The Daring Mission To Assassinate Nazi Leader Reinhard Heydrich
By: Peter Burns
Tags: Nazis, Czechoslovakia, History, Heroes, World War II

The Daring Mission to Assassinate Nazi Leader Reinhard Heydrich

Operation Anthropoid has passed down into legend

Heydrich’s car after the assassination (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

If you go to Prague, a short walk down from the Vltava River, past the Dancing House, you will find a nondescript looking church. If it weren’t for the plaques on its walls, you wouldn’t know its significance. Even now remaining pot-marked with bullet holes, this building was the site of a great drama that took place during World War II.

Inside the building, a group of Czechoslovak paratroopers was holding out against the Nazi German army. None of them would make it out alive at the end, but their story has passed into legend. Numerous films have been made about their deeds and their sacrifice.

Reinhard Heydrich (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Among that small group of paratroopers were a duo that carried out the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, and one of Adolf Hitler’s top Nazi lieutenants. Heydrich, one of Nazi Germany’s most feared men, and one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, was the highest-ranking Nazi assassinated during the War.

The two men who assassinated him, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, were not acting alone. In their acts, they were supported by other paratroopers and Czechoslovak resistance fighters. Their act of bravery inspired others. The Nazi war machine had been steam-rolling through Europe at the time, and the death of one of the regime’s most important men gave hope to resistance fighters everywhere.

The Munich Agreement and the path to war

Before World War II, Czechoslovakia was a small country in central Europe. It rose from the ashes of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire and established itself as the only permanent democracy in the region.

By the 1930s, it was totally surrounded by non-democratic states, many of which wanted to have a piece of it. Faced with a dangerous neighborhood, it entered into a series of military alliances. The chief part of this system was its alliance with France. However, another important piece was the Little Entente alliance with Romania and Yugoslavia. In 1935, the Czechoslovak government also concluded an assistance treaty with the Soviet Union.

The country was an industrial powerhouse, churning out heavy machinery and other goods. This also translated into a strong domestic armaments industry. In a worsening security environment in 1934, the leaders of the country decided to spend a lot of money in order to upgrade the army’s defenses to the latest weaponry innovations. This resulted in the army getting a lot of new quality armaments, including the Lt-34, Lt-35, and later Lt-38 tanks.

Czechoslovak border fortifications (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

What was significant was that, at that time, Czechoslovakia started constructing a series of fortifications near its borders. They were inspired by the Maginot Line in France and knew this would have made it hard for any advancing army to pass through their perimeter. There were different types of forts set up on the line, each of them covering the other, with the bigger ones even having significant firing power.

This made the Czechoslovak army quite formidable. In his book The Soviets, the Munich Crisis, and the Coming of World War II, Hugh Ragsdale quotes the reports of French and British military attaches stationed in Prague. Their assessment of the strength of the Czechoslovak army is quite telling.

In his analysis of the army, the British attache wrote “here was a force capable of defending its frontiers and willing to do so at any cost.” He estimated that unassisted, the army could hold the German army at bay for around three months.

The French general heading his country’s military mission in Czechoslovakia also thought that the army could hold out for several months. However, if assisted by its allies, the war in 1938 or early 1939 could be fought to a stalemate. This never came to be.

Instead, Czechoslovakia was abandoned by its allies (France and the United Kingdom). On the 30th of September 1938, the leaders of these two countries signed an agreement at Munich that transferred large parts of the Czechoslovak territory to Nazi Germany, as well as smaller parts to Poland and Hungary. These areas included much of the border fortifications.

Resigned to the fact that its allies sold them out, the Czechoslovak government signed the agreement and left its territory. However, this appeasement would pass down in history as counter-productive. In 1939, Hitler’s army would invade Poland, starting off World War II. Later, the Wehrmacht would turn its power to the west, invading France. Among its equipment, were hundreds of tanks it took from the Czechoslovak army.

The Czechoslovak army abroad and the hatching of the plan to kill Heydrich

After its territory passed to Nazi orbit, thousands of soldiers from the Czechoslovak army escaped abroad. Many of them found themselves in Poland and France, later going to the UK or the Soviet Union. There was even a significant force stationed in the Middle East. These troops participated in many of the Allied campaigns in both that region and North Africa.

Czechoslovak troops (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The most significant cluster of Czechoslovak soldiers found themselves in the United Kingdom. After the start of the war, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile relocated to London, and a Czechoslovak army-in-exile was set up. The Czechoslovak intelligence service was also located in London. Its head, Frantisek Moravec, came up with a daring plan.

A group of the most promising soldiers from the Czechoslovak troops in Britain was selected and started training for special operations. In the end, two soldiers, Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were selected as the men who were tasked with assassinating Heydrich.

The duo, together with a number of other paratroopers were airlifted over the territory of occupied Bohemia. However, due to navigational errors, they were dropped at the wrong spot. They were now faced with the problem of getting to their rendezvous point. After a strenuous journey undercover, they arrived in Pilsen and later moved onto Prague.

The assassination

In Prague, they contacted various members of the resistance and started to plan out their attack. Heydrich lived in a chateau outside Prague, and every day made a car ride to his office at the Prague Castle. Kubis and Gabcik observed that Heydrich made the same drive every day, in an open car, with only his driver as protection.

The duo looked at his daily route and found the perfect spot to carry out the assassination. There was a tram stop. Near it, the road curved noticeably. This would slow down the car, and allow the two would-be assassins to approach Heydrich while he was sitting in his seat.

They enlisted the help of another paratrooper, Josef Valcik, and picked a date for their assassination: 27 May 1942. On that day, the three soldiers went to their spots. Valcik was set up at 100 meters before the curve, in order to spot the car and then signal the duo. After giving the signal of the approaching car, he waited for what was to happen next.

The game was now in the hands of Kubis and Gabcik. As the car was rounding the bend, Gabcik threw off his big raincoat and revealed his Sten submachine gun. In that instant, bad luck struck. The gun was jammed, and Gabcik couldn’t fire off a shot!

However, instead of speeding away, Heydrich ordered his driver to stop. He drew his pistol and started shooting at Gabcik. As he was doing that, Kubis stepped out of the shadows and threw a grenade. The grenade landed on the front wheel of the car and exploded.

The explosion wounded Heydrich but did not kill him. A shoot-out ensued. Heydrich’s driver got out of the car and started chasing after Kubis, who managed to get away. Heydrich, although wounded, managed to get up and began shooting at Gabcik. The paratrooper returned fire, but the driver came running back.

Gabcik started to run away, and the driver gave chase. In the meanwhile, Heydrich fell to the side of the road, in pain from his injuries. Gabcik also managed to run away, wounding the driver in the leg with his shots. He then hid out in a safe house.

The aftermath

The paratroopers ran away to hide out, convinced that their plot had failed. Heydrich was transported to a hospital, and it seemed as if he had managed to survive. However, after signs of improvement, on the evening of the 3rd of June, he went into shock. He died the next day in the morning, on the 4th of June.

The bold assassination of a prominent leader enraged the Nazis. They started a hunt for the killers, and also enacted a series of reprisals. Two villages, Lidice and Lezaky, were razed to the ground. Thousands of people were arrested, many of them dying under interrogation. Several friends and members of the families of the paratroopers were later sent to concentration camps.

However, the assassins were nowhere to be found. They hid well. After moving around, they ended up hiding inside the St. Cyril and Methodius Eastern Orthodox Church in Prague. Kubis, Gabcik, and Valcik hid out inside together with several other paratroopers, including Adolf Opalka. This decorated officer was the leader of the Out-Distance group, which had carried out several acts of sabotage.

In order to find the paratroopers, the Nazis stepped up their reprisals. Another paratrooper, who came in with Opalka’s group was hiding out in southern Bohemia. Afraid for his family, he snapped. He turned himself in and gave away the locations of several resistance fighters.

After torturing several of them, the Gestapo finally got the location of where the group was hiding. Around 750 SS troops arrived at the Church but had trouble in taking it over. The seven paratroopers hiding inside were giving stiff resistance. The Germans tried to flush them out by pumping in water into the building.

Two of the paratroopers died after an intense gun battle, while the rest of them killed themselves as it was becoming apparent that they were running out of bullets, and the basement of the church they were hiding in was getting flooded.

Bullet holes and memorial at the church where the paratroopers died (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

While these men died, their sacrifice was not in vain. The Nazis were defeated, and Czechoslovakia was liberated in 1945. The Nazis surrendered in Prague on the 9th of May 1945, one day after the official surrender of Nazi Germany in the rest of Europe.