On this date, 4 June
1942, one of Adolf Hitler’s Henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich died of his injuries,
after he was assassinated on 27 May 1942 in Prague.
If he had live longer than that month, he could have caused more deaths to the
Jews.
Reinhard
Heydrich
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Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (German:
[ˈʁaɪnhaʁt ˈtʁɪstan ˈɔʏɡn̩ ˈhaɪdʁɪç] (7 March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was
a high-ranking German Nazi official
during World War II, and one of the main
architects of the Holocaust.
He was SS-Obergruppenführer
und General der Polizei (Senior Group Leader and Chief of Police) as well
as chief of the Reich Main
Security Office (including the Gestapo, Kripo,
and SD). He was
also Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor (Deputy/Acting Reich-Protector)
of Bohemia
and Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. Heydrich served as
president of the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC; later known as
Interpol) and chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference,
which formalised plans for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question—the deportation and genocide of all Jews in German-occupied
Europe.
Many
historians regard him as the darkest figure within the Nazi elite; Adolf Hitler described him as "the man
with the iron heart". He was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), an intelligence
organisation charged with seeking out and neutralising resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and
murders. He helped organise Kristallnacht, a series of co-ordinated
attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938. The attacks,
carried out by SA stormtroopers
and civilians, presaged the Holocaust. Upon his arrival in Prague, Heydrich sought to eliminate
opposition to the Nazi occupation by suppressing Czech culture and deporting and executing
members of the Czech
resistance. He was directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces
which travelled in the wake of the German armies and murdered over two million
people, including 1.3 million Jews, by mass shooting and gassing.
Heydrich
was attacked in Prague on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and
Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak
government-in-exile to kill him in Operation Anthropoid. He died
from his injuries a week later. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to
the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Lidice was razed to the ground; all
men and boys over the age of 16 were shot, and all but a handful of its women
and children were deported and killed in Nazi
concentration camps.
Reinhard
Heydrich on the Final Solution
[PHOTO
SOURCE: http://izquotes.com/quote/306762]
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