Hitler's Hangman (70 page)

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-