The Man And His Wife

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The Man And His Wife


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The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 24, 2022
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An astonishing journey into the heart of Nazi evil: a portrait of one of the darkest figures of Hitler’s Nazi elite—Reinhard Heydrich, the designer and executor of the Holocaust, chief of the Reich Main Security, including the Gestapo—interwoven with commentary by his wife, Lina, from the author's in-depth interviews. He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo, the "butcher of Prague," with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer. He was the head of the SS, and the Gestapo, second in command to Heinrich Himmler. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and, as the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe were toasted with cognac. In The Hangman and His Wife, Nancy Dougherty, and, following her death, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, masterfully explore who Heydrich was and how he came to be, and how he came to do what he did. We see Heydrich from his rarefied musical family origins and his ugly-duckling childhood and adolescence, to his sudden flameout as a promising Naval officer (he was forced to resign his Naval commission after dishonoring the office corps by having sex with the unmarried daughter of a shipyard director and refusing to marry her). Dougherty writes of his seemingly hopeless job prospects as an untrained civilian during Germany’s hyperinflation and unemployment, and his joining the Nazi party through the attraction to Nazism of his fiancée, Lina von Osten, and her father, along with the rumor shadowing him of a strain of Jewishness inherited from his father’s side. And we follow Heydrich’s meteoric rise through the Nazi high command—from SS major, to colonel to brigadier general, before he was thirty, deputy to Heinrich Himmler, expanding the SS, the Gestapo, and developing the Reich's plans for "the Jewish solution." And throughout, we hear the voice of Lina Heydrich, who was by his side until his death at the age of thirty-eight, living inside the Nazi inner circles as she waltzed with Rudolf Hess, feuded with Hermann Göring, and drank vintage wine with Albert Speer.
“Magnificent . . . One of the great achievements of biography . . . What makes the individual important, why differences in personality matter, are on display everywhere in this searching book . . . We get the living presence of Nazism and understand how it was that such evil was perpetuated with a perverted sense of doing good.”—Carl Rollyson, New York Sun “The hollowed-out soul of one of Nazi Germany’s worst criminals is explored through his wife’s recollections in this searching biography . . . Dougherty vividly dissects the murderous intrigues roiling Nazi bureaucracies . . . A chilling, revelatory case study of the moral corruption of the Third Reich.”— Publishers Weekly (starred) “Gripping . . . engrossing . . . A masterful account of the quintessential Nazi.”— Kirkus (starred) “An exhaustive and dark expedition into the diabolical mind of a truly evil villain and unsettling insight on the deliberate delusion that blinded some Germans to the horrific atrocities committed by the Third Reich.”— Booklist
NANCY DOUGHERTY was a biographer and film critic. She received the PEN Girard Award in 1987. She died in 2013. CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT was a journalist, novelist, literary critic, and for almost three decades, daily book reviewer for The New York Times . 
1 The Face of National Socialism “The position of my man is always overrated. Just look at the photographs of him. There he’s shown where he really belongs, always in the second rank.” —Lina Heydrich On January 20, 1942—a dark snowy Tuesday morning—Obergruppenführer Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich strode through the porticoed entrance of a grand villa at 56–58 Am Grossen Wannsee, in the prosperous west Berlin suburb of Wannsee. There, in a residence overlooking the larger of two bodies of water known collectively as Lake Wannsee, fifteen men waited for Heydrich to convene a brief meeting, which later came to be known as the Wannsee Conference. Its stated intention was to arrive at a Final Solution of the Jewish Question. Given that the mass murder of Jews had already begun and that the death camps were already under construction, the true purpose of the meeting is still a subject of scholarly debate. But Heydrich’s lofty status as the meeting’s leader was unambiguous. By January 1942 he had reached a pinnacle of power in the Nazi hierarchy. To arrive at the meeting, he had flown his own private plane from Prague, where, as of three months earlier, he held the position of Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. He was scheduled shortly to take over the Nazi occupation of France. Heydrich’s career is often described as a “skyrocket,” perhaps because there was an explosion at its end, in the form of his assassination three months after the Wannsee Conference. The rocket’s igniting occurred obscurely, in the summer of 1931, when at age twenty-seven, Heydrich joined Heinrich Himmler’s new, small, elite bodyguard, the SS. His job was to take over the “intelligence” files, consisting of a shoebox full of the names of Himmler’s enemies within the Nazi Party. In 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power, and rewarded Himmler with the post of chief of the Bavarian Political Police, a not very important assignment. Himmler immediately appointed Heydrich as his assistant. Thirteen months later, the SS had gained control of every political police unit in Germany and united them into one organization, the Gestapo, short for Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), with Heydrich as the acting chief. By 1934, as well, his intelligence and counterespionage network, the SD, for Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), became the official Secret Service