Hitler's and Heydrich's 1941 Plan to Destroy the Czech Nation

On the 23rd of September 1941, Adolf Hitler appointed General Reinhardt Heydrich the vice-protector in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich was officially named the Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia and took up residence at the Castle Hradcany in Prague. This was another dubious title he shared as the head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party intelligence service, a position awarded to him by Heinrich Himmler.

Hitler gave Heydrich his orders: "I have accepted your plan to destroy the Czech nation. Basically it will cover three points: the Germanization of as great a proportion of Czechs as possible; the deportation or extermination of those Czechs who cannot be absorbed and of the intelligentsia hostile to the Reich; and the resettlement of the space free by these measures with good German blood." Hitler added that any Czechs who were antagonistic toward the Reich, or if there were any question as to any Czech's racial purity, that their "category must be exterminated."

Heydrich wasted no time in carrying out Hitler's wishes. In October of 1941, Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich delivered a speech to Nazi provincial governors where he outlined Hitler's plan for the Czechs. Heydrich explained that he would begin a vast screening process to salvage Sudeten Germans and "for the others, those of inferior origin with hostile intentions, these people I must get rid of." And so began an eight month reign of terror, during which Czechs suspected as being hostile to the Reich and Czechs deemed of inferior racial quality were murdered. The operation was known as Aktion Reinhardt. The Czechs gave Heydrich the name "The Butcher." He would later be known as the chief architect of the "final solution."

At the request of the Czech government-in-exile, the Allies' Joint Intelligence Committee authorized an assassination mission. Everyone involved in the assassination plan knew that the murder of one of the most powerful men in the Nazi regime would cause great retaliation on all who were involved. MI6 head Menzies thought the risk worth taking. If Heydrich were eliminated, Admiral Canaris, head of the German Army intelligence and a member of the Black Orchestra, could retain his position and continue to secretly plot against Hitler. There were many British intelligence agents who wished to plot against Canaris, but Menzies knew that Canaris would be more valuable alive than dead.

Operation Anthropoids

Two Czech resistant fighters, Jans Kubis and Joseph Gabcik, were trained in England to fly to Prague and kill Heydrich. The operation was known as "Anthropoids." A team of commandos, including Kubis and Gabcik, parachuted into Czechoslovakia in early 1942. Gabcik had been trained by the British to assemble and disassemble a Sten gun quickly for the operation. In his Prague hideout he continued to practice the efficient assembly and disassembly of the automatic weapon. Kubis had paratrooped with another weapon provided by the British - a disassembled bomb. Both of the men's weapons would be concealed in a briefcase.

Heydrich established an office in the Prague Hradcany Castle. Kubis and Gabcik became familiar with resistance workers within the castle. In May of 1942 they learned that Heydrich was planning on leaving Prague for a considerable time, possibly not to return. Kubis and Gabcik had been working on the operation for five months and intended to quickly conclude it.

They began to monitor Heydrich's actions carefully. On May 23 a watchmaker, Josef Novotny, was called into Heydrich's office to repair an antique clock. Novotny noticed a document on Heydrich's desk that detailed his complete schedule for May 27, which included his departure from Prague that afternoon. While Heydrich was away from the office, Novotny took the paper from the desk, crumpled it, and threw it in a wastebasket. When he left Heydrich's office he had another resistance worker empty the wastebasket, and soon the paper was in Kubis and Gabcik's hands.

On the morning of May 27, 1942 Kubis and Gabcik positioned themselves beside a road in the district of Prague called Liben. They had biked to their chosen spot with their briefcases filled with two bombs and the automatic Sten gun. Heydrich's car would use the road. They positioned themselves after a curve in the road where the car would be forced to decelerate. Beneath Gabcik's raincoat he hid the gun. They had four other confederates who would help: two other gunmen were positioned at another part of the road, a man with a mirror who would signal when the car was to arrive, and Gabcik's girlfriend, Rela Fafek.

Fafek would drive a car ahead of Heydrich's limousine that was driven by his chauffeur. It was a pleasant day and the top was down on the car, which made it easy to see if Heydrich was in the vehicle. If Heydrich was unescorted by SS troops, as usual, she would wear a hat and the attack would go on. At 10:30 a.m. Fafek appeared in her car, and she drove around the curve in the road wearing a hat.

