During World War II, Nazi Germany massacred a total of 6 million Jews, about a third of the world's Jews. This needs to be blamed on Hitler's frenzied anti-Semitism on the one hand, and on the other on the right and left arm in carrying out Hitler's murderous plans: heinrich Himmler and Rhinehard Heydrich. The former committed suicide by poisoning himself to avoid court trial after World War II, and heydrich died in 1942 by an Allied assassination – so why did Heydrich, known as the "murderous demon", eventually die as a suicide? How did his death affect the course of World War II? If you are interested in this topic, please help "press the 2-second like button" to give a strong thumbs up. And "pay attention" to it, often come later, and don't get lost.
(Rhinehard Heydrich)
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="4" > have Jewish ancestry, why should they be Hitler's Eagle Dogs</h1>
Throughout rhinehard Heydrich's life, we can find that he has many nicknames: "The Murderous Devil Who Kills Without Blinking", "The Blonde Beast", "The Nazi Decapitator", "The Follower of Death" and so on... Behind each of these nicknames, there is the blood of countless Jewish people. What is less well known, however, is that recent historians have found that Rhinehard Heydrich's ancestors were of Jewish descent. So why did Rhinehard Heydrich, who had Jewish blood, become Hitler's eagle dog in World War II?
This begins with Heydrich's family education: Reinhard Heydrich was born into a family of musical arts, and his father Bruno was a singer and composer who composed folk songs. From an early age, Heydrich was instilled by his father a strong nationalist ideology of "Germanic supremacy". After the First World War, Germany was defeated, socio-economically depressed, and the political situation was turbulent, and Heydrich's father had difficulty supporting his family. Rhinehard Heydrich also had to terminate his studies due to family financial problems and instead join the army as a soldier. In military life, the reluctance of soldiers to be defeated and the hatred of the Jewish people further affected Heydrich, which eventually led him to a road of no return such as defecting to the Nazis.
In 1931 Heydrich officially joined the Nazi Party and took up a position in the SS. Because of his active anti-Semitic work, he was soon appreciated by another Nazi executioner, Himmler, and promoted him to his deputy. After entering the Nazi hierarchy, Heydrich became Hitler's "right hand man" together with Himmler, and he helped Hitler complete the launch of the Night of the Long Knife, the formation of the Gestapo, and the intelligence activities against the Soviet Union, and gradually became trusted by Hitler. Although there were still rumors of Heydrich's Jewish origin during this period, after several "rumors" by himself and Hitler's unique trust in him, the matter was finally closed.
With the connivance of anglo-French appeasement policy, Nazi Germany first annexed the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, and then sent troops to occupy all of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, making Czechoslovakia one of the earliest "occupied areas" in Europe at that time. However, the Czechoslovak people did not give up their resistance. After Britain and France formally declared war on Germany on September 1, 1939, the resistance movement in Czechoslovakia flourished, and Heydrich once called it "a knife inserted in Germany's back." In 1941, when Germany was completing its conquest of most of Europe, Heydrich criticized the former German governor of Czechoslovakia (known in Germany as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) for being too weak in dealing with the resistance, and he asked Hitler to express his willingness to become deputy governor of Czechoslovakia, and Hitler granted his request. Rhinehard Heydrich thus took office on 27 September 1941 and took Hitler's rear.
When Rhinehard Heydrich arrived, he put forward the slogan of "Germanizing the Czechs", and he once said: "We will completely Germanize the Czechs so that the Czechs will never get anything more." Under his slogan, by February 1942, 4,000 to 5,000 people had been arrested, and the executed were even more difficult to count, and the underground intelligence networks of the Soviet Union and Britain and the United States had suffered serious losses. Between April and November 1942, 79,000 adult Czech laborers were transported to Nazi Germany for up to 12 hours a day, earning Rhinehard Heydrich another nickname: Prague (Prague is the capital of Czechoslovakia).
But what neither Hitler nor Rheinhard Heydrich may have imagined was that Rheinhard Heydrich, known as the "butcher of Prague," would eventually end his sinful life in the city of Prague.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="8" > assassination operations were full of twists and turns, and the poisonous bombs played a miraculous role at key moments</h1>
Heydrich's indiscriminate killing of innocents and wanton conquests in Czechoslovakia had reached the point of common indignation, and in order to protect Czechoslovakia's intelligence network from being destroyed and to strike at Hitler's intelligence secret service system, Britain, in conjunction with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, decided to formally carry out the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, code-named "Apes", which was perhaps the best summary of Heydrich's inhuman acts in Czechoslovakia.
The assassination mission was carried out by a seven-man action team led by Czech Army Warrant Officer Joseph Gabosek and Sergeant Jane Kubis, who had been carrying British Halifax bombers in the suburbs near Prague, Czechoslovakia, as early as December 1941, ready to carry out the assassination of Rhinehard Heydrich. The initial assassinations were planned on a special train for Heydrich or on his office bus in Prague. However, after many observations by the assassination team, it was found that Heydrich, who had been doing intelligence and espionage work for a long time, was very cautious in his life, and the special train trains he took were often heavily guarded, and the trains and rails would be specially inspected before the train started. And Heydrich's office car is often out of personal safety considerations, but does not set a fixed driving route, which undoubtedly greatly increases the difficulty of the assassination team to carry out the task.
