Well, he clearly wants to be.
 |
| Stephen Miller. |
 |
| Reinhard Heydrich. |
In the summer of 2013 Lois and I, and our old friends Greg and Martha Cukor, found ourselves in Prague. Even the locals conceded that the weather was quite warm - we had just come from St. Petersburg, where the weather was dramatically cooler - but still I found Prague magical. We loved the architecture, the food, the music, and the Karluv most, or Charles bridge, which spans the Vltava in the oldest part of Prague and is now limited to pedestrians and artists selling their work.
Franz Kafka lived and wrote in Prague; there is a Kafka museum with a reflecting pool in the courtyard in front of the building. There are two statues in the reflecting pool; they are large boys who are peeing in the water. We quickly came to understand that the Czechs had their own sense of humor.
One of the Czech national heroes is a fictional fellow known as the Good Soldier Schweik. He always obeyed orders, but somehow what he did rarely bore any relation to what his superiors had expected. He seemed to be everywhere in Prague.
And there was the Lennon wall, where people could write or draw whatever they wanted. And of course there's the pun between John Lennon and V.I. Lenin. And there was a John Lennon pub not far away.
The Praguers did seem particularly welcoming to the English, who were present in large numbers when we were there. We benefited from the many Praguers who spoke fluent English.
Our hotel was located next to the Vltava River, not far from the Karluv most. There was a patio next to the river, and we would sit out towards the end of the day and watch the river, and the people walking by. Occasionally a dog would go for a swim. The water was so friendly.
Eventually, however, we realized that the Vltava is not always a friendly river. We learned the breakfast room in our hotel had recently been completely submerged by a flood. We would occasionally walk along the path by the river. At one point there was a blank wall with a poster of Vaclav Havel that had not been repaired. But in general everything was normal.
(Vaclav Havel was a writer and a leader of the resistance to the Communist regime. He has the unusual distinction of serving as president of two different countries. He was president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 up until 1992, when, in what is sometimes called the Velvet Divorce, the country became two countries - the Czech Republic in the west and Slovakia in the east. Havel served as the first president of the Czech Republic (aka Czechia) from 1993 to 2003.)
The Vltava has flooded on numerous occasions - the flood of 2002 was even worse than the one in 2013. But the Czechs rebuild quickly and well. In 2013 the town was bustling, and it appears that not a single tourist had been scared away.
I knew enough about Czech history to know that floods were hardly the worst things that the country has experienced, from the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century to the communist regime that Joseph Stalin installed after World War II. And slowly I came to see the deeper level of what we were looking at. These smart, funny, cheerful people and their ancestors have endured a profoundly traumatic history.
And I think the worst thing that ever happened to the Czechs was the Nazi occupation during World War II. Central to this occupation was a man named Reinhard Heydrich.
Two Books, Two Movies
I'm going to tell you the story of Reinhard Heydrich and his collision with the Czechs. As sources, I'll be relying primarily on two books and two movies. The books do not have footnotes, and the movies are movies, but I find them highly credible, and the books have survived every crosscheck I made. If you're interested in the scholarly literature I suggest you consult two Wikipedia articles: Reinhard Heydrich and Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
Anthropoid (2016). In case you don't know, on May 27, 1942, Czech paratroopers attempted to kill Reinhard Heydrich. He survived the initial attack, but died a few days later. The movie Anthropoid tells the story of the paratroopers and the underground network of resisters who helped them. The paratroopers had come from England, where someone decided to name this effort Operation Anthropoid.
This is a very unsettling movie, filmed entirely in Prague, about people who are prepared to die for freedom, but would rather live. By the time the movie is over, almost all of the cast are dead or on their way to the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp.
Conspiracy (2001). This movie stars Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich. It replicates the Wannsee conference of January 20, 1942, where the SS, in the person of Heydrich and his Mini-Me, Adolf Eichmann (Stanley Tucci), brought the rest of the government into alignment with the SS plan for the Final Solution, which was already being executed. The Germans apparently thought they had destroyed all records of the conference, but they missed one copy of the final report, and the movie closely tracks that report. Branagh is brilliant as Heydrich, quietly taking aside recalcitrant officials and politely threatening them until they crumble.
HHhH (2009). Laurent Binet won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2010 for his first novel, HHhH. It is simply an extraordinary book. Not only does it tell the story of Heydrich and the Czechs, it also tells, in great detail, how he put the story together. It's a decent short course in practical epistemology. At one point he calls the book he's writing an "infranovel." And he confronts the fact that there are some things we will never know, or know for sure. To take a small example, was Heydrich's car green or black? (See pp. 12-13, 176, 185-187, 241.) It's a lesson in humility.