Gabcik stepped into the road and raised his gun. The gun jammed, either from grass stuck in the breech or Gabcik's forgetting to release the safety. Kubis threw a bomb near the car just as Heydrich and his chauffeur shot Gabcik with pistols. The bomb exploded next to the car. Heydrich stumbled from the car and collapsed. Both Gabcik and Kubis were injured from bullets and the effects of the explosion, but they were able to escape. Heydrich's injuries were first thought to be of a minor nature, but the explosion had broken his back and he died several days later.

The SS publicly displayed the briefcases and bicycles of the assassins demanding to know their identity. One hundred thousand crowns were offered for the capture of Kubis and Gabcik. Eventually the sum was raised to ten million crowns. Karel Caruda, one of the paratroopers and original commandos of the mission, informed the SS that resistance fighters were hiding in a Prague church. He was eventually awarded half of the reward money. After the war he was tried by a Czech court and hanged for treason.

Immediately following Heydrich's funeral Hitler ordered reprisals for the assassination. Earlier he had told Heydrich's assistance Colonel K. H. Frank to execute ten thousand Czechs. But Frank argued that this would play into the hands of their enemies, who would say that the actions of the Czech Resistance came from the will of the entire Czech nation. Hitler reluctantly agreed but nevertheless ordered the SS to execute 1331 Czechs, including 201 women.

Kubis and Gabcik hid in the Karl Borromaeus Church. The SS surrounded the church knowing that scores of resistance fighters were hiding there. The SS tried to smoke them out of the basement. They fought for several hours and tried in vain to escape from the basement into a nearby sewer line. All 120 men in the church were killed or committed suicide. The SS was never completely sure that the two assassins were in the church.

The Tragedy of Lidice

To avenge the loss of their leader the SS had 3000 Jews removed from the Theresienstadt ghetto and shipped to concentration camps where they were immediately murdered. Himmler arrested 500 of the few remaining Jews in Berlin on the day of Heydrich's attack and had 152 executed on the day Heydrich died.

Not to be out done by Himmler, Hitler's wrath would be focused on the mining village of Lidice outside Prague, a town that was accused wrongly of sheltering the conspirators. Hitler ordered his SS to murder all the occupants of the village and destroy all the buildings. This was only the beginning of a string of villages he destroyed throughout Eastern Europe in the following months for a variety of reasons.

On the night of June 9, 1942, ten truck loads of SS troops gathered the citizens of Lidice and grouped them by age and sex. The next day all men and boys over sixteen were housed in the mayor of Lidice's barns and stables. From dawn until late afternoon 172 men and boys, and seven women were herded into a garden and shot in groups of ten. The town was burned and dynamited.

Of the nearly 200 remaining women, most were transported to concentration camps where many died. Four were pregnant and taken to hospitals in Prague where their new-born infants were murdered. The mothers were sent to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. Of the ninety children of Lidice, most were sent to the Gneisenau camp where they died of ill-treatment. A very few were taken into German homes and raised under German names. It is believed that only three children survived, and one, Jaroslav Tichy, who was six years old on the day his father was shot, was taken into a German home because of his "German looks" of blond hair and blue eyes. He was the only Lidice child to be re-united with a parent. In 1965 he wrote "Only in 1947 the Czech authorities traced me and so I returned home two years after the war. . . Nothing is left of our village but the plains and grass. It was sad when I went over the meadow. Up there our school used to be, and further ahead was the village square, and the church and our houses. All that has disappeared. My mother and I met again. She recognized me by three scars which I had from childhood on my breast."

Eventually the SS found the names of the core members of the plot. Anyone expected to be part of the resistance or to have any connection to the paratroopers, if even a similar name, were taken into SS custody. Sometimes only distant relatives to members of the resistance were shot. A distant relative of a paratrooper was rounded up in a mass arrest and told this story: "Hell cannot be worse. We shivered with cold and hunger as we stood in the courtyard of the Theresienstadt Little Fortress, beaten, full of lice, in rags. . . Only Gabcik's family survived because they lived in Slovakia, a Fascist puppet state since 1939, which did not fall under German jurisdiction. His father and relatives lived to see the liberation in 1945."

Bibliography:

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Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, Simon and Schuster, 1950.
Snyder, Louis L. Hitler's Elite, Berkley, 1989.
Wiener, Jan. The Assassination of Heydrich, Grossman, NY, 1969.