- 18 hours ago
For educational purposes
As head of the SS Security police, Reinhard Heydrich rose with meteoric speed to control the murder squads operating in Poland and Russia with brutal efficiency.
He took charge of the 'final solution to the Jewish problem', becoming a central figure in the horrors of the Holocaust.
Interviews with Gestapo victims :
- Ralph Giordano
- Emile Brune
- Hermann Laupsien
- Czech Resistance member and writer Pavel Kohout
- Heydrich's SS contemporaries (Franz Wimmer-Lamquet and Boris von Drachenfels) are also featured.
As head of the SS Security police, Reinhard Heydrich rose with meteoric speed to control the murder squads operating in Poland and Russia with brutal efficiency.
He took charge of the 'final solution to the Jewish problem', becoming a central figure in the horrors of the Holocaust.
Interviews with Gestapo victims :
- Ralph Giordano
- Emile Brune
- Hermann Laupsien
- Czech Resistance member and writer Pavel Kohout
- Heydrich's SS contemporaries (Franz Wimmer-Lamquet and Boris von Drachenfels) are also featured.
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LearningTranscript
00:30Reinhard Heydrich was head of the SS secret police the Gestapo. He was the quintessential Nazi.
00:55He was the prototype of what Hitler had wished for.
01:00He was inhumanity personified.
01:05As Hitler's totalitarian police chief, Heydrich coordinated the persecution of the enemies of the Nazi state, culminating in the Holocaust.
01:16He was feared and hated by millions.
01:22You can't just order the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
01:27No normal person would ever dream of creating an industrial killing machine, as he did.
01:36Hitler prized Heydrich for his cold-blooded devotion to Nazism and the Third Reich.
01:41As Gestapo chief, Heydrich answered only to SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
01:47Together, they carried out Hitler's dream of the so-called final solution.
01:55Heydrich was one of the most powerful men in the Nazi empire.
01:59Yet this enforcer of Nazi tyranny was also an ardent music lover.
02:13Whenever Heydrich unpacked his violin and took it in his hands, his face lit up.
02:19And whilst otherwise he had a very severe and hard look about him,
02:23then his face and eyes would suddenly adopt a warm expression.
02:28He was a completely different person.
02:31There were two souls in one breast.
02:38This is the story of Heydrich's rule of terror.
02:43It would lead him to become the highest ranking SS man,
02:46to be successfully targeted by Allied intelligence forces.
03:02Reinhard Heydrich was born in 1904.
03:05His father was a composer, whose works included an operatic prelude,
03:09ominously called Reinhardt's Crime.
03:14At school, Heydrich was bright and hard-working.
03:17From his early years, he loved playing the violin.
03:25As an adult, he was a devoted father.
03:29Yet this family man, who enjoyed many cultivated pleasures,
03:33rose swiftly through the ranks of the Nazi hierarchy.
03:39He had total power.
03:42He had the whole executive in his hand.
03:44The criminal police, the security service, the Reich security headquarters,
03:49and also the Gestapo.
03:51He held power over life and death.
03:57The contrast between Heydrich's private and public lives was extreme.
04:09No one had ever come across someone like Heydrich before.
04:16He was the embodiment of the extermination mechanism.
04:24Heydrich's cold, hyper-competitive character fitted well with Nazi principles.
04:30A champion fencer, he loved the cut and thrust of combat.
04:35Whatever the sport, Heydrich was known as a bad loser.
04:41He seems to have been driven by a deep need to prove his worth to himself and to those around
04:47him.
04:48As a Nazi, he saw life as a power struggle in which the strongest and best forced their way to
04:55the top.
04:56Those he considered racially inferior, non-Aryans for example, were destined for destruction.
05:04Even in his teens, Heydrich had flirted with the right-wing racial theories of the Freikorps.
05:10And in appearance, he was an ideal candidate for the Aryan SS.
05:17In contrast to all the other Nazi bigwigs, Heydrich was what you could call a genuine Aryan.
05:24He was tall, with blonde hair, a real giant.
