Reinhard Heydrich, Hermann Behrends was born in Rüstringen
(Lower Saxony) on 11 May 1907, the son of an innkeeper. In 1932,
after completing his doctorate in law at Marburg, he joined the Nazi
Party and became the local SS leader in Wilhelmshaven. His earlier
friendship with Heydrich then led to his appointment as head of the
SD office in Berlin in January 1934, which became heavily involved
in preparing for the purge of the Sturmabteilung during the Night of
the Long Knives. Keenly ambitious, Behrends was assigned in 1936
the directorship of Office II in the main SD headquarters and thus had
responsibility for Jews, churches, Freemasons, and other perceived
enemies of the Third Reich. In 1937, he became deputy to Werner
Lorenz of the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or Ethnic German Liaison
Office, which gave the SD a further network of listening and obser-
vation posts in the frontier areas. Yet another assignment brought
him directly into Heydrich’s scheme to implicate General Mikhail
Tukhachevskiy of the Red Army as a German informer by passing
forged documents to the Czechs.
During World War II, Behrends held a number of important ex-
ecutive positions, notably as the senior SS and police commander in
Serbia from April to October 1944. Captured in Flensburg in July
1945, he was interned in Wales before being returned to Yugoslavia.
Following his trial in Belgrade for his counterinsurgency operations
against Yugoslav partisans, Behrends was hanged on 4 December
1948.BELL, GEORG (1897–1933). An intelligence operative engaged by
Sturmabteilung (SA) leader Ernst Röhm, Georg Bell was born in
Nuremberg on 21 July 1897, the son of a clock manufacturer. After
serving in World War I and completing his studies in electrical en-
gineering, he worked for several firms before moving to Munich in
- His anti-Bolshevism led him to participate in the Chervonets
Affair, although he was acquitted in 1930. The following year, Röhm
engaged Bell to develop domestic and foreign contacts, as well as ac-
quiring funds that would bypass the Nazi Party and go into the coffers
of the SA. After his testimony in a libel trial in October 1932, Bell
fell out of favor with the Nazi leadership and began to write for
an oppositional Catholic weekly. Despite fleeing to Austria, he was
shot to death in Durchholzen on 3 April 1933 by an SS raiding squad.
BELL, GEORG • 27