Editing Reinhard Heydrich (section)

==Biography==
Heydrich’s father, who directed a musical conservatory and sang Wagnerian roles in the opera, exposed his son to the cult of Richard Wagner, and his mother was a stern disciplinarian; the family was falsely suspected of partial Jewish ancestry. 

Heydrich joined a Freikorps paramilitary unit in 1919 and entered the German navy in 1922. Commissioned as a naval officer, he was discharged in 1931 after a naval court of honour found him guilty of misconduct (for refusing to marry a shipyard director’s daughter with whom he had had an affair). That same year he joined the SS. Soon after a chance introduction to Himmler, Heydrich was entrusted with the organization of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; “Security Service”), the intelligence and surveillance arm of the SS.

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 [[Death squad|death squads]] that travelled in the wake of the German armies and murdered more than two million people by mass shooting and gassing, including 1.3 million Jews.

When Hitler asked for a pretext for the invasion of Poland in 1939, [[Heinrich Himmler]], Heydrich, and Heinrich Müller masterminded a false flag plan code-named Operation Himmler. It involved a fake attack on the German radio station at Gleiwitz on 31 August 1939. Heydrich masterminded the plan and toured the site, which was about four miles from the Polish border. Wearing Polish uniforms, 150 German troops carried out several attacks along the border. Hitler used the ruse as an excuse to launch his invasion.

On 10 October 1941, Heydrich was the senior officer at a "Final Solution" meeting of the RSHA in Prague that discussed deporting 50,000 Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to ghettos in Minsk and Riga. Given his position, Heydrich was instrumental in carrying out these plans since his Gestapo was ready to organise deportations in the West and his ''Einsatzgruppen'' were already conducting extensive killing operations in the East. The officers attending also discussed taking 5,000 Jews from Prague "in the next few weeks" and handing them over to the ''Einsatzgruppen'' commanders [[Arthur Nebe]] and [[Otto Rasch]]. Establishing ghettos in the Protectorate was also planned, resulting in the construction of Theresienstadt, where 33,000 people would eventually die. Tens of thousands more passed through the camp on their way to their deaths in the East. In 1941 Himmler named Heydrich as "responsible for implementing" the forced movement of 60,000 Jews from Germany and Czechoslovakia to the Lodz (Litzmannstadt) Ghetto in Poland.

Earlier on 31 July 1941, [[Hermann Göring]] gave written authorization to Heydrich to ensure the co-operation of administrative leaders of various government departments in the implementation of a "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" in territories under German control.  On 20 January 1942, Heydrich chaired a meeting, now called the Wannsee Conference, to discuss the implementation of the plan.

Heydrich was critically wounded in Prague on 27 May 1942 as a result of Operation Anthropoid. He was ambushed by a team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill the Reich-Protector; the team was trained by the British Special Operations Executive. Heydrich died from his injuries a week later. [[Ernst Kaltenbrunner]] would take over all his positions, and [[Heinrich Müller]] (who was already the nominal leader) assumed full control of the Gestapo.

Nazi intelligence falsely linked the Czech/Slovak soldiers and resistance partisans to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Both villages were razed; all men and boys over the age of 16 were shot, and all but a handful of the women and children were deported and killed in Nazi [[Concentration Camp|concentration camps]].
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