Operation Anthropoid

In the files of the Special Operations Executive at The National Archives, the operation that killed the most senior Nazi to die by Allied action is listed in one plain line: "ANTHROPOID: liquidation of Heydrich"². It was a Czechoslovak operation in conception and execution. SOE supplied the training, the weapons and the aircraft. The cost fell on people who had no part in it.

Why Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich headed the Reich Security Main Office, which controlled the SD and the Security Police, and was a leading architect of the "Final Solution"¹. From autumn 1941 he was also Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where he combined terror against the resistance with policies meant to keep Czech arms factories working^1,3. A secret SOE memo, quoted by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, called him "probably the second most dangerous man in German-occupied Europe"¹.

The Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London, led by Edvard Beneš, had political reasons too. Visible resistance in the Czech lands had been slight compared with Poland or Yugoslavia. A dramatic blow would show the Allies that Czechs were fighting, and so strengthen Beneš's case against the Munich settlement of 1938^1,3. The exiled intelligence chief, František Moravec, proposed the operation and SOE agreed to support it³.

Preparation and insertion

Planning began in October 1941. Moravec chose candidates from the Czechoslovak army in Britain, and they were trained at SOE schools in Scotland³. The two men eventually selected were Jozef Gabčík, a Slovak, and Jan Kubiš, a Czech; Kubiš replaced a soldier injured in training³. SOE adapted an anti-tank grenade to be light enough to throw and powerful enough to wreck a car³.

On the night of 28 December 1941 a Royal Air Force Halifax dropped the pair, together with two other parties (SILVER A and SILVER B) with communications tasks, over the Protectorate. Navigation errors put them down well away from their intended drop zones^2,3. Over the following five months they hid in Prague with resistance families¹. When local resistance leaders learned what the mission was, they asked London to call it off, warning that reprisals would be out of all proportion to any gain. The government-in-exile let the operation go ahead^1,3.

The attack, 27 May 1942

Heydrich drove each morning from his country house to Prague Castle in an open Mercedes. Gabčík and Kubiš waited at a hairpin bend in the Libeň district, where the car had to slow down. A third parachutist, Josef Valčík, acted as lookout³. When the car slowed, Gabčík stepped out and pulled the trigger of his Sten gun, which jammed. Heydrich ordered his driver to stop so he could return fire, and Kubiš threw the grenade. It burst against the rear wheel^1,3. Both attackers escaped.

Heydrich's wounds were not immediately fatal. Fragments and upholstery driven into his body led to infection, and he died on 4 June 1942¹.

Reprisals

Hitler's first reaction was to demand the killing of up to 10,000 Czechs. Karl Hermann Frank, the senior SS and police officer in the Protectorate, argued that mass killing on that scale would damage war production. Martial law and a manhunt followed instead¹. On 9 June, the day of Heydrich's state funeral in Berlin, Hitler ordered the destruction of Lidice, a village near Prague that had been named in a letter found during the investigation. No real evidence linked it to the attackers¹.

That night German police and SS surrounded the village. According to the USHMM, they shot 173 men and boys on the spot and more than 20 other villagers later in Prague. They sent most of the women to Ravensbrück and the children to Łódź. Nine children were selected for "Germanization"; about 80 of the others were murdered, probably at Chełmno. The village was burned and leveled¹. Later in June the hamlet of Ležáky, where a SILVER A radio transmitter had been found, was also destroyed and its adults killed^3,4.

The church

The parachutists were found only when Karel Čurda, a member of another team dropped from Britain, gave himself up to the Gestapo and named their helpers³. Seven of them were sheltering in the crypt of the Orthodox Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague. On 18 June 1942 several hundred SS troops besieged it. Kubiš and two others died in the fighting in the upper church. Gabčík, Valčík and two others held out in the crypt and killed themselves when the Germans tried to flood them out³. The bishop and priests who had sheltered them were later shot³. Čurda was hanged for treason in 1947³.

Consequences

In August 1942 Britain declared that Germany had destroyed the Munich Agreement, a limited but real diplomatic gain for Beneš³. Lidice became an international byword for Nazi brutality¹. Neither the government-in-exile nor SOE seems to have expected collective punishment on the scale the Germans imposed³. No other senior Nazi was killed by an operation organized by an Allied government. The plan SOE drew up later against Hitler himself was never carried out³.

Read next

United Kingdom · 1940–1946 Special Operations Executive (SOE) Britain's wartime sabotage and subversion service, created in July 1940 to arm resistance movements in occupied Europe and Asia. It ran Anthropoid and Gunnerside, suffered the Englandspiel, and was wound up in 1946. 16–28 February 1943 Operation Gunnerside In February 1943 nine Norwegian SOE commandos crossed a gorge in Telemark and blew up the heavy-water cells at Vemork without firing a shot, after a British glider raid had ended in disaster. 5 June 1944 – April 1945 Operation Jedburgh From June 1944 Allied three-man teams in uniform, drawn from SOE, the OSS and the Free French, parachuted into France and the Low Countries to arm and lead resistance fighters behind German lines. United Kingdom · 1909 Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) Britain's foreign intelligence service, founded in 1909 as the foreign section of the Secret Service Bureau, run by a chief known as 'C', and not placed on a statutory footing until the Intelligence Services Act 1994.