Membership of the SS meant joining an elite organisation explicitly modelled on an ahistorical version of religious orders, such as the Teutonic Knights or the Jesuits, whose dedication to a higher idea was admired in these otherwise anti-clerical circles. As SS membership became a mass affair, including every physically prepossessing farmboy, the SD regarded itself as "an elite within the elite", with unrevealed truths requiring incremental induction. Here it is impossible to postpone consideration of the SS leadership, for the ethos was Himmler's mind projected on an institutional canvas, while the operational style largely derived from Heydrich. The Nazi leadership have become overly familiar, albeit as a galere of grotesques rather than as gods in ancient or pagan pantheons. Since the 'school masterly' Himmler and the 'blond beast' Heydrich have acquired their own character attributes and mythologies, we need to divest them of respectively bizarre beliefs and putative Jewish ancestry, the stuff of cliche, to grasp how they created one of the most awesome and efficient concentrations of police power mankind has known.

Himmler's more outre obsessions should not distract from his manifestly astute grasp of how this highly chaotic and protean political system worked. Routinely out-manoeuvring his foes, his empire spread between the interstices of state, Party and army, throughout Germany, and then across the whole of occupied Europe. His manner may have been distracted and unassuming, but the coldness, moralising, prying and suspicion kept him in absolute control of subordinates, whose own utter ruthlessness was accompanied by human frailties which Himmler lacked. Here some of the obsessions cited to illustrate this moralising little creep's weirdness make sense within his own dim terms of reference - except he did not confine his prurient sententiousness to how much his men drank or smoked, although that was surely bad enough.

Moralising interventions in the marital affairs of his subordinates were an example of how the watchers were watched, not to speak of the information assembled on each SS man (up to and including Heydrich) by eugenic and racial vetting stretching back to 1750 or 1800. This was leverage, for somewhere or other there was bound to be a weak link, whether racial or eugenic, in the 'clan' pedigree. How could there not be, when one filled tooth was enough to prohibit admission? Even those of unimpeachable ancestry and impressive physique were not yet home and dry. Himmler insisted that the SS equivalent of livestock breeders cast an instinctive eye over the candidate, in search of subjective character defects. Suspicious watchfulness was also part of a personal and institutional desire to create fear. While the SD attempted to cultivate a friendly face, to facilitate delation, the SS deliberately sought to make others shudder. As Himmler said in 1935: "I know there are many people who fall ill when they see this black uniform; we understand that and don't expect that we will be loved by many people."

The Security Service itself had its origins in reports early in 1931 that the Nazi Party had been infiltrated by its enemies. Himmler established the Security Service to investigate the claims, and put the business in the hands of a man who subsequently became perhaps more universally and cordially feared and disliked than any other leading figure in the Nazi regime - Reinhard Heydrich. Born in 1904 into a highly cultured middle-class family - his father was an opera singer, his mother an actress - Heydrich was an accomplished violinist, who, contemporaries reported, played with feeling, often weeping as he did so. Tall, slim, blond, his striking good looks marred for some only by his narrow face and small, close-set eyes, he also became an expert swordsman who excelled at fencing. Joining a Free Corps at the age of sixteen, he enlisted as an officer cadet in the navy in 1922 and had become a lieutenant by 1928, working in the signals department. His future in the armed forces had seemed assured. But Heydrich also found it easy to make enemies. The sailors disliked his abrupt, overbearing manner and mocked his high, almost falsetto voice. His numerous affairs with women got him into trouble with his superiors when the father of one of his girlfriends, a director of I.G. Farben and a friend of Admiral Raeder, head of the navy, complained; not only was the girl pregnant, but at the naval court of honour summoned to hear the case, Heydrich tried to pin the blame for the conception on her, causing general outrage amongst the officers and leading to his being cashiered from the navy in April 1931. Marrying his new girlfriend, Lina von Osten, who held strong Nazi convictions and had family connections with the SS chief in Munich, Karl Baron von Eberstein, Heydrich found new employment in the SS and was immediately set to work rooting out infiltrators. So thorough was he at this task that he convinced Himmler that the Security Service needed to widen the scope of its activities to become the core of a new German police and surveillance force. His intrusive investigations aroused the hostility of a number of old Nazis, including the Regional Leader of Halle-Merseburg, who riposted with the malicious allegation that Heydrich had Jewish ancestry in his blood. An investigation ordered by Gregor Strasser, Reich Organization Leader of the Nazi Party at the time, came to the conclusive finding that the allegations were untrue, though they continued to dog Heydrich for the rest of his career and have surfaced periodically since his death as well.