05:28He was the ideal representation of the Aryan being.
05:34But in his early twenties, Heydrich showed little interest in Hitler and his fledgling Nazi party.
05:40He was dedicated to his career in naval intelligence.
05:46But his world fell apart in June 1931, when the Navy dismissed him for conduct unbecoming.
05:53He'd promised to marry one woman, but got engaged to another.
06:01Heydrich always suffered from having to leave the Navy.
06:05He never got over it, and that bitterness affected him deeply.
06:12Lots of people who knew him said that he would never have assumed this role if he'd stayed in the
06:18Navy.
06:22Within months, Heydrich started his meteoric rise through the SS.
06:27He would soon become Himmler's second in command, using his ruthless efficiency to build the Nazi terror state.
06:35After his dismissal from the Navy, the jobless Heydrich had been interviewed by Himmler at his chicken farm.
06:43Heydrich dazzled Himmler with his plans for the SS counter-espionage service.
06:47He was promptly put in charge of it.
06:50In his new post, he soon showed the verve and cunning that made him indispensable to the SS chief.
06:56Himmler was his boss.
07:01Thanks to him, he became an intelligence man and was always being promoted.
07:09Himmler knew only too well that without Heydrich, he was nothing.
07:16He could never have achieved such power if it hadn't been for Heydrich.
07:26But there were rumours which, if proven, could have shattered Heydrich's career.
07:32In his hometown of Halle, documents came to light suggesting he had Jewish ancestry.
07:39He was investigated and cleared, but the rumours persisted.
07:48A malicious tongue can destroy someone.
07:53You can take it back and say you're sorry you said it, and that it's not true.
07:59But rumours stick.
08:03Himmler decided not to sack Heydrich, but to promote him.
08:06He may have calculated that rumours of Heydrich's Jewish blood would make him more ruthless.
08:14Himmler believed that this would make Heydrich do a thorough job.
08:18That was Himmler's reasoning. He was being strategic.
08:23He thought that otherwise, Heydrich might have spared a few Jews out of weakness.
08:30He now had to prove himself as extra rigorous to show that he was a true Aryan.
08:38In 1933, Heydrich was put in charge of the police in Bavaria. His men threw anyone they wanted into concentration
08:46camps.
08:46He had the task of tracking down opponents of the Nazi party and all enemies of the state.
08:54He was to exterminate them or ensure the Bavarian state police locked them up in concentration camps.
09:02That was his job. And I don't envy him. I don't think there were many people who could have done
09:09what he did.
09:13In the years to come, anyone refusing to conform to Nazi ideals became an enemy of the party and of
09:20the people.
09:21Socialists, communists, Jews and gypsies were hounded by Heydrich's secret state police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo.
09:33The truth was that the Gestapo was everywhere, from this time on, until liberation in fact.
09:42It was the synonym for the Third Reich. It was the code word for Hitler's Germany, for Nazi Germany, and
09:51for terror.
09:53As the Gestapo's chief from 1934, Heydrich made it an instrument of terror.
09:59At its peak, it had 45,000 staff, but it fed off a huge network of spies and informers.
10:06Propaganda films encourage citizens to report to the Gestapo the slightest expression of disloyalty to the Reich.
10:14And treat the negotiator as he did, as a common traitor.
10:19Because he's the highest one we all serve, our German people.
10:25Keep the words, keep the mouth.
10:27That was also characteristic of such a system.
10:33A system which always appealed to the evil in people.
10:38It meant tarnishing your neighbour's name.
10:44When you read the files, you see how it was like something out of the Middle Ages.
10:50Like the Inquisition.
10:56Neighbours could battle out personal feuds by denouncing one another.
11:00And that was enough to cause serious difficulties between them.
11:04If not a lot worse.
11:10Ralph Giordano lived in Hamburg and was arrested six times by the Gestapo because of his Jewish ancestry.
11:19Interrogations often lasted several days and nights.
11:23Among the many socialists interrogated was Emil Brunner from Dortmund.
11:32One after another was called down from the cell.
11:37It often took place at night.
