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Reinhard Heydrich, high-ranking Nazi official, personality type?

10K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  Ermenegildo 
#1 ·
Reinhard Heydrich appears to be INFP, National Capitalist, olfactory temperament, visual learner. Can someone verify?

Personality traits description:
http://personalitycafe.com/myers-br...-enhance-character-description-profiling.html

Brief biography:
Reinhard Heydrich was born into a musical family, where his father opened a musical school. The economic depression in 1920s devastated his family's financial situation, and caused great social unrest. Heydrich had patriotic ideals from his father, and later joined the German navy due to the financial security it offered. He was later dismissed due to being a womanizer, and became engaged to someone who was a supporter of the Nazi party. Through this, he was introduced to Himmler, and worked for him till near the end of the war, when he was assassinated.

Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich
 
#2 ·




Robert Gerwarth, Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (2011)

Read this book and search here for more if necessary:

USHMM Collection Search

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An interesting course of life anyway:

The History Place:

Born in the German city of Halle, near Leipzig on March 7, 1904, Reinhard Eugen Tristan Heydrich was raised in a cultured, musical environment. His father founded the Halle Conservatory of Music and was a Wagnerian opera singer, while his mother was an accomplished pianist. Young Heydrich trained seriously as a violinist, developing expert skill and a lifelong passion for the violin.

As a boy, he lived in an elegant home with his family enjoying elevated social status. But young Heydrich also suffered as the target of schoolyard bullies, teased about his very high pitched voice and his devout Catholicism in the mostly Protestant town. He was also beaten up by bigger boys and tormented with anti-Jewish slurs amid rumors of Jewish ancestry in his family.

At home Heydrich's mother believed in the value of harsh discipline and frequent lashings. As a result, Heydrich was a withdrawn, sullen boy, unhappy, but also intensely self-driven to excel at everything. As he grew he excelled at academics and also displayed natural athletic talent, later becoming an award winning fencer.

Too young to serve in World War One, after the war at age 16 Heydrich teamed up with the local Freikorps, a right-wing, anti-Semitic organization of ex-soldiers involved in violently opposing Communists on the streets. Young Heydrich was also influenced by the racial fanaticism of the German Völk movement and its belief in the supremacy of the blond haired, blue eyed Germanic people which he resembled. He took delight in associating with these violently anti-Semitic groups to disprove the persistent, but false rumors regarding his possible Jewish ancestry.

The German defeat in World War One brought social chaos, inflation and economic ruin to most German families including Heydrich's. In March of 1922, at age 18, Heydrich sought the free education, adventure and prestige of a Naval career and became a cadet in the small, elite German Navy.

Once again, however, he was teased. Heydrich was by now over six feet tall, a gangly, awkward young man who still had the high, almost falsetto voice. Naval cadets took delight in calling him "Billy Goat" because of his bleating laugh and taunted with "Moses Handel" because of rumored Jewish ancestry and his unusual passion for classical music.

But the intense, driven Heydrich persevered and rose by 1926 to the rank of second lieutenant, serving as a signals officer attached to Intelligence under Wilhelm Canaris. The teasing and taunting soon gave way to resentment over the extraordinary arrogance of this young man who was already dreaming of becoming an admiral.

Heydrich also developed great interest in women and pursued sex with the same self-driven desire for achievement he applied to everything else. He had many sexual relationships and in 1930 was accused of having sex with the unmarried daughter of a shipyard director. According to popular Nazi legend, as a result of his refusal to marry her, Heydrich was forced by Admiral Erich Raeder to resign his Naval commission in 1931 for "conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman."

With his Naval career wrecked, his fiancé, Lina von Osten, an enthusiastic Nazi Party member, suggested he join the Nazi Party and look into the SS organization which at that time served mainly as Hitler's personal bodyguard and had about 10,000 members.

In 1931, at age 27, Heydrich joined the Nazi Party and became a member of the SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite organization of black-coated young men chosen on the basis of their racial characteristics.

An interview was soon arranged with the new SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, who was seeking someone to build an SS intelligence service. During the interview Himmler posed a challenge to Heydrich by asking him to take 20 minutes and write down his plans for a future SS intelligence gathering service. Himmler was impressed by Heydrich's Aryan looks, his self-confidence, and diligent response to the challenge and gave him the job.

