Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (March 7, 1904) was born in Halle an der Saale. He was a talented musician (violin) and an impressive athlete, excelling in fencing and swimming.
It was later widely rumoured that Heydrich was of Jewish extraction. It is said that Adolf Hitler himself was aware of the rumour at the very least and that Himmler had definite proof of the allegation. Some sources claim that one of his great-grandparents was Jewish and others go further saying that it was actually one his grandparents - making Heydrich himself a Jew according to the Nuremberg laws passed by the Nazi Party in 1935.
He was too young to join the German Army during the First World War but at the age of sixteen joined the right-wing Freikorps. After taking part in battles with socialist revolutionaries in Halle he joined the German Navy once he has finished college. He starts his career as naval cadet on the training sailing ship “Niobe”. In 1926 he was promoted to lieutenant of the German Navy. While detached to the cruiser “Braunschweig” he met and became friends with Wilhelm Canaris. Promoted to 1st lieutenant in 1928, he joined the German intelligence service.
However, he was later dismissed when he had a brief liaison with a shipyard director's daughter and subsequently became engaged to a young woman, Lina von Osten. The daughter—-who was left pregnant by Heydrich-—told her father of her anger over the incident, and he was subsequently charged with "conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman". His behavior in court was apparently so disdainful that the court also rebuked him for insubordination. Heydrich was left with no career prospects. However, he remained engaged to von Osten, whom he married in 1931.
Angry at the way he had been treated, Heydrich immediately joined the Nazi Party. He also became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and in 1931 he was introduced to Heinrich Himmler. It is alleged, after a twenty minute test whereby Heydrich had to outline plans for the new division, Himmler hired him on the spot to form the SD (Sicherheitsdienst/Security Service)). By 1933 Heydrich had reached the rank of Obergruppenfuhrer. He would later receive a Totenkopfring from Himmler, for his service. The SS-Ehrenring ("SS Honour Ring"), inofficially called Totenkopfring (English "Death's head ring"), was an award of Heinrich Himmler's Schutzstaffel (SS). It was not a state decoration, but rather within Himmler's personal gift.
The Sicherheitsdienst (SD) was an ideologically saturated intelligence organisation wholly committed to the defence of Nazism. He built it by recruiting a number of amateurish, if ideologically committed, agents, with whom reports could be compiled on various aspects of life in Nazi Germany.
By 1934 Adolf Hitler appeared to have complete control over Germany, but he constantly feared that he might be ousted by others who wanted his power. To protect himself from a possible coup, Hitler used the tactic of divide and rule and encouraged other leaders such as Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Roehm to compete with each other for senior positions.
One of the consequences of this policy was that these men developed a dislike for each other. Roehm was particularly hated because as leader of the Sturm Abteilung (SA) he had tremendous power and had the potential to remove any one of his competitors. Goering and Himmler asked Reinhard Heydrich to assemble a dossier on Roehm. Heydrich, who also feared him, manufactured evidence that suggested that Roehm had been paid 12 million marks by the French to overthrow Hitler.
In June 1934, Himmler arranged for Heydrich, Kurt Daluege and Walter Schellenberg, to carry out what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. The purge of the SA was kept secret until it was announced by Adolf Hitler on 13th July. It was during this speech that Hitler gave the purge its name: Night of the Long Knives (a phrase from a popular Nazi song). Hitler claimed that 61 had been executed while 13 had been shot resisting arrest and three had committed suicide. Others have argued that as many as 400 people were killed during the purge. In his speech Hitler explained why he had not relied on the courts to deal with the conspirators: "In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason."
Heydrich and the SD further benefited from close cooperation with the Gestapo, which Heydrich was also handed control of in 1936 as part of a combined security police force. Later he became the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), of which the SD and the Gestapo were sections.
Upon the establishment of the Third Reich, Heydrich helped Adolf Hitler 'dig up dirt' on many political opponents, keeping an impressive filing system listing individuals and organizations opposing the party and the regime. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm. Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy.
Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin's sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.
The Soviet chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.
