Download or read book Hitler s Hangman written by Robert Gerwarth and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling biography of the head of Nazi Germany’s terror apparatus, a key player in the Third Reich whose full story has never before been told. Reinhard Heydrich is widely recognized as one of the great iconic villains of the twentieth century, an appalling figure even within the context of the Nazi leadership. Chief of the Nazi Criminal Police, the SS Security Service, and the Gestapo, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, and leading planner of the "Final Solution," Heydrich played a central role in Hitler's Germany. He shouldered a major share of responsibility for some of the worst Nazi atrocities, and up to his assassination in Prague in 1942, he was widely seen as one of the most dangerous men in Nazi Germany. Yet Heydrich has received remarkably modest attention in the extensive literature of the Third Reich. Robert Gerwarth weaves together little-known stories of Heydrich's private life with his deeds as head of the Nazi Reich Security Main Office. Fully exploring Heydrich's progression from a privileged middle-class youth to a rapacious mass murderer, 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 toward re-creating the entire ethnic makeup of Europe. “This admirable biography makes plausible what actually happened and makes human what we might prefer to dismiss as monstrous.”—Timothy Snyder, Wall Street Journal “[A] probing biography…. Gerwarth’s fine study shows in chilling detail how genocide emerged from the practicalities of implementing a demented belief system.”—Publishers Weekly “A thoroughly documented, scholarly, and eminently readable account of this mass murderer.”—The New Republic

Download or read book The Assassination of Heydrich written by Jan G. Wiener and published by Hodder Christian Books. This book was released on 2012-07 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jan Wiener's fascinating, well-documented book tells of the heroic exploits of various Czech men and women, most of whom paid for their resistance with their lives. Above all it gives a detailed, documented account of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the most gruesome of the Nazi murderers, by Czech resisters parachuted from London but aided in their task by the Czech underground." William L. Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich If you only read one book about what it felt like to be present during the worst time in modern human history, a time when your life could be snuffed out for having the mere thought of opposition against the Nazi regime, this should be the book because it is told by survivors and by one of the greatest survivors of them all, Jan Wiener.

Download or read book The Hangman and His Wife written by Nancy Dougherty and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astonishing journey into the heart of Nazi evil: a portrait of one of the darkest figures of Hitler’s Nazi elite—Reinhard Heydrich, the designer and executor of the Holocaust, chief of the Reich Main Security, including the Gestapo—interwoven with commentary by his wife, Lina, from the author's in-depth interviews. He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo, the "butcher of Prague," with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer. He was the head of the SS, and the Gestapo, second in command to Heinrich Himmler. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and, as the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe were toasted with cognac. In The Hangman and His Wife, Nancy Dougherty, and, following her death, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, masterfully explore who Heydrich was and how he came to be, and how he came to do what he did. We see Heydrich from his rarefied musical family origins and his ugly-duckling childhood and adolescence, to his sudden flameout as a promising Naval officer (he was forced to resign his Naval commission after dishonoring the office corps by having sex with the unmarried daughter of a shipyard director and refusing to marry her). Dougherty writes of his seemingly hopeless job prospects as an untrained civilian during Germany’s hyperinflation and unemployment, and his joining the Nazi party through the attraction to Nazism of his fiancée, Lina von Osten, and her father, along with the rumor shadowing him of a strain of Jewishness inherited from his father’s side. And we follow Heydrich’s meteoric rise through the Nazi high command—from SS major, to colonel to brigadier general, before he was thirty, deputy to Heinrich Himmler, expanding the SS, the Gestapo, and developing the Reich's plans for "the Jewish solution." And throughout, we hear the voice of Lina Heydrich, who was by his side until his death at the age of thirty-eight, living inside the Nazi inner circles as she waltzed with Rudolf Hess, feuded with Hermann Göring, and drank vintage wine with Albert Speer.

Download or read book Heinrich Himmler written by Peter Longerich and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 1053 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of Henrich Himmler, interweaving both his personal life and his political career as a Nazi dictator.

