Hunting the Hangman

by Howard Linskey

  Then he spied a solution; a small butcher’s shop, which would certainly have a rear entrance for deliveries. If Gabčík could reach the front door before Heydrich’s driver came round the corner he could disappear from view and confuse his pursuer for a moment. That was all he would need to get through the shop and out the back way, where he could lose himself in a maze of side streets.

  Gabčík thundered through the shop door a second before Klein raced round the corner. The German stopped in his tracks, momentarily unsure of his next move, just as Gabčík found himself face to face with the owner of the shop. The butcher’s name was emblazoned on a canopy above the door outside and Gabčík took a chance, breathlessly addressing the startled man.

  ‘Brauer, I am a patriot. Show me your back door. Quickly, the Germans are after me.’

  To his astonishment Brauer, a fat man with a red face and balding crown topped with a thin ginger wisp of combed over hair, appeared shocked at the very notion.

  ‘No, never, get out of my shop! Get out!!’

  Rage welled up in Gabčík. Who was this coward, this traitor to his country who would not help him in his distress? Had he a moment longer and the means to do it quietly he would have happily killed the collaborator.

  ‘Bastard,’ he hissed and ran through the shop looking for the back door.

  Brauer dashed outside into the street and began to shout for help and the forces of law in that order. Klein spotted the distressed butcher immediately, realised his quarry must be in the shop and ran towards it.

  Gabčík could not believe his ill luck. First he finds a traitor and now a dead end. The anticipated rear exit was completely blocked with trays of butchered produce, carcasses suspended on hooks and wooden slabs for working these raw materials into useable cuts of meat. There were no shortages for this collaborator, who must surely have connections with the state police to enjoy such privileges. The entire detritus of the butchery trade blocked Gabčík’s progress and he had no time to fling it all to one side. In a frenzy of anger and fear for his life he turned and ran back through the shop.

  Klein entered the building just as Gabčík was leaving it. Both men reached the doorway from opposite sides, at speed and exactly the same time. Gabčík tensed his body and charged the startled Nazi with his shoulder. There was a bone shuddering collision, which threatened to knock Gabčík completely off his feet but, luckily for him, it was Klein’s stockier frame that ended off balance and he crashed to the floor. Gabčík, with his lower centre of gravity, landed in a tripping, hurdling motion, just outside the front door. He instinctively reached for his gun. Before Klein could retrieve his discarded Luger, Gabčík turned and fired twice, in the double-tap manner he had been taught by the SOE. He shot by reflex and with no time to aim. Though he was off balance the bullets found their mark, striking Klein in both legs and the SS man screamed in pain.

  Gabčík did not wait to finish Klein off. Instead he ran out into the road and waved his gun at Brauer to get him out of the way. He had the satisfaction of seeing a steady stream of urine pour from the collaborator’s trouser legs as he sprinted past him and away. A moment later Gabčík spotted a tiny alleyway and flung himself down it, not pausing for a second until he had put several blocks between himself and the butcher’s shop. By the time help arrived to attend to the wounded Klein, Gabčík had a head start and his would-be captors were left with no clue as to his whereabouts.

  Heydrich tried to haul himself onto an elbow but a sharp jolt of pain passed through his torso and he slumped onto his face. Sprawling helplessly on the pavement in agony he became vaguely aware of movement all around him but it was not the presence of the returning Klein he could sense. The Reichsprotektor rolled over onto his back, causing another surge of pain beneath his ribs, and he realised a small crowd of Czechs was beginning to mass around him. They walked slowly and unsurely towards Heydrich, a man none of them had seen before at close quarters. He could pick out their alien Slavic faces clearly. They were untermensch but he had been hurt and his first impression of his injuries was that they were serious. He needed help and quickly; and with no sign of Klein or any other German presence he had to appeal to them. When he spoke it was a supreme effort.

  ‘Help me,’ he pleaded.