None of this stopped Heydrich's meteoric rise to power within the SS. Unsentimental, cold, efficient, power-hungry and utterly convinced that the end justified the means, he soon won Himmler over to his ambitious vision of the SS and its Security Service as the core of a comprehensive new system of policing and control. Already on 9 March 1933, the two men took over the Bavarian police service, making the political section autonomous and moving SS Security Service personnel into some of the key posts. They went on to take over the political police service in one federated state after another, with the backing of the centralizing Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. At this point they ran into a major obstacle to their plan to create a unified national political police system, however, in the formidable shape of Hermann Goring, the Prussian Minister-President, who on 30 November 1933 established a separate political police service for Prussia. This was based on the political police section of the Berlin police presidium, which had acted as an information-gathering centre on Communists during the Weimar Republic and was staffed by professional policemen, headed by the career police officer Rudolf Diels. Goring's new, independent force was known as the Secret State Police, Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo for short.

Himmler accepted Heydrich's draft proposals for setting up an SS intelligence service and, after a short spell of duty in the ranks of the Hamburg SS, Heydrich returned to Munich in August 1931 to begin work. On a kitchen table, with a borrowed typewriter, a pot of glue, scissors and some files, Heydrich, now leader of the Security Service (Leiter des Sicherheitsdienstes), aided by his landlady and some out-of-work SS men, began to gather information on what the Nazis referred to as the 'radical opposition'. Top of the list were the political churches, Freemasons, Jews and Marxists. A titillating side-line was homosexuality and 'mattress affairs' both inside and out of the Nazi Party.

Heydrich then toured the SS regional commands throughout Germany, and on his return began to recruit men of his own age and background into the SD. In contrast to the typical Nazi 'Lumpenpack' Heydrich sought bright young university graduates whose career prospects had been dimmed by depression. It was these young intellectuals from good families who were to give the SD its peculiar character.

At the beginning of September 1931 SS regional commanders were secretly ordered to set up an Ic desk in their headquarters, but this decentralized system of intelligence-gathering by SS men with no experience or special training led to a number of embarrassments for Heydrich, and he was obliged to set up an independent SD chain of command.

In April 1932 the SA and SS were banned and Heydrich had to go underground. His embryo intelligence service became the Press and Information Service, but the ban was only one of Heydrich's many problems, the most acute of which was a desperate shortage of cash. He himself received a pittance and all he could give his helpers was a bowl of soup, while the telephone of the Zentral in Munich Nymphenburg was often disconnected because the SD couldn't
pay its phone bill.

At the head of this organisation was Heydrich's erstwhile naval colleague, now his serious rival, Oswald Pohl. Whether Himmler's motive in thus mightily building up Pohl's power base was to curb Heydrich's growing ambition and popularity with the Fuhrer after his decisive action in the Protectorate and with the Endlosung, whether it was to fend off outside rivals from the economic sector, or whether it was just an obvious rationalisation now that camp labour and the SS building materials firms were in the forefront of eastern colonisation plans is not clear.

