Hitlers Hangman The Life Of Heydrich 1st Edition Robert Gerwarth by Robert Gerwarth 9780300177466, 0300177461 instant download after payment.

How does one write the biography of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the key players in the most murderous genocide of history, a historial figure the Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann famously referred to as Hitler’s ‘hangman’?
This is the question I have been asking myself from the moment I first decided to embark on this book project. It was always clear to me that the writing of a Nazi biography would pose a specific set of challenges, ranging from the need to master the vast and ever-growing body of literature on Hitler’s dictatorship to the peculiar problem of having to penetrate so the mind of a person whose mentality and ideological universe seem repellent and strangely distant, even though the Nazi dictatorship ended less than seventy years ago. But the major challenge lay elsewhere: namely, in the fact that any kind of life-writing requires a certain degree of empathy with the book’s subject, even if that subject is Reinhard Heydrich.
Biographers often use the contrasting images of autopsy and portrait to describe their work: while the autopsy offers a detached, forensic examination of a life, the portrait relies on the biographer’s empathy with his subject. I have chosen to combine both of these approaches in a third way best described as ‘cold empathy’: an attempt to reconstruct Heydrich’s life with critical distance, but without reading history backwards or succumbing to the danger of confusing the role of the historian with that of a state prosecutor at a war criminal’s trial. Since historians ought to be primarily in the business of explanation and contextualization, not condemnation, I have tried to avoid the sensationalism and judgemental tone that tend to characterize earlier accounts of Heydrich’s life. Heydrich’s actions, language and behaviour speak for themselves, and wherever possible I have tried to give space to his own characteristic voice and choice of expressions.