The man with the iron heart
Photo montage printed on metal 2015 HISTORICAL INFORMATION The most evil man of the Third Reich Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich March 1904 – 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German Nazi official during World War II, and one of the main architects of the Holocaust. He was SS-Obergruppenführer (General) and General der Polizei, chief of the Reich Main Security Office (including the Gestapo, Kripo, andSD) and Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor (Deputy/Acting Reich-Protector) of Bohemia and Moravia (in what is now the Czech Republic). Heydrich served as president of the ICPC (later known as Interpol) and chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which formalised plans for the "final solution to the Jewish Question"—the deportation and murder of all Jews inGerman-occupied territory. Historians regard him as the darkest figure within the Nazi elite; Adolf Hitler described him as "the man with the iron heart".[5] He was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), an intelligence organisation charged with seeking out and neutralising resistance to the Nazi Party via arrests, deportations, and killings. He helped organise Kristallnacht, a series of co-ordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938. The attacks, carried out by SA stormtroopers and civilians, presaged theHolocaust. Upon his arrival in Prague, Heydrich sought to eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation by suppressing Czech culture and deporting and executing members of the Czech resistance. He was directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces which travelled in the wake of the German armies and murdered over one million people, including Jews, by mass shooting. Heydrich was attacked in Prague on 27 May 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him inOperation Anthropoid. He died from his injuries a week later. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Lidice was razed to the ground; all men and boys over the age of 16 were murdered, and all but a handful of its women and children were deported and murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