Download or read book Heydrich written by Mario R. Dederichs and published by Greenhill Books. This book was released on 2022-06-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive biography of the Nazi mastermind behind the Holocaust and his military career, featuring interviews with his surviving family. Adolph Hitler praised Reinhard Heydrich as ‘the man with the iron heart’. He admired Heydrich so much that, despite rumors about Jewish ancestry, he considered him a potential successor. Reinhard Heydrich was undeniably one of the Führer’s most enthusiastic, brutal, and ambitious henchmen and one of the key architects of the Third Reich’s horrific genocide. He quickly rose through the ranks of the Nazi party and became one of the key architects of the Third Reich’s horrific genocide. Indeed, after his 1942 assassination, the murder of more than 2 million people at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblina was code-named ‘Action Reinhard’. In this critically acclaimed biography, which includes interviews with some of his surviving family, Mario Dederichs creates a complete and compelling portrait of Heydrich’s life. Dederichs details his short-lived naval career, to his work under the SS chief Himmler, his appointment as Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, and his assassination by Czech agents and the terrible reprisals exacted on the town of Lidice. Praise for Heydrich: The Face of Evil “A chilling study of the man who masterminded the Holocaust . . . Heydrich was inhumanely cruel, ruthless, devious, shameless, a sixteen hour a day workaholic who was feared and loathed even by his closest colleagues.” —The Daily Telegraph “An impressive mix of psychological analysis, biography and historical reporting . . . Dederichs descends into Heydrich’s personal abyss and describes it in a captivating and intelligible manner while not rejecting the scientific approach.” —Die Rheinische

Download or read book Odilo Globocnik Hitler s Man in the East written by Joseph Poprzeczny and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-01-24 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Odilo Globocnik, a collaborator of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, was responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million people in three Nazi camps in occupied Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. Along with Rudolf Hoss, Globocnik may be named as one of the first industrial-style killers in history. Betraying his homeland by conspiring with Hitler to destroy Austria's independence, he then launched the Generalplan-Ost, which was to expel over 100 million Slavs into Western Siberia, and played a pivotal role in Aktion Reinhardt, directing the entire program from early 1942 until September 1943, and writing letters to Himmler detailing goods looted from his victims. Globocnik's Lublin Distrikt gulag was not merely a vehicle for a well-organized pogrom; it also involved creating a highly organized network of ghettos and forced labor camps. By the winter of 1943 nearly all of the Jews of the Lublin Distrikt had been exterminated, leaving only skilled laborers used in Globocnik's industrial conglomerates. His ethnic cleansing teams, assisted by Ukrainian policing units, also cleared the Polish peasant farmers from the Zamosc Lands. Very little has been published on Globocnik, most especially the four years he spent in Lublin. This authoritative biography details every aspect of his life from his ancestry to his suicide after being captured. Information has been researched from more than thirty international archives, Globocnik's SS file, extensive interviews with his lover Irmgard Rickheim and others, a wealth of letters both personal and formal, internal memos and official reports of the SS, diaries, and the reminiscences of survivors. Includes rare photographs, many from the collection of Irmgard Rickheim.

Download or read book Heydrich Hitler s Most Evil Henchman written by Charles Wighton and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE MAN WITH THE IRON HEART Hitler called him “The man with the iron heart”—yet Reinhard Heydrich was utterly different from those other iron men who served the Führer. Gifted with intellect, charm and great courage, Heydrich used his outstanding talents to create the Nazi Security Service, the notorious SD (Sicherheitsdienst), thereby becoming one of the most powerful figures—perhaps the most evil influence of all—in Nazi Germany. Charles Wighton, through unprecedented co-operation on both sides of the Iron Curtain, has had access to top secret Nazi Party files, to official sources in East Germany, to highly secret records in Czechoslovakia—and to the frank recollections of Heydrich’s widow. The result is a fascinatingly detailed revelation of the rise of this diabolical genius. Through Heydrich’s racial campaigns, which gathered their own momentum after his death, six million Jews were murdered by 1945. And yet this son of a cultured, upper-middle-class Roman Catholic family, who became the real power behind Himmler, was himself blackmailed by the Führer for possessing non-Aryan blood. In addition to clarifying this aspect of Heydrich’s astonishing career, the author throws new light, too, on “Plan Ost”, the blueprint for the extermination of thirty million Slavs, and on the mystery surrounding Heydrich’s assassination in 1942. Here, then, is the full story of the man with the iron heart—Heydrich, Hitler’s most evil henchman.

