On the morning of May 27, 1942, a black Mercedes convertible rolled through the gates of a grand neoclassical estate north of Prague. Inside sat Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the man Adolf Hitler once called the man with the iron heart, and one of the most feared figures in Nazi-occupied Europe. It was the last time the estate would see him alive. Two hours later, Heydrich lay mortally wounded in a Prague hospital, felled by an assassination that would echo through the war.
But the estate he left behind, a stolen Jewish mansion transformed into a Nazi stronghold, would face a fate almost as strange as the story of the man who lived there. It is a tale of stolen art, communist seizure, decades of decay, and a question that lingers to this day: What becomes of a place marked by such darkness? The village of Panenské Břežany sits in the central Bohemian countryside, its name derived from the Czech word for virgin, a reference to the Benedictine nuns of St. George’s Convent at Prague Castle, who first owned the land in 1233.
The settlement grew slowly over the centuries, passing through various hands until the early 18th century, when the abbess of the convent constructed a Baroque palace on the site of an earlier fortress. This became known as the upper castle. A small chapel designed by the Baroque architect Jan Santini Aichel was built nearby. The estate remained tied to the monastery until Emperor Joseph II dissolved the convent in the late 18th century, and the property was sold to a succession of private owners.
In 1828, a German-speaking nobleman named Matthias von Riese-Stallburg purchased the estate. Around 1840, he constructed a second building on the grounds, a neoclassical mansion in the French style that came to be called the lower castle. The building featured elegant proportions, refined interiors, and, later, a monumental art deco staircase. When his descendants fell into debt, the property passed to the Prague Credit Bank in 1901.
It seemed the estate might slide into obscurity, just another piece of Central European real estate changing hands among creditors. Then came Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Born in 1864 into a Jewish family that had built its fortune in the sugar industry, Bloch-Bauer was one of the wealthiest industrialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1909, he purchased the entire estate, both castles, the chapel, and the surrounding parkland, for use as a summer residence.
Ferdinand and his wife, Adele, whom he had married in 1899, transformed the lower castle into a haven of culture. They renovated the interiors, commissioned fine furnishings, and filled the rooms with art. They also established a school for village children and sponsored improvements to the local community. For the farmers who grew sugar beets in the rich loamy soil north of Prague, the Bloch-Bauers were benevolent landlords who brought prosperity to their quiet corner of Bohemia.
Adele was no ordinary society hostess. Born in 1881, she possessed an intellectual curiosity that drew her into the most rarefied circles of Viennese society. Her salon attracted celebrated figures, the composer Gustav Mahler, the author Stefan Zweig, and the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. Between 1903 and 1907, Klimt worked on a commission from Ferdinand: a portrait of Adele that would become one of the most recognizable paintings of the 20th century.
The finished work, known today as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, or The Woman in Gold, depicts Adele seated against a shimmering golden background, her pale face and hands emerging from ornamental patterns inspired by Byzantine mosaics. The painting marked the culmination of Klimt’s golden phase. Adele died of meningitis in 1925 at the age of 43. Her death was a devastating blow to Ferdinand, who never remarried.
In her will, Adele expressed a wish that Ferdinand donate the Klimt paintings to the Austrian State Gallery after his death. Though legally the paintings belonged to Ferdinand, he did not honor this request immediately. Instead, they remained in the family, displayed in Adele’s former bedroom in their Vienna home as a private shrine. The rise of fascism cast a shadow over Central Europe, and by the mid-1930s the threat to Jewish families like the Bloch-Bauers was becoming impossible to ignore.
After the Anschluss of March 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Ferdinand fled Vienna. He stayed briefly at the lower castle in Panenské Břežany before escaping to Switzerland, where he would spend the rest of his life in exile. He left behind virtually everything: his homes, his businesses, and his art collection. The Nazis seized his Austrian assets under a fraudulent charge of tax evasion, claiming he owed 1.
4 million Reichsmarks. His paintings, including The Woman in Gold, were confiscated and eventually ended up in Austrian state collections. Within months of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the Gestapo confiscated the Panenské Břežany estate under a process called Aryanization, the systematic theft of Jewish property across the Reich. The upper castle, which had been sold to Friedrich Gerstl in 1921, faced the same fate.
Gerstl, a prominent Jewish furniture manufacturer from Prague, had transformed the Baroque building into a showroom for his luxury products. He fled to the United States in March 1939, just as the Nazis arrived. Both castles were secured by the German secret police and designated for use by senior Nazi officials. The first Nazi occupant of the lower castle was Konstantin von Neurath, appointed Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939.
