Chapter 98:
Chapter 98
Heydrich was in a rather delicate position. He had the appearance of an ‘ideal Aryan’ that the Nazi party promoted, and he had risen rapidly to a rank equivalent to a senior colonel in the Defense Army despite his young age.
But there were many people who envied and despised his success, both inside and outside the Nazi party.
His direct superior, Heinrich Himmler, tried to restrain and check his enormous authority, and he had a bitter rivalry with the Defense Army’s intelligence agency, Abwehr.
His immense influence over the party’s intelligence and police forces, as well as his frequent favoritism from the Führer, made him hard to touch, but many were sharpening their knives against him.
From the high-ranking Defense Army officers who hated him for the Blomberg–Fritsch affair, to the Jews who vowed to kill him after the Kristallnacht pogrom.
Many forces within and outside the Third Reich wanted him dead, and the ones who came closest to their target – physically – were the anti-government forces within Czechoslovakia.
“There are many who want to kill that bastard in Prague, but…”
There weren’t many who had the courage to do so.
Czechoslovakia had succumbed to Germany’s threats and ceded Sudetenland, which had many German residents, and eventually handed over their entire country as a protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia.
Germany brutally suppressed the resistance groups within Czechoslovakia, and executed countless people under its iron fist.
The resistance was uprooted, but the communist grassroots organizations were still barely breathing.
They just lacked the power and opportunity.
The Soviet Union had succeeded in infiltrating four of its elite Spetsnaz agents through the Comintern-affiliated Czechoslovak Communist Party, and the communists had provided them with information on Heydrich’s movements and whereabouts that they had been collecting with vengeance.
The ‘captain’ reviewed the operation with the other three team members for the last time.
A sniper and six operatives.
The Czechoslovak Communist Party had decided to lend three of their most determined operatives as support, and if the Spetsnaz agents failed to kill Heydrich in their first attempt, the Czech operatives would make a second try.
If the Spetsnaz succeeded? Then they would cover their retreat. If they succeeded and ‘survived’.
The operation was aimed at Heydrich’s commute from his residence to Prague Castle, where the governorate headquarters was located.
He drove from his residence, which was about 14km away from the center of Prague, to Prague Castle every day in a Mercedes cabriolet open car.
Heydrich seemed to enjoy the taste of Germany’s iron rule, mocking and cursing those who looked at him with hatred.
It was obvious that he was more vulnerable to sniping and bomb attacks by insisting on driving an open car even in this weather.
The assassination team planned to place a sniper on a rooftop of a building in the city, block his route right in front of him, stop his car, and kill him with a sniper shot.
“One shot is all we need! One shot will do!”
“Hahaha, just watch! Let’s see who kills that bastard.”
The ‘boss’ boasted that he would blow off Heydrich’s head with one shot, but the captain chuckled and said let’s see.
The headquarters had provided them with the best weapons they could get to Prague.
At first, the Czech communists offered them a few Sten submachine guns that they had.
But the headquarters said that they couldn’t use those old-fashioned guns that jammed or broke all the time, and sent them four Kalashnikov assault rifles, which were the latest Soviet-made weapons, and a Simonov 14.5mm anti-tank rifle for the sniper.
[Sniping alone might not be enough to kill him, so use the anti-tank rifle to hit his car and blow it up, and then shoot him with guns and bombs while they are confused!]
The higher-ups ordered them to kill Heydrich as surely as possible. Of course, they didn’t know how things would turn out. They had reviewed all possible scenarios.
***
At a recent meeting, the ‘final solution’ for the Jews was finally passed.
At first, they planned to sweep away all the Jews in Europe along with the inferior races left in Lebensraum after crushing Soviet Union – which was dominated by Jewish-Bolsheviks. But their advance to A-A line – their initial goal – had already failed.
In this situation, there was a widespread perception within the Nazi party that they had to ‘solve’ somehow the Jews – who were potential rebels and could spread their inferior blood – within Reichskommissariat.
At first, there were opinions that they should deport them to Vichy France’s Madagascar or their ‘homeland’ Palestine.
But Madagascar was selected as Germany’s submarine base that would dominate the Indian Ocean, and Palestine also became too valuable to give to the Jews as it came under Germany’s sphere of influence.
The pro-German Arabs were already living in a scarce land. Why should they give it to the filthy Jews?