He was also instrumental in establishing the false 'attack' by Poland on German national radio at Gleiwitz, which was to prove the Nazi justification for the beginning of World War II.
Reinhard Heydrich also served as Reserve Hauptmann, then Major in the Luftwaffe. Despite his advanced age, he completed a fighter pilot course in 1940, probably due to reasons of ambition. Heydrich wanted to set an example and show that the members of SS are not "asphalt" soldiers acting behind the front line, but a leading elite of the Third Reich. In April 1940 he flew a Bf 109 in the Fighter Group II./JG 77 "Herz As" in Norway. The planes flown by Heydrich had an ancient Germanic runic character S (Sieg = victory) painted on the side of the fuselage. On May 13, 1940 he crashed his plane during take-off and was injured. For a short time in May he flew patrol flights over North Germany and the Netherlands. Then, after a new accident, he returned to Berlin. In mid-June 1941, before the German attack on the USSR, he resumed flying, ignoring Himmler's ban. He flew his personal plane Bf 109E-7 again with Group II./JG 77 from Baltsi on the southern Eastern Front, which put the wing commander under pressure due to Heydrich's position and lack of experience. On July 22, 1941, his plane was badly damaged over Yampol by Soviet AA artillery. Heydrich managed to crash-land in no-man's land, and run back to the German lines. After this adventure he was forbidden to fly once again, as it was realized that Heydrich's capture as a POW would be a major security breach for Germany, and he never again returned to active flying. He was awarded the Frontflugspange (Front Pilot Badge) in silver, which usually was awarded after 60 successful combat missions.
Heydrich was one of the main architects of the Holocaust during the first years of World War II. He had initially gained some control over Jewish policy, when in November 1938, Hermann Goering assigned him as head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration following Kristallnacht. From this position, he worked tirelessly both to coordinate various initiatives that were forwarded for the Final Solution, and to assert SS dominance over Jewish policy.
In the evening of June 22, 1940, Heinrich Himmler was summoned privately by Hitler in his field headquarters “Wolfsschlucht” in Brûly-de-Pesche (Belgien). The meeting took place behind closed doors - probably in the Fuehrer's private rooms - and neither Hitler nor Himmler did ever put anything in writing about what happened that evening. It was not really necessary, for the oral order of the Fuehrer was not of a kind to be misunderstood: during a coming campaign against the Jewish-Bolshevist Russia SS-units should exterminate the many millions of Russian Jews, sheltered by the war - just as it had been done to Jews and Poles the year before.
At the same time Himmler, together with Heydrich, should set to work on how the extermination of the European Jews in areas controlled or influenced by Germany could be carried out. The strategy in this case should be that the Jews were to be used to the utmost as slave labourers, and whenever they came to putting the Reich to expenses, they were to be killed. Those who survived the forced labour should be killed as well, because otherwise they could became the foundation of a new, stronger, and therefore dangerous, Jewry. As the Jews gradually disappeared, their forced labour should be taken over by Slav "subhumans"; the next phase in the endeavours to create a millenary Third Reich.
The extermination should be carried out region by region, starting with the Jews in Occupied Poland, because they constituted the largest problem. After that the Jewish populations of the rest of Europe should be slowly but safely weeded out, eliminated along the same lines as the Polish Jews. The ongoing Madagascar Project would provide a suitable cover for this process, as it would offer the best opportunities to register the Jews outside Germany.
Heinrich Himmler was shocked, because he considered it "un-German" to kill off entire nations. On November 11, 1941, he told his masseur, Felix Kersten, about the proceedings which according to Himmler had taken place just after the conclusion of the campaign in France:
Heinrich Himmler was shocked, because he considered it "un-German" to kill off entire nations. On November 11, 1941, he told his masseur, Felix Kersten, about the proceedings which according to Himmler had taken place just after the conclusion of the campaign in France:
"When Hitler explained what he wanted to do, I answered, without thinking of what I said, and by sheer egoism: "My Fuehrer, I and my SS will be ready to die for you, but don't lay this task on he!". In the end, Himmler obeyed, contacted Heydrich in Berlin and briefed him on the task. Heydrich promised him to take the necessary steps, and the very next day he wrote to the Foreign Office in order to monopolize the elaboration of the Madagascar Project. The consciousness of having delegated the responsibility for the "un-German" task to Heydrich helped Himmler to repress its existence. Instead he threw himself on the more positive work in connexion with the germanization of the new German parts of Eastern Europe.
