On May 27, 1942, he kissed his wife and children in front of the fence and left the villa in his special Mercedes-Benz 150. It was a sunny morning, and Heydrich was in a good mood, he didn't even bring a guard. In his eyes, the Czechoslovaks had succumbed to his obscenity, and no one in the effective Nazi jurisdiction could threaten him, but this time he was wrong...
Heydrich
Heydrich was born on 7 March 1904 in Saxony, Germany. In his 20s, Heydrich served in the German Navy, but was dismissed in 1931 for having an improper relationship with the daughter of a prominent naval engineer. At the time, the event was enough to completely bury Heydrich's future. However, things took a turn for the worse in 1932 – Heydrich joined the Nazi SS. By chance, Himmler, who was already a leading figure in the Third Reich at the time, instructed him to write a report on the forces of covert operations, which deeply impressed Himmler. By participating in the planning of the Night of the Long Knife in 1934, Heydrich soon established himself in the Nazi Party.
Among the notorious German SS, Heydrich was promoted to second place after Himmler at an unimaginable rate. In 1936, in order to protect Hitler's personal safety and at the same time more effectively eliminate dissidents, the Third Reich established a secret police force independent of the Gestapo, and Heydrich became the head of this terrorist force, and his minions spread throughout Germany.
Himmler and Heydrich
After the outbreak of World War II, Heydrich's secret police, like other SS branches, expanded their power into german occupation zones. Thousands of Jews were expelled from their homes and escorted to concentration camps, a symbol of death. Of course, Jews are not the only targets of the secret police, all of them are likely to be targeted, and if they become suspects, they are arrested and sent to concentration camps. Documented information indicates that resistance forces, pacifists, beggars and even homosexuals and alcoholics have all appeared in the death files of the secret police. Heydrich became the "arbiter of life and death" of the residents of the Third Reich and the occupied territories, and became the object of complaints against countless unjust souls.
Heydrich's physical characteristics fully reflected the characteristics of the Aryan race that the Nazis boasted of—tall, white-skinned, blonde hair and blue eyes, and a strong physique. According to sources, Hitler admired Heydrich very much, nicknamed him "the man with the heart of stone". If Heydrich had not died, it is likely that the future heir to the Third Reich would have been him and not Deniz. But Heydrich had a strong sense of self-harm in his bones, he often drank uncontrollably, and his bodyguards even saw him one night drawing a gun at himself in the mirror and firing furiously. Heydrich's father lived in Germany, but his family was a Jew who migrated here more than a hundred years ago, in other words, Heydrich had absolute Jewish ancestry. For Heydrich, who held the power of life and death, this could be called one of the state secrets of the Third Reich. Both Hitler and Himmler knew this, but they believed it would make Heydrich more loyal.
Massacre of Jews
The Munich Agreement of 1938 ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, leaving Czechoslovakia's western border undefendable. In March 1939, Hitler's army invaded Bohemia and Moravia, splitting Czech Sgefak in half. After intensive preparations, Heydrich appeared in a conspiracy to invade Poland. On August 31, 1939, a group of Polish soldiers attacked a radio station on the German-Polish border, and the attackers fled, leaving only the bodies of German soldiers, which became an excuse for Nazi Germany to invade Poland.
Heydrich's performance took his position in the Third Reich by the day, and at this time another opportunity was before him. The German high command wanted Czechoslovakia as the best platform for an attack on Europe, which required the appointment of an excellent ruler in Czechoslovakia. Heydrich became the supreme governor of the occupied territories in 1941, the year he was only 37 years old.
Within two weeks of taking office, the murderous Heydrich ordered the execution of nearly 200 Czechs involved in the resistance and broke the British spy organization in Prague, which seriously injured the British spy network in The Czech Republic, and he also had a new nickname, "The Beast of Prague". But Heydrich was no simple-minded bloodthirsty man, and in order to make the Czechs happy to serve the Third Reich, he worked to raise the food treatment and wages of workers while brutally suppressing the resistance. For this reason, the Czech government-in-exile in London was often criticized by Poland and other countries, and everyone asked: Where is the Czech resistance?