of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei, NSDAP, or Nazi Party). In 1936, Heydrich took over the regular Criminal Police, known as the Kripo, short for Kriminalpolizei. In 1939, he combined these organizations, along with four other divisions, to form the RSHA, or Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office), which was estimated to have employed 100,000 men. Heydrich’s formal powers over the SD, the Kripo, and even the Gestapo had been based on his abilities to control and coerce the German citizens of his own nation. What he said he wanted was nothing less than “the total and permanent check on the situation of each individual.” But in 1939, Germany went to war, and responsibility for racial policies began to pass from the hands of the party’s propaganda machinery into those of the already militarized SS. In that same year, and again in 1941, Heydrich received a completely different grant of authority, based on a “Führer order,” which bypassed all organizations, including his own, and went directly from Hitler to the individual recipient of his commands. A second Führer order to Heydrich directed him in a few terse words to “make all necessary organizational, functional, and material preparations for a complete solution of the Jewish Question in Europe.” In 1939 that usually meant deportation; by the time of Heydrich’s death three years later, it certainly meant annihilation. Reinhard Heydrich had been chosen by the Nazis as the responsible official, the man with the mandate who arranges for the arrival of the man with the gun. The Final Solution was neither Heydrich’s idea nor his primary responsibility: his orders came from Hitler, Himmler, or Göring; Himmler alone controlled the network of death camps that oozed across eastern Europe, and Adolf Eichmann handled the so-called business details. Heydrich’s expertise lay in translating vaguely formulated commands into orderly, clever directives that other officials could then handle on their own. One of his former subordinates has called him “the puppet master of the Third Reich,” and he is often regarded today as the Nazis’ preeminent “technologist of power.” The most dreadful crime in modern history thus represented only one of his many-faceted concerns. In September 1941, Heydrich acquired still another kind of power, when he was appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, the strategic heartland of Czechoslovakia, which had been incorporated into the Reich. This appointment gave him the status of a government minister, as well as Hradčany Castle as his official residence, and meant that for this one function he outranked Heinrich Himmler himself. In the light of the increasing responsibility with which he was entrusted (including the leadership of the French occupation), Heydrich can plausibly be thought of as a candidate to succeed Hitler. And that is far from the whole story. In addition to an inscrutability and prodigal nature, Reinhard Heydrich possessed high intelligence, a photographic memory, considerable athletic skill, a striking physical appearance, strong musical aptitude, and a store of sheer physical energy that few of his contemporaries could match. He skied and sailed and hunted and played tennis. He rode horseback in the mornings with Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, his rival as chief of military intelligence. He played the violin well enough to have considered it as a career; he fenced well enough to win international competitions. He had countless love affairs, yet he seems to have had a deep affection for his wife, and it is clear that she loved him. They had four healthy, attractive children. As a high administrative official, Heydrich was exempted from combat, but he nevertheless went off to battle, incognito, in the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. He had learned in his spare time to pilot a plane, and flew nearly a hundred reconnaissance missions, including one in which his aircraft was shot down and he was forced to crawl, injured, through enemy territory. He won the Iron Cross. In late May 1942, Heydrich was mortally wounded by a bomb thrown into the back seat of the unescorted, open convertible in which he regularly drove through the streets of conquered Prague. Before he collapsed, he managed to leap from his car and fire several shots at his fleeing assailants. Reinhard Heydrich received a hero’s burial in Berlin, to the inevitable accompaniment of the funeral march from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Martin Bormann, deputy chief of the Nazi Party, and Heinrich Himmler both gave emotional eulogies, and the short funeral oration was delivered by Adolf Hitler himself. “He was one of the best National Socialists,” the Führer declared, “one of the strongest defenders of the idea of the German Reich.” The Führer also personally selected a suitable monument to Heydrich’s memory—the total destruction of the inhabitants and buildings of the Czech village of Lidice, on suspicion of having harbored local resistance partisans. Later, in an aside to his entourage, Hitler murmured in a shaking voice, “Heydrich . . . ​He was the man with the iron heart.” On the very day of the funeral, the mythologizing of the Nazi’s leading candidate for the role of metallic, inhuman Superman had already begun. But none of Heydrich’s multifarious qualities were unambiguous to his widow, Lina von Osten Heydrich. Consider, for a prime example, our talks about the very faces that she and her husband presented to the world. Lina said she had met Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1937, when she accompanied her husband to a reception at the Reich chancellery. That was eight years after she herself had joined the Nazi Party, six years after Reinhard joined the SS, and one year after he became chief of the Secret Police and the Security Service. She no longer remembered the occasion, but she did recall the Führer saying “spontaneously” as he greeted them, “What a handsome couple!” Reinhard Heydrich was tall, blond, blue-eyed, and good-looking in the harshly angular, rawboned style so