A mirror to a dark past — and present? Book Review: “The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich,” by Nancy Dougherty

I’m sure I’ve never anticipated a book’s publication as much as this one because the author, Nancy Dougherty, who died in 2013, had a proud publicist in her longtime husband Jim. Before her untimely passing, he often told me about the biography she was writing of uber-Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.

Jim Dougherty spent the years since her death arranging for noted New York Times book reviewer and author Christopher Lehmann-Haupt to edit and finish the book. All three of them, combined with the book’s original editor, who saw it through to publication 30 years after signing it up, helped create a remarkable work. The portrait of Heydrich and his wife Lina, with whom Nancy did extensive interviews, is at once, riveting, chilling and ultimately tragic.

Reinhard Heydrich was the Aryan poster child. Tall, blond, with chiseled features, he was athletic and cultured. His family were musical professionals, and he was a master violinist as well as a competitive fencer.

He is not as well-known as his infamous colleagues Himmler, Goering and Goebbels.

According to Nancy, many believed he redoubled his cruelty and sadism toward those identified for extermination because he was hiding his partial Jewish lineage. His peers all thought his blood ran cold.

The entire arc of the National Socialist (Nazis) Party, as it climbed out of and fostered the end of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and 30s, until the end of it all in 1945, has fascinated me for over 50 years. I have a sizeable bookshelf devoted to attempts at understanding what happened and why.

My particular focus has been on the campaign of disinformation, lies and false narratives that so successfully convinced the vast majority of Germans to surrender to the Nazi regime. Ultimately, they allowed themselves to be destroyed so completely that for all intents and purposes European civilization stopped at the war’s end. Hence the term Zero Hour.

Nancy Dougherty uses Heydrich as the focal point for understanding Nazi leadership since he was involved in many historically significant decisions. He ultimately became deputy to Himmler, expanded the SS and the Gestapo, and organized the Wannsee Conference in 1942 which laid out the path to the “final solution” for the extermination of Europe’s 11 million Jews under Nazi control. Her detailed observations of Hitler’s henchmen and their often-vicious interactions with each other, is the result of brilliant research and a deep understanding of Germany.

For anyone interested in the way the National Socialists undermined the legal structures of the Weimar Republic and how they capitalized on the deepest divisions in German politics, the book really delivers.

Divided into six parts, the book presents a timeline as norms eroded — the often small but crucial steps taken to circumvent both legal and social underpinnings — resulting in the Nazi power grab that sealed the fate of the entire country.

Nancy’s descriptions of the self-doubt and political uncertainties that Heydrich and his cronies felt as they rose to power, present us with a far more nuanced picture than the one-dimensional portrait of smooth, coordinated, assured evil depicted in movies and television.

The interviews with Lina conducted in German by Nancy reinforce what sadly we already know from history, and yet again are living through today. Distortions, excuses and denial. To the end, Lina minimizes her husband’s role in everything, saying:

• It’s always another Nazi who planned the deportations, the slaughter at the ravines in the east, the Polish concentration camps, and torture chambers in every occupied city.

• It was necessary to enslave tens of millions of laborers in order to save Germany from destruction.

• There was never a proven order from him to murder tens of millions of Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and other “undesirables.”

Lina is clear on this: None of the facts Nancy presents clear the bar of truth as Lina defines it. Her reality is the only reality.

While there was no way Nancy Dougherty could have known her book would, like Barbara Tuchman’s 1978 National Book Award winner “A Distant Mirror” serve as just that — a mirror of our current politics — Nancy unsettlingly details the erosion of trust in authority, in laws, in civility and in the ability of democracy to relieve the chaos and despair created by both the Depression and the stifling Versailles Treaty. Boxed in by the polarization of the Communist and Socialist left and the Fascist and Nationalist right, the average German citizen was prepared to give up the rule of law and even their freedom to a strongman promising to restore the nation to greatness.

It did not happen overnight and there was resistance all along. But, in the end brute force, never-ending propaganda, and Fuhrer-worship prevailed. Fifty million people died in World War II and Germany was reduced to rubble.

Jim, it was worth the wait. Thank you for lovingly shepherding your wife’s book through to its successful publication. “The Hangman and His Wife” is an extraordinary legacy.

“The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich,” by Nancy Dougherty, was published by Knopf in May 2022.