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Reinhard Heydrich (7. 3. 1904-4. 6. 1942)

After graduating from secondary school in 1922 Reinhard Heydrich served in the Navy, from which he was discharged at the end of 1930 for unbefitting conduct after breaking a marriage engagement. In 1931 he joined the NSDAP and the SS. In July 1932 he founded and thereafter headed the Security Service (SD). He became the "right hand" of the Reich SS leader, Heinrich Himmler. In 1936 he was appointed to head the Security Police (in addition to the SD). From September 27, 1939 he headed the newly established RSHA. He was directly responsible for the terror against adversaries of Nazism in Germany and all the occupied territories.

In 1939 he was asked to prepare a so-called "final solution to the Jewish problem". From August 1940 he was President of Interpol. From 1941 he personally supervised the creation of a system of extermination concentration camps. On January 20, 1942, he presided over a conference in Wannsee, where the "final solution" was adopted. As the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference - where details about the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe was debated and toasted with cognac.

As well as his role in Kristallnacht, he oversaw the Einsatzgruppen, which murdered intellectuals and clergy in Czechoslovakia and Poland, which at the time were both occupied by the Nazis, then he moved on to Jews and Roma. By 1941 it had become quite clear that Heydrich was the one driving anti-Jewish policies.

On September 27, 1941, the Czech Press Agency released the news that the Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath had fallen ill, and named a substitute Reich Protector, Reinhard Heydrich. What lay behind this change was the Nazi's concern about future developments in the Protectorate. In addition to burgeoning strikes and sabotage that plagued mainly railway transport, open demonstrations and resistance against the occupying forces were becoming more frequent. Adolf Hitler accused Neurath of not being tough enough with the Czech resistance movement. In an effort to reverse this development he came to a radical solution. Konstantin von Neurath was sent away to recuperate and, on the same day, an aeroplane arrived in Prague with Reinhard Heydrich on board. Heydrich immediately put a plan into effect with the objective of annihilating resistance in the Czech Lands. The surprise elements in this intervention were to be speed and cruelty, calculated to have a strong psychological effect on the population.

Immediately after his arrival in Prague Heydrich began to implement his idea of "the final solution to the Jewish problem". One of his first decrees, dated September 29, 1941, concerned measures against Czech Jews in mixed marriages, Czechs who were friends of Jews, and the closing of synagogues. It stated, among other things: ".Jewish synagogues and places of prayer have not been used for religious purposes for some time. Instead, they have become centers for all kinds of Jewish subversive elements and focal points of illegal whispered propaganda. For this reason I have ordered the closing of all Jewish synagogues and places of prayer."

On September 30, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich advised the Commander of the Berlin headquarters of the Gestapo, SS-Brigadeführer Henrich Müller that all persons sentenced by martial law courts should be placed exclusively in the Mauthausen concentration camp. In Mauthausen a total of 4,473 of Czechoslovak citizens were tortured to death or executed.

From his quarters in Czernin Palace on October 2, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich presented a speech delivered to leading representatives of the occupying forces. In a part of a speech concerning the "final solution" he said that the Protectorate must once and for all be settled by the German element: "To be able to make a decision as to who is suited to be Germanized, I need their racial inventory.We have all kinds of people here, some of them are showing racial quality and good judgment. It's going to be simple to work on them - we can Germanize them. On the other hand, we have racially inferior elements and, what's worse, they demonstrate wrong judgment. These we must get out. There is a lot of space eastwards."

The Czechoslovak government in exile in London was gradually slipping into last place among the representatives of the occupied countries that were actively contributing in their resistance to the defeat of Germany. In such a situation it was necessary to prepare an enterprise that would clearly show the home resistance movement's anti-German stance while simultaneously demonstrating President Benes' control of the situation in the home country.

