Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich by Robert Gerwarth (review)

Except for Shlomo Aronson's study of Reinhard Heydrich's formative years, and Charles Sydnor's more recent essays, biographical analysis of Heydrich has been the preserve of journalists.¹ Scholarly depictions shifted over the years, reflecting our evolving perceptions of SS men and Holocaust perpetrators, but never fully fleshed out the man.

Benefiting from several generations of distance, the availability of probably every surviving piece of relevant evidence, the scholarly syntheses that emerged from debates over the origins of the Holocaust, and the more recent, sophisticated insights from Taterforschung, Robert Gerwarth has given us what probably will be the definitive study of the man. Combining an appropriate degree of empathy with objectivity—what he calls "cold empathy"—the author goes as far as one can toward understanding a man who became so deeply immersed in the greatest of evils. The Heydrich who emerges is truly human—neither psychotic nor demonic. His is the sad story of how far someone can drive himself in pursuit of perverse ideals built on distorted ideological perceptions of necessity.

The book's dramatic beginning is the end of Heydrich's story, his assassination in 1942. The rest of the book is a chronological analysis of Heydrich's personal evolution through his pre-Nazi years and then within the context of the history of the Nazi "seizure of power," the evolution of the Third Reich, and the latter's imperialistic expansion and programs of ethnic cleansing. Heydrich's role in the long and tortuous evolution from fomented Jewish emigration through "resettlement" to total extermination is thoroughly developed. On the last stages of that process, Gewarth sides with the arguments of Peter Longerich over those of Christopher Browning.²

Gewarth's insights into the Heydrich family environment begin with a thorough analysis of Heydrich's parental background. It is in the areas of Heydrich's formative years and of his transition to a fanatically dedicated NS ideologue that the author makes his most significant contribution to our understanding of both Heydrich and perpetrators in general. The initial impetus for Heydrich's transformation into a Nazi was his wife and her family. The need to impress them drew the humiliated, cashiered ex-naval officer into becoming Heinrich Himmler's lieutenant in 1931. Before that, he had no apparent interest in either antisemitism or right-wing nationalism, much less Nazi ideology.

The old ideas of a rivalry between Heydrich and his boss are thoroughly laid to rest. Heydrich was the loyal collaborator of Himmler, who was his ideological mentor. It was Heydrich's instinct for presenting himself as the best man for any job that made him indispensable to both Himmler and Hitler. He thus became more ideologically correct or extreme than his Old-Fighter rivals, the proactive executor of Himmler's dreams of a racially-purged environment in which to fulfill Hitler's visions. Although his published essays arguing for an efficient terror apparatus expanded fully on "the theoretical and doctrinaire assertions about enemies of the state that came from Hitler or Himmler," he was more firmly committed to acting against enemies than to developing "ideas or theories" (p. 92f). Nevertheless, to the end he would spout those theories as justification for the massive inhumanities that he and his men unleashed.

Gerwarth argues that "the most significant contributing factor to Heydrich's radicalization was his immersion in a political milieu of young and often highly educated men who thrived on violent notions of cleansing Germany from its supposed internal enemies while simultaneously rejecting bourgeois norms of morality as weak, outdated, and inappropriate for securing Germany's national rebirth" (p. xviii). Thus Gerwarth ties Heydrich to Ulrich Herbert and Michael Wildt's analyses of the perpetrators as the Generation des Unbedingten.³ But it was Himmler and Heydrich's drive for power that fused the SS-Sicherheitsdienst (SD) with the professional policemen of the Sicherheitspolizei (the Gestapo and Kriminal Polizei) and immersed men like...