him. More innocent people fell victim in the village of Ležáky, where
Gestapo agents found the transmitter of the underground radio team
Silver A that had been parachuted into the Protectorate alongside Gabćík
and Kubiš. All of the village’s adult inhabitants – thirty-three in total –
were shot. The children were handed over to the German authorities and
the village’s buildings reduced to rubble. Alfréd Bartoš himself, the leader
of Silver A, who had repeatedly warned Beneš about the potential reper-
cussions of an attempted Heydrich assassination, was fatally wounded
when his hide-out was discovered by the Gestapo.30 Excluding those
killed in Lidice and Ležáky, 3,188 Czechs were arrested and 1,327 were
sentenced to death during the reprisals that summer, 477 of them for
simply approving of the assassination. Up to 4,000 people with relatives
among the exiles were rounded up and placed in concentration camps or
ordinary prisons.31
The terrifying memory of the
Heydrichiáda
, as the wave of terror that
followed the assassination was soon to be known in Czechoslovakia,
served as a powerful deterrent to a revival of active resistance. Contrary to
Beneš’s intentions, the War Office in London noted a ‘dying enthusiasm’
for further resistance within the Czech population. The Czech armaments
industry remained one of the strongest and most reliable pillars of the
German war effort until the Wehrmacht’s unconditional surrender in the
spring of 1945. Through his death, Heydrich had inadvertently fulfilled
one of his short-term missions in Prague: the complete and lasting ‘paci-
fication’ of the Protectorate.32
286
HITLER’S HANGMAN
If Heydrich’s assassination triggered an unprecedented wave of retalia-
tion against the Czech population, it also prompted the Nazi leadership in
Berlin to a further radicalization of its policies towards its main perceived
enemy: international Jewry. Although the Nazis’ genocidal campaign of
systematically murdering Europe’s Jews was well advanced by early June
1942, Heydrich’s death added extra ferocity to the Nazi crusade. In
Heydrich, Himmler had lost his closest and most important collaborator,
and he was more determined than ever that the vast majority of European
Jews would have to die before the year was over. As Himmler proclaimed
in a secret speech to senior SS officers in Berlin immediately after
Heydrich’s funeral: ‘It is our sacred obligation to avenge his death, to take
over his mission and to destroy without mercy and weakness, now more
than ever, the enemies of our people.’ Himmler also ordered his subordi-
nates to be more careful of their personal safety in the future – ‘after all we
want to kill our enemies; our enemies are not supposed to kill us’ – and
made it very clear that the programme of mass extermination was to be
completed as soon as possible: ‘The migration of the Jewish people will be
completed within a year. Then no more of them will be migrating. Now we
shall make a clean sweep [
jetzt muss eben reiner Tisch gemacht werden
].’33
That responsibility for Heydrich’s death should first and foremost be
pinned on ‘the Jews’ was, in the twisted logic of the Nazis, perfectly
obvious. Ever since the German attack on the Soviet Union and America’s
entry into the war, Nazi Germany had been at ‘war with the Jews’ and the
assassination of the head of the Nazi security apparatus constituted an act
of hostility that could be fully avenged only through the destruction of the
Jewish enemy allegedly responsible for that act. Himmler kept his word.
At the time of Heydrich’s death, about three-fourths of the 6 million Jews
whom the Nazis and their accomplices would murder over the course of
the Second World War were still alive. Nine months later, there were 4.5
million Jewish victims.34 It is likely that Himmler sought and received
Hitler’s approval for this further extension of the mass murders during
their frequent meetings in late May and early June 1942. On 19 July,
Himmler visited Lublin, where he told the higher SS and police leader
East, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, that, with few exceptions, all Jews living
in the General Government should be killed before the end of the year.
Three days later, on 22 July, the most murderous phase of the final solution
began with mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka
extermination camp.35
In ‘honour’ of Heydrich, the extermination programme in the General
Government was given the operational name ‘Aktion Reinhardt’.36
When Aktion Reinhardt tailed off in the autumn of 1943, some 2 million
people – the vast majority of them Jews – had been murdered.37
L E G AC I E S O F D E S T RU C T I O N
287
The transition to ful -blown genocide was not confined to the General
Government, but increasingly affected the rest of Nazi-control ed Europe
and indeed the Reich itself. Under the influence of Heydrich’s assassina-
tion, Goebbels immediately stepped up the persecution of Berlin Jews:
In Berlin I am having the planned arrest of 500 Jews carried out and I
have told the Jewish community leaders that for every attack or for every
Jewish attempt at insurrection 100 or 150 of the Jews in our hands will
be shot. As a result of the Heydrich assassination, a whole range of
incriminated Jews have been shot in Sachsenhausen. The more of this
filth is swept away, the better for the security of the Reich.
