On the morning of May 27, 1942, a green Mercedes convertible carrying Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, rounded a sharp hairpin turn in the Prague suburb of Libeň. Heydrich, one of the most feared men in Nazi-occupied Europe and the chief organizer of the Holocaust, rode without an armed escort, a gesture of arrogance he would not survive. As the car slowed for the curve, a Czech-trained paratrooper named Jozef Gabčík stepped into the road and raised his Sten submachine gun, but the weapon jammed. For a fatal instant, both men froze.
Heydrich, instead of ordering his driver to accelerate, stood up in the open car and drew his pistol, ordering the vehicle to stop. In that moment, Gabčík’s comrade, Jan Kubiš, hurled a modified anti-tank grenade at the car. The bomb exploded against the rear wheel, driving shrapnel, upholstery leather, and horsehair into Heydrich’s body. The attackers escaped.
Heydrich collapsed from blood loss shortly after chasing Gabčík on foot. The estate Heydrich left behind that morning, the lower castle at Panenské Březany, had a history as layered and dark as the man himself. The village, whose name derives from the Czech word for virgin, traced its origins to 1233, when Benedictine nuns of St. George’s Convent at Prague Castle first owned the land.
In the early 18th century, the abbess of the convent built a Baroque palace on the site of an earlier fortress, known as the upper castle, and commissioned a chapel dedicated to St. Anne from the celebrated Baroque architect Jan Santini Aichel. The convent was dissolved by Emperor Joseph II in the late 18th century, and the estate passed through private hands. In 1901, after a German-speaking nobleman named Matias von Riese-Stallburg fell into debt, the property fell to the Prague Credit Bank.
Then came Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Born in 1864 into a Jewish family that had built its fortune in the sugar industry, Bloch-Bauer was among the wealthiest industrialists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1909, he bought the entire Panenské Březany estate as a summer residence. He and his wife Adele, whom he married in 1899, transformed the lower castle into a haven of culture.
He renovated the interiors, commissioned fine furnishings, filled the rooms with art, established an elementary school for village children, and became a benevolent landlord to the local farmers. Adele Bloch-Bauer was no ordinary society hostess. Her Viennese salon drew celebrated figures, including composer Gustav Mahler, author Stefan Zweig, and the symbolist painter Gustav Klimt. Between 1903 and 1907, Klimt worked on a commission from Ferdinand: a portrait of Adele that became one of the most recognizable paintings of the twentieth century, known today as Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer or The Woman in Gold.
The painting, depicting Adele against a shimmering golden background, marked the culmination of Klimt’s golden phase. Adele died of meningitis in 1925 at age 43. Her death devastated Ferdinand, who never remarried. Though her will expressed a wish that Ferdinand donate the Klimt paintings to the Austrian State Gallery, the portraits legally belonged to him, and he kept them in the family, displayed in Adele’s former bedroom in Vienna as a private shrine.
The rise of fascism darkened central Europe. After the Anschluss of March 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Ferdinand fled Vienna, stayed briefly at the lower castle, then escaped to Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life in exile. He left behind everything. 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 entered Austrian state collections. The jeweled choker Adele wore in Klimt’s portrait, a wedding gift from Ferdinand, was reportedly sent to Hermann Göring as a present for his wife. Within months of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the Gestapo confiscated the Panenské Březany estate under the policy of Aryanization, the systematic theft of Jewish property.
The upper castle, sold to Friedrich Gerstel in 1921, suffered the same fate. Gerstel, a prominent Jewish furniture manufacturer, had transformed the Baroque building into a showroom and built an elaborate pseudo-Baroque garden. He fled to the United States in March 1939, just as the Nazis arrived. The first Nazi occupant of the lower castle was Konstantin von Neurath, appointed Reich Protector in March 1939.
By September 1941, Hitler had grown dissatisfied with von Neurath’s approach, believing him too lenient, and replaced him with a far more ruthless figure: Reinhard Heydrich. Born in 1904, Heydrich had been dismissed from the German Navy in 1931 after a scandal, then found a new career in Heinrich Himmler’s SS. By 1939, he headed the Reich Security Main Office, controlling the Gestapo, criminal police, and security service. He had helped organize Kristallnacht, coordinated the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units that murdered hundreds of thousands in Poland and the Soviet Union, and in January 1942 chaired the Wannsee Conference, where senior Nazi officials formalized plans for the systematic murder of eleven million European Jews.
When the death camps at Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec began operations that year, the murder program was named Aktion Reinhard in his honor. Heydrich moved into the lower castle with his wife Lina and their three children at the turn of 1941 into 1942. Their neighbor in the upper castle was Karl Hermann Frank, the Higher SS and Police Leader, a man who bore enormous responsibility for the terror inflicted on the Czech people. Every morning, Heydrich’s chauffeur drove him the roughly fourteen kilometers from Panenské Březany to his headquarters at Prague Castle, without an armed escort.
He believed visible security would be a sign of weakness, an admission that the Czechs posed a genuine threat. It was a miscalculation that would cost him his life. Heydrich’s rule combined terror and manipulation. Within days of his arrival, he declared martial law and ordered mass executions.