11:40And nighttime interrogation was associated with beating, fights and all sorts of torture.
11:49That all happened mostly during the night so that the neighbours in the area would not hear too much of
11:55what was happening to these people.
12:03There was a prisoner next to me who had gone down to the cellar.
12:08Half an hour later he came back up, blood pouring from all over his face.
12:13They had beaten him up for so long blood was coming out of every pore of his skin.
12:17Then he told me what he'd confessed.
12:20He'd received two illegal leaflets.
12:23He said, all I did was receive them, but they still beat me half to death.
12:30Hermann Lauschbein was arrested in Dusseldorf in 1933 for distributing anti-Nazi broadsheets.
12:38I was led into the cellar, and under the cellar was yet another cellar.
12:42When I finally got there, I thought, no one can hear you here.
12:45You can scream as much as you want down here.
12:47So it's probably going to happen.
12:49Yes, now it's going to start.
12:55And then they started.
12:57So now you're going to confess.
13:00One of them sat on the table, a rough kind of table in the corner.
13:03And the other one started to get angry.
13:06Then two SS men came down into the cellar with riding whips and started to strike me.
13:13They tore off my jacket, but first I had to lie down on the bench so that they could thrash
13:18me better.
13:20I thought, you have to endure it.
13:23You have to hold out, because you can't give anyone away.
13:26They'll grow tired, I thought.
13:28They did indeed grow tired.
13:30But then two others came down, and it started all over again.
13:37Laubsin was imprisoned by the Gestapo for weeks.
13:44I don't know how long anyone can take that.
13:47My back was raw, and every additional blow on that sore spot is torture.
13:51It's no longer a beating, it's torture.
13:57Many were killed in their cells.
13:59In Cologne, prisoners left traces of their desperation, scratched onto the cold walls.
14:06Hours pass like years.
14:08The room only knows size.
14:11Laughter fades to sorrow, and the sun no longer shines.
14:15When will this agony come to an end?
14:20I am here, and I don't know why.
14:25As a thoroughly committed Nazi, Heydrich persecuted all enemies of the state with ruthless vigor.
14:31The German Jews were top of his list of undesirable citizens.
14:37He's on record as saying that all Jews were intolerable to his soul.
14:41In the 1930s, he favoured their expulsion, so-called emigration to Palestine.
14:47He claimed to be a Zionist, and carried support among young German Jews eager to create Israel.
14:55Lots of us wanted to emigrate, especially the young ones.
14:59We believed it was best to get out, as quickly as possible.
15:04The older generations, the parents and older relatives, wanted to stay.
15:12They said, this is our homeland. This is our fatherland.
15:17I fought for our German fatherland, my child.
15:20My father said excitedly.
15:22We are staying here.
15:25And so a great proportion had no intention of getting out.
15:29They didn't even think about it.
15:32In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria as part of the Third Reich.
15:39Heydrich grabbed the chance to test out his policy of mass expulsion of the Jews.
15:45He had emigration centers set up, so that Austrian Jews fleeing persecution
15:50could get their emigration papers processed with maximum speed and efficiency.
15:56Heydrich's henchman in Vienna was SS man Adolf Eichmann.
16:00He too had many helpers.
16:04At the time I said to Eichmann, make an emigration center that has a long table
16:08with seats for all the representatives of the travel agencies, of the tax office, of the consulate and so forth.
16:14He took that up with enthusiasm.
16:16I wasn't exactly proud of it, but though they aren't really appreciated today,
16:20these emigration centers were effective.
16:23And then the process went very quickly, you see.
16:25And he did the same later in Prague and also in Berlin, and they all got out a lot faster.
16:34Within 18 months, 150,000 Austrian Jews had been driven out of their homes,
16:40stunning proof to all concerned that Heydrich's policy could work.
16:46Heichmann acted with the same fanaticism as everyone else.
16:50I, Eichmann, will show you what the Führer wants.
16:53We will make Europe free of Jews.
16:56They shall all emigrate.
17:00Heydrich, as head of the Gestapo, was doing exactly what the Führer wished.