He drew up a new memorandum which contained the proposal that the area should be occupied by German and Nordic peasant, as History had shown that otherwise it would never become a "safe" area. He thought of providing lands for his SS veterans, as they would then be able to constitute a well-trained reserve in case of an attack from the Soviet Union. The rest of the native population should be used in connexion with construction works, but they were to be gradually driven away - an eighth might be left in villages and towns to take care of the work that was deemed to be beneath the dignity of the German race. The rest of the population, some seven million Poles, were to be deported to Occupied Poland, which already acted as the "garbage can" of the Reich.
On June 30, 1940, the Fuehrer approved Himmler's new draft, which in contrast to his plan of the preceeding month did not mention the Jews at all. Even though Himmler had been entrusted with the formal responsibility, the real responsibility lay with Reinhard Heydrich. With the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich marched off the Einsatzgruppen (mission group or task force)
In the summer of 1938, when Germany was preparing the invasion of Czechoslovakia scheduled for October 1, 1938, the Einsatzgruppen were founded. Heydrich´s intention for Einsatzgruppen was to travel in the wake of the German armies as they advanced into Czechoslovakia, securing government papers and offices. The Einsatzgruppen were never a standing formation; rather they were ad hoc units recruited mostly from the ranks of the SS, the SD, and various German police forces such as the Ordnungspolizei, the Gendarmerie, the Kripo and the Gestapo, given several weeks’ to several months’ training and then sent into action
In response to the invasion of Poland, Heydrich ordered the Einsatzgruppen to travel in the wake of the German armies. Unlike the earlier operations, Heydrich gave the Einsatzgruppen commanders carte blanche to kill anyone belonging to groups that the Germans considered hostile.
After the occupation of Poland in 1939, the Einsatzgruppen killed Poles belonging to the intelligentsia, such as priests and teachers. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France in May 1940, the Einsatzgruppen operations in Western Europe in 1940 were within the original mandate of securing government offices and papers. Had Operation Sealion, the German plan for an invasion of the United Kingdom been launched, six Einsatzgruppen were scheduled to follow the invasion force to Britain The Einsatzgruppen intended for "Sealion" were provided with a list (known as The Black Book after the war) of 2,820 people to be arrested immediately.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Einsatzgruppen's main assignment was to kill Communist officers and Jews on a much larger scale than in Poland. These Einsatzgruppen were under control of Reinhard Heydrich and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) (Reich Security Main Office); i.e., under and his successor Ernst Kaltenbrunner. The original mandate set by Heydrich for the four Einsatzgruppen sent into the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa was to secure the offices and papers of the Soviet state and Communist Party; liquidate all of the higher cadres of the Soviet state; and to instigate and encourage pogroms against all local Jewish populations. As the Einsatzgruppen advanced into the Soviet Union after July 1941, the Einsatzgruppen increasingly engaged in the mass murders of the local Jews themselves rather than encouraging pogroms. Initially, the Einsatzgruppen generally limited themselves to shooting Jewish men; but as the summer wore on, increasingly all Jews regardless of age or sex were shot. The most murderous of the four Einsatzgruppen was Einsatzgruppe A, which operated in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania formerly occupied by the Soviets. Einsatzgruppe A was the first Einsatzgruppen that attempted to systematically exterminate all Jews in its area. After December 1941, the other three Einsatzgruppen began what Raul Hilberg has called the "second sweep", which lasted into the summer of 1942, where they attempted to emulate Einsatzgruppe A by likewise systematically killing all Jews in their areas.
They murdered more than 1.5 million Jews, Communists, prisoners of war, and Roma (Gypsies) in total. They also assisted Wehrmacht units and local anti-Semites in killing half a million more. They were mobile forces in the beginning of the invasion, but settled down after the occupation. In addition, the Einsatzgruppen were often used in anti-partisan operations in the occupied Soviet Union.
