Benoit Douville wrote:
Well, The Czech population suffered a lot when Heydrich was the leader and they suffered a lot more after the death of Heydrich, think about the tragedy of Lidice.
Actually, no.
The Czech population was relatively well treated, and enjoyed much the same conditions of life as the population of Germany proper, for example they had the same level of food rations. Bohemia/Moravia made a very important contribution to German war production, in particular the munitions plants at Skoda, and continued to do so right until the end of the war. The Czech workers at the factories were normal employees, and not conscripted labour; they continued to turn out weapons for the German army until the end of the war.
Heydrich did not treat the Czech population brutally. In fact, he was making great progress in reconciling them to German rule through a two-pronged policy of on the one hand increasing wages and the supply of goods, and on the other of cracking down very hard on black-marketeers, who were very unpopular. At the same time he was utterly ruthless with saboteurs and resisters; for example he executed a number of Czech officials and senior Czech army officers who were plotting to subvert German rule.
It was precisely because of Heydrich's success in cutting the ground from under what little resistance activity there was in Bohemia/Moravia, and of getting the workforce to produce efficiently and abundantly for the German war effort that the Czech Government-in-Exile set out to assassinate him. It was purely for propaganda reasons; the lack of Czech resistance, plus the fact that the Czechs seemed to be working hard for Germany, was severely undermining the credibility of the Czechs in Allied eyes.
Another reason for assassinating Heydrich was to provoke the German authorities to punish the Czech population, and thereby ruin the modus vivendi that Heydrich had created.
The Lidice atrocity in reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich stands out because it was pretty well unique in Bohemia/Moravia. There was very little resistance activity that needed to be suppressed, no large-scale anti-partisan warfare, no civil war between rival political groupings.
The atrocities committed at the very end of the war against both German soldiers and the large German ethnic minority were most likely the work of underground resistance organisations which came out of the woodwork when all the fighting was basically over. The population as a whole did not have any real reason to seek revenge, although they may have stood by and let the resistance activists commit atrocities in order to ingratiate themselves with the new rulers.
The same thing happened in France after the German retreat. The public reprisals against collaborators, including a wave of semi-legal executions, were carried out mainly by Communist activists who emerged once the Germans had left.