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Reinhard Heydrich was perhaps the ablest Nazi of them all - a SS-General, Police General, Luftwaffe pilot, a remarkable linguist, a wonderful musician and a superb bureaucrat. He was assassinated in Prag (Prague, Praha) by Czech commandos sent from England in the spring of 1942, less than a year after Hitler appointed him the Acting German Governor of Bohemia and Moravia. 

The story of the life and untimely death in Prague of SS-Obergruppenführer and Acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, is truly fascinating. it has been made into many movies. The perfect German administrator, Heydrich rose through the ranks from relative obscurity in the 1920s to the pinnacle of power in the Third Reich by 1936. The story of the commandos that the British S.O.E. trained and parachuted into Czechoslovakia to kill Heydrich is absolutely incredible!

The rare lot of 200+ actual vintage glossy photos offered for sale here were first offered decades ago to a western buyer at around midnight in the darkened lobby of the old centrally located Atrium Hotel in communist Prag, Czechoslovakia. The result of that meeting was that the American involved agreed to buy the entire cache of over 200 glossy photographs (printed on slick photographic paper from negatives - not mechanical reproductions) and the Czech who owned them agreed to sell them. That is the archive we are selling on this USMBOOKS web page.

The archive includes 25 images of SS-Obergruppenführer Heydrich, or of Reinhard Heydrich with other people such as German Chancellor Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. There are 40+ well-made pictures that features the Czech commandos that attacked Heydrich's car in Prague in May 1942, many of them depicting commando training in Britain. Twelve photos shot by the SS show the immediate post-attack damage to Heydrich's open Mercedes-Benz car, and 18 show the SS efforts to capture the Czech commandos holed-up in the Cathedral of St. Cyril and Methodius on Resslova Strasse in Prague.

The photographs in this archive are almost all around 5 x 7 inches in size and a great many have a caption on the back written in the Czech language. Many of them have archival stamps on the back side showing that they came from several Czech archives. Most of the photos are well-focussed, sharp, and with a good contrast. The 200+ photos weigh 1 pound 13 ounces (0.825 kg).

Over the years other authors and publishers have paid us well to license the use of some of the photos in the archive for inclusion in a variety of books and magazine articles, film and TV productions about Heydrich.

These very photos were first used in the United States to heavily illustrate the critically acclaimed 1994 book REINHARD HEYDRICH: ASSASSINATION! by Ray Cowdery & Peter Vodenka (published now by Reddick Militaria, Pottsboro TX).

There are 14 photos of the Heydrich memorial funeral service at Hradcany Castle in Prague and his funeral at the Reichschancellery in Berlin attended by his wife, his children, Adolf Hitler, and very high-ranking Nazi dignitaries of Third Reich Germany.

Thirty-three amazing photos show corpses, autopsies and the circumstances of death of many persons the SS authorities connected with the assassination of SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, the highest-ranking Nazi official in the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the most feared man in all of Europe at the time that he died.

There are 11 photos of the postwar trials and hangings of the Nazis implicated in the round-up of accused conspirators in Heydrich's assassination, the destruction of the town of Lidice, etc. A few of the pictures show Heydrich's widow, the monument to Heydrich the Nazis erected on the site of the attack that resulted in his death, etc.

Forty-two of the photographs are miscellaneous images showing important people connected in some way to the story of the assassination of Heydrich; people like Adolf Hitler, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, SS-General Sepp Dietrich, Hans-Ulrich Geschke (head of the Sicherheitspolizei in Prague and the man who ordered the destruction of Lidice), SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank, Generaloberst der Polizei Kurt Daluege, etc.

The purchaser of this archive receives all rights to the use of the images in the future, including the rights to sell or license the use of them to others. Properly administered, the use-licensing of this archive could easily recover the entire cost of it quite quickly.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to purchase a rare and historical photo archive of one of the most important events in all of World War II history. These photos would cost many times our asking price if one was able to find them and purchase them one at a time!