A Man Called Intrepid

by William Stevenson

  The stage-manager of this pogrom was Heydrich. His instructions were distributed by teleprinter to all secret police groups:

  1. Only such measures are to be taken which do not involve danger to German life or property. . . . Synagogues to be burned down only when there is no danger of fire to the surroundings.

  2. Business and private apartments of Jews may be destroyed but not looted.

  3. The demonstrations which are going to take place must not be hindered by the civil police.

  4. As many Jews, especially rich ones, are to be arrested as can be accommodated in the existing prisons. Upon their arrest, the appropriate concentration camps should be contacted immediately in order to confine them in these camps as soon as possible.

  Hitler described him as “the genius of all the police and security forces of the Reich” for this “triumph of organisation and cunning” and considered that he should be given governorship of an entire satellite state. What seemed to pleasure the Fuehrer was the way Heydrich organised The Night of Broken Glass, down to the bothersome aftermath like insurance claims. “Settle the Jews’ claims in full,” Heydrich advised in his report of November 11, 1938 to Hitler. “Then confiscate the money. Claims for broken glass alone will amount to some five million marks. . . . As for the practical matter of clearing up the destruction, Jews will be released from the concentration camps to clear up their own mess under supervision and the courts will impose upon them a fine of a billion marks to be paid out of the proceeds of their confiscated property. Heil Hitler!” One year before Heydrich started the Second World War with the simulated attack on the Polish border on August 10, 1939, he had already launched the first large scale operations to destroy “the racial vermin” as Hitler planned.

  His power was total by mid-1941. He was the symbol of Hitler’s “new kind of ruler, youthful, self-assured, untrammeled by tradition, and so brutal that the world shrinks back in horror . . . ruling by terror, eye gleaming with pride and the merciless independence of the beast of prey.”

  The size of Heydrich’s empire of horror could be measured by the lengths to which BSC agents went to travel around it. The file on Heydrich included information from SIS stations the world over. One of the busiest was Stockholm, run by Ronald Turnbull. To get from London to Sweden in 1941, he traveled to South Africa, flew to Cairo, sailed to Turkey, and took a train through Moscow to Leningrad, where he proceeded by ferry to Finland and thus slipped into Stockholm by the back door. He covered 10,000 miles to reach a city some 900 miles from his point of departure.

  Inside the perimeter of Turnbull’s travels lay Heydrich’s wasteland. From end to end, the traffic of death moved toward the new camps “built with all possible speed,” said Heydrich, “to receive all who misunderstand the aim of the Third Reich which is on a far higher plane than any religious doctrine.” Trains rolled across Europe with their human cargoes. Guards chanted monotonously, “Schnell! Schnell!” The victims marched in orderly groups, often into the gas chambers. The direction of the Final Solution remained Heydrich’s responsibility until the end of his life.

  Heydrich’s predecessor in governing Occupied Czechoslovakia had won the friendship of local leaders. Czech exiles in London, in daily touch with Czech intelligence circuits, such as Sparta I and Sparta II, and the Czech secret army, UVOD, the Central Committee for Internal Resistance, feared that resistance to the Nazis was being undermined by the collaborators.

  When Heydrich issued a public announcement that he had taken control, the secret-army chiefs had already decided to arrange the death of a prominent collaborator, a Czech code-named JUDAS.

  Three JUDAS letters had been forged at Station M, using information culled from a Proso-Profile. The letters were hand-carried from Canada to Chile, from where they were mailed at intervals to JUDAS in Prague. Chile, dominated by German economic and political agents, was the logical place for a mistress of JUDAS to go, and the fake letters were signed by that mistress—“Anna.” She was in fact a product of BSC’s imagination.

