Why a Booktrail?
WW2 – A real historical trail through the story of about Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi security chief
HHhH
What you need to know before your trail
Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich – chief of the Nazi secret services, ‘the hangman of Prague’, ‘the blond beast’, ‘the most dangerous man in the Third Reich’.
His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says ‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’, which in German spells HHhH.
All the characters in HHhH are real. All the events depicted are true.
Travel Guide
The Third Reich was an outstandingly brutal place to be and this novel is all the more haunting for it is based largely on fact. We believe only some of the dialogue is made up and even that is based on true fact and only added where the history books showed a blank.
This is the story of Hitler’s Germany and the rise of the Third Reich but from the viewpoint of the one man at the centre of it al. Heydrich was his right hand man in Prague – Laurent Binet is the guide to show how he writes this story and how he came to trace history –
“Something floating in the Prague air pierces me to my bones. The twists of the road are spelling out the destiny of a man, and of another, and another, and another.”
The story behind the story can be found under the history books as ‘Operation Anthropoid’, the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, and the shocking parachute drop of two heroic men – heroic pair, Jan Kubis and Jozek Gabcik – tasked with ridding the country and indeed Europe of a tyrant.
Heydrich was Head of the Gestapo, central to the Final Solution and was also known as the Hangman or the Butcher of Prague.
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