Rheinhard Heydrich was born in 1904 in Halle on the Saale to a very artistic family, but Heydrich's desire to become a soldier was that at the age of 18 he officially joined the German Navy. In April 1931, Heydrich was forcibly retired due to a relationship dispute.
Two months later, he defected to Heinrich Himmler and became a member of the headquarters of the SS National Leadership. From then on, Heydrich, with his superior intelligence, perseverance and cruel means, rose to prominence, and by the outbreak of World War II, he had become the leader of the SS, ranking only after Hitler, Goering and Himmler.
Himmler and Heydrich restructured the German secret police in the name of establishing a so-called "new order" in the newly occupied areas. In June 1938, all the secret police, including the Gestapo and the Criminal Police, were required to join the SS; after the beginning of World War II, Heydrich's power was further expanded, and all the police forces in Germany, including the Gestapo, the Criminal Police, and the SS Security Service, were controlled by him with the help of the Imperial Central Security Service. Nevertheless, he continued to compete for power with Wilhelm Franz Canaris, director of military intelligence, another important German intelligence agency.
Heydrich's contribution to Nazi Germany, with supreme power, was enormous. He once designed to frame Poland, put Polish uniforms on death row prisoners, and threw them on the border between Germany and Poland, slandering the Polish army for attacking Germany, and finding an excuse for Hitler to start a war.
In addition, he dealt a fatal blow to britain's intelligence system. At the beginning of World War II, Heydrich ordered the SS Security Service, under the name of the military intelligence bureau under the moderate Kanaris, to secretly contact the British secret intelligence service to discuss the so-called armistice between the two countries. This move not only nearly wiped out the Spy Network of the British Secret Intelligence Service in Europe, but also dealt a blow to his political rival Canaris. This shows Heydrich's cunning and viciousness.
Heydrich, like Hitler, was an extreme nationalist who held an anti-Semitic and anti-communist attitude that was no worse than Hitler's. In the early days, he spared no effort to brutalize the Jews and attack the Communist Party. After the German occupation of Poland, he proposed "to wipe Poland completely off the map through purges and eventually eliminate its leaders and all the educated strata."
The initiator of the heinous "Final Settlement Act" was also Heydrich. On January 20, 1942, at the Lake villa Wilhelm at Grossen Wansee 56-58, Heydrich presided over the infamous "Vance Conference". At the meeting, he pointed out that with the development of the war situation and the continuous expansion of the occupied territories, the original policy of deportation and massacre supplementation was no longer suitable, but "shouldered the heavy responsibility of finally solving the Jews regardless of the territory." Thus began the most brutal and systematic massacre in human history.
Less than a year later, under Heydrich's command, Dozens of concentration camps of varying sizes were established in Germany and its occupied territories, including the gruesome Auschwitz concentration camp. And the targets of the massacre were not limited to Jews, but also Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally retarded, and mentally ill people were included in the "final solution."
After these people were captured in concentration camps, all that awaited them was death. They were herded into the gas chambers in droves, and after a few tens of minutes hundreds of thousands of people died in fear. Later, the cruel SS members used iron hooks to knock out the inlaid gold teeth from the mouth of the deceased and plucked the jewelry hidden by the deceased from the anus. When all this is done, the skin of the deceased will be made into a lampshade, the hair will be made into mattress pads, the fat will be made into soap... The "useless" corpse will be thrown into the trench to wait for the swelling to subside, and finally thrown on the railroad track and burned to ashes...
During World War II, nearly 10 million people, including 6 million Jews, were tortured to death in this inhumane way. Heydrich, who single-handedly planned this plan, was called a "blonde monster" and a "Nazi decapitator".
Heydrich, who was particularly favored by Hitler, was given a new appointment in September 1941 to succeed the too benevolent Baron Constantine von Neurath as governor of the protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia(a puppet regime established by Nazi Germany in western Czechoslovakia).
After the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in June 1941, Czechoslovakia became more and more important because Czechoslovakia was a very developed industrial country, especially the military industry, which was one of the few in the world, and was the European arms production site second only to the Ruhr area in Germany. Because the Ruhr area was in the British bombing zone, after the outbreak of World War II, Germany became more dependent on Czechoslovakia's arms supply, and the military enterprises in the Ruhr area were relocated to Czechoslovakia in large numbers. By the summer of 1941, one-third of Germany's tanks, a quarter of its trucks and four-tenths of its machine guns were produced here.
Originally, the resistance to Germany in Czechoslovakia was not strong, but after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Stalin began to support the Czech government-in-exile in order to weaken Germany's war potential, and instructed the Czech Communist Party and the underground resistance organizations under the government-in-exile to reach an agreement to deal with the Germans together.
With the cooperation of the Czech Communist Party, the underground resistance groups caused great restraint to the Germans, and they often cut off the government's communication lines, destroyed the railway tracks, and blew up the Germans' strategic oil storage bases. In August, they blew up a large oil depot, costing the Germans 100,000 litres of gasoline.
More importantly, after German companies moved into the Czech Republic, a large number of Germans and local residents had a great conflict. The Czech people began to actively respond to the call of the underground resistance organization, passive production, and the output of the factory was greatly reduced. Between June and September 1941, Czech arms production fell by an average of 18 percent, and in some factories by 35 percent.
