Hitler's Hangman Quotes

“The genuinely modern idea of creating ethnically homogeneous nation-states through the suppression, expulsion and often murder of ‘suspect’ minorities was by no means a Nazi invention.”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“the most significant contributing factor to Heydrich's radicalization was his immersion in a political milieu of young and often highly educated men who thrived on violent notions of cleansing Germany from its supposed internal enemies while simultaneously rejecting bourgeois norms of morality as weak, outdated and inappropriate for securing Germany's national rebirth.”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“Heydrich's life therefore offers a uniquely privileged, intimate and organic perspective on some of the darkest aspects of Nazi rule, many of which are often artificially divided or treated separately in the highly specialized literature on the Third Reich: the rise of the SS and the emergence of the Nazi police state; the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust; the interconnections between anti-Jewish and Germanization policies; and the different ways in which German occupation regimes operated across Nazi-controlled Europe. On a more personal level, it illustrates the historical circumstances under which young men from perfectly ‘normal’ middle-class backgrounds can become political extremists determined to use ultra-violence to implement their dystopian fantasies of radically transforming the world.”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“After the trial, and despite extensive evidence about her late husband's role in the Holocaust, the Federal Republic was forced to pay her the widow's pension of a German general killed in action, roughly equivalent to that of a retired minister president.”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“persecute”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“Vier Jahreszeiten,”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“High Command of the Wehrmacht”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“Reich Leader SS”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“13,000 Reichsmarks”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“an international crisis that soon culminated in the First World War.”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich

“Although Himmler, out of ‘inner conviction’, rejected ‘the Bolshevik methods of physical annihilation of a people as unGerman and impossible’, he advocated forced migration as a possible non-genocidal solution.”
― Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich