4. The Regency
To understand the events following the death of the Führer, one must understand the man whom he nominated as his successor at the Munich commemoration of November 1962. Reinhard Heydrich had been an integral part of the Party and government since before the 1933 Revolution, and had held a variety of important posts, culminating in being the Führer's Russian viceroy. However, because his background remained in intelligence, and he was viewed originally as Himmler's spymaster, Heydrich was viewed with deep suspicion by much of the original Party apparatus.
Beyond this, many of the ideological purists of the Party, such as Martin Bormann, Arthur Rosenberg, and Joseph Goebbels, viewed Heydrich with considerable alarm simply because of his methods. He was a pragmatist, which they saw as a disadvantage; Heydrich had resorted to the use of Reichsheer forces when the "puritans" had preferred the police and Party soldiers of the Waffen-SS, all prior to the establishment of treaty forces. Heydrich's ideological defense of this was, of course, impeccable: there were far more troops in Army uniform, and they were, after all, Germans, intent on the business of establishing a German empire to the Urals. To neglect the Army simply because, for instance, Goebbels wanted another photo-essay of the SS commander Jochen Peiper leading his helicopters in a search for Sowjet-remnant bandits was simply ludicrous. Unsurprisingly, Peiper, whose division did amass an impressive record during this time, Skorzeny, the ultimate expert on this kind of asymmetric warfare, and Hausser, all from the traditional Waffen-SS hierarchy, all sided with Heydrich for practical reasons.
That the Führer chose this man as his successor on the grounds of a "balance of power" theory leading to a civil war on his death is spurious; the surviving correspondence between the Chancellory and Heydrich's Munich headquarters indicates that Heydrich was indeed Hitler's anointed successor. Phrases such as "I repose complete confidence in you" dot the Führer's memoranda. However, Heydrich lacked a strong power base outside his proteges in intelligence and the colonial agencies. He began to remedy this by following the old principle of 'divide and rule.' Heydrich established secondary channels in foreign policy, beginning a period of rapprochement with the United States while at the same time pressuring the government of King Edward VIII and Lord Protector Mosley to cede or lease bases in the Caribbean to the Reich. The outright purchase of Jamaica was freely discussed, but came to nothing. Confusion arose between the use of Heydrich's preferred intermediary, former Waffen-SS Brigadeführer Rudolf von Ribbentrop, and his father, the Party Foreign Secretary. The younger Ribbentrop was confidently expected to replace the elder by both internal and external observers, and his willing participation in Heydrich's parallel government gave the new Reichsführer considerable legitimacy.
Similarly, Hausser and Skorzeny, as said elsewhere, established broad contacts with Heydrich in the years leading up to the establishment of the Heydrich Regency, finding him more reasonable in his expectations than the Party favorites. Heydrich further extended his favor in the realm of the old die-hards by favoring Wilhelm Frick, onetime Minister of the Interior and Himmler's fierce rival, as a national intelligence coordinator. It was purely a sinecure, as all of the organs of the intelligence apparatus were already controlled by Heydrich proteges such as Kaltenbrunner and Schellenburg, but the appointment of a man widely seen as a veteran of the "struggle days" of the 1930s gave the Reichsführer an unexpected degree of leverage with the few remaining old fighters.
Figure 151: Wilhelm Frick, Reichsaufklärungsführer from 1962
By mid-1963, therefore, after six months as the Führer's designated successor, Heydrich had established relatively complete control of the government, ensuring what should be a smooth eventual succession. He was confident enough in his status at this point to consider sending a special envoy to the American President, in this case the Youth Leader, Baldur von Schirach, asking for a face-to-face meeting between the Führer and President Kennedy in Berlin to begin the difficult task of repairing relations damaged by the war. The choice of Schirach as an ambassador was a difficult one, coming so soon after the recall of the younger Ribbentrop after protests by the Kennedy Administration, but the Americans mistakenly viewed Schirach as a moderate. Schirach was a primary architect of the German war machine, responsible as he was for the indoctrination of the young, and it was thanks to Schirach that the German youth movement was so strongly loyal to the Führer.
Figure 152: The youthful Baldur von Schirach, former Reichsjugendführer and Ambassador to the United States from 1963
Schirach arrived in Washington, DC on the Führer's birthday, 1963, to replace the younger Ribbentrop. His instructions were explicit, to bring the American President himself to the negotiating table, and there is additional evidence that the Reichsführer had dispatched him to the United States as a way of securing his own position and eliminating Schirach as a potential rival come the Führer's expected demise. It is to Schirach's tremendous credit that he was able to achieve this at all, with President Kennedy agreeing to participate in the celebration of the Führer's seventy-fifth birthday.
In the Reich, meanwhile, Heydrich finalized his consolidation of the apparatus of authority by assuming control of the funding for Dornberger and von Braun, who had advanced by now from the mere plan of sending General Warsitz into space to a more ambitious scheme, with the objective of placing a German on the Moon. Heydrich did this by means of funneling much of the intelligence funding for their program through his own subordinates; Frick fully participated in this move because of the increased perception of his importance after being in eclipse for the past twenty-odd years. The end result was the subordination of von Braun and the Peenemünde works to Heydrich.
Figure 153: The Ehrentempel, following the younger Albert Speer's renovations, on his father's 1936 plan
To celebrate the yearlong consolidation of power, Heydrich contracted the younger Albert Speer to renovate his father's Feldherrnhalle monument in Munich, to be opened in time for the 1963 fortieth anniversary and the first anniversary of his own elevation to heir-presumptive. Speer's renovations consisted exclusively of renovation, not update or replacement, in keeping with his father's so-called "ruin value" theory. This was the younger Speer's public debut; the firm of Speer und Speer, already the Reich's premiere architectural firm, sealed its position in the coming Heydrich administration.
There were, to be sure, areas beyond Heydrich's immediate reach. The ideologically radical faction of the Reichswehr remained skeptical, and Heydrich's efforts to purchase Jamaica to transform it into a vast naval base did not bring Dönitz and the fleet into his camp, largely because they never quite succeeded. However, the far-sighted among the Reichswehr's leadership saw that with Hausser's alignment with Heydrich, there would be no chance to stand against the Reichsführer. As a result, their criticisms were generally muted and kept internal.
The result was that by the end of 1963, it was quite clear to all involved that Reinhard Heydrich, a former naval officer, the Führer's Party spymaster in the years of struggle, and a colonial administrator who had overseen the settlement and pacification of territories that made India pale in comparison, all in the space of thirty years, would be the Führer's successor.
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OOC: Yes, it lives.