Amidst stiff competition from his fellow tyrants Reinhard Heydrich has a strong claim to be the 20th century’s most evil monster: even an awed Adolf Hitler called him ‘the man with the Iron heart’.

For when this tall blonde epitome of the Nazi Aryan ideal was assassinated in Prague by British-trained Czechoslovak partisans in 1942, Heydrich, though still under 40, had set up the most formidable secret Police system in existence,  repressed resistance movements across occupied Europe, and – most infamously – had set the industrialised slaughter of the continent’s Jews in motion by chairing the Wannsee conference which gave the green light for the Holocaust.

In his spare moments when not organising mass-murder, Heydrich had flown combat missions in fighter aircraft on both the western and eastern fronts, achieved Olympic standards in fencing, rode horses, sailed yachts, read spy pulp fiction, and was a frequent visitor to Berlin’s bars and brothels.

He was, in his warped way, a sort of Nazi superman.

Born in the eastern city of Halle in 1904, young Reinhard grew up in a cultured and middle class musical milieu. His father Bruno composed sub-Wagnerian operas and ran Halle’s musical conservatoire where his mother Elisabeth also taught.

Heydrich had a high whinnying voice and a wide hipped feminine figure, and was much mocked at school, partly because of a false rumour that he had Jewish ancestry.

Intensely patriotic, Reinhard conceived a romantic ambition to join the Navy, whose exploits during World War One he followed with breathless enthusiasm. But when the war ended in 1918 in German defeat it was the Navy’s mutinous sailors who spearheaded the wave of left-wing revolution spreading inland from the northern ports.

The revolution reached Halle in 1919 which was twice occupied by revolutionary strikers who had to be dislodged by right-wing paramilitaries known as the  Freikorps amidst much bloodshed. The teenage Heydrich – or so he later claimed – ran errands as a messenger for the Freikorps which occupied Halle. Soon afterwards he joined the Navy as a junior officer.

Though the Naval officer corps was intensely nationalist, Heydrich showed no apparent interest in politics, and spent his leisure hours practicing the violin on which he became an accomplished performer. This and his haughty and arrogant attitude made him as unpopular with his shipmates as he had been at school.

His only friend and mentor in the Navy was a captain, Wilhelm Canaris, an intelligence specialist who as an Admiral became head of Germany’s  military intelligence agency the Abwehr under the Nazis. Though they shared musical evenings and respected each other’s skills, Canaris grew to hate and fear his Nazi protege when they became rival spymasters in the Third Reich.

In 1931 Heydrich’s Naval career came to an abrupt end. He had been conducting an affair with the daughter of an influential friend of the Navy’s commander in chief, Grand Admiral Raeder. But then Heydrich met the woman he would marry, Lina von Osten, and dumped his previous girlfriend without more ado.

The woman’s father considered his daughter’s honour had been compromised and complained to Raeder. Heydrich was hauled before a court martial charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman. His behaviour at the tribunal trying him was so arrogant and his lies so blatant that he was dismissed from the service – albeit with a generous payout.

A jobless  Naval officer with no obvious qualifications was in a parlous position in a country ravaged by mass unemployment in the midst of the Great Depression, but Lina stood by her fiancée and it was on her advice that Heydrich’s second career fatefully began.

A keen anti-Semite with a brother already in the Nazi party, Lina advised her man to try and find employment in the ranks of the rising movement and a family friend of the Heydrichs secured him an interview with Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS.

Himmler was looking for someone to organise a new intelligence service within the SS, which he was building up to become the pure racial and ideological core of the whole Nazi movement. Impressed by the young man’s Aryan looks, he gave Heydrich half an hour to sketch out a plan for such a service.

Though knowing nothing of espionage beyond what he had read in spy novels, Heydrich completed the task to Himmler’s satisfaction and was hired on the spot. He set to work at once building the service he called the SD in a tiny shared office in Munich and within an incredibly short time had agents infiltrated  in parties opposing the Nazis, but also within the party itself to inform on their comrades.

Though he paid lip service to the Nazi ideology, this was not what really interested Heydrich. He lacked the fanatical racial manias of Himmler and Hitler. His goal was the accumulation  of power for its own sake: an amoral aim  that he pursued with relentless and single minded ruthlessness.

Within two years Hitler had been appointed Chancellor and Himmler and Heydrich had transferred their operations to Berlin where they set about consolidating Nazi rule, eliminating all opposition and clamping Germany in the iron fetters of a totalitarian state.

Heydrich disliked the brawling undisciplined violence of the SA Brownshirts whose thuggery had battered open the gates of power. He therefore took a leading role in the Night of Long Knives purge in 1934 in which the SA leaders were murdered, along with a group of conservatives who deplored Nazi violence and lawlessness.

