How the Heydrich Assassination Became Good: Czech History and Memory since 1989

On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, the second highest ranking official of the Nazi SS, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, and the governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was critically wounded in an assassination attempt organized by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and carried out by Czech and Slovak commandos. One week later, he died of his wounds. In reprisal, more than 5,000 Czechoslovak citizens were killed. From the beginning, even sympathetic observers questioned the wisdom of this act of resistance.

            This paper explores the curious transformation in postwar Czechoslovakia and especially since 1989 of the memory of the killing of Heydrich. Whereas in 1943 and for years thereafter the assassination was widely remembered as a reckless and ill-conceived endeavor that threatened the very existence of the nation, by the early 1990s, it was celebrated as the single most important and necessary act of Czech resistance. What accounts for this dramatic revision?

            I argue that the tendency towards its positive re-evaluation can be attributed to three factors: forgetting, the postwar anti-fascist discourse, and most importantly shifting political circumstance. The postwar Communist government created an unsustainable memory of the event by simultaneously extolling anti-fascist resistance but disparaging this particular act because of its “Western” origins. These contradictions came to the fore first in 1968 and then more dramatically after 1989. The transition from Communism after 1989 and the re-emergence of historical and political paradigms privileging the nation accelerated the assassination’s positive re-evaluation and recollection.