Some suggested that they should expel them to a place like Siberia, where it was hard for humans to live, but they soon had to shut their mouths after hearing the words ‘Are you out of your mind?’
The Führer ordered that those who prayed for sabotage within the Reich should be punished with the highest possible penalty, and accordingly, some of the labor camps were modified in a ‘different’ way.
Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office and the governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia, was appointed as the person in charge of this issue, and he held a meeting in Wansee, near Berlin, and gave orders to the agents of Gestapo and SD.
“Install ‘auxiliary facilities’ in the existing labor camps and ‘solve’ those who cannot contribute their labor for the Reich. And drag out the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled, political criminals and other impure elements from the occupied areas such as Poland, Baltic, and Galicia in Western Ukraine, and transport them to the camps!”
This required very sophisticated administrative work. They had to secure transport trains, manage the ‘troublemakers’ with scarce materials and manpower, and also contract with IG Farben to get chemical products to solve them.
The production and supply of gas masks for German soldiers was also one of Heydrich’s responsibilities.
“Those IG Farben bastards… They’re whining again that they don’t have enough raw materials?”
“Is that so, sir?”
“Well, they’re always like that. They have no intention of sacrificing for the nation and the race, but they always try to get a share of the war.”
Heydrich himself was a high-ranking Nazi official and knew well about the shortage of raw materials that Germany faced.
There was a lack of metals for war, and oil supply was also insufficient.
They said they were digging the ground in the occupied North Africa, but it was literally digging a barren land.
The oil was too deep underground to be mined efficiently with the current technology. He knew that there was a report that said so.
But the chemical industry was not yet lacking enough materials to shake. Coal was abundant in Germany, France and Britain, and coal could be liquefied into oil through a process that was not very efficient but could supply oil – which was essential for industry.
They had enough fuel reserves to last for more than three years.
He knew what those pig-headed IG Farben executives were up to.
If he had the Führer’s permission, he could expose their corruption and blow off their heads one by one. But the Führer was surprisingly lenient about his subordinates’ corruption and embezzlement. ‘Men have no personality below their waist’, or something like that?
The Führer didn’t seem to care about punishing them for ‘such things’ as corruption.
The high-ranking officials of Nazi Germany were no different from feudal lords.
G?ring was a great lord who had the territory of air force and aviation industry, Goebbels was a lord who controlled propaganda ministry, and Heydrich himself was a nobleman who had a vast territory of SD, secret police, and Bohemia-Moravia.
The Führer talked about centralization, but his form of centralization was more similar to feudalism where each ‘great lord’ pledged loyalty and duty to the Führer as their sovereign.
The great lords fought for the Führer’s favor and trust, which gave him absolute power.
Heydrich didn’t like this system very much.
He wasn’t as generous as the Führer, and he wanted to crush those who harbored impure thoughts with his power of intelligence and secret police.
From corrupt low-level bureaucrats who ate away at the nation’s granary, to pig-like businessmen who tried to fill their pockets by colonizing new conquered lands; from former SA leaders who engaged in homosexuality with each other, to filthy Jewish-Bolsheviks.
“They should all be executed and hanged… Dirty bastards.”
He wanted to build a nation of pure and loyal Aryans.
His ambition and desire drove him.
He rose to become a core high-ranking official of Nazi at the age of thirty-eight. His motivation was probably hatred and disgust.
And he wasn’t satisfied with his current position.
The Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia was one of the core industrial areas of the Third Reich. Czechoslovakia was the 11th industrial country in the world before the war started, and this industrial capacity was transferred entirely to the Third Reich when Germany annexed this area.
Heydrich ruled this area with iron fist, whip and carrot, and he had much better results than other governors with less sabotage incidents.
As an administrative officer, he not only achieved such results but also exposed a coup plot by the Defense Army’s top brass through SD, and reported it.
He would be able to rise to a higher position in the upcoming political reshuffle.
Maybe he could be the next Reichsführer of SS. Himmler was inferior to Heydrich, his own self, in every aspect except his unconditional loyalty to the Führer.
The SS officials joked behind his back that Himmler was favored by the Führer because he looked like a Japanese that the Führer liked.
He was incompetent, had an Asian-like appearance rather than a typical Aryan, and was obsessed with strange occult things. G?ring, Goebbels, Bormann and other Nazi power-holders also scorned him.
