Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich is the new Reichsprotektor whose visit to the biometric centre in the former Landauer House brings the regime’s racial politics face to face with the institution’s claim to scientific reason. He arrives with the authority of the Nazi state, questions whether the researchers can identify Jews, and demands more decisive racial categories. Yet when he submits to measurement, he orders the record destroyed. The scene makes his power visible not as a search for impartial knowledge but as the power to dictate what knowledge is produced, retained, and used against others.

Identity and Political Authority

Heydrich is introduced as the new Reichsprotektor of Město, replacing von Neurath. His impending inspection sends the biometric centre into a flurry of telegrams, telephone calls, rumours, and revised plans. Staff cannot tell whether he will come, when he will arrive, or whether he will want to see the centre occupied. His itinerary eventually arrives under the seal of the Reichsprotektor’s office in Prague Castle: the inspection is fixed for eleven in the morning, with all staff present. The uncertainty itself registers the reach of his authority; the researchers’ work and movements are reorganized around the possibility of his scrutiny.

The convoy arrives on time, led by motorcycles and followed by officials in a closed car. Heydrich rides in a dark green Mercedes convertible, its Hakenkreuz flying from the front mudguard and SS–3 displayed on the number plate. The narration explains the numerical hierarchy: Adolf Hitler is SS–1, Heinrich Himmler SS–2, and Heydrich SS–3. His open car makes rank into a public spectacle, while the staff’s formal welcome establishes the distance between the man being displayed and those required to serve him. He acknowledges Stahl’s Nazi salute with a wave, then addresses him by name and says he has heard of his work.

The Inspection of the Biometric Centre

Heydrich refuses Stahl’s elaborate attempt to praise the visit and asks to see what the researchers do rather than hear what they think about his presence. As the party descends toward the Glass Room, he asks what kind of building it was. Told that it had been a private house, he asks whether its inhabitants were Jews. When Stahl says that he believes they were, Heydrich pauses on the stairs and asks whether the centre’s work can identify Jews. Stahl replies that the researchers are making progress, offering hair colour as an example. Heydrich’s questions expose the political purpose behind the institution’s research: its measurements are being judged by whether they can make Jewish identity legible to the state.

In the measuring area, Heydrich encounters a Bösendorfer piano and plays a few bars from Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words, “Spring.” He asks Stahl whether he plays Mendelssohn. Stahl answers that he plays Liszt and Beethoven, but not Mendelssohn because Mendelssohn was Jewish. Heydrich challenges the implication, asking whether Mendelssohn’s Jewishness makes his music worse and remarking that he might have played with Stahl had he brought his violin. He then returns the visit to its governing purpose: he wants to see the measuring. The brief musical exchange does not soften the inspection; it tests the boundary between a Jewish artist’s work and the racial prejudice the centre is meant to systematize.

Heydrich consents to be measured, and Elfriede Lange indicates where he should stand, sit, and lie down. The reversal is temporary and controlled: the official who has come to inspect the scientists becomes the body on their measuring couch, but remains master of the encounter. When Elfriede adjusts the callipers for the final measurements of his cranium, he seizes her wrist with the speed and precision of a fencer. He tells her that he will take his file as a souvenir and orders her to keep no record of his measurements. She complies, wide-eyed with fear. The experiment’s supposed neutrality collapses into an explicit privilege: he can demand that the researchers measure him and then prevent his measurements from entering their records.

Race Science as Political Demand

Heydrich’s interest extends from Jews to Slavs. He asks whether Slavs may be racially assimilated into German stock, and, after Stahl assures him that the centre is working on both problems, tells him to hurry because the work is vital. At the end of the measurement, he calls the proceedings fascinating but criticizes the researchers for not having found a Jewish character that is beyond argument. He directs them to work on it as a priority and insists that some Slavs are no less degenerate than Jews. These remarks turn the centre’s open-ended research into an assigned political task: its researchers are expected to produce classifications that support persecution and German racial hierarchy.

The encounter also lays bare the contradiction within Heydrich’s demand for certainty. The centre is to establish supposedly decisive racial distinctions, but Heydrich provides no neutral standard by which those distinctions could be tested. Instead, he judges the research by whether it confirms the regime’s prejudices, and he exempts his own body from the permanent record. The demand for an unanswerable category therefore coexists with the arbitrary authority to suppress inconvenient evidence. Measurement appears scientific, but the power to define its purpose and control its results remains political.

Relations, Exposure, and Narrative Significance

Elsewhere, Heydrich’s presence forms part of a wider world in which people are exposed to decisions made by officials. At the inspection, the former residents of the house are reduced in conversation to the question of whether they were Jews, while the institution occupying their home seeks methods of identifying people by race. The contrast between the former private house and its new function sharpens the violence of that transformation: a place made for living becomes a workplace devoted to turning human difference into administrative knowledge.

The book also shows how vulnerability is experienced at a more immediate, personal scale. In another scene, a woman explains that she did not disclose something earlier because she feared it might scare someone away; she then decides to let him see rather than continue hiding it. Refugees brought before an audience in the Glass Room, by contrast, have no comparable control over being seen. They stand confused and exposed: a family’s clothes are crumpled, the girl’s spectacles have a cracked lens, and a woman and her young daughter are inspected by the watching men. The woman is identified as Kata. Though these moments are not encounters with Heydrich, they resonate with the inspection’s larger pattern: visibility is not inherently liberating when others control the terms on which a person is seen and classified.

That coercion becomes explicit when Katalin explains that Viktor had helped her financially during a period when work, rent, food, and clothes for her baby were difficult to secure. Later, at a border checkpoint, an official refuses Viktor’s attempt to speak for her, examines Katalin’s passport and visas with another official, and leads her away to a nearby hut. Marika cries out for her mother; Liesel draws the child close and promises that she will be looked after. These episodes do not make Heydrich their direct agent, but they place the biometric centre’s racial sorting within the larger machinery of official power: people with precarious means or documents can be assessed, separated, and removed while others decide whether their claims count.

Heydrich’s inspection is thus more than a display of rank. Its sequence—from the carefully staged convoy, through questions about Jewish identity, to the self-measurement he orders erased—shows a regime demanding knowledge of the vulnerable while reserving concealment and control for the powerful. The centre’s rational order and Heydrich’s command do not stand apart: his visit reveals how readily the language of measurement can be bent to racial doctrine, and how little that doctrine’s demand for objective proof restrains the authority that imposes it.