Reinhard
Heydrich was one of Hitler's most ruthless Nazis and
second in importance only to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi
SS organization and the principle planner of the Final
Solution. There was even talk of his one day succeeding
Adolf Hitler.
At a villa on the shores of a suburban Berlin lake called
the Wannsee, mid-level bureaucrats from a number of
Nazi agencies assembled January
20, 1942, at the
request of Heydrich. Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich
Himmler were in the process of assuming leadership in the Final
Solution of the Jewish Question, i.e., the murder
of Europe's Jews by the Nazis.
This meeting was a part of that process, as bureaucratic
coordination would be required for the massive efforts to
be undertaken throughout Europe to kill the 11,000,000
Jews described in the document. The Nazis ultimately
succeeded in killing six million of Europe's Jews, with
hundreds of thousands already dead by the time of this
meeting.
By mid 1942, mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at
Auschwitz in occupied Poland, where extermination was
conducted on an industrial scale with some estimates
running as high as three million persons eventually killed
through gassing, starvation, disease, shooting, and
burning.
The
ever-ambitious Heydrich had achieved favored status with
Hitler and was appointed Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia
and Moravia in former Czechoslovakia and set up
headquarters in Prague. Soon after his arrival, he
established the Jewish "model" ghetto at
Theresienstadt.
In 1942
Heydrich was assassinated in Prague and the Nazis destroyed an innocent Czech village - Lidice - to avenge
the assassination. On June 9, just five days
after Heydrich's death, ten truckloads of the Security
Police came and quickly surrounded the village. No one was
allowed to leave - a 12 year old boy and a peasant woman
were shot as they tried to escape. All the men and boys
over 16 years old, 172 in all, were rounded up and locked
in a barn. They were shot the next day in groups of ten,
which lasted from dawn until 4 in the afternoon. 19 men
who were working in the mines during the shooting were
also rounded up and sent to Prague where they were killed.
The women as
a whole fared better than the men, but still faced cruel
situations. Seven of the women were taken to Prague where
they were shot. The rest, numbering 195, were sent to the
Ravensbrück KZ camp in Germany. 49 of
the women died - 7 by gassing, and the rest from cruel
treatment.
The
children, 90 in all, were taken to a KZ camp at
Gneisenau. They were selected according to the
"racial experts" and distributed to German
people with new German names to be raised as their own.
The village itself was completely destroyed - it was
burned, the remains dynamited, and bulldozed so that no
structure was left standing.
Lidice became a symbol of Nazi barbarism.
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