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
Solutionof 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.