Himmler and Heydrich’s next coup was to frame the Army commander General von Fritsch on trumped up charges of gay ‘cottaging’ in order to remove military opposition to Hitler’s plans for war. He may also have been responsible for planting the seeds of suspicion in Stalin’s mind that his generals were plotting against him, leading to a bloody purge of the Red Army’s High Command.

In 1938 the terrible duo Himmler and Heydrich flew to Vienna to take charge of the persecution that followed the Anschluss – Hitler’s annexation of Austria – in which hundreds of Jews were done to death.

Heydrich also took a gruesome part in the false flag operation on the Polish border in 1939 that gave Hitler the ‘casus belli’ he needed to launch World War Two. Concentration camp inmates were dressed in Polish uniforms and shot to make it look as though Poles had seized a German radio station in an act of provocation.

That same year Heydrich and his deputy  Walter Schellenberg organised the abduction of the two heads of the British Secret services in the Netherlands who thought that they were negotiating  with anti-Nazi plotters who were in fact Schellenberg and his fellow SD operatives.

It was around this time that Heydrich and Schellenberg conceived a scheme to take over Berlin’s leading High Class brothel, known as ‘Salon Kitty’ after its madam, Kitty Schmidt, and transform it into a spy listening post, with a typically thorough ‘belt and braces ‘ approach: placing some 50 hidden microphone bugs in the brothel’s ‘love rooms’ and recruiting 20 suitable women  to pose as prostitutes and report on their clients’ pillow talk.

Naturally, Heydrich, though married-to Lina and the father of a growing family, patronised Salon Kitty himself – though always insisting that the microphones were switched off during his visits.

In the midst of all this activity Heydrich found the time to fly combat missions in an Me109 Fighter. His flying skills however did not save him from twice crashing his plane: when this happened in Russia he was missing  between the lines in No Man’s land for two days before finding his way back to safety. On hearing of this Hitler had the headstrong Heydrich grounded.

Besides concern for his safety, Hitler had two other jobs in mind for the super efficient Spymaster . Heydrich, he considered, had the ideal skill set – and lack of conscience –  to organise the extermination of the Jews in Nazi- occupied Europe – and to eliminate the rising tide of resistance against that occupation.

Obediently Heydrich called and chaired a conference on the Wannsee lake in Berlin at which officials and bureaucrats agreed plans to deport all European Jewry to their deaths in  the newly conquered east: the beginning of the organised Holocaust.

Next, Heydrich flew to France to coordinate the repression of the French resistance before taking on his final task: killing the resistance in the conquered Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia with a mixture of cruelty and kindness.

Heydrich on arrival in Prague had scores of those members of the Czech resistance already in custody summarily executed. At the same time, by raising the wages and improving the conditions of Czechs working for the Nazis in the armaments and other industries, he did much to remove the discontent fuelling the  resistance.

So successful was he that resistance activity almost ceased, and the exiled Czech government in London decided that  Heydrich had to die. It was an agonising decision for they knew that if Heydrich was killed Nazi retribution would be merciless, and hundreds if not thousands of Czechs would be murdered.

Nevertheless the green light was given for Operation Anthropoid, as the assassination plot was called, and two courageous Czechoslovak soldiers Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik took off from RAF Tangmere in Sussex and were parachuted into their homeland.

After months of uncertainty and preparation an ambush was organised and Heydrich was attacked as his car slowed to take a sharp bend on the outskirts of Prague as he drove into the city from his country home. Gabcik raised his Sten sub-machine gun to fire but the gun jammed. Instead of driving on. Heydrich ordered his driver to stop and engaged Gabcik with his pistol.

Kubis seized his chance and threw a special high explosive grenade into Heydrich’s open top Mercedes. It exploded, driving splinters and horsehair from the car’s seats deep into Heydrich’s guts.

The assassins got clear of the scene, but were betrayed and tracked to their hideout in the crypt of a Greek Orthodox Church where they were besieged by SS men who used fire hoses to flood the crypt. To save themselves from torture and certain death Kubis and Gabcik shot themselves.

Heydrich lingered in hospital for almost a fortnight, but the horsehair caused blood poisoning and the ‘butcher of Prague’ succumbed to his wounds. Hitler and Himmler staged an elaborate funeral in Berlin for the fallen paladin, but few others mourned the icy and fiendish ‘man with the iron heart’.

The Nazi revenge for Heydrich’s killing was as savage as the Czech government had feared. The village of Lidice, wrongly thought to be linked to Heydrich’s killers, was destroyed and all its adult inhabitants murdered. Their children were sent to concentration camps where most perished.

Nigel Jones is a historian and the author, with Urs Brunner and Julia Schrammel, of Kitty’s Salon: Sex, Spying and Surveillance in the Third Reich.