According to his own estimates, between four and five thousand Czechs were arrested in the first months, and between four and five hundred were executed. At the same time, he sought to pacify Czech industrial workers by improving their rations and working conditions, distributing shoes and cigarettes, and establishing recreation facilities. He spoke openly about his plans: those who could be Germanized would be absorbed into the Reich; those who could not would be eliminated. The Czechs called him the Butcher of Prague.
The Czechoslovak government in exile in London decided he had to die. In October 1941, František Moravec, head of Czechoslovak military intelligence in London, approached the British Special Operations Executive with a proposal for a mission to assassinate the acting Reich Protector. The British agreed, and Operation Anthropoid was born. Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, both veterans of the Czechoslovak army in exile, trained in Scotland in parachuting, demolitions, and small arms.
On the night of December 28, 1941, they were dropped into occupied Czechoslovakia, landing near Prague rather than their intended drop zone. After weeks of reconnaissance, they chose the hairpin turn near Bulovka Hospital in Libeň, where the curve would force Heydrich’s car to slow down. The aftermath of the attack was savage. Heydrich was transported to Bulovka Hospital, where surgeons found his spleen ruptured and fragments of metal, leather, and horsehair embedded in his wounds.
He appeared to improve, but on June 3 he fell into a coma, and early the following day he died of sepsis. He was thirty-eight years old. Hitler attended his second funeral in Berlin, though privately he blamed Heydrich for his own death, calling his decision to ride in an open car damned stupidity. The Nazi response was catastrophic.
On June 10, 1942, the village of Lidice was surrounded. All men and boys over fourteen, 172 people, were shot. The women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and the children were either murdered at the Chełmno extermination camp or dispersed to German families. The village was burned and bulldozed, even the cemetery destroyed.
Two weeks later, the village of Ležáky suffered a similar fate after a resistance radio transmitter was discovered there. In total, more than thirteen thousand people were arrested in the reprisals and approximately five thousand were killed. Gabčík, Kubiš, and five other paratroopers hid for three weeks in the crypt of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague. On June 16, 1942, a resistance member named Karel Čurda betrayed them for one million Reichsmarks.
On June 18, more than seven hundred German soldiers surrounded the church. After hours of fighting, the four surviving paratroopers turned their pistols on themselves rather than be captured. At Panenské Březany, Lina Heydrich remained in the lower castle with her children. In April 1943, Hitler issued a special decree granting the estate to her family in perpetuity.
In September 1942, Jewish prisoners from the Theresienstadt ghetto were assigned to work at the estate, building one of the smallest satellite camps of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Lina administered the estate with an iron hand, demanding villagers give the Hitler salute or face whippings. Staff called her Heydricha among themselves. One servant, Helena Vovsová, secretly smuggled food and letters to the Jewish prisoners, an act of extraordinary courage.
In October 1943, tragedy struck the family again when Heydrich’s eldest son Klaus was struck by a truck while cycling in the courtyard and died at age ten. He was buried in the garden, a grave that would later complicate the property’s history. By early 1945, the war was lost for Germany. On April 18, 1945, Lina gathered her children and fled, slaughtering the estate’s rabbits, geese, and chickens to take meat for the journey.
She promised the household staff pensions, believing she would return. She never did. She lived until 1985, defending her husband’s reputation to the end and successfully suing the West German government for a pension as the widow of a police general killed in action. Soviet forces arrived at Panenské Březany in May 1945.
The upper castle was briefly used as an internment camp for German women, and the lower castle became a Red Army headquarters until October. The Czechoslovak government then took control. Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer died in Zurich on November 13, 1945, just months after the liberation, leaving his estate to his nephew and two nieces. But the communist government that took power in February 1948 absorbed the properties into state hands, ignoring the family’s claim and paying no compensation.
Czech restitution laws enacted after 1989 required claimants to be Czech citizens, and Ferdinand’s niece Maria Altmann, who would later win a famous legal battle over the Klimt paintings, did not qualify. The two castles followed different paths. The upper castle became a retirement home in 1957, and in 2012 the regional museum acquired it, converting it into the Memorial of National Oppression and Resistance, open to the public with an interactive exhibition on the Nazi occupation and Operation Anthropoid. The lower castle became the headquarters of a state precious metals research institute, whose industrial laboratories surrounded the elegant neoclassical building, subjecting its interiors to decades of neglect.
The Institute was privatized after 1989, went bankrupt, and by the mid-1990s the lower castle stood empty and abandoned. For nearly twenty-five years, mold infected the cellars, tiles fell from walls, and the manicured gardens became a jungle of weeds. In May 2019, the property was auctioned off as part of the bankrupt company’s settlement. An anonymous buyer paid 39 million Czech koruna, approximately $1.
7 million, for the sixteen-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, and the future of the estate remained uncertain. The assassination site in Prague has been marked by a monument since 2009, and the crypt where the paratroopers died now houses an underground museum.
The story of Heydrich’s villa is a story of layers: a Jewish summer estate, a Nazi stronghold, 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 became the site of a concentration camp.
What becomes of the lower castle remains an open question, but it will carry the weight of its history, a place that, like the people who passed through it, cannot escape what happened within its walls.