Hangmen Also Die! (1943)

Hangmen Also Die! is a 1943 noir war film directed by the Austrian director Fritz Lang and written by John Wexley from a story by Bertolt Brecht (credited as Bert Brecht) and Lang. Hanns Eisler composed the score, being nominated for an Academy Award, and the cinematographer was James Wong Howe.

The film is loosely based on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reich Protector of German-occupied Prague, number-two man in the SS, and a chief mastermind of the Holocaust, who was known as “The Hangman of Prague.” The real Heydrich was assassinated by Czech resistance fighters parachuted from a British plane in Operation Anthropoid, but in the film, which was made during World War II before the full story had become public knowledge, Heydrich’s killer is depicted as a member of the Czech resistance with ties to the Communist Party.

Director – Fritz Lang

Writers – John Wexley (screenplay), Bertolt Brecht (adaptation and original story), Fritz Lang (adaptation and original story)

Cast –
Brian Donlevy – Dr. Franticek Svoboda
Walter Brennan – Prof. Stephen Novotny
Anna Lee – Mascha Novotny
Gene Lockhart – Emil Czaka (brewer)
Dennis O’Keefe – Jan Horak (Mascha’s fiancé)
Nana Bryant – Mrs. Hellie Novotny
Hans Heinrich von Twardowski – Reinhard Heydrich
Margaret Wycherly – Ludmilla Novotny
Tonio Selwart – Chief of Gestapo Kurt Haas
Alexander Granach – Gestapo Insp. Alois Gruber
Reinhold Schünzel – Gestapo Insp. Ritter
William Roy – Beda Novotny
Jonathan Hale – Dedic
Sarah Padden – Mrs. Dvorak
Byron Foulger – Bartos
Ludwig Donath – Gestapo Insp. Schirmer
Arno Frey – Camp Lieutenant
Edmund MacDonald – Dr. Pillar
Lester Sharpe – Rudy
Arthur Loft – General Votruba
George Irving – Necval
James Bush – Pescacek

Watch “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943)

Plot

During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, surgeon Dr. František Svoboda, a Czech patriot, assassinates the brutal “Hangman of Europe”, Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, but his getaway car is discovered and therefore his planned safe house must reject him. When a woman whom he does not know, named Mascha, deliberately misdirects German soldiers close to finding him, he seeks her home as an alternative safe house. This turns out to be the home of her father, history professor Stephen Novotny, whom the Nazis have banned from teaching.

This plan works. But because the assassin now cannot be found, the Nazi leaders in Prague decide to create an incentive for him to turn himself in or for others to do so. They arrange – with the help of fifth-columnist Emil Czaka, a wealthy brewer – for 400 citizens, including Professor Novotny, to be executed, forty at a time, until the assassin is named. Through a complex series of events, however, the resistance manages to frame Czaka himself for the murder, but not before the Nazis have executed many of the hostages.