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Summary
Summary
Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany. He shouldered a major share of responsibility for some of the worst Nazi atrocities, and up to his assassination in Prague in 1942, he was widely seen as one of the most dangerous men in Nazi Germany. Yet Heydrich has received remarkably modest attention in the extensive literature of the Third Reich.
Robert Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich's private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office. Fully exploring Heydrich's progression from a privileged middle-class youth to a rapacious mass murderer, Gerwarth sheds new light on the complexity of Heydrich's adult character, his motivations, the incremental steps that led to unimaginable atrocities, and the consequences of his murderous efforts toward re-creating the entire ethnic makeup of Europe.
Author Notes
Robert Gerwarth is professor of modern history at University College Dublin and director of UCD's Centre for War Studies.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 fiancee, 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. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
IN June 1942, Thomas Mann, who was living in exile in California, delivered a commentary on a German-language BBC radio program that decried the sanguinary actions of the Third Reich in avenging the assassination of the leading SS official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. After Heydrich's elaborate funeral ceremony at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler screamed at the Czech president, Emil Hacha, "Nothing can prevent me from deporting millions of Czechs if they do not wish for peaceful coexistence." It wasn't an idle threat. "Since the violent death of Heydrich," Mann lamented, "terror is raging everywhere, in a more sickly, unrestrained fashion than ever before. . . . An entire town, that supposedly sheltered the perpetrators, is massacred and razed." Indeed, to honor Heydrich and help create what Hitler referred to as "Germany's Garden of Eden" in the East, the Nazis chose the code name "Aktion Reinhard" for the extermination of two million people, most of whom were Jewish, in the General Government of Poland by the end of 1943. None of Hitler's paladins did more to realize the Final Solution than Heydrich and his superior Heinrich Himmler, who ran the SS and the Gestapo. This pair worked assiduously to expand their influence from modest beginnings to the establishment of the most powerful and fearsome security apparatus in the Nazi empire. Now two supremely enlightening biographies, Peter Longerich's "Heinrich Himmler" and Robert Gerwarth's "Hitler's Hangman," show how they did it Longerich is a professor of history at the University of London and the author of several books on the Holocaust. Gerwarth is the director of the Center for War Studies at University College Dublin. These two books don't fundamentally revise our understanding of the Final Solution - too much has already been published for bold revision to be remotely plausible - but they significantly deepen it. Little in either Himmler's or Heydrich's upbringing would have indicated their future line of work. While Hitler came from Austrian peasant stock, Himmler, who was born in 1900, and Heydrich, who was born in 1904, belonged to thoroughly respectable Catholic families. Himmler's father, Gebhard, taught Greek and Latin at the renowned Wilhelm Grammar School in Munich, and his son was a diligent student Heydrich's father, Bruno, was a gifted composer who ran a conservatory in the city of Halle and ensured that his son enjoyed a rigorous musical education, including playing the piano and violin by age 6 and attending Wagner operas. Then came World War I, followed by the sudden collapse of the monarchy. Heydrich was too young to serve but experienced the upheaval and violence that accompanied the demise of Wilhelmine Germany. Soon his parents saw their livelihoods and social standing jeopardized by Germany's economic woes. Allegations of a Jewish pedigree in the Heydrich family tree further discombobulated the parents and would later plague the son. For his part, Himmler had eagerly marched off to war, entering a Bavarian regiment in 1918, but to his lifelong regret was demobilized before he could see action. During the tumultuous postwar era, his parents' financial difficulties meant that he couldn't afford to study at Munich University as he might have liked. Instead, he earned an agricultural degree in 1922 and accepted a job in an artificial fertilizer factory, which he left after a year. For both Himmler and Heydrich, the Nazi Party offered a second