Deserved Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich
- Operation Anthropoid - Lidice Massacre - World War 2

6 May 2022

Category: High Ranking Nazi Representatives

Reinhard Heydrich was born on 7 March 1904. In 1922 Reinhard Heydrich joined the German Navy and in 1931 he joined the Nazi party and the SS. Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, was immediately impressed with Reinhard Heydrich and appointed him the chief of the Gestapo which was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and the SD which was the intelligence agency.

Heydrich was also a driving force behind Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass which was a series of coordinated violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. It was also Heydrich who organized the Wannsee Conference which was held on 20 January 1942. The purpose of this meeting of senior government officials and the SS was to ensure their cooperation in implementation of the so called “ Final Solution to the Jewish question “ which was a Nazi plan for the genocide of European Jews during World War II.

Operation Anthropoid

On 27 September 1941, Heydrich was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia which was the part of Czechoslovakia incorporated into the Reich on 15 March 1939. To exact retribution for Heydrich's brutal rule and to help confer legitimacy on the government-in-exile, Edvard Beneš - the president of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile approved the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. This assassination was codenamed - Operation Anthropoid. After months of preparations, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš attacked and wounded Heydrich when he was being driven to his headquarters in Prague on May 27, 1942.

The Nazis were desperately looking for the assassins and thousands of people were arrested. Soon after the Gestapo obtained a love letter which they incorrectly linked to the village of Lidice. The following destruction of the village and execution of its citizens occurred on June 9, 1942, on Hitler’s direct order.

Massacre in Lidice

In total 340 inhabitants of Lidice were slaughtered - 192 men, 60 women and 88 children. In the end, some kind of justice was served. On 21 May, 1946 the People’s court in Prague sentenced Karl Hermann Frank, the Nazi Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia who was among the top leaders responsible for the massacres in Lidice and Ležáky, to death by hanging. 7 surviving women from Lidice sat in the front row to watch without pity as Karl Hermann Frank was hanged.

Although justice can never bring back the lives of the Lidice victims, it was only after Heydrich’s assassination that the United Kingdom and France agreed to dissolve the Munich agreement and return the annexed Sudetenland back to Czechoslovakia after the Nazis would be defeated.

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