  The JUDAS letters were copied from drafts prepared by a girl in New York with a Slovakian background. The dictation of the draft letters was carried out by a BSC expert who knew nothing about the intended victim in Prague. All he had was the study written by a professor who analyzed enemy personalities. Enough was known about JUDAS to formulate a convincing series of letters that made Anna seem familiar with his personal life. The paper on which the letters were written had been prepared by experts in the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, working from samples of stationery used in Chile. They, too, had been given no more information than was necessary to carry out their part of the job. The forgers were equipped with ink, pens, and envelopes consistent with the false story that JUDAS was in communication with someone in Santiago.

  JUDAS’S real name was Alois Elias; the General was Prime Minister of the puppet government in Prague. It is doubtful if more than three men involved in his overthrow through the JUDAS letters were aware of his identity.

  German censors, examining these fabricated letters as they came drifting in from Santiago, became convinced that General Elias must be in secret communication with enemies of Nazism. The letters contained phrases and figures that read like code. For instance: “Father caught 75 fish on Wednesday the 17th. Brother was not well but caught 82.”

  When Elias was questioned by the Gestapo, he could not explain mysterious sentences like “Look after the marks and do nothing with the Polish zlotys.” The letters struck out of a clear blue sky. They were proof, said the Germans, that he was communicating in plain-language code. What, otherwise, was the meaning of “I knitted Karl a sweater using 14 skeins of wool each 60 feet long although two were only 28 feet”?

  Elias had no answer. When he denied knowledge of Anna, the Gestapo pointed out, not unreasonably, that she seemed to know all about him. How else could she write about the habits of his former wife or the circumstances of his brother’s unusual death?

  The trial of Prime Minister Elias marked Heydrich’s actual assumption of supreme power in the conquered land. Elias was charged in Division I of the People’s Court on October 1, 1941. He was then tried, sentenced, and, on the morning of October 2, executed for action in aid of the enemy.

  The Butcher of Prague thus began a reign of terror by destroying the one man who might have helped him survive. “The day of parliamentary decisions which only hinder the practical measures of government has gone,” Heydrich told the Prague government. “Get out of your heads that you can continue the tricks of the democratic party politicians.” He purged the administration and then announced: “Accounts with the Czech Resistance Movement will also be settled.” And so they were. He sat in the tapestry room of the castle to watch the mass execution of “intellectuals” in the courtyard below.

  Heydrich had been maneuvered into one self-defeating act; could he be manipulated further? He wielded great power outside his satrapy. Shuttling between Prague and Berlin, he tended his other allotments. In December, he summoned a high-level meeting of Nazi party officials to discuss the Final Solution and practical methods for “raking Europe from East to West.” The conference was to be held at the International Criminal Police Commission in Berlin. Using this ambitious institution, Heydrich, already seeking prospective victims in the next phase of Hitler’s purification of the human race, extended his probing fingers into North and South America.

  It was in this December of Pearl Harbor that the final decision was made to eliminate Heydrich. The case against him was bolstered by a legal justification volunteered by a courageous German Catholic, Clemens Count von Galen, Bishop of Münster. In a sermon aimed at Nazi leaders now conducting massacres in their respective regions, the Bishop reminded the authorities that the German legal code still authorized the punishment by death of “any individual who kills.” In London, the exiled Beneš government agreed that Heydrich deserved the death sentence as “the pivot around which the Nazi regime revolves and as the designer of the mechan
ism for mass murder.”

  Heydrich’s conference took place on January 20, 1942. It boiled down to a simple order: All opponents of German occupation troops should be banished into Night and Fog.

  Heydrich had conceived this method of reinforcing Nazi propaganda after the capture of Warsaw. The German authorities published a version of why they had occupied new territory. This claimed that National Socialism was the solution to economic chaos. The victims of economic chaos were the people. Therefore, anyone opposing Nazism must be an enemy of the people. Wherever Hitler governed, the Gestapo could recruit helpers by putting this gloss on reality. Traitors came forward: Quisling in Norway, Clausen in Denmark, Mussert in Holland, Sima in Rumania, Szalassy in Hungary, and Pavelič in Croatia. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem could enthusiastically issue calls to nationalists from Berlin, for he had brainwashed himself with Nazi claims to be helping other victims of Jewish, American, or some other imperialism. Those who opposed these Nazi collaborators masquerading as “nationalists” were ipso facto enemies of the people and joined Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in the catalogue of the condemned.

