Although the execution was postponed in order to keep him as a pressure instrument against the Czech government, hundreds of identified members of the internal resistance were arrested, tried by special courts, and executed or deported.
At the same time, Hydrickch increased food rations for Czech industrial workers, expanded access to shoes and clothing at regulated prices, and organized free film screenings and sporting events for the working class.
Absenteeism in armaments factories visibly declined.
Resistance networks that had survived the autumn of 1939 fragmented under the pressure of the purges.
In that context, Heddrich adopted a habit his associates considered reckless.
He traveled in an open top Mercedes Benz without visible armed escort between Prague Castle and the villa at Panenski Brezani where he lived with his family.
When his agitants raised concerns about the danger of moving unprotected through the streets of an occupied city, Heddrich replied that no Czech would dare attack him.
It was not a careless remark.
It was the assessment of a man who had spent a decade analyzing resistance movements and had concluded that the Czech internal resistance after the autumn purges lacked the operational capability to carry out an action of that scale.
The assessment was correct as far as the internal resistance was concerned.
What Hydrich had failed to calculate was that the decision to eliminate him would not come from Prague, but from an office in London, and that the men assigned to carry out that decision had not yet set foot on Czech soil when he began driving through the city in his convertible.
In London, Francisc Moravec, head of the Czechoslovak intelligence service in exile, studied the reports arriving from the protectorate and prepared a proposal that no one within the Reich had considered possible.
Hydrickch’s services detected no sign of what was being organized.
By the time the first reports of the plan reached them, it would already be too late to stop it.
The most dangerous mission the Allies sent into Europe.
Francisc Moravec had escaped from Prague in March 1939, hours before German armored columns crossed the border.
As head of Czechoslovak military intelligence, he possessed information the Allied powers wanted, and he used it as leverage to gain access in London.
He brought with him the services most sensitive files, 10 of his best officers, and the accumulated knowledge of years of intelligence work against Germany.
From that moment on, his mission became twofold.
to maintain contact with the underground networks that had survived inside the protectorate and to prove to the western allies that the Czechoslovak intelligence service in exile had real operational value, not merely symbolic importance.
Preserving that dual usefulness was what secured the exiled government’s position within the Allied structure.
President Edvard Beans led that government in exile from London while facing a political challenge that had become structural.
The Munich Agreement of 1938 through which France and Great Britain had seeded the Sudatan land to Germany without consulting Prague was still formally recognized by sectors of allied diplomacy as part of the existing framework of international law.
That meant Benise’s position as the legitimate representative of Czechoslovakia before the Allies depended in part on the perception that his country was an active combatant in the war, not merely an occupied territory whose exiled representatives waited for others to resolve their situation.
The intelligence operations Morav’s service provided to the British were valuable, but insufficient to project the image of active resistance that Beness needed.
Something more visible was required.
By late September 1941, when Reinhard Hydrickch arrived in Prague and began dismantling the networks Moravec had spent years building, the intelligence chief presented Edvard Baines with a proposal he had been considering for weeks.
The objective was the physical elimination of Hydrich.
Moravec argued that the operation would serve several purposes simultaneously.
It would demonstrate to the Allies that the government in exile was capable of high impact action.
It would disrupt the administrative apparatus that was crushing the Czech resistance and it would establish a precedent forcing Reich officials to move more cautiously throughout the occupied territories.
Bennis listened to the analysis and authorized the plan to proceed.
Moravec contacted Brigadier Colin Gubbins, director of operations for the special operations executive, the organization created by Winston Churchill in 1940 with the explicit mandate to set Europe ablaze.
In other words, to foster resistance across German occupied territories through sabotage, partisan training, and clandestine operations.
Gubbins heard the proposal without major objections.
The special operations executive already had experience in targeted elimination missions, and from the perspective of strategic impact, Heddrich’s profile justified the operational risk.
Logistical coordination would be handled by the British.
The selection and preparation of the operatives would be Moravec’s responsibility.
The operation was given the code name anthropoid, a Greek derived term meaning something that takes human form commonly used in zoology.
Moravec selected candidates from among the 2,000 Czechoslovak soldiers in exile training at British military bases.
The selection criteria combined physical and tactical aptitude with a less measurable factor that Moravec considered decisive.
The candidates could not have immediate family inside the protectorate whose safety might become a point of pressure during the operation.
An agent who knew that his parents or wife were in Prague and could be used as hostages was an agent potentially vulnerable to coercion.
The first team chosen consisted of Staff Sergeant Yosef Gapic, a 22-year-old mechanic of Slovak origin, and Sergeant Caroloda.
Soboda suffered a head injury during training that medically disqualified him from the mission.
He was replaced by Jan Kubis, a Czech sergeant who had not completed the specialized training cycle and required several additional weeks of instruction before all elements of the operation were ready.
The training Gabchik and Kubis received at special operations executive facilities in Scotland covered a broad spectrum of skills.
Close quarters combat techniques, both armed and unarmed.
The construction and placement of improvised explosives, encrypted communication procedures using compact radio equipment, the use of forged documentation, identity papers, work permits, and transit credentials.
Methods for moving through occupied territory while minimizing exposure to Gestapo controls which operated through a combination of systematic document inspections and networks of civilian informants.
The special operations executive instructors who worked with the two agents described Gabchik as the more instinctively capable in direct combat situations and Kubis as the more meticulous in preparation and in the handling of explosive materials.
That complimentarity was one of the factors Moravec had considered when assembling the team.
The initial operational plan called for carrying out the attack aboard a train traveling between Prague and Berlin, a route Reinhard had regularly used for meetings in the German capital.
That option was abandoned because the tactical reality of a confined space with limited exits combined with the routine presence of security personnel on high priority trains made any viable escape plan nearly impossible.
The alternative was an attack in a public street at a point along Hydrick’s regular route where his vehicle would be forced to slow down.
That option offered more potential escape routes, but it also introduced more variables beyond the agents control.
Pedestrians, unexpected traffic, and the possibility of additional escort vehicles on a given day.
In the early hours of December 28th, 1941, a Royal Air Force aircraft carried Gabchic and Kubis along with two other parachute teams, Silver A and Silver B, into the airspace of the Protectorate.
The drop was inaccurate.
Fog and nighttime navigation over unfamiliar territory caused deviations that left all the teams far from their intended landing zones.
Yosef Gabbik and Yan Kubis landed near the town of Nizdi, 30 km east of Prague.
They buried their parachutes in the frozen ground and began orienting themselves in the darkness using the maps they carried.
The contact network that was supposed to receive them was incomplete.
During the first weeks, the two agents moved between safe houses using forged identity papers that presented them as traveling workers while avoiding random Gestapo inspections at railway stations and tram stops.
Contact with the surviving fragments of the underground resistance was established gradually and with extreme caution.
Every new connection represented a potential exposure and determining with certainty who within the internal resistance could still be trusted was a task with no guaranteed answer.
The family of Marie Morava, who was not related to intelligence chief frantise Moravec, became one of the central nodes of the support network.
Marie Morava sheltered the agents on several occasions over the following months, connected them with other members of the network and managed part of the flow of encrypted messages to London.
Her husband Alois and her son Ata participated to varying degrees in the same activities.
Marie Morava understood exactly what that meant for her family.
If the Gestapo discovered her role, the punishment for all of them would be death.
She knew it from the very beginning and accepted the risk.
When the internal resistance network supporting the agents learned the true objective of the mission, the reaction was immediate and growing alarm.
The underground leaders of the surviving organizations had witnessed firsthand the cost of Hydrick’s purges over the previous two months.
Hundreds arrested, dozens executed both publicly and in secret.
Entire families deported to concentration camps.
More than anyone in London, they understood the scale of the reprisals that would follow if an attack were carried out against the Reich Protector himself.
Their private estimates of the number of victims such retaliation could produce were accurate.
From January to May 1942, the leaders of the Internal Resistance sent several urgent messages to London requesting that the operation be cancelled or redirected toward a lower ranking target whose elimination would provoke a proportional response.
On May 12th, 1942, the Gestapo intercepted one of those messages in which the Internal Resistance explicitly asked that the assassination not be carried out because it would bring terrible consequences upon the Czech nation.
and suggested that if the operation had to proceed, it should instead target a lesser local collaborator.
London acknowledged receipt of the message.
The response was that the command was fully aware of the seriousness of the situation, but saw no reason that justified cancelling the operation.
The order was not revoked.
Yosef Gabchic and Yan Kubis received confirmation that their mission remained unchanged.
They were soldiers under orders they were in no position to question.
And as they stated during the only direct confrontation they had with leaders of the internal resistance over the matter, they had come to Prague to kill Reinhard Heddrich.
And that was exactly what they intended to do.
During the 6 months they remained in the city, the two agents systematically studied Hydrickch’s movements.
The Reich Protector traveled between Prague Castle, where his offices were located, and the villa at Panenske Brezani, 17 km north of the city, where he lived with his family.
Several routes connected the two locations, but the one Heddrich used most frequently descended along Kircherova Street in the district of Lebanon and passed through a sharp curve that forced the Mercedes driver to slow down significantly.
It was the only point along the usual route where the vehicle predictably lost speed and where there was enough space on the sidewalk for two men to take position without appearing visibly out of place.
The process of observing Hydrick’s movements without being detected required a level of operational discipline that the two agents maintained for weeks.
They could not remain at the same observation point on consecutive days without attracting the attention of local residents or Gustapo agents patrolling in civilian clothing.
They rotated between different positions along the route, adjusting their forged identities depending on the neighborhood in which they were operating that day.
Industrial workers in some districts, office employees in others.
Every visit to the bend in the road was a concealed rehearsal.
Every return to the safe houses became an evaluation of what they had observed.
The time at which Reinhard Hydrich left Panenski Brazani varied between 9 and 10:30 in the morning depending on the day with enough variation to make it impossible to predict precisely when he would arrive at the curve.
The two agents had to calculate how far in advance they needed to be in position without making the weight itself appear suspicious.
The weapons available for the operation were those they had brought in during the parachute drop.
The arsenal included a British-made Sten submachine gun, modified hand grenades fitted with impact fuses designed to detonate on contact and backup pistols.
The Sten submachine gun had been designed for indoor operations, inexpensive to manufacture and easy to transport in dismantled pieces, but it carried an operational floor well known to anyone who had used it in field conditions.
It had a tendency to jam when dirt or moisture accumulated inside the mechanism.
Ysef Gabchic was fully aware of that defect.
Rehearsals for the attack at the selected location were repeated numerous times without actually carrying it out, measuring reaction times, identifying escape routes toward the bridge over the Volulta River and toward the district of Kobalysis, and establishing what each member of the team would do if the first strike failed and under what circumstances the mission would have to be aborted.
On May 26th, 1942, Reinhard Hydrich chaired a meeting at Prague Castle with representatives of the protectorate government to present a national socialist indoctrination program aimed at Czech youth between the ages of 10 and 18.
When the meeting ended, his schedule listed a commitment for the following day, a flight to Berlin for a meeting with Adolf Hitler.
The trip had been planned days in advance with no lastminute changes to the itinerary.
