Prague unveils monument to collaborators of Heydrich's killers

Prague, Jan 26 (CTK) - The Prague City Hall yesterday unveiled a monument to the people who helped Czechoslovak paratroopers who killed Nazi SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich in 1942.

The names of the 294 Czechs and Slovaks who paid with their lives for the aid are engraved in two marble steles unveiled in the courtyard of the St Cyril and St Methodius Church in Prague.

Names of the members of the anti-Nazi resistance were read at the close of the ceremony in the church in which the paratroopers were hiding after the assassination and eventually died.

The Nazi regime summarily murdered the paratroopers' families, relatives and collaborators.

"My mum was told she should not take along any things with her as she will soon return," Irena Hesova, a victim of the Nazi persecution, said about the moment she and her mother were sent to a concentration camp.

It should be stressed that in his plans, Nazi murderer Heydrich was considering the physical elimination of the Czech nation, Defence Minister Alexandr Vondra said in the opening speech.

Immediately upon taking up the post of Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Heydrich had hundreds of members of the Czech national elite executed, Vondra said.

In their tactics to get rid the nation of leading figures, Nazis were close to the Communists who also eliminated real personalities of the nation after their 1948 take-over, Vondra said.

"We have to bear in mind this fact as this similarity is no coincidence, displayed by both totalitarian ideologies and regimes," Vondra said.

As part of the operation Anthropoid, a group of Czechoslovak paratroopers was sent by the London-based government-in-exile to help the Czech resistance movement and to kill Heydrich. They carried out the attack on Heydrich on May 27, 1942. On June 4, Heydrich succumbed to his injuries.

In the aftermath of the assassination, the Nazi regime unleashed brutal reprisals. It proclaimed the martial law, started mass executions and razed two Czech villages, Lidice and Lezaky, to the ground.

The paratroopers were hiding for three weeks, eventually in the crypt of the Orthodox church in Prague. They were betrayed by one of them and the German police tracked them down. They all died in the fight.