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seemingly model student. Yet, despite his cultured background, he joined the thuggish proto-Fascist organization the Freikorps in the 1920s, where he acquired a taste for street violence. In 1922, aged eighteen, he met the future spy chief Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and through him joined the German Navy, rising to chief signals officer by 1930. Yet his naval career came to a sudden halt due to a sex scandal: he refused to marry the daughter of a steel magnate whom he had made pregnant, because he was engaged at the time to Lina von Ostau, whom he subsequently did marry. Dishonourably discharged in February 1931 for conduct unbecoming a German officer, Heydrich secured an interview, through Lina’s help, with Heinrich Himmler, who had become head of the SS two years previously. Himmler was quickly impressed by Heydrich’s cold efficiency, and offered him the chance to set up the SS’s intelligence and security service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), which soon became feared for its utter ruthlessness.

In July 1934 Heydrich became a key figure in the Night of the Long Knives, thus bringing him to the admiring attention of both Hitler and Goebbels. By 1939, when the SD, Gestapo and Kripo (criminal police) were amalgamated as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), it was Heydrich who was appointed its first director. Hitler then entrusted him with creating the wholly invented ‘border incident’ at Gleiwitz which triggered the invasion of Poland. Once war had begun, Heydrich took charge of the brutal so-called housekeeping operations in Occupied Poland, with mass deportations of freezing victims in the dead of winter. After Germany had invaded Russia in June 1941, he was promoted to Obergruppenführer, and it was he who created the Einsatzgruppen.

Gaining the nickname the Hangman, Heydrich used the services of lieutenants such as Adolf Eichmann and Odilo Globocnik to kill the maximum numbers of Jews, and on 31 July 1941 he received written instructions from Göring to undertake the Final Solution. This was his prized chance to prove to the Führer that he rather than Himmler – whom he privately despised for weakness – would be the principal architect of the genocide programme. In September 1941, Hitler appointed Heydrich acting Reich protector of Bohemia and Moravia, that is dictator of the occupied Czech territories. Of course instead of ‘protecting’ anyone there, he ruled the region through torture and terror, sending hundreds of thousands to the concentration camps that he was busily converting into extermination centres. He soon earned the new soubriquet the Butcher of Prague.

On Wednesday, 27 May 1942, four British-trained Czech resistance fighters – Josef Valčik, Adolf Opálka, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabčik – who had been parachuted into Czechoslovakia especially for the attempt, ambushed Heydrich’s dark-green Mercedes at the bottom of the Kirchmayerstrasse in Prague. Although Gabčik’s Sten gun jammed, Kubis managed to hurl a grenade which blew a hole in the car’s bodywork. The Czech anaesthetist who tended him recalled that Heydrich’s spleen had been punctured and his rib pierced by metal splinters and that horsehair from the car upholstery had entered his back on the left side above the diaphragm.64 It took Heydrich seven days and twelve hours to die from septicaemia.

Heydrich received a state funeral in Berlin on 8 June; the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra played a funeral march from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Hitler laid a laurel wreath, although privately he blamed Heydrich’s ‘damned stupidity, which serves the country not one whit’ for having driven publicly through the streets of Prague.65 The four assassins of Heydrich were betrayed to the Germans, but none was captured alive, each fighting bravely to the death or committing suicide sooner than surrender. ‘The Gestapo arranged for the identification of the dead in a particularly gruesome manner,’ records Heydrich’s biographer, ‘the corpses being decapitated and the heads impaled on a stake, the relatives and friends then being invited to file past the display.’66 It was a touch