His driver, Corporal Johannes Klene, prepared the open top MercedesBenz for the early morning departure.
Hydrich did not request an escort.
The following morning, Yosef Gabchic and Yan Kubis took their positions at the curve on Kyosha Street.
They had spent 6 months in Prague waiting for that moment.
Hydrickch’s Mercedes was leaving Peninski Bzani heading toward Prague.
The final seconds that ended the butcher of Prague.
The morning of May 27th, 1942 was cold and overcast over Prague.
Traffic along Kirch Meerova Street was typical for a weekday.
Trams, bicycles, and a handful of motor vehicles moving through the main lanes.
Yosef Gabbik carried the disassembled Sten submachine gun inside a briefcase that resembled the ordinary luggage of a traveling worker.
Yan Kubis waited several meters farther ahead with the modified grenades concealed beneath his coat.
The two men had arrived at the location early enough to confirm there was no visible escort or additional surveillance in the area.
Kubis’ position had been calculated so he could act from the vehicle’s left side if Gabchick’s first attempt failed.
Tram number 12 passed the stop they were using as their synchronization signal.
The two men moved into their final positions.
The waiting time between that moment and the arrival of the vehicle lasted several minutes.
During that interval, several pedestrians crossed the same stretch of street without either agent altering his position or demeanor.
A witness who later testified before the Czechoslovak authorities in exile recalled seeing a man with a briefcase standing at the tram stop, staring toward the top of the incline without looking away for what seemed to him an unusually long time for someone supposedly waiting for a tram.
The witness had not acted on the observation.
The open top MercedesBenz bearing protectorate license plates appeared descending the slope shortly before 10:30 a.
m.
Corporal Johannes Klene was driving.
Reinhard Hydrickch occupied the front passenger seat.
They had no escort.
When the vehicle reached the sharp curve where the geometry of the street forced a significant reduction in speed, Klene hit the brakes.
Gabchic stepped out from the tram stop, positioned himself in the middle of the road, and raised the submachine gun toward the driver.
Klein brought the vehicle to a halt.
In that instant, Hydrickch made a decision his own agitants would later describe as reckless.
Instead of ordering the driver to accelerate out of the danger zone, he rose from the passenger seat and drew his pistol.
That decision, which likely spared Klein from Gabch’s burst of gunfire by stopping the car, was also the decision that killed him.
The submachine gun did not fire.
The mechanism jammed.
Gabchic threw the weapon aside and reached for his backup pistol.
In the second and a half that passed between the malfunction and the moment Gabchic was able to draw his pistol, Yan Kubis hurled one of the modified grenades from the left side of the road toward the inside of the vehicle.
The throw was off target.
The grenade did not land inside the Mercedes.
It struck the right rear wheel and exploded against the outer bodywork at the junction between the wheel and the fender.
The blast sent shards of metal from the car body and fragments of the rear seat upholstery flying in multiple directions.
wool stuffing, compressed horseair used as cushioning material in the upholstery of German luxury vehicles, textile fibers.
Hydrich was struck by those fragments on the right side of his body, a fractured rib, a perforated diaphragm, a spleen damaged by the shockwave and secondary projectiles.
Organic fragments from the upholstery contaminated with dirt and bacteria from the exterior of the vehicle penetrated the thoracic cavity along with the metal shards.
Klene emerged from the vehicle unharmed.
Hydrickch leapt from his seat with his pistol in hand and began pursuing Kubis, who was fleeing toward a side street.
He ran approximately 50 m before the internal injuries stopped him.
He leaned against the car’s rear fender and waited for help to arrive.
Several Czech civilians who witnessed the assassination attempt transported Hydrickch in a delivery van that had been stopped nearby.
They took him to Bolovka University Hospital less than 10 minutes from the site of the attack.
The doctors who received him carried out a rapid assessment of the injuries.
Fractured rib, plural perforation, splenic damage, compromised thoracic cavity.
Surgeon Vladimir Snagda opened the surgical field that same afternoon.
The fragments removed during the operation confirmed what the wounds had already suggested.
Alongside the metal shrapnel, the thoracic cavity contained organic material from the vehicle’s upholstery.
The bacterial contamination introduced into Hydrick’s body by those materials was not fully understood during the first hours because the antibiotics available at the time.
The early sulfonomides had a limited range of effectiveness and the microbiology of complex traumatic infections remained at the frontier of contemporary medical knowledge.
News of the attack reached the Fura headquarters in Rastenberg that morning.
Hitler reacted with an immediate order.
10,000 checks were to be arrested as a preventive reprisal.
Carl Herman Frank, Secretary of State of the Protectorate and the highest ranking official in Prague at that moment, received the order and temporarily restrained it, arguing that mass arrests on such a scale before Hydrickch’s death had been confirmed could destabilize the protectorate’s industrial production more than they would contribute to suppressing the resistance.
Hitler also ordered the immediate transfer to Prague of Carl Ghart, Himmler’s personal surgeon, along with a team of specialists from Berlin.
Ghart arrived at Bulovka Hospital that very day.
He was a surgeon with an established reputation within the regime’s medical apparatus, although his record also included experiments carried out on concentration camp prisoners that would later be documented during the postwar trials.
In Prague, his role was to supervise Hydrick’s treatment and ensure that the best medical resources available in the Reich were placed in the hands of the team treating the Reich Protector.
Ghart reviewed the procedures performed by Snagda and issued cautiously optimistic reports during the first days.
The initial assessment indicated that the injuries were severe but not necessarily fatal in a patient with Hdrich’s physical constitution as he was known to practice fencing, horseback riding, and sports regularly until just days before the attack.