Target: Heydrich [1972]. Miroslav Ivanov was a well-known Czech writer with several dozen books to his credit. Target: Heydrich is a series of oral history interviews, linked together with background chapters written by Ivanov. He centers the Czechs, particularly the underground, more particularly the parachutists, and most particularly the two members of Operation Anthropoid: Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik.
As I was reading this book, I started to feel that I was living in Prague in 1942, working with an underground resistance network, swimming in a curious mixture of the quotidian and the surreal. I had seen this mixture before - most successfully perhaps in the movie The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965, starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, and Oskar Werner), but Ivanov's book was the first time that I felt I was actually participating, instead of simply observing.
Three Quotes From Ivanov
Here are three brief quotations from the oral history interviews.
The gamekeeper (Antonin Sedlacek). "I was very lucky. Almost everyone who helped the parachutists is dead; but somehow I came through." (P. 19.)
The second woman's evidence (Milada Matulova). "But then I saw a woman who came running from the corner crying 'Oh God, oh God! Our Heydrich, our Heydrich.' I asked her what had happened and she said there had been an attempt on the Reichsprotektor's life and he was probably dead. A woman who lived in the next-door house said 'Thank God.'
"The next day the Gestapo arrested her whole family and they were all executed for approving of the attack." (P. 167.)
The old doctor (Stanislav Hruby). "Now, when I walk in the evenings along the banks of the Vltava, I sometimes remember them all and I ponder about Kubis' and Gabcik's mission. Was what they did right? Necessary? Probably it was - I do not know." (P. 23.)
About Heydrich
In the Nazi world Heydrich did well by doing evil. The more evil he did, the higher he rose.
I continue to wonder where he found all that evil. He came from a family of musicians; his father ran a music conservatory in Halle an der Salle, and his father's wife taught piano there, and little Reinhard learned both the piano and the violin.
After World War I, in search of a stable career in a highly unstable environment, Heydrich embarked on a naval career, serving first as a cadet and then as an officer. In 1931 he left the navy and almost immediately joined the Nazi party. Soon he found himself working for Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS.
The fearsome SS, or Schutzstaffel, or protection squadron, was originally a personal bodyguard for Hitler. Himmler became its leader in 1929, and the organization began to grow and take on new responsibilities. One of the things Himmler wanted to add was an intelligence service, or Sicherheitsdienst (SD). He gave the job of organizing and running this new unit to Heydrich, who did a spectacular job.
I'm going to leave out most of the bureaucratic moves from this point - it's very complicated, and there are far too many very long German nouns. I would point out that in 1931, when Heydrich joined the SS, Hitler had not yet become chancellor of Germany. That would not happen until 1933. So Himmler was effectively building a private army and a private intelligence service.
When Hitler came to power, the SS expanded, eventually including all the police forces in Germany. This centralization of police power was a major departure for Germany, which had long seen policing as a local affair. (See the history section in the Wikipedia article Gestapo.)
Sitting on top of this police force, with its own intelligence service, were Himmler and his second in command, Heydrich. And Heydrich's tentacles were everywhere. As Binet puts it, "It's incredible. Almost anywhere you look in the politics of the Third Reich, and particularly among its most terrifying aspects, Heydrich is there - at the center of everything." (P. 110.)
What They Called Him
The people around Heydrich called him various things. Adolf Hitler called him "the man with a heart of iron." (Ivanov, p. 38.) He was also called "the most dangerous man in the Third Reich." (Binet, p. 253.)
People liked to say HHhH. Binet explains: "It's true that in the devilish duo he forms with Himmler, he is thought to be the brains ("HHhH," they say in the SS: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich - Himmler's brain is called Heydrich), but he is still only the right-hand man, the subordinate, the number two. Heydrich is so ambitious that he will not be satisfied with this situation forever." (P. 129.)
My personal favorite is "the blond beast" (Binet p. 253), which was an important image for Friedrich Nietzsche.
I'm not a Nietzsche scholar, but the indefatigable researchers at Wikipedia inform me that the blond beast is introduced as a lion, then glides on to the idea of a master race of northern Europeans with very pale skin, and then dribbles on to masterful Arabians and Japanese. A remarkable stew, all designed to encourage us to release our vilest impulses.
Here's a quote from Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887): "At the ground of all these noble races, the beast of prey, the splendid, blond beast, lustfully roving in search of spoils and victory, cannot be mistaken." And here's another bit: "Here they enjoy liberty from all social restraint; the wilderness must compensate them for the tension produced by a long incarceration and impalement in the 'peace' of society; they step back into the innocence of the conscience of the beast of prey, as exultant monsters, which, perhaps, walk away from an abominable sequence of murder, burning down, violation, torture, with such wantonness and equanimity, as if merely some student trick had been accomplished; with the conviction, that now for a long time again the poets will have something to celebrate and sing of."
