True war stories are not a genre I especially seek out. I read this account of the complex web of intrigue and decisions behind Nazi Heydrich's assassination because a relative of mine was actually involved in the plot. I can't say it was spellbinding since it's hard to build much suspense about a case with so well known an outcome. But this book is not just about or even, I would say, primarily about, the halting, fascinating and nearly abortive ground operation that ended the life of one of Nazi Germany's most determined mass murderers. The opening several chapters are about Heydrich's rise to power after a checkered sometimes-disgraced early career in the military. Callum MacDonald clearly has a penchant for dissecting the meticulous planning and thirst for raw power that lay behind this ascent, and the frigidly cold-blooded maneuvers rising stars of the Nazi regime used, including against each other.

MacDonald then maps in detail the even more complicated political terrain navigated by Czech president in absentia Eduard Benes. Ever since the May 1942 killing of Heydrich and the predictable gory aftermath of reprisals -- including the systematic and total destruction of the Czech village of Lidice -- the wisdom a plot to kill such a high ranking Nazi and bring on excessive retaliation, has been doubted. The author depicts the rationale in terms of tragic choices Benes faced in trying to shore up the very limited and shaky international support for his government-in-exile. In a nutshell, the very existence of Czechoslovakia seemed, at that time, to be in question, as German military success against Russia led the latter to call for uprisings behind Nazi lines. From Benes' point of view, had his exiled government accomplished nothing dramatic in the war effort, Russia would have turned to the Czech communist party and thereby ensured their eventual rule in post-war Czechoslovakia. Thus sprang Operation Anthropoid, and the parachuting of assassins into occupied Eastern Europe.

MacDonald has been painstaking in his research into and use of primary once top-secret files. He has then brilliantly boiled it down to just the right amount of detail to both educate and tell a good story. At the end he devotes what seems to be a bit of an afterthought to the question of whether, in sum, the assassination was worth it. I hungered for MacDonald's last word and opinion on something he spent such obvious care researching. But in the end his balanced answers and the way he weighs the complexities may have real bearing on the difficult questions the free world now faces today confronting the new century's brutes and monsters.

The above caption means "Iron heart and a grenade." It captures the essence of this book. SS General Reinhard Heydrich (1904-1942) had been called the reflection of National Socialism because he epitomized every ideological ideal that the Nazis considered revered - he was blond-haired and blue-eyed, tall, calculating, organizational and ruthless. In his lifetime, he was head of the Nazi SD (Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence branch of the elite SS), the creator of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and the Security Police (SIPO - a branch of the RSHA), the de facto governor of Nazi-annexed Bohemia-Moravia and the chairman of the Wannsee Conference, where the 'Final Solution to the Jewish Question' was intimately planned. In each of these positions that he held, the outlined qualities and ideals resurfaced and certainly were put into practice. Consequently, Heydrich became one of the most hated and reviled Nazis in occupied Europe. Even within the Nazi hierarchy, he used espionage and blackmail to secure his hard-won position: many believed that he would be Adolf Hitler's eventual successor. On the morning of May 27, 1942, he was being chauffeured in an open-roofed Mercedes in a suburb of Prague, intending to reach the airport where he would fly to Berlin and meet with Hitler to discuss Nazi foreign policy. But then, at a bend in the road, he was assassinated. Hitler would call him "the man with a heart of iron," but he expired from his wounds nine days after the incident, on June 9, because shrapnel and pieces of his car got lodged in his spleen and gangrene set in. So much for iron...

Callum MacDonald first wrote this book in 1989 under the title "The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich" (New York: Free Press, 1989), and it is this edition that was consulted by the reviewer. His work is the first in several years to address the full story of Heydrich's assassination, significant in itself because it was the only successful assassination of a high-ranking Nazi during the Second World War. Using the existing literature on the topic (MacDonald has cited works in English, German and Czech) as well as several primary archival sources, he vividly re-creates a full account of the whole phenomenon of Heydrich. His life is discussed in some detail, as are the details of his assassination, from its implementation, planning, involved personnel and a valuation of it, in the context of its aftermath. It is a very well written book; readers are lucky that the book has now been reissued.