Even less clear is the underlying nature of the relationship between Heydrich and Himmler. To judge from letters and reports which they exchanged, the partnership was one of mutual trust and on Himmler's part affection. To judge from statements by Heydrich's widow since the war, her husband was secretly contemptuous of the theories which obsessed his chief. This is difficult to believe; all the documentary evidence suggests that he was quite as committed to the Aryan-Germanic virtues and the fight against their eternal enemies. However, her portrayal of Himmler as "the schoolmasterly type who never looked like a soldier and always wanted to be what he was not", her husband by contrast "a soldier" who "did not play with ideas" but "saw his tasks in concrete form" rings true. Obviously it was so. Kersten pointed the same contrast between the two, Heydrich by far the more dynamic, far superior in exposition and as decisive as Himmler was constitutionally indecisive. Now that Wolff was at Fuhrer headquarters, Heydrich had the right of immediate access to Himmler, even during Kersten's treatments, hence Kersten had opportunity to see him in action. His impression was that the clarity and incisiveness of Heydrich's arguments when he was proposing a course of action simply overwhelmed Himmler - so much so that, after Heydrich had gone and he had had time to reflect, Himmler would often phone through instructions that the agreed measures should not be put into effect until he had discussed them with the Fuhrer. He was, Kersten concluded, simply not in the same class as Heydrich.

Schellenberg, who had equal opportunities to observe both men closely, came to a similar conclusion, indeed he wrote of Heydrich as the "hidden pivot around which the Nazi regime revolved.... He was far superior to all his political colleagues and controlled them as he controlled the vast intelligence machine of the SD." Many others with first-hand knowledge of the two men have written in the same vein and have credited Heydrich with carrying his mediocre chief up to the power position he occupied; Edouard Calic, Heydrich's latest biographer, has implied this. Obviously it is how it appeared from the outside; obviously too neither man could have been unaware of Heydrich's sharper mind and practical abilities, yet it never showed. Himmler treated his protege with special consideration and fondness; Heydrich showed him what Kersen regarded as "quite inexplicable servility". It was 'Jawohl, Herr Reichsfuhrer!' - when everyone else addressed him simply as "Reichsfuhrer!" - and "if that is the Herr Reichsfuhrer's wish" and if Himmler expressed an opposing view.

Heydrich immediately adopted it. Whether this was merely outward form - a sign of his diabolical management of people - or whether, like Karl Wolff and Jurgen Stroop, he truly respected his chief for his ideological hardness, wider knowledge in all the ideologically important areas of race, Germanic history and comparative religions, above all perhaps as the founder and head of the Order of the SS, are questions which cannot be answered. Both men were too complicated to conform to such simple analysis. Both were driven characters with deep-seated childhood complexes of inadequacy and they operated within a shifting minefield of power rivalries; neither was what he seemed. Lina Heydrich said of her husband that he also played the hard man; "his apparent arrogance was no more than self-protection. Even with me he expressed no kind word, no word of tenderness". Himmler and Heydrich were a partnership and after more than a decade of success that virtually moulded the Nazi revolution they knew each other's strengths and weaknesses and each his position vis-a-vis the other as intimately as the partners in a marriage; as in a marriage no doubt the relationship changed and shifted subtly from time to time.

Following the attempt on the life of Secretary of the Legation von Rath in Paris, demonstrations against the Jews are to be expected in all parts of the Reich in the course of the coming night, November 9/10,1938. The instructions below are to be applied in dealing with these events:

I. The chiefs of the State Police, or their deputies, must immediately upon receipt of this telegram contact, by telephone, the political leaders in their areas - Gauleiter or Kreisleiter - who have jurisdiction in their districts and arrange a joint meeting with the inspector or commander of the Order Police to discuss the arrangements for the demonstrations. At these discussions the political leaders will be informed that the German Police has received instructions, detailed below, from the Reichsfiihrer SS and the chief of the German Police, with which the political leadership is requested to coordinate its own measures:

(a) Only such measures are to be taken as do not endanger German lives or property (i.e., synagogues are to be burnt down only where there is no danger of fire in neighboring buildings).

(b) Places of business and apartments belonging to Jews may be destroyed but not looted. The police are instructed to supervise the observance of this order and to arrest looters.

(c) In commercial streets particular care is to be taken that non-Jewish businesses are completely protected against damage.

(d) Foreign citizens - even if they are Jews - are not to be molested.

II. On the assumption that the guidelines are observed, the demonstrations are not to be prevented by the police, who are only to supervise the observance of the guidelines.