By 1941, however, Hitler had grown dissatisfied with what he saw as von Neurath’s lenient approach. In September of that year, he appointed a far more ruthless figure to take effective control of the protectorate: Reinhard Heydrich. Born in 1904, Heydrich joined the German Navy as a young man but was dismissed in 1931 after a scandal. Almost immediately, he found a new home in Heinrich Himmler’s SS, where his intelligence, ambition, and capacity for cruelty propelled him rapidly through the ranks.
By 1939, he was head of the Reich Security Main Office, controlling the Gestapo, the criminal police, and the security service. He had helped organize Kristallnacht, the violent pogrom against Jews in November 1938. He had coordinated the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that followed the German army into Poland and the Soviet Union, murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews and others. And in January 1942, just months after arriving in Prague, Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, where senior Nazi officials formalized plans for the Final Solution, the systematic murder of eleven million European Jews.
When the death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bełżec began operations later that year, the murder program was codenamed Aktion Reinhard in his honor. Heydrich moved into the lower castle at Panenské Břežany with his wife, Lina, and their children at the turn of 1941 into 1942. Their neighbor in the upper castle was Karl Hermann Frank, the Higher SS and Police Leader and State Secretary for the protectorate, a man who bore enormous responsibility for the terror inflicted on the Czech people. Every morning, Heydrich’s chauffeur drove him in an open-topped Mercedes 320 Cabriolet along the roughly fourteen-kilometer road to his headquarters at Prague Castle.
He made this commute without an armed escort, a decision that reflected both his arrogance and his contempt for the occupied population. He believed that visible security would be a sign of weakness. It was a miscalculation that would cost him his life. Heydrich’s rule in Prague was characterized by a combination of terror and manipulation.
Within days of his arrival, he declared martial law and ordered mass executions. Between 4,000 and 5,000 Czechs were arrested in the first months of his tenure, and between 400 and 500 were executed. Czech resistance networks were infiltrated and destroyed. At the same time, Heydrich sought to pacify Czech industrial workers by improving their rations and working conditions, because he needed their labor for the German war effort.
The Czechs called him the butcher of Prague. The Czechoslovak government in exile in London decided that Heydrich had to die. In October 1941, František Moravec, the head of Czechoslovak military intelligence, approached the British Special Operations Executive with a proposal: a mission to assassinate the acting Reich Protector. The British agreed to provide training and support for what became Operation Anthropoid.
Two soldiers were selected: Jozef Gabčík, a 29-year-old Slovak, and Jan Kubiš, a 28-year-old Czech. On the night of December 28, 1941, they were dropped into occupied Czechoslovakia. Navigation errors scattered the parachutists, and they landed east of Prague rather than their intended drop zone near Pilsen. They made their way to the capital, contacted Czech resistance networks, and began planning.
After weeks of reconnaissance, they chose a spot in the Prague suburb of Libeň, where the road made a sharp hairpin turn near Bulovka Hospital. The curve would force Heydrich’s car to slow down. A third member of their team was positioned about a hundred meters up the road to signal the approach of the Mercedes with a pocket mirror. The attack was set for the morning of May 27, 1942.
At approximately 10 a. m. , Heydrich’s green Mercedes rounded the curve. Gabčík stepped into the road, dropped his raincoat, and raised his Sten submachine gun, but the weapon jammed.
For a fatal instant, both men froze. Then Heydrich made the decision that would cost him his life. Instead of ordering his chauffeur to accelerate, he stood up in the open car and drew his pistol, shouting for the driver to stop. In that moment, Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade at the car.
The bomb landed against the rear wheel and exploded, sending shrapnel and fragments of the upholstery into Heydrich’s body. In the chaos, both assassins escaped. Heydrich tried to chase Gabčík on foot, firing his pistol before collapsing from blood loss. A Czech woman flagged down a delivery van, and Heydrich was transported to Bulovka Hospital, where surgeons discovered extensive internal injuries.
His spleen was ruptured, his diaphragm torn, and fragments of metal, leather, and horsehair from the car’s upholstery were embedded in his wounds. For several days, his condition appeared to improve. But on June 3, Heydrich fell into a coma, and early the following morning, June 4, 1942, he died of sepsis caused by the infected wounds. He was 38 years old.
Two elaborate funerals followed, one in Prague, one in Berlin, where Hitler attended and placed medals on Heydrich’s coffin. In private, however, Hitler blamed Heydrich for his own death, calling his decision to ride in an open car damned stupidity. The Nazi response to the assassination was savage. On June 10, 1942, the village of Lidice was surrounded by German forces.
All 172 men and boys over the age of fourteen were lined up and shot. The women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. The children, 82 in all, were either murdered at the Chełmno extermination camp or dispersed to German families. The village was burned and bulldozed, and even the cemetery was destroyed.
