Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust.
Reinhard Heydrich, the commander of the German Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), the acting governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and a principal architect of the Holocaust, was assassinated during the Second World War in a coordinated operation by the Czechoslovak resistance. The assassination attempt, code-named Operation Anthropoid, was carried out by resistance operatives Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš on 27 May 1942. Heydrich was wounded in the attack and died of his wounds on 4 June.
Arthur Nebe was a German SS functionary who held key positions in the security and police apparatus of Nazi Germany and was, from 1941, a major perpetrator of the Holocaust.
Karl Hermann Frank was a Sudeten German Nazi official in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia prior to and during World War II. Attaining the rank of Obergruppenführer, he was in command of the Nazi police apparatus in the protectorate, including the Gestapo, the SD, and the Kripo. After the war, he was tried, convicted and executed by hanging for his role in organizing the massacres of the people of the Czech villages of Lidice and Ležáky.
Ležáky, in the Miřetice municipality, was a village in Czechoslovakia. During the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, it was razed by Nazi forces as reprisal for Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich's assassination in late spring 1942.
Maria "Mimi" Terwiel was a German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was active in a group in Berlin that wrote and distributed anti-Nazi and anti-war appeals. As part of what they conceived as a broader action against a collection of anti-fascist resistance groups in Germany and occupied Europe that the Abwehr called the Red Orchestra, in September 1942 the Gestapo arrested Terwiel along with her fiancée Helmut Himpel. Among the leaflets and pamphlets they had copied and distributed for the group were the July and August 1941 sermons of Clemens August Graf von Galen which denounced the regime's Aktion T4 programme of involuntary euthanasia.
Herbert Baum was a Jewish member of the German resistance against National Socialism. Baum organized a large network of resisters within Berlin. Most of these activists, like Baum, were Jewish and had backgrounds in the pre-1933 German-Jewish youth organizations, and most were affiliated with the German Communist Party (KPD), the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and/or their youth movements. While often described as a "Communist" (KPD) organization, in reality the Baum Group was a leftist organization that included socialists, anti-Stalinist leftists, some who were influenced by anarchism, and so on.
Czechoslovak resistance to the German occupation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during World War II began after the occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia and the formation of the protectorate on 15 March 1939. German policy deterred acts of resistance and annihilated organizations of resistance. In the early days of the war, the Czech population participated in boycotts of public transport and large-scale demonstrations. Later on, armed communist partisan groups participated in sabotage and skirmishes with German police forces. The most well-known act of resistance was the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Resistance culminated in the so-called Prague uprising of May 1945; with Allied armies approaching, about 30,000 Czechs seized weapons. Four days of bloody street fighting ensued before the Soviet Red Army entered the nearly liberated city.
Marianne Baum was a German communist and anti-Nazi. She was executed after an attack on a propaganda show in Berlin.
Lidice is a municipality and village in Kladno District in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 600 inhabitants.
Marianne Joachim was a Jewish German resistance activist during the Nazi years. She was executed at Plötzensee on 4 March 1943 following an arson attack the previous summer on the party propaganda department's "Soviet Paradise" exhibition in Berlin's "Lustgarten" pleasure park.
Heinz Michael Pannwitz was a German war criminal, Nazi Gestapo officer and later Schutzstaffel (SS) officer. Pannwitz was most notable for directing the investigation into the assassination of Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich on 27 May 1942 in Prague. In the last two years of the war, Pannwitz ran the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle, a combined Abwehr and Gestapo counterintelligence operation against the Red Orchestra espionage network, in France and the Low Countries.
Wolfgang Kreher Johannes "John" Graudenz was a German journalist, press photographer, industrial representative and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. Graudenz was most notable for being an important member of the Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group that would later be named by the Gestapo as the Red Orchestra and was responsible for the technical aspect of the production of leaflets and pamphlets that the group produced.
Heinz Günther Joachim was a German music student. He played the clarinet. In 1941 he became involved with an anti-government resistance group. He was arrested at work on 22 May 1942 and murdered/executed at Plötzensee Prison on 18 August 1942.
Fritz Thiel was a German precision engineer and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. He became part of a Berlin-based anti-fascist resistance group during World War II, that was later named the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Thiel along with his wife Hannelore were most notable for printing stickers using a child's toy rubber stamp kit, that they used to protest The Soviet Paradise exhibition in May 1942 in Berlin, that was held by the German regime to justify the war with the Soviet Union. The group found the exhibition both egregious and horrific; one exhibited photograph showed a young woman and her children hanged side by side. Thiel was executed for his resistance action.
Lothar Salinger was a politically engaged German worker and part of the Jewish youth movement in Berlin, who became a resistance activist and an associate of Herbert Baum. He was executed by guillotine at the Plötzensee execution facility. His fiancée was also an anti-Hitler activist but she managed to outlive the régime, living "illegally" (unregistered) in Berlin, and some years later emigrated to California where she married Dr. Gerhard Salinger, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley and brother to her murdered fiancé.
Helmut Himpel was a German dentist and resistance fighter against Nazism. He was a member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra by the Abwehr. Himpel along with his fiancé Maria Terwiel were notable for distributing leaflets and pamphlets for the group. Specifically this included the July and August 1941 sermons of Clemens August Graf von Galen. The 2nd leaflet the couple posted, on Aktion T4 denouncing the murders of the sick by euthanasia, induced Hitler to stop the euthanasia murders and find other ways to do it.
Hermann Carl Hagen was a German banker, bank archivist, and economist who was murdered during the Holocaust at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Hella Hirsch was a Jewish resistance fighter during World War II. She was a member of the Baum Group, a collaborative anti-Nazi resistance organization.