Snard and the Czech surgeons who had performed the initial operation recommended the use of sulfonomides to treat the infection they anticipated would result from contamination of the wound area.
Ghart following the dominant position within German medicine during that period opposed the treatment during the first days.
The infection progressed unchecked throughout that interval.
By the time Ghart authorized the use of sulfonomides, the sepsis had already spread beyond what the medical resources of 1942 were capable of reversing.
Ghart was sentenced to death and executed after the war for the crimes committed in the concentration camps under his supervision.
Himmler personally visited the hospital.
Hydrich received him sitting upright in bed, conscious, showing no visible collapse.
Communications between the hospital and headquarters recorded a condition that during the first days appeared to be stabilizing.
That perception changed gradually over the following days and then suddenly.
What the doctors had been unable to remove during the initial operation were the smaller organic fragments, upholstery fibers and horseair that had penetrated areas of the thoracic cavity where surgical access was limited.
Those materials triggered a bacterial infection that spread faster than the available treatments could control.
Hedri’s temperature began to rise on the third day after the attack.
During the visits he received in those days, including another from Himmler, after the reports began to grow less optimistic, Hydrich maintained a composure that his doctors described as striking given his physical condition.
He did not ask for his family to be called.
He did not dictate final instructions.
He behaved like a man who still calculated that the situation was recoverable.
While his own vital signs indicated otherwise, on the fourth day, kidney function began to deteriorate.
The doctors performed a second surgical procedure in an attempt to reach the sources of infection.
The result was insufficient.
Hydrich’s condition deteriorated rapidly.
On June 3rd, he fell into a coma.
On June 4th, 1942, at 4:30 in the morning, Reinhard Hydrich died at Bulovka Hospital.
The official cause of death recorded was generalized septasemia.
He was 38 years old.
The wartime wound that killed him was not the shrapnel impact.
It was the horseair from the upholstery of his own automobile.
The news reached Hitler during the morning of June 4th.
He ordered state funerals of the highest magnitude.
Heddrich’s body was prepared at the hospital, transferred to Prague Castle, and displayed in the ceremonial hall for 3 days.
Draped over the coffin was his SS Oberg and Fura uniform with all of his decorations, including the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross with oak leaves that Hitler had awarded him weeks before the attack.
Thousands of checks filed past the coffin during the days it lay in state.
It was not an expression of mourning.
It was an obligation imposed by the protectorate authorities carried out by the inhabitants of Prague under the visible surveillance of the police.
The body was transported by train to Berlin.
In the capital of the Reich, the coffin was placed in the new Reich Chancellery under an SS honor guard.
Himmler delivered the funeral eulogy in the controlled tone he used during official ceremonies, describing Heddrich as the man who embodied the SS ideal and whose death represented the gravest loss the movement had suffered since the beginning of the war.
Hitler personally laid the largest wreath placed upon the coffin.
The regime newspapers published editorials describing the assassination as the crime of an international Judeo-Bolleshevik conspiracy acting through the Czech government in exile.
The chain of causality drawn by the regime’s editorialists was simple and functional.
Benners in London, agents trained by the British, the Czech terrorists who had sheltered them, the villages that had supported them.
The narrative served a specific operational purpose to justify the reprisals before the German public and across the occupied territories as a proportional response to an act of terrorism orchestrated from abroad.
Carl Herman Frank designed the response together with the SS and Gustapo units available in the protectorate.
The logic of the reprisal demanded a concrete target that could be publicly presented as demonstrably linked to the attackers.
Intelligence reports gathered during the weeks following the assassination pointed in several directions simultaneously.
The Gestapo had identified fragments of information about the parachutists from materials recovered at the attack site.
An abandoned bicycle partially destroyed false documents British-made equipment.
But the fragments did not converge on any specific name or address that could serve as the starting point for a visible operation.
While the investigation continued without concrete results, the executions began without waiting for conclusive evidence.
In the days and weeks following Hydrickch’s death, groups of people identified as suspects, relatives of individuals connected to known resistance networks or simply selected from among those detained in previous weeks were executed in small groups at different locations across the protectorate.
The number surpassed 1,000 before the investigation found the information it was seeking.
The machinery of repression was already in motion with or without a precise target.
What it needed was a focal point that could give the reprisal a visible geographic form.
That point would come, and it would not come from German intelligence work.
It would come from someone who had stepped out into the cold without being asked to do so.
Hitler’s revenge.
Two villages destroyed.
2,000 checks executed.
Carol Cura had arrived in the Protectorate by parachute in March 1942 as a member of Operation Outdoor by the British Special Operations Executive during the same phase as anthropoid.
His assigned mission was reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, not direct action.
His profile was that of an information extraction agent, not a combat operative.
He knew of the existence of Gabchic and Kubis and he knew part of the contact network supporting them because portions of that network were shared among the parachute teams that had arrived at the same time.
During the months following the assassination, Kurder watched from his safe houses as the German reprisals intensified with each passing week.
The executions, the mass arrests, the house searches carried out across entire neighborhoods of Prague.
the growing pressure on anyone who might have had contact with underground networks.
On June 16th, 1942, Carol Cura voluntarily presented himself at the Gestapo headquarters in Prague.
He was not captured.
He was not coerced.
He walked in on his own.
In exchange for information about the parachutists and their support networks, he requested a guarantee of safety for himself and his family along with the reward of 1 million Czech crowns that the German authorities had publicly offered for information leading to the capture of those responsible for the assassination.
The Gestapo agreed.
The information Kura provided that day did not immediately lead to Gabchik and Kubis because Kura did not know their exact location at that time.
