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By CAROL M. RUSSELL
If two cities could hate each other with a vengeance, then Berlin and Prague, two of the most highly cultured cities in Europe, certainly did during World War II each for a different reason.
It all started with the Munich Agreement signed on Sept. 30, 1938, in which England and France gave dictator of Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler what he wanted: the Sudetenland, the northern part of Czechoslovakia. Not one Czech was at the table. This was English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin's famous "appeasement." Winston Churchill, never at a loss for words, said, "We chose between shame and war; now we have shame and war." With that, the seeds for the most famous assassination during the WWII's European Theater of Operations took root.
Czechoslovakia knew what was coming to their country: Germany's Third Reich. If you look at the map of Europe, even today, you will see that Germany appears like a large animal with the head of Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) in its mouth. When Hitler had his army sufficiently built up, he helped himself to the rest of Czechoslovakia and that giant mouth closed on the country.
In the meantime, a 6-foot, 38-year-old Reich star rose to power. As deputy to Heinrich Himmler, SS Gen. Reinhard Heydrich ran the police and security operations in Germany and oversaw Germany's campaign to get Jews to emigrate.
When the emigration campaign didn't work (it was too cumbersome and inefficient for such large numbers of people), he became a major architect of the "Final Solution" or what became known as the Holocaust. Mass murder and torture surged. Victims called Heydrich the "Blonde Butcher," the "Hangman" and, soon, the "Butcher of Prague."
Heydrich really wanted to go to France as Protecktor; however in September, 1941, Hitler sent him to Czechoslovakia to get the restive Czechs to knuckle under. Heydrich saw this as a positive step to get to France.
As that country's Protecktor, he started his terror campaign to break the Czech will, crush the Resistance (400 executed...