chance. They became professional Nazis. Himmler was first off the mark. His initial whiff of excitement came in 1923 during Hitler's abortive Munich putsch, which Himmler participated in as a member of a paramilitary organization known as the German Combat League, led by Ernst Röhm. After Hitter's imprisonment in Landsberg in 1924, the banned Nazi Party went underground, but Himmler worked for it as a courier. In his spare time, Longerich reports, Himmler read various anti-Semitic and astrological tracts in an effort to "integrate the most important elements of radical right-wing ideology, which are increasingly apparent in his thinking - anti-Semitism, extreme nationalism, racism, hostility to democracy - into a far more comprehensive worldview, cobbled together from the most varied sources." Fortified with these newly won insights, Himmler, who had become an aide to the leading Nazi Gregor Strasser (whose murder he would later connive at during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934), traveled around lower Bavaria to educate peasants about the diabolical links between capitalism, Freemasons and Jews. He also married a blond, blue-eyed nurse named Margarete Boden whose credo was "A Jew is always a Jew!" HIMMLER'S big break came in September 1927 when Hitler appointed him deputy leader of the "protection squads," or SS, that were supposed to guard Nazi bigwigs. This small grouping gave him the chance to build up a modern and racially aristocratic order of the Teutonic Knights. It was supposed to provide a stark contrast to the rowdy SA brown-shirts led by his erstwhile mentor Röhm (whom Himmler also had murdered in the Night of the Long Knives). When it came to the SS, Himmler's officious punctiliousness can hardly be exaggerated. He saw himself as a paterfamilias, fussing over his young charges. He demanded that each local SS leader ensure that "his squad brings with it a sufficient number of shoe and clothes brushes" to the 1929 Nuremberg rally. Himmler also insisted on such precautionary measures as examinations of the "hereditary health" of any future SS wives. Himmler loved to talk of his "decency," and would later complain that the task of eliminating Jews and other undesirables was a burden, a heroic, if unpalatable, task that he could not shirk. If anyone seemed to conform to Himmler's aspirations for a Nordic elite, it was Heydrich. Himmler himself suffered from poor posture and a recessed chin, which he liked to hide in photos by covering it with his left hand. Heydrich represented everything Himmler was not - a tall blond with blue eyes who was a ladies' man as well as a skilled sportsman, musician and pilot. Heydrich's career as a naval officer ended abruptly because of an affair; his insolent conduct before a military court of honor resulted in his dismissal in 1931. Heydrich was devastated. But his fiancée, Lina von Osten, was an ardent Nazi, and Heydrich's family pulled some strings, landing him an interview with Himmler, who was impressed by Heydrich's apparent familiarity with espionage, mostly gleaned from reading spy potboilers as a boy. According to Gerwarth, Heydrich had been largely apolitical and entered the most extreme paramilitary group within Hitler's movement "not out of deep ideological conviction, but because Nazism offered him the opportunity to return to a structured life in uniform, providing along with it a sense of purpose and a way of regaining the confidence of Lina and her family of devoted Nazis." Soon enough, however, Heydrich became one of the most zealous exponents of Nazi racial doctrine. Under Himmler's guidance, Heydrich would play a key role in preparing the political and bureaucratic terrain on the road to Auschwitz. When was the decision actually made to move from the extrusion of Jews from Germany and Western Europe to their actual liquidation? This question has vexed scholars for decades, leading to controversies between two schools of historians: the intentionalists, who believe Hitler was always determined to exterminate the Jews, and the functionalists, who contend that the Holocaust was arrived at in a rather haphazard fashion. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. Hitler scarcely made a secret of his desire to wipe out the Jews: in 1939 he prophesied the extinction of world Jewry during a speech at the Kroll Opera House. And contrary to the notion derived from Hannah Arendt, most of the SS officials were not soulless technocrats - or as the German phrase has it, "desktop perpetrators" - but skillful bureaucrats driven by seething ideological hatreds. Himmler himself, Longerich writes, "liked to present himself in the pose of the victor" when visiting concentration camps and give "guided tours" of them. His eventual goal would have been to replace the Wehrmacht itself with his elite corps of Waffen-SS troops. For all of Himmler's zeal, however, the SS had to proceed carefully. It attracted much criticism, Longerich writes, from the Wehrmacht for engaging in flagrant atrocities during the 1939 invasion of Poland. Yet as Himmler saw it, the SS murdered "decently." He distinguished between valid "political motives" for killing Jews and illegitimate "selfish, sadistic or sexual motives," which would lead to prosecution for murder or manslaughter. It is important to remember that it was always Hitler who made the ultimate decisions in steadily moving toward a state-sanctioned policy of extermination. According to Longerich, in 1941 "the initiative for the intensification of Jewish policy - in this case, the start of the deportations - once again came from Hitler, but Himmler, like other leading functionaries, intuited such a decision, felt his way forward and acted in advance of it and took on an active role as soon as the time was ripe." By 1942, the Nazis' rapid military successes and anger over Heydrich's death accelerated their plans to annihilate the Jews. Then, as defeat loomed, and in the wake of the failed assassination plot against Hitler on July 20, 1944, Himmler devoted himself to settling scores with the military and the Prussian aristocracy, who were often one and the same. The result was a fresh blood bath. From the outset, Hitler and his fellow conspirators had been obsessed with the idea of avoiding a new November 1918, when they believed that internal Jewish and Communist subversives had stabbed imperial Germany in the back and cost it victory in World War I. And to the end, Hitler clung to the conviction that he was engaged in a titanic battle with world Jewry; in his final statement before he committed suicide, he called upon future generations to carry on the fight. Himmler himself committed suicide after he was captured by the British. Longerich and Gerwarth underscore that the Nazis' sinister delusions about Jewish power prompted them to transform an entire continent into what Thomas Mann in his postwar novel "Doctor Faustus" called a "thick-walled torture chamber." Vienna, 1938: The SS leader Heinrich Himmler, left, and his aide Reinhard Heydrich. Little in either Himmler's or Heydrich's upbringing would have indicated their future work for the Third Reich. Jacob Heilbrunn, a regular contributor to The Book Review, is a senior editor at The National Interest.
Choice Review
German historian Gerwarth's powerful biography carefully delineates Reinhard Heydrich's transition from an insecure apolitical naval officer to the most uncompromising executor of Adolf Hitler's "dystopian racial fantasies," a man who became a principal architect of the Holocaust before his assassination in 1942. Contrary to previous portrayals, Gerwarth (Univ. College Dublin, Ireland) contends that Heydrich was neither a deranged sadist nor an opportunistic careerist for whom ideology was merely a vehicle for advancement. Instead, Heydrich became Heinrich Himmler's eager ideological pupil, thoroughly reinventing himself as a model Nazi after joining the SS in 1931 as Himmler's intelligence chief. Immersion in that organization's political milieu of violence and racial anti-Semitism completed Heydrich's transformation into "Hitler's hangman." Heydrich intuitively grasped that initiative was the key to advancement in the "polycratic jungle" of the Third Reich; by anticipating the Fuhrer's wishes, he quickly rose to the top of Nazi Germany's security apparatus. Gerwarth's mastery of primary sources and relevant secondary literature is impressive, and his integration of the most recent scholarship and historiographical perspectives on the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust make this fine biography even more compelling. An outstanding, exceptional book sure to become the standard account of one of the most infamous Nazi war criminals. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. D. R. Snyder Austin Peay State University
Kirkus Review
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 (19041942).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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and Maps | p. viii |
Preface | p. x |
Introduction | p. xiii |
I Death in Prague | p. 1 |
II Young Reinhard | p. 14 |
III Becoming Heydrich | p. 50 |
IV Fighting the Enemies of the Reich | p. 84 |
V Rehearsals for War | p. 116 |
VI Experiments with Mass Murder | p. 141 |
VII At War with the World | p. 173 |
VIII Reich Protector | p. 218 |
IX Legacies of Destruction | p. 278 |
Notes | p. 295 |
Bibliography | p. 352 |
Index | p. 383 |