The 80th Anniversary of Operation Anthropoid: The ‘Butcher of Prague’ killed in a spectacular special operation Adam Leong Kok Wey

It was exactly eighty years ago that a daring special operation was conducted to kill a top Nazi officer in Prague - the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich codenamed Operation Anthropoid on 27 May 1942 – which yielded handsome strategic effects for Czechoslovakia but also unleashed tragic brutal reprisals.

Czechoslovakia was a new state created at the end of World War I, consisted of some former Austro-Hungarian including the Sudetenland, whose large population of ethnic Germans underlaid Adolf Hitler's 1938 request for the territory to be handed over to the Third Reich. At the Munich Conference convened in September 1938, Britain, France, Italy and Germany notoriously agreed that the Sudetenland would go to Germany in return for Hitler's promise that he would make no further territorial claims. This concession, however, turned out to be futile when Nazi Germany invaded the remaining Czechoslovakian territories on 15 March 1939 and then proceeded to divide them up into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Slovakia. Hitler then turned his attention to Poland, whose invasion on 1 September 1939 sparked off World War II.

On 27 September 1941, Heydrich was appointed as Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich's policy for Czechoslovakia contained a mixture of Germanisation and extermination: those he deemed as ‘un-Germaniseable’ would be deported to concentration camps and eliminated. It was estimated that in the first four months of Heydrich's reign, 486 people were executed and another 2,242 sent to concentration camps. Heydrich's brutal pacification campaign earned him the nickname ‘The Butcher of Prague’. He had also chaired the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 to ensure the implementation of Hitler's "Final Solution," the subsequent extermination of six million Jews in Europe.

The start of World War II had offered former Czechoslovakia president Eduard Beneš the opportunity to form a Czechoslovakian government-in-exile based in London, and to continue his plans to regain international recognition of Czechoslovakia with the annulment of the Munich Agreement. Beneš’s passion, however, was dampened by two main factors: the docility of the Czechoslovakian population in resisting occupation and the disinterest Britain and France in terminating the Munich Agreement. According to Beneš’s chief intelligence officer, Colonel František Moravec, Czechoslovakia then had the lowest resistance activities of the German-occupied European states. Beneš was deeply concerned for the legitimacy of his government-in-exile and Czechoslovakia's future status. He wanted to ensure that when the war ended, the country's territorial rights would be reinstated as per the status quo prior to the 1938 Munich Agreement.

Beneš realised that he needed a spectacular event to give a decisive push for his fight for the future of Czechoslovakia. He decided to kill Reinhard Heydrich. The operation was given the code name Anthropoid. Two Czech soldiers trained by British Special Operations Executive (SOE) were selected for this special operation – Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš.  They parachuted into Czechoslovakia on 28 December 1941 and spent almost five months hiding in numerous resistance safe houses while conducting surveillance of Heydrich's movements. The two special operatives decided that the best option to kill Heydrich was when he travelled from his home to his office in Hradcany Castle in an unescorted open-top car. They will ambush Heydrich at a hairpin bend located at the end of a downhill stretch of road and kill him with submachinegun fire and anti-tank grenades.

The ambush was sprung on the morning of 27 May 1942. Heydrich left his home late on that day and reached the hairpin bend at 10.32 am. As his driver slowed the car to negotiate the sharp bend, Gabčík walked casually across the road. Heydrich's driver braked hard to avoid hitting Gabcik, which resulted in the car coming to a standstill. At this moment, Gabčík swung his Sten gun up and pulled the trigger but the Sten gun was jammed. Heydrich then reacted and rose from his seat with his pistol drawn. He ordered his driver not to speed away as he wanted to attack the would-be assassin. Kubiš reacted at this moment and threw his anti-tank grenade at Heydrich's car. It missed the car, but exploded on the right-hand-side door and lower step. Kubiš and Gabčík rapidly escaped by bicycle and foot respectively. Heydrich was injured by the blast and was rushed to hospital. Shrapnel had injured his spleen, diaphragm and left rib. The extent of his internal injuries was not thought to be critical or life threatening, but he contracted septicaemia from the shrapnel that penetrated his body, which was contaminated by horsehair from his car's leather seats. Heydrich fell into a coma and died on 4 June 1942.

Hitler was furious when he heard of the ambush and dispatched Heinrich Himmler to Prague to launch a wave of reprisals and hunt down the assassins. Between 28 May and 1 September 1942, 3,188 Czechs were arrested, of which 1,357 were executed. After following some false leads, the Germans destroyed the villages of Lidice and Ležáky with the villagers either massacred or sent to concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Gabčík and Kubiš had gone into hiding in a Prague Orthodox church, only to be betrayed by a fellow SOE operative. On 18 June 1942 the Germans surrounded the church and a firefight started. The SOE men managed to hold out until almost running out of ammunition, and not wanting to be captured alive, decided to take their own lives with cyanide pills and shooting themselves.

Operation Anthropoid’s aftermath created the spectacular event that Beneš wanted. The dramatic assassination and its resultant reprisals paid off substantially in providing the necessary dramatic episode and international sympathy that moved the major parties of the 1938 Munich Agreement to renounce the treaty; the British on 5 August 1942 and France on 29 September 1942. The annulment of the Munich Agreement reinstated Czechoslovakia’s territorial sovereign and integrity to its pre-Munich Agreement condition.

Operation Anthropoid also demonstrated the successful use of a small special operations team in conducting a leadership decapitation mission. The two highly trained special operatives managed to spend five months reconnoitring, surviving in a highly hostile environment and succeeded in killing Heydrich. The successful conduct of Operation Anthropoid exemplifies the strategic effectiveness of special operations and the disproportionate utility they can yield when used aptly.

Adam Leong Kok Wey is professor in strategic studies and the director of the Centre for Defence and International Security Studies (CDISS) at the National Defence University of Malaysia. Operation Anthropoid has been assessed critically by the author in his book, Killing the Enemy: Assassination Operations During World War II published by Bloomsbury in 2020. His latest book is Strategy and Special Operations: Eastern and Western Perspectives published by NDUM Press (2021).