HHhH

16 hrs. 26 min.

Romance & Prose

Language Russian

Author Laurent Binet

Narrator Sergey Dadyko

Description

HHhH is a German phrase from the times of the Third Reich: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich (the brain of Himmler is called Heydrich). Reinhard Heydrich was the most terrifying man in Hitler’s office—a monster from the lair of monsters. “The brain of Himmler is called Heydrich,” the SS men joked. This man possessed incredible power and even greater ruthlessness. Rumors about him spread—each one more dreadful than the last. And all of them turned out to be true.

Heydrich was one of the ideologues of the Holocaust. He devised the plan for a false attack by the Poles on German residents, which became the pretext for the outbreak of World War II. He also ruled Czechoslovakia after its occupation.

Heydrich was mortally wounded on May 27, 1942 by two desperate Czechs—Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis—who became national heroes of the Czech Republic. The attempt on Heydrich shocked the leadership of the Reich deeply. On the day of Heydrich’s death, the Nazis began a campaign of mass terror against the Czech people. It was announced that anyone who knew the whereabouts of the assassins of the Protector and failed to turn them in would be shot along with their entire family. 1331 Czechs were executed. After Heydrich’s funeral, the village of Lidice was destroyed—all its men were killed, and all its women were sent to a concentration camp.

Laurent Binet’s novel, which received the Goncourt Prize for a debut novel, tells this story—one of the most heroic and desperate in World War II. The book became an international bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

According to French critics, the nearly documentary text by Laurent Binet makes it a real novel not because it interweaves truth with fiction, nor because of a fictional portrayal of historical figures, but because of “the author’s passionate attitude toward history as a constant source of reflection and self-knowledge.”

In 2017, the novel was adapted into a film.