Hitler's Hangman

On 27 May 1942, as his car slowed to make a hair-pin turn, Czech assassins attacked Reinhard Heydrich, acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). An avid sportsman, Heydrich chose to take on his assassins and, in the process, incurred wounds that brought on a fatal infection (that penicillin, if it had been available, would have cured). Ironically, Heydrich had been obsessed with his own security. But, as Nazi overlord of the Czech lands, he had refused a security escort because he believed that it would damage German prestige; Czechs might sense that he feared them. Heydrich’s death symbolised his life: a cold hubris, coupled with ideological fervour, animated his deeds. Robert Gerwarth has written a biography of Heydrich for our times. In earlier decades, scholars portrayed Nazi perpetrators as monsters or, conversely, bureaucratic cogs in a totalitarian machine. Now, however, historians attribute agency and ideological passion to Nazi perpetrators. Shaped by war, defeat, and revolution, Heydrich belonged to the war-youth generation that rejected bourgeois morality in favour of tough solutions to Germany’s problems. He came to privilege, and tried to live by, SS virtues such as ‘heroic realism’, ‘sobriety’, ‘rule-despising activism’, and ‘self-imposed asceticism’ (pp. 72–4). For Heydrich and his ilk, violence was the means to create a racially cleansed, regenerated Germany

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