Killing Reinhard Heydrich Worth Lidice?

[Flagg]

Basically what the thread title says, was the assassination of Heydrich worth the massacre at Lidice?

[fgalkin]

Heydrich was a very special kind of scumbag (Hitler called him "the man with the iron heart"), while what the Nazis did to Lidice was what they did to other, larger villages in the East every single day. It was only noteworthy because it was in the "civilized" West.

Heydrich was directly personally responsible for the worst of Nazi atrocities, from Kristallnacht to the Final Solution and was one of the planners of the false flag operation that was the pretext for the invasion of Poland. The man personally started WWII. So yeah, definitely justified.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Sea Skimmer]

That guy was so driven to kill people, work the Czechs to the edge starvation on the side, and drive on his subordinates to the same its entirely plausible to think that his death saved lives, by making the nazi murder machine work ever so slightly less hard. Its hard to think anyone involved with planning the assassination thought it would pass without reprisals and it was the Czech government in exile that wanted him dead as I recall.

[fgalkin]

That guy was so driven to kill people, work the Czechs to the edge starvation on the side, and drive on his subordinates to the same its entirely plausible to think that his death saved lives, by making the nazi murder machine work ever so slightly less hard. Its hard to think anyone involved with planning the assassination thought it would pass without reprisals and it was the Czech government in exile that wanted him dead as I recall.

IIRC, his official goals were to eventually ship 2/3s of the Czechs to be killed in the East and replace them with Germans. He was already implementing it, with ever greater amounts of Czechs forced into slavery and shipped further and further out.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Flagg]

Would those goals have been possible had he survived or the assassination not carried out?

[D.Turtle]

To be honest, I have very little idea as to what the Czech occupation looked like, but looking at what the Belorussian occupation resulted in, I think its not too far out there.

[Sea Skimmer]

Would those goals have been possible had he survived or the assassination not carried out?

Not during the duration of the war, well, not full scale anyway. The Czechs were needed too much as relatively effective arms workers. However several hundred thousand were deported to German as slave workers, another several hundred thousand were murdered in the holocaust often after being worked as slaves, another hundred thousand died from starvation and other causes, and some major deportations eastward within the country did take place. Its more then 10% of the population enslaved or killed, while relying on them as key workers and with the bastard dead! In early 1942 when this operation was setup meanwhile, nobody had any clue just how long it would take to beat the Nazis and certainly doubts existed that they would ever be fully defeated.

The Germans had a lot of other deportation/Germanification projects, but the Czech one was a fair bit more realistic then most, since the limited supply of German citizens would be far more willing to move into former Czech towns and cities then to become solider-colonists attempting to farm in Russia. I suspect this was a factor in the Czech government in exiles thinking, particularly if the war ended in some kind of negotiated settlement.

[spaceviking]

Were the Czech factories cannibalized and shipped to Germany after Czechoslovakia was absorbed, like some of the other conquered nations?

[CaptHawkeye]

Not to the scale other nations had their industrial assets stolen. Keeping Czechoslovakia's economy somewhat functional was actually beneficial to the Germans. The Czech Army was small but well equipped by anyone's standards during the day. Various tanks and guns produced by Skoda remained in production at their facilities in Czechoslovakia during the war. That's the only Czech company who's story I have any knowledge of though. Things might have been different for factories less relevant to the war.

I think it's worth pointing out that the real issue that was bottle necking German production was a lack of manpower. A lot of factory space and equipment already existed back in Germany (relative to the surrounding nations) but the men who would normally be operating these facilities were off suffering slow, agonizing death by frostbite or starvation in Russia.

[spaceviking]

IIRC at least early in the war the Germans were working far fewer hours than their counterparts in conquered nations. When they moved industrial assets to Germany they not only stopped production in the nation they stole it from, they also failed to use it to the same level of production in Germany.

[PeZook]

I'm not sure if it's applicable here, but killing Kutschera in Warsaw resulted in slightly reduced brutality on the part of the Germans (it proved that sufficiently extreme measures would result in the resistance ignoring the threat of retaliatory executions ; Plus, it proved they could carry out an assasination of one of the highest officials right there, in front of SS HQ). I'm not familiar enough with the circumstances of Heydrich's assassination to know if a similar effect happened there.