III. On receipt of this telegram, police will seize all archives to be found in all synagogues and offices of the Jewish communities so as to prevent their destruction during the demonstrations. This refers only to material

of historical value, not to contemporary tax records, etc. The archives are to be handed over to the locally responsible officers of the SD.

IV. The control of the measures of the Security Police concerning the demonstrations against the Jews is vested in the organs of the State Police, unless inspectors of the Security Police have given their own instructions. Officials of the Criminal Police, members of the SD, of the Reserves and the SS in general may be used to carry out the measures taken by the Security Police.

V. As soon as the course of events during the night permits the release of the officials required, as many Jews in all districts, especially the rich, as can be accommodated in existing prisons are to be arrested. For the time being only healthy male Jews, who are not too old, are to be detained. After the detentions have been carried out the appropriate concentration camps are to be contracted immediately for the prompt accommodation of the Jews in the camps. Special care is to be taken that the Jews arrested in accordance with these instructions are not ill-treated.

The most sophisticated apparatus for conveying top-secret orders was at the service of Nazi propaganda and terror. Heydrich had made a study of the Russian OGPU, the Soviet secret security service. He then engineered the Red Army purges carried out by Stalin. The Russian dictator believed his own armed forces were infiltrated by German agents as a consequence of a secret treaty by which the two countries helped each other rearm. Secrecy bred suspicion, which bred more secrecy, until the Soviet Union was so paranoid it became vulnerable to every hint of conspiracy.

Late in 1936, Heydrich had thirty-two documents forged to play on Stalin's sick suspicions and make him decapitate his own armed forces. The Nazi forgeries were incredibly successful. More than half the Russian officer corps, some 35,000 experienced men, were executed or banished.

The Soviet chief of Staff, Marshal Tukhachevsky, was depicted as having been in regular correspondence with German military commanders. All the letters were Nazi forgeries. But Stalin took them as proof that even Tukhachevsky was spying for Germany. It was a most devastating and clever end to the Russo-German military agreement, and it left the Soviet Union in absolutely no condition to fight a major war with Hitler.

I refer to the meeting that took place today in Berlin and want to point out once again that the overall measures planned (thus, the final objective) must be kept strictly secret.

Distinctions must be drawn between: (1) the final objective (which will require more extensive time periods), and (2) the phases towards fulfillment of the final objective (which will be carried out on a short-term basis).

It is obvious that the task ahead cannot be determined from here in every detail. The following instructions and guidelines will simultaneously serve the purpose of prompting the commanders of Special Units to do some practical thinking.

I. The first prerequisite for the final objective will be, for one, the concentration of Jews from the countryside into larger cities. This must be carried out expeditiously. Attention must be paid to the requirement that only such cities may be designated as areas of concentration which are either railway junctions or are at least situated on a railway line. One prevailing basic rule will be that Jewish congregations of less than 500 members will be dissolved and moved to the nearest city of concentration

II. Jewish Council of Elders.

(1) Each Jewish congregation must set up a Jewish Council of Elders it will be fully responsible, in the truest sense of the word, for an exact and prompt execution of all past or future directives.

(2) In case of sabotage of such directives, the councils will be advised that most severe measures will be taken.

(3) Deadlines given to the Jews for departure into the cities.

The most characteristic trait was that he (Reinhard Heydrich) was a man of few words. He never talked about something or discussed something just for the love of talk. Every word had to have a concrete meaning, or purpose, had to hit the point. Therefore he never said even one word more than necessary.

He did not read much. Never did he read novels or philosophical books, eventually he read themes on scientific topics.

He never wasted a minute of his time. Every minute had to have is aim and purpose. Therefore he simply hated to go for a walk. Gymnastic exercise was not meant for a past-time or leisure, but for discipline, a training to reach the highest possible record in it. Therefore he always chose such sports to which he did not take naturally, but which required a hard training, self discipline. For instance, he was not at all gifted for fencing, but the end of its hard and enduring training was that he became German champion....

In the morning, while being shaved, he worked at the new reports that had come in during the night... After breakfast during the 30 minutes ride to the office this reading was continued. He never let his staff had even a minute's rest, it was very hard and strenuous for them....

