The Hangman and His Wife Audiobook Libro.fm

Description

An astonishing journey into the heart of Nazi evil a portrait of one of the darkest figures of Hitlers Nazi eliteReinhard Heydrichthe designer and executor of the Holocaust chief of the Reich Main Security including the Gestapointerwoven with commentary by his wife Lina from the authors indepth interviews

He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo the butcher of Prague with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer He was the head of the SS and the Gestapo second in command to Heinrich Himmler His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and as the lead planner of Hitlers Final Solution hechaired the Wannsee Conference at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazioccupied Europe were toasted with cognac

In The Hangman and His Wife Nancy Dougherty and following her death Christopher LehmannHaupt masterfully explore who Heydrich was and how he came to be and how he came to do what he did We see Heydrich from his rarefied musical family origins and his uglyducklingchildhood and adolescence to his sudden flameout as a promising Naval officer he was forced to resign his Naval commission after dishonoring the office corps by having sex with the unmarried daughter of a shipyard director and refusing to marry her

Dougherty writes of his seemingly hopeless job prospects as an untrained civilian during Germanys hyperinflation and unemployment and his joining the Nazi party through the attraction to Nazism of his fiance Lina von Osten and her father along with the rumor shadowing him of a strain of Jewishness inherited from his fathers side And we follow Heydrichs meteoric rise through the Nazi high commandfrom SS major to colonel to brigadier general before he was thirty deputy to Heinrich Himmler expanding the SS the Gestapo and developing the Reichs plans for the Jewish solution

And throughout we hear the voice of Lina Heydrich who was by his side until his death at the age of thirtyeight living inside the Nazi inner circles as she waltzed with Rudolf Hess feuded with Hermann Gring and drank vintage wine with Albert Speer