13
a trace of their subversion? “Any approach to the study of European society under Nazi rule that privileges the concepts of resistance and collaboration,” Drapac and Pritchard warn, “leads to misrepresentations.”7
If I remember only the men celebrated as exemplars of resistance, I reinscribe a dangerous politics of power. At the German Resistance Memorial Center, I learned that no one ideological, religious, or moral commitment united those who opposed the Nazi regime. Our guide ventured “incredible courage” as the only common denominator. The site itself, however, risks telling the same beguiling story about who resisted and why.
Located in the Bendlerblock, where elite Wehrmacht officers and other officials plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the memorial valorizes men whose Nazi complicities ran deep. They were not unadulterated heroes. “[T]he courageous officers who decided upon tyrannicide,” Czech-American historian Milan Hauner notes, “risked their lives not because the Führer threatened to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population, but because at that moment his conduct of the war proved disastrous.”8 Earlier this year, German historian Wolfgang Benz put it plainly: “the Holocaust did not interest them at all.”9
I do not claim the Wehrmacht resistance that culminated in the July 20 Plot lacked integrity. Perhaps it was exemplary given how enormously Nazism had profited Hitler’s would-be assassins. But that interpretation is not innocent, especially if I take it alone. “Power is constitutive of the story,” Trouillot reminds us.10 And adulation is not the story that FASPE tells.
As summer arrived in 1942, my paternal ancestors faced their own crossroads: whether to confront or capitulate to the Nazi occupation of their country, Czechoslovakia. Three years after columns of Wehrmacht soldiers had marched into Prague, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile struck back. It orchestrated, with British support, one of the war’s most daring acts of resistance: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague” and SS official who had a pivotal role in the Holocaust.11 As head of the Reich Main Security Office, Heydrich oversaw the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads that murdered at least 1.5 million inhabitants, the vast majority of them Jewish, of the countries that Germany occupied. On January 20, 1942, he convened the so-called Wannsee Conference, the meeting that systematized the Final Solution.12
Code-named Operation Anthropoid, the plot to kill Heydrich involved a secret cadre of paratroopers, who landed in the countryside and made their way to Prague. Two of them ambushed and mortally wounded their target, unleashing a massive Nazi manhunt. The fugitives, seven in total, needed a place to hide. My grandfather’s grandfather, Jan Sonnevend, served as a lay elder at the Orthodox Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague. Drawing on his contacts with the Czech resistance, Sonnevend proposed that they be sheltered in the crypt beneath the sanctuary. The paratroopers were covertly moved there and concealed in the heart of Prague, underneath the Nazi dragnet. Over the weeks that followed, Jan, his wife Marie, and their daughter Ludmila—mother of my living grandfather, then eight years old—helped keep the desperate men alive.13
After another operative betrayed the resistance, Nazi forces found and besieged the crypt. A firefight erupted. The surviving paratroopers used their last bullets on themselves. Arrested, tortured, and convicted in a show trial, Jan and other church officials were executed by firing squad. Marie and Ludmila were imprisoned at Terezín before being killed at Mauthausen. They were but three of some 5,000 people—among them, 3,000 members
9. Wolfgang Benz quoted in Christoph Hasselbach, “Operation Valkyrie: 80th anniversary of plot to kill Hitler,” Deutsche Welle, July 20, 2024, https://www.dw.com/en/operation-valkyrie-80th-anniversary-of-plot-to-kill-hitler/a-66282598.
10. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 28.
11. For an overview of how the Czechoslovak government-in-exile planned to assassinate Heydrich, see: “Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich,” Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed September 29, 2024, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/timeline-event/holocaust/1942-1945/assassination-of-reinhard-heydrich; Lisette Allen, “A Prague church that defied Nazi rule,” BBC News, September 1, 2017, https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20170831-a-prague-church-that-defied-nazi-rule. For a thorough account thereof, see: Callum A. MacDonald, The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich: The ‘SS Butcher of Prague’ (New York: The Free Press, 1989).