In October 1941 the Czech government in exile in London began planning an operation designed to carry out the assassination of either Reinhard Heydrich or K. H. Frank, State Secretary of the Reich Protector for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The plan was given the code name ANTHROPOID. The actual preparations began on October 2, 1941, in cooperation with the British SOE. Warrant Officer Josef Gabcík and Staff Sergeant Karel Svoboda were selected to carry out the assassination. The operation was to be carried out in the shortest time possible. October 28, 1941 was chosen as an appropriate date, Czechoslovakia's Independence Day. The assassination was considered an act of just retribution. At the same time it was meant to prove to the Nazis that none of them was untouchable and might anytime be called upon to account for their actions.

As the news was arriving of cruel repressions in the Protectorate, even against some of the Republic's top military leaders, the London exile leadership became convinced that the assassination should be carried out directly on the Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich's concept of occupation policy relied on splitting Czech society into individual social groups, fully integrating them into war production activities, and gradually Germanizing them according to racial criteria. The Protectorate's political representation - headed by State President Dr. Emil Hácha who was convinced that only full subordination to the occupants could ensure the very existence of the Czech nation - played an important role in the implementation of Heydrich's plan of action. From the beginning Reinhard Heydrich took pleasure in the fact that State President Hácha, along with the Protectorate government, joined the anti-Benes propaganda, pledged allegiance to Adolf Hitler as his Führer, used the Nazi salute, and was a compliant tool of the occupation's politics.

On December 5, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich received a delegation of Czech farmers. He listened to their assurances of willingness to cooperate, but at the same time reprimanded them for sabotaging the inventory of cattle and grain. This move was part of Heydrich's fight against the black market, which reached such proportions in 1941 that a special agricultural police squad had to be established. The Czech farmers were threatened with the confiscation of their farms if they failed to report their true output. In the spirit of his speech of October 2, 1941, Heydrich demanded that farms be confiscated only from farmers unsuited for Germanization.

Reinhard Heydrich combined the fight against the black market with terror directed against the entire population. The Martial Law Courts began to carry out dozens of death sentences on butchers, grocers and pub owners to a certain extent with the silent consent of the population. Less than four months after his arrival in the Protectorate, a cruel, bloody tax was paid. From September 27, 1941, after being sentenced by martial law courts, a total of 486 people were executed and 2,242 others were dragged away to concentration camps.

In London on December 1, 1941, Warrant Officers Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcík signed a pledge stating: "The substance of my mission basically is that I will be sent back to my homeland, with another member of the Czechoslovak Army, in order to commit an act of sabotage or terrorism at a place and in a situation depending on our findings at the given site and under the given circumstances, and I will do so effectively so as to generate the sought-after response not only in the home country but also abroad. I will do it to the extent of my best knowledge and conscience so that I can successfully fulfill this mission for which I have volunteered." Half a year later they both fulfilled this pledge to the last bit.

On December 29, 1941, at approximately 2:30 a.m., Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcík jumped from an RAF Halifax and parachuted into a snow-covered field near Nehvizdy not far from Prague. Because an air-drop of paratroopers had been anticipated, the Wehrmacht units searched the areas of their overflight.

On January 19, 1942, a new Protectorate government was named, replacing the old government (entirely according to Heydrich's ideas), which was in effect non-functional from September 27, 1941, onwards. The reason behind the reorganization of the government was the destruction of the Protectorate's autonomous administration. The greatest change to take place, apart from changes in personnel, was the establishment of the Office for People's Enlightenment. The affairs of the press, theatre, literature, art, film and foreign tourism were subordinate to this office. People were to work for the good of the Third Reich and not to worry about anything else.

On January 20, 1942, in Berlin-Wannsee, a secret meeting took place that was to coordinate the systematic extermination of European Jews. One of the leading architects of the "final solution to the Jewish problem (Endlösung der Judenfrage)" was Reinhard Heydrich. After the Wannsee meeting, which laid the foundations for the extermination of six million European Jews, he stated that the "final solution to the Jewish problem" would involve 11 million people, of which 74,000 were living in the Protectorate. Five days after the meeting in Wannsee, Reinhard Heydrich advised K. H. Frank that Göring, had appointed him on July 31, 1941, to take all the steps necessary for implementing the "final solution to the Jewish problem".