On the evening of July 31, 1941, the head of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, presented a document to Hermann Goering for his signature. Goering occupied second place in the National Socialist hierarchy. Adolf Hitler had granted him an extensive degree of power which included the coordination of all anti-Jewish measures. With Goering’s signature, Heydrich’s role as the person in charge of planning the monstrous killing program was confirmed. Heydrich used this document in the RSHA and vis-à-vis other governmental agencies to legitimize both the murders committed by the Special Units and his own leading position in connection with the projected “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (a euphemism for the deportation and extermination of all European Jews; “Evacuation” meant deportation). Every participant who had been invited on November 29, 1941 by circular letter to attend the Wannsee Conference received a copy.
The original document
Reich Marshal of the Großdeutsches Reich Berlin, July 31, 1941
Plenipotentiary for the Four Year Plan Chairman
of the Ministerial Council for Defense of the Reich
To the Head of the Security Police and SD,
SS-Major General [Gruppenfuehrer] Heydrich
Berlin.
Supplementary to the task entrusted to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish question under the prevailing circumstances by emigration or evacuation in the most favorable way possible, I herewith commission you to carry out all necessary preparations in regard to organizational, practical and material matters for a total solution of the Jewish question (Gesamtlösung der Judenfrage) in the German sphere of influence within Europe. Inasmuch as the competences of other central organizations will hereby be affected, they are to be included.
I further commission you to submit to my office in the near future an overall plan that shows the preliminary organizational, practical and material measures requisite for the implementation of the projected final solution of the Jewish question (Endlösung der Judenfrage).
(hand written signature) Goering
On January 20th 1942, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which plans for the deportation of the Jews to extermination camps were discussed.
The setting was the luxurious Wannsee House in a stylish neighbourhood just outside Berlin. One by one, the cars and limousines pulled up and let out their VIPs. One by one, the men came into the great hall to give up their coats to butlers, attempting to anticipate what was in store. 15 of the highest-ranking technocrats were to discuss "the Final Solution," including Adolph Eichmann, Friedrich Krizinger, and Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart. While the plan to disenfranchise the Jews throughout Europe was already underway, with exterminations carried out in various places, it was time for greater efficiency. There were so many to be rid of—still 11 million---and it needed to be done more quickly.
The meeting took place around a conference table next to the room where an elegant lunch was to be served. It was brief, lasting just over an hour. There was to be no record of certain things that were said but in fact one person kept his notes, and it was from those notes that the world learned about the cold, rational argument, met with general enthusiasm around the conference table that resulted in the extermination of millions of people.
Heydrich worked to erase the general substance of the meeting by rewriting the notes in neutral language, but once decoded, the gist was clear: These men were there to approve the use of death camps, gas chambers, and crematoriums. To this point, the shootings and gas vans used by mobile killing squads had proven inefficient and were stressful to those carrying out orders. The solution was to utilize more "work camps," where people would die from "natural causes."
Speaking with one another in "Amtssprache"—office talk meant to make others do what they're supposed to do—they acted as if they were merely part of a large machine at work and they were simply there to ensure that it continued to run. No one was responsible for its initiation, only for its maintenance and increased speed. They had a job to do and they were to do it without question. The final solution was to be managed with precision and economy. It was company policy. Orders. The law.
Later during his trial in Israel, Adolph Eichmann, who had prepared Heydrich's speech that day, was asked about the Wannsee conference. He said that the reason for it was Heydrich's attempt to extend his scope of influence by imprinting his will on the others. To help him accomplish this goal, Eichmann was to make a general survey of the "operations" thus far on the question of Jewish "emigration," with specific attention paid to the difficulties. To step up the operations, these difficulties had to be resolved.
The suggestion was to stop allowing Jews to just leave, which only increased the ranks of the enemy, and to send many more Jews "east"—meaning to the concentration camps. There the able-bodied men were to be forced into a program known as "Vernichtung durch Arbeit," or "extermination via work." They would simply die from attrition but first make whatever contribution they could manage. Others who could not work were simply killed. Heydrich proposed a specific means of "liquidation" and offered a prepared report on how many people they could expect to "remove" in a specified amount of time. They now had a clear agenda and each man there had his part to play.
