The Hangman and His Wife Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2022 by James D. Dougherty;

  Foreword copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dougherty, Nancy, 1939–2013, author. | Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, other.

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

  Other titles: Life and death of Reinhard Heydrich

  Description: New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021024236 (print) | LCCN 2021024237 (ebook) | ISBN 9780394543413 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593534137 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Heydrich, Reinhard, 1904-1942. | Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei. Schutzstaffel—Biography. | Nazis—Biography. | Heydrich, Lina, 1911–1985—Interviews. | Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945.

  Classification: LCC DD247.H42 D68 2022 (print) | LCC DD247.H42 (ebook) | DDC 943.086092/2 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021024236

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2021024237

  Ebook ISBN 9780593534137

  Cover photograph from the author’s collection

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  ep_prh_6.0_140078984_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

  Introduction: The Hangman’s Wife

  PART I STARTING OUT

  1 The Face of National Socialism

  2 Child of Uncertainty

  3 The Honor of an Officer

  4 The Honor of a Woman

  5 Heinrich Himmler: The Great Enigma

  6 Fate, or “Work in Relation to Life’s Possibilities”

  PART II GATHERING POWER

  7 Bitter Young Men, Bright Young Men: Heydrich’s SD

  8 The Evil Twins

  9 The Road to Berlin

  10 The Rules of the Game

  11 A Lesson in Life

  PART III EXERCISING POWER

  12 Transformations of Our Struggle: The Invisible Apparat

  13 The Expert on the Forms of Words

  14 “Garbage Can of the Third Reich”

  15 The House Across the Way

  16 Drawing the Line: The Abwehr Resistance

  17 The Night of Broken Glass

  18 Inside the Spider’s Web

  19 The Second Sex and the Third Reich

  20 A Disgrace—for Germany

  PART IV GOING TO WAR

  21 “Perfectly Normal Men”

  22 The Road to Wannsee

  23 The Wannsee Conference

  PART V REICHSPROTEKTOR: BOHEMIA AND MORAVIA

  24 The Castle

  25 The Fatal Crown

  26 The Road to Jungfern-Breschan

  27 The Temple of Fear

  PART VI AFTERWARD

  28 Surviving Death and Defeat

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Sources

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Photographic Credits

  FOREWORD

  by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

  Nancy Dougherty traveled a long and circuitous route to arrive at the writing of The Hangman and His Wife—admittedly 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 Dougherty’s 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 war’s 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 Heydrich’s 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 leadership’s 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 Heydrich’s spouse, domestic partner, and mother of his children casts light by her very existence on the course of Heydrich’s 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 subject’s personality, slowly exposing her shocking, if unsurprising, interior.

  Sadly, Nancy Dougherty succumbed to Alzheimer’s 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 Heydrich’s 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 Berlin’s 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 Heydrich’s 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 hadn’t heard of Heydrich or weren’t quite sure who exactly he was. This is puzzling, because while Hitler, Göring, 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 physiognomy—blond hair, blue eyes, aquiline nose—Heydrich 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 Wagner’s widow, Cosima, at the Wagner Festival House in Bayreuth).

  Moreover, while at various times during the Nazi era, Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, Joseph Goebbels, and Karl Dönitz 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 Germany’s next Führer.

  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 Dougherty’s handling of Heydrich’s career—particularly in her treatment of the Wannsee Conference, held on January 20, 1942, a few months before Heydrich would be assassinated—we 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 Heydrich’s 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 Hitler’s Holocaust.

  Yet one searches in vain for a rational explanation of Heydrich’s 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 un
trained civilian, what with the deadly combination of hyperinflation and unemployment corroding Germany’s economy. Not the attraction to Nazism of his fiancée and her father. Not the rising contempt for the Weimar Constitution’s experiment in democracy. Not Heydrich’s 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 father’s side—the 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 suffices—not singly nor as a symphony of evidence orchestrated in cacophonic discord.

  Reinhard Heydrich’s monstrosity surpasses experiential evidence. His career puts one finally in mind of the controversial experiment designed in the 1960s by Stanley Milgram, a Yale University social psychologist, and described in his book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Here it was determined that under carefully controlled circumstances where subjects were ordered to administer what they believed to be extremely painful electric shocks in order to teach “victims” random word associations, 60 percent of the subjects continued to obey the experimenter’s commands, despite the evident and increasing suffering of the “victims.”

  Except that in imagining Heydrich as a subject, one sees him falling through some trapdoor in his mind, and not only administering the maximum electric voltage but then breaking into the glass chamber where the “victim” is pretending to suffer and proceeding to strangle him to death with his bare hands.

  Or in a similarly well-known undertaking, the so-called Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip G. Zimbardo in 1971, where people pretending to be guarding prisoners found themselves resorting to physical violence, one imagines Heydrich going even further and exterminating the playacting subjects with Zyklon-B gas.

  There is simply no accounting for the nature or extent of his evil.

  In Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, the author famously tells of reaching for an icicle to slake an awful thirst and having it knocked from his hands to the ground by a concentration camp guard. When Levi asks the universal Holocaust question, “Warum?,” meaning, simply, “Why?,” the guard answers, now famously, “Hier gibt es kein Warum!”—“Here, there is no why!”