Heydrich proceeded to create the intelligence gathering organization known as the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), or SS Security Service.

It began in a small office with a single typewriter. But Heydrich's tireless determination soon grew the organization into a vast network of informers that developed dossiers on anyone who might oppose Hitler and conducted internal espionage and investigations to gather information down to the smallest details on Nazi Party members and storm trooper (SA) leaders.

Heydrich also had a taste for gossip and maintained folders full of rumors and details of the privates lives and sexual activities of top Nazis, later resorting to planting hidden microphones and cameras.

Heydrich's ruthless diligence and the rapid success of the SD earned him a quick rise through the SS ranks - appointed SS Major by December, 1931, then SS Colonel with sole control of the SD by July of 1932. In March of 1933, he was promoted to SS Brigadier General, though not yet 30 years old.

The only stumbling block occurred as the old rumors surfaced about possible Jewish ancestry on his father's side of his family. Heydrich's grandmother had married for a second time (after the birth of Heydrich's father) to a man with a Jewish sounding name.

Both Hitler and Himmler quickly became aware of the rumors which were spread by Heydrich's enemies within the Nazi Party. Himmler at one point considered expelling Heydrich from the SS. But Hitler, after a long private meeting with Heydrich, described him as "a highly gifted but also very dangerous man, whose gifts the movement had to retain...extremely useful; for he would eternally be grateful to us that we had kept him and not expelled him and would obey blindly."

Reinhard Heydrich - Biography

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Uğur Ümit Üngör

Robert Gerwarth has written a compelling biography of Reinhard Heydrich by weaving together the personal, professional, and institutional dimensions into an insightful and definitive historical examination of Heydrich’s life and work. Gerwarth opens the book by identifying two challenges to writing a Nazi biography: mastering the literature on Nazism, and fathoming the mentality and ideology of a committed Nazi. He succeeds admirably in overcoming both, by holding on to his principle of ‘cold empathy’, detachment. He does not prosecute or demonize Heydrich, nor does he moralize, trivialize, or sacralize his violence. The book is teeming with dense narrative and empirical recreation (supported by 90 pages of sources), and interspersed with incisive analytical segments. Throughout the chapters, Gerwarth skillfully alternates between Heydrich’s personal story and German political and social history. Gerwarth calmly debunks the myth that Heydrich had Jewish ancestors, revises assumptions about his anti-Semitist background, and nuances overstatements about his careerist motives. But in doing so, he also takes a clear position in the historiography of Nazi mass violence, for example by identifying as the major turning point of Heydrich’s life his dismissal from military service due to a broken engagement promise, and by tracing his radicalism to his lack of early Nazi credentials. …

A major question in the book is violence. After all, the life of Heydrich is a story of unbridled mass violence. How did a sporty, boyish-looking musician from an upper middle class, cultured family turn to the Nazi party and become one of the most violent architects of genocide? Gerwarth richly illustrates the agency of Heydrich, but he also pays ample attention to the structural conditions of bureaucratic competition in which Heydrich operated. His relations with the police, the law, and the army fluctuated between conflict, competition, and cooperation. …

Entering the impervious mind of an upper-echelon perpetrator like Heydrich is just as complex as unraveling a dictatorship. Perhaps the most telling part of the book is chapter 7, particularly the section in which Gerwarth explores Heydrich’s state of mind, in the month following the invasion of the Soviet Union, about the monumental genocide he was about to commit. The record suggests that “he was conscious that his actions constituted a radical breach of the norms of Western civilization and the values cultivated in his paternal home” (p. 198). But Heydrich’s mental faculties were strong enough for the equally monumental neutralization needed to justify the genocide, “by convincing himself that in order to be kind to future generations of Germans […] he and his men had to be hard in the present conflict” (p. 199).