Download or read book Stormtroopers written by Daniel Siemens and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full history of the Nazi Stormtroopers whose muscle brought Hitler to power, with revelations concerning their longevity and their contributions to the Holocaust Germany’s Stormtroopers engaged in a vicious siege of violence that propelled the National Socialists to power in the 1930s. Known also as the SA or Brownshirts, these “ordinary” men waged a loosely structured campaign of intimidation and savagery across the nation from the 1920s to the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Chief of Staff Ernst Röhm and many other SA leaders were assassinated on Hitler’s orders. In this deeply researched history, Daniel Siemens explores not only the roots of the SA and its swift decapitation but also its previously unrecognized transformation into a million-member Nazi organization, its activities in German-occupied territories during World War II, and its particular contributions to the Holocaust. The author provides portraits of individual members and their victims and examines their milieu, culture, and ideology. His book tells the long-overdue story of the SA and its devastating impact on German citizens and the fate of their country.

Download or read book Heinrich Himmler written by Roger Manvell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-09-17 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Authors Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel, notable biographers of the World War II German leaders Joseph Goebbels and Herman Goring, delve into the life of one of the most sinister, clever, and successful of all the Nazi leaders: Heinrich Himmler. As the head of the feared SS, Himler supervised the extermination of millions. Here is the story of how a seemingly ordinary boy grew into an obsessive and superstitious man who ventured into herbalism, astrology, and homeopathic medicine before finally turning to the "science" of racial purity and the belief in the superiority of the Aryan people.

Download or read book In the House of the Hangman written by Jeffrey K. Olick and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-09 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central question for both the victors and the vanquished of World War II was just how widely the stain of guilt would spread over Germany. Political leaders and intellectuals on both sides of the conflict debated whether support for National Socialism tainted Germany's entire population and thus discredited the nation's history and culture. The tremendous challenge that Allied officials and German thinkers faced as the war closed, then, was how to limn a postwar German identity that accounted for National Socialism without irrevocably damning the idea and character of Germany as a whole. In the House of the Hangman chronicles this delicate process, exploring key debates about the Nazi past and German future during the later years of World War II and its aftermath. What did British and American leaders think had given rise to National Socialism, and how did these beliefs shape their intentions for occupation? What rhetorical and symbolic tools did Germans develop for handling the insidious legacy of Nazism? Considering these and other questions, Jeffrey K. Olick explores the processes of accommodation and rejection that Allied plans for a new German state inspired among the German intelligentsia. He also examines heated struggles over the value of Germany's institutional and political heritage. Along the way, he demonstrates how the moral and political vocabulary for coming to terms with National Socialism in Germany has been of enduring significance—as a crucible not only of German identity but also of contemporary thinking about memory and social justice more generally. Given the current war in Iraq, the issues contested during Germany's abjection and reinvention—how to treat a defeated enemy, how to place episodes within wider historical trajectories, how to distinguish varieties of victimhood—are as urgent today as they were sixty years ago, and In the House of the Hangman offers readers an invaluable historical perspective on these critical questions.

Download or read book The Hangman and His Wife written by Nancy Dougherty and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An astonishing journey into the heart of Nazi evil: a portrait of one of the darkest figures of Hitler’s Nazi elite—Reinhard Heydrich, the designer and executor of the Holocaust, chief of the Reich Main Security, including the Gestapo—interwoven with commentary by his wife, Lina, from the author's in-depth interviews. He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo, the "butcher of Prague," with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer. He was the head of the SS, and the Gestapo, second in command to Heinrich Himmler. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and, as the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe were toasted with cognac. In The Hangman and His Wife, Nancy Dougherty, and, following her death, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, masterfully explore who Heydrich was and how he came to be, and how he came to do what he did. We see Heydrich from his rarefied musical family origins and his ugly-duckling childhood and adolescence, to his sudden flameout as a promising Naval officer (he was forced to resign his Naval commission after dishonoring the office corps by having sex with the unmarried daughter of a shipyard director and refusing to marry her). Dougherty writes of his seemingly hopeless job prospects as an untrained civilian during Germany’s hyperinflation and unemployment, and his joining the Nazi party through the attraction to Nazism of his fiancée, Lina von Osten, and her father, along with the rumor shadowing him of a strain of Jewishness inherited from his father’s side. And we follow Heydrich’s meteoric rise through the Nazi high command—from SS major, to colonel to brigadier general, before he was thirty, deputy to Heinrich Himmler, expanding the SS, the Gestapo, and developing the Reich's plans for "the Jewish solution." And throughout, we hear the voice of Lina Heydrich, who was by his side until his death at the age of thirty-eight, living inside the Nazi inner circles as she waltzed with Rudolf Hess, feuded with Hermann Göring, and drank vintage wine with Albert Speer.

