Heydrich’s career was guided and dominated by his relationship with an older friend, Freidrich Karl von Eberstein, son of Count Ernst von Eberstein, Heydrich’s godfather. Freidrich von Eberstein was Heydrich’s senior by ten years and had served in the navy during World War I. More importantly, Eberstein was one of the original Nazi leaders in the SA and was a personal friend of Adolf Hitler (Calic:33). Historian Callum MacDonald writes,
While Heydrich was serving on the Naval staff in Kiel, von Eberstein had been leader of the Nazi Stuermabteilung or SA, in Munich and upper Bavaria...In 1931, however, von Eberstein joined another organization, the Schutzstaffel or SS...On the recommendation of von Eberstein, now an officer on Himmler’s staff, Heydrich became a member of the Nazi Party, number 544,916, in June 1931. He joined the SA in Hamburg and was soon involved in bloody street battles against the communists and other opponents of the Nazis. He took this step on the understanding that his association with the beerhall brawlers was to be purely temporary and that von Eberstein would use his influence to secure a speedy transfer to the SS...[Later, Hitler] began to look for someone capable of organizing the SS intelligence service on a professional basis and was handed Heydrich’s file by von Eberstein (MacDonald:16f).
Outside of his involvement with the early SA we have little evidence to conclude that von Eberstein was homosexual, but we strongly suspect that he was. Other of Heydrich’s close associates were known homosexuals. In 1931, when Ernst Roehm was faced with accusations of homosexuality under Paragraph 175, it was Heydrich who came to his defense (Lombardi:12). Heydrich’s mentor in the navy, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, was also alleged to be homosexual -- by Heydrich’s successor in the position of Chief of the SD-SS, Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Rector:62). Rector questions this allegation because Kaltenbrunner “once said that 80% of the Abwehr [German Military Intelligence] were sexually perverted” and believed it “to be a center of every form of vice” (ibid.:62). This allegation, however, seems quite consistent with what we have come to know of certain segments of the German military, though the specific statements are perhaps exaggerated. Heydrich and Canaris were very close during Heydrich’s tenure in the navy (MacDonald:12), but Canaris later came to fear the man he had trained in intelligence tactics, and kept a dossier on Heydrich’s homosexuality as insurance to protect his own career (Stevenson: 349). Much later Canaris was discovered to be a leader in the attempt to assassinate Hitler and was executed at Flossenberg concentration camp on April 9, 1945.
Heydrich’s loyalty to Hitler never wavered. Rector writes that “Hitler considered him the ideal Nazi, and Nazi inner circles regarded Heydrich as a likely successor to Hitler even though Hermann Goering was officially slated for the post of Fuehrer” (Rector:62). Hitler’s support gave Heydrich nearly unlimited power. As Snyder writes, “Heydrich could order immediate arrests and preventative detention, and he could send any persons to concentration camps at any time. He was the absolute master of life and liberty in the Third Reich” (Snyder:317).