  In a system created and executed by the strivings of incomprehensibly evil genius, the answer to millions of victims’ “Why?” is no more than Reinhard Heydrich.

  INTRODUCTION: THE HANGMAN’S WIFE

  “I think that even if it is very difficult, the old National Socialists should be incorporated into the unity of history.”

  —Lina von Osten Heydrich

  This book provides an intimate glimpse into the political and social life of one of history’s most notorious, dreaded, and least understood organizations, the Nazi SS, short for Schutzstaffel (literally Defense Squad, though known as Black Shirts). Its story focuses on two people who were both members of the Nazi Party. One of them—Reinhard Heydrich, who, as SS Commander Heinrich Himmler’s chief assistant, was second in command of the SS—was a remarkable man by any reckoning, and was responsible for a remarkable amount of suffering. The other, Heydrich’s wife, Lina, represented the other side of the Nazi coin, the quiet supporters of the leadership. She was “responsible” for nothing, except that she built a household for her husband and did her best to back him in every way possible.

  Their stories flow together, break apart, and converge again. Some things they shared; in more ways their lives were parallel, but barely touched. Reinhard Heydrich died in 1942; Lina Heydrich in 1985. She spent much of the forty-two years following Reinhard’s death trying to come to terms with what her husband had done almost two generations earlier.

  The world at large, of course, is also still attempting to come to terms with what her husband did, generally through reliance on convenient stereotypes that teach us little and usually prevent us from learning anything else. In Reinhard and Lina Heydrich our two most widespread myths—the diamond-hard, fanatic SS monster and the “ordinary” camp follower who weakly acquiesces to the dictates of an evil regime—join hands and lives. And, like all real people, one of the things they have to tell us is that nothing is as simple as clichés would make it seem.

  The history that this book recounts is mainly devoted to Reinhard Heydrich—his remarkable rise in the Nazi hierarchy from almost nowhere, and his precipitous fall from a high place. How I discovered him began with my stunned apprehension of the Holocaust, its incomprehensible statistics, the racial fanaticism behind it, the concentration camps, the SS and Gestapo (or Secret State Police), and eventually the places and people involved.

  When, in the early 1960s, I was studying sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and reading about social change and organizational leadership, I put on my reading list a book on the history of the SS. I was less concerned with victims of Nazi Germany and more with the way the persecutors had organized their activities, with what sociologists might call “integration, adaptation, goal attainment, and pattern maintenance”—as far from suffering people as the jargon of sociology is from the language of everyday life.

  From this perspective, the individual is important only when he occupies a pivotal position, where many strands of the social network converge. As I read about the SS, I was surprised to discover that the man with the gun who greeted the camp prisoners, and who held the power of life and death in his hands, did not occupy a pivotal position in the sociological sense; in fact, he represented just about the bottom rung of the huge SS hierarchy. He and his victims had reached the end of the line together.

  As the leaders of the SS bureaucracy had learned, intense pressure was ordinarily required to induce a man to participate in mass murder, and so they seem to have searched systematically for weak and desperate people. For instance, the man who designed the training programs for the Death’s Head Legions, SS Obergruppenführer Theodor “Papa” Eicke, had once been hospitalized for mental illness; the commandant of Auschwitz had been jailed for murder.

  Franz Stangl, commandant of the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka, perhaps had a more typical career. As a police official in Austria, he had incurred the displeasure of his boss, and as a way out of the situation had accepted service in an “experimental” euthanasia program. This was in 1938, and Stangl’s willingness to participate in the killing of 100,000 physically sick and mentally disabled Germans must have been entered in a file somewhere. In 1942, he was sent to Sobibor, along with many of his fellow workers from the earlier “program.” But Stangl had been reluctant in 1938; in 1942, when he found out what his assignment was to be, he immediately applied for a transfer. He received many promises, but no ticket home. Week after week, Stangl sent desperate pleas to various higher SS leaders, but week after week, he stayed on the job.

  After the war, he told an interviewer that one of his methods of coping with his inner conflict was to avoid spending much time in the areas where the exterminations occurred. That was not as difficult as it may have seemed: as much as possible, the SS tried to arrange for the actual dirty work to be done by the inmates themselves, or failing that, by guards in SS uniform who were citizens of an occupied country. From the SS point of view, the ideal death camp guard was not a German, but an “inferior” foreigner, someone who couldn’t even talk to most of the inmates, and who was already in fear for his own life. Many of the guards drank heavily when they could, and the higher officials were no models of self-discipline either. Attempting to explain how he struggled to anesthetize his conscience, Stangl admitted, “I took a large glass of brandy to bed with me each night and I drank.”

  Heinrich Himmler, the leader, or Reichsführer, of the SS, often made speeches glorifying the “courage” and “sacrifices” of men like Stangl, but he spent relatively little time with these “brave” camp commanders. The brightest stars within the organization’s hierarchy tended to be more resourceful, more polished, and much more calculating. Where the camps were concerned, they followed Himmler’s lead. It was all right to accompany him on one of his brief visits to selected sites (which were inevitably spruced up for his arrival, since everyone knew the sight of blood made Himmler ill) but only a fool would get involved in running those sites.