Two weeks later, a similar fate befell the village of Ležáky. In total, more than 13,000 people were arrested in the reprisals, and approximately 5,000 were killed. Gabčík, Kubiš, and five other paratroopers took refuge in the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague’s New Town. For three weeks, they hid in the crypt.
Then, on June 16, 1942, a resistance member betrayed his comrades for one million Reichsmarks. On the morning of June 18, more than 700 German soldiers surrounded the church. After hours of fighting, the four surviving paratroopers turned their pistols on themselves rather than be captured. Operation Anthropoid remains the only successful assassination of a senior Nazi leader during World War II.
Its consequences were profound and terrible, but the assassination also demonstrated that the Czech people were not passive subjects of the Reich, and it secured recognition of the Czechoslovak government in exile by the Allied powers. At Panenské Břežany, Lina Heydrich remained in the lower castle with her children. In April 1943, Hitler issued a special decree granting the estate to Lina and her family in perpetuity, recognizing Heydrich’s service to the Reich. A fourth child, a daughter, was born in July 1942, shortly after Heydrich’s death.
In September 1942, Jewish prisoners from the Theresienstadt ghetto were assigned to work at the estate, constructing one of the smallest satellite camps of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. They labored under brutal conditions, rebuilding the lower castle and tending the gardens. Lina administered the estate with an iron hand, demanding that villagers give her the Hitler salute or face whippings. One servant, Helena Všetová, secretly smuggled food and letters to the Jewish prisoners, an act of extraordinary courage.
Tragedy struck the Heydrich family again in October 1943. Klaus, the eldest son, was cycling in the courtyard when he rode out onto the road and was struck by a truck. He died later that afternoon at the age of ten. Klaus was buried in the garden of the estate, a grave that would later become another complication in the property’s troubled history.
By early 1945, the war was clearly lost for Nazi Germany. On April 18, 1945, Lina Heydrich gathered her children and fled the estate. Before leaving, she had the estate’s rabbits and geese slaughtered and cooked the meat to take with them. She shook hands with each member of the household staff and promised them pensions, believing she would return.
She never did. She lived until 1985, defending her husband’s reputation to the end. When Soviet forces arrived in May 1945, they found the estate abandoned. The lower castle became a headquarters for the Red Army until October 1945.
After the Soviets departed, the Czechoslovak government took control of both properties. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in Zurich on November 13, 1945, just months after the liberation of his former estate. His will left everything, including the castle, to his nephew and two nieces. But the postwar communist regime had other plans.
Under the government that took power in February 1948, the Bloch-Bauer properties were absorbed into state hands. The family’s claim was ignored, and no compensation was ever paid. The two castles followed different paths through the communist era. The upper castle became a retirement home in 1957.
The lower castle became the headquarters of a state precious metals research institute. Industrial laboratories sprouted around the elegant building, and the art deco staircase and refined interiors were subjected to decades of institutional neglect. The estate’s wartime history was largely suppressed. By the mid-1990s, the lower castle stood empty and abandoned.
For nearly 25 years, no one lived there. Mold infected the walls, tiles fell, and the manicured gardens became a jungle of weeds. In May 2019, the lower castle was put up for auction as part of the bankrupt company’s settlement. An anonymous buyer paid 39 million Czech koruna, approximately 1.
7 million dollars, for the 16-acre property. Local officials estimated that restoring the building alone would cost at least 100 million koruna. The identity of the buyer was not disclosed. The upper castle, by contrast, has undergone a very different transformation.
In 2012, the Regional Museum Prague East acquired the property and converted it into the Memorial of National Oppression and Resistance, featuring an interactive exhibition that traces the history of Czechoslovakia from the Munich agreement of 1938 through the Nazi occupation. The contrast between the two castles is striking. The upper castle, where Karl Hermann Frank lived, has become a place of remembrance and education. The lower castle, where Heydrich himself resided and where Jewish prisoners labored in a satellite concentration camp, remains in private hands and largely inaccessible.
The building that witnessed some of the darkest moments of the occupation stands silent and decaying behind its walls. Today, the assassination site in Prague has been transformed into a memorial, marked by a nine-meter steel triangular prism supporting three figures with outstretched arms. The Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius, where the paratroopers made their final stand, houses an underground museum in the crypt where they died. The story of the estate at Panenské Břežany is, in the end, a story of layers.
It was a Jewish summer estate, then a Nazi stronghold, then a communist industrial facility, and now a crumbling monument to neglect. The same walls that sheltered artists and composers witnessed the planning of genocide. The same gardens that once bloomed with flowers became the site of a concentration camp.
Whatever its future, the estate will carry the weight of its history, a reminder that places, like people, cannot escape what has happened within their walls.