My husband never had time. He had lost the human measure. He always hurried his subordinates. He did not know any private or family life, and he did not estimate that of his fellow-workers. His life was the conditionless unconditional devotion to his task and that was what he expected from everyone....

My husband was vain. He hated nothing more than to be dressed inadequately. That did not apply to his wife. She might have worn the most impossible dresses, he thought them all right.

He also was ambitious, ambition meant work and efficiency... He could deliver speeches or orations, but he could take part in discussions and then his logic was forceful.... His memory was astounding. He never needed a telephone directory. He knew by heart all the numbers he needed, he never forgot a single report that he had read. In this respect the most surprising stories are told about him.

Neither in his youth nor later on had he any personal friends. He also tried to avoid every social contact with neighbors or fellow workers. That was very hard on me. When I once asked him for the reason, he answered, "How can I be friends with any one, as I never can tell whether there might not perhaps arise the possibility of having him arrested one day!"

He distrusted every one and he was hardly ever mistaken in his judgment of persons. How often did he not say to me, "I don't know, there is something about this person that I don't like, if I would only know what's wrong with him." So my husband who seemed to be guided only by his logic and intelligence was in the end led by intuition. There was an immense danger in his development, that of human isolation.

He was easily irritated and got excited about the smallest matters such as wrongly filed reports, incorrectness in the behavior of adjutants, belated beginnings of public assemblies, and so on. But difficult problems in his work he solved without any signs of excitement. He was the man who passed the most dangerous cliff without difficulty, but whom a straw caused to stumble.

He required absolute obedience as he himself obeyed without questioning.... His way of living... was modest. He did not like pomp, nor to be the centre of a society. He loved good food, but he did not like splendid dinners. Receptions, state funerals, public affairs of every kind he just hated, and he tried to get away from them wherever he could. He smoked little and hardly ever took alcohol. When he did go out, he preferred to go incognito. His daily life was scheduled to the minute. He kept absolute silence as to office matters.

He never gave in before he had reached the aim he wanted to reach. If he did once mistrust a person, it was exceedingly difficult to convince him or to prove to him that this person did not earn this judgment....

Orders from Hitler were obeyed absolutely. My husband saw in him the one great man. I sometimes ask myself what his thoughts would have been if he had seen the bitter end. He thought him to be the one and only being who could lead the German nation to greatness and glory. Therefore it is good that my husband died in 1942. He has kept his faith and ideal.

I wrote you these items today because they just came to my mind. I am not always able to write, there are too hard and woeful memories connected with this.

Gubbins found it necessary to turn his attention once again to Central European affairs. At the initial meeting between Dalton and Edvard Beneš in 1941, it had been agreed that SOE should train a small contingent of Czech troops for special operations. The SIS was unwilling to allow Moravec to jeopardize his existing radio links which were being used to carry valuable intelligence traffic, and before any action could be taken it was necessary to establish independent radio communications with the Protectorate. Several air sorties to Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1941 had proved abortive because of bad weather and during the summer months the hours of darkness were too short to permit flights to Central Europe. The Czech authorities were not particularly worried by these failures, nor by the decision of the Chiefs of Staff that it was impossible to provide air support for general risings in Central Europe. There were ample supplies of arms and explosives in the Protectorate; their armament industry, fully mobilized by the Germans, provided Czech workers with innumerable opportunities for the undetectable (and unverifiable) sabotage approved of by the Chiefs of Staff in which their underground organization claimed to excel. There had never been any question of the Czech Home Army attempting the sort of paramilitary operations favoured by the Poles, at any rate until the time was ripe for a general rising. Nevertheless, with Russia's entry into the war, Benes began to worry lest the relatively passive role adopted by the Czech resistance might count against the Czechs' territorial claims in the post-war settlement. In short, they could no longer rely on the reputation for subversion and sabotage which they had gained when under Austrian domination before and during the First World War; some spectacular gesture was needed, whatever the cost.