  No one moved to his aid. They merely stood and gawped at him, their looks somewhere between confusion and curiosity.

  ‘Help me,’ he said again, this time turning it into an order, ‘get me to a hospital.’

  But still they did not move, merely continuing to stare down at his incapacitated figure. Why would they not come to his assistance? What were they doing just standing there? Were they just going to let him die here? Oh God, were they going to kill him? Was that it, now that he was helpless and unguarded? Heydrich had to accept they could tear him apart with their bare hands if they chose, then simply melt back into the anonymous sprawl of the city. Surely it could not end like this.

  ‘Help me.’ Heydrich weakly slurred the words once more but, as a menacing dark red stain began to spread visibly across his tunic, he received no reply.

  31

  ‘After life nothing will remain but death and the glory of deeds’

  Adolf Hitler’s philosophy – quoted by Walter Schellenberg

  The Bulkova hospital had never seen the like before. SS General Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, the most senior figure in the occupying forces, transported there in agony in the back of a filthy truck, draped face down across some tins of floor polish like a piece of tarpaulin.

  If that were not enough for the little provincial hospital, half an hour later another Nazi luminary arrived, this one in an animated state. It had taken that long for word to reach him on Heydrich’s whereabouts, such was the confusion surrounding the assassination attempt. An obviously shocked Heinz Pannwitz, head of the anti-sabotage section of the Prague Gestapo, angrily ordered the detachment of SS men he’d brought with him to clear all other patients away from the unguarded general, as he lay unconscious in an emergency ward.

  ‘I want a sentry at every doorway and teams of men up on the rooftops with machine guns,’ he barked. ‘Jump to it!’

  When he reached the bedside of the shirtless figure of the Reichsprotektor, he became puce with rage.

  ‘Cover all of the windows with whitewash. A sniper could finish him here while he sleeps!’

  Heydrich was under a general anaesthetic, in preparation for emergency surgery to remove shrapnel from his battered body. After a few moments supervising the placement of sentries, followed by several minutes standing around not knowing what to do next, Pannwitz decided he could be of more use elsewhere. Leaving a sufficient number of soldiers behind to secure the area, he set off for the scene of the attack to scrutinise it personally.

  There was still confusion in the German ranks but by now he was at least in possession of some facts. From the crippled driver of the Mercedes they had been able to piece together a reliable account of events. Two men had attacked Heydrich’s car with a machine gun and a grenade before fleeing the scene and losing themselves in the city.

  The whole street was cordoned off by now and guarded by grim faced SS men. At the centre of the scene was the Mercedes, which had borne the full brunt of the explosion. The collapsed car was on its axles, listed to one side like a ship that had run aground, its highly polished metalwork now sporting gashes from the shrapnel. Pannwitz surveyed the scene. What little evidence of the crime there was had been left where it lay and he was thankful for that small mercy. The Gestapo man had taken one look at Gabčík’s abandoned Sten gun and the briefcase, which still contained an undetonated Mills grenade, and instantly deduced the origins of this plot lay in London. He turned to the nearest uniformed member of the Czech Police.

  ‘Tell all of your people we will catch the men who perpetrated this outrage and, before they die, a full confession of their links to the Brit
ish will be extracted. This was no spontaneous revolt!’ He said that last bit with some satisfaction.

  Then he walked briskly from the scene, looking forward to the moment when he could unleash the maximum enthusiasm and expertise of the Geheime Staatspolizie on the two anonymous fugitives.

  For now, though, it was the condition of the Reichsprotektor that was of most concern to Pannwitz and everyone else, so he returned to the hospital to receive an early and encouraging report from the general’s doctors. Heydrich had arrived in great pain and some distress, as much for the fact that his wounds had to be cleaned by an untermensch, a junior Czech doctor, as there was the possibility that he faced emergency surgery, but it seemed at least that he was likely to live. Crucially the shrapnel had missed his vital organs and he had reached the hospital in time for surgery to be carried out to save his life. Professor Hollbaum, the top German surgeon in Prague, was brought to his side and he felt reassured to at last be in safe hands. The fragments of shrapnel were carefully removed from Heydrich’s body and a full exploration of the damage carried out. It was confidently felt that, with the administration of the right drugs and a blood transfusion, there would be no need for further surgery. On completion, Professor Hollbaum pronounced the procedure a complete success.

