Mary Wakefield has narrated this article for you to listen to.
One of the many good reasons to want every new generation to study the second world war is that it forces you to confront your own cowardice. Last weekend, my husband and I went to Prague – the first time we’ve been away together since the birth of our son eight years ago. We wandered the city and ended up crying in a church crypt – as you do on a romantic mini-break. The church was the Czech Orthodox cathedral of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius and, as we discovered after we had entered, the scene of the final, bloody showdown of Operation Anthropoid, the mission to assassinate SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the butcher of Prague’.
TikTok was forced to remove an AI-generated video of Hitler’s speeches viewed a million times
Heydrich was Himmler’s protégé, a man so brutal that Hitler’s admiring nickname for him was ‘the man with the iron heart’. The young Czechs selected for the mission, Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, were paratroopers trained by the SOE in Britain, then flown over occupied Europe and dropped into the snow near Prague. After months of planning and hiding, in May 1942 they succeeded in ambushing Heydrich as he drove by in his open-topped Merc and blew him up with an anti-tank grenade. They fled and laid low in the crypt at St Cyril’s, which was where they were discovered by SS and Gestapo and where they died, right in the place where we were standing. The stone around the crypt window is still pockmarked with little craters from the SS bullets.
Studying the second world war in school, you put yourself in a child’s position. What would it have been like in a bomb shelter? Could I have stayed quiet in Anne Frank’s annex? As an adult, a parent, it’s much worse. Almost every member of many Czech families that hid and fed Gabcik and Kubis was later tracked down and murdered, often tortured first. The museum in the church crypt has photographs of the families who helped the parachutists: the Kral family, the Denemareks – happy Czech mothers next to their happy sons. Could I have encouraged my own child to join the resistance? Would I even have had the guts to take in poor Kubis and Gabcik and hide them, knowing the sort of punishment Heydrich and his SS would dole out? The soundtrack to the story of Anthropoid is the nonstop crack of pistol shots. Pretty much every member of the Czech resistance who aided Anthropoid turned their guns on themselves in the end. The alternative was torture and the risk of revealing resistance secrets.
After Heydrich’s assassination, the Gestapo raided the flat of Marie Moravcova, known to Gabcik and Kubis as ‘Tante Marie’. Marie bit into a cyanide capsule and died but they took her teenage son Vlastimil. He was tortured but refused to talk until they force-fed him brandy, showed him his mother’s severed head in a bucket and told him that his father would be next. Vlastimil was executed by the Nazis in Mauthausen on 24 October, with his father, his fiancée, her mother and her brother, 82 years ago next Thursday.
I mention this now in particular because on that same day we visited the crypt, a poll was released which found that about one in five of both Gen-Z voters and black and Hispanic voters in America think that Hitler wasn’t all evil. They actually ticked a box marked: ‘He had some good ideas.’
I have a nasty feeling that the same shift in attitude has happened across the West. Earlier this month, TikTok was forced to remove an AI-generated translated video of Hitler’s speeches that had been seen more than a million times. Somehow the idea of Nazis as the example of ultimate evil has lost its hold. Is it the fashion for Gaza protests and unthinking anti-Semitism? Perhaps it’s that the living memory of the second world war has nearly gone. As the last few who actually saw the war die off, so the horror of it fades.
It could also be that we have a skewed idea of evil now. Netflix turns psychos into heroes: Dahmer, the Menendez brothers. Next up: Ironheart, how Heydrich subdued the citizens who failed to appreciate Hitler’s ‘good ideas’.
But one of the instructive things about Heydrich’s story is that he doesn’t conform to the comic-book stereotype of damaged psycho hellbent on sticking it to a cruel world. His family were musical, church-going, reasonably loving. He did well at school. His best friend was Jewish, son of the local cantor, yet he helped organise Kristallnacht, founded the Gestapo and in 1941 drew up plans for the Final Solution. Video footage playing in the church crypt showed Heydrich, newly arrived in Prague, inspecting troops, visibly excited by the power he’s been given; smiling a little, licking his lips.
Heydrich was logical, methodical, a man who loved an index system. On his arrival in Prague he had made up a chart of different skin colours and eye colours to help officials sort the Czechs who might decently be ‘Germanised’ from the darker Czechs who should be gassed, so as not to pollute the breeding stock. It was Churchill who founded the SOE and authorised the hit on Heydrich. But in 2020, BLM activists sprayed the statue of Churchill in Prague with the words: ‘Byl rasista’ (‘He was a racist’). Go figure.
My husband got talking to some young Czechs about our visit to St Cyril and St Methodius and they told us about the revenge attacks that followed the assassination. A rumour spread that the villages of Lidice and Lezaky had harboured the fugitives, so they were entirely razed. The men were shot on Hitler’s orders and the women and children sent to the Terezin camp to be gassed. The rumours proved untrue but that didn’t matter one bit. I tried to find out the names of the Czech families that had sheltered Kubis and Gabcik using Google’s new AI search engine. The information is easily available but ‘AI Overview’ now gives you the first result. It’s what any googling school child will use and what they’ll assume is true. ‘Sorry,’ replied AI Overview cheerily, ‘we don’t know the names of those families.’
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