Download or read book The Reich Marshal written by Leonard Mosley and published by Pan. This book was released on 1974 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich written by Callum Macdonald and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary account of one of the most daring World War II missions, as told in the movie Anthropoid If anyone warranted assassination during World War II, the man to know was Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) -- chief of the security police, rabid anti-Semite, architect of the Final Solution, ruthless overlord of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and Hitler's most likely successor. In 1941, at the height of the Nazis' seeming invincibility, the Czech government-in-exile launched a desperate operation to kill Heydrich. From the assassins' training in England to their Thermopylae-like last stand in the flooded crypt of a Prague church, and the Nazis' savage reprisals (including the obliteration of two villages), The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich brilliantly recounts one of World War II's most daring and tragic missions.

Download or read book Speer written by Martin Kitchen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-28 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Sets the record straight on Albert Speer’s assertions of ignorance of the Final Solution and claims to being the ‘good Nazi.’”—Kirkus Reviews In his bestselling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi Germany, repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of Hitler’s Third Reich. In this revealing new biography, author Martin Kitchen disputes Speer’s lifelong assertions of ignorance and innocence, portraying a far darker figure who was deeply implicated in the appalling crimes committed by the regime he served so well. Kitchen reconstructs Speer’s life with what we now know, including information from valuable new sources that have come to light only in recent years. The result is the first truly serious accounting of the man, his beliefs, and his actions during one of the darkest epochs in modern history, not only countering Speer’s claims of non-culpability but also disputing the commonly held misconception that it was his unique genius alone that kept the German military armed and fighting long after its defeat was inevitable. “A devastating portrait of an empty, narcissistic and compulsively ambitious personality.”—The Wall Street Journal “Kitchen’s exhaustively researched, detailed book nails, one by one, the lies of the man who provided a thick coat of whitewash to millions of old Nazis. Its fascinating account of how the moral degradation of the chaotic Nazi regime corrupted an entire nation is a timely warning for today.”—Daily Mail (“Book of the Month”) “[An] excellent new biography . . . Kitchen has taken a wrecking ball to Speer’s mendacious and meticulously created self-image. And about time, too.”—History Today

Download or read book Reinhard Heydrich written by Fred Ramen and published by Rosen Publishing Group. This book was released on 2001 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Profiles the life of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and the man in charge of the Nazi death camps.

Download or read book The Nazis Next Door written by Eric Lichtblau and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Newsweek Best Book of the Year: “Captivating . . . rooted in first-rate research” (The New York Times Book Review). In this New York Times bestseller, once-secret government records and interviews tell the full story of the thousands of Nazis—from concentration camp guards to high-level officers in the Third Reich—who came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own as self-styled war “refugees.” But some had help from the US government. The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories. Only years after their arrival did private sleuths and government prosecutors begin trying to identify the hidden Nazis. Now, relying on a trove of newly disclosed documents and scores of interviews, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau reveals this little-known and “disturbing” chapter of postwar history (Salon).

Download or read book The Bismarck Myth written by Robert Gerwarth and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-14 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few statesmen in history have inspired the imagination of generations of Germans more than the founder of the Kaiserreich, Otto von Bismarck. The archetype of charismatic leadership, the Iron Chancellor maintained his pre-eminent position in the pantheon of Germany's political iconography for much of the twentieth century.Based on a large selection of primary sources, this book provides an insightful analysis of the Bismarck myth's profound impact on Germany's political culture. In particular, it investigates the ways in which that myth was used to undermine parliamentary democracy in Germany after the Great War, paving the way for its replacement by authoritarian rule under an allegedly 'Bismarckian' charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler.As one of the most powerful weapons of nationalist agitation against the Weimar Republic, the Bismarck myth was never contested. The nationalists' ideologically charged interpretation of Bismarck as the father of the German nation-state and model for future political decision-making clashed with rivalling - and thoroughly critical - democratic and communist perceptions of the Iron Chancellor. The quarrel over Bismarck's legacy demonstrates how the clash of ideologies, particularly between 1918and 1933, resulted in a highly political fight for the 'correct' and universal interpretation of the German past.Essential reading for anyone interested in modern German history, this book sheds new light on the Weimar Republic's struggle for survival and the reasons for its failure.