  Now the Gestapo and the SS were authorized to go beyond the mass extermination of inferior races. “After lengthy consideration the Führer has decided that measures taken against those guilty of offenses against the Reich or against the occupation forces in the occupied areas must be changed,” Heydrich announced. “The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or a sentence of hard labor for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. A more effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures that will leave the family and population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. . . .”

  Night and Fog came one year after the first Baker Street agent was parachuted into enemy territory: eighteen months after Stephenson organized the supply of American equipment to the secret armies. Night and Fog was a response to underground warfare. It was Heydrich responding defensively to something he did not yet understand.

  He soon would. Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubris were two of the agents selected to kill Heydrich. Nine men had gone through training before the final decision was taken, each expert in his field. At first, like the forgers who destroyed JUDAS, they were unaware of their target. But there came a point when they knew the nature of their mission. Gabcik carried a Sten under the raincoat draped over his arm as he stood waiting at the hairpin bend outside Prague on the morning of May 27. Kubris had a grenade in the deep poacher’s pocket of his jacket. One hundred yards away, up the hill toward the village of Jungfern-Breschen, stood a third man, known as Valcik. And another two hundred yards farther on, the man called Jemelik waited on the opposite side of the road. He would be the first to see the open green Mercedes in which the Protector rode to his office.

  Getting the assassins into position required a more intricate series of maneuvers than putting men on the moon. At least the moon follows a set course. Heydrich did not. The four agents had parachuted near the Polish border from an aircraft whose crewmen were constantly adjusting to conditions in enemy skies, so that until the last moment nobody could be sure where the men would be dropped. Since it had been decided that the difficulties were too great for penetrating Heydrich’s castle, at Camp X a replica was made of the green Mercedes he used when not piloting himself to Berlin. But who could be sure that the car had not been changed, the route altered?

  The hairpin bend where Gabcik stood with the Sten was a sharp one. Streetcars, two trolleys hitched together and taking power from overhead cables, screeched agonizingly as they turned. The street was busy. German soldiers drilled in the woods nearby. The two lookouts, Valcik and Jemelik, had difficulty keeping each other and the two assassins in view, what with passing German military vehicles and trucks, and the need to avoid attracting attention. For fifty-five minutes, this painful wait continued—painful and dangerous. At any moment some sharp-eyed German might well have wondered why four able-bodied men were loitering.

  At ten-twenty-five Gabcik heard four sharp whistles—H in Morse code—the signal. A moment later an open Mercedes swept down the hill. Klein, the chauffeur, changed gear to take the turn. Beside him sat Heydrich, in the silver-trimmed SS uniform with wings on the arms and braided cords on the shoulders, a target so naked that Gabcik caught his breath. Heydrich was leafing through papers, and his head was down. Klein was concentrating on the road. A pair of trolleys came grinding down the hill behind; and another streetcar hauled its way up from the opposite direction. Gabcik dropped his coat, just as he had done a dozen times in training. The coat carried misleading documents and false labels. He brought up the Sten and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The Sten was something you did not aim so much as spray, but now no stream of bullets emerged. Heydrich, fifty feet away, looked up, saw the light machine gun pointing at him, drew his revolver, and shouted something. Klein threw the Mercedes into a skid.

  The car screeched to a stop across the tram tracks. The following trolleys slid, with metal brakes throwing sparks, to within a few feet of the stalled Mercedes. Heydrich was standing, trying to force his door. The uphill streetcar rattled into the bend. Kubris, seeing his companion trying to clear the Sten, tossed his grenade against the side of the vietim’s car. There was an explosion. Out of the billowing smoke emerged Heydrich, vaulting over the stuck door, firing at the assassins caught between the two stalled trams. They began to run.