What he did know were the names, addresses, and procedures of several of the families who had supported the parachutists during the previous months.
One of those names was the Moravec family.
In the hours following Kura’s confession, units of the SS Security Corps and the Gestapo were deployed to the addresses he had provided.
When the agents entered the building where the Moravec family lived, Marie Morava swallowed the cyanide capsule she had carried for months in preparation for that scenario.
She died before they could interrogate her.
Her son, Ata Moravec, was arrested.
The Gestapo agents interrogated Ata Moravec over the course of several hours, administering alcohol to weaken his resistance.
Under the effect of that combination, Arta provided the information the investigators needed.
The parachutists along with several additional members of special operations executive teams who had sought refuge during the weeks of active pursuit were hiding in the underground crypt of the Orthodox Church of St.
Sirill and Methodius on Reslova Street in Prague’s Nove following weeks alongside his father and other relatives.
At dawn on June 18th, 1942, 700 members of the SS, the Gestapo, and the security corps deployed a complete cordon around the block where the church stood.
Snipers took positions in the surrounding buildings.
SS vehicles sealed off every access point to the block.
Bishop Goras, head of the Orthodox Church in the Protectorate, and the man responsible for authorizing the use of the crypt to shelter the parachutists, was present when the siege began.
He negotiated with the officers directing the operation, attempting to convince them that the men they were searching for were not inside the building.
The negotiations achieved nothing.
The officers sent Bishop Gaz inside with an ultimatum.
The occupants had to surrender or the building would be destroyed.
The bishop entered and delivered the message.
None of the men inside considered surrender.
Inside the church and the underground crypt were seven men, Gabchic and Kubis, the executives of the assassination, and five parachutists from other special operations executive teams, the anthropoid, Silver A, Bioscope, and Tin teams who had converged on that refuge during the weeks of intense manhunts.
From the moment the SS vehicles arrived, all seven understood that they would not leave the building alive.
None of them expressed it as a complaint.
The battle began at 4 in the morning.
The first attempts by SS troops to enter through the windows of the main nave were repelled from defensive positions inside the church.
Kubis and three of the parachutists held the upper level of the building.
Gabchic and the other three remained in the underground crypt, accessible only by a narrow service staircase and a small ventilation window that opened directly onto Resova Street.
Kubis suffered a grenade wound to the head during the exchanges in the early morning hours.
He continued fighting.
The bleeding worsened progressively.
He died inside the church before the Germans were able to force entry to the upper level.
The three parachutists fighting beside him on the upper floor were also killed during the assault over the following hours.
Capturing the crypt presented the SS troops with a tactical problem that they solved using the means available to them.
The access staircase was so narrow that any attempt to descend under fire resulted in immediate casualties among the attackers.
During the first assault attempts down the staircase that morning, the SS men who tried to advance were met with pointblank gunfire and forced to retreat with losses.
The four men inside the crypt had limited ammunition, but they knew the terrain precisely and could concentrate their fire on the only access point available from above.
The Germans then inserted a fire hose through the ventilation window and began flooding the crypt.
Water started rising across the stone floor.
The four men withdrew toward the highest end of the chamber, which contained an upper recess where the water level took longer to reach them.
They continued firing as the water rose and for as long as they were able to maintain positions above it.
The SS troops also attempted to descend through the ventilation opening using the smoke from gas grenades to cover their movement.
Those attempts were likewise repelled.
The siege lasted more than 6 hours.
At 1:00 in the afternoon, the gunfire from inside the crypt stopped abruptly.
When the SS troops cautiously entered through the staircase, they found four bodies.
The water reached their knees.
The four men had used their last bullets on themselves before the water or the German gunfire could reach them.
Yosef Gabchic was among them.
The official German report of the siege recorded four wounded among the attackers and noted that the seven parachutists had fought for more than 6 hours with minimal weaponry against 700 men.
Carl Herman Frank transmitted the result to Berlin.
Hitler received the news without any recorded comment in the minutes of that day’s meeting.
The elimination of the parachutists was the necessary conclusion of the response operation to the assassination, but not its most visible part.
Cura received the promised reward and was relocated under a false German identity within Reich territory.
He lived under that identity until the end of the war, working in commercial activities in Western Germany under the name Carl Jerhot.
He was identified and arrested in Czechoslovakia in 1945 while attempting to cross the border with documents that failed verification.
During the interrogations following his arrest, Cura described the moments leading up to his appearance at Gestapo headquarters without showing visible remorse for the consequences of his decision.
He was tried by a Czechoslovak court for treason and executed in April 1947 at Pankra Prison in Prague.
The trial was brief.
The evidence was indisputable.
Bishop Goraz and the three priests who had facilitated the use of the crypt were arrested on the same day as the siege.
Tried by a German military tribunal, all four were executed on September 27th, 1942, exactly one year after Hydrickch’s arrival in Prague.
The Serbian Orthodox Church, to which the congregation of the Church of St.
Sirill and Methodius belonged, canonized them decades later as martyrs.
The crypt where the parachutists resisted the siege was preserved as a memorial and opened to the public after the end of the war.
The bullet marks in the stone walls, the holes torn open by grenades, and the conduit through which the pumps forced in the water are still visible.
The day before the siege of the church on June 10th, 1942, SS units had surrounded the village of Liddity before dawn, 25 km northwest of Prague.
The SS troops separated the men and boys over the age of 15 from the rest of the population during the early morning hours while most of the village was still asleep.
173 men and teenage boys were taken to the Horak family farm on the edge of the village.
They were executed against the barn wall in groups of 10.
The gunfire continued for several hours.