Stunning are MacDonald's revelations and assessment of the exiled Czech president, Eduard Benes, who remained in England during the war and sponsored the assassination. His motives certainly bear question, as he wanted the assassination of Heydrich to prove that Czechs would not blindly accept their fate at the hands of the Germans and had "contributed" to the war, even though he had inklings and knowledge of how the Nazis would wreak their revenge on Czechs and Jews in Heydrich's name. It was these two groups that suffered most after the assassination: the towns of Lidice and Lezaky were razed to the ground and its inhabitants were massacred (except for a few children deemed worthy of "Aryanization"). Several convoys of Jewish deportees were sent to extermination camps under the words "Aktion Reinhard." From that point, occupied Bohemia-Moravia was ruled even more so by checkpoints, security police and the Gestapo than when Heydrich was still living. Benes never sighed a word of the assassination (code-named OPERATION ANTHROPOID) after the war in light of the consequences.

The three assassins, Jan Kubis, Josef Gabcik and Josef Valcik are described and given a face: heroes they were indeed, as they made the ultimate sacrifice in assassinating Heydrich. It was Kubis' grenade that blew up Heydrich's Mercedes and sent bits into his insides, while Gabcik would have mowed him down with a Sten gun, but it jammed at the crucial moment. Valcik was their lookout man, poised at the top of a hill where Heydrich would come down; he signaled with a pocket mirror to his accomplices down below that their target was on the way. MacDonald describes what happened to these three heroes: they fled the scene and hid in the cellar of an Orthodox cathedral in Prague, only to be betrayed by a comrade named Karel Curda, allegedly fearing the arrest of his mother and sister (he was rewarded with one million marks, but was hanged after the war for treason). Fighting the SS for six hours, they all used their last bullets to shoot themselves rather than be taken alive.

Callum MacDonald has written a superb and original book. It is a tale of military intelligence and espionage, heroism and grand sacrifice, banality of evil and the man that reflected Nazism more so than any other in his age, except for Hitler himself.

I have always been facinated by Reinhard Heydrich...what made this cold-blooded, calculating Nazi leader tick? MacDonald's book was able to answer those questions and more...For anyone interested in Reinhard's background and the events in his life which made him hate not only Jews but himself, you will enjoy this book and get to really despise this man...It makes you really ask yourself how a person like this could exhist and hope you never come across...The book equally delves deep into the assisantion plot and one appreciates the sacrifice and heroism made by the Czech assassins...I read this book in two days...very engrossing, tense and educational...

