Hitler's Hangman

August 22, 2011
The exploits of an iconic Nazi illuminate the Third Reich’s ideology and machinery of mass murder in this probing biography. A hawk-faced Aryan poster boy who fended off false rumors of Jewish ancestry, Reinhard Heydrich oversaw the Gestapo, played a key role in formulating the Final Solution, and organized the Einsatzgruppen death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews during WWII. Historian Gerwarth reduces this diabolical figure to human terms, painting him as an apolitical man drawn to the SS by careerism and whose Nazi fiancée, Lina, instigated his drift toward the party. Heydrich then embraced SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s racial theories and his ethos of ruthless Darwinian struggle against Germany’s enemies. The author’s fluent, meticulously researched account of Heydrich’s career frames a trenchant analysis of the “radicalization” of German anti-Semitic policies; as Heydrich searched fruitlessly for a place to which he could deport the Reich’s Jews (none of the satrapies in the Nazi empire wanted to accept them), exclusion and expulsion gave way to systematic extermination almost as a matter of convenience. Gerwarth’s fine study shows in chilling detail how genocide emerged from the practicalities of implementing a demented belief system. Photos.

September 1, 2011

In calm and harrowing detail, Gerwarth (Modern History, War Studies/Univ. College Dublin; The Bismarck Myth: Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor, 2005, etc.) explores the life and work of the embodiment of Nazism, Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942).

The author trails the life of this favorite of the Fuhrer, the Gestapo chief, from his comfortable childhood as the favored son of a musician through his career as a paragon of Nazi philosophy put into practice. Rumors of the taint of Jewish blood in the veins of the arrogant man wearing the cap with the death's-head insignia were untrue. After being drummed out of the German navy, the ambitious young man found his calling in the nascent SS, quickly rising to second in command under Heinrich Himmler. The "Jewish expert" Eichmann reported to Heydrich, who was instrumental in establishing the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938. He conceived ghettoes as storage places for Jews until more convenient disposal could be arranged. The requirement for Jews to wear the yellow star was his idea, and he worked to rapidly increase the population of the concentration camps. To ease the work of his murderers, Heydrich pioneered the use of lethal gas. Breaks from his day job of killing civilians included flying missions with the Luftwaffe just for fun. His successes earned him the Protectorate of Moravia and Bohemia. As the war progressed, the Jewish "final solution" evolved, and Heydrich convened Wannsee to implement it early in 1942. A few months later, he was assassinated. In partial reprisal, the village of Lidice and its inhabitants were liquidated. Page by page in this scholarly history, Gerwarth builds a complex story of the perfection of mass murder.

The author meticulously takes us inside the Third Reich, face to face with the Nazi hero, revealing as few texts do how the bureaucracy of evil worked.

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