MOVED

[2RHPZ]

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[LeMat]

Have you ever read Walther Schellenberg memorials? He had written so many lies about that action that I couldn`t believe that human can lie in this way. Why? Maybe he had known about that attack before but he wanted Heydrich`s death?

[WolverineBlue]

God bless the brave Czech resistance!

[2RHPZ]

Have you ever read Walther Schellenberg memorials? He had written so many lies about that action that I couldn`t believe that human can lie in this way. Why? Maybe he had known about that attack before but he wanted Heydrich`s death?

No, I didn´t. Do you have any online source on him? BTW, I am pretty sure that he didn´t know anything about action. General Moravec (the chief of Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service based in London) kept it, until it was finnished (or I rather say until commandos left Britain), very secret. Well, there is a plenty of stuff on Czech and I have no time to translate that. But if there are any questions, please feel free (anyone) to ask me and I will find answers.

WolverineBlue, thanks for kind words. Many Czechs are very proud of this action so far.

[LeMat]

No, I didn´t. Do you have any online source on him? BTW, I am pretty sure that he didn´t know anything about action. General Moravec (the chief of Czechoslovakian Intelligence Service based in London) kept it, until it was finnished (or I rather say until commandos left Britain), very secret. Well, there is a plenty of stuff on Czech and I have no time to translate that. But if there are any questions, please feel free (anyone) to ask me and I will find answers.

WolverineBlue, thanks for kind words. Many Czechs are very proud of this action so far.

I don`t know if Schellenberg had known or not. But it is very strange that he had written so many lies about that action. The question is "WHY".

[2RHPZ]

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[TheDeacon]

Heydrich was possibly one of the most evil members of that regime; what followed was horrible. However, this chilling story is a reminder that submitting to tyranny will not save you from it. Honor to the memories of the brave men and women of the Czech resistance.

[2RHPZ]

Wrongly accused of having assisted the parachutists, the town of Lidice was destroyed on June 10, 1942. All the men were shot, the women were sent to Ravensbruck, and the children were either sent to Chelmno or to German families for Germanization. The bodies of the men were buried in a mass grave constructed by Jews from Terezin.

Yesterday was anniversary of extermination of Lidice ...




Website (http://www.lidice-memorial.cz/h_uk.htm)

[2RHPZ]

The bodies of the men and boys over age 16 of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, murdered by the Nazis on June 10, 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of SS Leader Reinhard Heydrich.


Members of the Schutzpolizei (German protective police) pose in front of the Horak family farm, which they had just destroyed.

[Amethystfretchen]

OPERATION ANTHROPOID:
THE GERM-BOMB ASSASSINATION OF REINHARD HEYDRICH

[Excerpted and condensed from "A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare" by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman (NY: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1982), pp. 88-94.]

According to his own account, Paul Fildes made his most spectacular contribution to the Second World War on 27 May 1942 on a street corner in Prague in Czechoslovakia. Ever since the establishment of the bacteriological warfare wing at Porton [Down], Fildes had been working on 'B T X' - the botulinal toxins, recently described in a World Health Organization report as 'being among the most toxic substances known to man.' BTX, more commonly known as botulism, generally appears as a particularly virulent form of food poisoning, with an average mortality rate of 60 per cent. Although there is no official confirmation, by 1941 it appears that Fildes had succeeded in turning BTX into a weapon; the British code-named it 'X'.

Chemical and biological weapons have long been favourite tools of spies: the ties between Porton, Camp Detrick in America, and the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Office of Stregic Services [OSS] were extremely strong... Both Polish and Russian partisans used biological weapons in sabotage operations against the Germans. In December 1942, for example, the Gestapo discovered a germ warfare arsenal in a four-roomed Warsaw house used by the Polish underground. They reported to Himmler the discovery of 'three flasks of typhus bacilli.' 20 lb of arsenic had also passed through the house. A few days later, Himmler showed Hitler a captured NKVD order instructing the Russian partisans to use arsenic to poison German occupation troops. The raids on the Warsaw house apparently failed to prevent the Poles from continuing to use germ weapons. The Combined Chiefs of Staff learned from the Polish Liaison Officer in Washington, Colonel Mitkiewiczm, that in the first four months of 1943 426 Germans had been poisoned by the Polish underground; that seventy-seven 'poisoned parcels' had been sent to Germany; and that 'a few hundred' Nazis had been assassinated by means of 'typhoid fever microbes and typhoid fever lice.'

