Quotes about reinhard heydrich biography book
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I don’t recall any significant thing revealed by her that is relatable as an anecdote. Other Heydrich biographies, such as Robert Gerwarth’s superb standard work, Hitler’s Hangman (2011), have made extensive use of these sources.
Dougherty’s book offers a readable overview of Heydrich’s life, though it also includes long-winded passages with background information on Nazi Germany and its leadership clique that are not directly related to Heydrich himself.
He died a few days later. Its general reports about the Germans’ attitudes toward the regime were often frank, sometimes critical, and not very popular among the party’s higher echelons. A recent book, Kittys Salon: Legenden, Fakten, Fiktion (2020) by Urs Brunner and Julia Schrammel, has debunked many of the myths about it that sprang up in the postwar years.
So, to judge this book by Dederichs, I have to put this out that his passing away did indeed affect the book's final editing and polishing.
But it's also fair to say that not everything here is a matter of Dederichs dying before he could edit it for publication. Firing simultaneously helped them avoid any sense of individual responsibility.1 Demanding “unparalleled hardness” from his men, Heydrich constantly had to deal with officers who couldn’t cope anymore and, despite extra rations of alcohol, suffered breakdowns.
Heydrich was deeply involved in the Nazi persecution of Jews from the outset.
I'm sorry that Dederichs wasn't able to see this to the end, but maybe it wouldn't have been much better given how summed up, dull and tendentious his delivery was here. In the early postwar years, they were predominantly characterized as savage, brutal, and socially deprived rogues who “think in slogans and talk in bullets,” as George Orwell once put it.
I believe it was Schellenberg—I don’t know exactly.” She approved: “My husband told me about it in full detail and we were very amused by it.” Heydrich, she explained, was “a police perfectionist,” or as Dougherty put it, the Nazi’s “Grand Inquisitor, all-knowing, arrogant critic of the morals of others.”
The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich
Heydrich Reinhard quotes
What ever actions he took he carried them out as a National Socialist and an SS man, from the very bottom of his heart and through his blood, he carried out felt and understood Adolf Hitlers world vision. Certainly 7 is a big one, but also 4, 5, 6, and 8.He had great musical talent, playing the violin well enough to consider a professional concert career, and considerable athletic skill, excelling at skiing, sailing, tennis, hunting, and fencing. Refusing to give up, he focused on sports, was sent to a special navy sports training school, and soon was competing in major fencing and sailing tournaments.
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Things changed after his promotion to junior officer.
But leave their children out; they don't owe you their regret, and they weren't defending their father either.
To conclude, I imagine some will say this is a good overview of Heydrich's life. And in postwar memory, he tends to stand in the shadow of men like Himmler, Goebbels, and Göring.
Nancy Dougherty’s The Hangman and His Wife offers some intriguing insights into Heydrich’s world.
So it was completed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. And as Dougherty acknowledges, it was she who advised him after his dismissal from the navy to meet with Himmler to ask to join the SS. Later, when he was a powerful Nazi leader, his SS comrades, including Himmler, felt that his wife had far too much influence on him. He also developed some charm and became involved in numerous affairs.
Dougherty also claims that Felix Kersten, Himmler’s physical therapist, “used his influence with Himmler to save many Jews,” although it has long been established that this story, spread after the war by Kersten in his memoirs, is exaggerated. He had immense drive, which was liable to carry him too far; total ruthlessness in the attainment of his own ends, which were wrapped up in personal ambition; no active enjoyment of cruelty except sometimes, perhaps, almost as an afterthought; and a devilish sense of humor.
But Dederichs isn't right in demanding public mea culpa and self-flagellation of Heydrich's three children, because they were children during the war and one was born post-assassination; they're not morally obliged to repent for being the children of that monster.