Eichmann described an atmosphere of agreement and enthusiasm. All parties present wanted to participate, even those men who were generally hesitant and reserved. When asked whether it was difficult for him to participate in sending so many people to their deaths, Eichmann responded, "To tell you the truth, it was easy. Our language made it easy."
Military Governor
Already on September 27, 1941 Heydrich was appointed acting Reichsprotektor in the Czech puppet state called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. He replaced Konstantin von Neurath who remained titulary protector till 20 August 1943. Heydrich had his own special plans for the Czechs: his grotesque pseudo-scientific studies concluded that 45% of Czechs could be successfully Germanized, 40% were inferior "mongrels", and 15% were racially intolerable. In a speech in October 1941 he stated: "Bohemia and Moravia must become German, Czechs have no business to be here."
Soon after his arrival, he established a Jewish ghetto at Theresienstadt. He also established a successful policy of offering incentives to Czech workers, rewarding them with food and privileges if they filled Nazi production quotas and displayed loyalty to the Reich. At the same time, Heydrich's Gestapo and SD agents conducted a brutal crackdown of the Czech resistance movement.
SS Obergruppenführer Heydrich was by now a supremely arrogant young man who liked to travel between his country home and headquarters in Prague in an open top green Mercedes car without an armed escort as a show of confidence in his intimidation of the resistance and successful pacification of the population.
But Heydrich's rein was to be short-lived. The British Special Operations Executive had been training teams of dedicated Czech patriots in Cheshire to parachute into their homeland to organise the underground resistance and assassinate the Butcher of Prague. This assassination was nicknamed Operation Anthropoid, and was the bravest and most decisive act to emerge from the Czech resistance movement. A mere two months after Heydrich had moved to the Protectorate, in December 1941, a band of seven assassins parachuted into the country near the town of Lidice. Armed with British weapons and explosives, they quickly went underground and began intelligence-gathering. After spending five months building up a detailed picture of Heydrich's movements, they decided to strike.
On May 27, 1942, four of the men (Lt. Adolf Opalka, Sgt. Josef Valcik, Sgt. Jan Kubis and Sgt. Josef Gabchik) had finally found their opportunity. Heydrich, believing himself to have succeeded in pacifying the Czech population and expecting transfer to France soon, had taken to driving around his dominions in an open-topped, unarmoured Mercedes 320 B, with SS-Oberscharfuhrer Klein behind the wheel. Near the Troja Bridge, Valcik and Opalka kept lookout waiting for the car to, and signalled to the others that it was without a military escort. As the car slowed to turn around a hairpin bend, Gabchik lifted his overcoat and opened fire with his Sten submachine gun. To his horror, the gun jammed, and Heydrich screamed to his driver to run the man down. Jan reacted quickly, realising what had happened, and tossed one of his modified anti-tank grenades at the vehicle. It failed to enter the open-topped car, but ripped through the right wing, embedding fragments of itself and the car into Heydrich's body.
As the Germans open-fired, the Czechs fled. Heydrich, barely able to walk, staggered out of the vehicle and collapsed on the bonnet. His driver was relatively unharmed, and Heydrich ordered him to pursue the men. He ran after Josef, the men duelling with their pistols as they went, and Josef was able to wound the man and escape.
Author and historian Miroslav Honzik wrote a book about his death and what he has to say is quite remarkable. Heydrich was immediately taken to the Bulovka hospital where they took X-rays of his spine and pelvis. And the diagnosis was: a back injury and lacerated spleen. By noon, the patient was taken for an operation that lasted about sixty minutes. The man who decided about the life and death of millions of Czechs was now fully in the hands of a few doctors. The operation was started by Doctor Hohlbaum, but it was Doctor Walter Dick who soon took over and finished it. The spleen was removed as was a four-by-two-centimeter large piece of metal from Heydrich's back. The doctors of course had to keep in mind that in similar cases patients were often in danger of blood poisoning. Immediately after Heydrich, they operated on his chauffer, Klein. Then the Reichsprotector was taken back to the operation room where he got a blood transfusion.
