Richard Overy

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

The wife of ‘the Butcher of Prague’ always denied knowledge of the camps – and claimed mass extermination was anyway impossible

Lina Heydrich with the death mask of her husband Reinhard. [Getty Images]
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  • The Man with the Iron Heart: The Definitive Life of Reinhard Heydrich, Architect of the Holocaust

    Nancy Dougherty, edited by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

    Welbeck, pp. 656, £30

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.

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