Crosshairs

Episode 8 : Reinhard Heydrich

You don’t get a nickname like the Butcher of Prague without earning it and Reinhard Heydrich, one of the highest ranking officers in the Nazi party, had certainly done that. Arriving in the occupied city in 1941, he deported, imprisoned or executed anyone he believed to be standing in the way of the crushing march of the German war machine. His reign of terror demanded a response and Operation Anthropoid was the answer. On December 29th, 1941, as World War Two raged, two soldiers parachuted into Czechoslovakia under cover of darkness. Their mission: to find and kill the man who had been holding Prague hostage.
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With one squeeze of a trigger, or flash of a blade, the course of history can change forever.
In this series - we tell the stories of assassinations throughout history, plotting the path of the killer and victim, step by step, until they meet. We examine the fall out, following the assassination of world leaders. We reveal how cultural icons were targeted, and why. And we unpack stories which you may never have heard about before.
From What's the Story Sounds - and narrated by Jonathan Guy Lewis - Crosshairs is your weekly dose of crime and history, with new episodes every Thursday.