17:07In fact, Heydrich was even outshining his boss, Himmler.
17:12SS comrades joked, Himmler's brain is called Heydrich.
17:18Himmler had to be pushed to do what Heydrich wanted in the end,
17:22to achieve his goal, the purging of the party, cleansing the party of its enemies.
17:30Heydrich also sought to eliminate all the Nazis opponents within the church.
17:35He soon had a network of informers within the Catholic Church in Vienna, spying on nuns.
17:42Helena Kafka was known simply as Sister Restituta.
17:48I cannot understand how they could kill such a person.
17:51So atrocious.
17:54Terrible.
17:57Sister Restituta was devoted to her job as a nurse in the operating room at a Viennese hospital.
18:06She was strong-willed and resented any attempts to muzzle her religious freedom.
18:15She had been ordered and she had refused to take down the crosses.
18:20That was something of a bone of contention.
18:24She said, I will happily put a cross up, but I certainly will not take one down.
18:32When Sister Restituta disseminated the words of a soldier's song criticizing the Nazis,
18:37a doctor denounced her.
18:40Her file has been preserved in the Vienna Gestapo index.
18:45She was accused of perfidy and preparing for high treason.
18:51Those who knew her still find it hard to believe.
18:58We were all horrified, of course.
19:00Above all, we didn't know how it would all turn out.
19:03We hoped she'd just be locked up for three weeks, maybe even three months.
19:07And then she'd come back, until we realized it wasn't that easy.
19:12The Gestapo commanded her to leave the order.
19:19The sisters submitted petitions of mercy.
19:27We always prayed, always.
19:30And she always hoped as well, I believe.
19:33I don't believe that she expected to be killed.
19:37But Sister Restituta was condemned to death and executed.
19:42Passing sentence, the court described her as a serious threat to the security of the Reich.
19:50The Pope beatified her in 1998.
19:57Heydrich's Gestapo penetrated every layer of German society.
20:01They even kept files on the Nazi leaders.
20:05They also turned the private lives of ordinary citizens into Gestapo business.
20:15In 1937, he was arrested by the Gestapo for having sexual relations with a Jewish woman.
20:22It was particularly bad when my mother became pregnant the second time.
20:29Before I was even born, my father was taken into detention for the crime of racial disgrace.
20:38In 1938, August Landmesser was imprisoned for two and a half years.
20:44The Nazi race laws forbade him to marry Irma Eckler, the mother of both his children.
20:52She was taken away when I was 11 months old.
20:58The Gestapo arrested her and sent her off to a concentration camp.
21:06Only one family photo survives.
21:10Irma died in 1942 in Ravensbruck concentration camp.
21:16Conscripted into the German army, August Landmesser was sent to fight in Yugoslavia.
21:23I continued to wait for him.
21:26I continued to wait for him.
21:27I went to the Damter station in Hamburg.
21:31There's a railway bridge there.
21:35And I often stood there watching the trains coming in.
21:44They were the trains bringing back homecoming soldiers.
21:52But Irma's father never did come back.
21:55She grew up as an orphan.
21:58All Irma has left of her parents is a few photographs.
22:04I would have had a caring mother and a caring father.
22:11While the SS carried out his orders, Heidrich found time to enjoy frequent holidays with his wife Lina and their
22:18children.
22:23What applied to Heidrich, applied to others too.
22:28He was like Himmler.
22:31Like Hörs, the commander at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
22:35They were caring fathers.
22:37People close to them didn't see the cruelty and inhumanity in them.
22:47Utterly convinced that he was in the right, Heidrich was undisturbed by guilt or pity.
22:52He maintained his happy family life as he unleashed his relentless campaign of terror across Europe.
23:04Gestapo chief Reinhard Heidrich and his wife Lina had four happy, healthy children.
23:11They often spent summer holidays on the island of Feimarn.
23:17Heidrich used to fly himself there direct from Berlin.
23:25He'd work on state papers while his children played around him.
23:31But on the 1st of September 1939, he wrote his wife an unexpected farewell letter invoking the values of the
23:39SS.