In September, 1941, Gubbins was informed that President Beneš had sanctioned a terrorist attack on some prominent personality in the Protectorate, possibly on the Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich himself. Colonel Moravec enquired whether SOE would help in this project by providing facilities for training and supplying any special weaponry that was required. Gubbins had no hesitation in agreeing, but decided to restrict the knowledge of the Czech approach, and above all of the identity of the probable target, to a very small circle. There was no need for him to seek ministerial approval and there is no evidence that he consulted Dalton at this stage. Acts of terrorism fell within SOE's charter and, as a senior official of the Sicherheitsdienst, Heydrich was a legitimate target. Moreover, in the last resort Benes and the Czech government were free to do what they liked in their own country without having to seek British approval. However, Gubbins pointed out to Moravec that an assassination of this sort was a purely political act which, even if unsuccessful, would result in wholesale reprisals for which, in his view, there was insufficient military justification. Later on Gubbins revised this opinion on learning that Heydrich, before coming to Prague, had made a special study of resistance elements in North West Europe, his elimination therefore becoming of direct interest to SOE.

By the time that Selborne took over from Dalton, independent radio communication with the Protectorate had been re-established; two agents had been selected by the Czechs, trained and equipped by SOE and dropped in Bohemia by the RAF, and the assassination was due to take place at the first opportunity. Gubbins therefore lost no time in putting Selborne in the picture, making it clear that the odds were against the operation succeeding and that absolute secrecy was essential. There is no reason to think that Selborne informed the Prime Minister of SOE's implication until news reports were received that the attack had succeeded to the extent that Heydrich had been seriously wounded. The SIS was certainly aware of Czech intentions and may or may not have informed the Foreign Office. It also seems likely that the Russians were forewarned, if not by Benes, at least by Moravec who was in regular contact with Ivan Chichayev, the NKVD resident representative in London.

Although ANTHROPOID, as the operation was code-named, had been planned and executed entirely by the Czechs, SOE's Czech section had provided essential support and the two agents had been transported to Czechoslovakia by the RAF. The reprisals were even more terrible than Gubbins had predicted and effectively liquidated organized Czech resistance for the rest of the war. This is not the place to try to assess the importance of ANTHROPOID which was certainly one of the most sensational operations in which SOE was involved.... Nor did he seek ministerial approval or disclose the true nature of the operation until it was too late for anyone to interfere. As it transpired, news of SOE's part in Heydrich's assassination was received with approval by the Prime Minister, and Mr Churchill was reported to have winked when President Roosevelt subsequently asked him whether the British authorities had been involved. Nevertheless, although Gubbins wrote to Moravec congratulating him on the success of the operation, it was not until many years after the war that. SOE's involvement was publicly acknowledged. Meanwhile Benes had his own reasons for not wishing the responsibility of the Czech government in London to become known. The secret was well kept.

President Beneš had, since 1939, led an untiring diplomatic campaign for nullification of the Munich Pact and rerecognition of the Czechoslovak Republic. Manifestations of resistance both in the occupied Czech lands and in Slovakia were of crucial importance. The need for a spectacular act of anti-Nazi defiance in the so-called Protectorate helped inspire the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. Heydrich was the head of the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the Nazi secret service, and was sent by Hitler to Prague in early 1942 as the ranking German officer in the occupied Czech lands.

Beneš and his chief of army intelligence in London, General Moravec, chose two noncommissioned officers of the Czechoslovak Army in England to parachute into the Protectorate and execute Heydrich. It was no coincidence that one of them - Jozef Gabčík - was Slovak, and the other, Jan Kubis, Czech. This pairing was meant to symbolize the continuing mutuality of Czech and Slovak national interests.

Authorities in London and Prague fully appreciated that this assassination would bring terrible retribution, but the Czechs decided their people would suffer less in the long run if Heydrich were killed...

Within a week the Anthropoids, lucky from the start, were located by partisans and taken in by Czech families. Kubis and Gabčík made contact with other parachutists but did not reveal their own mission. For this reason Heydrich was not alarmed when informed of their arrival but remained preoccupied with catching Paul Thuemmel, and the Anthropoids soon had new orders from London to help save Franta. After the latter's final arrest on 20 Mar 42 Kubis and Gabcik returned to their original task.

