Reinhard Heydrich, Hitlers Nazi butcher

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 owned by the SS on the shores of a suburban Berlin lake called the Wannsee, mid-level bureaucrats from a number of Nazi agencies assembled at the request of Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich and his boss, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, 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 between five and six million of Europe's Jews, with hundreds of thousands already dead by the time of this meeting.

Heydrich was the speaker at this Wannsee Conference January 20, 1942 and admitted received order for Final solution from Adolf Hitler. Heydrich presided over the conference with the aid of Adolf Eichmann. The conference was attended by all high ranking officials. It began the immediate starting of the overall European Genocide.

Himmler and Heydrich

The liquidation of those Jews who were unable to work was mentioned implicitly and later extermination of the remainder was mentioned explicitly. The production of liquidation camps began such as Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. The vast amount of concentration camps produced after this conference made the Jewish question clear.

Reinhard Heydrich took cynical delight in forcing the Jews themselves to partially organize, administer, and finance the Final Solution through the use of Jewish councils inside the ghettos.

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.

In September of 1941, the ever-ambitious Heydrich had achieved favored status with Hitler and was thus 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.

Few know that the entire Czech nation was the subject of a Holocaust plan. Reinhard Heydrich, who planned the "final solution" for the Jewish people, also prepared similar plans for all Czech, except a few with the blue eyes and blond hair traits of the "master race." Hitler, himself, called Czechs subhumans.

SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was by now a supremely arrogant young man who liked to travel between his country home and headquarters in Prague in an open top green Mercedes without an armed escort as a show of confidence in his intimidation of the resistance and successful pacification of the population.

In 1942 Heydrich was assassinated in Prague, and so the Czechs saved their nation, but thousands of innocent Czech lives had been lost in executions.

Nazi Germany destroyed an innocent Czech village - Lidice - to avenge the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

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 the village; 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 then 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 Ravensbrueck concentration camp in Germany. There 49 of the women died; 7 by gassing, and the rest from cruel treatment.

The children, 90 in all, were taken to a concentration camp at Gneisenau. The children were then 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. The village was burned, the remains dynamited, and then bulldozed so that no structure was left standing. Lidice became a symbol of Nazi barbarism.

When the war ended, millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists, and others targeted by the Nazis, had died in the Holocaust. The Jewish dead numbered more than 6 million: about 4 million in killing centers like Auschwitz, 1.4 million in shooting operations, and more than 600,000 in ghettos.

Only one man managed to get prisoners out of Auschwitz - Oskar Schindler, one remarkable man who outwitted Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than most of the heroic rescuers during WWII ...

Adolf Hitler's SS Men
Hitler surrounded himself with a small clique of fanatical, ruthless henchmen - a violent group of outsiders who rose to power in the Third Reich and established political and economic institutions of legitimized terror.

These masterminds of death were found to be quite psychologically normal. They were men of fine standing, husbands who morning and night kissed their wives, fathers who tucked their children into bed.

But murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts were an everyday occurrence.