Against this background it is therefore not surprising that the British Secret Service should have turned to Fildes for help when, in October 1941, they began to plan Operation Anthropoid. Its object: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.


It was an almost suicidal mission for those who undertook it, but one which the British regarded as of overriding importance. Heydrich had already acquired a fearsome reputation as the ruthless head of the SICHERHEITSDIENST (S.D.), the Nazi security service, through which he ran the counter-intelligence operation against British agents in occupied Europe. He was said to be Hitler's personal choice as the man to succeed him as Fuhrer, and in September 1941 he appointed him REICHSPROTECHTOR of Bohemia and Moravia... The British Secret Service decided to have Heydrich killed.

At ten o'clock on the night of 29 December 1941, a four-engined Halifax bomber took off from Tempsford aerodrome. To help it make the long, hazardous flight over occupied Europe, the RAF laid on a diversionary bombing raid to draw off German radar and fighter squardons. Four and half hours after take-off, seven Czechs, in semi-moonlight, parachuted into the snow-covered hills near the small Bahemian town of Lidice.

The men had all trained at Cholmondely Castle in Cheshire and in an SOE Special Training School in Scotland. With them they carried British arms, wireless and cipher equipment. Two weapons in particular were handled with extra care. They were British No. 73 Hand Anti-tank grenades. Normally these were 9 1/2 inches long and weighed 4 pounds. The grenades the Czechs carried were special conversions, consisting of the top third of the grenade, with adhesive tape thickly binding the open end. The grenades each weighed just over 1 pound. It now seems likely that they had been personally prepared by Fildes at Porton Down, and each contained a lethal filling of X.

The 'Anthropoids', led by Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, went to earth with the help of the Czech underground for five months, building up a detailed picture of Heydrich's movements. Astonishingly for so high a Nazi leader he rarely travelled with an armed escort. On 23 May 1942, by a stroke of good fortune, the Anthropoids learned where Heydrich would be in four days' time. At 9:30 AM on the morning of the 27th they took up positions on a hairpin bend near the Troja Bridge in a suburb of Prague on the busy route to Heydrich's fortress HQ at Hardcany Castle. Precise details of what followed differ, but in all there were probably six assassins: four men armed with sub-machine guns and grenades, one with a mirror to flash a signal when Heydrich's car rounded the bend, and Rela Fafek, Gradcik's girlfriend, who was to drive a car ahead of Heydrich: if he was coming along unescorted she would wear a hat.

At 10:31, complete with hat, she drove round the corner. Seconds later came the mirror signal. Grabcik strode into the middle of the road and aimed his sub-machine gun at the bend. Heydrich's open-topped green Mercedes came sailing round the corner, but as Grabcik tried to open fire his gun jammed. As the car slowed, Herdrich screamed at his chauffeur to put his foot on the accelerator, but the driver, a last-minute replacement, kept slamming on the brakes. It was at this point that Kubis hurled one of Fildes' grenades.

Heydrich had just risen to his feet in the now-stationary car when the grenade exploded with a force powerful enough to shatter all the windows in a passing tram. Although it missed the Mercedes, the blast tore off the door. Splinters from the grenade embedded themselves in Heydrich's body. Like 'the central figure in a scene out of any Western' Heydrich leapt into the road, shouting and screaming, then suddenly dropped his revolver. Clutching his right hip he staggered backwards and collapsed. The gunmen escaped.

Heydrich, in considerable pain and bleeding from his back, was driven, fully conscious, in a commandeered van to the nearby Bulovka Hospital. The doctor on duty in the surgery department was Vladimir Snajdr.

At first sight the wound did not seem dangerous... [he recalled] Professor Dick hurried in. He was a German doctor whom the Nazis had appointed to our hospital... He tried to see whether the kidney was touched: no, all seemed well for Heydrich. And the same applied to his spinal column... The X-ray showed something in the wound, perhaps a bomb splinter. Or a piece of coachwork... The patient's state called for a full-scale surgical operation: one rib was broken, the thoracic cage was open, a bomb splinter was in the spleen, the diaphragm was pierced... I did not see him again. But Dr. Dick said that he was coming along very well. His death surprised us all...

