On the morning of May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, was traveling through Prague in an open convertible Mercedes. He had become so confident in his pacification of the Czech lands that he had disregarded all security precautions. Two Czechoslovak paratroopers, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, waited for his car along a sharp curve in the road. As the vehicle slowed, Kubiš rolled a hand grenade toward the rear wheel.
The explosion tore into Heydrich’s back and lower body. Bleeding and screaming in pain, the man who had become the chief architect of the Nazi genocide was rushed to a hospital. He seemed not to be mortally wounded, but the grenade fragments had driven infection deep into his tissue. Because the attending physicians ignored a recommendation to treat him with an early antibiotic, the wound festered.
On June 4, 1942, at the age of thirty-eight, Reinhard Heydrich died. Hitler reacted with fury. He demanded the murder of up to ten thousand Czechs as revenge. Only the intervention of Karl Hermann Frank, the Higher SS and Police Leader in the protectorate, who argued that such reprisals would ruin long-term economic and political plans for the region, persuaded Hitler to scale back his demands.
But a more particular vengeance had already been shaped. During the early days of the investigation into the assassination, the SS had discovered a love letter that indirectly pointed to the village of Lidice. Although there was no real evidence connecting the town’s inhabitants to the attack, this slender pretext was enough. On June 9, the day of Heydrich’s state funeral in Berlin, Hitler ordered the annihilation of Lidice.
That same day, German forces surrounded the village. All 192 men and boys were shot and buried in a common grave. The 60 women were sent to concentration camps. The 88 children were murdered in gas vans at the Chełmno extermination camp, while four pregnant women were forced to undergo abortions in the very hospital where Heydrich had died.
The road to that moment had begun decades earlier. Heydrich was born on March 7, 1904, in Halle, then part of the German Empire. His father, Bruno Heydrich, was an opera singer and the founder of the Halle Conservatory of Music, and the family, part of a Catholic minority in the city, maintained cordial relations with the local Jewish community. Young Reinhard was a talented swimmer and fencer, but he was shy and insecure, bullied for his high-pitched voice and for rumors of Jewish ancestry.
The economic collapse of the family’s music school during and after World War I coincided with the revolutionary chaos that swept Germany, and the teenage Heydrich was drawn to racist nationalism. In the spring of 1922, instead of pursuing the musical career his father hoped for, Heydrich enlisted in the German Navy. As a naval cadet at Kiel, he found the financial security his family had lost, but his unpleasant laugh earned him the nickname “the goat,” and many of his fellow cadets falsely regarded him as Jewish. A gifted signals officer, he was ambitious, arrogant, and known for his pursuit of women.
In the spring of 1931, a military court of honor found that he had dishonored the officer corps after he jilted the daughter of a senior naval officer and compelled him to resign his commission. He received a small severance and was cast adrift. That same year, he married Lina von Osten, a fanatical Nazi whose antisemitism reinforced his own. Through her connections, he came to the attention of Heinrich Himmler, who in 1931 was building an internal intelligence service for the Nazi Party.
Himmler had actually canceled their interview, but Lina ignored the cancellation, packed her husband’s suitcase, and sent him to Munich. Himmler, impressed by Heydrich’s appearance and bearing, brought him into the SS and assigned him to develop the security service known as the SD. By January 1933, the SD had become the Nazi Party’s most significant intelligence agency. After Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933, Heydrich’s rise accelerated.
When Himmler was appointed commander of the Bavarian political police that April, Heydrich became his deputy, and together they centralized Germany’s political police departments into the Gestapo, the secret state police. After the purge of the SA leadership in the summer of 1934, the SS became independent, and Heydrich took direct command of the Gestapo while remaining chief of the SD. In June 1936, Himmler appointed him chief of the newly established Security Police Main Office, which merged the Gestapo and the criminal police into a single agency. By the time of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Heydrich helped organize and for which he received a decoration, he and Himmler had become two of the most powerful men in the internal administration of Nazi Germany.
The regime’s growing persecution of the Jews provided Heydrich with his most infamous role. On the night of November 9–10, 1938, the SA, SS, Hitler Youth, and German civilians destroyed Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues, hospitals, and schools across Germany, annexed Austria, and areas of the Sudetenland recently occupied by German troops. Ninety-one Jews were murdered, and nearly thirty thousand Jewish men were sent to concentration camps. The event came to be called Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, a euphemism that disguised the full brutality of what occurred.
Immediately afterward, Nazi officials imposed a fine of one billion Reichsmarks on the German Jewish community on the grounds that the Jews themselves were responsible for the riots. Kristallnacht marked the shift from legal persecution to open, violent aggression. Heydrich was one of its main organizers, issuing orders that police should arrest as many Jews as local jails could hold, preferably young, healthy men. A year later, the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of Poland brought Heydrich into direct control of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads of the SS and SD that followed the German army into newly conquered territory.
These units identified and neutralized enemies of German rule, seized important sites, recruited collaborators, and, together with the order police and local collaborators, shot thousands of Jews and tens of thousands of members of the Polish elite. With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the scale of their mass murder vastly increased. Under the cover of war, the Einsatzgruppen and allied units shot more than half a million people, the vast majority of them Jews, in the first nine months of the campaign. In the end, at least 1.
5 million, and possibly more than two million, Holocaust victims died in mass shootings or gas vans on Soviet territory. Heydrich was the man who created these killing units and bore direct responsibility for them. In September 1939, Heydrich had become chief of the Reich Security Main Office, an SS and police agency created shortly after the invasion of Poland. This brutal institution coordinated many aspects of the Holocaust.
Impressed by Heydrich’s dynamic leadership, Hermann Göring authorized him in July 1941 to coordinate the resources of the Reich for a total solution of the Jewish question in the areas of German influence in Europe. Six months later, on January 20, 1942, Heydrich called key officials from various Reich ministries to a villa on the Wannsee, on the southwestern edge of Berlin. At this Wannsee Conference, he announced that Hitler had authorized the physical annihilation of the European Jews and had designated the Reich Security Main Office to coordinate the policy. None of the officials present objected; they discussed only the implementation of a decision already made at the highest level of the regime.
That spring, Heydrich was also serving as acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, a post he had received after Hitler dismissed his predecessor for being too lenient toward the Czechs. When Heydrich arrived in Prague in September 1941, he launched a wave of terror. The protectorate’s special courts sentenced hundreds to death, and he established the Theresienstadt ghetto, which served as a transit camp for Jews on their way to extermination camps while being presented to the outside world as a model settlement. Of the roughly 140,000 Jews sent there, nearly ninety thousand were deported to the east and almost certain death, and roughly thirty-three thousand died within the ghetto itself.
At the same time, Heydrich was shrewd enough to pacify Czech workers and farmers by raising their wages and benefits to match those of their German counterparts. Within six months, acts of sabotage fell by 73 percent, and the German authorities could boast of a pacified protectorate. This success bred the overconfidence that cost Heydrich his life. After his death, Hitler gave Heydrich’s widow the castle at Panenské Břežany, north of Prague, where she set up a miniature labor camp of around 150 prisoners who worked for her in poor conditions.
One of her children died in a traffic accident in the castle courtyard in October 1943, and the family fled the area in April 1945 before the advancing Red Army. The Reich Security Main Office Heydrich had led and the “Final Solution” he had launched proved dreadfully effective. Between 1941 and 1945, the Germans and their allies murdered six million Jews. The operation that killed 1.
7 million of them in the killing centers of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka was named Operation Reinhard, in honor of the man the Nazis themselves considered the most ruthless practitioner of mass murder.