[zabawy]

Lina Heydrich to Jean Vaughan, December(?) 1951.



This is the answer to your letter of Nov. 24.

1. I think it rather superfluous that Herr Niemann should keep up a further correspondence with Herr Neumann. I am afraid that Herr Niemann would not be very successful for everybody, especially people with some "past" are very hesitating and distrustful.

2. It was very interesting for me to hear from you that in foreign countries there is the rumour of Walter Schellenberg's death. Now, to make it entirely clear, I speak of that Schellenberg who was sent into Sweden to [Count] Bernadotte by Himmler in 1945, who stayed there until the Allied forces had him given up to them, who then was kept in Great Britain in order to write and who then came to Nürnberg into the Justizpalast.

His comrades look upon him as a traitor for he is said to have disclosed much at that time and to have written in the tendency of putting the whole blame on my husband, while he pictured himself without any blame. Here he is called the crown witness against the SD (there is no such institution as crown-witness in the German justice). In 1950 he wrote a book: Die geheime Front (the secret front) under the name of Walter Hagen. [Website note: nicht Walter Schellenberg schrieb unter dem Pseudonym "Walter Hagen", sondern Wilhelm Höttl.] In his early time Schellenberg was the fellow worker of my husband, he entered the SD as a Referendar then he was advanced quickly and at the time of my husband's death he was the head of the Section 6 [Amt VI] (spies in foreign countries). In June 1942 people wanted to know that he was very eager to get the place of my late husband to become chief of the SD. Later on, when Kaltenbrunner had become chief of the SD, he always kept close to him, to this politically untrained man, and knew how to attain the favour of Himmler.

Therefore it is no wonder that Schellenberg became the successor of Canaris. Whether Sch. is to blame for the death of Canaris, I don't know, but I know for sure that if my husband had been living, Canaris never would have been hanged. Experts also say, that there never would have been a July 20th, on the one hand nobody [would have] had dared it, and on the other hand my husband had mentioned to me the people of the 20th July [1944 plot] as politically suspicious years before the actual happenings. It was my husband's opinion that only very few officers were able or willing to think politically. For too many years they had been educated as 'unpolitical soldiers.'

www.fpp.co.uk/Heydrich/Lina_Heydrich_221251.htm...