This book is undoubtedly the definitive work on Reinhard Heydrich. As can be seen from the title, it focuses on both the brutal career of this so-called "Nazi Martyr" as well as his assassination, which has been hidden behind inaccuracy ever since it occured over fifty years ago. The book sheds very informing light on Exiled Czech President Eduard Benes and his government exiled in London, who sponsored the assassination, codenamed ANTHROPOID, for the main purpose of showing post-war world powers that the Czechs had attempted to strike out against the seemingly invincible Nazis that combined brutal measures and their seemingly immortal power to Germanize Czech soil and incorporate it into the Greater German Reich. Yet, Benes seemed to be pig-headed enough to continue the operation, despite his knowledge of the brutality of Nazi reprisals, especially when it came to killing a high-ranking official of grand importance. And then there is Heydrich himself, the ideal Nordic Man, a cold, calculating manipulator that worked his way up to the top in the SS. He had created the SD, or "Sicherheitsdienst" (Intelligence Service), the RSHA, or "Reichsicherheitshauptampt" (Reich Main Security Office), and had organised the infamous Wannsee Conference, in which the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was planned to the finest detail. He was also in charge of the "Einsatzgruppen," or the Mobile Killing Units which operated in Nazi-Occupied territories in the East. In late 1941, he was appointed by Hitler to be Reichsprotektor of Bohemia-Moravia. In this he excelled and was determined in smothering the remnats of the Czech Resistance. His successes grew, and so did his reputation within the Nazi regime. During this time, two young members of the Czech Brigade, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, were trained for the sole purpose of killing Heydrich who had now come to be known as the "Butcher of Prague." On the morning of May 27, 1942, at a suburban corner in Prague, Heydrich was being driven by his chauffeur, Klein, in his open Mercedes to the airport where he was to fly to Berlin to meet with Hitler and discuss Nazi occupation policy, the two assassins managed to mortally wound the Nazi--by a whisker. What followed was a brutal rampage: thousands of Jews and Czechs deported, the relatives of Kubis and the ANTHROPOID team's lookout man, Josef Valcik, killed, and the destruction of the two Czech villages of Lidice and Lezaky, in which the majority of the population was killed. The three team members, along with other parachutists, fought with the SS in the Karel Boromejsky Church where they had been hiding from the Gestapo for days in a crypt beneath the church. They fought for six hours and at the last minute, all of them used their last bullets to commit suicide rather than be taken alive. A captured Czech parachutist, Seargeant Karel Curda, had been caught a while before and had led the Gestapo to discover where the assassins were hiding. He received one million marks for his contribution and his mother and sister were saved. He became a Gestapo agent and married a daughter of an SS man. After the war, he stated to his prosecutor, when asked at how he could have betrayed his comerades, "You would do the same for one million marks." He was hanged for treason. Embarrassed by the enormous amounts of reprisals that followed Heydrich's assassination, Benes denied all responsibility for ANTHROPOID and stated that it was the work of the Czech resistance in Prague and London had nothing to do with it. This is just a part of the vivid episodes that the reader will encounter while reading Callum MacDonald's impressive and awesome account of the life and death of "the man with the heart of iron," Reinhard Heydrich. Get it and read it before it dissapears for good!