The Czech government-in-exile decided to orchestrate an assassination campaign that would shake the Third Reich, targeting Heydrich, the "beast of Prague." The British initially expressed skepticism about the Czechs' ideas, fearing that it would be too difficult and would provoke retaliation from the Germans, but with the persistence and enthusiasm of the Czechs, they decided to give it a try. British Special Forces train volunteers for government-in-exile in Scotland. Two of the Czech young men, Jann Kubis and Joseph Gabsikh, were eventually selected for the "Operation Apes" that assassinated Heydrich.
Heydrich received the Prague masses
Late on the night of December 28, 1941, a British long-range bomber took off from an airfield near London and dropped Kubis, Gabsikh and five others in the village of Nehvizdi, 20 kilometres outside Prague, with whom the local resistance group Movement Sokoll connected and placed them. A carpenter who had worked at Heydrich's residence provided information about the Mercedes car. Kubis and Gabsikh eventually chose the sniper location at the Lira Bend, which is in the shape of an "u" on the main road from Prague to Dresden, where Heydrich had to brake and slow down to bypass the bend when he passed by car. Gabsikh and Cubis decided to attack the target right here, when a third man joined in, and Walsik was entrusted by the resistance to assist them in their operations.
1942 was also exceptionally busy for Heydrich. After January 1942, in a speech on the outskirts of Berlin, he stated one of his plans to expel the approximately 11 million Jews living in Eastern Europe from their homes, enslave them, and eventually put them all to death. Heydrich's speech was the prototype of the "ultimate solution" top-secret plan that would later claim the lives of millions of Jews. On May 27, 1942, Heydrich was ordered to return to Germany from Czechoslovakia to participate in further discussions on plans to exterminate the Jews.
At 10 a.m., Heydrich bid farewell to his family and got into a Mercedes car and headed for the airport. Half an hour later, the car came to the Leela bend, and the driver, Klein, reduced the speed as usual, and everything looked the same as usual. No one noticed that from 9 o'clock there were two young people waiting next to the bus stop in the Lira Bend, letting one bus after another pass by, and they were Kubis and Gabsikh, who were waiting here. When Heydrich's car slowed down, Gabsikh threw away his coat, grabbed his submachine gun and rushed to the middle of the road, aiming at the car and pulling the trigger. Unexpectedly, there was a problem with the safety of the gun and the inability to shoot bullets. Heydrich and Klein, seeing that the situation was not good, pulled out their pistols and prepared to return fire, but the quick-witted Kubis preemptively threw a special bomb under the car. After the violent explosion and heavy smoke, Heydrich, covered in blood, was able to jump out of the car and shoot back. Kubis and Gabusikh, who succeeded in the attack, did not dare to stay long, And Kubis jumped on a bicycle to grab the road and fled, while Gabsikh rushed onto a passing bus. A passing Czech policeman temporarily borrowed a van from a food store to take Heydrich to a nearby hospital.
Heydrich was blown up in a car
The explosion of the Lira Bend brought the whole of Prague into a state of emergency, the occupation authorities declared a curfew and martial law, more than 36,000 houses in the city were searched inside and out by the crazy Gestapo and SS, and more than 500 Czechs were arrested in the great search. Nazi Germany and the Czech puppet regime offered a reward of 2 million marks for the arrest of the killer. On examination, Heydrich's lungs and abdomen were hit by shrapnel in multiple places, the wire springs of the car's saddle were embedded in his crotch and diaphragm, and most deadly, a piece of shrapnel penetrated his spleen thoroughly. Holbaum, a first-rate Czech surgeon, operated on Heydrich's surgeon and his injuries went in a good direction, but when the Nazi military doctors took over Heydrich, Heydrich developed a fever and sepsis, and on June 4 swallowed his last breath.
Hitler
When news of Heydrich's death reached Berlin, Hitler pounded his chest. Gritting its teeth, it was announced that Czechoslovakia would pay a heavy price for this. On 10 June, the town of Lidice, 30 kilometres from Prague, became the target of retaliation by the Third Reich, when the SS "Prince Eugen" division shot all 173 men over the age of 15, sent women to concentration camps, and gassed 82 children to death. All the buildings in the town were destroyed. As a final step in revenge, the name of the town of Lidice was also erased from the map by the Nazis.
On 10 June 2000, a bronze memorial statue was completed in the town of Lidice in honor of 82 Czech children who were gassed to death. The statue stands on a hill next to the town, looking down on the land that was once ravaged by the "Beast of Prague" at its feet, and also remembering the fearless Einsatzgruppen.