He had eliminated Afwehr and absorbed all the spy organizations, he had secured a military force called the Armed SS by taking the position of the Imperial Leader of the Guard, and…
The Führer was still young in his fifties, but Heydrich himself was even younger in his thirties.
When the Führer died, G?ring would be old, Goebbels would be powerful but lack military strength, and the Defense Army would be left with only scarecrows after losing all its top brass.
Then who would be the next Führer?
“Heh, hehe.”
“Sir, did something good happen?”
“No, no.”
Heydrich immersed himself in the documents again.
The installation of the camps for the final solution was the top secret of the Third Reich and required caution and accuracy.
He could urge IG Farben to deliver Cyclon B a little faster under the pretext of ‘pesticide’ for disinfecting stables and barracks, and he could divert some of the SS combat units that had been sent back due to problems with Model 1.
He scanned the documents quickly with his thin eyes and suddenly looked up at the sky.
The weather was unusually nice today.
Despite being February, the sky was clear and the sunlight poured through the clouds.
‘Maybe it’s a good sign.’
Heydrich was disgusted by Himmler’s occult play and rejected superstitions and mystical stories, but somehow the sunlight that shone on him when he dreamed of a hopeful future made him feel elated.
The second Führer of the Third Reich! Reinhard Heydrich!
A nation that would become pure by killing all the pig-like Jews, a glorious Aryan, a future of German race…
***
Bang! Bang!
The 14.5mm anti-tank rifle bullet seemed to have blown up the engine of the olive-colored Mercedes Cabriolet.
Heydrich always drove around in the only olive-colored Cabriolet in Prague, as if to announce his presence, and ‘the boss’ proved his shooting skills by hitting the car directly as it slowed down around the corner.
Black smoke rose in clumps.
The captain and sergeant who were standing on each side of the road threw away their long muzzle tubes and briefcases as if they were throwing them away, and took out their Kalashnikov automatic rifles and ran towards the car.
There was no scream.
There was no spirit.
They just clenched their teeth and tried to shoot at the target that was not visible behind the smoke as close as possible.
The weapons they had were automatic rifles with 100-round drum magazines and one grenade each. It would be difficult for the boss to try sniping again in this situation where his sight was blocked, so if they failed, then…
“Damn it… God!”
His hand was sweaty.
The people around him were already screaming and running away, and the police were coming from afar with their horns blowing.
The engine of the car was still spewing black smoke, so he probably couldn’t escape by car.
Before the police surrounded him with their bodies…!
His hand was full of sweat.
He felt like he would slip his hand while throwing his briefcase.
He had to run as close as possible and blow it up. One, two…
“Sirrrrrr! Heydrich sir! Please be carefulllll!”
With his loudest voice possible, with his most accurate German pronunciation possible, he shouted at Heydrich.
Holding his briefcase, looking back with a puzzled expression, Heydrich saw him flying over his briefcase and flinched with a quick reflex and shot him with his pistol.
‘Damn it, I didn’t hear that he was a master of shooting!’
His thigh burned, his shoulder burned.
He probably aimed for his chest but hitting his thigh and shoulder was fatal enough.
It was lucky that he didn’t hit the grenade hidden in his chest.
Bang! Bang!
The back of his head cracked and something white and red splashed out even from afar.
“Damn it… Czechs, what are you doing?”
The Czechs were supposed to join after all four Spetsnaz failed, so now it was his turn to throw the bomb.
The distance was about… 30 meters.
He had to approach as much as possible and throw it.
He couldn’t throw this heavy thing at this distance with his tremendous arm strength.
Heydrich was still looking at him, and the police were approaching him with their horns blowing.
He carefully closed his briefcase so that it wouldn’t explode, took a breath, and peeked out of the alley.
“Watch out! Watch out!”
He didn’t know what he meant by watch out, but Heydrich looked at him with a confused expression and saw his briefcase flying towards him.
He ducked down quickly and pointed his gun at him. His body didn’t listen to him anymore. If he did, he would have peeled off the grenade and thrown it.
“Goodbye, you traitor…”
Puck, a red mist sprayed. The left side of his head, which had a cruel smile on it, burst like a watermelon. The rest of his body fell slowly into the bullet-riddled car, as if in slow motion.
‘Ha, boss. You did it.’
His consciousness faded. He heard people screaming and shrieking in panic, but it was only a faint sensation of ‘hearing a sound’. It had no more meaning to him.
He felt a burning sensation on his back. The police must have shot him. His vision went dark.
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