Hitler's Hangman (69 page)

when a suspicious letter fel into the Gestapo’s hands. Václav Říha, a married

man from a smal dwel ing near Lidice, had sent a message to his young

lover, Anna Marušćáková, cal ing off their affair under the pretext of having

to ‘disappear’ for a while. The reason was deliberately elided, but he gave the

impression that he knew Josef Horák from Lidice and had received a

message from him. Desperate for any possible lead that might aid the search

for Heydrich’s assassins, the Gestapo arrested both Říha and Marušćáková.

Although it quickly became clear that Říha had never met Josef Horák and

that he had no connection to the Czech resistance whatsoever, he and Anna

Marušćáková were deported to Mauthausen, where they were gassed along-

side 261 other Czech camp inmates in October 1942.13

Despite the fact that the allegations had proved to be false, Böhme

continued to regard Lidice as suspicious, and, on the day of Heydrich’s

death, Gestapo men from Kladno arrested fifteen members of the Horák

and Stříbrný families. Worse was yet to come: just a few hours after

Hitler’s destruction order of 9 June, German police units surrounded the

village. Male inhabitants were herded on to the farm of the Horák family

where they were successively shot in groups of ten. All in all, 172 men

between the ages of fourteen and eighty-four were murdered in Lidice on

9 June. The shootings were still under way when the first houses were set

on fire. By ten in the morning, every house in Lidice had been burned

down and their ruins blown up with explosives or bulldozed to the

ground.14 The women of Lidice were deported to Ravensbrück concentra-

tion camp while their children underwent racial screening. Only nine of

the children of Lidice were deemed Germanizable and given new German

names and identification papers before being assigned to German foster-

parents. The majority were murdered.15

Gestapo officers further tracked down eleven men from Lidice who

had been working the night shift in a nearby factory, a miner from the

village who was recovering from a broken leg in the regional hospital and

another villager who had hidden in the woods for three days. All of them,

as well as those remaining members of the Horák and Stříbrný families

who were not living in Lidice, were shot in the next few days. All in all,

199 men from Lidice were executed, a massacre which, as Goebbels noted

with satisfaction in his diary, ‘will not fail in its cooling effect on the

remnants of the underground movement in the Protectorate’.16

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

The Lidice killings, broadcast with pride by German propaganda, made

the front pages of newspapers around the world.17 Long before Auschwitz,

Lidice became, as the British War Office succinctly remarked, the ‘symbol

of the German policy of
Schrecklichkeit
[terror] . . . a symbol of all the

Lidices in all the countries touched by German hate’. Of all the sites of

brutal German reprisals in the Second World War – from Oradour,

Marzabotto, Kraguljevac, Distomo to Kalavryta and other villages –

Lidice possessed the greatest propagandistic value to the Allied cause,

precisely because the Germans were gleefully reporting its destruction in

news-reels and propaganda speeches. As the War Office report suggested,

‘each time it is remembered, mankind becomes a little more determined

that the thing which tried to kill Lidice shall itself be killed, shall be

driven from the earth so that no Lidice will ever die again’.18

Shortly after the destruction of the vil age, several communities in the

United States, Mexico, Peru and Brazil renamed their vil ages and towns

‘Lidice’, making Heydrich known throughout the world. In his Californian

exile, Heinrich Mann wrote the novel
Lidice
(1943), director Humphrey

Jennings filmed
The Silent Vil age
(1943) and Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang

col aborated on the Hol ywood blockbuster
Hangmen Also Die
(1943).

Cecil Day Lewis and Edna St Vincent Mil ay wrote elegies to the vil age,

and US war posters cal ed on Americans to ‘Remember Pearl Harbor and

Lidice’. ‘The Nazis are stupid beasts,’ the most famous German writer-

in-exile, Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann, remarked from the United States:

‘They wanted to consign the name of Lidice to eternal oblivion, and they

have engraved it forever into the memory of man by their atrocious deed.

Hardly anyone knew this name before they murdered the entire population

of the settlement and razed it to the ground; now it is world famous.’19

Mann, whose Munich home had been raided on Heydrich’s orders by

the Bavarian Political Police in 1933, also commented on the Reich

Protector’s assassination on the famous German-language BBC radio

broadcast
Deutsche Hörer!
in June 1942:

Since the violent death of Heydrich, the most natural death that a

bloodhound can die, terror is raging everywhere, in a more sickly, unre-

strained fashion than ever before. It is absurd, and once more our disgust

is aroused by this mixture of brutality and shrieking whininess that has

always been a hallmark of Nazism . . . Wherever this killer went, blood

flowed in rivers. Everywhere, even in Germany, he was simply called: the

Hangman . . . Now he has been murdered. And how are the Nazis

reacting? They are getting cramps. They are literally behaving as if the

most inconceivable misdeed has been committed, as if the highest level

of humanity has been attacked . . . Thousands must die – men and

L E G AC I E S O F D E S T RU C T I O N

283

women. An entire town, that supposedly sheltered the perpetrators, is

massacred and razed. The surviving population of Prague must line the

streets as the saint’s funeral procession passes by. At home, a pompous

state funeral is commanded, and another butcher [Himmler] says at his

grave that he had been a pure soul and a man of profound humanity. All

of this is insane . . . to say that Heydrich was a noble person one needs

power – absolute power to prescribe what is truth and what is idiocy.20

In the midst of the international outrage over the Lidice killings, one

person could search for a ray of light: the Czech President-in-exile,

Edvard Beneš. ‘What the Germans are doing is horrible,’ he assured the

Czech home resistance, the vast majority of whom would be arrested and

murdered over the following days and weeks, ‘but from a political point of

view they gave us one certainty: under no circumstances can anyone doubt

Czechoslovakia’s national integrity and her right to independence.’21 As

Beneš had hoped and anticipated, the Allies rewarded him for backing the

Heydrich assassination. On 5 August 1942, Anthony Eden officially repu-

diated the Munich Agreement of 1938 and secretly assured Beneš that,

after the war’s successful conclusion, the problem of ethnic diversity in a

restored Czechoslovakia would be resolved once and for all, thus paving

the way for the eventual expulsion of almost 2 million ethnic Germans

from the Sudetenland after May 1945.22

In the Protectorate, the response of the West to the massacre in Lidice

radicalized an already tense atmosphere. Karl Hermann Frank noted that

‘the genuinely American fad of naming towns after Lidice’ would not

prevent him ‘for one second from continuing to proceed against the

enemies of the Reich with even harsher measures’.23 Meanwhile, the

Gestapo had failed to achieve its most pressing objective: the capture of

Heydrich’s assassins. While martial law courts continued to pass an ever-

growing number of death sentences, the Protectorate authorities promised

an increased reward for anyone who knew of the assassins’ location. At the

same time, they announced drastic measures if the assassins were not

handed over by 18 June. As the date approached, the tensions came to a

climax. Rumours spread that the Nazis would execute every tenth non-

German in the Protectorate, and many Czechs, either out of fear for their

lives or in exchange for money, offered information to the Germans. None

of it, however, delivered a real lead on the assassins. The investigation

seemed to have reached a stalemate.24

Then, on 16 June, two days before the deadline, Karel Čurda, a para-

chutist dropped into the Protectorate in late March 1942, walked into the

Gestapo headquarters in Prague’s Pećek Palace – not a place many Czechs

entered voluntarily. To save his life and protect his family, Čurda was

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HITLER’S HANGMAN

willing to sacrifice those of others. He did not know GabČík’s and Kubiš’s

current location, but he did betray those who had provided safe houses

since their arrival in December 1941, including that of the Moravec

family in the Žižkov district of Prague, who had sheltered Heydrich’s

assassins for several weeks.25

A wave of arrests followed. On 17 June, before daybreak, the Moravec

apartment was raided. The mother of the family, Marie Moravec, killed

herself with a cyanide capsule when the Gestapo officers arrived. Her

husband, Alois Moravec, oblivious to his family’s involvement with the

resistance, was taken to the cellars of PeČek Palace alongside his teenage

son, Vlastimil. After withstanding nearly twenty-four hours of brutal

interrogation, Vlastimil cracked when the Germans showed him his

mother’s severed head in a fish tank and threatened to place his father’s

beside it. Vlastimil told the Gestapo that the assassins had taken shelter

in the Orthodox Church of St Cyril and Methodius in central Prague. His

forced confession was not rewarded. Both Vlastimil Moravec and his

father Alois were deported to Mauthausen concentration camp and

executed.26

In the early hours of 18 June, 800 SS men surrounded the Orthodox

Church. Their orders were to take the assassins alive, allowing for further

interrogations regarding their confederates in the Protectorate. The unsus-

pecting Kubiš and two fellow parachutists, Adolf Opálka and Jaroslav

Švarc, had the night watch as the Germans burst into the church. From

the choirstalls the parachutists opened fire and managed to keep the

attackers at bay for nearly two hours. By 7 a.m., the first Czech was dead;

the other two, including Kubiš, were seriously wounded and captured.

Kubiš was carried out of the church alive and brought to the SS military

hospital, but died there without regaining consciousness.27

Initially, the Germans were unaware that there were four additional

parachutists hiding in the crypt, but on searching the choirstall they found

items of clothing that clearly did not belong to any of the dead men. The

Gestapo searched the building more thoroughly and found a trapdoor to

the catacombs. Under pressure, the resident priest, Vladimír Petřek,

admitted that four more parachutists – including Heydrich’s second

assassin, GabČik – were hiding there. Petřek and Čurda tried to persuade

the men to surrender, but they refused. Over the following four hours, the

SS desperately tried to find a way into the catacombs. Tear gas and water

were pumped into the cellar in an attempt to force the parachutists out.

When the SS finally used dynamite to enlarge the narrow entrance to the

catacombs and prepared to raid the cellar, the four parachutists – knowing

that their fate was decided and that torture could be avoided only through

suicide – shot themselves in the head.28

L E G AC I E S O F D E S T RU C T I O N

285

The death of Heydrich’s assassins was greeted with great relief and

joy in Berlin, but the reprisals nonetheless continued. On 1 September,

the spiritual leader of the Orthodox community in Prague, Bishop

Gorazd, who had accepted full responsibility for the events in the Church

of St Cyril and Methodius, was sentenced to death, alongside Father

Petřek, and two other Orthodox priests who had sheltered the

assassins. Their sentence was carried out three days later. Over the next

few weeks, 236 other supporters and providers of safe houses for the

parachutists were taken to Mauthausen concentration camp and

murdered.29

Nazi reprisals continued throughout the summer. With the help of

local informants, Gestapo agents rounded up most of the surviving

members of the Communist resistance and ÚVOD, including its entire

Central Committee. The Czech underground was almost completely

wiped out and was never to recover from the blows it suffered in the weeks

after Heydrich’s death. In Prague, Alois Eliáš, the former Prime Minister

of the Protectorate government, who had been arrested immediately after

Heydrich’s arrival in Prague, was executed. Hitler had no more use for