  Heydrich’s expected deliverance was no thanks to the bungling of German forces in the city. They had dismissed the initial report of an attack as a false alarm and the Reichsprotektor owed his safe deliverance entirely to the actions of a passer-by, a young Czech girl who flagged down a truck. She then persuaded the reluctant driver to lift the general into the back of his vehicle and transport him to the hospital.

  ‘Saved by a Czech,’ mused Pannwitz, ‘inexplicable.’ And he shook his head in wonder at the world.

  Later the Gestapo man paced the corridors, waiting for the Reichsprotektor to wake from the anaesthetic; his relief at the doctor’s optimism short-lived. Pannwitz was in a state of some agitation by now, for he’d heard Karl Frank had finally been alerted and would be arriving at the hospital to take belated control of operations. Worse than that, an apoplectic Heinrich Himmler was already on his way from Berlin.

  After the attack Heydrich crossed over. When he awoke from the operation he was in a new world. One almost entirely made up of pain and encompassed by the three bare white walls he could see from his hospital bed.

  In this world, nothing from his previous existence mattered; not rank or privileges, women or wealth. They were a distant irrelevance. He would gladly trade them all now to anyone who could stop the unendurable agony of his wounds. The pain centred on his abdomen but spread in waves over his whole body, rising in intensity until he prayed for unconsciousness again, so he could be spared the anguish for a few precious moments. And he swore, when they captured the men who had put him here, he would take a highly personal interest in the remaining days of their short wretched lives.

  When Frank finally arrived, his sense of shock was almost as profound as his keen awareness of the opportunity before him. He would have a chance to impress the Führer himself if he could quickly bring these assassins to justice and, if Heydrich failed to fully recover, who would be a more natural heir to the position of Reichsprotektor?

  Hitler had been raging round the Wolf’s Lair demanding justice and revenge. Much of this was entrusted to Frank and Pannwitz, in a blistering phone call, which left the former in no doubt as to the ferocity of action expected. Frank was to oversee proceedings and he started that afternoon at the hospital with an emergency meeting involving his most senior men.

  ‘Martial law is to commence immediately,’ he told the officers who had hastily assembled before him.

  ‘A 9.00 pm curfew is proclaimed throughout the Protectorate. Anyone caught breaking the curfew is to be shot. Ten thousand Czechs will be rounded up for arrest, including all those deemed to be part of the nation’s intelligentsia.’ He spat the last word. ‘We have lists, use them. On Himmler’s personal orders one hundred of these are to be shot immediately. And no, it doesn’t matter which ones.’ He said it impatiently so he might be spared any foolish questions.

  Then he added, seemingly as an afterthought, ‘All political prisoners held in the capital are to be summarily executed. I want the word to be sent out that these acts are taken in direct reprisal for the cowardly attack on General Heydrich, protector of the Czech people. Begin immediately.’

  Within minutes the house-to-house searches began, closely followed by the first arrests. That night the city’s streets reeled from the ferocity of the German reprisals and the air was filled with the screams of women and the desperate pleading of their men as thousands of homes were systematically cleared by hundreds of troops in full battle dress. At the same time, what remained of Prague’s educated classes was marched off to the ghetto at Theresienstadt. The firing squads killed one hundred and fifty that night. From this point panic slowly began to grip the population of Prague.

  A day later Himmler and his personal surgeon flew into the Czech capital. The effect on the atmosphere in the hospital was tangible for Himmler always brought with him an air of barely suppressed threat. It ensured each sentry snapped-to with precision as he passed them, and every officer walked alongside him with the high alert of a soldier leading a patrol through the streets of a bombed out Russian city, never knowing what peril awaited him at the next turn.