The 184 adult women of Leichi were loaded onto trucks and deported to the Ravensbrook concentration camp.
Of the villages 98 children, 88 were transported to the Chelno Extermination Center in gas vans.
They were suffocated during the journey.
Seven children were selected as racially suitable for Germanization and handed over to German families under new identities.
Three were too young to be separated from their mothers and were sent to an orphanage in Prague.
The buildings of Liddichi were burned one by one.
The ruins were demolished with explosive charges.
The terrain was leveled with heavy machinery until no visible structures remained.
The name Liddichi was removed from the maps of the protectorate and from German administrative records.
On June 14th, the Reich Ministry of Propaganda announced the action as a retaliatory measure for the assassination of Hydrich.
The news reached the Allied press within hours.
Photographs of the destroyed village and details about the victims appeared in newspapers in London, New York, and Washington over the following days.
On June 24th, the same procedure was carried out in the village of Lzaki, where a clandestine radio transmitter linked to one of the parachutist teams had been discovered.
The 33 adults of Lzaki were executed.
The 13 children were sent to Chelno.
The village was demolished.
The total number of checks executed as a direct consequence of the attack on Hydrich during the period the Protectorate authorities called the Hydraad exceeded 2,000.
The internal resistance networks that had survived the autumn purges were virtually eliminated.
The destruction was not only physical.
The structure of trust that sustained any underground organization, the knowledge of who could be trusted and who could not had been shattered in a way that would take years to rebuild.
In terms of organized resistance activity, the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia became one of the quietest territories in occupied Europe during the two years that followed the Hydraad.
That silence was not acceptance.
It was the result of the systematic elimination of everyone who had attempted to do something different.
What the machinery of the Reich failed to calculate was the effect the destruction of Liddis would have on Allied public opinion.
The images and reports of the massacre generated international outrage that changed the diplomatic calculations surrounding the Czech government in exile.
Churchill publicly backed Benes.
In August 1942, the British government formally repudiated the Munich agreement, the political objective Benes had pursued by authorizing operation anthropoid had been achieved.
The price was paid entirely by the dead of Liit and Lzaki, the more than 2,000 executed during the Hydrichad, and the seven parachutists trapped in the flooded crypt.
Lena von Austin was 30 years old, the mother of four children, and the recipient of a lifetime pension from the German state.
The regime had given her everything owed to the widow of the man who had built the most efficient apparatus of terror in German history.
What came next would no longer depend on the regime, but on her and on the decisions she would make over the following four decades to live with a surname the world had no reason to forget.
What happened to Hydrickch’s family after the war? Lena von Austin was 30 years old when Reinhard Hydrich died at Bulovka Hospital.
She had carried the Hydrickch surname since December 1931 when they married in Grossenbro 3 days after Christmas.
It was she who had shaped her husband’s career through Carl von Eberstein, a member of the family network with direct access to Himmler.
She arranged the meeting that brought Heddrich into the SS after his expulsion from the Navy.
Heddrich was not a member of the National Socialist Party when she met him.
Lena had already joined in 1929 with membership number 1,200,380.
It was she who introduced him to that world, who packed the suitcase when Himmler summoned them to Munich, and who, according to later testimony from people close to them both, imposed the pace of ambition that defined the early years of her husband’s career.
Lena never interpreted that chain of events as a responsibility.
She saw it as a contribution to the project they had shared.
While Heddrich lay in Bulovka hospital, Himmler had assumed the role of legal guardian of the family.
It was a designation Lena formerly accepted but managed in her own way.
During the 3 years following her husband’s death, Lena ran the villa in Panenske Brezani with an independence that irritated Himmler.
The head of the SS, who had projected the image of Hydrich as a martyr of the Reich, reprimanded Lena on at least one occasion for being what he described in an internal communication as a politicizing widow.
Lena received visitors, maintained correspondence with figures within the apparatus, organized her own network of relationships inside the regime, and never adopted the discrete profile Himmler considered appropriate for the widow of a fallen hero.
She did not ask permission to withdraw Haida from the Hitler youth in 1944 when she decided he had had enough, nor did she inform Himmler in advance.
Rumors also circulated through the corridors of the regime regarding the nature of the relationship between Lena and Walter Shelonburg, head of the foreign intelligence service of the Reich main security office and one of Hydrickch’s closest associates.
The rumors pointed to a relationship that went beyond the professional.
Shelonburgg always denied any involvement.
What was recorded in testimonies from people within their circle, however, was that Hydrickch had summoned Shelonburgg on at least one occasion and made it clear to him with the same coldness with which he handled any other operational matter that this line was not to be crossed.
Shelonburgg never crossed any documented line, but the fact that the head of the Reich’s most powerful security apparatus had felt the need to issue such a warning to his own chief of foreign intelligence said something about the dynamics within the family.
There was another dimension of Hydrickch’s life that Lena knew about and chose to treat with strategic silence in all her interviews.
Hydrich had ordered the creation and operation of Salon Kitty, a luxury brothel in Berlin’s Giza Brestrasa district that the SS security service used as an intelligence instrument.
The rooms were equipped with hidden microphones.
The women working there had been recruited and trained by Hydrick’s apparatus to extract information from clients, foreign diplomats, highranking military officers, Reich officials, and visitors from allied and neutral countries.
The material gathered at Salon Kitty was incorporated into the files.
Hydrish kept on persons of operational interest.
In interviews during the 1970s, Lena described the matter with a phrase journalists who knew her later recalled as characteristic of her style.
She said that such things were part of Reinhardt’s work, and Reinhardt’s work was none of her concern.
The statement was technically false.
Salon Kitty was well known within Hydrickch’s inner circle, and Lena was not outside that circle.
