The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich by Nancy Dougherty

Author:Nancy Dougherty [Dougherty, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780394543413
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

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Sometimes after supper, Frau Heydrich would start to tell me her views about the war. But she never finished. “The war,” she would say, “the war changed everything.” And then, she would get depressed. And the evening would be over.

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INSIDE THE SPIDER’S WEB

“My husband did not want people who only said ‘Ja!’ ”

—Lina Heydrich

Frau Heydrich was correct: the war would change everything. However, the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), that great, complicated organizational “machine”—comprising mainly a network of people working together under Heydrich’s control—retained its essential outlines, even as its functions expanded and its momentum continued to accelerate.

Nazism, however, cannot be encompassed by any single metaphor or theory. Thus, Walter Schellenberg, who often described Heydrich as the lord of the machine, also characterized him as a black-garbed spider spinning threads of influence and intrigue from his lair in Berlin. This graphic depiction has some validity, for multiple lines of communication ended in the chair where Heydrich (sometimes) sat, and where he constructed his web of organizational connections from the inside out.

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