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‘Protector’ of Prague.

One of the most important men in Hitler’s wartime intelligence network was Reinhard Heydrich, the infamous ‘Protector’ of Prague. Heydrich was the chief architect of ‘The Final Solution’ – the mass extermination of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ in all nations captured by the German military advance through Europe between 1939 and 1942. In September 1941, Heydrich was also tasked with the ‘Germanisation’ of the Czech population in Prague when he began his posting as the unofficial dictator of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

Born in Halle, near Leipzig on 7 March 1904, Reinhard Tristram Eugen Heydrich was second in importance only to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS organization. Nicknamed ‘The Blond Beast’ by his henchmen, and ‘Hangman Heydrich’ by others, Heydrich had an insatiable greed for power and was a cold, calculating manipulator seemingly devoid of compassion. The Heydrich family was an intellectual and musical one. His father, a Wagnerian opera singer, founded the Halle Conservatory of Music and his mother was an accomplished pianist. Young Heydrich trained seriously as a violinist, developing an expert skill and a lifelong passion for the instrument. A tireless workaholic, his only other leisure activity was womanizing.

Though rumored to have Jewish ancestry, he was passionately anti-Semitic and joined the fanatical Freikorps as a teenager. Like many Germans at the time, Heydrich was also influenced by the racial fanaticism of the German Volk movement and its belief in the supremacy of the blond haired, blue-eyed Germanic race that he epitomized. He joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and with Himmler founded the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) intelligence-gathering organization that enabled the Nazis to spy on each other. On 30 June 1934, he was one of many SS men who executed around 400 SA ‘Brownshirts’ and their homosexual leader Ernst Rohm in what became known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’. This act of mass murder gave Himmler’s SS organization ultimate power in Germany. On 20 January 1942, Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference in Berlin where he and fifteen other top Nazi bureaucrats coordinated the ‘Final Solution’: a plan to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe; an estimated figure of 11 million people. These men sat and calmly discussed the logistics of genocide as if they were solving all the problems of the Third Reich.

British intelligence services began to plot the assassination of Heydrich in 1941. Nine selected men went through a rigorous training program although they were not at first told who the target was. ‘Operation Heydrich’ was kept on a ‘need to know’ basis. Finally two local Czechs, Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubris, were assigned to carry out the ‘hit’ on a remote road outside Prague on the morning of 27 May 1942. On 25 May, the assassins parachuted into Czechoslovakia near the village of Lidice, and were then smuggled into the capital city.

Two days later, they waited by a roadside to carry out their assignment. Gabcik had a British-made Sten gun hidden under a coat he carried, and Kubris carried a grenade in the deep poacher’s pocket of his jacket. A hundred meters away on a hill towards the village of Jungfern-Breschen were two lookouts that would signal to the assassins when they spotted the open green Mercedes in which Heydrich rode to his office in the city every morning.

‘There was a steep hairpin bend where Gabcik and Kubris waited patiently. Streetcars (two trolleys hitched together and taking power from overhead cables), screeched agonizingly as they turned and German soldiers drilled in the woods nearby. The two lookouts, Emile Valcik and Libor Jemelik, had difficulty keeping each other in view; what with passing German military vehicles and the need to avoid attracting attention. This painful and tense wait continued for 55 minutes.

It was also dangerous, for at any moment some sharp-eyed German might well have wondered why four able-bodied Czech men were loitering by the roadside.

At 10.25am Gabcik heard four sharp whistles (‘H’ in Morse code). That was the signal they were waiting for. Moments later the target vehicle swept down the hill. Wolfgang Klein, the chauffeur, changed gears to take the sharp turn ahead. Behind him sat Reinhard Heydrich, in his black and silver trimmed SS uniform, shuffling through some official papers. Amazingly, he traveled without an escort; not even motorcycle outriders to clear the road ahead. Gabcik felt his heart rate soar. Unbelievably, they had been presented with a naked target. As the Mercedes came past, Gabcik dropped his coat, brought up the Sten, and squeezed the trigger, intending to put a ten-round burst into one of the most feared and hated men in Europe. Nothing happened. At this vital moment in history, his weapon had jammed. Heydrich looked up and saw the light machine gun pointed at him. He drew his Luger automatic pistol and shouted to his driver. Klein threw the Mercedes into a skid, and the car screeched to a stop across the tram tracks, causing trolleys to slide and stop, showering sparks. Seeing his companion desperately trying to clear the Sten, Kubris pulled the pin on his grenade and hurled it at the stalled car. Heydrich vaulted over the door and fired two shots at the Czechs before the grenade exploded by his side. The two assassins swiftly fled the scene. Heydrich staggered to the pavement, bleeding profusely from multiple injuries. Passengers from the trams climbed down, some panicked by the explosion and gunfire. “Fetch an ambulance!” shouted a woman, “It’s the protector!”