The four children Hedrik left behind were of very different ages at the time of his death.
Klouse, the eldest, had been born in 1933.
Haida in 1934, Silka in 1939, and Martr, who was born on July 23rd, 1942, 7 weeks after her father died.
On October 24th, 1943, Klaus rode his bicycle through a gate someone had left open on the estate.
A truck traveling along the road struck him.
He died that same afternoon.
He was 10 years old.
Himmler ordered the investigation into the accident to be closed without consequences for the driver.
The collapse of the Reich in the spring of 1945 forced Lena to leave Panenski Brezani before Soviet forces reached the protectorate.
She placed Haida and Silka with families of acquaintances who would take them westward while she looked after Marte who was less than 3 years old.
The family reunited on Feyman.
The area fell under British military administration.
Czechoslovakia submitted extradition requests for Lena Hydrich on several occasions during the following years.
The British administration rejected them all.
The Czechoslovak Supreme Court went further.
It tried her in absentia for war crimes connected to the administration of the Paninski Brazani estate using forced labor and sentenced her to life imprisonment.
Lena Hydrich did not serve a single day of that sentence.
The German denatification process cleared her of all charges and allowed her to recover her property on Feyman, including the former summer house Hydrich had used before the war.
With that property, Lena built her postwar life.
She turned the building into an inn and restaurant that operated for more than two decades under the name Imbria Parva.
The establishment became a meeting point for former SS officers who regularly traveled to Fyan for veterans gatherings.
In the main hall displayed on a side table, Lena kept the bronze death mask of Reinhard Hydrich.
Journalists who managed to gain access to the establishment to interview her invariably mentioned that detail.
Lena considered it perfectly natural.
It was the way she organized the space she lived in.
Her husband remained present at the center of the room 40 years after his death in Prague.
What postwar German authorities never investigated was Lena’s administration of Peninski Brzani during the three years following Hydrickch’s death.
The estate had operated using labor from a satellite subcamp of Flossenberg.
Checks Poles Dutch prisoners, Germans classified as antisocials, and Jehovah’s Witnesses worked on the agricultural and forestry operations of the property under conditions later described by survivors of the sub camp in testimony before Czech authorities.
Czechoslovakia included that period of administration among the charges in her trial in absentia.
The Federal Republic of Germany opened no proceedings.
The denassification tribunal that cleared Lena took no account of the testimonies from the forced laborers of Panenski Brazani.
Lena was never questioned in any German judicial proceeding about the working conditions on the estate.
Of the 98 children from Liche deported in June 1942, 88 had been sent to Chelno and murdered in the days following the destruction of the village.
The remaining 10 were classified as racially suitable for Germanization and placed with German families under new identities.
After the war, Czech and Allied search organizations located several of those children in different parts of Germany and Austria, raised under German names with no memory of Liichi or the Czech language, unaware that they were survivors of a village that no longer existed.
The process of reintegrating those children into their original Czech families, or what remained of them, extended well into the 1950s, and in many cases remained incomplete.
Some no longer spoke the language.
Others had adoptive families who resisted giving them up and some were never found.
The West German state suspended the pension after the defeat.
Lena sued to recover it.
The legal argument was technically solid.
Her husband had been a general in the German police who died in service and the legislation of the Federal Republic of Germany recognized pensions for the widows of fallen officers.
The government opposed the claim by invoking Hydrickch’s role in the Holocaust.
The lower courts ruled against Lena.
She appealed.
The case dragged on through 1956 and 1959.
In the end, the courts of the Federal Republic of Germany ruled in her favor.
The Democratic German state was compelled by its own courts to pay the widow of the architect of the Holocaust, a pension equivalent to that of a retired minister president.
Lena received that pension until her death.
In February 1969, a fire at the Imbria Pava Inn destroyed the building to its foundations.
Local authorities never determined the cause of the blaze.
That same year, Mano Maninan, the Finnish poet and theater director whom Lena had married in 1965 in order to legally replace the surname Hydrich with Maninan, died.
Maninan had traveled to Fyan from Helsinki after reading articles about her in the Scandinavian press.
The marriage served an explicit purpose and both acknowledged it without ambiguity.
Lena needed a different surname for everyday life.
Maninan died 4 years after the wedding.
In 1976, Lena published her memoirs under the title Lebanon EMTT Anam Creeks for Brea, translated as living with a war criminal.
The title was ironic.
She considered the label unjust.
The book portrayed Hydrich as a professional carrying out orders without personal ideological involvement, a man who loved the violin, horseback riding, and his children.
Regarding the Holocaust, Lena claimed the stories about the camps were a fairy tale.
In interviews during those years, she stated that she dreamed of Reinhard almost every night.
A later edition of the book published under the title Mine Leen Mit Reinhard featured a forward by her son Haida, the engineer from Vertzie, who refused interviews with anyone.
For his mother’s book, he made an exception.
Silka Hydrich lived an entirely private life with no recorded public statements.
Marte, the youngest daughter, born 7 weeks after her father’s death and with no possible memory of him, ran a business in Berg on the same island of Feman.
She responded to journalists who managed to find her with politeness and brevity, adding nothing to the historical record.
Haida was the only one of the three to leave a concrete public trace.
In 2011, at the age of 76, he traveled to Paninsky Brazani, the estate north of Prague, where he had grown up during the years his father administered the protectorate.
There he gave an interview to the Czech magazine Reflex, the first and only interview he would ever grant in his life.
What Haida said in that interview contradicted point by point everything his mother had maintained for four decades.
He stated that as an adult he had visited concentration camps in Germany and Poland in order to understand what his father had done.