23:41Bring up our children to believe in Germany's Führer, to be ruthless in obeying the basic laws of the SS,
23:48ruthlessly disciplined, kind hearted to their own people and merciless towards all enemies at home and abroad.
23:56War had come to Europe.
23:58Heidrich, in spite of his high rank, was determined to see action.
24:02He served as a rear gunner in Luftwaffe attacks on Lublin, Poland.
24:06If you constantly decide over life and death, he said, you must look death in the eyes yourself.
24:14He had no experience of the front, none at all.
24:20That was probably the decisive factor in him wanting to go.
24:25He wanted to be part of the action and would do anything to get there.
24:32Back from Poland, he soon became even more powerful.
24:35In 1939, he was put in charge of the newly created Reich Security Headquarters, which consolidated the SS grip on
24:43policing and security.
24:45Wielding these new powers, Heidrich had police reserves mobilized for mass murder in Poland.
24:51Police Reserve Battalion 102 from Hamburg was among the units under SS control.
24:56Its men shot as many as 200 Polish prisoners a day.
25:00They were carrying out Heidrich's order to render harmless the entire top-ranking population of Poland.
25:08Poland was the prelude to a new dimension of murder.
25:11With the outbreak of war, Heidrich couldn't continue the Nazi policy of expelling Jews.
25:17The Soviet Union was to be the testing ground for his new approach to the so-called Jewish question.
25:24In May 1941, in the Saxon castle of Pretz, Heidrich informed top-ranking SS officers of a sinister new mission.
25:33Men like Otto Ohlendorf were to lead SS death squads to liquidate the Jews of the Soviet Union.
25:39Heidrich warned him the mass murder would be a tough job.
25:43Within a month, four Einsatzgruppen, or task forces, were ready.
25:48Under Heidrich's overall command, they included members of the Gestapo, the secret police, the Waffen-SS, and other police officers.
25:58We were always told we would be sent to the front if it was necessary.
26:01We were told that we would be securing areas behind the lines, for example against partisans,
26:08ferreting out soldiers of the Red Army who had lost contact with their units, and so on.
26:15Heidrich and his SS top brass knew differently.
26:18He cold-bloodedly advised his commanders, be ruthless where you have to be ruthless.
26:29For me and for my fellow soldiers, it was an enormous turning point in our attitude.
26:37We found it so difficult to comprehend.
26:45Until then, we had thought that such mass extermination was only ever perpetrated by the communists.
26:52And now it was suddenly the cultured German nation that was practicing it.
27:01In July 1941, in the sand dunes of Libau in Latvia, the true purpose of the Einsatzgruppen was revealed.
27:10There were a couple of hundred of us, and suddenly the order was given, all men out.
27:16There were a couple of men out.
27:16My father began to cry.
27:18He kissed me, gave me his wristwatch.
27:21He knew it was the end.
27:26All men fit for military service were rounded up.
27:33I saw how they were killed.
27:36I was only a hundred, a hundred and fifty meters away from the spot.
27:41We had a forest track.
27:43That's where we kept our vehicle, you see.
27:46And from there we could see everything.
27:50By the end of 1941, the 3,000 men from Heydrichs Einsatzgruppen had personally shot three to four hundred thousand
27:58Jews.
27:59They included Fanny Seagal's father.
28:04I took his coat and went to the prison.
28:08There was a policeman there.
28:10I said, look, my father was brought here yesterday.
28:15Do me a favor and give my father his coat.
28:17His name is Merkowitz.
28:19He said, little girl, when was your father taken?
28:23I said, yesterday at around five o'clock.
28:26He said, girl, go home.
28:28Your father doesn't need his coat anymore.
28:33In Berlin, the public were being entertained by some of the murderer's colleagues.
28:39At least two people in the audience knew just what was happening in the East.
28:45Like his boss Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich kept himself fully informed of the killings
28:50and was plotting the next response to the so-called Jewish problem.
28:55When fighting intensified on the Russian front in summer 1941,
28:59Heydrich took to the skies once more.
