THE WALLPAPER AND HIS WIFE: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich, by Nancy Dougherty
What is the fatal attraction they exert on us, the Nazis? We continue to read books and watch documentaries about them many decades after they coolly began exterminating the Jews – a genocide unparalleled in duration and depth in the bloody annals of history. (A close example would probably be the extermination of the Armenians by the Turks during World War I, about which Hitler said in one of his incendiary speeches, “After all, who is talking about the destruction of the Armenians today?”)
Does their enduring attraction tell us something about what we fear in relation to our own capacities for malicious behavior, what Freud called the “death instinct”? Or perhaps, despite Hannah Arendt’s decidedly deaf statement about the “banality of evil” – judging by the recent release of more than 70 hours of tapes Adolf Eichmann made after the war, in which he celebrates the extermination of the Jews – deal with the perverse glamour of evil instead.
In my own zeal to understand what happened under the Third Reich, I’ve collected bookshelves with well-thumbed titles such as “How Could This Happen” and “The Nazi Conscience,” as well as reports of the Gestapo; Nazi women; Hitler’s decorator; his beloved niece Geli, whom he probably killed (although it was presented as suicide); the philosophers who influenced him; his “pact” with Hollywood; his relationship with Eva Braun…and so on. It seems that every year new books are published about high-ranking Nazis – Adolf Eichmann, Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, even a thick bundle of letters from Heinrich Himmler to his wife. Not to mention the exhaustive canon about the Fuhrer himself.
Now comes a new Reinhard Heydrich biography, “The Hangman and His Wife”, by Nancy Dougherty. Not a staunch believer (he only joined the Nazi party in 1931, two years after his future wife Lina), but Heydrich quickly rose from non-ideological roots to become head of the SD (intelligence service) and the Gestapo, as well as from an architect of the Final Solution.
In a preface to the book, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt essentially raises his hands to the mystery of Heydrich’s evolution from a musically gifted, intelligent and lonely boy to a monstrous, hyper-rational technocrat with a photographic memory and unparalleled organizational skills: to a rational explanation for Heydrich’s descent into evil,” he writes. “No biographical fragment is sufficient.”
From the start, one of Heydrich’s strengths has been his striking Aryan looks. When he first met the physically inconspicuous Himmler, Heydrich was immediately hired as chief of SS intelligence, probably because Himmler was “simply heavily influenced by the way Heydrich would look in his new uniform.” For all their focus on Scandinavian physical perfection, the Nazi leaders were, quite frankly, a bunch of misfits and… mieskeits (to use Yiddish slang for the ugly). Himmler himself had a weak chin and peered from behind thick glasses; Göring was fat and jawed; Goebbels had club feet. Even Hitler, whose hyperbolic blue eyes made him the object of female devotion, had the unhinged look of a man barely held in check.
Dougherty’s particular contribution is that she has extensively interviewed the feisty and usually thoughtless widow, Lina, who generally ends her revisionist observations with a verbal shrug:niece wahr?” (wasn’t it?). Lina published her selfish memoir, “Life With a War Criminal” (she intended the title to be ironic), in 1976 and died just over four decades after her husband. Dougherty herself died in 2013 before completing a final draft of her biography, which was subsequently edited by Lehmann-Haupt, who died five years later.
There is, perhaps because of the successive deaths of both author and editor, a somewhat morbid, almost meaningless atmosphere to this book – as if the subject matter has surpassed the attempt to pin it down. “The Hangman and His Wife” sums up Heydrich’s lightning-fast career and the qualities that enabled him to succeed – “his Luciferian coldness, amorality and insatiable greed for power,” as historian Joachim Fest puts it. Due to a close relative’s Semitic-sounding surname, he was overshadowed by rumors of Jewish blood in his family and was mocked during his nine years in the navy; a former roommate stated that “everyone more or less took Heydrich for a Jew.”
This general suspicion only seemed to fuel his drive: “There is no doubt,” notes another former bunkmate of Heydrich, “that ambition was his characteristic idiosyncrasy. … On all occasions he wanted to be excellent – in the service, for his superiors, with the comrades, in sportsmanship and in bars.” We learn that unlike many Nazi leaders, he “rewarded technical expertise, promoted men known for pragmatic cynicism, and insisted on factual accuracy,” although he was also known for paradoxically informing subordinates that “the truth is for are children”. Towards the end of Heydrich’s life he had become so self-assured and careless that, with the roof down on his Mercedes convertible, on May 27, 1942, he encountered a grenade from a hit man. He lingered for several days and was given a fully dressed state funeral, which Hitler attended.
Dougherty’s account makes for fascinating reading without offering radically new insights into what drove Heydrich. Although it presents itself as revealing due to the interviews the author conducted with his wife, Lina Heydrich is too crafty to be caught in anyone’s net; she is willing to admit the complexities of her marriage and has strong, sometimes witty opinions about other Nazis, but admits nothing when it comes to the horrific vision her husband embraced.
On the other hand, I would suggest that even the most psychologically astute biography is not equipped to account for the guiltless machinations of ruthless despots: it can never grasp the elusive, complex matrix of character and circumstances that a Heydrich (or a Putin, whatever that concerns) creates ). Gitta Sereny, who wrote a book that cast doubt on the self-explanatory version of events that the Nazi architect Albert Speer composed from prison, also wrote a biography of Franz Stangl, the commander of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, in which she tried to understand , in a non-judgmental way, what drove him. And the controversial psychotherapist Alice Miller analyzed Hitler within the context of historically abusive patterns of Germanic upbringing and described Hitler’s brutal treatment by his father, Alois.
But as understandable and drastic as these efforts are, none are completely adequate. Such creatures seem to exist in a separate space, imbued with a ferocity that is irreversible and self-feeding without fully traceable to early experiences, no matter how painful or humiliating they may be. In the end, the reader continues to stare at something that is ultimately unfathomable. Just as real train wrecks tend to keep us cold because of their seeming inevitability and insensitivity to intervention, moral train wrecks seem to create a similar element of stopping time – a mixture of fascination and paralysis – where no one can prevent the damage, even while massacre and destruction continue.
Daphne Merkin is a cultural and literary critic. Her most recent book is a novel, “22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.”
THE WALLPAPER AND HIS WIFE: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich, by Nancy Dougherty | Illustrated | 656 pages | Alfred A. Knopf | $40