{"product_id":"the-hangman-and-his-wife-the-life-and-death-of-reinhard-heydrich-9780394543413","title":"The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn astonishing journey into the heart of Nazi evil: a portrait of one of the darkest figures of Hitlers Nazi eliteReinhard Heydrich  the designer and executor of the Holocaust  chief of the Reich Main Security  including the Gestapointerwoven with commentary by his wife  Lina  from the authors 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 Hitlers 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 Germanys hyperinflation and unemployment  and his joining the Nazi party through the attraction to Nazism of his fiance  Lina von Osten  and her father  along with the rumor shadowing him of a strain of Jewishness inherited from his fathers side. And we follow Heydrichs meteoric rise through the Nazi high commandfrom SS major  to colonel to brigadier general  before he was thirty  deputy to Heinrich Himmler  expanding the SS  the Gestapo  and developing the Reichs 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 Gring  and drank vintage wine with Albert Speer.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45651896533045,"sku":"ByrdShop_0394543416","price":30.07,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780394543413.jpg?v=1781844310","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-hangman-and-his-wife-the-life-and-death-of-reinhard-heydrich-9780394543413","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}