He stated that he had been forced to separate the private man his mother described from the public man portrayed in documents and testimony.
And he stated that the assassination of his father had been the correct decision.
The son of Reinhard Hydrich in the only public statement he ever made validated the men who killed his father.
Before her death, Lena passed on to Haidra a detail she herself had kept secret for decades.
Before losing consciousness at Bulovka Hospital, Hydrich had told her that he did not want Germany to carry out reprisals for his death.
Carl Herman Frank knew his position and had argued with Hitler in an attempt to limit the scope of the immediate executions.
Hitler ignored the argument.
Liddichi was destroyed 3 days later.
Lzaki a week after that.
More than 2,000 checks were executed in the weeks that followed.
The man who had organized the extermination of millions died asking that no one be killed in his name.
No one listened.
That was the only inheritance Hydrickch left his children that was not a surname.
The knowledge that in the final moment their father had asked for something he had no right to ask for.
Haida knew it.
He carried it for 70 years before speaking it aloud.
And when he finally did, he spoke in Czech in Prague before the cameras of a magazine from the country his father had ruled through the method of carrot and stick.
What the Hydrickch name meant to the dead of Lichi, to the children sent to Shelno, to the more than 2,000 checks executed during the Hydraiad, and what it meant to Haida, Silka, and Martr are two magnitudes with no common scale.
The first paid with their lives, the second paid with the name.
That asymmetry, the most brutal of all those produced by the history of Reinhard Hydrich, has no resolution.
It only has heirs.
Heddrich’s Jewish ancestry.
In 1916, Hugo Raymond’s music lexicon, the most widely consulted music dictionary in the Germanspeaking world, published in its Leipig edition, a clarification alongside the name of Bruno Hydrich, director of the Haler Conservatory.
It stated that his artistic surname was actually Seuss, as though Hydrickch were a pseudonym adopted to conceal the family’s original name.
In Germany, Seuss was a surname with explicitly Jewish connotations.
The clarification was an unfounded editorial error.
Bruno Heddrich sued the publisher for defamation, won the case, and the following edition corrected the entry.
But by then, thousands of copies of the 1916 edition had already been distributed to libraries and conservatories across Germany.
The rumor planted by that mistake did not disappear with the correction.
It followed Reinhardt Hydrich until the day of his death and beyond.
The surname Seuss came from Gustaf Robert Seuss, a Protestant locksmith with no documented Jewish ancestry, who in 1877 married Ernestine, Reinhardt’s paternal grandmother, after the death of her first husband.
In the anti-semitic climate of Imperial Germany, an ambiguous surname within a family already under suspicion was enough to leave the question of the Hydrich family’s origins permanently unresolved.
Reinhard Hydrich grew up in Hala under the shadow of that rumor.
His schoolmates called him Moses Handel, a combination of Moses, a central figure in anti-semitic imagery and handle, a phonetic distortion of his surname in the Saxon dialect.
In the German Navy, which he joined in 1922, the nickname was shortened to Isidor, a name that in the slang of the time functioned as an informal synonym for Jew.
Hydrich’s response to that pressure was to join an anti-semitic student association in order to prove that the nickname had no basis.
The reasoning was simple.
No one with genuine Jewish ancestry would do such a thing.
The tactic reduced the direct pressure.
It did not eliminate the suspicion.
In 1932, as Heddrich was accumulating power within the SS apparatus at a pace that generated enemies just as quickly, Gregor Strasa, head of organization for the National Socialist Party, received a confidential report pointing to Hydrickch’s possible Jewish ancestry and forwarded it to the party’s official genealogologist, Dr.
Akim Girker.
Girka conducted an investigation and delivered his conclusion.
Hydrich was of German origin and free of any trace of Jewish blood.
The exoneration was official and signed by the responsible authority.
Hydrich did not feel exonerated.
He privately instructed Anst Hoffman, an agent of the SS security service under his command, to continue investigating independently until every loose end in the family tree had been documented.
The official investigation had ended.
Heddrich repeated it on his own.
In postwar files, investigators discovered an anomaly in Hydrickch’s personal SS records.
His great-g grandandmother was listed under the surname Burnbound, a name frequently associated with families of Jewish origin.
In the family tree belonging to Reinhard’s brother, that same woman appeared under a completely different name, Maria Rosine Likner, with no additional information.
The discrepancy had no administrative explanation.
If someone had altered one of the two records, logic suggested it would have been easier to intervene in Reinhardt’s file than in his brothers, implying that his record may have been modified to replace Bernbam with another name.
No postwar judicial proceeding ever conclusively investigated the anomaly.
In 1940, a baker from Hara was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to 12 months in prison for spreading the rumor that Reinhard Hydrich was Jewish.
The man who directed the most efficient apparatus of racial persecution in history used that same apparatus to imprison someone for calling him what he himself persecuted.
The sentence was not an administrative curiosity.
It was the precise measure of the mental space that rumor occupied in Hydrickch’s life.
Enough for him in the middle of a war while the machinery he commanded was exterminating tens of thousands of people every month to devote judicial attention to silencing a baker in a provincial town.
On January 20th, 1942, Hydrich chaired the conference at the Villa on the shores of Lake Vanzi, where he coordinated the extermination of 11 million people classified as Jewish according to the racial criteria he himself had helped define over the course of a decade.
In that room, the man whose file contained the anomaly of the surname Bernbomb, whose grandmother’s stepfather was named Seuss, and whose childhood had unfolded under the nickname Moses Handel, coordinated with officials from 15 state agencies the final solution to the very question that had marked his own life since the age of 12.
None of those present raised the contradiction.
None of them could have.