In his speech of February 4, 1942, to the leading representatives of the occupying power, Heydrich addressed the racial issue as follows: ".Clearly, if I am to germanize the country, I must know who is suitable for germanization. I reckon the number is somewhere between 40 and 60 percent .Those who are suitable for germanization will, whenever feasible be, sent to work in the Reich in a manner precluding their return. Those who are not suitable, we could use around the Arctic Ocean, where we will take over the Russian concentration camps. Those camps would make an ideal home for the 11 million European Jews. Czechs who are not suitable for germanization could serve there in the name of positive service for Germany as guards, foremen, and so on."

The home resistance movement's representatives realised from the preparations of the paratroopers that they were trying to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich. Fearing a major reprisal, they decided to contact London with a dispatch warning not to continue with assassination plans.

On the morning of May 27, 1942 a black Mercedes 320 C approached Kirchmayer Street from Kobylisy. The red standard of the Reich Protector on the right fender and the license plates SS-3 indicated SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was in the car, arriving from his summer residence in Panenské Brezany. Josef Gabcík jumps in front of the vehicle, holding a STEN machine gun with which he was to spray Heydrich with deadly bullets. At the critical moment, however, the machine gun fails. Jan Kubis pulls one of the special bombs out of his briefcase, and throws the bomb in the direction of the Reich Protector's vehicle. The bomb misses the target. The explosion punctures the vehicle's body, rips out the right door and does apparently nothing else.

A passing supply truck took the wounded Heydrich away to the neighbouring Bulovka Hospital. At 7:30am on June 4, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich died. The eulogy was still sounding in Berlin over Heydrich's coffin when a decision was taken on the bloody end of a small Czech village "to atone his death". The village, its name and the crime linked to it, would enter history. The name of the village is Lidice. The village, situated near Kladno, had a population of 483 people living in 96 homes in the early hours of June 10, 1942. The Gestapo presumed they had a direct connection with the assassination. During the night of June 9, 1942, the village of Lidice was surrounded and all the 173 men between the ages of 15 and 84 were shot. The women of Lidice were transported from Kladno to the Ravensbrück concentration camp on June 13, 1942. Their 104 children were sent for "proper upbringing". Nothing was to remain to remember the vanished Lidice. For that reason even the course of the streambed, which once flowed through the centre of the village, was changed. All of the trees in the village were chopped down, and the village pond was also gradually filled in with piles of debris.

With the betrayal by Karel Curda, on 17 June 1942 the Gestapo began extended raids on the apartments of the people who had assisted the paratroopers. The Gestapo and SS then proceeded to the inner section of the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius where the paratroopers were hiding. Warrant Officer Jan Kubis bled to death from multiple wounds. Warrant Officer Josef Gabcík ended his life with a shot from his own pistol. The wave of resistance which arose abroad in reaction to the Lidice massacre apparently caused the Nazis to refrain from committing some crimes, and they therefore limited themselves to murdering only those who directly assisted the paratroopers.

The massacres in Lidice and Lezáky were only part of the revenge for Heydrich's death. During the time that the martial law courts were active, 1,585 patriots (including the 173 men murdered in Lidice, with whom the Prague court did not concern itself) were executed on the territory of the Protectorate. The punitive measures were designed deliberately to wipe out the Czech intelligentsia. In other words, its members accounted for 21 % of those executed. On Friday, October 23, 1942, the group of "paratroopers", as they were called, were sent to the concentration camp in Mauthausen. On the following day, all of its members were murdered. On October 24, 1942, 257 collaborators of the paratroopers were murdered by a shot to the back of the head. A second 31-one member group had its turn in Mauthausen on January 26, 1943.

Whether Heydrich had visions of ever becoming leader of the Third Reich is open to speculation. In his book "Fatherland," Robert Harris penned a vision of a world where Heydrich survives into the 1960s and is seen as the likely successor to Hitler. It deals with Heydrich's imagined Machiavellian attempts to cover up the fate of murdered European Jews.

Amazon's series "The Man in the High Castle," loosely based on a book of the same name by Philip K. Dick, envisions a world where the Nazi Reich occupies much of the United States, and where Heydrich is vying to replace an ailing Hitler.