  Heydrich staggered to the sidewalk. Passengers from the trams climbed down, puzzled, more than frightened. “Fetch an ambulance,” said a woman. “It’s the Protector.”

  An hour later, Heydrich was delivered in a commandeered baker’s van to Bulovka Hospital, where the medical director tried to reach Hradcany Castle, official headquarters of the Protectorate as well as Heydrich’s family residence. Nobody at the Castle seemed to comprehend what had happened. The Protector was on his way to Berlin. No, there was no way Secretary of State Dr. Karl Frank would come to the phone. “Too bad,” said the medical director. “Tell him we have the Obergruppenführer here and he is unlikely to live. He’s full of holes.”

  The subsequent events are known from reports made by the assassins to the Czech secret army before they were trapped and killed, by Dr. Frank and witnesses, and by the surgeon Dietrich Hohlbaum, who was faced with the impossible task of trying to remove from Heydrich’s vital organs the pieces of metal, wire, glass, leather, and horsehair distributed by the exploding grenade. The surgeon went to work while the hospital was surrounded by SS troops. Patients were bundled out. During the following week, Hitler telegraphed around Europe for the best physicians. Specialists flew in from a half-dozen capitals. The Führer, from his headquarters on the Russian front, ordered “a stamping out of the whole canker at the heart of the Protectorate.”

  The scale of retribution was to be extended to the very limit possible without harming war production, a prudent recognition of Germany’s reliance upon factories like that of the huge Skoda munitions complex. Karl Frank, as chief of the Protectorate police forces, blocked all roads into the city, stopped all public transport, and permitted the passage only of trains bringing reinforcements of SS from other corners of Eastern Europe and from Berlin. Every public place was closed. Every citizen was ordered to go home and await the Gestapo unless he or she could prove to be engaged in essential war work. A reward of a million crowns was announced by loudspeaker vans touring the city.

  An escape plan had been worked out beforehand with local guerrillas. The assassins were taken to the crypt of the Karl Borromaeus church. A change of clothing and fresh documents transformed them into barge workers plying the Vltava river, and it was intended that they should travel downstream out of danger when the hue and cry subsided. Meanwhile, they hid in the crypt, which was entered through a removable slab that appeared to commemorate a Bohemian knight. The church was Greek Orthodox, and the SS and Gestapo were under instruction to avoid provoking members of that faith for political reasons. The church, lik
e all buildings, was put under guard but not searched. The priests smuggled into the crypt during the next few days more than eighty members of the Resistance, while outside 10,000 hostages were herded to places of execution. From the day of the attack, 100 Czechs were shot each evening. Thirteen days after the attack, Frank announced that the assassins had been parachuted by the British into the village of Lidice, twenty miles northwest of Prague. On the night of June 8, special squads from Heydrich’s Main Security Office surrounded the village. Every house was emptied of occupants. When workers from the local mines came off shift, they were pushed into the village square to join women and children. Babies had been torn from their mothers’ arms and thrown into cattle troughs to drown. During the night, fathers were separated from their families. Wives were locked into the village school. Children were pushed into the village hall. At dawn, the men were brought out in groups of ten and shot against the wall of the village café, watched by their relatives. When 189 had been executed, Captain Max Rostock, in charge of the operation, decided it was taking too long. The remaining men and youths were marched into a farmer’s barn; the barn was set alight, and those inside burned to death. All the women except those who were pregnant were sent to the gas chambers of Ravensbrück. The pregnant women were sent to Bulovka Hospital, where Heydrich had died a full week after the attack on him, and there their babies were aborted by the same doctors who had tried to save the Protector. Then the women were sent to Berlin to be experimented upon by “racial experts.” Finally, Lidice was burned to the ground with flamethrowers.