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The hangman and his wife : the life and death of Reinhard Heydrich / Nancy Dougherty ; edited with a foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2022Copyright date: ©2022Edition: First editionDescription: xx, 623 pages : illustrations ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780394543413
  • 0394543416
Other title:
  • Life and death of Reinhard Heydrich
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Contents:
Starting out. The face of National Socialism -- Child of uncertainty -- The honor of an officer -- The honor of a woman -- Heinrich Himmler : the great enigma -- Fate, or "work in relation to life's possibilities" -- Gathering power. Bitter young men, bright young men : Heydrich's SD -- The evil twins -- The road to Berlin -- The rules of the game -- A lesson in life -- Exercising power. Transformations of our struggle : the invisible apparat -- The expert on the forms of words -- "Garbage can of the Third Reich" -- The house across the way -- Drawing the line : the Abwehr resistance -- The Night of Broken Glass -- Inside the spider's web -- The second sex in the Third Reich -- A disgrace--for Germany -- Going to war. "Perfectly normal men" -- The road to Wannsee -- The Wansee Conference -- Reichsprotektor : Bohemia & Moravia. The castle -- The fatal crown -- The road to Jungfern-Breschan -- The temple of fear -- Afterward. Surviving death and defeat.
Summary: "A biography of Reinhard Heydrich and his wife, Lina von Osten Heydrich"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Dr. James Carlson Library Biography HEYDRICH R. D732 Available 33111010986533
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Biography HEYDRICH R. D732 Available 33111010848949
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 577-598) and index.

Starting out. The face of National Socialism -- Child of uncertainty -- The honor of an officer -- The honor of a woman -- Heinrich Himmler : the great enigma -- Fate, or "work in relation to life's possibilities" -- Gathering power. Bitter young men, bright young men : Heydrich's SD -- The evil twins -- The road to Berlin -- The rules of the game -- A lesson in life -- Exercising power. Transformations of our struggle : the invisible apparat -- The expert on the forms of words -- "Garbage can of the Third Reich" -- The house across the way -- Drawing the line : the Abwehr resistance -- The Night of Broken Glass -- Inside the spider's web -- The second sex in the Third Reich -- A disgrace--for Germany -- Going to war. "Perfectly normal men" -- The road to Wannsee -- The Wansee Conference -- Reichsprotektor : Bohemia & Moravia. The castle -- The fatal crown -- The road to Jungfern-Breschan -- The temple of fear -- Afterward. Surviving death and defeat.

"A biography of Reinhard Heydrich and his wife, Lina von Osten Heydrich"-- Provided by publisher.

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