‘It was all a fairy tale’: Lina Heydrich’s description of the Holocaust

There have been many biographies of Reinhard Heydrich, the cold, cynical head of the SS in the Third Reich, but none quite like this one. Nancy Dougherty, an American film critic and biographer, died in 2013 before finishing a very large manuscript. The book was put into shape by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, an old friend of hers, who died in 2018. It now sees the light of day years after the research and writing was carried out, but it is a fine posthumous monument to both author and editor.

What makes this biography different is not the life of Reinhard but his wife Lina. Dougherty spent three long sessions in the 1970s and 1980s tape recording interviews with Heydrich’s widow on the Baltic island of Fehmarn, where Lina was born, and where she returned after the end of the war. Her voice can be heard throughout the biography, passing judgment on those who see her husband as the evil genius of the terror apparatus of the regime and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust.

Lina and Reinhard met in Hamburg in 1931 and were married after a three-day courtship, which cost Heydrich his career as a German naval officer, since he was supposed to be engaged to another, and jealous, woman. The disciplinary court found him guilty of conduct inappropriate in an officer. Faced with no work at the height of the economic depression, he applied for a post with the SS, then a small security squad in the growing National Socialist party, run by Heinrich Himmler. He got the job of organising an SS intelligence department (the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD for short) and for the next 11 years, until he died in June 1942 after a clumsy assassination by Czech resisters, he manipulated and schemed his way to become the boss of all Germany’s security forces.

The political story of Heydrich’s rise is well known.