Lina heydrich biography of donald

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.

Pension Schmidt, better known as “Salon Kitty,” was one of the most glamorous bordellos in Nazi Germany. Among its illustrious clientele were foreign diplomats, government ministers, generals, and regime functionaries. The interior of the grand bourgeois building—located at 11 Giesebrechtstraße in Berlin, close to Kurfürstendamm—was elegant, with expensive rugs, crystal chandeliers, plush armchairs, and thick velvet drapes. The madam of the establishment was Kitty Schmidt, who had run brothels across the German capital since the early interwar years. “She didn’t take dum women,” one of her employees later told an interviewer. “She liked women who were married and who wanted to earn a bit on the side.” Salon Kitty remained in business even after the fall of the Third Reich.

After the war, reports emerged that the prostitutes who worked there had been informers for Reinhard Heydrich&r

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