Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich

by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Nancy Dougherty traveled a long and circuitous route to arrive at the writing of The Hangman and His Wifeadmittedly yet another among thousands of books about Nazi Germany as well as one of several dozen volumes on Reinhard Heydrich, whom Adolf Hitler himself called the man with the iron heart, and who as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia was the top Nazi trusted by Hitler most with the leadership of another country. Yet this book is unique in being a portrait of a leading Nazi figure based in part on interviews with his wife, Lina von Osten Heydrich, who survived him by more than four decades, well into the latter half of the twentieth century.

Nancy Doughertys long journey into the heart of Nazi evil began with her childhood experience of World War II on the remote home front of midwestern America. Then, as an eleven-year-old in 1950, she was shocked by the wars physical damage by seeing firsthand the bombed remains of Cologne, Germany.

Much later, in college, as a student of modern European history, she searched for why wars were fought at all, which prompted her to write her senior thesis on the Nuremberg war trials. From there her dismayed curiosity led her to the German concentration camps, to the guards who manned them, to their boss Adolf Eichmann, to his boss the enigmatic Heydrich, and finally to the Baltic island of Fehmarn, where Heydrichs widow agreed to be interviewed at length.

True, while Frau Heydrich loved and supported the man who can be described as the designer and executor of the Holocaust and was called the Butcher of Prague, she was never herself even socially part of the Nazi leaderships inner circle. And though she must have seen him change over the years, she did not ever participate in or even witness at first hand the process of decision-making that defined the horrors of the Nazi era. Still, her presence in these pages as Heydrichs spouse, domestic partner, and mother of his children casts light by her very existence on the course of Heydrichs career and the nature of his monstrous evil.

During the three occasions in the 1970s and 1980s that Nancy Dougherty visited and interviewed Lina Heydrich at her various homes, she succeeded in peeling away the many layers of her subjects personality, slowly exposing her shocking, if unsurprising, interior.

Sadly, Nancy Dougherty succumbed to Alzheimers disease before completing a final draft of her biography. So my task as the editor engaged by her husband after her death has been to sharpen and highlight her all-but-tragic vision of Heydrichs descent into profound evil. At the time I was approached, I was in the midst of writing a book about a year living in Berlin right after World War II. There, as a twelve-year-old, I became physically familiar with the Wannsee, the large lake in Berlins suburbs, by learning to sail on it. But I never once heard of the meeting held nearby five years earlier, the so-called Wannsee Conference, purportedly intended to settle on a Final Solution of the Jewish Question, and presided over by Heydrich. Many years later, when I finally learned of the conference and discovered Heydrichs role as an enemy of anyone even partly Jewish, I was prompted by my own German-Jewish ancestry to write a memoir.

Oddly enough, whenever I would mention Heydrich as the reason I had interrupted work on that memoir, I was often greeted by silence. At first, I interpreted this as stunned horror at the very thought of the man, but after a time I found that in a surprisingly large number of cases, people either hadnt heard of Heydrich or werent quite sure who exactly he was. This is puzzling, because while Hitler, Gring, Goebbels, and Himmler remain vividly grotesque images of evil in the minds even of people born after these barbarians ceased to bestride Europe, Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich in a number of respects surpassed them in frightfulness. Dubbed the Blond Beast (as well as the Butcher of Prague and the Hangman) and evincing a chiseled physiognomyblond hair, blue eyes, aquiline noseHeydrich possessed also athletic skills (he was a near Olympic-level fencer and an able pilot), musical talent (he played the violin well), a photographic memory (his subordinates characterized him as a human filing cabinet), and a keen sense of German culture (his father was a composer and opera singer good enough to study with Richard Wagners widow, Cosima, at the Wagner Festival House in Bayreuth).

Moreover, while at various times during the Nazi era, Hermann Gring, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, Joseph Goebbels, and Karl Dnitz each became a candidate to succeed Hitler, Heydrich, as the leader of Bohemia and Moravia and about to be put in charge of Nazi-occupied France when he was assassinated in the spring of 1942, possessed possibly better credentials to become Nazi Germanys next Fhrer.

In the pages of The Hangman and His Wife, we come face-to-face with the embodiment of the Nazi ideal of the Aryan master race.

In Nancy Doughertys handling of Heydrichs careerparticularly in her treatment of the Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, a few months before Heydrich would be assassinatedwe come to grips with the existential question of whether the Nazis embodied evil in their very being, or whether they were human beings who turned bad.

In telling Reinhard Heydrichs story, largely in her own words, but with commentary by his widow, we meet someone who at first appears to be a quintessentially cultured and talented German who was buffeted by the storms of twentieth-century history and bit by circumstantial bit turned from an ambitious and talented naval officer into the architect and engineer of Hitlers Holocaust.

Yet one searches in vain for a rational explanation of Heydrichs descent into evil. No single biographical fragment satisfies. Not his awkward, ugly-duckling childhood and adolescence. Not the sudden flameout of his promising naval career. Not the seemingly hopeless job prospects he suddenly faced in 1931 as an untrained civilian, what with the deadly combination of hyperinflation and unemployment corroding Germanys economy. Not the attraction to Nazism of his fiance and her father. Not the rising contempt for the Weimar Constitutions experiment in democracy. Not Heydrichs experience fighting in the Freikorps (Free Corps), the right-wing paramilitary volunteer group that fought leftist elements during the Weimar period. Not the rumor of a strain of Jewishness inherited from his fathers sidethe rumor at that time amounting for all intents and purposes to established fact. Not even the inclination in the German character to excel at any job, regardless of its purpose. Not one of these details sufficesnot singly nor as a symphony of evidence orchestrated in cacophonic discord.