Heydrich is bullied at school because of a Jewish grandmother and a shrill squeaky voice. When he is fired for "dishonorable behavior" toward a girl in the Navy, Himmler mistakenly hires him as the boss of the Nazi secret service. Soon he is nicknamed "the blond beast. He tirelessly searches for the best way to make Germany Jew-free. It takes a remarkably long time before the German Jews realize that things are serious.
Heydrich grows into his role as head of Hitler's security service. He is the spider in the web behind many frightening actions. In 1939, he stages an attack by so-called Polish insurgents on a German radio station. It gives Hitler an excuse to invade Poland, making World War II a reality. But Heydrich's task does not end there. He has three more years until the Prague attack to achieve his ultimate goal: solving the "Jewish question. English stand-up comedian John Martin collects everything about the attack on Heydrich and knows exactly how it went down. His fascination begins at an early age; as a child he already has the desire to visit the bend in the road where the attack took place. Uncovering every detail about the attack, in addition to making jokes, has become his life's work.
The loving father who is nevertheless also a monster. The pile of photographs depicting Nazi atrocities on writer Laurent Binet's desk grows by the day. There is a photo of a pile of just-shot naked Jewish women and children in a ditch. One little boy is still alive. He leans on his mother's body while a German soldier lays down his rifle. Did this soldier have children? What did he tell them when he came home later, after the war? Several children of war criminals are featured in this episode.
The attackers practice at the Czech Resistance Army in England a little on Germans cut from cardboard. Until suddenly they are selected for a highly secret mission in Prague. Reinhard Heydrich, meanwhile, is lord and master there. He has rolled up the resistance. Czechs who are not Aryan enough are taken away or forbidden to have children. Full of self-confidence, Heydrich drives through the city in his open Mercedes. One hundred and twenty kilometers away, the assassins land with their parachutes in a snowy field.
The assassins search feverishly for the best place to kill Heydrich. Heydrich feels stronger than ever. He lives with his family in a small castle outside Prague and his wife Lina feels like a princess in fairyland. The assassins have found the best place for their act: a sharp curve where the Mercedes has to slow down. The English stengun refuses at the moment suprême. But thank God they also have a bomb.
Heydrich succumbed to his wounds after all. The perpetrators celebrate in their hiding place in the crypt of a church. In revenge, the Germans destroy two villages. The women and children are taken away and all men over the age of fifteen are executed. One man survives. He was in prison when the village burned down. In the cell, no one tells him what happened to his village. After the war, he returns to a house that is no longer there.
The assailants are betrayed by a paratrooper friend. After an hours-long siege of the church where they were hiding, they shoot themselves. Everyone who helped them is executed. After the war, the Czechs cool their anger at the Sudeten Germans with massacres and rapes on a grand scale. When, after years, Heydrich's pathological examination report is released, it turns out that he did not die, as thought, from an infection caused by a horsehair. But how then?
Detlef Bothe
Reinhard Heydrich
2020
2026
1978
2004
2022
1989
2016
2024
2023
2005
