The death of Heydrich

On the morning of 4 June 1942 Reinhard Heydrich – head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the chief organisers of the Holocaust – died in Prague’s Bulovka hospital. He was 38. His dying lasted more than a week: on 27 May the Czechoslovak parachutists Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš had attacked his car on a bend in the Prague district of Libeň, and fragments of a grenade, together with pieces of metal, upholstery and uniform, had been driven into his left side. It is often written that the attack took place “a week earlier”. To be exact, eight days had passed.

Heydrich’s death did not end the reprisals the Germans had begun on the day of the attack but intensified them. In the weeks that followed the Czechs lived through the bloodiest period of the occupation, which they called the second Heydrichiáda.

Eight days in hospital

The wounded man had been brought to Bulovka hospital in a delivery van stopped by chance. That same day, 27 May, he was operated on by German surgeons from Prague, Professor Josef Hohlbaum and Walter Dick: they removed his spleen, in which a fragment was lodged, sewed up his torn diaphragm and cleaned the wound in his chest and left lung. In the evening Himmler’s personal physician, Karl Gebhardt, flew in from Berlin and took charge of the treatment. When Hitler’s doctor, Theo Morell, proposed administering new antibacterial drugs of the sulphonamide group, Gebhardt, according to post-war accounts, refused, convinced that the patient was recovering. The Germans had no penicillin at the time.

For several days Heydrich’s condition did indeed seem to improve, although he had a high fever and was in severe pain. On 2 June Heinrich Himmler visited him. According to later accounts, Heydrich spoke to him of his fate in words from an opera by his father, the composer Bruno Heydrich, about the world as a barrel organ turned by God himself. Around lunchtime on 3 June his condition suddenly deteriorated and he fell into a coma from which he never awoke. He died early on the morning of 4 June; sources give different times, most often around 4.30 a.m.

The post-mortem gave the cause of death as infection – sepsis – caused by the fragments and by horsehair from the car’s upholstery that had penetrated deep into his body. Some doctors and historians who have analysed the surviving records believe that the direct cause of death may have been a pulmonary embolism or cerebral ischaemia resulting from the infection. A hypothesis that has circulated for years, that Kubiš’s grenade was laced with botulinum toxin, has found no confirmation in the documents. Heydrich’s death had one more grim consequence: according to historians, it was precisely in order to vindicate his decision that from July 1942 Gebhardt carried out criminal experiments with sulphonamides at Ravensbrück concentration camp on women prisoners, mainly Poles, in whom artificially inflicted wounds were deliberately infected. After the war an American tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced him to death for this.

Two funerals

The Nazi leadership made Heydrich a martyr. For two days his body lay in state in the courtyard of Prague Castle, where thousands of people, among them officials and employees of the Protectorate who had been rounded up for the purpose, filed past the coffin under the eyes of an SS guard. On 7 June a memorial ceremony was held in Prague, attended by the occupation authorities, members of the Protectorate government and President Emil Hácha; then a cortège passed through the city and the coffin was taken by train to Berlin.

On 9 June the Mosaic Hall of the New Reich Chancellery (PL) was the scene of the greatest state funeral in the Third Reich since that of President Hindenburg in 1934. The entire top tier of the regime attended, headed by Hermann Göring. The main address was given by Himmler, who said that Heydrich had “sensed, understood and realised” Hitler’s world view. Adolf Hitler spoke briefly. He called the dead man “one of the best National Socialists”, a martyr who had fallen in defence of the Reich, and “the man with the iron heart”, and then posthumously awarded him the highest grade of the German Order, the Party’s highest decoration, previously conferred only on the armaments minister Fritz Todt, who had died in February. Heydrich was buried in the Invalids’ Cemetery. In private, according to notes made by those around him, Hitler blamed him for recklessness: he called driving in an open car without an escort a piece of stupidity that served no purpose. From then on Reich dignitaries in the occupied territories were to travel in armoured cars.

According to surviving accounts, on the same day Hitler received Hácha and members of the Protectorate government in Berlin. He threatened them that if assassinations and acts of resistance were repeated, he would consider deporting the Czechs. Also on 9 June the decision was taken to destroy the village of Lidice, which the Germans carried out that night and the following day.

State of emergency and manhunt

On Hitler’s orders, the running of the Protectorate after the attack was taken over by the police general Kurt Daluege, head of the Reich’s Order Police, who remained in Prague as Deputy Reich Protector until 1943. Real police power continued to be exercised by the State Secretary, Karl Hermann Frank. Until January 1943 the RSHA was run by Himmler in person, and thereafter by Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

The state of emergency declared by Frank on the evening of 27 May continued. Summary courts in Prague and Brno passed death sentences for sheltering unregistered persons, for possessing weapons, for contact with the resistance and even for merely “approving of the assassination”. Sentences were carried out immediately, usually at the shooting range in Prague’s Kobylisy, and bilingual notices and newspapers published the names of the executed every day, often entire families. According to figures cited in the literature, 157 people had been executed by the day of Heydrich’s death, and by the time the state of emergency was lifted on 3 July, according to Czech historians, about 1,600, including some 540 for “approving of the assassination”. One of the victims was General Alois Eliáš, the former prime minister of the Protectorate government, held by the Germans as a hostage since the autumn of 1941 and shot on 19 June.

The manhunt produced no results. Tens of thousands of policemen, soldiers and SS men searched tens of thousands of houses. A reward of 10 million crowns was offered for information leading to the assassins, and doubled by the Protectorate government. The objects abandoned at the scene of the attack – a bicycle, a briefcase and coats – were put on display in the window of the Baťa shop on Wenceslas Square in the hope that someone would recognise them. The parachutists, meanwhile, were hiding in the crypt of the Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in the New Town.

The reprisals were not confined to the Protectorate. At the end of May, in Berlin, where the Gestapo was also hunting a communist group of young Jews that had set fire to an anti-Soviet propaganda exhibition, about 500 Jews were arrested. According to most studies, more than 150 of them were shot at Sachsenhausen concentration camp together with a group of Jewish prisoners already held there. Also in June, transports of Jews left Prague and the Theresienstadt ghetto for the east, which some historians link directly to the assassination.

Operation Reinhard

Heydrich’s most enduring “monument” was a name. The murder of the Jews of the General Government in the extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka, directed by the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin District, Odilo Globocnik, had begun as early as March 1942, at Bełżec. In SS documents from the second half of 1942, however, the undertaking appears under the code name “Einsatz Reinhardt” or “Aktion Reinhardt”. For years some historians linked the name with Fritz Reinhardt, State Secretary in the Finance Ministry, who was responsible for seizing the victims’ property, because the spelling with “dt” appears in the sources. Today the prevailing view is that the code name commemorated Heydrich, whose first name was spelled that way even in Himmler’s correspondence. By the autumn of 1943 some 1.7 million Jews had been murdered in the course of Operation Reinhard.

Heydrich’s death did not slow down the Holocaust, which as head of the RSHA he had helped to organise on the basis of Göring’s authorisation of July 1941. The machinery he had built ran without him. In the summer of 1942 the deportations from the ghettos of the General Government, from Western Europe and from the Reich reached their greatest scale of the whole war, and in July the Great Deportation began in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Place in the war

For the Czechs, 4 June marked the beginning of the hardest weeks of the occupation. Five days after Heydrich’s death the decision was taken to destroy Lidice, and on 10 June the village ceased to exist: the men were shot, the women deported to Ravensbrück, and most of the children murdered a few weeks later in the extermination camp at Chełmno on the Ner. On 16 June one of the parachutists, Karel Čurda, gave himself up to the Gestapo. His statements led the Germans to the hiding place in the cathedral, where on 18 June, after a fight lasting several hours, seven soldiers were killed, among them Gabčík and Kubiš. On 24 June the Germans destroyed the hamlet of Ležáky, where the radio transmitter of one of the parachute groups had been hidden. The families and helpers of the parachutists, almost three hundred people, were later murdered at Mauthausen.

To the Nazis Heydrich remained a hero. A scholarly foundation bearing his name was set up in Prague to provide a justification for the Germanisation of Bohemia, and on the first anniversary of the attack a bust of him was erected at the scene, before which passers-by had to bow. To the rest of the world he became the embodiment of SS terror. The crimes committed in reprisal for his death, above all Lidice, led Britain in August 1942 to declare itself no longer bound by the Munich Agreement, and the Czechoslovak cause won the support in the West that Edvard Beneš had been seeking since the beginning of the war.