Heydrich's sudden collapse--from apparently only minor injuries to coma and subsequent death--may have baffled the doctors, but in retrospect matches completely the symptomology of BTX poisoning. After an initial period of calm, lasting perhaps for a day or so, the victim lapses into a progressive paralysis which fails to respond to treatment. As X went to work on Heydrich's central nervous system, the doctors could only stand by helplessly as their famous patient succumbed to the clasic symptoms of poisoning by BTX: a combination of extreme weakness, malaise, dry skin, dilated and unresponsive pupils, blurred vision, dry coated tongue and mouth, and dizziness when upright. As the patient becomes worse, he develops a progressive muscular weakness with facial paralysis, and weakness of arms, legs and repiratory muscles. He may die of respiratory failure unless artifical respiration is applied. There may be associated cardiac arrest or complete vasomotor collapse. The patient generally either dies or recovers within seven days. A week after the ambush, on 4 June 1942, Heydrich died. Dr. Snajdr recalled that the offical diagnosis of the cause of Heydrich's death was septicaemia. Blood transfusions could do nothing. Professor Hamperl, head of the German Institute of Pathology, and Professor Weyrich, head of the German Institute of Forensic Medicine, drew up a joint report on their medical conclusions. Among other things it said, 'Death occurred as a consequence of lesions in the vital parenchymatous organs caused by _bacteria_and_possibly_ _by_poisons_carried_into_them_by_the_bomb_splinters_ [author's italics] and desposited chiefly in the pleura, the diaphragm and the tissues in the neighborhood of the spleen, there agglomerating and multiplying.' That is all I can tell you.

Heydrich's coffin was borne in state in a black-creped train into Berlin, escorted by Adolf Hitler's SS guard. The Fuhrer laid a wreath on the grave of 'the man with the iron heart'. 'The German intelligence service,' one historian has written, 'would never really recover from the murder of Heydrich.'...

The Germans launched a period of terror. The entire town of Lidice was razed in reprisal: its male population shot, its women and children carried away in trucks. 10,000 Czechs were arrested. The Anthropoids were hunted down and eventually trapped in the crypt of a Greek Orthodox Church in Prague. Kubis and Gabcik were both killed. Yet, wrote General Moravec, one of the planners of the mission, 'our hope that the Czech people would react to German pressure with counter-pressure did not materialise...' On the day that Heydrich died 'fifty thousand Czech workers demonstrated against the British-inspired act in Prague.'

...There is no *written* evidence of Fildes' involvement in Heydrich's death. The relevant official files are still closed. When asked to comment, Porton Down could only reply that they had no record of this incident; if Fildes was involved, they added, they thought it highly unlikely that any record would have been made. [FN: Authors' interview with Dr. Rex Watson, 21 July 1981.] We have therefore only the circumstantial evidence which points to the use of biological weapon--and the claims of Fildes himself.

The secret of X in Heydrich's murder might have died with the Anthropoids themselves had it not been for Fildes. The Times [of London] was right when it spoke of a streak of vanity in his character: he made a point of telling a number of colleagues what he had done. Two senior scientists involved in Allied germ warfare have privately confirmed that Fildes told them he 'had a hand' in the death of Heydrich. To a young American biologist, Alvin Pappenheimer--later Professor of Microbiology at Harvard--Fildes was even more melodramatic. Heydrich's murder, he told Pappenheimer, 'was the first notch on my pistol.'

Source:"A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare" by Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman (NY: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1982) ISBN 0-8090-5471-X http://www.beyond-the-illusion.com/files/Politics/General/shrod.radio



This is Heydrich's car, showing the bomb damage.


Karel Boromejsky Church showing the Prague Fire Brigade pumping water into the crypt


Heads of Gabcik and Kubis, displayed to their relatives by the always-considerate Nazis


This is the Monument erected to the Memory of Heydrich at the fatal corner in Prague, with it's perpetual SS Guard of Honor.
The Czechs tore it to hell in 1945, needless to say.

(From: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=26208)