Did Hitler really ‘have some good ideas’?

00:00 06:48

Mary Wakefield has narrated this article for you to listen to.

One of the many good reasons to want every new generation to study the second world war is that it forces you to confront your own cowardice. Last weekend, my husband and I went to Prague – the first time we’ve been away together since the birth of our son eight years ago. We wandered the city and ended up crying in a church crypt – as you do on a romantic mini-break. The church was the Czech Orthodox cathedral of Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius and, as we discovered after we had entered, the scene of the final, bloody showdown of Operation Anthropoid, the mission to assassinate SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the butcher of Prague’.

Heydrich was Himmler’s protégé, a man so brutal that Hitler’s admiring nickname for him was ‘the man with the iron heart’.