An hour later, Heydrich was delivered in a baker’s van to the Bulkova Hospital, where the medical director tried to reach Hradcany Castle, official HQ of The Protectorate and Heydrich’s family residence. Nobody there seemed to comprehend what had happened. The Protector was on his way to Berlin, the caller was told. No, there was no way that Secretary of State Dr Karl Frank would come to the telephone. He was far too busy to take a call from some sniveling Czech peasant.

“That’s too bad”, said the medical director, “tell Doctor Frank that we have the Oberguppenfuhrer here and that he is unlikely to live. He walked into a bomb, and he’s full of holes.” Frank was finally galvanized into action. A battalion of SS troops cleared out all other patients and surrounded the hospital with a ring of steel. Heydrich lingered on for a week, as surgeons and specialists worked on him, trying to remove the pieces of metal, wire, glass, leather and horsehair distributed by the exploding grenade. But inevitably, he died on the operating table on 3 June 1942. As expected, retribution was severe. Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) ordered “a stamping out of the whole canker at the heart of the Protectorate.” Heydrich’s body was flown to Berlin and the Fuehrer himself attended an elaborate funeral, where he gave one of his impassioned speeches. “He was one of the greatest defenders of our greater German concept,” he proclaimed to the massed gathering, “and he will be avenged!” A thousand Czech civilians were rounded up a day after the assassination attempt and imprisoned. Each evening at 6pm in Wenceslas Square, 100 of them were Ironically, the film of the revenge massacre at Lidice was excellent evidence for the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials after the war. On 30 September 1946, Dr Frank himself, the ‘Butcher of Lidice’ was convicted of this barbaric war crime. He went to the gallows on 16 October 1946 insisting that he had been merely “following orders.”

In 1950, a socialist member of the British Parliament questioned the wisdom of provoking such killers. Mr. Robert Paget, MP, challenged British Intelligence services on the concept of sending agents on missions that stung the Nazis into such bloody reprisals. These in turn created more civilian hatred against the Nazi occupying forces. “This was our general idea when we flew in trained agents to assassinate Heydrich,” Paget said. “The main Czech resistance movement was a direct consequence of´SS reprisals for the violent death of Reinhard Heydrich. But was it worth the loss of so many innocent lives?”

A man named Richard Pinder, who had been working undercover in Prague, came forward for the first time in public to answer the politician. “The killing of Heydrich was an act of justice that lightened our darkness and gave us hope,” he insisted. Pinder had been training guerrilla fighters in sabotage techniques in 1941 when he was caught up in a German drive to round up men for forced labor (known as slavery in earlier times).

Pinder’s fake papers made him out to be a French gardening expert. Dr Frank, as Deputy Protector of Czechoslovakia, had taken over the big estates of a once wealthy Jewish family and wanted a professional landscape gardener to look after the grounds. Pinder got the job, and was thereafter the silent witness to Frank’s career as a uniformed tyrant. “It is true that Dr Frank avenged Heydrich’s assassination in horrific fashion”, he said, “but in all occupied countries, the Nazis were liquidating whole communities once they had served their purpose. Czechoslovakia was very important to the German war machine. The local people fed the guns until it became their own turn to die. Hitler and his ruling cadre of psychopaths put vicious thugs into uniform and gave them official sanction to torture and kill. This was the stark reality of Nazi philosophy.”

Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) also joined in the debate. “The only way to mobilize popular support for secret armies of resistance fighters during the war was to stage such dramatic acts of terrorism against the German occupying forces,” he said.

Czech-Americans were also well aware of the sacrifice. In Stern Park Gardens, Illinois, and in Bohemia, Long Island, NY, local citizens voted to change the
names of their communities to ‘Lidice’ in memory of the innocents who had been so brutally murdered there. These civilians had died for the actions of four brave men who had waited by a road outside Prague one fine spring morning in May 1942.

(Research: ‘A man named Intrepid’ by William Stevenson, Sphere Books).

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