Reinhard Heydrich

• 1. The Jammed Gun

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  Reinhard Heydrich was riding through the Prague suburb of Libeň on the 27th of May 1942. He was heading for the airport and a planned meeting with Adolf Hitler in Berlin. At a hairpin bend the car had to slow down. Jozef Gabčík stood ready with a Sten submachine gun and took aim. The weapon jammed and did not fire.

  drich did not tell his driver to speed away. He ordered the driver, Klein, to halt the car, and he tried to confront Gabčík instead.

  Hitler once called Heydrich "the man with the iron heart." Many historians regard him as one of the most sinister figures of the Nazi regime. Yet he began life in a house full of music, with a violin in his hands. How did a conservatory owner's son become the man Hitler praised in those words? What did he build in the police stations, intelligence offices and conquered cities he controlled? And what price did other people pay once the attack on that Prague road was over?

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• 2. A Musician's Son

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  Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was born on the 7th of March 1904 in Halle an der Saale. His father, Richard Bruno Heydrich, was a composer and opera singer. His mother was Elisabeth Anna Maria Amalia, born Krantz. Two of the boy's forenames were musical references. Reinhard was the hero of his father's opera Amen, and Tristan came from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Eugen honoured his late maternal grandfather, who had directed the Dresden Royal Conservatory.

  The Halle Conservatory of Music, Theatre, and Teaching belonged to the family. His father founded it, and his mother taught piano there. As the oldest son, Reinhard was expected to inherit the school. His father trained him, and he began learning piano and violin at the age of six. The violin became a passion that he carried into adulthood, and listeners were impressed by his talent. His father had grown up Protestant but converted to Elisabeth's Roman Catholic faith on marriage. Every week the boy served as an altar boy and attended evening prayers and Mass with his mother, as part of the small Catholic minority in Halle.

  Robert Gustav Süss, Richard Heydrich's stepfather, had a surname that sounded Jewish, and that was enough to start a rumour. Richard Heydrich was not of Jewish descent. The talk grew after Reinhard's maternal uncle, Hans Krantz, married a Hungarian Jew named Iza Jarmy. At school Reinhard was shy and insecure, and he was frequently bullied over the rumours and his high-pitched voice. The family itself kept cordial relations with the Jewish community. Many Jewish students attended the conservatory, its cellar was rented to a Jewish salesman, and Reinhard was friends with Abraham Lichtenstein, the cantor's son.

  Richard Heydrich was a German nationalist with loyalties to the Kaiser, and he ran a strict household. He instilled patriotic ideas in his three children. Reinhard started out frail and sickly, so his parents pushed him to exercise. He fought mock fencing duels with his younger brother, Heinz, and grew into an expert swimmer and fencer. At the secular Reformgymnasium he excelled in his schoolwork, especially in the sciences.

  In late February 1919, Halle was shaken by strikes and clashes between communist and anti-communist groups. Paramilitary Freikorps units, following directives from Defense Minister Gustav Noske, recaptured the city. Heydrich, then 15 years old, joined the Freikorps Maercker's Volunteer Rifles. The step was largely symbolic, since he was too young for military service. There is no evidence that he fought, and his force was assigned to protect private property. Even so, he began to form positive opinions about the Völkisch movement and anti-communism, along with a distaste for the Treaty of Versailles and the placement of the German-Polish border.

  On his officer's personnel record, Heydrich claimed membership in the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, an antisemitic organisation. Historians have questioned whether the documentation is sufficient. However, an official Nazi Party publication supports the claim. It says he belonged to the league from 1920, when he left the German National Youth League, until he was forced to withdraw on entering the navy in 1922.

  Germany's war debt and the terms of Versailles drove hyperinflation across the country, and many people lost their life savings. Halle was not spared. By 1921 few townspeople could afford lessons at Bruno Heydrich's conservatory, and the family slid into a financial crisis. The inheritance that Reinhard had been promised was shrinking, and he looked for a different future.

  In 1922 Heydrich joined the German Navy, the Reichsmarine, attracted by the security, structure and pension it offered. He became a naval cadet at Kiel, Germany's primary naval base. Many fellow cadets falsely took him for a Jew. To counter the rumours, he told them he had belonged to several antisemitic and nationalist organisations, including the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund, and his standing with his peers improved.

  On the 1st of April 1924 he was promoted to senior midshipman and sent to officer training at the Naval Academy Mürwik. In 1926 he became an ensign and a signals officer on the battleship SMS Schleswig-Holstein, flagship of Germany's North Sea Fleet. His superiors gave him good evaluations, and he had few problems with other crewmen. On the 1st of July 1928 he was promoted to first lieutenant. He also became notorious for his numerous affairs.

  drich met Lina von Osten at a rowing-club ball in December 1930, and the two soon got engaged. Early in 1931 he was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. The charge was breach of promise, because he had already been engaged to another woman he had known for six months. Admiral Erich Raeder dismissed him from the navy in April, with severance pay of 200 Reichsmarks a month for the next two years. Lina had attended her first Nazi rally in 1929, and her influence on his next step would be direct.

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• 3. Himmler's Spymaster

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  On the 30th of May 1931, Heydrich's discharge from the navy became legally binding. Either the next day or on the 1st of June, he joined the Nazi Party in Hamburg. Six weeks later, on the 14th of July, he joined the SS. His party number was 544,916 and his SS number was 10,120. Those numbers placed him in an awkward middle ground. Members who joined after Hitler took power in January 1933 were suspected by the Alte Kämpfer, the earliest party members, of chasing career advancement. Heydrich's 1931 enlistment was early enough to quiet that suspicion but too late to make him an Old Fighter.

  Heinrich Himmler was setting up a counterintelligence division of the SS in 1931. Karl von Eberstein, a friend of Lina's who was already close to Heydrich, advised Himmler to meet him. Himmler agreed, then cancelled the appointment at the last minute. Lina ignored the message, packed Heydrich's suitcase and sent him to Munich. Eberstein met him at the railway station and took him to Himmler. Asked to describe his ideas for an SS intelligence service, Heydrich so impressed Himmler that he was hired immediately.

  The starting salary was 180 Reichsmarks a month, which was low. Heydrich took the job anyway, because Lina's family supported the Nazi movement and the quasi-military, revolutionary nature of the post appealed to him. At first he shared an office and a typewriter with a colleague. By 1932 he earned 290 Reichsmarks a month, a salary he called comfortable. In 1935 he received a base salary of 8,400 Reichsmarks plus an allowance of 12,000, and by 1938 his income had risen to 17,371 Reichsmarks a year. Himmler also gave him a Totenkopfring for his SS service.

  On the 1st of August 1931, Heydrich started work as chief of the new Ic Service, the SS intelligence service. His office was in the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich. By October he had built a network of spies and informers. It gathered intelligence and also information that could be used for blackmail to further political aims. Details on thousands of people were recorded on index cards and kept at the Brown House. To mark his December wedding, Himmler promoted him to SS-Sturmbannführer, the rank of major.

  In 1932 Heydrich's enemies spread rumours of Jewish ancestry again. Wilhelm Canaris said he had obtained copies of documents proving it, and the Nazi Gauleiter Rudolf Jordan claimed Heydrich was not a pure Aryan. Himmler reportedly called him "an unhappy man, completely divided against himself, as often happened with those of mixed race." Gregor Strasser passed the allegations to the party's racial expert, Achim Gercke. After investigating Heydrich's genealogy, Gercke reported him "of German origin and free from any coloured and Jewish blood" and called the rumours baseless. Heydrich still privately hired an SD member, Ernst Hoffmann, to investigate further and dispel them. The rumours did not stop his rise. In mid-1932 Himmler appointed him chief of the renamed Sicherheitsdienst, the SD.

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• 4. The Police State

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  In 1933, Heydrich gathered some of his SD men and stormed the police headquarters in Munich. They took over the organisation with intimidation tactics. Himmler and Heydrich wanted control of the political police forces of all 17 German states, and Bavaria was the first. Himmler became Munich's police chief, and Heydrich became commander of Department IV, the political police. That same year Hitler became Chancellor and then, through a series of decrees, Führer und Reichskanzler. The first concentration camps, intended for political opponents, opened in early 1933, and by the end of the year there were over fifty.

  Hermann Göring founded the Gestapo in 1933 as a Prussian police force. In April 1934 he transferred full authority over it to Himmler, and it became an instrument of terror under the SS. On the 22nd of April 1934, Himmler named Heydrich to head it. Göring also made him an advisor to the Prussian government, with a seat on the Prussian State Council. On the 9th of June 1934, Rudolf Hess declared the SD the official Nazi intelligence service.

  From April 1934, at Hitler's request, Heydrich and Himmler built a dossier on Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Sturmabteilung, to remove him as a rival for party leadership. The SA then numbered over three million men, and the SS was still part of it. At Hitler's direction, Heydrich, Himmler, Göring and Viktor Lutze drew up lists of people to be killed, starting with seven top SA officials. On the 30th of June 1934, the SS and Gestapo began coordinated mass arrests that continued for two days. Röhm was shot without trial, along with the SA leadership. Up to 200 people died in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Lutze took over the SA, which was converted into a sports and training organisation.

  With the SA out of the way, Heydrich turned the Gestapo into an instrument of fear. He improved his index-card system with colour-coded cards for categories of offenders. The Gestapo could arrest citizens on suspicion that they might commit a crime, and it decided what counted as a crime. The Gestapo Law of 1936 gave the police the right to act outside the law. It led to the wide use of Schutzhaft, or protective custody, a euphemism for imprisonment without judicial proceedings. Courts were not allowed to investigate or interfere, and the Gestapo counted as legal whenever it carried out the leadership's will.

  On the 17th of June 1936, Hitler appointed Himmler Chief of German Police, and all police forces in Germany were united. Himmler reorganised them into two groups. The Ordnungspolizei, or Order Police, held the national uniformed police and the municipal police. The Sicherheitspolizei, or Security Police, held the Gestapo and the Kriminalpolizei. Heydrich headed the Security Police and the SD, while Heinrich Müller was the Gestapo's operations chief.

  At the March 1936 parliamentary election, Heydrich was elected a Reichstag deputy for constituency 22, Düsseldorf East. He was re-elected in April 1938 and held the seat until his death. In early 1936 he also left the Catholic Church for the Gottgläubig movement, a step Himmler favoured for SS members. His wife, Lina, had left the year before. Heydrich came to regard the church's political power and influence as a danger to the state.

  drich helped organise the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, which the regime used for propaganda. Goodwill ambassadors were sent to countries considering a boycott. Anti-Jewish violence was forbidden for the duration, and news stands had to stop displaying copies of Der Stürmer. Heydrich received the German Olympic Games Decoration, First Class, for the games' success. In January 1937 he told the SD to collect and analyse public opinion in secret, and the Gestapo then carried out searches, arrests and interrogations, which in effect gave him control over it. In February 1938, when Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg resisted Hitler's proposed merger with Germany, Heydrich raised the pressure with Nazi demonstrations and propaganda in Vienna. On the 12th of March the Anschluss followed.

  By late 1940, German armies had invaded most of Western Europe. The next year the SD was made responsible for the Nacht und Nebel, or Night-and-Fog, decree. People judged to endanger German security were to be arrested in the most discreet way possible, under the cover of night and fog. They vanished without a trace, and no one was told their whereabouts or fate. For each prisoner the SD filled in a questionnaire, sealed it in an envelope marked Nacht und Nebel and sent it to the Reich Security Main Office. The decree stayed in force after Heydrich's death. The number of people who disappeared has never been established, but it is estimated at 7,000.

  On the 27th of September 1939, the SD and the Security Police were merged into the Reich Security Main Office, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, under Heydrich's control. On the 1st of October he received the title Chief of the Security Police and SD. He became president of the International Criminal Police Commission, later known as Interpol, on the 24th of August 1940, and its headquarters moved to Berlin. On the 24th of September 1941 he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei. Days later he would be sent to rule a conquered country.

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• 5. Forgeries and Flights

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  In 1936, Heydrich learned that a top-ranking Soviet officer was plotting to overthrow Joseph Stalin. He saw a chance to strike at both the Soviet Army and Admiral Canaris of Germany's Abwehr, and he decided the officer should be unmasked. Himmler and Heydrich took the matter to Hitler, who approved acting immediately. But the information was misinformation planted by Stalin himself. He had ordered one of his best NKVD agents, General Nikolai Skoblin, to suggest that Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other generals were plotting against him. Heydrich's SD forged documents and letters implicating Tukhachevsky and other Red Army commanders, and the material reached the NKVD.

  The Great Purge of the Red Army followed on Stalin's orders. Heydrich believed he had tricked Stalin into executing or dismissing 35,000 of his officers. The importance of his part is a matter of conjecture. Soviet military prosecutors did not use the SD forgeries in their secret trial of the generals. They relied on false confessions extorted or beaten out of the defendants.

  The night of the 31st of August 1939 brought a very different deception at the German radio station in Gleiwitz, about four miles from the Polish border. Hitler had asked for a pretext to invade Poland. Himmler, Heydrich and Heinrich Müller masterminded a false flag plan code-named Operation Himmler, built around a fake attack on the station. Heydrich toured the site. Wearing Polish uniforms, 150 German troops carried out several attacks along the border, and Hitler used the ruse as an excuse to launch his invasion.

  drich began pilot training in 1935. In 1939 he took fighter pilot training at the flight school at Werneuchen. Himmler first forbade him to fly combat missions but later relented. From the 15th of April 1940, Heydrich flew in Norway with Jagdgeschwader 77, known as Herz As, or Ace of Hearts, during Operation Weserübung. His plane crashed at Stavanger on the 13th of May, and he returned to Berlin the next day. While in Norway he also arranged the arrests of political opponents and stationed a contingent of 200 Security Police and SD men in several major cities.

  On the 20th of July 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, Heydrich rejoined the same fighter wing without asking Himmler's permission. He arrived at Yampil, in Vinnytsia Oblast, in a borrowed Bf 109. Two days later Soviet flak hit his aircraft in action near the Dniester, and he had to land in enemy territory. He avoided capture and returned to Berlin after a patrol rescued him. It was his final combat mission. As a major in the Luftwaffe he had flown nearly 100 combat missions, and his awards included the Luftwaffe Pilot's Badge, bronze and silver Front Flying Clasps, and the Iron Cross First and Second Classes. Hitler personally ordered him back to Berlin to resume his SS duties.

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• 6. Architect of Genocide

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  On the night of the 9th to the 10th of November 1938, a pogrom against Jews swept through Germany, and Heydrich helped organise it. That night he sent a telegram to SD and Gestapo offices to coordinate the SS, SD, Gestapo, uniformed police, SA, Nazi Party officials and even fire departments. It gave permission for arson and the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues. It ordered the confiscation of all archival material from Jewish community centres and synagogues. It also demanded that as many Jews as detention facilities could hold be arrested, particularly affluent ones, and sent quickly to concentration camps. Twenty thousand Jews were sent to camps in the days that followed. Historians consider Kristallnacht the beginning of the Holocaust.

  On the 21st of September 1939, Heydrich sent a teleprinter message on the Jewish question in the occupied territory to the chiefs of all the Einsatzgruppen. It told them to round up Jewish people for placement in ghettos and called for the formation of Judenräte, or Jewish councils. It also ordered a census and promoted Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses and farms. The Einsatzgruppen were the task forces that Heydrich had formed, on Himmler's instructions, to travel behind the German armies. They followed the army into Poland to carry out these plans. On the 29th of November 1939, Heydrich issued a cable on the Evacuation of New Eastern Provinces. It detailed deportation by railway to concentration camps and gave guidance on the December 1939 census, which would be the basis for the deportations.

  A Gestapo unit called Zentralstelle IIP Polen, which Heydrich created, coordinated the ethnic cleansing of Poles in Operation Tannenberg and the Intelligenzaktion. These were two code names for extermination actions against the Polish people during the German occupation. About 100,000 people were murdered in the Intelligenzaktion operations in 1939-1940. Roughly 61,000 of them belonged to the Polish intelligentsia, including scholars, clergy and former officers. The Germans had named them as political targets in the Special Prosecution Book-Poland, compiled before the war began in September 1939.

  In May 1941, Heydrich drew up regulations with Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner for the coming invasion of the Soviet Union. They made sure the Einsatzgruppen and the army would co-operate in murdering Soviet Jews. In the Soviet Union the task forces were charged with rounding up Jews and murdering them by firing squad and gas vans. The historian Raul Hilberg estimates that between 1941 and 1945 the Einsatzgruppen and related auxiliary troops murdered more than two million people, including 1.3 million Jews. On the 31st of July 1941, Hermann Göring gave Heydrich written authority to secure the co-operation of government departments in implementing a final solution to the Jewish question in German-controlled territory.

  On the 10th of October 1941, Heydrich was the senior officer at a Final Solution meeting of the Reich Security Main Office in Prague. It discussed deporting 50,000 Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to ghettos in Minsk and Riga. The officers also discussed taking 5,000 Jews from Prague in the next few weeks and handing them to the Einsatzgruppen commanders Arthur Nebe and Otto Rasch. Plans for ghettos inside the Protectorate led to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, where 33,000 people would eventually die. Tens of thousands more passed through it before being sent east to be murdered. In 1941 Himmler also named Heydrich responsible for implementing the forced movement of 60,000 Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland.

  One detail complicates the picture without softening it. Heydrich ensured the safety of certain athletes, among them Paul Sommer, a Jewish German champion fencer he knew from before his SS days, and the Polish Olympic fencing team that competed at the 1936 Summer Olympics.

  In mid-1939, Heydrich created the Stiftung Nordhav Foundation to obtain real estate for the SS and Security Police as guest houses and vacation spots. The foundation acquired the Wannsee Villa in November 1940. On the 20th of January 1942 it hosted the meeting now called the Wannsee Conference, with Heydrich as lead speaker. Senior Nazi officials formalised plans to deport and exterminate all Jews in German-occupied territory and in countries not yet conquered. Representatives of the state agencies at the meeting were to coordinate the action. Heydrich answered only to Hitler, Göring and Himmler on all matters of deporting, imprisoning and exterminating Jews. The historian William L. Shirer described him as "of diabolical cast" and the genius of the Final Solution.

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• 7. Ruling Prague

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  On the 27th of September 1941, Heydrich was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. That was the part of Czechoslovakia absorbed into the Reich on the 15th of March 1939. Konstantin von Neurath remained the titular Reich Protector but was sent on leave. Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich felt his soft approach to the Czechs had encouraged anti-German sentiment, strikes and sabotage. Heydrich came to Prague to enforce policy and fight resistance. He also had to keep up production quotas of Czech motors and arms that were considered extremely important to the German war effort.

