#4 Operation Anthropoid & Reinhard Heydrich

 We crossed paths with the SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich at Wannsee Conference where he decided on the Final Solution to deal with the Jewish Problem. 

He was brutal & worked with Himmler - both brutal SS officers. 

He helped organise Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.

In Prague, we followed the story of his assassination by the Czechoslovakian Resistance movement who planned & executed a hit on his vehicle, not well carried out but enough to injure him & for him to pass from his injuries.  

Heydrich was mortally wounded in Prague on 27 May 1942 as a result of Operation Anthropoid. He was ambushed by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him; the team was trained by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich died from his injuries on 4 June 1942.

However, this led to a brutal & violent backlash, particularly against the communities of Lidice who were massacred in reprisals. 

Nazi intelligence falsely linked the Czech and Slovak soldiers and resistance partisans to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Both villages were razed; the men and boys age 14 and above were shot and most of the women and children were deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps.

The story of the resistance fighters who were holed up in the Cathedral of Saints Cyril & Methodius still bares the bullet scars & the small museum next door told their story. 

In 1942, during World War II, the cathedral was where a last stand was made by SOE-trained Czech and Slovak agents involved in the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. SS and Police Leader of Waffen-SS Karl Fischer von Treuenfeld commanded the Nazi forces that stormed the church on 18 June 1942. After a fierce gun battle, two of the Czechoslovaks were killed and the rest committed suicide to avoid capture

The stairs up in to the church

The church was interesting & the priests were conscious of the need to preserve the spirituality alongside this story. 

A really interesting day getting the details of this assassination, the story of which we had followed from Wannsee. It is fascinating how history overlaps in places, how ordinary people take up the cause & how widespread the repercussions are. 

Thank you for reading this part of the Holocaust's story across Europe, be thankful, 

Dee