Reinhard Heydrich

Dominant Introverted Intuition converges: it discards alternatives early, fixes on a single unfolding pattern, and works backward from an end state that nobody else can yet see. Heydrich’s first act in the SS was exactly that — asked in 1931 to describe an intelligence service, he produced within twenty minutes a blueprint for an organization that did not exist and would not for years, and then spent a decade making it real. The Sicherheitsdienst began as a handful of men in a Munich flat with a card index. By 1939 it was the nervous system of a police state.

He thought in terms of the whole system and its future states rather than the immediate task. Where the party’s street fighters saw enemies to beat up, Heydrich saw a problem of categories, files and coverage: opponents were to be identified, indexed, monitored and neutralized before they became opposition. He anticipated the utility of holding compromising material on the regime’s own leadership, and the SD accumulated dossiers on Nazi grandees as readily as on communists. The Venlo incident of 1939, in which SD men posing as anti-Hitler conspirators lured two British intelligence officers to the Dutch border and abducted them, was the same instinct in operation: several moves ahead, patient, and entirely willing to spend months constructing a deception.

The darkest expression is the trajectory from the Einsatzgruppen orders of 1941 to Wannsee. Heydrich did not decide the Holocaust alone — that authority came from Hitler, and the written commission came from Göring in July 1941 — but he understood earlier than almost anyone that mass shooting could not scale, that the problem was interdepartmental rather than military, and that whoever convened the ministries would own the programme. Wannsee was ninety minutes long and produced no new decision; its purpose was jurisdictional. That is Ni-Te thinking at its most efficient and most monstrous.

Auxiliary Extraverted Thinking turns the vision into an organizational chart with names in the boxes. In September 1939 Heydrich amalgamated the Gestapo, the Kripo and the SD into the RSHA, a single body under his command with departments for ideology, foreign intelligence, domestic surveillance, criminal police and — from 1941 — Amt IV B4 under Eichmann, the office that organized the deportations. Before him, German security work had been split between party organs and state ministries with overlapping mandates. He made them one instrument, and he made himself its handle.

He was a working executive, not a distant strategist. He drafted the operational guidelines for the Einsatzgruppen, staffed them deliberately with educated men — lawyers, doctors of philosophy, economists — on the reasoning that professionals would carry out killing more systematically and with less institutional breakdown than brawlers. He required reporting: the Ereignismeldungen, the daily incident reports tallying executions by place and category, compiled and circulated in Berlin. In Bohemia and Moravia he ran the same method against an occupied economy, combining martial law and rapid executions with wage increases, extra rations and social insurance for armaments workers — terror and incentive as two levers on the same machine, calibrated to raise output.

It also drove his relentless accumulation of jurisdiction. Heydrich took work nobody had assigned him, produced results, and kept the resulting authority. He supplied the forged evidence that destroyed the Soviet marshal Tukhachevsky and helped Himmler assemble the dossiers used in the Blomberg-Fritsch affair to break the army leadership. He staged the fake Polish attack on the Gleiwitz radio station in August 1939, complete with concentration-camp prisoners killed and dressed in Polish uniforms as props, to furnish the pretext for the invasion. Every one of these operations enlarged his office.

Tertiary Introverted Feeling in an INTJ is a small, hard, private centre: not warmth, but an intensely personal sense of what must be proved and what cannot be borne. Heydrich’s was organized around humiliation. The taunts about Jewish blood — almost certainly baseless, but never fully dispelled and used against him by rivals — the naval dismissal, the mocked voice, the mother’s beatings recorded in the biographies: these produced a man who reportedly investigated his own genealogy and who pursued proof of hardness with the intensity of someone answering an accusation nobody had formally made. Hitler is said to have called him the man with the iron heart, and he took it as the highest possible commendation.

What that core did not contain was any restraint of the ordinary human kind. There is no episode in his record of hesitation, no equivalent of Himmler’s nausea at Minsk, no private grumbling of the sort that fills Goebbels’s diaries. He kept a family, played chamber music at home, and went to the office to sign deportation schedules. Colleagues who disliked and feared him agreed on the coldness; Carl Jacob Burckhardt described him as a young evil god of death.

Fi at this position also explains the ferocious personal loyalty running upward and the absence of it running sideways. He was faithful to Himmler while systematically acquiring the capacity to replace him, and he held files on virtually every senior figure in the regime. He served the ideology as an absolute, not as a career, and the distinction matters: a careerist can be bought or deflected, and there is no evidence anyone ever deflected Heydrich from anything.

Inferior Extraverted Sensing gives the INTJ an uneasy relationship with the physical present: usually neglected, occasionally seized upon as something to conquer. Heydrich’s version was compulsive physical proof. He fenced at national level. He trained as a pilot and flew combat missions in Norway and over the Eastern Front, against explicit instruction, until he was shot down behind Soviet lines and had to be recovered — an absurd risk for the head of the Reich’s security apparatus, taken because a man who had been dismissed from the navy for dishonour needed to be seen to be brave. He drank, chased women, and pushed himself at every physical test available.

The same blind spot killed him. In Prague he drove an open-topped green Mercedes, unescorted, on a fixed route between his villa at Panenské Břežany and Hradčany Castle, because he judged that visible fearlessness was itself a form of rule and that the Czechs had been sufficiently terrorized to be safe. On 27 May 1942, at a hairpin bend in Libeň where the car had to slow, the Operation Anthropoid agents Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík were waiting. Gabčík’s Sten gun jammed; Heydrich, instead of ordering his driver on, stood up and drew his pistol to fight, and in that pause Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade against the rear of the car. Splinters and upholstery debris drove into his spleen. He died of sepsis on 4 June.

The reprisals were the regime’s worst act of collective punishment in the west. On the strength of a false connection, the village of Lidice was destroyed on 10 June 1942: 173 men shot, the women sent to Ravensbrück, most of the children gassed at Chełmno, the buildings demolished and the site erased from maps. The village of Ležáky followed. Thousands more were killed across the Protectorate. The extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka were named Operation Reinhard in his memory, which is the most honest epitaph anyone ever gave him.

Why INTJ Over ISTJ

The pairing is instructive precisely because both men were murderers of the desk. But Himmler needed a template to replicate and a rule to follow; Heydrich generated the templates and left the following to others. It is the difference between the man who runs the machine and the man who conceived it — and it is why the historians who study the two agree that had Heydrich lived, he, not Himmler, would very likely have been the more dangerous survivor.