  Martial law came first. Within five days of his arrival, 142 people were executed, and their names appeared on posters across the occupied country. Most were resistance members who had been captured earlier and were awaiting trial. By Heydrich's own estimate, between 4,000 and 5,000 people were arrested and between 400 and 500 executed by February 1942. Those who were not executed were sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, where only four per cent of Czech prisoners survived the war. The Czech prime minister, Alois Eliáš, was among those arrested on the first day. He was tried in Berlin and sentenced to death but kept alive as a hostage. After Heydrich's assassination he was executed in retaliation.

  Further sweeps in March 1942 hit Czech cultural and patriotic organisations, the military and the intelligentsia. They left the London-based Czech resistance practically paralysed. Small, disorganised cells of the Central Leadership of Home Resistance, known by its Czech initials ÚVOD, survived. Only the communist resistance could still function in a coordinated way, although it too suffered arrests. Almost every public outlet for Czech culture was closed. Heydrich's brutality quickly earned him the nickname "the Butcher of Prague." Czechs call the reprisals the Heydrichiáda.

  drich also used carrots alongside the stick. He reorganised labor on the model of the German Labour Front and used equipment confiscated from the Czech gymnastics organisation Sokol to stage events for workers. Food rations and free shoes were handed out, pensions went up, and for a time Saturdays were free. Unemployment insurance was introduced for the first time. He suppressed the black market and labelled those involved as economic criminals and enemies of the people, and some were tortured or executed. Conditions were relatively peaceful and industrial output rose. Shortages and growing inflation could not be hidden, and reports of discontent multiplied.

  Privately, Heydrich was clear about the goal. He said: "This entire area will one day be definitely German, and the Czechs have nothing to expect here." He demanded racial classification of those who could and could not be Germanized. Eventually up to two-thirds of the population were to be removed to regions of Russia or exterminated after a German victory, and Bohemia and Moravia would be annexed directly into the Reich.

  More than 100,000 Czech workers were pulled out of jobs deemed unsuitable and conscripted by the Ministry of Labour. By December 1941, Czechs could be called to work anywhere in the Reich. Between April and November 1942-79,000 were taken for work in Germany. In February 1942 the working day was lengthened from eight hours to twelve. Heydrich was in effect military dictator of Bohemia and Moravia. His changes left President Emil Hácha and his cabinet virtually powerless. He often drove alone in a car with an open roof, which showed his confidence in the occupation forces and in his own government. By the 3rd of October 1941, Czechoslovak military intelligence in London had already decided to kill him.

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• 8. Death and Reprisal

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  On the 28th of December 1941, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík parachuted into the Protectorate. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London had chosen them to kill Heydrich, and the British Special Operations Executive had trained them. They lived in hiding while they prepared. German documents suggest Hitler intended to transfer Heydrich to German-occupied France, where the French Resistance was gaining ground. The Libeň junction suited the attack because motorists must slow for the hairpin bend.

  When Gabčík's gun jammed and the car stopped, Kubiš, whom neither Heydrich nor Klein had spotted, threw a converted anti-tank mine. It landed against the rear wheel. The blast tore through the right rear fender and drove metal fragments and upholstery fibres into Heydrich's left side. He suffered major injuries to his diaphragm, spleen and one lung, as well as a broken rib. Kubiš received a minor shrapnel wound to his face. Heydrich ordered Klein to chase Gabčík on foot, but Gabčík shot and wounded Klein and escaped.

  A Czech woman went to Heydrich's aid and flagged down a delivery van. He was laid on his stomach in the back and taken to the emergency room at Bulovka Hospital. Surgeons removed his spleen and cleaned the chest wound, the left lung and the diaphragm. Himmler ordered Karl Gebhardt to fly to Prague to take over his care. Hitler's personal doctor, Theodor Morell, suggested the new antibacterial drug sulfonamide. Gebhardt expected Heydrich to recover and declined it. Despite a fever, the recovery appeared to be going well.

