Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

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. (Oct.)