In his book published in 1983, academic Prokop Malek pointed out that spleen injury is not fatal and just like Miroslav Honzik, Malek too has doubts about the real cause of Heydrich's death. There were two key moments: more German doctors were summoned to Prague, including the famous surgeon, Professor Sauerbruch. But also present was Himmler's personal doctor, Gebhardt. As Heydrich's immediate superior, Himmler was aware of his subordinate's evil genius. It was said that Heydrich kept files on all of the Third Reich's prominents, including Hitler himself.
Heydrich felt very good on June 3 and he even sat in his bed and enjoyed his meal. But the next morning he was dead. The autopsy was carried out by two German doctors. One of them, Professor Herwig Hamperl, wrote in his memoirs that there were no pathological changes found on Heydrich's body. He probably died of shock, concluded Hamperl. Well, that's not a very good explanation and author Miroslav Honzik tried to find out more. What he found out was that all the vital documents are lost, including the autopsy report.
There are two possible causes of Heydrich's death - blood poisoning or anaemic shock. Academic Malek claims there were no signs of an infection discovered during the autopsy. After consulting many experts, Honzik was convinced that there was no blood poisoning involved. And shock? Anaemic shock is caused by loss of blood. The patient is in bad shape and refuses to eat. Not likely the case with Heydrich, who ate well only hours before his death. Another thing we know for sure is that the autopsy did not include a toxicological report. The turnaround in his health was so dramatic and the symptoms he displayed so akin to botulin poisoning that there has long been speculation that the modified anti-tank grenades contained the toxin. Although the files on the operation are still sealed, it is known that Paul Fildes, head of the Porton Downs research center that was developing BTX weapons, was involved in the pre-planing stages. He would later claim that the death of Heydrich was "the first notch on my pistol." Despite all efforts Heydrich died in agony in a Prague hospital at the age of 38.
Meanwhile, the German reprisal was beginning. They pieced together evidence from the scene of the attack to identify resistance members, and accidently stumbled across a briefcase which contained details of Czechs who were soon to acquire false papers. They pounced on numerous members of the resistance and interrogated them, although some committed suicide to avoid capture. The Gestapo offered 10,000,000 Crowns for information leading to the capture of the assassins, and two of their own team - Sgt. Karel Curda and Cpl. Vilem Gerik - betrayed them. Holed up in the orthodox church of St Cyril and Methodius on June 18, 1942, the Czechs made their last stand.
Germans stormed the Church, and the seven men, Josef Bublík, Josef Gabcík, Jan Hrubý, Jan Kubiš, Adolf Opálka, Jaroslav Švarc und Josef Valcík holed up inside fought bravely with pistol, rifle, submachine gun and grenade against an armada of 800 SS and Gestapo men for six hours. Opalka was killed in the firefight, and Kubis and Svarc fatally wounded. The other four men were hiding in the crypt, afraid to tunnel away for fear of giving away their position, although it might have saved them at this point. The Germans discovered they were in the crypt and tried to storm it repeatedly, first through the entrance hatchway and then by blowing up the stone entrance. The defenders acquitted themselves bravely, killing fourteen Germans and fighting until they ran out of ammunition, and the Nazis began to flood the crypt through its sole ventilation hatch. At this point they committed suicide with their revolvers. The Czech bishop Matěj Pavlík, also known as the second saint Gorazd, who had given shelter to the resistance fighters, was executed by the Gestapo on 4. September 1942 in Prag-Kobylisy.
The Nazi retaliation was savage and a brutal warning against further armed resistance. About 13,000 people were arrested, some of them killed. Horrendously, this was not the most brutal of the reprisals carried out by the Nazis for the death of Heydrich. On June 8 they had surrounded the village of Lidice, and placed all the men aged over 16 in a barn. The next day they were shot, and the women and children were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. The village was destroyed and removed from German maps - but placed on others as villages around the world renamed themselves Lidice to commemorate the senseless destruction. The Nazis declared that for every further act of "Jewish terrorism" they would kill hundreds of Jews in their custody, and the total death toll for the reprisals is estimated at 1,300.