  On the 2nd of June, during a visit from Himmler, Heydrich reconciled himself to his fate by reciting lines from one of his father's operas. They compared the world to a barrel-organ turned by the Lord God, and ended: "We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum." He fell into a coma on the 3rd of June and died the next day. An autopsy concluded that he died of sepsis. Two professors at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, R. J. Defalque and A. J. Wright, suggest that pulmonary embolism or brain ischemia may have been decisive factors. He was 38 years old.

  An elaborate funeral took place in Prague on the 7th of June 1942. His coffin then went by train to Berlin for a second ceremony on the 9th of June in the new Reich Chancellery, where Himmler gave the eulogy. Hitler attended and placed Heydrich's decorations on his funeral pillow, among them the Blood Order Medal and the Wound Badge in Gold. Heydrich's death was used for pro-Reich propaganda. In private, Hitler blamed Heydrich's carelessness and condemned his open, unarmoured car and unguarded walks as "stupid and idiotic."

  drich was buried in Berlin's Invalidenfriedhof, a military cemetery, in Section A near the north wall. The exact spot is no longer public knowledge. A temporary wooden marker vanished when the Red Army overran the city in 1945 and was never replaced, so that the grave could not become a rallying point for neo-Nazis. On the 16th of December 2019, the BBC reported that unknown persons had opened the unmarked grave without taking anything. Hitler had planned a monumental tomb designed by the sculptor Arno Breker and the architect Wilhelm Kreis, but Germany's declining fortunes meant it was never built.

  The assassins hid in safe houses and finally took refuge in Saints Cyril and Methodius Cathedral, an Orthodox church in Prague. A traitor in the Czech resistance betrayed their location, and 800 members of the SS and Gestapo surrounded the church. Several Czechs were killed, and the rest hid in the crypt. The Germans used gunfire, tear gas and flooding, and finally made an entrance with explosives. Rather than surrender, the soldiers killed themselves. Supporters killed in the aftermath included the church's leader, Bishop Gorazd, who is now revered as a martyr of the Orthodox Church.

  Hitler first ordered the arrest and execution of 10,000 randomly selected Czechs. After consulting Karl Hermann Frank, he changed course, because the Czech lands were an important industrial zone and indiscriminate killing could reduce output. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Lidice lay 22 kilometres north-west of Prague, and the Gestapo suspected it because several Czech army officers then in England came from there. In Ležáky they had found a resistance radio transmitter. On the 9th of June, after talks with Himmler and Frank, Hitler ordered brutal reprisals.

  Lidice was destroyed, and 172 boys and men between the ages of 14 and 84 were shot. All but four of its women went at once to Ravensbrück concentration camp. The four were pregnant and were subjected to forced abortions at the hospital where Heydrich had died, and then sent to the camp. Some children were chosen for Germanization, and 81 were murdered in gas vans at the Chełmno extermination camp. Lidice's ruins were levelled. On the 24th of June, all adults in Ležáky were murdered and the village was burned. In all, at least 1,300 Czechs, including 200 women, were killed in reprisal for the assassination.

  Ernst Kaltenbrunner replaced Heydrich as chief of the Reich Security Main Office. Karl Hermann Frank and then Kurt Daluege took over as Deputy Protector. After Heydrich's death, implementation of the policies set at Wannsee accelerated. The first three true death camps, built for mass murder with no legal process or pretext, were at Treblinka, Sobibór and Bełżec. The project was named Operation Reinhard, after Heydrich.

  His widow, Lina, won a pension in court cases against the West German government in 1956 and 1959. She was declared entitled to a substantial pension because her husband was a German general killed in action. The government had earlier declined to pay because of his role in the Holocaust. The couple had four children. Klaus, born in 1933, was killed in a traffic accident in 1943. Heider was born in 1934, Silke in 1939, and Marte shortly after her father's death. Lina published a memoir in 1976 titled Leben mit einem Kriegsverbrecher, or Living With a War Criminal. She remarried once and died in 1985.

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