Reinhard Heydrich Killed in Cold Blood. His Wife Defended Him 40 Years After His Death

The book, “Husband, Father, Criminal,” is scheduled for release on August 13. Nancy Dougherty died before completing her biography of Reinhard Heydrich. The manuscript was edited by New York Times journalist and reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.

Read an excerpt:

The real SS leaders sat at their desks all day, drove back and forth in limousines, and went to elegant parties in shiny paramilitary uniforms. So it was possible that the administrator of the death camps, Adolf Eichmann, who always wanted to be one of those real leaders, could sit in a bulletproof cage in Jerusalem in 1961 and wonder why he was considered an ordinary murderer. He repeatedly declared that he personally had never killed or ordered anyone killed, nor had he ever held a gun in his hand.

From the man on the train ramp to the man in the glass cage, no one felt responsible for anything.

Adolf Eichmann’s superior, the man he tried so hard to please, was Reinhard Heydrich, and with Heydrich we finally come to someone whose character and responsibility matched his terrible power. Heydrich was the official guardian of the new morality. Neither his career nor his personality can be considered banal; in fact, it was at his desk that decisions were made about so many elements of social importance that one historian has called him “the symbol and probably the most representative figure of the Third Reich at the height of its internal and external power.”

It is easy to understand why: if ever a man killed in cold blood, it was Reinhard Heydrich; if ever a man lived with reckless, almost demonic intensity, it was Heydrich. This is the stuff of legend and nightmare, philosophical speculation and psychological kitsch, B-movies and high-flying dramas – and, unfortunately, of the gravest historical consequences.

What we know about the SS and its members comes largely from the work of historians, journalists, political philosophers – and purveyors of what can be politely described as garbage. When I read about Heydrich and the bizarre stories and speculations that have always circulated (and still do) about him, I thought that someone with a background in social science should try to analyze his role as a “technologist of power” and try to understand how, as a human being, he could become so inhuman.

Alas; it probably shouldn’t surprise me to discover that the man who symbolizes everything we mean by “Nazi” was also the most enigmatic of their leaders. Heydrich’s actions, taken in isolation, seem as clear, as obvious, as a stabbing, but the man himself defies our attempts to look at him and understand him.

Any attempt to describe even the main events or the most important accounts of his life becomes a complicated historical problem. From his family roots to his true opinions about Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler or the Holocaust to the causes of his death in Prague; indeed, from the cradle to the grave, Reinhard Heydrich remains a controversial figure. And this unfortunately makes it easy for everyone to fall back on the comfortable, conventional stereotype of Nazi leaders who, as George Orwell put it, “think in slogans and speak in bullets.”

Laying wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (also a monument to King Victor Emmanuel II). In the foreground, the head of the Reich Main Security Office, Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich Associated Press-Photo, Berlin, NAC/Public Domain

Reinhard Heydrich will also speak in this book, but the reader should note that his voice comes from a distance and that there is occasional static on the line. Like most young men who die suddenly in the middle of war, he had no time to write down his memoirs. And Heydrich, unlike Himmler, kept no diary and wrote few letters. Most of what we know about his behavior comes from accounts by people who were clever enough to survive both the war and the war crimes trials that followed. Professional survivors are useful, but they usually make poor historians.

In addition, there are scattered documents that remained despite the Nazis’ last-minute efforts to destroy incriminating evidence. Heydrich appears in them as a high-ranking civil servant, issuing orders or analyzing worrying situations, but they are often notes written by someone else, so they give us directions and arguments but few specific statements. When he became protector of Bohemia and Moravia, he made formal speeches to his new subjects and subordinates, but this was only during the last eight months of his life and shows only his public side.

And so it happened that, in order to learn the details of Heydrich’s personal life, many researchers ended up in the same place, the small, windy island of Fehmarn in the Baltic Sea, located between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, where Heydrich’s wife spent her childhood and where she returned in 1945.

As a rule, the wives of former Nazi leaders, especially major war criminals, do not give interviews and live in the deepest seclusion, surrounded by a cordon of watchful family members. But Lina Heydrich was never like other Nazi wives. After her husband’s death in 1942, she chose to remain in Czechoslovakia and led such an active life in her thirty-two-room country villa that Himmler (who had assumed the role of her legal guardian) reprimanded her for becoming something almost unimaginable, a “politicking widow.”

After the war and her madly risky escape from the advancing Allied armies, Frau Heydrich settled with her children on the island of Fehmarn, only to resurface in the early sixties, when she tried to apply for a pension that was available under West German law to widows of soldiers “killed in battle.” Her case made headlines when a court ruled that no one who had “benefited” from the Nazi regime could apply for such a pension. From then on, the widow of “Hangman Heydrich” began to give occasional interviews to historians, journalists, and war document screeners. In 1976 she published a book of memoirs, “Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher” (“Life with a War Criminal”) (a deliberately ironic title that she soon regretted, because for obvious reasons her husband, had he lived, would have been considered a war criminal, an irony that many missed); and a few years later, when the film “Holocaust” was broadcast on German television, she gave a television interview in which she condemned the way in which her husband, played by English actor David Warner, was portrayed.

From all this, you might have guessed that talking to Lina Heydrich would be a bit like listening to a Germanic version of one of the Tokyo Rose’s propaganda broadcasts. I had no trouble getting hold of her by phone or getting her permission to visit her home, where she ran a small guesthouse, for an interview in late 1974, two years before her memoirs were published and a decade before her death in 1985. Driving in my rental car along one of Hitler’s motorways past the pretty villages and thatched houses of Schleswig-Holstein toward the new bridge over Fehmarn, I expected a cold, cautious, fragile, and fanatical Valkyrie—but in my research I never found exactly what I had imagined.

When I arrived at her house on a cold and windy evening, it was not a good moment for either of us. She did not know that I was exhausted, because I had already done one interview that morning in Hamburg, and I did not realize that I had arrived on June 4, the anniversary of Reinhard Heydrich’s death.

My husband was with me, to be honest, as a bodyguard, although unlike me, he didn’t speak German. The woman who greeted us in the driveway of a rectangular, two-story white brick house was clearly crying. Inside, the first thing she did was offer me a glass of cognac; the first thing I did was take it.

We sat nervously on a flowered sofa while Frau Heydrich cooked dinner in a small, hidden kitchen to which we had not been invited. The room in which we were seated, and in which my future interviews—three more in seven years—were to be conducted, would have been a fairly large rectangular room, except for the crowd of furniture. There were various tables, on which there was always something—a bowl of apples, a vase of ferns—a large wardrobe of polished, carved wood, an old sailor’s trunk decorated with wrought-iron flourishes, a few pink porcelain dishes in a niche in the wall, and other pleasant or elegant objects that appeared and disappeared from day to day. One thing, however, was always there—her dead husband’s bronze death mask.

Husband, father, criminal promotional materials Prószyński i S-ka