What really opened the door for the assassination team was a civilian who was engaged in the resistance in Czechoslovakia, who, as a watchmaker, sneaked into Rhinehard Heydrich's residence in May 1942 and learned of Heydrich's driving route from a suburban villa to Prague on the 27th. After learning of the intelligence, the assassination team decided to ambush Heydrich at a tram stop near Broca Hospital – as the intelligence stated, Heydrich was the only one on the way to Prague and his driver, SS Sergeant Klein. The main person in charge of the operation, Gabosek, saw that the open-top vehicle was approaching him, and suddenly appeared, pulled out the Stern submachine gun hidden in his coat, and tried to turn out Heydrich - but the submachine gun at that time jammed!
Seeing that Gabsek's gun was stuck, Heydrich, instead of running away, asked his subordinate Klein to stop the vehicle and pull out his gun to fight back against Gabsek. Kubiz, who was lurking on the other side, saw that the situation was critical and pulled out an anti-Tan grenade and threw it at Heydrich's car, causing Heydrich to be injured. But heydrich, still unwilling to let go of Gabsek, took a pistol and Klein to pursue Gabosek and Kubitz: perhaps to Heydrich's anger, he had been playing for the tiger in Prague for many years, and the butcher's name was well known, and now there were people who dared to rebel against him! However, as Heydrich's injuries became more apparent, he gave up the pursuit of the assassination team. The assassination team also saw that Heydrich was not killed on the spot, so they judged that the assassination failed and began to prepare for escape.
(Heydrich's damaged car)
However, none of the members of the assassination team imagined the final power of the anti-Tan grenade: according to the book Advanced Killing: A Secret History of Biological and Chemical Weapons, the grenade thrown at Heydrich contained human botulinum toxin, which British biological warfare experts called X-bomb. After being shot, Heydrich was taken to the nearby Broca Hospital and treated by the best doctors at the time, Heydrich fell into a high fever and coma after the 7th, and was pronounced dead by the hospital on June 4.
However, Heydrich's death did not represent the end of everything. After the assassination of Heydrich, the members of the assassination team still in Czechoslovakia began to flee the Nazis, and it was Czechoslovak civilians who took the risk of taking them in. Among them, Bishop Gorazed of the Orthodox Church of St. Zililu and St. Meddotius sheltered a large number of members of the group involved in the assassination until one of the panelists, Carlisle Da, was arrested.
Tempted by a hefty German prize of 1 million Reichsmarks, the group member eventually chose to defect and gave up the group's hiding place and the Czechoslovak family that sheltered them. With information provided by the traitors, the German Gestapo arrested a large number of civilians who had received the assassination team, including Mrs. Moravec, who was allegedly the same person who had infiltrated Heydrich's residence disguised as a watchmaker and provided intelligence to the assassination team. But when the Gestapo arrived at her house, she had committed suicide by poisoning herself to keep the secret, but even then the Gestapo cut off her head and threatened her son Atta to ask for information.
After learning the hiding place of the assassination operation team, more than 700 German soldiers quickly surrounded the church and surrounded and suppressed the assassination team of Geiserberg and others, the most Geiserberg led 7 people to negotiate with more than 700 German troops for 2 hours, and finally 7 people died heroically in the church - according to local people, the German army not only used heavy weapons such as machine guns, but also used smoke and fire water trucks to force the assassination team to surrender, but the assassination team chose to be generous. The priest Who provided shelter to the assassination team, Bishop Gorazd, was not spared, and the bishop was canonized as a saint after the war.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track = "15" > Hitler carried out a frenzied revenge after the war, and a village of people was buried with Heydrich</h1>
Upon learning of Heydrich's death, Hitler was furious. On his orders, the local Germans in the Czech Republic carried out an unprecedented massacre in the village of Lidice on June 9, 1942, claiming that it was to avenge "Heydrich", because Hitler suspected that the small village was likely to be the stronghold of the assassination team in the first place. Under the butcher's knife of the Nazis, a total of 199 men were killed in the village, 195 women and 95 young children were arrested, except for 8 young children who were taken in by German families for "blonde hair and blue eyes", most of the other children were killed in the end, and it is in honor of the children who suffered in the war that International has designated June 1 as "Children's Day".
After Heydrich's death, Hitler's retaliation against the local people was something the Allies could not have predicted, and Churchill, after hearing of Hitler's massacre in the village of Lidice, indignantly said: "Every time the Germans inflict atrocities on a czech village, the future Allies will repay it in three times the number." Later, precisely because of the fact that the death of the Nazi high-rankings could lead to larger-scale retaliation, the Allies rarely carried out targeted assassinations of the Nazi high-rankings in the two years after Operation Apes. But it is undeniable that this "operation of the great apes" shook Nazi rule in Czechoslovakia by eliminating Heydrich, and also inspired the morale of the people in the occupied areas of Europe at that time to resist Nazi atrocities.
Although the atrocities of the Nazis were once frightening, it was precisely because of its injustice that failure was its inevitable fate. After the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany and the restoration of Czechoslovakia, the heroes who participated in the operation and the children who suffered were commemorated in various forms, and Carlisle Dada, who betrayed the movement team at that time, was finally arrested in 1947 and sentenced to death for "treason".
If the heavens are full of love and the heavens are old, the right way in the world is vicissitudes. Those who have given and dedicated their lives to the people have finally received the evaluation they deserve. And those traitors who seek glory for themselves and betray the interests of the nation, although they were once able to escape the butcher's knife of the enemy army, they could not escape the people's judgment in the end.