Born in Halle in 1904 to a family that ran a music conservatory, Reinhard Heydrich was a frail, high-voiced teenager bullied over rumours of Jewish ancestry. Drawing on SS personnel files, Wannsee testimony and biographies, this episode follows his path from nationalist paramilitary youth to naval cadet, his dismissal from the Navy in disgrace after a broken engagement, and the interview with Heinrich Himmler that his fiancee Lina practically forced to happen. From a single shared typewriter, Heydrich built an intelligence apparatus on colour-coded index cards, an analogue surveillance database used to blackmail and destroy rivals.

We trace how he weaponised that system in the Night of the Long Knives, invented protective custody to place the Gestapo outside the law, staged the Gleiwitz false-flag attack that gave Hitler a pretext to invade ...