12. For Heydrich’s role as a foremost architect of the Holocaust, see: “Reinhard Heydrich: In Depth,” Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed September 29, 2024, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/reinhard-heydrich-in-depth.
13. For Jan Sonnevend’s role in offering the paratroopers refuge, see: Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937–1948 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 222; “Heydrich Assassination Took Place 82 Years Ago,” Prague Morning, May 27, 2024, https://praguemorning.cz/heydrich-assassination-took-place-79-years-ago/; “Jan Sonnevend (Nové Město),” Encyklopedie Prahy 2, accessed September 29, 2024, https://encyklopedie.praha2.cz/osobnost/1587-jan-sonnevend.
a trace of their subversion? “Any approach to the study of European society under Nazi rule that privileges the concepts of resistance and collaboration,” Drapac and Pritchard warn, “leads to misrepresentations.”7
If I remember only the men celebrated as exemplars of resistance, I reinscribe a dangerous politics of power. At the German Resistance Memorial Center, I learned that no one ideological, religious, or moral commitment united those who opposed the Nazi regime. Our guide ventured “incredible courage” as the only common denominator. The site itself, however, risks telling the same beguiling story about who resisted and why.
Located in the Bendlerblock, where elite Wehrmacht officers and other officials plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, the memorial valorizes men whose Nazi complicities ran deep. They were not unadulterated heroes. “[T]he courageous officers who decided upon tyrannicide,” Czech-American historian Milan Hauner notes, “risked their lives not because the Führer threatened to exterminate Europe’s entire Jewish population, but because at that moment his conduct of the war proved disastrous.”8 Earlier this year, German historian Wolfgang Benz put it plainly: “the Holocaust did not interest them at all.”9
I do not claim the Wehrmacht resistance that culminated in the July 20 Plot lacked integrity. Perhaps it was exemplary given how enormously Nazism had profited Hitler’s would-be assassins. But that interpretation is not innocent, especially if I take it alone. “Power is constitutive of the story,” Trouillot reminds us.10 And adulation is not the story that FASPE tells.
As summer arrived in 1942, my paternal ancestors faced their own crossroads: whether to confront or capitulate to the Nazi occupation of their country, Czechoslovakia. Three years after columns of Wehrmacht soldiers had marched into Prague, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile struck back. It orchestrated, with British support, one of the war’s most daring acts of resistance: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague” and SS official who had a pivotal role in the Holocaust.11 As head of the Reich Main Security Office, Heydrich oversaw the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads that murdered at least 1.5 million inhabitants, the vast majority of them Jewish, of the countries that Germany occupied. On January 20, 1942, he convened the so-called Wannsee Conference, the meeting that systematized the Final Solution.12
Code-named Operation Anthropoid, the plot to kill Heydrich involved a secret cadre of paratroopers, who landed in the countryside and made their way to Prague. Two of them ambushed and mortally wounded their target, unleashing a massive Nazi manhunt. The fugitives, seven in total, needed a place to hide. My grandfather’s grandfather, Jan Sonnevend, served as a lay elder at the Orthodox Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague. Drawing on his contacts with the Czech resistance, Sonnevend proposed that they be sheltered in the crypt beneath the sanctuary. The paratroopers were covertly moved there and concealed in the heart of Prague, underneath the Nazi dragnet. Over the weeks that followed, Jan, his wife Marie, and their daughter Ludmila—mother of my living grandfather, then eight years old—helped keep the desperate men alive.13
After another operative betrayed the resistance, Nazi forces found and besieged the crypt. A firefight erupted. The surviving paratroopers used their last bullets on themselves. Arrested, tortured, and convicted in a show trial, Jan and other church officials were executed by firing squad. Marie and Ludmila were imprisoned at Terezín before being killed at Mauthausen. They were but three of some 5,000 people—among them, 3,000 members