(Here's a link to an English translation, which has the title A Genealogy of Morals. If you're interested, the quoted material is on pages 40-41.)
Or, as Shakespeare put it, "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." (Julius Caesar 3:1:274.)
Which of course is exactly what happens in the twentieth century in Germany.
Heydrich and the Final Solution
I became interested in Heydrich because of his activity in Czechoslovakia, and it actually took me a while to figure out that the Czechs were a side gig for him. His day job was killing Jews and other unwanted people.
While Himmler was organizing a new religion, Heydrich was orchestrating a symphony of murder. It started in Poland, with one of his most brilliant innovations, the Einsatzgruppen (literally, task forces; in practice, they were mobile killing units).
When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, starting World War II, these specialized SS units followed the front-line troops; their initial task was to round up and murder Poland's leadership, including "teachers, writers, journalists, priests, industrialists, bankers, civil servants, merchants, wealthy farmers ... everyone of any note." (Binet, p. 109.) Those killed also included Jews, gypsies, prostitutes, and the mentally ill. By the end of 1939, approximately 65,000 Polish civilians had been murdered.
When it came to the Jews, at this point the main task of the Einsatzgruppen was to round them up and transport them to ghettoes, which were quickly established in various cities, most notably Warsaw.
Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Very soon, as Wehrmacht troops were pushing deep into the lands of the Soviet Union, the Einsazgruppen moved on to a second phase, where they rounded people up, shot them, and dumped them into pre-dug burial pits. (Sometimes the prisoners were required to dig their own burial pits.) The most notable of these events occurred at Babi Yar, a ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine, where 33,771 Jews were murdered over two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941.
After a while, Himmler decided that shooting prisoners in large numbers was bad for the morale of the troops - that is, the presumably hard men who served in the Einsatzgruppen. Since October 1939 the Nazis had been using poison gas to euthanize the mentally ill and people with disabilities, and it was decided to shift the mass murder in the east to gas. Special vans were used, with sealed passenger compartments. The prisoners would be loaded into the back of the van; the exhaust from the van's engine would be redirected into the passenger compartment, and the prisoners would die from carbon monoxide poisoning. However, there were drawbacks to this approach - perhaps most importantly, the small-batch processing could not realistically be scaled up to the size of the planned mass murder. Also, the troops did not enjoy cleaning out the back of the van after a poisoning. I guess it turns out that even people who think they are supermen may occasionally act like normal humans.
So, the final phase of the Final Solution was the shift to death (or extermination) camps, which were different from concentration camps. The Nazis had opened their first regular concentration camp at Dachau in March 1933, and initially used it and the others that followed to house political prisoners, such as communists, social democrats, and trade unionists. Soon, however, they came to house many kinds of undesirables, including Jews and gypsies. The death camps came later, during the war. A lot of people died in the concentration camps, but the extermination camps were different. They were factories of death. There were only a handful of them; the most notable was Auschwitz-Birkenau. All were located in the part of Poland that Germany occupied in 1939, and they were built in 1941-1942. As these new camps ramped up production, the concentration camps started to feed their inmates into the jaws of death.
Meanwhile, on July 31, 1941, Hermann Goering signed an Ermachtigungsbrief (briefly, a letter), putting Heydrich in charge of the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. Goering signed the letter because he was still officially in charge of the Jewish question, although he seemed more interested in building his collection of art masterpieces looted from the conquered countries of Europe. (Binet, pp. 129-131.)
So the Wannsee conference, on January 20, 1942, was not the start of anything. It was simply a way of informing people who had not previously been in the loop - and ensuring their compliance. That is why the conference lasted only two hours. (Binet, pp. 195-196. Wannsee, by the way, is in the southwestern part of Berlin, near Potsdam, site of the famous Potsdam conference at the end of World War II.)
In May 1942, at a meeting of senior SS officers in Paris, Heydrich shared the news with a larger audience, making this announcement: "All the Jews in Europe have been sentenced to death." (Binet, p. 230.)
Heydrich had built the machine and set it in motion. He went back to Prague and died a few days later, but he was undeniably the "principal architect" of the Final Solution. (Binet, p. 131.)
