The black Mercedes slowed for the hairpin bend, and Jozef Gabčík stepped into the road. He raised his Sten gun, aimed at the man in the back seat, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun had jammed.

Reinhard Heydrich, the most feared man in the Third Reich after Hitler himself, should have ordered his driver to speed away. Instead, he made a fatal decision. He told SS-Oberscharführer Johannes Klein to stop the car. Heydrich stood up, drew his pistol, and prepared to shoot the man who had just tried to kill him.

In that split second, Jan Kubiš threw the modified anti-tank grenade he had been concealing in his briefcase. It missed the car’s interior but exploded against the rear wheel, tearing through the bodywork and driving fragments of metal, upholstery, and horsehair from the seat deep into Heydrich’s body. The blast shattered the car’s window and sent shrapnel into Kubiš’s face, temporarily blinding him. Despite his wounds, Heydrich staggered from the vehicle, still firing his pistol at Gabčík, who fled into a nearby butcher shop.

Klein pursued him but was shot in the leg. Kubiš escaped on his bicycle, bleeding heavily. Heydrich, in shock, collapsed on the street corner. What follows is a story of courage beyond measure, betrayal beyond comprehension, and a sacrifice that would echo through decades of memory, controversy, and commemoration.

To understand what happened to the men who killed Reinhard Heydrich, one must first understand why they were sent to kill him—and the extraordinary circumstances that brought two young soldiers from a defeated nation to that Pariserplatz corner in Prague’s Libeň district. The story begins not in 1942, but in the aftermath of the Munich Agreement of September 1938, when Britain and France handed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland to Nazi Germany without a shot being fired. President Edvard Beneš, humiliated and abandoned by his Western allies, resigned on 5 October 1938 and fled into exile. Six months later, on 15 March 1939, German troops marched into Prague and the independent Czechoslovak state ceased to exist.

What remained became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, a Nazi puppet territory that Hitler intended to gradually Germanize, deporting or eliminating the Slavic population entirely. Beneš established a government-in-exile in London, but his position was precarious. Britain and France had not yet formally repudiated the Munich Agreement. The United States maintained only tentative recognition of his provisional government.

Without dramatic action, Czechoslovakia risked being forgotten, its borders redrawn at the war’s end, its people abandoned to whatever fate the great powers decided. By 1941, Beneš faced a stark calculation. The Czech resistance inside the Protectorate had been crushed by successive waves of Gestapo terror. There was no visible proof that Czechoslovakia still resisted.

Something spectacular was needed—something that would demonstrate to the world that the Czech and Slovak people had not surrendered, that they remained in the fight against fascism. In September 1941, Hitler appointed Reinhard Heydrich as acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, replacing the more lenient Konstantin von Neurath. Heydrich arrived at Prague Castle on 28 September and immediately declared martial law. Within five days, he had ordered the execution of 142 people.

The Sokol movement, a patriotic gymnastics organization that had served as a cover for resistance activities, was banned, and its leaders were shipped to Mauthausen concentration camp. Prime Minister Alois Eliáš was arrested, tried for treason, and sentenced to death. The message was clear: Czech resistance would be met with annihilation. Heydrich earned the nicknames by which history remembers him—the Butcher of Prague, the Hangman, the Blonde Beast.

He was quite simply the perfect target. In October 1941, František Moravec, head of Czechoslovak military intelligence in London, approached Brigadier Colin Gubbins, director of operations at the British Special Operations Executive. SOE, Churchill’s famous organization created to set Europe ablaze through sabotage and subversion, agreed to provide training and logistical support for an assassination mission. The operation was given the code name Anthropoid, from the Greek word meaning “having human form,” a term typically used in zoology.

From over 2,000 Czechoslovak soldiers in exile in Britain, 24 were selected for intensive training. They were sent first to Cholmondeley Castle in Cheshire, where the Free Czechoslovak forces were headquartered, then to SOE’s special training schools in Scotland’s remote highlands, at Arisaig and other locations, where they learned the arts of demolition, silent killing, and clandestine operations. Two men emerged as the most capable candidates. Jozef Gabčík was a 29-year-old Slovak from the village of Poluvsie near Žilina.

He had served in the Czechoslovak army before the occupation, escaped through Poland to France, fought in the French campaign of 1940, and evacuated to Britain after France’s fall. He was quiet, determined, and methodical. Jan Kubiš was a 28-year-old Czech from Dolní Vilémovice in Moravia. Like Gabčík, he had fled through Poland to France, where he earned the Croix de Guerre for bravery.

The two men became close friends during their training, and their complementary skills made them an ideal team. Moravec personally selected them to carry out the mission that would define their legacies and end their lives. On the night of 28 December 1941, a Halifax bomber from Number 138 Squadron RAF lifted off from Tangmere airfield in England. Aboard were Gabčík and Kubiš, along with seven other soldiers from Operation Anthropoid and two related missions, Silver A and Silver B.

Navigation problems plagued the flight from the start. Instead of landing near Plzeň as planned, the Anthropoid pair parachuted into the countryside near Nehvizdy, east of Prague. Gabčík injured his foot on landing and could barely walk without assistance. The two men made their way overland, aided by sympathetic villagers who risked their lives to shelter them.

Eventually they reached Prague, where they established contact with the local resistance network known as ÚVOD, the Central Leadership of Home Resistance. The resistance was initially horrified when they learned the nature of the paratroopers’ mission. Local leaders pleaded with London to cancel the operation, warning that reprisals against the civilian population would be catastrophic. A coded message was sent directly to Beneš: “An attempt against Heydrich’s life would be of no use to the Allies and its consequences for our people would be immeasurable.

”

But Beneš personally insisted that the attack proceed. For him, the diplomatic stakes outweighed even the threat of mass murder. Only Heydrich’s death could demonstrate Czechoslovakia’s active resistance and strengthen his case for the repudiation of the Munich Agreement. London’s reply was unambiguous.

Anthropoid would go forward as planned. For nearly five months, Gabčík and Kubiš prepared. They moved between safe houses provided by brave Prague families, including the apartment of Marie Moravec in the Žižkov district. Marie’s husband, Alois, knew nothing of his wife’s activities.

Her 21-year-old son, Vlastimil, known by his nickname Aťa, served as a courier. The paratroopers gathered intelligence on Heydrich’s daily routines: his unarmored Mercedes convertible, the routes he took from his country residence at Panenské Břežany to Prague Castle. They identified a hairpin bend on Kirchmayerova, now Zenklova, in the Libeň district, where the car would be forced to slow almost to a stop. It was the perfect ambush point.

On the morning of 27 May 1942, Reinhard Heydrich set off for Berlin, where he was to meet with Hitler. Some historians believe he was about to be transferred to German-occupied France to deal with the growing resistance there. Whatever his destination, he would never arrive. At approximately 10:30 that morning, Heydrich’s green Mercedes slowed at the Libeň hairpin.

Gabčík stepped into the road and raised his Sten submachine gun. He pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. At Bulovka Hospital, surgeons removed fragments of seat material, leather, and wire from Heydrich’s spleen and diaphragm.

Initially he appeared to be recovering, but on 4 June 1942, eight days after the attack, Reinhard Heydrich died. The official cause was septicemia—blood poisoning caused by the debris driven into his wound. Some historians have speculated that the grenade may have been coated with botulinum toxin, though this has never been proven. What is certain is that the most powerful man in Nazi-occupied Europe, the architect of the Final Solution, the man who had chaired the Wannsee Conference, where the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews was planned, was dead at 38 years of age.

Hitler was enraged. He initially demanded the execution of 10,000 Czechs as retribution. Karl Hermann Frank, the Secretary of State for the Protectorate and Heydrich’s deputy, persuaded him that such indiscriminate slaughter might reduce industrial productivity in a region vital to the German war effort. Instead, the reprisals were focused, but no less savage.

More than 13,000 people were arrested in the weeks following the assassination. Courts-martial sentenced hundreds to death. The Gestapo tortured prisoners in the basement of Peček 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. Meanwhile, Gabčík and Kubiš went into hiding. They were joined by five other paratroopers from related SOE operations: Adolf Opálka from the Out Distance group, Josef Valčík from Silver A, Jaroslav Švarc from Tin, and Josef Bublík and Jan Hrubý from Bioscope. The seven men moved between safe houses, knowing that the noose was tightening.

By early June, they had found sanctuary in the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius on Resslova Street, an Eastern Orthodox cathedral in Prague’s New Town. Bishop Gorazd and Father Vladimír Petřek agreed to hide them in the church’s crypt, a decision that would cost them their lives. The assassins remained hidden in the crypt for three weeks.

Above ground, the Nazi terror intensified. On 9 June, 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. That night, German police surrounded the village. The next morning, 10 June 1942, all 173 men and boys over the age of 15 were shot in groups of ten against the wall of the Horák farm.

One hundred and ninety-five women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where approximately sixty would die. Of the 95 children, 81 were later murdered in gas vans at Chełmno extermination camp. The remaining children, deemed suitable for Germanization due to their appearance, were placed with German families. The village itself was burned to the ground, then demolished with explosives.

The Nazis intended to erase Lidice from the map and from memory. They would fail in this aim, but not before murdering hundreds of innocent people. Two weeks later, on 24 June, a similar fate befell the village of Ležáky, where a resistance radio transmitter had been discovered. All adult residents, both men and women, were shot.

Thirteen children were deported, and most were killed, probably at Chełmno. The village was razed to its foundations. In total, an estimated 5,000 Czechs were murdered in the reprisals for Heydrich’s assassination. These included not only the victims of Lidice and Ležáky, but also resistance fighters, their families, and anyone suspected of harboring the assassins.

The end came through betrayal. Karel Čurda was a member of the Out Distance parachute group who had not participated in the assassination. After the attack, he had fled Prague and hidden 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 for information leading to the assassins’ capture, Čurda cracked.

On 16 June 1942, he walked into Gestapo headquarters in Prague and offered to tell 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 5:00 on the morning of 17 June, the Gestapo raided the Moravec apartment in Žižkov. Marie Moravec was allowed to use the toilet, where she bit into a cyanide capsule and died instantly. Her husband, Alois, who had known nothing of her resistance activities, was arrested along with their 21-year-old son, Aťa.

At Peček Palace, Aťa was tortured throughout the day. He refused to talk even as his interrogators beat him and threatened worse. Finally, they stupefied 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 18 June 1942, approximately 750 SS soldiers under the command of SS-Brigadeführer Karl Fischer von Treuenfeld surrounded the Church of St.

Cyril and Methodius. The Germans brought Karel Čurda with them, hoping the sight of their former comrade might 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 someone shouted back: “We are Czechs! We will never surrender!

Never! ”

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 paratroopers—Gabčík, Valčík, Hrubý, and Švarc—retreated to the crypt. The Germans could not reach them. The narrow stone stairway leading down was a death trap for any attacker.

SS troops threw hand grenades through the ventilation window. They fired tear gas. They called in Prague Fire Brigade trucks to try to flood the crypt with water. The paratroopers fought on, taking turns bailing water while the others maintained their defensive positions.

They even attempted to dig through the crypt wall to reach the sewer system, hoping to escape underground. By the time the Germans finally broke through, the paratroopers had used their last bullets. Rather than be taken alive, each man turned his weapon on himself. When SS soldiers entered the crypt, they found the bodies of four men who had refused to surrender, who had chosen death over capture, who had held out against overwhelming odds for nearly six hours.

The seven paratroopers were carried out of the church and laid 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 his new identity as Karl Jerhot. He married a German woman and spent the rest of the war as a Gestapo collaborator.

The aftermath was swift and brutal. Bishop Gorazd of Prague, who had authorized the hiding of the paratroopers, surrendered himself to the German authorities and took full responsibility, hoping to spare his congregation. He was tortured, then executed by firing squad at Kobylisy shooting range on 4 September 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 concentration camp. Aťa Moravec was executed on 24 October 1942, the same day as his father, his fiancée, her mother, and her brother. The Moravec family’s last surviving member, Aťa’s older brother, Miroslav, who had escaped to Britain and joined the RAF, was killed in action over Normandy on 7 June 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. In a grim irony, Karel Čurda would later be buried in the same cemetery after his execution in 1947. For decades, the precise location of Gabčík and Kubiš’s remains was unknown. It was only in 2007 that researchers confirmed the mass grave’s location.

As of today, no formal exhumation or reinterment has taken place. Calls have been made periodically, including during the 2016 release of the film Anthropoid, for the heroes to be given a dignified burial befitting their sacrifice. These calls have not yet resulted in action. Yet even as the Nazis sought to erase the memory of the paratroopers, the world was watching.

News of the Lidice massacre spread rapidly, sparking international outrage. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, furious at the scale of German reprisals, suggested destroying three German villages for every Czech village the Nazis annihilated. Communities around the world adopted the name Lidice for their own towns and neighborhoods, determined that the village would not be forgotten. In Stoke-on-Trent, England, Dr.

Barnett Stross launched the “Lidice Shall Live” campaign, raising the equivalent of over 1. 5 million pounds today to rebuild the village after the war. On 6 September 1942, at a mass meeting in Victoria Hall, President Beneš spoke to the gathered miners and their families: “This meeting has made it clear that Lidice has not died. It lives on in the hearts of the people of Stoke-on-Trent.

”

The political consequences of Heydrich’s assassination were exactly what Beneš had hoped for. On 5 August 1942, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden stood in the House of Commons and announced that Britain formally repudiated the Munich Agreement. The Czech lands, he declared, would be restored to their pre-1938 borders at the war’s end. France followed suit in September.

The United States and Soviet Union extended full recognition to Beneš’s government-in-exile. The death of Reinhard Heydrich had achieved its primary purpose: it had demonstrated Czechoslovak resistance to the world and secured international support for the restoration of an independent state after the war. But the cost had been immense. Beyond the 5,000 who died in the immediate reprisals, the assassination accelerated the machinery of genocide.

The first three dedicated death camps, designed exclusively for mass murder with no pretense of work or resettlement, were built at Treblinka, Sobibór, and Bełżec 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.

Whether Heydrich’s survival would have slowed or altered this program is unknowable, but the terrible irony remains: the man who planned the Holocaust was killed, and the Holocaust accelerated. The traitor Karel Čurda did not long outlive his victims. After Germany’s surrender in May 1945, he went into hiding, knowing that the restored Czechoslovak state would hunt him down. 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 one million marks. ” On 29 April 1947, Karel Čurda was hanged at Pankrác Prison in Prague, the same prison where his information had sent so many to torture and death. He was 35 years old. He offered no apology and showed no remorse.

In the decades since the war, the memory of Operation Anthropoid has evolved through distinct phases. During the communist period in Czechoslovakia, from 1948 to 1989, the assassination was officially commemorated, but with certain complications. The paratroopers had been trained by the British SOE, worked with the London-based government-in-exile, and represented a non-communist strand of Czech resistance. The communist regime preferred to emphasize Soviet contributions to liberation and the role of domestic communist partisans.

Yet Gabčík and Kubiš were too important to ignore entirely. Their sacrifice was acknowledged, if sometimes with less enthusiasm than the deeds of communist heroes. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the fall of communism allowed a fuller recognition of the paratroopers’ legacy. In 1995, the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror was opened in the crypt of the Church of St.

Cyril and Methodius, the very place where the seven men had made their last stand. The memorial was expanded and reconstructed, reopening in 2010 with an extensive exhibition covering the Munich Agreement, the Nazi occupation, the assassination, and its aftermath. Visitors can stand in the crypt where the paratroopers died, see the bullet holes still visible in the walls, and examine the ventilation window through which the Germans threw grenades and pumped water. It is one of the most moving historical sites in Prague.

In 2009, a striking memorial was unveiled at the site of the ambush itself, where Kirchmayerova, now renamed Zenklova, curves sharply toward the Troja Bridge. Designed by sculptors David Moješčík and Michal Šmeral, the monument features three bronze figures atop a triangular plinth of rust-red Cor-Ten steel. The figures’ outstretched arms reference Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, an allusion to the operation’s code name, Anthropoid, meaning “humanlike. ” The rusted steel symbolizes the vulnerability of the Czech state, while the triangular shape echoes the design of the Czech flag.

The memorial stands amidst busy traffic, a constant reminder to passing motorists and pedestrians of what happened at this unremarkable corner more than 80 years ago. Beyond the Czech Republic, memorials to the paratroopers can be found wherever they trained, lived, or are remembered. In Leamington Spa, England, a fountain in Jephson Gardens commemorates all seven men who died in the church crypt. Unveiled in 1968 by Czechoslovak veterans, it bears their names: Jozef Gabčík, Jan Kubiš, Adolf Opálka, Josef Valčík, Josef Bublík, Jan Hrubý, and Jaroslav Švarc.

At Arisaig in the Scottish Highlands, where Czech and Slovak soldiers trained with the SOE, a memorial depicting a fallen parachute was unveiled in 2009. A plaque in Itfield, Shropshire, where Kubiš and Gabčík befriended a local family during their time at nearby Cholmondeley Castle, remembers the two men. In London, at Porchester Gate, a plaque marks the building where Czechoslovak military intelligence planned Operation Anthropoid in October 1941. The assassination has been the subject of numerous films, documentaries, and books, each reflecting its era’s understanding of heroism, sacrifice, and moral complexity.

The 1943 Hollywood film Hangmen Also Die, directed by Fritz Lang with a story co-written by Bertolt Brecht, was made while the war was still being fought and took considerable liberties with the facts. The 1975 British-Czech production Operation Daybreak, based on the novel Seven Men at Daybreak, offered a more historically grounded account but still contained inaccuracies. Most recently, the 2016 film Anthropoid, starring Cillian Murphy as Gabčík and Jamie Dornan as Kubiš, was praised for its attention to historical detail, its use of authentic Prague locations, and its unflinching depiction of both the assassination and its terrible aftermath. The question of whether Operation Anthropoid was worth the cost has been debated since 1942 and will likely never be definitively resolved.

Critics point to the thousands of innocent civilians murdered in reprisal, the destruction of Lidice and Ležáky, the devastation of the Czech resistance network, and the acceleration of the Holocaust. They note that Heydrich was already marked for transfer to France, that another equally brutal Nazi would have replaced him in Prague, that the symbolic value of the assassination came at far too high a price. Defenders respond that Beneš faced an impossible choice, that the repudiation of the Munich Agreement and the international recognition of Czechoslovak resistance might not have come without dramatic action, that the paratroopers themselves understood and 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. Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš volunteered for a mission from which they knew they were unlikely to return. They trained for months, parachuted into occupied territory, evaded capture for half a year, and carried out the assassination despite every obstacle. When their gun jammed, when the grenade missed its mark, when the resistance begged them to stop, they persisted.

Adolf Opálka, Josef Valčík, Josef Bublík, Jan Hrubý, and Jaroslav Švarc joined them in the church, knowing that discovery was inevitable and escape almost certainly impossible. When the final assault came, not one of them surrendered. They chose death on their own terms rather than betrayal under torture. The families who sheltered them—the Moravecs and the Fafeks, and countless others whose names are now forgotten—showed equal courage.

They knew what the Gestapo did to those who helped enemies of the Reich. Marie Moravec knew that her cyanide capsule was not a dramatic gesture but a practical necessity, the only way to ensure she could not betray her comrades under torture. Her son Aťa held out for hours before breaking. And when he finally spoke, it was only after horrors that would shatter anyone.

The clergy of the Orthodox Church gave sanctuary, knowing they would pay with their lives. Bishop Gorazd tried to take all blame upon himself, hoping to spare his flock. It did not work, but the attempt was made. Today, 80 years after the assassination, the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror 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 700 SS soldiers for six hours. They come to Lidice, where a memorial garden contains bronze statues of the 82 children murdered at Chełmno, forever frozen in time. They come to the assassination site at what is now called Heydrich’s Curve to photograph the monument and imagine the chaos of that May morning. In the years that followed the war, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík were promoted posthumously through the ranks of the Czechoslovak army.

Kubiš eventually reached the rank of colonel in memoriam, Gabčík of staff captain. They were decorated with the Czechoslovak Military Cross, the British King’s Commendation for Brave Conduct, the Order of the White Lion, and numerous other honors. Streets in Prague and other Czech cities bear their names. A small museum opened in the house where Kubiš was born in 2013, the centenary of his birth.

Every year on 18 June, a memorial service is held at the Church of St. Cyril and Methodius, attended by representatives of the Czech government, veterans’ organizations, and descendants of those who fought and died. In Slovakia, Jozef Gabčík is honored as a national hero, his face appearing on commemorative coins and stamps. In the Czech Republic, Jan Kubiš holds the same status.

The two men, one Slovak and one Czech, represent the unity of the Czechoslovak nation during its darkest hour—a unity that would later dissolve peacefully in 1993, but which in 1942 was forged in blood and sacrifice.