Apparently, the sources do not allow us to probe deeper than this into Heydrich’s mind. But two aspects of Heydrich’s life and career appear to be crucial to any explanation of the violence. First of all, his ascetic self-denial and obsession with ideological, racial, and physical purity – a central concept among genocide perpetrators that also appears among Khmer Rouge cadres. Genocide arises as an effort of regeneration of the group at the expense of another group by purification of society. A second concept is thoroughness: Heydrich dismissed the crude methods of random pogroms committed by disorderly mobs, in favor of secret, sweeping solutions. Both during the Anschluss and Kristallnacht, he even issued orders counteracting violence against Jews. In this regard he was a caricature of Gründlichkeit.

Much like Himmler, Goebbels, and (as Thomas Weber has argued) Hitler himself, Heydrich had no real, extensive or intensive experience with violence, whether in war or street fighting. This corroborates recent research that the worst genocidal campaigns are often thought out, planned, and ordered by men for whom violence exists mostly at the level of fantasy.

https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-16799

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George C. Browder

Except for Shlomo Aronson's study of Reinhard Heydrich's formative years, and Charles Sydnor's more recent essays, biographical analysis of Heydrich has been the preserve of journalists.1 Scholarly depictions shifted over the years, reflecting our evolving perceptions of SS men and Holocaust perpetrators, but never fully fleshed out the man.

Benefiting from several generations of distance, the availability of probably every surviving piece of relevant evidence, the scholarly syntheses that emerged from debates over the origins of the Holocaust, and the more recent, sophisticated insights from Täterforschung, Robert Gerwarth has given us what probably will be the definitive study of the man. Combining an appropriate degree of empathy with objectivity—what he calls "cold empathy"—the author goes as far as one can toward understanding a man who became so deeply immersed in the greatest of evils. The Heydrich who emerges is truly human—neither psychotic nor demonic. His is the sad story of how far someone can drive himself in pursuit of perverse ideals built on distorted ideological perceptions of necessity. …

Gewarth's insights into the Heydrich family environment begin with a thorough analysis of Heydrich's parental background. It is in the areas of Heydrich's formative years and of his transition to a fanatically dedicated NS ideologue that the author makes his most significant contribution to our understanding of both Heydrich and perpetrators in general. The initial impetus for Heydrich's transformation into a Nazi was his wife and her family. The need to impress them drew the humiliated, cashiered ex-naval officer into becoming Heinrich Himmler's lieutenant in 1931. Before that, he had no apparent interest in either antisemitism or right-wing nationalism, much less Nazi ideology.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/508212

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Istvan Deak

He might well have been the cruelest among the many cruel National Socialist leaders. He hated, with a nearly unparalleled passion, all Jews; Gypsies; homosexuals; the Catholic church, and particularly the Jesuits; the Poles; the Freemasons; handicapped or retarded fellow-Germans; all Communists; the Soviet Union; socialists; liberals; democrats; members of the rival Abwehr, the German military counter-intelligence service; the inefficient and corrupt Old Nazi Party bosses; conservative generals; and anyone who had ideas different from his own on how to build an ever greater National Socialist Germany. He was an ideological fanatic, but also an opportunist who always sensed which way the wind was blowing. …

There was much that could be described as pleasant about Heydrich. Since he died at the age of thirty-eight, the memory of a handsome, dashing, elegant young man—with the true Nordic features so lacking in Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders—remains. Yet Heydrich’s hips were far too wide for an Aryan superman, and there was something effete, something feminine, about him. Hence his relentless pursuit of sports; virility and strength had not come naturally to him. ...

Reinhard Heydrich successfully projected the image of an ideal family father and husband, although he behaved callously toward his parents when they fell on hard days, and he openly cheated on his devoted National Socialist wife. Yet Heydrich was also an accomplished violinist with a sincere love and talent for classical music. Owing to his charm, he was welcome in high society. He was a great athlete, a superb fencer, horseman, and sailing champion. And he was no coward: during the war Heydrich used his leave times to serve voluntarily as a fighter pilot. Mostly, however, he was engaged in his self-appointed task of building a world empire for his Führer, one that would conform to his own plans. This consisted of putting a violent end to the ethnic mix in Europe, all in the interest of the Germanic peoples and his own power. For that goal, he systematically and methodically engaged in the murder of millions and was preparing—when he was assassinated in 1942—to kill tens of millions more. Even in his violent end, Heydrich fulfilled the role of an angel of death: many thousands were executed following his murder by two Czech parachutists.