In the Czech Lands
On September 27, 1941, Heydrich arrives in Prague and his appointment as Protector of the Reich of Bohemia and Moravia is announced to the Czech people. He also orders his first arrests; the next day he starts killing people. Soon a state of emergency is in place. All gatherings of people are forbidden; the courts may still acquit a defendant, but if the defendant is found guilty, the only available sentence is death. Selling on the black market? Death. Distributing pamphlets? Death. Listening to foreign radio stations? Death. (Binet, pp. 139-142; Ivanov, p. 37.)
Heydrich had a short-term goal: suppress the resistance, which had been annoying Hitler. He also had a long-term goal: Germanize the Czech lands.
Killing people helped with both those goals. As in Poland, people in leadership positions were rounded up and executed, but in the Czech lands really any remotely patriotic Czech was in danger. The grim posters (Bekanntmachungen) put up on walls around Prague listed the names of the dead and also their occupations: baker, jeweler, postman, miner, electrician, fisherman, glove maker. (Ivanov, p. 37.)
Not only was the population terrorized, but the underground resistance was severely damaged. During the fall it lost the ability to communicate with the government in exile in England. (Ivanov, p. 87.)
A few days after he assumed command, Heydrich sunmoned all the senior Nazis in the protectorate and, in a secret speech, outlined his vision for the future of the Czech lands: They would be German. Suitable Czechs, willing to mimic their masters in language and behavior (and perhaps belief), would be allowed to remain. Others would be expelled "to the east." This euphemism had a specific meaning. The east was Poland. People would go to a death camp in Poland. (Ivanov, pp. 38-9; Binet, pp. 143-145.)
Since Heydrich was already conducting a similar operation against the Jews, I see no reason not to believe that he would have tried to eliminate all the Czechs, either by conversion or by execution.
Ivanov reports that, on October 10, 1941, "Heydrich told Berlin he had the task in hand." (P. 39.)
But the resistance is not dead. As Binet puts it, at the end of 1941 "the state of the Resistance in the Protectorate is worrying but not entirely hopeless." (P. 180.)
May 27, 1942
It's possible that, at the end of 1941, the Czech government in exile in England was not aware of the Final Solution, or Heydrich's role in it, but they had reason enough to be unhappy with the Protector for what he was doing in the Czech lands. They looked for something they could do to oppose the destruction of the Czech nation. They decided to kill Heydrich. The in-country resistance had been pleading for some highly trained operatives to be parachuted into the home country to help out with the struggle, and they got their wish. (Ivanov, pp. 39, 43-44; Binet, pp. 149-150, 167-169.)
On December 28, 1941, a Halifax heavy bomber on special duty dropped several separate groups of parachutists into several different drop zones in the Czech lands. All of them were dropped far from their planned drop zones, which meant their maps and contact information were of limited use. But they were the best of the best, and they made their way to where they needed to be. One unit, called Silver A, had a transmitter called Libuse, which was used to reestablish contact between the underground and the Czech government in England. Another, called Anthropoid, found its way to Prague, where its mission was to assassinate Reinhard Heidrich. (Ivanov, pp. 44-47; Binet, pp. 174-178.)
The resistance network in Prague was largely composed of ordinary people who had quietly decided to do what they could to defend their country. They took the paratroopers into their homes, fed them, arranged for necessary identification papers, and made sure they shifted their locations and identities frequently.
The leadership of the in-country resistance did not initially know that the mission of the Anthropoid group (that is, Kubis and Gabcik) was to kill Heydrich. When they found out, there was considerable discontent. They sent two messages, using the Libuse transmitter, expressing their concern in strong language: Here is a bit of one of them: "This attack would not be of the least value to the Allies and it would have serious and unforeseeable consequences. It would threaten not only hostages and political prisoners with shocking reprisals but also thousands of ordinary people. Its consequences might include the complete suppression of all underground organizations. It would then be impossible for the resistance to be useful to the Allies." (Ivanov, pp. 142-144, 198-199; Binet, p. 223.)
The government-in-exile and the soldiers of Anthropoid stick with the original plan.
Heydrich lives with his wife and children in a commandeered castle on the outskirts of Prague and commutes to the Hradcany Castle in Prague for work. Shortly after ten in the morning on May 27, 1942, he and his driver get into an open Mercedes car and start on their routine commute. There is a spot on the way where the street turns very sharply, forcing the Mercedes to slow down. It is at this point that Josef Gabcik produces a British Sten submachine gun, aims it at Heydrich, and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. The gun has jammed. Next, Jan Kubis produces a powerful British No. 73 grenade and tosses it at the car. His aim is a bit off; instead of landing in the front seat of the open car, the grenade explodes next to the right rear wheel. But it does succeed in seriously wounding Heydrich. (Ivanov, 153-154, 159-161; Binet, pp. 251-258, 261-277.)