cherished by the Nazis. Lina Heydrich was blue-eyed, blond, a little severe, and a little sad, the perfect Germanic beauty of her era. Appearances are deceiving. Still, what better way to make the acquaintance of myth-shrouded people than to observe the faces they presented to the outside world. Nazi Germany was unique among modern societies in its obsession with the ideal human form; for an equal concern with perfect physique one must go back to the Italian Renaissance or to ancient Greece. In Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, artistic subjects were chosen for their ability to function as archetypes of such things as “leaders” and “followers,” “men and women in their basic duties of combat and fertility,” and, most of all, “ideal biological form.” For art was linked with the achievement of another goal, the creation of a racially disproportionate, totally Aryan Reich, out of whose purified gene pool would arise a fabulous creature that Nazi propagandists called “the New Man.” (There was rather less talk about the “New Woman,” probably because the role envisioned for her was already familiar: women were to do the breeding and provide domestic comfort, while the men did everything else.) But what, exactly, was the New Man to be like? Most of the party leaders were too busy preparing first for power, and then for war, to give much thought to this problem; but Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS (which he described as “a formation of German men in the Nordic mold”), was obsessed by it. It was easy enough to devise an ideal physical model on which Himmler’s so-called racial experts could agree. As enunciated, for example, by Paul Schultze-Naumburg, an artist who also lectured on the subject of physiognomic racial fitness, the perfect Aryan prototype would have a high and receding forehead, a strongly protrusive nose, thin lips, a jutting chin, pale gray or blue eyes (the latter could be either pale or dark), and undulant, fine, blond hair. A long neck, a tall, long-legged body, long slender hands, a clearly discernible pelvis, and a spinal column rising “vertically, like a jet of water,” were also deemed desirable. Unfortunately, this ideal was not everywhere in evidence, especially among the leadership. To compensate, Hitler took the long view. Confronted with the obvious fact that the major Nazi figures—fat Göring, clubfooted Goebbels, the puny, myopic Himmler, and even Hitler himself, with his swarthy visage—were hardly cast in the Nordic mold, the Führer liked to talk of the generations it would take to shape the New Man. Himmler, however, could not rationalize so easily. His SS was supposed to be an elite, the vanguard and emblem of the new order to come. Every SS man was supposed to be able to trace his ancestry backward through two hundred years of Teutonic racial purity, and to be in good health. Each was supposed to be able to pass rigorous tests of physical fitness, to see without glasses, to be at least 1.70 meters (five feet six inches) tall. In fact, however, most SS men resembled their Reichsführer more closely than their ideal. Year after year, Himmler tried and failed to pass the physical exams he himself had designed, until finally his officers agreed to fake the results. And, in the end, Himmler was always forced to extend the same tolerance to the generality of his men. SS racial specialists eventually produced a chart of genetically acceptable German types—only one of which was actually called “Nordic.” Included were such categories as “Dinaric” (darker than the Aryans) and “Eastern” (usually Germans from the Baltic area). Within these types, there was an even larger range of physique, beginning with “ideal” and ending with “deformed,” which, of course, was not acceptable. But in the intermediate categories, “good bearing” and desirable personal characteristics might override physical deficiencies. Thus, space was made for exceptions, for selection among traits, and for a rather confused adaptation to the old, old reality that a “good” man (however defined) is hard to find. Despite his many compromises, Himmler never quite overcame his early conviction that blond was best. This sometimes took him to the extremes of tragic lunacy. During one of his periodic inspections of the concentration camps, Himmler spied a blond and blue-eyed man wearing the yellow triangle designating a Jew. Thinking a mistake had been made, the Reichsführer asked if he were really Jewish. “Yes,” the prisoner replied with magnificent courage. “Then I can’t help you,” Himmler said sadly, and walked away. On another occasion, he met an impressive-looking blond SS man on the street and promoted him on the spot. (He later turned out to be a pimp, and had to be dismissed.) In the long term, however, Himmler intended to recruit primarily from among the children of his own SS men. No member of his elite guard could marry without obtaining a permit, a difficult process requiring the woman to pass an athletic test, submit to a physical exam, and provide, in addition to the obligatory proof of Aryan ancestry, a photo of herself in a bathing suit. The Reichsführer himself scrutinized the pictures of potential wives: “I looked at the photographs of all of them, and asked myself, can I see infusions of foreign blood?” He must have seen a lot of something, for between 1932 and 1940, 106,304 marriage applications were submitted, but only 7,518 of these were judged entirely satisfactory. Of the remainder, 40,388 received “provisional clearance in default of documentation.” Yet however intractable real people may be, in art everything is possible. Official portraits and formal photographs of the leaders, as well as glossy mass-produced pictures of perfect, Nordic followers, abounded during the Third Reich. What the real world lacked, propaganda would furnish. Hitler often rewarded deserving underlings with pictures of himself, and these seemed to set the trend. The Führer always appeared larger than life, posed against a flag or a large group of trees, or on horseback, wearing armo
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