In Sean Ellis’ ANTHROPOID, Czechoslovakian resistance fighters Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) and Jozef Gabčík (Cillian Murphy) risk everything to take out SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. Never before had such an audacious act of resistance against the Nazis been undertaken.
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No one involved knew what the consequences of their actions would be, or what devastating repercussions might occur. What the Czechoslovakian people did know, however, was the dark shadow Heydrich had already cast over Europe.
Although he’d been appointed Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia only a year before in September 1941, Heydrich’s reputation for machinelike efficiency and unflinching cruelty preceded him. Not only had he put together one of the most brutal policing organizations in modern history, he had also masterminded several of the Nazi’s most insidious acts of aggression, including laying out the blueprint for the Final Solution. To provide a fuller picture of what made Kubišand Gabčík’s mission so essential, we outline Heydrich’s short, sinister life here.
As with many monsters, it’s often hard to see the evil they would inflict in the childhood they lived. The son of musical parents who owned and ran a popular conservancy in the town of Halle, Heydrich grew up in material comfort and high social standing. Deeply patriotic and anti-Semitic from at an early age, Heydrich was not, however, overtly ideological.
Even his membership into the Nazi party had less to do with politics than pragmatism. In order to interview with Heinrich Himmler for a position with his newly formed Schutzstaffel paramilitary group (or SS) in 1931, Heydrich needed to be a Nazi party member. The fact that he was granted an interview in the first place occurred only because a friend of his family misrepresented Heydrich’s experience in the Navy as having to do with intelligence, rather than simply being a communications officer.
Himmler, immediately taken with Heydrich’s Aryan blond-haired, blue-eyed countenance, hired him on the spot. In the next decade, under Himmler’s mentorship, Heydrich quickly rose to the top of the Nazi organization, becoming one of Hitler’s most trusted henchmen in the process.
Starting off as the head of Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and then taking over control of the Gestapo, Heydrich, whom the Nobel Prize Laureate Thomas Mann dubbed the “man with the iron heart,” became the chief enforcer of Nazi terror inside Germany. Beginning with a crackdown on direct political opponents of the Nazis, Heydrich widened his net over time to persecute more and more groups, including unionists, intellectuals, liberal priests, Seventh Day Adventist, sexual minorities, gypsies, and, of course, Jewish people.