Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich: The SS 'Butcher of Prague' by C. A. MacDonald, Callum MacDonald ISBN: 0-306-80860-9 Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: excellent book
Comment: This is an excellent book for people exploring the dedicated and intelligent Nazi known as the "Butcher of Prague." It looks at Heydrich and his career through the German military and the Nazi ranks and eventually leading up to his assassination. This is a small book but a very good one. I recommend it to anyone interested in exploring the monster and "ideal Nazi" Reinhard Heydrich.
Rating: 5
Summary: Multi-layered account of a killer's killing
Comment: 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.
Rating: 5
Summary: Eisernes Herz und eine Handgranate.
Comment: 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.
 |
Title: Reinhard Heydrich: Assassination by Ray R. Cowdery ISBN: 091066742X Publisher: Victory Pub Ltd Pub. Date: 01 October, 1994 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
 |
Title:Operation Daybreak ASIN: 6303082637 Publisher: Warner Studios Pub. Date: 11 June, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.95 Comparison N/A, buy it from Amazon for $14.95 |
 |
Title: The Labyrinth: Memoirs of Walter Schellenberg, Hitler's Chief of Counterintelligence by Walter Schellenberg, Louis Hagen ISBN: 0306809273 Publisher: Da Capo Press Pub. Date: 01 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
 |
Title: Operation Eichmann : The Truth about the Pursuit, Capture and Trial by Zvi Aharoni, Wilhelm Dietl ISBN: 0471193771 Publisher: Wiley Pub. Date: 21 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
 |
Title: The Ss: Hitler's Instrument of Terror by Gordon Williamson ISBN: 0879389052 Publisher: Motorbooks International Pub. Date: 01 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $26.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