This book is both scholarly and riveting. It describes the controversial assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, originally Himmler's deputy at SS headquarters and later supreme Nazi commander of the Czech territories. No one will be shocked to learn of SS oppression of the occupied territories in Central Europe, but it is especially chilling to hear a detailed account. The book will come as a revelation to those who may never have heard of Heydrich, or who have encountered only scattered references to his name. In fact, at 38 years old, Heydrich was a rising star in the Nazi movement and one of its most brutal figures at the time of his killing. One especially shocking feature of the book is that Heydrich comes off as an even more vile character than Hitler, to whatever extent that is possible. The handsome SS-Oberfuehrer was actually an expert at manipulating Hitler, egging him on to some of his worst atrocities by falsely claiming that revolts were brewing in the occupied territories. Based on these generally illusory reports, Hitler would give Heydrich and the SS a free hand in using all possible suppressive tactics against the native populations. It was Heydrich who chaired the infamous Wannsee conference, which sealed the fate of European Jewry; afterwards, he was sometimes rumored to be Hitler's likely successor as the Third Reich stretched onward into the late 20th century. After finishing off the Jews, Heydrich planned to deport the entire Polish race to death camps, followed by as many as 60% of the Czechs (those who were deemed non-Germanizable.) The book argues that the assassination occurred in the following context. Czech intelligence was astoundingly good even before the Munich Conference in 1938. The main reason is that Paul Thuemmel (the mysterious Agent A-54), a high-ranking Wehrmacht officer, was spying for the Czechs for reasons that are still not clear. After the German invasion of their country, Czech intelligence fled to London, from where they broadcast news to their oppresssed countrymen and trained patriot commandoes in Scotland to undertake parachute raids in the motherland. Czech access to Thuemmel gave them an enviable position with respect to the British and Soviet governments, who first learned in this way of the planned Nazi invasion of Russia. But in February of 1942, Thuemmel was discovered and arrested by the Gestapo. This put Eduard Benes and his Prague exiles under great pressure to find other avenues to maintain their prestige with the leading Allied powers. They achieved this result with the killing of Heydrich, who had gotten off to a busy start in Prague with the summary execution of the city's student leaders, and with other brutal, cynical maneuvers. (One of the worst was Heydrich's proclamation tripling pension benefits for Czech citizens, knowing fullwell that he planned to gas most of them well before retirement age.) Two Czech soldiers who had parachuted back into the country in late 1941 attempted the hit on Heydrich on what was reportedly his very last day in Prague, on May 27th in 1942. His next stop was to have been France, where he would certainly have liquidated the French resistance by means of the despicable techniques pioneered in occupied Czechoslovakia. At the crucial moment, the gun meant to kill Heydrich jammed, but a bomb wisely designed as a back-up sent shrapnel into his spleen. The man often described as the model SS soldier died a week later in Prague, of blood poisoning (the Nazis did not have penicillin, which would probably have saved his life). Wicked retaliations followed. The village of Lidice, wrongly thought to be connected with the killing, had all of its males over age 15 shot on the spot. The women were sent to death camps, and so were the non-Germanizable children. The "best" children were put up for adoption in Germany, and tracked down after the war by the Red Cross. Furthermore, all political prisoners were immediately executed, and a special train of Prague Jews was immediately sent to Auschwitz, labelled with signs reading "The Assassination of Heydrich". The son of the family that had provided a safe house for the assassins was tortured for a full day without revealing any information. He finally broke down when the SS brought into his presence the severed head of his mother floating in a fish tank (she had actually taken cyanide earlier in the day to avoid interrogation). Having been broken in this way, he finally revealed the hiding place of the valiant assassinsРthe basemnt of a greek Orthodox Church in central Prague. After a courageous siege in the church, the assassins and their look-out men use their final bullets to take their own lives. The names of the assassins had already been supplied by a traitorРanother of the Czech parachutists who had turned on his compatriots, perhaps with the initial aim of preventing further German retaliation against innocent civilians. This traitor, Karel Curda, later went into the permanent employ of the SS, marrying the sister of a ranking official and posing as a commando in various parts of Czechoslovakia so that anyone offering him aid might be captured and executed. He himself was hanged after the war by his outraged countrymen after stating at trial, "You would have done it too for one million marks." Heydrich's deputy, a grim one-eyed Sudeten book dealer named Karl Frank, was also hanged after the war. The story of Heydrich is an amazing one in so many respects, and the author proivdes us with an exhaustive but readable picture of several key elements to the story: 1) the grim background of Heydrich's manipulative rise from cashieered Navy womanizer and SA street-brawler to Heinrich Himmler's ace hatchet man. We watch on in amazement as the lonely teen-aged son of an obscure Halle composer turns into a formidable customer matching intrigues with the shadowy likes of Martin Bormann and Adolf Hitler himself. 2) the remarkable tale of the birth of the Czech intelligence service. This story of the far-sighted Frantisek Moravec and his brilliant cultivation of a top agent within the German military would be worthy of a book in its own right. 3) the complicated saga of former Czech President Eduard Benes, stiffed by the appeasing allies at Munich in 1938. Benes is the picture of liberally-minded nationalism, but also of a ruthless politician willing to risk the deaths of hundreds of countrymen in his power-jockeying against the Czech Communist Party for eventual postwar influence. 4) the cloak-and-dagger tale of the assassination itself, one of the best real-life spy stories one could ever hope to read. The eventual assassins are forced to improvise following a disastrous parachute drop miles from their target zone and to indiscreetly debate the merits of the assassination with resistance workers concerned about the after-effects for the general population. 5) finally, the account of brutal SS retaliation against innocent Czech civilians in the wake of Heydrich's death. This part of the book offers one the best account I've ever read of Nazi atrocities OUTSIDE of the notorious death camps. In sum, the author gives us at least five compelling narratives woven into one compact account that will leave even ardent death penalty opponents (such as this reviewer) cheering in spite of themselves for the timely fall of Reinhard Heydrich.

This is an exciting account of a truly incredible battle. Yet for some inexplicable reason, the author condemns the reader to a losing fight to understand the action on the ground with one totally inadequate, puny little map. I can't believe it!