Police in Berlin are investigating after the unmarked grave of a high-ranking Nazi official was prised open.
Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SS and one of the main architects of the Holocaust, was killed by Czech partisans in 1942.
He was the Reich’s third in command after Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler and the leader of the Nazi forces in Czechoslovakia.
He chaired the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, where Hitler’s genocidal “final solution” was planned. What followed were mass killings at death camps in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor.
Nicknamed “The Butcher of Prague”, his reign of terror and brutality prompted Czech authorities to hatch a top-secret assassination mission, codenamed Operation Anthropoid. In retaliation, the Nazis destroyed the Lidice village, murdering all the men and adolescent boys and deporting the women and children to concentration camps.
On Thursday, an employee at the city’s Invalidenfriedhof (Invalids Cemetery) found the grave had been opened, Tagesspiegel reported.
Police say no bones are missing but believe the perpetrators must have had insider knowledge as the grave was levelled after the end of the Second World War.
This was carried out by Allied occupation forces, who asserted that the graves of prominent Nazis shouldn’t be marked, lest they be turned into shrines by Nazi sympathisers.