Even though Heydrich has entered history as one of the most infamous Nazi leaders, and even though he appears in some notable works of fiction, the biographies of Heydrich have been mostly journalistic in character, some emphasizing his alleged (and partial) Jewish origins. Now Robert Gerwarth has produced a thoroughly documented, scholarly, and eminently readable account of this mass murderer. Among many other things, Gerwarth documents the fact that there was no Jewish ancestry, and that when the gossipy charges arose, Heydrich was not yet a Nazi or an anti-Semite. The main difference between Gerwarth’s approach and that of some other historians is that whereas the latter emphasizes the bureaucratic character of Heydrich’s lethal activities, Gerwarth insists on his ideological fanaticism as well as on that of other SS leaders.

There was much that could be described as pleasant about Heydrich. Since he died at the age of thirty-eight, the memory of a handsome, dashing, elegant young man—with the true Nordic features so lacking in Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders—remains. Yet Heydrich’s hips were far too wide for an Aryan superman, and there was something effete, something feminine, about him. Hence his relentless pursuit of sports; virility and strength had not come naturally to him.

https://newrepublic.com/article/93929/hitler-hangman-reinhard-heydrich-robert-gerwarth

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Chris Mauriello

According to Gerwarth, this moment of personal and professional crisis led Heydrich to the three most influential people in his life: his pro-Nazi wife, Lina von Osten; his intellectual mentor, Dr. Werner Best; and his political ally, Heinrich Himmler. Making the most from limited private papers, speeches, articles in Nazi and SS magazines, and internal memoranda, Gerwarth attempts to reconstruct Heydrich’s political and intellectual embrace of the Nazi movement and ideology. Convincingly, the author makes the case that Heydrich, with the support of his ambitious and ideologically committed wife and his professional relationship with Himmler, found in the SS and the Nazi Party a new basis for professional and personal status that he so desperately needed at the time.

What is not entirely clear is whether he intellectually embraced the ideas of Nazi ideology and race theory or instead came to see them as a necessary corollary to reinforce his rather weak Nazi credentials (he was a relative newcomer to the SS and the party and was never part of the Old Guard); to enhance his important professional relationship with party leaders (especially Himmler); or to define a goal for his policy and action in his important position as head of the RSHA. While Gerwarth implies that Heydrich eventually did make the intellectual journey to Nazism, especially in the context of “fighting enemies of the Reich,” (p. 84) this important question lingers, and instead of receiving an explicit analysis of Heydrich’s ideological trajectory, the reader is left with only more examples of his antisemitic and racialist policies and memoranda supporting those policies. While it is obviously unfair to criticize a biographer for not definitively revealing the intentions behind his subject’s actions, some discussion of the relationship of intention to function would have filled out this transformative moment in Heydrich’s life and one of the key hinges of the biography.

https://networks.h-net.org/node/3180/reviews/6345/mauriello-gerwarth-hitler’s-hangman-life-heydrich

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Richard Overy

The striking thing about both men is their superficially unprepossessing appearance and character. They were weak personalities sheltering behind a show of strength; both had problems of self-esteem compensated for by a facade of hardness and exaggerated self-control; both had awkward relationships with women; both were, perhaps as a result, fiercely homophobic; both shied away from actual violence. This last is what sets them apart. There are plenty of security bosses in authoritarian states who are happy to join in with the knuckle-dusters and electrodes, but Himmler and Heydrich seem never to have killed or tortured anyone.

Heinrich Himmler: A Life by Peter Longerich and Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich by Robert Gerwarth

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Richard J. Evans

His father Bruno was an opera singer, musical administrator and composer; his mother a piano teacher; they named Reinhard after one of the characters in Bruno's first opera. Reinhard himself could play Czerny's piano studies perfectly by the age of 10 and became an accomplished violinist who was said to show deep emotion when he played. Gerwarth solves many of the riddles of Heydrich's life convincingly, but he does not in the end explain how a man who orders the death of millions can weep while playing a Mozart sonata; perhaps nobody can.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/hitlers-hangman-the-life-of-heydrich/417638.article
 
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