29:02Shot down, he was missing for two days, but survived.
29:06Hitler and Himmler banned him from flying in combat ever again.
29:13He was ordered not to fly because they needed him.
29:19They didn't want him to be killed in a crash or to fall into enemy hands if his plane was
29:24shot down.
29:27That would have left no one at the helm.
29:34With his unrivaled expertise in organizing mass murder,
29:38Heydrich was the man Hitler had chosen to complete the extermination of the Jews.
29:45Heydrich was to organize the deportation of all European Jewry to the death camps in the East.
29:50A task he undertook with relish.
29:56In January 1942, he chaired a top secret meeting in a villa on the Vanse Lake.
30:03He'd summoned senior Nazis there to discuss the so-called Final Solution.
30:08The group openly discussed mass murder.
30:13Heydrich announced that it was time to annihilate all of Europe's Jews.
30:19As part of the final solution to the Jewish question in Europe, he told them,
30:25around 11 million Jews come into the equation.
30:31Heydrich was a prototype.
30:34An example of a generation defined by absolutes.
30:39And by that I mean there are no longer any humane limits.
30:44Nothing is impossible.
30:47Millions of human beings can be killed.
30:53Heydrich prided himself on having the inner strength to do the unthinkable.
30:59Only I can do it, he said.
31:01The others cannot.
31:04Faced with innocent victims, Heydrich spoke of the duty to be ruthless.
31:09He expected his men to be unflinching in their duty.
31:14An enemy of the Nazi party, an opponent of its ideology, needs to be eliminated.
31:23That was it.
31:29And in the view of the party, this was a difficult task.
31:35But a good deed.
31:40In September 1941, Hitler appointed Heydrich deputy Reich protector in charge of Bohemia and Moravia in former Czechoslovakia.
31:50His task was to crush all Czech resistance.
31:53By the manner of his arrival, he intended to show that the SS were now the masters of Prague.
32:02His entrance was really a stage entrance, as if a big star was coming on stage with drums and trumpets.
32:11There is a lot of good to be done here, he announced, and promptly ordered 400 executions.
32:18Heydrich was dubbed the hangman of Prague by the Czechs.
32:21Although the word deputy didn't really sound all that impressive,
32:28you had the feeling that Hitler's extended hand suddenly appeared over Bohemia.
32:38Heidrich wanted his protectorate to be a model for all Nazi-occupied territories.
32:43From Prague Castle, he ruled like a new king.
32:47He intended to integrate Bohemia and Moravia into Hitler's Reich.
32:51The Czechs would be assimilated.
32:53Everyone else would be deported to the east by the SS.
32:58Heydrich's major policy, as you know very well, was complete Germanization of the Czech populations.
33:07In other words, it would be another German state.
33:12Lena Heydrich was intoxicated by the power her husband enjoyed.
33:17I am swayed by sublime feelings.
33:20I am no longer a human being.
33:22I am a princess and live in a fairytale land.
33:27Heydrich set up Theresienstadt, a so-called retirement camp for elderly Czech and German Jews.
33:33It became a transit camp for victims of the Holocaust en route to the death factories in the east.
33:39Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the full force of SS tyranny.
33:44Heydrich's Gestapo inspired fear and terror.
33:46I came there and there was an officer and door and anti-chamber took away and I saw the man
33:58who was completely broken, swollen, full of blood and so forth.
34:06Yeah.
34:09But Heydrich ruled with the carrot as well as the stick.
34:13He knew he couldn't afford to alienate all his new subjects.
34:20Naturally, Heydrich wanted to keep the protectorate quiet to get as much as possible out of the weapons production.
34:28And so we were supposed to serve the front from here.
34:34Heydrich could not afford to expel the Czechs straight away.
34:38He basically wanted to keep them there until the victory of national socialism and fascism.
34:48Heydrich encouraged Czech workers with special rewards, inciting them to make weapons for Hitler's war machine.
34:55And on the face of it, this tactic paid off.
