Posted 04 October 2011
The Life of Heydrich, Hitler’s hangman, from middle-class youth to rapacious murderer
Although merely thirty-eight years old at the time of his assassination in Prague in 1942, Reinhard Heydrich (Hitler’s hangman) had held three key positions in Hitler’s rapidly expanding empire.
As Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service and the Gestapo, he was in charge of the infamous SS mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, during the campaigns against Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union.
As acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, he was undisputed ruler of the former Czech lands. The eight months of his rule in Prague and the aftermath of his assassination are still remembered as the darkest times in modern Czech history.
And in 1941, he was instructed by the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, Hermann Göring to find and implement a ‘total solution of the Jewish question’ in Europe, a solution which by the summer of 1942, culminated in the indiscriminate and systematic murder of the Jews of Europe.
“Despite his major share of responsibility for some of the worst atrocities in the name of Nazi Germany, Heydrich remains a remarkably neglected and oddly nebulous figure in the extensive literature on the Third Reich,” says UCD Professor Robert Gerwarth in the introduction to his new book Hitler’s Hangman – The Life of Heydrich (Yale University Press).
- Listen to Professor Robert Gerwarth discuss Reinhard Heydrich on ABC National Radio, Late Night Live, Australia
In Hitler’s Hangman – The Life of Heydrich, Professor Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich’s private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office.
By fully exploring Heydrich’s progression from privileged middle-class youth to rapacious murderer, Professor Gerwarth sheds new light on the complexity of Heydrich’s adult character, his motivations, the incremental steps that led to unimaginable atrocities, and the consequences of his murderous efforts towards recreating the entire ethnic make-up of Europe.
“Drawing on profound research, Robert Gerwarth presents a penetrating, authoritative analysis of the ruthless personality and murderous career of the man who directed the Third Reich’s police state and became a driving-force in the programme to exterminate Europe’s Jews.” - Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler, who launched Hitler’s Hangman – The Life of Heydrich in Dublin.
Professor Robert Gerwarth (pictured right), author of Hitler’s Hangman - The Life of Heydrich, and Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler, discuss the book before the official launch in Newman House, Dublin.
Robert Gerwarth is Professor of Modern History at the UCD School of History and Archives, University College Dublin, and Director of the Centre for War Studies, University College Dublin.
He was educated in Berlin and Oxford and has held fellowships at Princeton, Harvard, the NIOD (Amsterdam) and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia.
His publications include the award winning book The Bismarck Myth (2005) and several articles and anthologies focused on the history of political violence in twentieth-century Europe.
- Copies of Hitler’s Hangman - The Life of Heydrich are available from the UCD Campus Book Shop
(Produced by UCD University Relations)
