Hangmen Also Die

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Hangmen Also Die was a 1943 film directed by the legendary Austrian director Fritz Lang with a script by Bertolt Brecht and John Wexley, with James Wong Howe serving as cinematographer.

On May 27, 1942, the Nazi "Reich Protector" of Nazis-occupied Prague in Bohemia and Moravia—"Hangman" Reinhard Heydrich—was assassinated by Czech resistance fighters parachuted from a British plane (Operation Anthropoid). Heydrich was the number-two man in the Nazi SS and a chief architect of the Holocaust.

Hangmen Also Die (1943) is the story of Heydrich's assassination in fictionalized form. It was Bertolt Brecht's only script for a Hollywood film: the money he earned from the project allowed him to write "The Visions of Simone Marchand, "Švejk in the Second World War" and an adaptation of Webster's "The Duchess of Malfi." Hanns Eisler was nominated for an Academy Award for his musical score. The collaboration of three prominent refugees from Nazi Germany—Lang, Brecht and Eisler—is an example of the influence this generation of German exiles had in American culture.