  An almost whispered ‘Doctor,’ was all he bothered to enunciate in greeting to a clearly panicked Hollbaum, who had lined up outside Heydrich’s room with a posse of white-coated subordinates alongside him.

  ‘Herr Reichsführer,’ the good doctor stammered, ‘may I be permitted to say what an honour it is…’

  Himmler raised a hand to prevent further flattery. ‘I merely wish to be informed of General Heydrich’s condition.’

  ‘Good, I think,’ he answered and immediately appeared alarmed. Was this the wrong word to describe one who has fallen victim to an assassination attempt? ‘I mean under the circumstances.’

  Himmler frowned at the doctor’s statement of the obvious and he attempted to redeem himself with a hastily delivered monologue on the surgery carried out and the drugs administered to aid recovery. All the while Himmler scrutinised the man with an unblinking stare, causing the doctor to be so disconcerted he began sentences without ever knowing where they would end. When he had delivered his appraisal under Himmler’s famously passionless gaze, Hollbaum fell silent and braced himself for some form of chastisement. The surgeon was used to dealing with pressure but never had anyone made him feel more wretched than the Reichsführer, whose priestlike features and diminutive frame somehow made him more alarming than if he was a man twice his size. The fear of Himmler was all about his power and knowing that in the Third Reich it was second only to Hitler’s.

  ‘Gebhart,’ said Himmler quietly to the man who had accompanied him. The illustrious professor, Surgeon General of the SS, shuffled forward to scrutinise the effects of Hollbaum’s work on the general. Eventually he emerged to declare the surgery a good job well done, to the intense relief of all assembled.

  A pacified Himmler preferred to survey the stricken figure of Heydrich through the window, because, ironically, the sight of wounds close up made him squeamish. His protégé was asleep but appeared half dead to the Reichsführer’s untrained eye. It was only the sweat, which matted the hair to his forehead, that convinced Himmler the general was still in the land of the living at all.

  ‘We shall stay by his side until he awakes,’ he announced grandly, but when Heydrich spent the next three hours drifting in and out of consciousness he instead decamped to a city centre hotel, accompanied by enough soldiers to capture a small town.

  32

  ‘Truth and goodness had no intrinsic meaning for him’

  Wilhelm Höttl, Nazi Security Service, on Reinhard Heydrich

  The next morning Himmler rose early, breakfasted lightly then s
pent an hour dealing with his correspondence. The Reichsführer was in buoyant mood. He had arrived in Prague fearing the worst but his right-hand man had survived an assassination attempt and would soon be on the road to recovery. He wondered how many weeks it would be before he would reach full operational effectiveness again. Weeks? Knowing Heydrich it could be days.

  As Himmler travelled back to the Bulkova hospital that afternoon, he fully expected his protégé to be sitting up in bed demanding to know when he could leave the place. What he saw instead shocked him palpably. Heydrich was unconscious, his skin white and lifeless, his pallor that of the cadaver.

  ‘I thought you said he was recovering.’ He spoke to Professor Gebhart, in a quiet voice that was infinitely more sinister for its lack of emotion.

  ‘That was my initial prognosis, Herr Reichsführer, but I am afraid that overnight there have been complications.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘We think, I mean it appears, that fragments of horsehair from the car seats passed into the general’s body with the force of the explosion. These strands are infected. They have been driven deep and are slowly poisoning the Reichsprotektor.’

  ‘Poisoning him?’

  ‘He has developed septicaemia. It’s very serious I am afraid. We have tried to treat him with transfusions and sulphonamide to control the infection but I fear it is too advanced.’

  ‘What about this operation to remove the spleen? The one you decided against.’

  ‘That was Professor Hollbaum’s decision and, I concede, it appeared a sensible course of action at the time.’

  ‘And now?’