Dramatic portrayals of Reinhard Heydrich

The first known portrayal was in the 1943 film Hangmen Also Die!, where Heydrich was played by Hans Heinrich von Twardowski. The same year, he was the subject of the feature Hitler's Madman, where he was portrayed by John Carradine. Further works produced during World War II were The Hitler Gang, where Heydrich is portrayed by Peter Pohlenz, and Air Raid Wardens where he is played by actor Don Costello.

Heydrich was portrayed by Martin Held in the 1954 film Deadly Decision.

Heydrich is portrayed by Alvin Epstein in a 1960 television episode of the Armstrong Circle Theatre, entitled "Engineer of Death: The Eichmann Story", Kurt Kreuger in G.E. True (USA, 1962), Malte Petzel in the 1963 West-German mini-series Das Kriminalgericht, Siegfried Loyda in the 1964 film Atentát, Malte Petzel in the 1966 West-German TV-film, Der Fall der Generale and Martin Benrath in the 1967 West-German TV-film, Heydrich in Prag.

Actor Anton Diffring portrayed Heydrich in the 1965 series Interpol (episode "Geld, Geld, Geld"). Diffring would portray Heydrich again, a decade later, in Operation Daybreak, a film focused on the assassination of Heydrich in Prague. It is adapted from the book Seven Men at Daybreak by Alan Burgess.[2] Atentát and Daybreak set the standard for the procedural-style rundown of the assassination itself, which the mainstream of later films follow.[3]

Heydrich was portrayed by David Warner in the miniseries Holocaust. Warner would again play the character in the 1980s TV production Hitler's SS: Portrait in Evil. Warner's performance was rated as "cunning and chilling" with the Holocaust miniseries receiving several television awards.[4]

Within Czechoslovak cinema, Heydrich appears in the 1974 war film Sokolovo, where he is portrayed by Hannjo Hasse, an East German actor, who often represented Nazi villains in East European war movies. Czechoslovakia also participated in the making of the movie Operation Daybreak. The character of Heydrich is further frequently mentioned in Czechoslovak movies dealing with the topic of the Nazi reprisals which followed Heydrich's assassination as well as his role in enforcing Nazi directives in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.[5]

Within West German productions, Heydrich appears as a character in the 1977 television production Manager des Terrors (1977) where he was portrayed by Dietrich Mattausch. Mattausch's performance was viewed as "cold and stunning",[6] and he reprises the role of Heydrich in the acclaimed 1984 film The Wannsee Conference. The Wannsee Conference would inspire the remake Conspiracy (2001), with Irish actor Kenneth Branagh, whose performance was described as a "chilling portrayal" of Heydrich.[3]

In 2009, Heydrich briefly appears as a non-speaking extra played by Ondřej Matějka in the awards winning Czech drama film Protektor, where the main character (radio commentator/Nazi-collaborator) describes him as "tall figure (who) attracts attention like a magnet". This movie also features the minimalist representation of the Heydrich's assassination which is not seen, only heard in the background.[7][8] In 2011, Czech cinematography portrayed Heydrich in the extensive TV series (44 episodes) named Heydrich — konečné řešení (Heydrich — Final solution), which used historical footage of Reinhard Heydrich combined with scenes in which he was portrayed by an uncredited actor.[9][10]

In 2011, Czech director Petr Nikolaev finished his drama film Lidice (2011), where Heydrich was portrayed by German actor Detlef Bothe. Bothe portrayed Heydrich before, he appears briefly in two episodes of BBC documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis and the 'Final Solution' (2005). He played Heydrich for the third time in the 2016 British-Czech-French thriller Anthropoid.[11][12] Bothe is often praised as "dead ringer" of Heydrich.[3] The following year saw the release of the war thriller film The Man with the Iron Heart based on Laurent Binet's novel HHhH (The Man with the Iron Heart is the name of another novel about Heydrich), with Heydrich portrayed by Australian actor Jason Clarke.[3]. A fictional iteration of Reinhard Heydrich is also one of the chief characters in Takashi Masada's popular light novel Dies Irae.[13]

In the 2015 Amazon Studios streaming television series The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history drama based on the Philip K Dick novel of the same name, Heydrich is portrayed by American actor Ray Proscia. In this story, the Axis forces were victorious and have occupied the former United States. By 1962, Heydrich has reached the age of 58 and risen to the rank of SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer.

• Fictional portrayals of Reinhard Heydrich (IMDb)