What verbatim wording appears in Karl Hermann Frank’s dispatches and Adolf Hitler’s communications regarding reprisals for Heydrich’s death?
Executive summary
Karl Hermann Frank’s contemporaneous proclamations include an official bilingual broadside headed “BEKANNTMACHUNG” / “VYHLASKA” that, hours after the May 27, 1942 assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich, offered a reward of “10,000 kronen” for information leading to the perpetrators and declared a state of civil emergency with curfew and public closures [1]. Adolf Hitler’s communications about reprisals are reported as furious calls for mass murder — including a demand to kill “up to 10,000 Czechs” — but the provided sources do not contain a direct, verbatim quote of Hitler’s words [2].
1. The explicit wording published by Frank: the “BEKANNTMACHUNG / VYHLASKA” broadside
Karl Hermann Frank issued an official bilingual proclamation headed “BEKANNTMACHUNG” (German) and “VYHLASKA” (Czech) dated May 27, 1942, which “offers a reward of 10,000 kronen leading to the capture of the perpetrators” and “declared a state of civil emergency” including curfews and the closure of restaurants, theaters, amusement parks and public transport [1].
2. Frank’s later confessionary phrasing about signing reprisal orders
In postwar interrogations and press reports Frank is quoted as confessing he “signed two reprisal decrees for the murder of Heydrich,” and reportedly saying, “Today I confess that such methods were measures *of a brutal system, but in that time I had to obey or- ders from Rerlin,” a contested transcription preserved in contemporary reporting of his statements [3].
3. How historians and archives render Hitler’s response — paraphrase, not verbatim
Major institutional accounts record Hitler as having “demanded the murder of up to 10,000 Czechs” in immediate reaction to the attempt on Heydrich’s life, a characterization reported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and echoed in secondary sources, but the sources provided do not reproduce an original written or spoken Hitler sentence with quotation marks that would constitute a verbatim communication [2].
4. The operational wording Frank used to enact reprisals (orders, decrees, and actions)
Beyond the reward broadside, documentation and trial records establish that Frank “signed” and issued summary decrees that implemented reprisals — including orders that culminated in the annihilation of Lidice and Ležáky and mass arrests and executions — language shown in interrogation transcripts and tribunal exhibits tying Frank’s signatures to those reprisal decrees [3] [4].
5. Dispute and context: Frank as intermediary and possible restraint-seeker
Contemporaneous reporting and museum accounts note that Frank flew to Berlin to intercede against Hitler’s most extreme proposals — arguing such wholesale slaughter would harm long‑term economic and political plans — which complicates the image of him as only an unrestrained executor of Hitler’s fury [2]. This context does not negate Frank’s authorship of punitive proclamations, but it does show competing aims within Nazi leadership recorded in the sources [2].
6. Limits of the record and what remains unproven by the provided sources
The materials supplied give verbatim text for Frank’s broadside title (“BEKANNTMACHUNG” / “VYHLASKA”), the concrete reward amount (“10,000 kronen”), and reported confession phrasing attributed to Frank, but they do not include a primary-source, verbatim transcript of a Hitler telegram or speech that reads “kill up to 10,000 Czechs”; that formulation appears in authoritative secondary accounts as a paraphrase of Hitler’s demand rather than a direct quotation in the supplied documents [2] [1] [3].