Reinhard Heydrich

On May 27, 1942, Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich was mortally wounded by a grenade thrown by Czech rebels in Prague during Operation Anthropoid. He would die a week later. Hitler would call for 10,000 Czech deaths that day. From the article:

"On May 27, 1942 at approximately 10:30 am, two Czech patriots, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, parachuted from Britain into Prague, ambushed Heydrich's Mercedes and threw a bomb into the front seat. Heydrich was seriously wounded and the driver of a baker's van took him to the Bulkova hospital. He remained in critical condition for days. On May 29, Joseph Goebbels blamed Jewish terrorists for the attack, arrested 500 Berlin Jews and warned the leaders of the Jewish community that "for every Jewish act of terrorism or sedition, one hundred or one hundred fifty of the Jews in our hands will be shot." (12) He also charged a crowd of Jews in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp with conspiracy and shot them on the spot. Nazi leaders proclaimed a state of emergency and a curfew in Prague. They offered a reward of 10,000,000 crowns for the capture of Heydrich's attackers. A wave of Nazi executions swept the Czech areas and the entire villiage of Lidice was wiped out. An SS general in charge of the deportation of Jews to Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor named the operation "Operation Reinhard" after Heydrich.

Meanwhile, Heydrich's condition deteriorated and he died on June 4 from "wound infection." Himmler delivered the key address at a state funeral on June 9. Hitler recognized Heydrich at the funeral for his contribution to Nazism.

Since the war, the man who felt it was his duty "to save the world from intellectual and moral decay" (13) has become notorious as one of the most heinous Nazi war criminals of the Holocaust. The surviving comrades of Heydrich's assassins erected a monument in their honor."