Deportations from the Reich now increasingly included those who had
previously been exempted such as older Jews and decorated war veterans
and their families. Between June and October 1942, approximately 45,000
German Jews were deported to Theresienstadt, which continued officially
to serve, as Heydrich had intended, as an old-age ghetto, thus concealing
its real purpose as a transit camp for Jews on their way to the extermina-
tion sites in occupied Poland.38
In the case of the destruction of the Protectorate’s Jewish community, no
such precautions were necessary. In the months after Heydrich’s death,
some twenty-nine trains brought almost 30,000 additional Protectorate
Jews to the kil ing factories of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In June 1943,
the last transport of ful Jews left Prague, carrying the remaining 4,000
members of the now dissolved Jewish Congregation of Prague and their
families. By the end of the war, only 424 members of Prague’s once substan-
tial Jewish community had managed to survive the occupation in hiding.39
The fate of the German and Czech Jews reflected a wider European
pattern. In the summer of 1942, the RSHA demanded that Germany’s
allies – Croatia, Romania, Hungary and Italy – surrender their Jews to the
Nazi authorities, a move that underlined Himmler’s determination to
realize the threat made on the day of Heydrich’s funeral that ‘Jewish
migration’ in Europe would end in 1942. Furthermore, in mid-June that
year the deportation of 15,000 Dutch, 10,000 Belgian and 100,000
French Jews was negotiated by the RSHA’s Jewish experts. Between July
and November 1942 alone, thirty-three transports carrying 1,000 Jews
each left France for Auschwitz.40
The Slavic population of Eastern Europe also remained in danger of
mass deportations. Immediately after Heydrich’s assassination, Hitler had
threatened to deport ‘millions of Czechs’ – ‘if necessary during the war’.41
Himmler, too, had pledged on the occasion of Heydrich’s funeral that that
his death would not put an end to the Germanization of the Protectorate.42
288
HITLER’S HANGMAN
Others echoed these sentiments. On 6 June 1942, the Gauleiter of Vienna
and head of the Hitler Youth, Baldur von Schirach, declared openly: ‘This
autumn we will celebrate a Jew-free Vienna. Then we shall turn towards
the solution of the Czech question. For the bullets that have killed our
comrade Heydrich have injured us, too. As Gauleiter of Vienna, I there-
fore give order to deport all Czechs from this city as soon as the Jews have
been evacuated. Just as I will make this city Jew-free, I will also make it
Czech-free.’43 Hitler, suddenly concerned about morale in the Czech
armaments industry, immediately banned all further public discussion
about the future treatment of the Czechs, but it was too late: for a brief
moment, members of the inner Nazi leadership circle had publicly spoken
their minds on what the Czechs could expect if Germany won the war.44
Fortunately, none of the dystopian fantasies for the Germanization of
Eastern Europe was ever implemented. Germanization plans in the
Protectorate and Eastern Europe more generally faltered at the very
moment when the murder of Europe’s Jews reached its climax.45
Instead of focusing on the distant goal of Germanization, Nazi leaders
turned to other, more immediate concerns of which winning the war was the
most vital. After a string of Wehrmacht losses in the Soviet Union and Africa
in the winter of 1942–3, victory on the battlefield became a more pressing
issue than the bloody unweaving of ethnicities. Heydrich’s short-term goals
of maintaining domestic peace and industrial productivity became para-
mount, not just in the Protectorate, but throughout al of Hitler’s Europe.46
How this was to be achieved remained a bone of contention between the
army, the SS, and the various German civilian administrations operating
throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The administrators, population plan-
ners, and racial hygienists who operated in every corner of German-
control ed territory never had time to develop a coherent and consistently
applied approach to their self-imposed problems in governing populations
several times larger than that of the Reich itself. As military fortunes turned
against Germany in late 1942, even Himmler was forced to make conces-
sions, be it by recruiting Eastern European and even Muslim volunteers for
the SS (whom he would have previously regarded as ‘racial y unsuitable’), or
by abandoning his ambitious settlement projects in Ukraine and Poland.
With respect to Bohemia and Moravia, Germany's military misfortunes, its
transport shortages and dependence on the Czech arms industry provided
a saving grace for the local population and a stumbling block for those who
hoped to resolve the ‘Czech question’ in a radical way. Even Heydrich – had
he lived – could not have ignored these new realities. 47
While pressure on the Czechs to become Germans decreased after
Heydrich’s death, little changed in the persecution of political enemies on
the home front after June 1942. If anything, the Nazi terror apparatus
L E G AC I E S O F D E S T RU C T I O N
289
under Heydrich’s successors as head of the RSHA – Heinrich Himmler
and, from January 1943 onwards, Ernst Kaltenbrunner – tightened its
grip on German society, fearing a repetition of the 1918 ‘stab in the back’
and a collapse of the home front that suffered increasingly from the Allied
bombing attacks. Kaltenbrunner may have lacked Heydrich’s organiza-
tional ability and ferocious energy, but the Security Police apparatus
remained a powerful institution. Yet the brutal persecution of the inner
German opposition after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July
1944 could not conceal the fact that the RSHA had not been able to
uncover the plot in time. The organization had little more than half a year
left before the Third Reich collapsed.48
The end of the Third Reich marked a decisive caesura for the Heydrich
family, whose good fortunes had steadily eroded since June 1942.
Heydrich’s widow, Lina, was thirty-one years old and heavily pregnant
when her husband was assassinated in Prague. She was left so distraught
by his death that she could not bear to attend the funeral in Berlin. In the
early hours of 23 July 1942, their fourth child and second daughter, Marte,
was born. In recognition of her late husband’s contribution to Nazism,
Hitler gave his widow the country estate of Jungfern-Breschan as a gift to
be kept in the Heydrich family in perpetuity. In the autumn of 1942, Lina
sold the family home in Berlin and gave up their hunting lodge near
Nauen.49
To ease her transition into a permanent life in rural Bohemia, Himmler
arranged for some thirty Jewish forced labourers to work on her estate.
Unsurprisingly, given Lina’s long-held anti-Semitic beliefs, the forced
labourers were treated with contempt. According to post-war testimonies
given by Jewish survivors who worked on the Heydrich estate, Lina
frequently observed the workers with a telescope from her veranda,
ordering the whipping of those who worked too slowly and displaying
‘no emotions whatsoever’ when prisoners were maltreated. On one occa-