Hitler was greatly annoyed by this situation, and he sent heydrich, a capable general, to stabilize the situation in the Czech Republic. Incredibly, instead of implementing the previous reign of terror in the Czech Republic, the Murderous Lord implemented the "Huairou Policy".
Upon his arrival, he imposed martial law and began to rule by force, but he ordered his men to secretly arrest members of the Resistance at night and not to harass others; at the same time, he also ordered the crackdown on unscrupulous merchants, even the Germans who broke the law. In November, he hanged the Brothers Adam, a Debe factory owner, for "disrupting economic order." Soon, the chaotic and disorderly economic order in the Czech Republic was restored.
Heydrich, on the other hand, did everything in his power to improve the welfare of Czech workers. He implemented the canteen system in the factory, and workers not only no longer need food tickets to eat, but also the food in the canteen was reasonable and the nutritional value was improved. Heydrich also raised the standard of food rationing in the Czech Republic to the level of Germany itself, and the rationing standard of the core armament factories even exceeded that of Germany itself.
In April 1941, he introduced a new welfare policy: full unemployment insurance for Czech workers, a 20% increase in pensions for the elderly, a 33% increase in widow benefits, and a 75% increase in orphan benefits.
The Czech people realized that the pre-war government had discussed "communism" for decades without any results, and Heydrich achieved it in half a year. Moreover, there were no bloody massacres and wars in the Czech Republic, the underground resistance movement almost stopped, the Czech people enthusiastically put into production, and the output of Czech military-industrial enterprises increased significantly from 1942.
Heydrich was proud of his success, and Hitler was full of praise for the miracles he had created. However, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and the British authorities, far away in England, were very unhappy: in this way, needless to say the development of underground resistance, it would not be long before the Czech Republic would be assimilated by Germany. So they began to plan to get rid of Heydrich.
The British, who already hated Heydrich to the bone, could turn a blind eye to the extermination of the Jews, but Heydrich's policy of softness in Czechoslovakia was intolerable to them, since at least half of the weapons made in Czechoslovakia were used against the British. However, on the issue of getting rid of Heydrich, the British top level has carefully considered it. Needless to say, the removal of his benefits to Britain would certainly provoke frenzied retaliation from the Germans, and the British in German-occupied territory would certainly pay a great price.
However, the materials obtained by the intelligence services continued to stimulate the nerves of the British high command, the resistance in Czechoslovakia was getting smaller and smaller, the production of arms was rising, and the British government finally decided to get rid of Heydrich. This would rekindle the hatred of the Czechs and thus undermine the orderly German rule in the Czech Republic.
In order to get rid of Heydrich, the British Special Operations Agency developed a plan code-named "Apes". The Einsatzgruppen recruited dozens of EINSoslovakia from exiles to Britain, led by Jenn Cubis and Joseph Gabišik. After the outbreak of World War II, they moved to England and became agents of the intelligence service of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, specializing in assassinations. In 1940, they succeeded in assassinating the traitor Major General Kajim in Switzerland.
After recruiting this group, the British Special Operations Agency first arranged for them to receive basic espionage skills training at a spy school near Manchester, and then sent them to camp Camp Ronstaldaloge in northern Scotland to be trained in sabotage activities. After a few months, these people have all become top killers.
With everything in place, late on the night of December 28 and 29, the Special Operations Team secretly parachuted into two groups on a snow-covered hill near the Czech city of Lidice Bohemia. During these two nights, the RAF launched a diversionary air strike on German positions and important targets, attracting the attention of German anti-aircraft radars, and they arrived safely at the intended location.
After landing, Kubis led the task force to contact the underground resistance in Czechoslovakia, secretly lurked, and began this history-changing assassination.
Heydrich's whereabouts were so mysterious that the task force spent two months in Prague and the nearby countryside, doing everything in its power to catch the devil's tracks, but to no avail. However, an unexpected circumstance allowed the task force to easily obtain Heydrich's itinerary.
One day, Heydrich's favorite antique clock broke down and he was anxious to send his secretary to find someone to fix it. On the morning of May 23, 1943, Heydrich's secretary brought Prague's most famous watchmaker, Joseph Heydrich, to the throne. Novotney invited Heydrich to the mansion and led him to Heydrich's office, where he could fix the broken antique clock as soon as possible. Little could the secretary have imagined, however, that Novotny was actually a member of the Czechoslovak underground resistance, and that he had come to find out Heydrich's whereabouts.
It turned out that when Heydrich ordered his secretary to find someone to repair the watch, Czechoslovak intelligence officers lurking at the Gestapo headquarters in Czechoslovakia had already spread the news to the underground resistance. The Special Operations Committee immediately sent someone to contact Novotney and instructed him to find a way to get Heydrich's schedule as soon as he was called to repair the watch.
Novotney first repaired the clock very carefully, he carefully disassembled the clock, and laid out the parts neatly all over the desk. In fact, he did this first to deceive the Germans, and second, to delay time, so that he could gather intelligence in his office.