By Wilfried Heink

Even though Heydrich was a high ranking official in the Third Reich (1933-1945) and “one of the main architects of the Holocaust” (Wikipedia), relatively little is known about him. He was chief of the security police, the security service (SD), the secret state police (Gestapo), and president of Interpol, the international police force. He is mentioned as the founder of Dachau – the first concentration camp – of the EG (Einsatzgruppen – rapid deployment force) and as the chair of the Wannsee Conference. One would think libraries would be filled with books about him, not so. Sure, information about Heydrich as a cold blooded mass murderer void of any conscience is available, but very few made an effort to look closer. This is confirmed in the September 2011 edition of Der Spiegel (German news magazine), were we read in an article by Georg Bönisch titled “The First In-depth Look at a Nazi ‘God of Death’ “: “Still, until now, almost 70 years after Heydrich’s death, there has never been a serious biography of this cold-blooded architect of mass murder that met high scholarly standards. German historian Robert Gerwarth has stepped in to meet this need.” (http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/reinhard-heydrich-biography-the-first-in-depth-look-at-a-nazi-god-of-death-a-787747.html). The title of the book simply “Reinhard Heydrich: Biographie”(available now in English: “Hitler’s Hangman”), and of course the cold-blooded architect of mass murder part has to be included.

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