Did Hitler really ‘have some good ideas’?

00:00 06:48

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’.

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.