Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, known as the Hangman of Prague, was conceived out of desperation.  Born in September 1941, the operation was meant to achieve some sort of significant, morale-raising victory after a long series of disasters.  Hitler had already conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Low Countries, France, Yugoslavia and Greece.  His armies were currently going from victory to victory in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.  The British needed something, anything to stem the morale-killing stream of endlessly bad news.  The civilians at home and the various branches of the military were in danger of sliding into a state of defeatism.

That explains the British motivation for the operation.  However, the Czechs had totally different reasons to sanction it.  The first was that the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile under President Edvard Benes had come under constant criticism.  Frantisek Moravec, Benes’ chief intelligence advisor stated in regards to resistance efforts in occupied Europe that ‘Czechoslovakia was always at the bottom of the list.  President Benes became very embarrassed by this fact.  He told me that in his consultations with representatives of Allied countries the subject of meaningful resistance to the enemy cropped up with humiliating insistence.  The British and the Russians, hard-pressed on their own battlefields, kept pointing out to Benes the urgent need for maximum effort from every country, including Czechoslovakia.’ ^[1]

Benes was right to be worried.  Looking at the post-war future, Benes wanted his restored Czechoslovakia to have its pre-1938 borders.  However, in 1941 Britain had still not repudiated the Munich Agreement of 1938, which meant that if she came to a negotiated peace with Germany, Berlin would keep possession of the Sudetenland permanently.

Consequently, on 5 September 1941, Benes instructed the Central Leadership of Home Resistance (UVOD) in Prague that ‘It is essential to move from theoretical plans and preparations to deeds…In London and Moscow we have been informed that the destruction or at least a considerable reduction of the weapons industry would have a profound impact on the Germans at this moment…Our entire position will appear in a permanently unfavorable light if we do not at least keep pace with the others.’ ^[2]

UVOD responded to this appeal by ramping up its sabotage and boycott activities.  Unfortunately, that led to a serious and unforeseen consequence.  Losing his patience with the weak Reich Protector in Prague (the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia) for not being able to keep matters under control, Hitler replaced Konstantin von Neurath with Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office.  That change set in motion a sequence of events that would severely impact the lives millions of people.

Heydrich came with an ominous reputation and the intention of getting the situation under control as quickly as possible.  Besides being the head of the Reich Security Main Office, he was also the founding head of the Security Service (the SD, which was an intelligence organization that sought out and neutralized resistance to the regime), played an instrumental part in Kristallnacht, chaired the Wannsee Conference (which discussed the Final Solution of the Jews and its implementation) and oversaw the Einsatzgruppen (special action) units that killed hundreds of thousands of people, mostly Jews.

Wasting no time, Heydrich quickly ended the problems of sabotage and boycotts as well as crushing the various resistance groups.  The arms factories continued their necessary production at the expected levels.  From there, Heydrich focused on administering the Protectorate and working out a Germanization program of the local population.

Looking back at the British in more detail, the Special Operations Executive (the SOE, which was set up in July 1940 and personally instructed by Winston Churchill to ‘set Europe ablaze’ by backing anti-Nazi resistance groups) was desperate for a successful operation.  Since its inception, the SOE accomplished almost nothing and was in danger of being shut down in favor of its rival, the much more well-established Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).  That led the SOE and Benes to come together to create Operation Anthropoid, the assassination of Heydrich. ^[3]

Everyone involved understood that the Germans would react to such an assassination with mass reprisals.  Benes buried his head in the sand focusing only on getting back his pre-1938 borders, though he was said to have been ‘apprehensive of the possible repercussions in the Protectorate.’ ^[4] Other exiled groups refused to sanction similar plans for fear of Hitler’s revenge, but the British saw matters entirely differently.  They coldly calculated that severe German reprisals would spark an uprising of the Czech population against their German occupiers and they wanted to be the match that set that powder keg off no matter how many Czechs had to pay the price for London’s machinations.

To make the situation even dirtier than it already was, the British didn’t want to be accused of condoning political assassination as a means of warfare ^[5] or ‘sponsoring an act of terrorism.’ ^[6] Therefore, they needed a stooge to take all the blame.  In an act of betrayal, it was decided that ‘the assassination was to be portrayed by Allied propaganda as a spontaneous act of resistance, planned and carried out by the Czech underground at home, although the resistance in Prague itself was never informed about London’s plans to murder Heydrich.’ ^[7]

The British trained and parachuted three teams into the Protectorate at 2 am on 29 December 1941: Anthropoid, the 2-man team tasked with the assassination, and Silver A and Silver B, 2 radio teams to re-establish the communications between London and the Czech resistance that Heydrich had severed.  