There is much more to say about this day, but I'll stop here. Heydrich is transported to a nearby hospital, where he undergoes surgery. The doctors are expecting a good recovery, but the Protector develops an infection that leads to sepsis, and he dies on June 4. (Binet, 268-269. 277-278 287, 290; Ivanov, pp. 175-178.)
To say that the Germans are upset by the attack and Heydrich's subsequent death would be an understatement. The messages that the resistance leadership had sent to London proved prescient. People were killed for any reason or for no reason. I've written previously about the village of Lidice; to see the story, click here.
Today I will concentrate on the parachutists. The resistance decided it was too dangerous to house them with families and found a church, actually the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius, that was willing to let seven parachutists reside in its crypt. (Binet, p. 285; Ivanov, pp. 203-204, 245-247.)
There were plans to exfiltrate these men, out of Prague and then out of the country, but they were forestalled when an informant told the Germans where the parachutists were. In the early morning of June 18 a force of more than 700 SS soldiers plus various auxiliaries surrounded the church and sought to dislodge the parachutists.
When the Germans first entered the church they were apparently surprised when people started shooting at them from above. Three of the parachutists had taken up positions in the church's gallery, which could only be reached from the nave by a winding staircase. They held their ground tenaciously for three hours, at which point one was dead and two were so badly wounded that they could not operate their weapons. The two wounded men died while being transported to the hospital. Jan Kubis was one of the wounded.
The Germans then turned their attention to the four parachutists in the crypt, but despite repeated attempts they were unable to gain access to the crypt or force the defenders to abandon their position.
The battle at the church is the Alamo of the Czech people. Seven parachutists held off a battalion of SS supermen for seven hours, and the four in the crypt only stopped when they ran out of ammunition. At the end, the remaining combatants used their last rounds to kill themselves. Gabcik was among them. The subsequent sweep turned up zero unused pieces of ammunition. (Ivanov, pp. 275-284; Binet, pp. 307- 319.)
I've been in this church, and I've been in the crypt where the last four parachutists died.
Was the Killing a Good Idea?
As I've noted above, the mission to assassinate Heydrich was controversial even among the Czechs. But let's hear what Miroslav Ivanov thinks:
"If the Nazis imagined that by these hideous reprisals they would succeed in smothering the resistance movements in Bohemia and Moravia, they were wrong. For a while underground activity might diminish, but the Czech nation began to fight again and in spite of everything the resistance grew.
"At first, the killing had, in the opinion of some politicians, been no more than a gesture. Others had seen it as a plot worked out against the will of several representatives of the home resistance movements; but it became a powerful and unanimous verdict against Fascism, a kind of judgment emanating from the people as a whole.
"The world learnt that in spite of Munich and in spite of the occupation, the Czech nation was continuing to fight for its independence." (P. 283.)
A little later, Ivanov tells a personal story. He is visiting the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Many people died here, and they were cremated. "At the edge of the crematorium, an abrupt slope; below, a little plain. That was where they once threw the ashes. Now grass and wild flowers grow there, green and blue: the dark blue of the sage in flower. ...
"The sage beneath the crematorium grows on ashes. It was here that so many died whose death was neither glorious nor heroic; but it was quite as full of pain, distress, and sorrow. Ordinary people. Czechs whose names are neither outstanding nor famous. And my father was among them." (Pp. 291-292.)
What Does All This Mean for Us?
I have a clear recollection of a dinner party in a nice restaurant in North Bennington, Vermont. I believe this was in the summer of 2015, but I could be wrong. It was a gathering of old friends, some of whom were also family. At some point the conversation turned to Donald Trump, who had recently descended his golden escalator and begun to escalate his pollution of the country's political discourse. We were mostly New Yorkers or former New Yorkers, and we had all been watching his bankruptcies and his tabloid antics for decades, and, like many New Yorkers, we had his number. And now this clown was running for president. At one point an old friend said, "Why don't we just shoot him now?" Or words to that effect. In response I delivered a little speech on the importance of not shooting politicians. Then I went to the rest room, even though I didn't need to. I washed my hands - cleansing rituals do have their place - and then returned to the party. We all had a lovely time.
Ten years later, I am not the same man.
I do hope Little Stevie Miller fails. Then I won't have to confront the difficult decision the Czechs faced when confronted with Reinhard Heydrich.
 |
Found object, Asbury Park beach.
August 31, 2025. |
See also Lidice and the Power of Nothing, Scavengers and Scow Trimmers, Somotomo, The Democrats Need to Fight the War, What Happened in Ferrrara?
