page_title: Operation Anthropoid
section_title: Medical treatment and death
hierarchical_section_title: Operation Anthropoid / Operation / Medical treatment and death
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Briefmarke zum 1. Todestag von Reinhard Heydrich, Michel#131 Deutschland Besetzungsausgaben II. Weltkrieg Böhmen und MährenFrançais&#160;: Timbre à l'affigie de Heydrich
context_page_description: Operation Anthropoid was the code name for the assassination during World War II of Schutzstaffel-Obergruppenführer and General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, the combined security services of Nazi Germany, and acting Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
  Heydrich was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and an important figure in the rise of Adolf Hitler; he was given overall charge of the "Final Solution to the Jewish question" in Europe. The Czechoslovaks undertook the operation to help confer legitimacy on Edvard Beneš's government-in-exile in London, as well as for retribution for Heydrich's brutal rule.
  The operation was carried out by soldiers of the Czechoslovak army-in-exile, in Prague, on 27 May 1942, after preparation and training by the British Special Operations Executive and with the approval of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Wounded in the attack, Heydrich died of his injuries on 4 June 1942. This was the only government-sponsored assassination of a senior Nazi leader during the Second World War.
context_section_description: A Czech woman and an off-duty policeman went to Heydrich's aid and flagged down a delivery van. Heydrich was first placed in the driver's cab but complained that the truck's movement was causing him pain. He was then transferred to the back of the truck on his stomach and taken to the emergency room at Bulovka Hospital. A Dr. Slanina packed the chest wound, while Dr. Walter Diek (the Sudeten German chief of surgery at the hospital) tried to remove the shrapnel splinters.
  Professor Hollbaum (a Silesian German who was chairman of surgery at Charles University in Prague) operated on Heydrich with Diek and Slanina's assistance. The surgeons reinflated the collapsed left lung, removed the tip of the fractured eleventh rib, sutured the torn diaphragm, inserted several catheters and removed the spleen, which contained a grenade fragment and upholstery. Heydrich's superior, Heinrich Himmler, sent his personal physician, Karl Gebhardt, who flew to Prague and arrived that evening. After 29 May, Heydrich was entirely in the care of SS physicians. Postoperative care included administration of large amounts of morphine.
  There are contradictory accounts concerning whether sulfanilamide (a new antibacterial drug) was given but Gebhardt testified at his 1947 war crimes trial that it was not. Theodor Morell, Hitler's doctor, suggested its use but Gebhardt, thinking Heydrich was recovering, declined. The patient developed a fever of 38–39 °C (100.4–102.2 °F) and wound drainage, and he was in great pain. Despite the fever, Heydrich's recovery appeared to progress well. On 2 June, during a visit by Himmler, Heydrich reconciled himself to his fate by reciting a part of one of his father's operas:
  The world is just a barrel-organ which the Lord God turns Himself. We all have to dance to the tune which is already on the drum.
  Heydrich's condition appeared to be improving when, while sitting up eating a noon meal on 3 June, he suddenly collapsed and went into shock. He soon slipped into a deep coma and never regained consciousness, dying on 4 June around 04:30 in the morning. An autopsy concluded he died of sepsis. Heydrich's facial expression as he died betrayed an "uncanny spirituality and entirely perverted beauty, like a renaissance Cardinal" according to Bernhard Wehner, a Kripo police official who investigated the assassination.
  One of the theories was that some of the horsehair in the upholstery of Heydrich's car was forced into his body by the blast of the grenade, causing a systemic infection. It has also been suggested that he died of a massive pulmonary embolism (probably a fat embolism). In support of the latter possibility, particles of fat and blood clots were found at autopsy in the right ventricle and pulmonary artery and severe oedema was noted in the upper lobes of the lungs, while the lower lobes were collapsed.
caption: Postage stamp (1943) features the death mask of Heydrich
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