What is a “victim”?

In my opinion the obvious victims of Hangmen Also Die are the 400 Czech intellectuals that are arrested after Heydrich’s assassination. They are victims to the Czech traitor Emil Cruka’s random decision of who has to go to the camp and who not. And just as this decision has been random, the decision of who has to die in which order was pure random. The arrested men had no influence on any of these decisions and therefore are in my opinion the clear victims of the movie – they are punished for something they are not responsible for.

But the Czeck people turn the table and make the hunter become the hunted: the final victim is Emil Cruka. Thinking of victim in the way that you are punished for something you haven’t done, it becomes obvious that he, too, is a victim as he is punished for killing Heydrich even though it wasn’t him. But still most people would tend to see him not as a victim but see his death as the moral ending of the movie as he was not only a traitor but did not even show remorse for his actions and was not sorry for seeing all his comrades being murdered. But still he is a victim of the Czech people and he, too, is murdererd for reasons he is not responsible for.