Little over a week later, Hitler was back in Berlin again, this time to address around 10,000 young officers in the Sportpalast on 30 May. Naturally, he struck a different tone. But essentially it offered the same images of the dire spectre of a Bolshevik victory and the power and prosperity of imperialist conquest. Kerch and Kharkov were, he told them, merely the ‘prelude’ to what was to follow in the summer. Germany would — and must — succeed, he declared. If the enemy proved victorious, then ‘Our German people would be exterminated
Hitler had been in ebullient mood when Goebbels saw him at lunchtime in the Reich Chancellery on the day before his speech to the officers. With the advance to the Caucasus, he told his Propaganda Minister, ‘we’ll be pressing the Soviet system so to say on its Adam’s Apple.’132 He thought the new Soviet losses at Kerch and Kharkov were not reparable; Stalin was reaching the end of his resources; there were major difficulties with food-supplies in the Soviet Union; morale there was poor.133 He had concrete plans for the extension of the Reich borders also in the West. He took it as a matter of course that Belgium, with its ancient Germanic provinces of Flanders and Brabant, would be split into German
Two days earlier, on 27 May, one of Hitler’s most important henchmen, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Security Police and since the previous autumn Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had been fatally wounded in an assassination attempt carried out by patriotic Czech exiles who had been flown from London — with the aid of the British subversive warfare agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE) — and parachuted into the vicinity of Prague. Heydrich’s own security had become lax. That morning, he left his palatial residence at Panenske Brezany, around twelve miles from Prague, to drive to his headquarters at the Hradcany Castle in the capital without bodyguard, in an open Mercedes, alone with his chauffeur. He always took the same route. The two assassins, and their comrade who would serve as the look-out, had observed him regularly. Heydrich was a little late leaving that morning. It was just after 10.30a.m. when the look-out flashed the signal by mirror that his car was approaching the hairpin bend where it would be forced to slow down, and where the attempt would be made. As the car slowed, the first Czech agent, Josef Gabcik, stepped out, pulled a sten-gun from under his coat, and pressed the trigger. The gun jammed. But Gabcik’s companion, Jan Kubis, ran towards the car and lobbed his grenade at it. The bomb hit the back wheel and exploded. Heydrich, injured in the blast, tried to pursue his assailant, before collapsing. Kubis, also wounded by the explosion, escaped on a bicycle. Gabcik disappeared on a crowded tram after shooting Heydrich’s chauffeur in both legs. The look-out walked away quietly. By the wrecked Mercedes, one of the most powerful men in Hitler’s Reich lay mortally injured.135
Hitler always favoured brutal reprisals. There could be no doubt that the attack on one of the key representatives of his power would provoke a ferocious response.
The assassins themselves were betrayed, for a large money reward, by another Czech SOE agent. Eventually trapped by the SS, they committed suicide after engaging in a gun-battle. But their deaths contributed little towards satiating the Nazi blood-lust. To this end, over 1,300 Czechs, some 200 of them women, were eventually rounded up by the SS and executed. On 10 June the entire village of Lidice — the name had been found on a Czech SOE agent arrested earlier — was to be destroyed, the male inhabitants shot, the women taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp, the children removed.136