35:05At no point would the Czechs on Heydrich's side, but they were happy to let Heydrich buy them.
35:10That is something else.
35:12They were happy to accept because they had to.
35:15They worked in heavy industry.
35:18They were actually the armorers for Germany.
35:20And they were better paid, better rewarded and better treated because of it.
35:27But that's not to say that they were at all happy about it or that their feelings changed.
35:32That's two completely different things.
35:36Opportunism does not mean that you accept the enemy's point of view just because you serve him in order to
35:40get something.
35:45Heydrich would call his subjects, my Czechs, seeming to believe he was safe and even popular.
35:53Secure in his castle rooms, he could tyrannize his protectorate and oversee the Holocaust in the east.
36:03At Prague Cathedral, in the chapel of St. Wenceslas,
36:07Heydrich formally accepted the surrender of the keys to the Czech royal treasure.
36:13This symbolized the total subjugation of his new kingdom.
36:20But Czech resistance wasn't broken, as signs of V for victory over the Nazis showed.
36:31Heydrich did not succeed in breaking our resistance.
36:34We continued to fight against the Nazis.
36:39Yes, there were many fatalities, but we communists and nationalists in the Czech resistance did not give up.
36:49We wanted to defend our land against the Nazis with all our might.
36:53See you.
36:55The Czechs did not have long to wait.
36:59Heydrich had made himself the number one target for the resistance.
37:05On Hitler's birthday in April 1942, Heydrich was given a train by the Czechs.
37:11Often mocked for his high-pitched voice, he was inspired to make one of his rare speeches.
37:36The president, Emil Hacker, was too old and weak to put up any opposition to Heydrich.
37:44We were really prisoners of our own impotence.
37:48And I think everyone longed for such a gesture to come.
37:51A liberating gesture to show everyone that the Nazis were not as strong as they appeared.
37:59This liberating gesture was advanced by Eduard Benesch,
38:02president of the exiled Czech government in London.
38:05He used men from the Czech army in exile to execute his plan.
38:11Late in 1941 in the Scottish Highlands, Czech and Slovak agents were training for a top-secret mission back in
38:18their homeland.
38:24Our job was to train the men right up to the last minute, until the operation.
38:30To put the finishing touches to the operation so that the mission would be a success.
38:37That December, a British Halifax took off on Operation Anthropoid.
38:43On board were agents Jan Kubisch and Josef Gabczyk.
38:49Their mission was to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich.
38:58But time was running out.
39:03Heydrich was on the verge of another big promotion.
39:06In France, where his job would be to crush the resistance and annihilate the Jews.
39:14In May 1942, Heydrich was in Paris, surveying what might soon be his new protectorate.
39:23To a group of close associates, he spoke again about the final solution.
39:29Killing people with exhaust gases was inadequate, he said, because the death toll is too low.
39:38As he left, he declared that the death sentence had been pronounced on France's Jews.
39:47Hitler knew exactly who he was sending.
39:50The man who could accomplish a task that no one else could do.
39:54A task even Hitler himself could not have completed.
39:59I believe that Heydrich was a completely split personality.
40:04On the one hand, he was musical and educated.
40:07And then again, he was this absolutely brutal terrorist who could not stop until he got his hands bloody.
40:15To the east, the death camps were taking shape just as Heydrich planned.
40:20Back in Prague, on the 26th of May, the music-loving Nazi ruler attended a concert.
40:25The programme included his father's operatic prelude, Reinhardt's Crime.
40:31He was photographed with Lena for what would be the last time.
40:36Next morning, he awoke as usual in the Heydrich family mansion outside Prague.
40:43Due to flight to Berlin, he took leave of his wife and children and set off for Prague airport.
40:52I was just mowing the lawn and I saw the family standing in front of the door.
40:57Heidrich bent down to his daughter Silke, lifted her up and gave her a kiss.
41:02Then he got in the car and drove off.
41:07Heidrich liked to ride in his green open-top Mercedes without an armed escort.
41:11The master of life and death felt invulnerable.
41:16But his overconfidence brought his downfall.