While the Anthropoids struggled to recruit a team they studied Heydrich's movements and habits. The butcher of Prague seemed to mock the threat of assassination. He always used the same routes between his country estate at Panenske Brezany, Hradcany Castle and the airport; he always sat in the front seat of his powerful Mercedes sports-convertible with Oberscharfuehrer Klein, the SS driver; he almost never had a bodyguard or armed escort.

The big break came on 23 May 42, when the Czech underground gave the Anthropoids Heydrich's schedule for 27 May. Meanwhile a perfect place for an ambush had been found. It was in the Holesovice suburb were Heydrich's car would have to slow for a right turn from Kirchmayer Blvd toward Troja Bridge and the center of Prague. With time for working out details of their plan Kubis and Gabčík formed their team. Josef Valcik would be on the boulevard about 100 yards from the turn, and he would flash a pocket mirror (pretending to comb his hair) when the victim came into sight. Rena Fafek, Gabcik's girlfriend, would be driven through the turn ahead of the big Mercedes and signal (by wearing a hat or not) whether the team had to deal with two cars or just one. Adolf Opalka was on the left-hand sidewalk across the street from the hit men; Kubis was on the corner watching Valcik:a few yards from him on the right sidewalk, were Gabcik and three other parachutists, Jaroslt Svarc, Josef Bublik, and Jan Hruby. Everybody was posted by 9 AM.

Heydrich left his country estate just after 10 AM, half an hour behind schedule. His senior warrant officer, Herbert Wagnitz, was driven a few minutes later after handling some final chores. The acting protector, who loved speed ordered Klein to step on it, and Wagnitz had no hope of catching up even if that had been the plan. Just after 10:30 the Anthropoids got the signals: Valcik flashed his mirror, and the lady partisan came through the turn bareheaded. As the unsuspecting Germans followed, a streetcar clanged up from the Troja Bridge to a transfer point on the boulevard. Klein had to slow futher for a couple of indecisive pedestrians, then he slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting a man who darted into the street. It was Josef Gabčík who whipped a Sten gun from under his rain coat, leveled it at Heydrich's chest, and calmly pulled the trigger. Nothing happened!

The startled Germans recovered fast, both standing to fire pistols and hit their dumb-founded assailant twice in the leg. As the car began moving on, Jan Kubis lobbed a grenade that exploded against the side of the car behind the front seat, tearing a great halt Heydrich got out clutching his pistol and briefcase, staggered a few steps, and fell. Klein, unscathed, pursued Gabčík, who had thrown down his gun and fled on foot, Kubis, whose face had been hit by slivers of metal, escaped on his bicycle. Valcik had run to the scene of action, being hit there by fragments and escaping with blood on his trousers. All the other partisans also got away.

The team's reconnaissance work revealed that he drove from his residence to the Hradcany Castle in Prague every morning, and this seemed to be when he was at his most vulnerable. On 27 May, the four commandos, led by Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabčík, struck. They set an ambush on a hairpin bend and waited for Heydrich to appear. When he did, Gabčík jumped into the middle of the road, raised his sub-machine gun and pulled the trigger. But the gun jammed. Heydrich's car screeched to a halt and he pulled his pistol from his holster and opened fire. At that point, Kubis a grenade under the car. It detonated, but then, to the Czechs' astonishment, Heydrich emerged from the cloud of smoke, shouting and still shooting. A running battle developed as the commandos tried to escape from their athletic and apparently unharmed enemy. Kubis managed to slip between two passing trams and escape on a bicycle he had positioned near by; but Gabčík seemed to be in real danger of being caught. However, Heydrich suddenly reached for his stomach, threw down his pistol and slumped to the ground. His driver, who had been slightly wounded in the blast, commandeered a passing bread van and took Heydrich to the nearest German military hospital. It was discovered that Heydrich had multiple shrapnel wounds, and he deteriorated over the next few days, despite being treated by Germany's leading doctors. He died on 4 June from septicemia, aged thirty-eight.

