadets, Ernst Werner Techow, participated in the murder
    of Foreign Minister Rathenau in the summer of 1922, Heydrich disap-
    pointed his roommates by displaying no interest in the case. Neither was
    the French occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 – hotly discussed among his
    fellow naval officers and the German population at large – of any concern
    to him. If anything, so his fellow cadet Hans Rehm testified