Heydrich became associated with these various epithets (butcher, hangman, etc.) largely because of the of the Third Reich's response to his assassination. The destruction of the town of Lidice and other massacres done to punish the Czechs for sheltering the SOE team that killed Heydrich was excessive and quite harsh even by German standards. Allied radio propaganda directed towards Germany made much of Heydrich's brutality to underscore the cruel nature of a man whose state funeral was one of the largest of its kind during the Third Reich. While the German media was valorizing Heydrich, Allied propaganda realized that this was an ideal time to highlight just what sort of man was a hero for the Third Reich. Thomas Mann's German-language BBC broadcast in June 1942 famously noted this:

Since the violent death of Heydrich, the most natural death that a bloodhound can die, terror is raging everywhere, in a more sickly, unrestrained fashion than ever before. It is absurd, and once more our disgust is aroused by this mixture of brutality and shrieking whininess that has always been a hallmark of Nazism … Wherever this killer went, blood flowed in rivers. Everywhere, even in Germany, he was simply called: the Hangman … Now he has been murdered. And how are the Nazis reacting? They are getting cramps. They are literally behaving as if the most inconceivable misdeed has been committed, as if the highest level of humanity has been attacked … Thousands must die – men and women. An entire town, that supposedly sheltered the perpetrators, is massacred and razed. The surviving population of Prague must line the streets as the saint's funeral procession passes by. At home, a pompous state funeral is commanded, and another butcher [Himmler] says at his grave that he had been a pure soul and a man of profound humanity. All of this is insane … to say that Heydrich was a noble person one needs power – absolute power to prescribe what is truth and what is idiocy.

Mann's broadcast was later transcribed into a leaflet and dropped on Germany and other Allied propaganda, both for German and Allied consumption such as the 1943 film Hitler's Madman, emphasized how Heydrich encapsulated the brutality of the regime.

One of the things that aided this propaganda was that there was a significant amount of truth to it. According to Heydrich's wife, a firm believer in National Socialism and the one who turned her husband towards his SS career, claimed postwar that Heydrich was "fully aware of his role as hangman but knew how to knew justify it positively." Heydrich had also gained a reputation as a skilled operator in the polycratic Third Reich power structure who shrewdly built up the RSHA so that it had begun to monopolize the Third Reich's internal security apparatus. Heydrich achieved this degree of power not only because of his willingness to use violence, but also through blackmail and intimidation of other rivals. Heydrich's SD was likely the force behind the fabrication of evidence used to justify the elimination of SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Even before the advent of war, Heydrich had earned a reputation not only as a skilled administrator in the SS, but also as someone who was dangerous to cross.

These fears of Heydrich helped build up much of the mystique surrounding him postmortem. Heydrich did not really maintain that grand of a public persona in the Third Reich, unlike Goering or Goebbels, despite Heydrich's extracurricular activities such as fencing or flying with the Luftwaffe. In one telling example of his wider anonymity, when his plane crashed behind Soviet lines in 1941, the infantry officer that rescued him reported that this German pilot must have suffered brain damage because he insisted that he was the head of a RSHA. After his death, legends of Heydrich's ruthlessness as the most dangerous man in Germany grew and had added legitimacy because of the harsh response to his death.

This embellished image of Heydrich does not absolve him of his wider responsibilities for the acts of genocide and murder carried out by the SS. As the head of the Protectorate, he pursued an active Germanization campaign and his attitude towards saboteurs likely indicates he would have approved of the punitive measures taken after his death. Heydrich not only saw the SS's control of the Jewish question not only as something that would benefit his career, but also important for Germany's wider future. Heydrich actively pursued the RSHA's active involvement in Jewish affairs and pushed for greater independence for the SS-Einsatzgruppen in Barbarossa. While there were tensions between Einsatzgruppen and the Heer in Poland, which was why these particular SS units were left out of the invasion of France, Heydrich's efforts managed to minimize this friction so that the Wehrmacht often cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen's mass executions of Jews and other suspected Bolshevik partisans. Heydrich bore a good deal of responsibility by centralizing the tangled and overlapping Jewish policies in occupied Europe which helped enable the organized Judeocide of 1942, fittingly named Operation Reinhard in his honor. Heydrich though was only one component in the shaping up of the Holocaust and he sometimes found himself checked in the Third Reich state apparatus, even in the realm of Jewish affairs. Like many other perpetrators of the Holocaust, Heydrich never really possessed a coherent master blueprint for the achievement of a Jew-free Europe and his actions between 1939 and the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 show him casting about for solutions, of which industrialized murder was only one option.

So while the actual Heydrich does not quite live up to the sometimes rather lurid and stereotypical Nazi archetypes, that makes him no less of a murderous and nasty individual.

Sources

Gerwarth, Robert. Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Wildt, Michael. An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.