Heydrich's death was the signal for the most bloody reprisals. More than three thousand arrests were carried out, and courts-martial at Prague and Brno pronounced 1,350 death sentences. The section leaders of the R.S.H.A., Nebe and Schellenberg, arrived in Prague on the evening of May 27 to start an inquiry. They were able to reconstitute the mechanism of the bomb, a remarkable weapon of British origin, which could be regulated according to the distance it was required to roll. It had been set for a distance of eight yards and had functioned with great precision.

The authors of the attempt had found asylum in the Church of Saint-Charles of Borromeo, where more than a hundred members of the Czech Resistance Movement were in hiding, The Gestapo discovered the existence of this hideout, and the S.S., after besieging the church, killed everyone inside, including the killers.

The inquiry petered out, probably because nobody wanted to go more deeply into the matter. The outrage was used as a pretext to track down the Resistance networks. The day of the assassination 150 Jews were executed in Berlin by way of reprisals.

Schirach, Gauleirer and Reich Governor in Vienna, seized without doubt by a feeling of solidarity with his opposite number in Prague, wrote to Bormann asking him to have a British town of cultural interest bombed by way of reprisals, since the bomb was of British manufacture.

A gigantic operation was unleashed against the Resistance and the Czech populace. An area of 15,000 square kilometers and 5,000 communes was searched and 657 persons shot on the spot. Finally it was decided to punish two villages suspected of having sheltered the authors of the crime-the communes of Lidice and Lezaki.

On the morning of June 9 a detachment of the S.S. Division "Prinz Eugen," commanded by S.S. Haupfsturmfuehrer Max Rostock, invested the hamlet of Lidice about thirty kilometers from Prague. The population was confined to the village and forbidden to leave; the men and youths of more than sixteen years old were then locked up in the barns and stables while the women and children were imprisoned in the school. The following morning the men were taken out in groups of ten into the garden behind Gorak's, the mayor of Lidice, farm and shot. By four o'clock in the afternoon 172 men of the village had been killed. Nineteen men of Lidice who worked in the neighboring mines of Kladno, or as woodcutters in the neighboring forests, were taken to Prague and shot, as were seven women from Lidice. The other 195 women of the village were deported to Ravensbruck. The newborn and babies were torn from their mothers and had their throats slit. The other infants, numbering about ninety, were sent to the Gneisenau concentration camp in Poland. Seventeen of them, placed in German families, were discovered in 1947. Finally the village itself was razed to the ground. The houses were set on fire and dynamited and the entire village demolished...

In this manner reprisals carried out on a peaceful peasant hamlet were brought to the knowledge of the German people, without the slightest protest being raised. This action had been ordered by State Secretary Karl Hermann Frank, subsequently known as the "Butcher of Lidice."

After the death of Heydrich the executions were just as savage. The arrests continued at an accelerated rate. People were murdered even in the prisons. In the Pankrac prison of Prague 1,700 Czechs were killed and 1,300 more in Koumic College at Brno, which had been transformed into a prison.

Until the end the Nazis harassed the Czech people without ever managing to break their resistance. It had been calculated that 200,000 people passed through the prison of Brno alone, of whom only 50,000 were liberated, the others having been killed or sent to the slow death of the concentration camps.

In all, 305,000 Czechs were deported to the camps; only 75,000 emerged alive, another 23,000 being so seriously affected that their chances of survival were very faint. The executions carried out until 1943 often received considerable publicity. After 1943 they took place almost in secret. An average of a hundred persons a month continued to be shot. By the time the Nazis had to evacuate Czechoslovakia they had claimed 360,000 victims.

In the course of the search for the murderer of Obengruppenfuehrer S.S. it was found that the population of the village of Lidice near Kladno had helped and cooperated with the perpetrators of the crime. This has been proved, although the villagers denied that they had cooperated. The attitude of the population with regard to the crime has also manifested itself by other acts hostile to the Reich. For example, underground literature, stocks of weapons and ammunition have been found as well as the existence of a transmitting set, and an illegal depot containing large quantities of rationed food. All the men of the village have been shot. The women have been deported to concentration camps and the children sent to appropriate houses for their education. All the buildings of this village have been razed to the ground and the name of the village removed from the land registers.