The 2 assassins spent the next 5 months moving from safe house to safe house, borrowing bicycles, clothes and briefcases along the way.  The ease with which this was done led to a breakdown of disciple and the rules of secrecy as they also carried out multiple affairs with women they met while waiting for the day of the operation.  The unforeseen consequence of this indiscipline was that almost every person who those two had contact with were hunted down, arrested, interrogated and either shot or sent to a concentration camp. ^[8] They condemned the very people who helped them.

There was a chance to avoid the impending disaster when UVOD discovered the nature of the 2 assassins’ mission.  Twice in early May they implored Benes to abandon the mission saying ‘Judging by the preparations which Ota and Zdenek (the codenames of Gabcik and Kubis – the assassins) are making, and by the place where they are making these preparations, we assume, in spite of the silence they are maintaining, that they are planning to assassinate ‘H.’  This assassination would in no way benefit the Allies, and might have incalculable consequences for our nation.  It would not only endanger our hostages and political prisoners, but also cost thousands of other lives.  It would expose the nation to unparalleled consequences, while at the same time sweeping away the last remnants of [underground] organization.  As a result, it would become impossible to do anything useful for the Allies in future.  We therefore ask that you issue instructions through Silver A for the assassination to be cancelled.  Delay might prove dangerous.  Send instructions immediately.  Should an assassination nevertheless be desirable for considerations of foreign policy, let it be directed against someone else.’ ^[9]

A couple of days later, a response came from Benes’ chief of intelligence saying ‘Don’t worry when it comes to terrorist actions.  We believe we see the situation clearly, therefore, given the situation, any actions against officials of the German Reich do not come into consideration.  Let UVOD know…’ ^[10] This was a total lie that would take the local resistance by surprise, much to their undoing. 

Benes continued the deception by sending another message stating that ‘I expect that in the forthcoming offensive the Germans will push with their forces.  They are sure to have some success…In such a case I would expect German proposals for an inconclusive peace.  The crisis would be a serious one [for us]…In such a situation, an act of violence such as disturbances, direct subversion, sabotage, or demonstrations, might be imperative or even necessary in our country.  This would save the country internationally, and even great sacrifices would be worth it.’ ^[11] With this statement, Benes completely disregarded the well-being of his own people in the interest of politics.  In essence, he sold them out.  The die had been cast.

 On 27 May 1942, the operation went into effect.  Bad luck (a jammed machine gun) and a misjudged throw of a makeshift bomb left Heydrich wounded but still alive.  The two would-be assassins temporarily escaped.  Severely wounded, Heydrich held on for 8 days, dying on 4 June.

An unimaginable tsunami of vengeance followed.  And the German’s figured out right away who was to blame.  In his diary, only a day after the attack, Goebbels wrote ‘Alarming news is arriving from Prague.  A bomb attack was staged against Heydrich in a Prague suburb which has severely wounded him.  Even if he is not in mortal danger at the moment, his condition is nevertheless worrisome…It is imperative that we get hold of the assassins.  Then a tribunal should be held to deal with them and their accomplices.  The background of the attack is not yet clear.  But it is revealing that London reported on the attack very early on.  We must be clear that such an attack could set a precedent if we do not counter it with the most brutal of means.’ ^[12]

It took only 1 day for the Germans to understand who the culprits behind the act were and Goebbels’ suggested reaction was exactly what those who were against the operation feared the most.  However, Benes was ecstatic.  He sent a message to the underground gushing ‘I see that you and your friends are full of determination.  It is proof to me that the entire Czech nation is unshakeable in its position.  I assure you that it is bringing results.  The events at home have had an incredible effect [in London] and have brought great recognition of the Czech nation’s resistance.’ ^[13]

Unfortunately for millions of people, Benes’ ecstasy was misplaced and mistimed.  The first wave of reactions followed almost immediately.  Within the first hour after the assassination attempt, Hitler ordered that 10,000 Czechs be executed immediately.  Fortunately for the intended victims, Hitler was talked out of this knee-jerk decision in the interests of keeping industrial production from faltering and not to give ammunition for enemy propaganda.  He was also talked out of sending SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski to replace Heydrich saying Bach-Zelewski would ‘happily wade through a sea of blood without the least scruple.  The Czechs have to learn the lesson that if they shoot down one man, he will immediately be replaced by someone even worse.’ ^[14] The Czechs were fortunately spared his tender mercies.

Even though Hitler changed his mind twice towards less dramatic actions, other severe measures were taken.  Martial law was imposed over the Protectorate with trains and other public transportation being cancelled, and cinemas, theaters, restaurants as well as coffee houses being closed down.  A 9 pm to 6 am curfew was enforced and Czechs over 16 years old (over 15 according to another source ^[15] who didn’t get new identification papers before midnight 29 May were to be shot.  One of the largest police operations in modern European history was carried out with the total sealing off of Prague and the searching of 36,000 buildings to find the assassins, which ended unsuccessfully. ^[16]

Far, far worse was to come.

Heydrich’s funeral was held on 9 June in the Mosaic Room of the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin in one of the most elaborate funeral ceremonies ever conducted in the Third Reich. ^[17] After it had ended, Hitler rounded on Czech President Hacha and screamed, ‘Nothing can prevent me from deporting millions of Czechs if they do not wish for peaceful coexistence.’  He also stated that he was no longer concerned with wartime needs and that the Czech population would face unprecedented consequences if the assassins were not found immediately. ^[18]

Later that same day, Hitler ordered the village of Lidice to be annihilated and its population wiped out.  There were suspicions about the village being linked to the assassination that proved not to be true but that didn’t matter in the murderous atmosphere at the time.  In total, 199 males 14 years old and over were shot, including 13 others who were not present at the time of the initial massacre.  195 women were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and 86 children were sent to Chelmno camp.  All were gassed.  9 other children (7 according to other sources ^[19] had passed a racial screening and were fostered out to be Germanized.  The village was brunt, then leveled by bulldozers and explosives.  All pets and farm animals were killed and the bodies in the local cemetery were looted.  The remains of the village were removed and a stream was rerouted through it.  Topsoil was placed over the area and crops planted, all of it cordoned off with barbed-wire fencing that had warning signs forbidding trespassing. ^[20] Two weeks later, a radio transmitter belonging to Silver A was found in the village of Lezaky leading to it being destroyed and all of its inhabitants killed.

The consequences of the Lidice massacre were great.  Goebbels wrote in his diary that it ‘will not fail in its cooling effect on the remnants of the underground movement in the Protectorate.’ ^[21] That prediction proved prophetic.  However, the Germans openly bragged about the massacre in their propaganda efforts and that sparked a major international outcry.  The Allies did not fail to make great use of it in their own propaganda, especially the British.  Multiple communities the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Peru renamed themselves Lidice to keep alive the memory of the destroyed village. ^[22]

The Western response to the massacre radicalized the mood in the Protectorate even more leading to harsher measures.  June arrived and the assassins had still not been caught.  An 18 June deadline was set with the promise of ‘drastic actions’ should the date pass without the assassins being caught or dead. ^[23] More and more arrests and executions took place in the meantime. 

Everything changed on 16 June when Karel Curda, a Czech working with the resistance who was parachuted into the Protectorate in late March 1942, turned himself in to the Gestapo to protect his family.  He didn’t know where Gabcik or Kubis were, but he did know about the safe houses they used.  That information was enough.  Only 2 days later, the 2 assassins were dead and many of the people who had helped them were either arrested or dead themselves. ^[24]

However, if anyone thought the death of the assassins would mollify the Germans, they were naively wrong.  The arrests, torture and executions continued throughout the summer resulting in the almost complete destruction of the various resistance groups.  It is hard to imagine the scale of this destruction but the proof of it is the fact that there was no serious resistance to German rule for the rest of the war until literally the last days of the conflict. 

This period of time became known as the Heydrichiada.  The consequences in the Protectorate were stunning.  The British War Office ‘noted ‘a dying enthusiasm’ for further resistance within the Czech population.  The Czech armaments industry remained one of the strongest and most reliable pillars of the German war effort until the Wehrmacht’s surrender in the spring of 1945.  Through his death, Heydrich had inadvertently fulfilled one of his short-term missions in Prague: the complete and lasting ‘pacification’ of the Protectorate.’ ^[25]

All in all, excluding the victims of Lidice and Lezaky, 3188 Czechs were arrested, with 1327 of them being executed.  A further 4000 were sent to prisons and concentration camps. ^[26] As horrible as that was, a far greater human tragedy was unfolding at the same time across much of occupied Europe.

To the Nazi leadership, it was clear who the ultimate enemy behind Heydrich’s assassination was, the Jews.  One has to remember that besides Britain, Germany was fighting the Soviet Union and the United States at that time.  The Nazis believed the USSR was controlled by what they called Judeo-Bolshevism, and the West, particularly the US, was under the heavy influence of Jewish finance.  In their minds, the Jews were squeezing them on all fronts and after the assassination, they were determined to accelerate the destruction of their hated enemy.  All thoughts of deporting the Jews to some sort of an eastern ‘reservation’ deep in the USSR were thrown to the winds.  This led to Aktion Reinhardt (Operation Reinhard), the most lethal period of the Holocaust. 

In a secret speech to senior SS officers that occurred immediately after Heydrich’s funeral, Himmler told his men that, ‘It is our sacred obligation to avenge his death, to take over his mission and to destroy without mercy and weakness, now more than ever, the enemies of our people.’ ^[27] The speech was not just rhetoric. 

On 19 July, Himmler ordered that, with few exceptions, all Jews in the General Government (most of occupied Poland) be killed by the end of the year.  3 days later, mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp began. ^[28] By the time Operation Reinhard wound up in November 1943, 2,000,000 people, mostly Jews, were murdered.  Astoundingly, the majority were killed in the first three months: At least 1.32 million Jewish dead in 90 days, a rate of nearly 14,700 per day. ^[29]

However, not all the victims came from the General Government.  The fury towards the Jews the Nazis blamed for Heydrich’s death extended beyond Polish Jews.  100,000 French Jews were deported as well as 45,000 German, 15,000 Dutch and 10,000 Belgian Jews in addition to 30,000 from the Protectorate. ^[30]

The desire for revenge began to take on a life of its own.  For example, the Gauleiter of Vienna gave an order to deport all Czechs from his city as soon as all the Jews were shipped out, the goal being to create Czech-free cities.  This alarmed Hitler because he thought it would affect the morale of Czech workers in the armaments industry, so he banned all further public comments and conversation on the future of the Czech people. ^[31]

Fortunately for the Czechs and other occupied peoples, the Nazis became distracted by the change in the war’s direction and that meant that major efforts towards Germanization and the unweaving of ethnicities in their empire had to be put on hold.  After the major losses at El Alamein and Stalingrad, the Germans needed to focus on winning the war first; then they could go back to their murderous plans for reordering occupied Europe, plans that would never see fruition.  For the Czechs, that meant the Germans had to behave more reasonably with them to keep war production at its highest levels.  ‘Even Heydrich – had he lived – could not have ignored these new realities.’ ^[32]

—————————————————————————————————————-

On 5 August 1942, Benes and the Czech government-in-exile finally got their reward for backing Operation Anthropoid even though it had a high human cost: Britain officially renounced the 1938 Munich Agreement, just as Benes had hoped.  In addition to that, Anthony Eden secretly assured Benes that after the war, the ethnic situation in Czechoslovakia would be settled once and for all.  This promise proved to be the seed that would lead to the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia after the war, an act of ethnic unweaving that the Allies supported at the same time condemning Germany for wanting to do the same.

Operation Anthropoid was a success in that it resulted in the death of its target Reinhard Heydrich.  That gave the British what they wanted: a morale-boosting ‘victory’ of some sort after so many terrible defeats in the first half of the war.  Benes and his exile government also got what they wanted as mentioned in the previous paragraph.  But when balanced against the costs, was the killing of this one man worth it?

The Czech resistance was crushed for the entire second half of the war, over 1500 Czechs were shot and thousands more were sent to prisons and concentration camps, 2 Czech villages were destroyed with one being completely removed from the Earth, and the deadliest period of the Holocaust was carried out as a direct reaction resulting in 2 million deaths.  It is up to each person to judge for him or herself.

As a final note, it is interesting to consider that the SOE and the Czechoslovakian government-in-exile under Benes both officially denied all responsibility for the assassination after 1945 because they didn’t want to be accused of condoning political assassination as a means of warfare, especially since they knew the Germans would carry out extreme reprisals against the civilian population in revenge, which they did in spades. ^[33] Their denials are very telling.  It is also telling that the Allies didn’t try to assassinate any other leading Nazis as the human cost proved to be too great.

Sources

Gerwarth, Robert. Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich. Cornwall, Great Britain: Yale University Press, 2012.

Heiman, Mary. Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed. Totton, Great Britain: Yale University Press, 2011.

1.32 Million Jews Were Killed in Just Three Months During the Holocaust | Live ScienceLidice massacre – Wikipedia

1. Gerwarth p.3.[↩]
2. Ibid., p.3[↩]
3. Ibid., p.4[↩]
4. Ibid., p.5[↩]
5. Ibid., p.2[↩]
6. Ibid., p.5[↩]
7. Ibid., p.5[↩]
8. Ibid., p.7[↩]
9. Ibid., pp.8-9[↩]
10. Ibid., p.9[↩]
11. Ibid.[↩]
12. Ibid., p.11[↩]
13. Ibid., p.13[↩]
14. Ibid., pp.11-12[↩]
15. Heimann p.138[↩]
16. Gerwarth p.12[↩]
17. Ibid., p.278[↩]
18. Ibid., p.280[↩]
19. Heimann p.139[↩]
20. Gerwarth p.281, Wikipedia[↩]
21. Gerwarth p.281[↩]
22. Ibid., p.282[↩]
23. Ibid., p.283[↩]
24. Ibid., pp.283-284[↩]
25. Ibid., p.285[↩]
26. Ibid.[↩]
27. Ibid., p.286[↩]
28. Ibid.[↩]
29. Live Science[↩]
30. Gerwarth p.287[↩]
31. Ibid., p.288[↩]
32. Ibid.[↩]
33. Ibid., pp.2-3[↩]