41:20Every morning, he took exactly the same route through Prague.
41:23It made the assassin's task much easier, even though that day Heydrich was behind schedule.
41:31But as usual, the chauffeur slowed here as the car approached the bend, where the Czech agents Kubis and Gabcik
41:38were lying in wait.
41:41They were armed with a Sten gun and some homemade hand grenades.
41:48At 10.29am, they attacked with all they had.
41:53Heydrich wasn't killed outright, but he was critically wounded.
42:00One of the guys called me and said there was an attack against a high SS officer in Lebanon.
42:15And he was severely wounded and they didn't dare, I don't know why, to tell me who it was, which
42:25was easily for me to guess.
42:28The explosives had torn through the car seat.
42:31Bits of upholstery, steel and fragments of his SS uniform flew into Heydrich's spleen.
42:38Himmler rushed in his own doctors, but they could not prevent blood poisoning.
42:43The Czechs knew there'd be a heavy price to pay.
42:47Standing there, seeing the car, I saw everything, blood all over Prague.
42:54On the 4th of June, Heydrich died of his injuries. He was only 38.
43:06When we learned about Heydrich's death, we were at first filled with enthusiasm.
43:11In our youthful heads, we didn't even think about the consequences.
43:17After executing his killers, the SS blew up the entire village of Ledica.
43:23The Gestapo falsely claimed that the villagers had harbored the assassins.
43:29172 men and boys from Ledica were shot.
43:38The surviving children were taken away with their mothers, but more was to follow.
43:49Then came the most terrifying moment for us that could ever be imagined.
43:55Not only for the mothers, but also for the children.
44:01Each mother had to give up the most precious thing they had.
44:05Their child.
44:12The women were deported to Ravensbrook concentration camp.
44:16Few survived.
44:18Ledica was leveled to the ground.
44:20Its name was removed from all maps.
44:25For us children, it was the worst thing that could possibly happen.
44:31We lost everything that we had.
44:34Our homes and our parents.
44:39Heidrich was given an elaborate state funeral in Berlin.
44:45The assassination of such a high-ranking SS man had shocked the Nazi elite to the core.
44:52Hitler compared Heidrich's death to a lost battle.
44:55Himmler praised Heidrich with a dark reference to the final solution.
45:21The violent death, thank God is all I can say, of Heidrich, had no bearing on the course of the
45:27final solution.
45:29You can't say that with Heidrich's death it got better, if you can use that word at all in this
45:34context.
45:38That's something you must always remember.
45:40The extermination process, like the rule of the secret police, only came to an end because Germany lost the war.
45:52Heidrich's death did not stop the next phase of mass murder he had planned for the SS.
45:58In Operation Reinhardt, named after Heidrich, two million Polish Jews were exterminated in the death camps.
46:08But Heidrich's plans did not end with the extermination of Europe's Jews.
46:13He had also proposed the murder of many millions of Slavs as the final phase of his so-called racial
46:19purification of Europe.
46:26The plans were in place.
46:28If Germany had defeated the Soviet Union, around 90 million Slavs would have been under the control of the Nazis.
46:37Of these, 14 million would have been needed as working slaves.
46:45Around 30 million were going to be killed.
46:49The rest were to be sent over the Ural Mountains into the wilderness of Siberia.
46:55All that is personified in Reinhardt Heidrich.
47:00I am utterly convinced that he would never have hesitated for one second, not a single second, to make these
47:10unthinkable plans a reality.
47:17To his family, Reinhardt Heidrich was a caring father and loving husband.
47:23But he will go down in history as the man who masterminded the murder of millions, without any remorse.
47:30His father's work, Reinhardt's crime, had been aptly named.
47:42He was the head of the SS, believed himself to be a reincarnation of the first German king,
47:48and reigned supreme over the extermination camps, managing genocide like an act of administration.
47:54A profile of Himmler's madness is next.
48:00For the first time, the first time he was nearly dead,
48:00He was like, oh, no.
48:00No, no.
48:00No, no.
48:06He was like, oh, no.
48:13No, no.
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