Quote of the Day (Laurence Rees, on a Prior Use of Political Deflection)

“[D]eflection [was] akin to modern ‘whataboutism.’ When confronted with the Holocaust they [leading former Nazis] voiced a series of blatantly false equivalences, such as the firebombing of Hamburg or colonial injustices, dismissing the charges as 'victor's justice.' This allowed them to label the Allies as hypocrites, reinforcing a belief in their victimhood.”— English historian and documentary filmmaker Laurence Rees interviewed by Danny Bird, “The Idea That There’s a Widespread Movement to Learn From History or to Understand It Meaningfully is False,” BBC History, February 2025

For the contemporary resort to “whataboutism” or “deflection,” please see Mona Charen’s June 2025 article in The Bulwark.

(The image accompanying this post shows former Nazi high officials who were defendants in the postwar Nuremberg trials.)

This Day in World War II History (Heydrich, Planner of Final Solution, Assassinated)

May 27, 1942—He had so effectively wiped out resistance to the Third Reich in the area under his control, Reinhard Heydrich reasoned, that he didn’t need to take the most elementary security cautions. But hubris led this most calculating and feared member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle to overestimate his safety, resulting in his fatal wounding at the hands of Czech assassins trained for the task by British intelligence.

Heydrich stands out from the rest of the gallery of malcontents and misfits who enlisted early in Adolf Hitler’s cause as much for what he represented as for what he did. Just looking at him, you might think he embodied the German ideal in a way that Hitler, for instance, never could. His blond good looks seemed to epitomize the Aryan heritage so often evoked by the Fuhrer; his violin-playing was so evocative that even rivals (not to mention himself) would weep. With a mother who was an actress and a father who was an opera singer, he seemed to represent the zenith of German culture, too.

Yet someone meeting him once was driven to exclaim that in looking at Heydrich, he saw two different people. The accompanying photo, I think, testifies to a coldness of character, a consummate bureaucrat who could outwork and outmaneuver many a foe--all in the service of a boundless racial fanaticism. “The Blond Beast” was so ruthless that even his boss, SS head Heinrich Himmler, confessed that he feared him. 

For the past year, in addition to his other duties as the head of the Reich Security Head Office--a vast directorate blending the SS and the police--Heydrich had gone by the Orwellian title of Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Hitler had decided that the prior occupant of the office was too conservative, too elderly, too languid in extinguishing resistance in his conquered territory. 

Promptly upon assuming office, Heydrich instituted high-profile repressive measures: the execution of 400 Czechs in his first two months alone, the deportation of 1,300 more to concentration camps in the Third Reich, and the show trial and execution of puppet Prime Minister Alois Elias.

These measures earned Heydrich the nickname "the Butcher of Prague." But he needed at the same time to motivate the population for the task Hitler had set: raising Czech agricultural and industrial output enough to supply Gemany's armed forces. Following the repressive measures, then, Heydrich raised food rations, improved social security, and even sent workers to luxury hotels in spa towns. Resistance to the Nazi regime weakened noticeably through use of this carrot-and-heavy-stick regime.

Surveying the security landscape, Heydrich felt so satisfied with what he had accomplished that he thought nobody would dream of killing him. Thus, he continued to follow the same route to his Prague office every day at the same time, with his only companion a chauffeur--no security escort, no armor for the vehicle. With the spring weather especially fine that late May day, he told his chauffeur to drive with the top down, too.

Heydrich might have been correct that those living directly under his rule had largely given up the struggle, but he hadn't reckoned with the Czech government in exile, which, watching from Great Britain, decided he needed to be eliminated. They prevailed on their ally to train a small group of partisans in sabotage and espionage, then to fly them over Prague, where they parachuted into a field on the city outskirts.

When Heydrich’s car slowed down on a curve in the road on the way to work, one assassin threw a hand grenade that, upon exploding, sent bits of the vehicle’s upholstery flying into the Reich minister’s ribs, shoulder and spleen. During the operation to remove these fragments, infection set into the wound, leading to Heydrich’s death eight days after the attack.

Publicly, Hitler hailed Heydrich as “indispensable”; privately, he damned the aide’s lack of caution as “stupid and idiotic.” The minister’s death did, however, furnish his leader with a pretext for terrible vengeance on the Czechs.

Hitler had decided to shoot 10,000 Czechs at once and to repeat the strategy he had adopted in Poland of making that nation into what governor-general Hans Frank called “an intellectual desert”—i.e., mass roundup and execution of professionals, along with wholesale closings of universities and even high schools.

At the urging of Heydrich’s successor, who argued that wholesale bloodshed would undermine German arms production, Hitler relented—to a point.

One town, Lidice, would be made the scapegoat for the Heydrich assassination. On June 10, the community was rounded up on the false charge of aiding the assassination, with the men summarily executed, the women hauled off to concentration camps, and the children corralled for racial cataloguing, adoption or assignment to concentration camps. The town was then razed to the ground, with even its name removed from all German maps. Altogether, 5,000 Czechs died in the next few weeks.

