How was he the "most evil"? More so than Hitler? Which is more evil -- the guy behind the desk who orders the deaths of millions, or the guy in the camp smashing babies against trees in front of their mothers? How was Heydrich more evil than his boss Himmler, who ended up with a lot more blood on his hands. How was he more evil than the notorious butchers of the extermination camps, like Franz, Matthes, Kuttner, Miete, Wagner, Moll, Bothmann? How did his evil exceed that of Christian Wirth who not only oversaw the gassing of more than 1.5 million people but who was actually there, torturing and killing people with his own hands?Zack M wrote:Supposing Heydrich (the most evil and intelligent Nazi)...
How was he the most intelligent Nazi?? More so than the famed philosopher Heidegger who was a member of the Nazi party? Was he more intelligent than a certan Nazi with an MD and a PhD, Josef Mengele? Or another physician, Irmfried Eberl, who ran the first phase of Treblinka when it turned into probably the most ghastly scene in the entire Third Reich? Was he more intelligent than Otto Ohlendorf, a lawyer and economist, who shot 90,000 people as the leader of Einsatzgruppe D?
Not much would have been different if Heydrich had lived. Why not? Because after his death Hitler and Himmler decided to greatly ramp up the killings, and the death toll skyrocketed after Heydrich died. The intent to totally exterminate the Jews of Europe (before the war ended) developed AFTER Heydrich's death. Treblinka opened after he died -- around 360,000 Jews died there in less than 2 months after Heydrich's death. Sobibor, Belzec, and Birkenau both expanded. Increased efforts were made to import Jews from other countries. The Einsatzgruppe launched their second wave of exterminations in the USSR.
So the killings reached their greatest extreme after Heydrich had died. I suppose they could have just dispensed with all labor selection and EVERY Jew could have died. But in the end, the fact that Hitler's war was entirely doomed determined the course of actions -- after 1942 the Reich depended more and more on slave labor mobilization because of war attrition, and Heydrich wouldn't have done any better than his superiors (Himmler, Hitler), subordinates (Eichmann and his staff), and colleagues in other depts (like von Ribbentrop) at importing Jews from reluctant countries like France, Denmark, Bulgaria, and Italy.
I would add that Heydrich was in charge of the RSHA, which controlled police actions to gather and deport Jews, and the on site killing of Jews in the USSR. But Heydrich was NOT in charge of 1) the Aktion Reinhard camps in which their leader (Globocnik) was directly subordinated to Himmler, 2) the Totenkopfverband (the staff in the camps, including the extermination sites), or 3) the WVHA (the SS economic department which notably ran Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek).