In May 1942, two SOE-trained paratroopers ambushed the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in broad daylight in Prague. Reinhard Heydrich died eight days later. What followed was one of the most brutal reprisals of the entire war.
On the morning of May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich left his country estate outside Prague and rode toward his office in his open-topped Mercedes. He made this commute regularly, and he made it without a significant security escort. Heydrich was the third most powerful man in the Nazi state after Hitler and Himmler. He was the architect of the Holocaust's operational machinery, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and reportedly confident enough in his personal control of the Czech population that he saw no need for heavy protection.
He was wrong.
At a sharp curve in the road at Holešovice, two men were waiting. Jozef Gabcik raised his Sten gun and pulled the trigger. It jammed. Heydrich stood up in the car to shoot back. As he did, Jan Kubis threw a specially modified anti-tank grenade. It exploded against the rear wheel of the Mercedes, driving shrapnel and fragments of the car's bodywork into Heydrich's back, side, and diaphragm.
Heydrich died of his wounds on June 4, 1942 — the highest-ranking Nazi official killed by enemy action during the entire war. The reprisals that followed killed thousands.
Operation Anthropoid was planned and authorized by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London under President Edvard Benes. The strategic rationale had both practical and political dimensions. By 1941, Czechoslovakia had developed a reputation within Allied intelligence circles as a relatively quiet occupied territory — in part because Heydrich's combination of brutal repression and economic co-option had suppressed open resistance. Some senior British officials questioned whether the Czech government-in-exile was actually contributing to the war effort.
Benes understood that a dramatic operation would demonstrate Czech resistance, restore political standing with the Allies, and potentially provoke a German reprisal so severe that it would eliminate the Czech collaborationist tendency entirely. The last point was explicitly discussed in SOE planning documents: Czech historians examining the operational record after the war have noted that Benes and his military commander General Frantisek Moravec understood that German reprisals were not merely a risk but, in a cold political calculus, a potentially useful outcome.
Gabcik and Kubis were selected from Czech soldiers who had escaped to Britain after the German occupation. They trained with the SOE at STS 25 at Arisaig in Scotland and completed parachute training before being inserted into the Protectorate by RAF aircraft on December 28–29, 1941. They spent nearly five months on the ground, making contact with local resistance networks, reconnoitering Heydrich's routes, and planning the ambush.
The choice of the Holešovice hairpin curve was deliberate: Heydrich's driver would be forced to slow significantly, reducing the vehicle's speed and making it a stationary target for the critical seconds of the ambush. Three other Anthropoid team members were positioned nearby as backup and lookout.
Gabcik's Sten gun jam was the operation's critical failure point. Heydrich, rather than ordering his driver to accelerate away, chose to stand and fight — a decision that put him squarely in the path of Kubis's grenade. Fragments penetrated the left side of Heydrich's body, causing damage to his spleen, diaphragm, and left lung. Heydrich managed to return fire and pursue the attackers briefly before collapsing.
SS and Gestapo medical staff attended to Heydrich immediately. German surgeons operated to remove shrapnel and repair internal damage. Initial reports suggested he might survive. On June 4, 1942, eight days after the attack, he died — almost certainly from septicemia related to upholstery and horsehair fragments introduced into his body by the explosion, which had driven material from the car's interior through his wounds.
Heydrich's death was reported by the Nazi propaganda apparatus as caused by "enemy bacteria" cultured on the paratroopers' weapons — a claim for which there is no credible evidence and which appears to have been manufactured to avoid acknowledging that the wound itself had proven fatal.
The German reprisal was immediate and savage. Within days of Heydrich's death, Heinrich Himmler ordered operations that would kill thousands of Czech civilians. The most notorious was the destruction of the village of Lidice, north of Prague, on June 10, 1942. On the basis of manufactured evidence linking the village to the assassins — the actual connection was tenuous — the SS executed all 173 men and boys over 15 in the village, deported 184 women to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and sent 88 children to be gassed at the Chelmno extermination camp. The village itself was burned and bulldozed.
The village of Lezaky was destroyed on June 24, 1942, all its adult inhabitants shot. In broader terms, the German security apparatus killed approximately 1,300 Czechs in the period following Heydrich's death, with thousands more arrested and sent to concentration camps. The reprisals did, as Benes had anticipated, effectively destroy the Czech collaborationist political tendency — no Czech politician could publicly align with a regime executing thousands of civilians — but at a cost that haunted Czech memory for generations.
Gabcik, Kubis, and five other paratroopers from related SOE operations took shelter in the crypt of the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague, where sympathetic Czech Orthodox clergy concealed them. On June 18, 1942, following the betrayal of their location by fellow paratrooper Karel Curda (who had turned himself in to the Gestapo for the reward money), approximately 750 SS troops surrounded the cathedral.
The paratroopers held out for several hours. When the SS flooded the crypt, the surviving men — Gabcik, Kubis, and five others — died by suicide rather than surrender. Karel Curda survived the war, was tried for treason by a Czechoslovak court in 1947, and was hanged.
Operation Anthropoid stands in the history of special operations as one of the most carefully planned and successfully executed targeted killings of the Second World War — and one of the most morally complex. The men who carried it out died for it. The civilians who sheltered them died for it. The villagers of Lidice and Lezaky died for it.
Callum MacDonald's 1989 study The Killing of Reinhard Heydrich, drawing on Czech, German, and British archival sources, provides the most thorough academic account. Robert Gerwarth's biography Hitler's Hangman: The Life of Heydrich situates the assassination within the broader context of Heydrich's career and the Nazi occupation apparatus.
The question of whether Operation Anthropoid was worth its cost is one that military historians continue to debate. What is not debated is that Gabcik and Kubis, dropped into occupied territory with a malfunctioning weapon and no reliable extraction plan, carried out their mission. That part, at least, was exactly what it was designed to be.
Free Press, 1989
Yale University Press, 2011
The National Archives, Kew, HS 4/39, 1942
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