As Heydrich was one of the most important Nazi leaders, two large funeral ceremonies were conducted. One was in Prague, where the way to Prague Castle was lined by thousands of SS-men with torches. "Thousands upon thousands" file past Heydrich's coffin in the honour court of the Prague Castle. Officials from all parts of the protectorate come to lay flowers and wreaths on the coffin. It is carried from the Castle over the Charles Bridge to the main railroad station. SS Obergruppenführer Kurt Daluege is present when the coffin is put on a train to Berlin. After the war Daluege was executed in 1946 in Prague; he was held accountable for the massacre of the men and boys of the Czech town of Lidice, the Nazi reprisal for Heydrich's assassination).
His funeral was held in the Mosaic Hall of the New Reich Chancellery, June 9, 1942 with Hitler attending and placing Heydrich's decorations on his funeral pillow, the highest grade of the German Order, the highest award of the Third Reich, instituted February 11, 1942 and the Blood Order Medal. Hitler said at the funeral: “I have only a few words to dedicate to this dead man. He was one of the best National Socialists, one of the strongest defenders of German Reich thought, one of the biggest opponents of all the enemies of the Reich. He fell as a martyr for the preservation and safeguarding of the Reich. As leader of the party and as leader of the German Reich, I give you, my dear comrade Heydrich, the highest recognition I have to bestow: the uppermost level of the German Order. After party comrade [Fritz] Todt, you are the second person to receive this award.”
Heydrich's grave was in Section A of the Invalidenfriedhof, Scharnhorststraße, Berlin. Heydrich was buried with full military honours next to General of Infantry Count Tauentzien von Wittenberg, who fought against Napoleon in the wars of liberation (1813-1815). Heydrich was to have had a monumental tomb, designed by the architect Wilhelm Kreis and the sculptor Arno Breker. Because of the downhill course of the war, the tomb was never built. Heydrich’s wooden grave marker disappeared in 1945. His grave is now unmarked. His death mask survives on postage stamps the Nazis issued to commemorate him.
The British press called the obsequies "a gangster funeral in the pompous Chicago style."
The British press called the obsequies "a gangster funeral in the pompous Chicago style."
Hitler himself perhaps best encapsulated Heydrich's general attitude in his acknowledgment that Heydrich was partly to blame for his own death through arrogance and a blasé attitude:
"Since it is opportunity which makes not only the thief but also the assassin, such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmoured vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the Fatherland not one whit. That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic."
"Since it is opportunity which makes not only the thief but also the assassin, such heroic gestures as driving in an open, unarmoured vehicle or walking about the streets unguarded are just damned stupidity, which serves the Fatherland not one whit. That a man as irreplaceable as Heydrich should expose himself to unnecessary danger, I can only condemn as stupid and idiotic."
Lina Heydrich later stated that she believed Heydrich had expected an early death, saying that she saw his frequent unnecessary risk-taking as an attempt to ensure that, should he die, his would be a dramatic death.
Heydrich's eventual replacements were Ernst Kaltenbrunner as the chief of RSHA, and Karl Hermann Frank 27 - 28 May 1942 and Kurt Daluege 28 May 1942 - 14 October 1943 as the new acting Reichsprotektors.
After Heydrich's death, the first three "trial" death camps were constructed and put into operation at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Belzec. The project was named Operation Reinhard in Heydrich's honour.
In 1943, a 36 page, illustrated Reinhard Heydrich memorial book published in very limited quantity by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in 1943, was initiated at the direction of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Each Gauleiter received an example of the Heydrich Memorial Book from Himmler and police leaders, honorary members of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and all leaders of the Allgemeine SS and Waffen SS each received a copy. Three thousand units of this book were sent to Party Chancellor Reichsleiter Martin Bormann for distribution to Kreisleiters, higher party leaders, leaders of NSDAP associations.
