The gun jammed. Josef Gabčík stood in the road and squeezed the trigger of his Sten submachine gun, but nothing happened. Nothing but a dry, empty click. Reinhard Heydrich’s green Mercedes had slowed to a crawl at the hairpin bend, just as they had planned, and now the most feared man in the Third Reich was staring straight at him.
It was 10:30 on the morning of May 27, 1942, in the Libeň district of Prague. This was the moment. Months of training, months of hiding in safe houses, months of waiting had come down to this. And the gun had jammed.
Heydrich made a fatal decision. Instead of ordering his driver to speed away, he shouted at SS Oberfahrer Johannes Klein to stop the car. He stood up in the open vehicle, drew his pistol, and prepared to shoot. In that instant, Jan Kubiš threw the modified anti-tank grenade he had been concealing in a briefcase.
It missed the car’s interior, but it exploded against the rear wheel. Shrapnel, upholstery fragments, and horsehair from the seat tore into Heydrich’s body. The blast shattered the car’s window and drove glass into Kubiš’s face, blinding him temporarily. Despite his wounds, Heydrich staggered from the vehicle, still firing at Gabčík, who dove into a nearby butcher shop.
The driver Klein chased him and was shot in the leg. Kubiš escaped on his bicycle, bleeding heavily. Heydrich collapsed on the street corner, more furious than afraid. He had no idea how badly he was wounded.
At Bulovka Hospital, surgeons removed fragments of leather, wire, and seat material from Heydrich’s spleen and diaphragm. For four days, he seemed to be recovering. Then his condition turned. On June 4, 1942, eight days after the attack, Reinhard Heydrich died of sepsis.
The man who had chaired the Wannsee Conference, where the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews had been planned, was dead at thirty-eight. The man who had been, after Hitler, the most feared figure in the Nazi state, the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the “Butcher of Prague,” was gone. Hitler was enraged. He initially demanded the execution of ten thousand Czechs as retribution.
But his deputy in Prague, Karl Hermann Frank, persuaded him that such indiscriminate slaughter might cripple the industrial output of a region vital to the German war effort. The reprisals were focused instead. They were no less savage. More than thirteen thousand people were arrested in the weeks that followed.
Courts-martial sentenced hundreds to death. The Gestapo tortured prisoners in the basement of Petschek Palace, their Prague headquarters, extracting information piece by piece. Among those arrested was Anna Malinová, Gabčík’s girlfriend. She would later die in Mauthausen concentration camp.
Gabčík and Kubiš went into hiding. They were joined by five other paratroopers from related British Special Operations Executive missions: Adolf Opálka from the Out Distance group, Josef Valčík from Silver A, Jaroslav Švarc, and Josef Bublík and Jan Hrubý from Bioscope. Seven men in total, hunted by the most powerful intelligence apparatus in Europe. They moved between safe houses, knowing the net was tightening.
By early June, they had found sanctuary in the crypt of the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius on Resslova Street, an Eastern Orthodox cathedral in Prague’s New Town. Bishop Gorazd and Father Vladimir Petřek agreed to hide them there. It was a decision that would cost them their lives.
Above ground, the Nazi terror intensified. On June 9, the day of Heydrich’s state funeral in Berlin, Hitler ordered the destruction of the village of Lidice, which had been falsely linked to the assassination through a misinterpreted letter. On June 10, 1942, German police surrounded the village. That morning, all 173 men and boys over fifteen were shot in groups of ten against the wall of the Horák farm.
The 195 women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where roughly sixty would die. Of the 95 children, 81 were later murdered in gas vans at Chełmno. The remaining children, judged suitable for Germanization by their appearance, were taken by German families. The village was burned, then demolished with explosives.
Two weeks later, on June 24, the same fate befell the village of Ležáky, where a resistance radio transmitter had been discovered. All adult residents, men and women alike, were shot. Most of the thirteen children were killed at Chełmno. In total, an estimated five thousand Czechs were murdered in the reprisals for Heydrich’s assassination.
The assassins’ end came through betrayal. Karel Čurda was a member of the Out Distance parachute group who had not participated in the attack. After the assassination, he fled Prague and hid with his mother in the town of Nová Hlína in southern Bohemia. As the reprisals mounted and the Gestapo offered a reward of one million Reichsmarks, Čurda cracked.
On June 16, 1942, he walked into Gestapo headquarters in Prague and offered everything he knew. He did not know where Gabčík and Kubiš were hiding, but he knew the code names of the families who had helped them. He betrayed the Moravec family. He betrayed the safe houses.
He betrayed his comrades. At five in the morning on June 17, the Gestapo raided the Moravec apartment in Žižkov. Marie Moravcová was allowed to use the toilet, where she bit into a cyanide capsule and died instantly. Her husband Alois, who had known nothing of his wife’s resistance work, was arrested along with their seventeen-year-old son, Vlastimil, known as Aťa.
At Petschek Palace, Aťa was tortured throughout the day. He refused to talk even as his interrogators beat him. Finally, they drugged him with brandy, showed him his mother’s severed head floating in a fish tank, and told him his father would be next. The teenager’s will broke.
He revealed that his mother had once told him to go to the catacombs of the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius if he was ever in trouble. It was enough. At 4:10 on the morning of June 18, 1942, approximately 750 SS soldiers surrounded the church.
The Germans brought Čurda with them, hoping the sight of their former comrade would convince the paratroopers to surrender. When the assault began, Čurda shouted through the church doors, “Friends, surrender. Nothing will happen to you. Nothing happened to me either.
”
The response from inside was immediate. Gunfire erupted, and a voice shouted back, “We are Czechs. We will never surrender. ”
The battle lasted for hours.
Adolf Opálka, Jan Kubiš, and Jaroslav Švarc held the prayer loft above the nave, firing down at the German troops with their pistols. Opálka and Josef Bublík were killed in the initial firefight. Kubiš, wounded by grenade fragments, was found unconscious and died shortly after. The remaining four men—Gabčík, Valčík, Hrubý, and Švarc—retreated to the crypt.
The Germans could not reach them. The narrow stone stairway was a death trap for any attacker. The SS threw hand grenades through the ventilation window. They fired tear gas.
They called in fire trucks to flood the crypt with water. The paratroopers fought on, taking turns bailing water while the others kept firing. They even tried to dig through the crypt wall to reach the sewer system. By the time the Germans finally broke through, the paratroopers had fired their last bullets.
Rather than be taken alive, each man turned his weapon on himself. When the SS soldiers entered the crypt, they found the bodies of four men who had chosen death over capture after holding out for nearly six hours. The seven paratroopers were laid out on the pavement outside. Karel Čurda was brought forward to identify the bodies of his former friends.
He confirmed their identities, then collected his reward and a new identity. He married a German woman and spent the rest of the war as a Gestapo collaborator. The aftermath was swift. Bishop Gorazd surrendered himself to the German authorities and took full responsibility, hoping to spare his congregation.
He was tortured and executed by firing squad at Kobylisy shooting range on September 4, 1942, along with Father Petřek and other church officials. The Czech and Slovak Orthodox Church was dissolved by Nazi decree. The families of the assassins and their helpers were sent to Mauthausen. Aťa Moravec was executed on October 24, 1942, the same day as his father, his fiancée, her mother, and her brother.
The family’s only surviving member, Aťa’s older brother Miroslav, who had escaped to Britain and joined the RAF, was killed in action over Normandy on June 7, 1944, one day after D-Day. The entire family was gone. The bodies of the seven paratroopers were buried in unmarked mass graves at Ďáblice cemetery in Prague. For decades, the precise location was unknown.
It was only in 2007 that researchers confirmed the graves’ location, and no formal exhumation or dignified reburial has taken place despite periodic calls. Yet even as the Nazis sought to erase their memory, the world was watching. News of the Lidice massacre spread rapidly, sparking international outrage. Winston Churchill suggested destroying three German villages for every Czech village the Nazis annihilated.
Communities around the world adopted the name Lidice for their own towns. In Stoke-on-Trent, England, Dr. Barnett Stross launched the “Lidice Shall Live” campaign, raising funds to rebuild the village after the war. The political consequences were exactly what President Edvard Beneš had hoped for.
On August 5, 1942, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden announced in the House of Commons that Britain formally repudiated the Munich Agreement. The Czech lands would be restored to their pre-1938 borders. France followed suit in September. The United States and Soviet Union extended full recognition to Beneš’s government-in-exile.
The death of Heydrich had achieved its primary purpose: it proved that Czechoslovakia still resisted. But the cost had been immense. Beyond the five thousand who died in the immediate reprisals, the assassination accelerated the machinery of genocide. The first three dedicated death camps, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec, were built in the months after Heydrich’s death.
The project was named Operation Reinhard in his memory. By the time the killing centers were destroyed in late 1943, approximately 1. 7 million Jews had been murdered in them. The terrible irony remains: the man who planned the Holocaust was killed, and the Holocaust accelerated.
Karel Čurda did not long outlive his victims. After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, he went into hiding. He was captured in early 1947, attempted suicide, failed, and was put on trial for treason. When asked how he could have betrayed his comrades, he reportedly answered, “I think you would have done the same for a million marks.
” On April 29, 1947, he was hanged at Pankrác Prison in Prague. He was thirty-five. He offered no apology and showed no remorse. The memory of Operation Anthropoid evolved through distinct phases.
During the communist period from 1948 to 1989, the assassination was officially commemorated, but with complications. The paratroopers had been trained by the British SOE and represented a non-communist strand of Czech resistance. The regime preferred Soviet contributions. Yet Gabčík and Kubiš were too important to ignore entirely.
The Velvet Revolution of 1989 allowed full recognition. In 1995, the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror was opened in the crypt where the seven men made their last stand. It was expanded and reopened in 2010. Visitors can stand in the crypt, see the bullet holes still visible in the walls, and examine the ventilation window.
In 2009, a striking memorial was unveiled at the ambush site, three bronze figures on a triangular plinth of rust-red corten steel, echoing the operation’s code name and the Czech flag. Memorials to the paratroopers stand in England, Scotland, and beyond, wherever they trained, lived, or are remembered. The question of whether Operation Anthropoid was worth the cost has been debated since 1942. Critics point to the thousands of innocent civilians murdered in reprisal, the destruction of Lidice and Ležáky, the devastation of the resistance network, and the acceleration of the Holocaust.
They note Heydrich was already marked for transfer to France, that another equally brutal Nazi would have replaced him. Defenders respond that Beneš faced an impossible choice, that the repudiation of Munich might not have come without dramatic action, and that the paratroopers accepted the risks they imposed on their countrymen. There is no simple arithmetic for measuring heroism against suffering. What is beyond dispute is the courage of the men themselves.
They volunteered for a mission from which they knew they were unlikely to return. When the gun jammed, when the grenade missed its mark, when the resistance begged them to stop, they persisted. When the final assault came, not one of them surrendered. The families who sheltered them showed equal courage, knowing what the Gestapo did to those who helped enemies of the Reich.
Marie Moravcová knew her cyanide capsule was not a gesture but a practical necessity. Her son Aťa held out for hours before breaking, and only under horrors that would shatter anyone. The clergy gave sanctuary, knowing they would pay with their lives. Today, the National Memorial receives visitors from around the world.
They come to see the crypt, to read the biographies of the seven paratroopers whose busts line the walls, to stand in the space where a handful of men with pistols held off 750 SS soldiers for six hours. They come to Lidice, where a memorial garden holds bronze statues of the 82 children murdered at Chełmno. They come to Heydrich’s Curve. They were young men who gave everything for a cause they believed in, knowing they would not live to see its triumph.
They were Czechs and Slovaks who refused to surrender, who shouted their defiance at a traitor’s urging and at their Nazi attackers alike. One Slovak, one Czech, they represent the unity of the Czechoslovak nation during its darkest hour, a unity forged in blood and sacrifice.