As for their “Protector”: the atrocities following his death merely continued the catalogue of terror he had created so assiduously on Hitler’s behalf. Heydrich's principal claim to infamy was his leadership role at the Wannsee Conference, in which he advised participants that Hitler desired a “coming final solution of the Jewish question” on the continent. Six million Jews would die in the wake of the effort he initiated. Even this only culminated a series of actions that, had he lived to war’s end, would have made him an especially strong target of the prosecution at the Nuremberg trials, including:

*faking an incident—the storming of a German-language radio station in Poland—as an excuse for Hitler’s invasion of that country;

*manufacturing evidence against Ernst Rohm, head of Hitler’s SA (Brownshirts), later used in his execution;

*using the SS to eliminate resistance in conquered Austria; 

* subjecting a third of Roman Catholic priests to state disciplining and harrassment, with punishment extending to prison, following a Pope Pius XI encyclical that castigated Nazism as an "idolatrous cult"; 

* deporting Germany’s Gypsies to occupied Poland;

* establishing ghettoes where Jews were to be herded and controlled; and

* approving the use of gas chambers against the Jews.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Writing “Too Much of Everything”)

“I know I write too much of everything. The thing I am going to learn some day is that you might write one of the best things you ever put on paper, but it doesn’t necessarily belong in the book at hand. I am going to learn, though. I’ll work hard and I know I can do it.”—Thomas Wolfe quoted in “Brevity to be Goal of Thomas Wolfe,” The New York Times, July 5, 1935, in Thomas Wolfe Interviewed, 1929-1938, edited by Aldo P. Magi and Richard Walser (1985)

Thomas Wolfe, boisterous, needy man-child, overflowing with creative fecundity, had little time left to master the kind of Jamesian control over his material of which he was speaking here. Another 3½ years and he’d be dead, leaving behind another three books to be hewn from the mass he left behind for his second, final editor, Edward C. Aswell.

Truth be told, the kind of self-consciousness he was promising as he stepped off the boat from a trip to Europe wasn’t always everything it was cracked up to be. All that endless mulling and shaping of materials could leave aridity to one’s work—something that Marion (Clover) Adams, clever, suicidal wife of historian Henry Adams, noted when she observed, about the work of her husband’s friend, Henry James: “He’s chewed much more than he’s bitten off.”

That kind of self-control also implied the ability to sit still—and it was growing ever more obvious that the gargantuan, experience-hungry Wolfe didn’t possess this gene, either. Nevertheless, on the day before the above quote appeared in The New York Times, questions about his self-discipline were becoming increasingly constant, and eventually they would drive a wedge between himself and the man who met him on the dock that Fourth of July when he came back from a triumphant trip abroad, his first editor, mentor and friend, Maxwell Perkins.

Wolfe had become a kind of surrogate son for Perkins, father of five daughters, as the Scribners editor shaped the manuscripts of the hulking Southerner’s first two sprawling novels, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, into print. The novelist had frankly acknowledged his debt in a nonfiction account of his writing process, The Story of a Novel, as well as three months ago in his dedication of the just-published Of Time and the River. (See my prior post on Wolfe, Fitzgerald and Hemingway—the trio that Fitzgerald called Max’s “sons”—and their competition for his attention and approval.)

But now the whispers were growing louder about how much Wolfe was a creature of his editor. Before long, critic Bernard De Voto would bring these concerns to a fever pitch—and damage Wolfe’s reputation so much that it never fully recovered—in “Genius Is Not Enough.”

The German intelligentsia hadn’t minded Wolfe’s headlong romantic spirit. This, after all, was the country that had practically invented Romanticism, and the writers Wolfe met there embraced him eagerly. He exulted to Perkins about having awoken one morning, Byron-like, to find himself “famous in Berlin.”

Guided through Berlin by the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, Wolfe’s sojourn was a triumph. Biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote a glittering description of this American giant in a nation otherwise increasingly fearful about exercising its own creative energies:

“The might and music of his personality exalted everyone he met; striding the streets with head aloft and his body full of lumbering rhythm, he personified the freedom and promise of America. For the first time since Hitler’s rise to power the Romanische Café, a former gathering place of artists and intellectuals, showed signs of life.”

Try as you might, you can’t really understate Wolfe’s puppy-like yearning for adulation or naivete. At the same time, we need to give him some credit—no matter how much he hated to notice faults in a country that paid no attention to his biggest creative limitation, he had, by the end of his sojourn in Germany, begun to be alarmed by that nation’s anti-Semitism, which was so virulent that it exceeded his own. It all manifested itself, insidiously, in "the solid, liquid smack of booted feet, and young brown faces shaded under steel goose-stepping beneath the green arcades of the Kurfurstendamm, the army lorries rolling past, each crowded with regimented rows of young, formal, helmeted, armfolded, ramrodded bodies.”

Wolfe, let it be said, did not become blind to a country that had lionized him, as Charles Lindbergh was about to do with Hitler’s Germany, or willfully uncurious about why intellectuals he had befriended were suddenly disappearing, as Paul Robeson would react when faced with the toll of Stalin’s purges. Two years later, his short story “I Have a Thing to Tell You” would make unmistakably clear his break from the country he loved more than any other next to his own.

The novelist might have been talking about artistic self-control when he vowed “I am going to learn” when he stepped off the boat, but he did, in fact, learn something along the way before he died: not to allow ego or ideology to cloud his vision of the world before his eyes.