The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich: Two Paratroopers, a Jammed Sten Gun, and the Death of the Third Reich's "Blond Beast"

Reinhard Heydrich was 38 years old in the spring of 1942 and had not yet done the most destructive thing he would do. He had organized the Einsatzgruppen — the mobile killing squads that followed the German advance into the Soviet Union and killed approximately 1.5 million Jews and others by shooting. He had chaired the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, at which the "Final Solution" was coordinated administratively among senior Nazi officials. He was the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia — the effective military governor of the Czech lands — and he ran his governorship with a combination of selective accommodation and lethal terror that had made him one of the most effective Nazi administrators in the occupied territories.

He was also, according to contemporary reports by senior Nazis and Allied intelligence alike, the most likely successor to Hitler. The code name for the assassination mission — Operation Anthropoid — was the British designation. The Czech government-in-exile in London approved and facilitated it.

The Training

Jozef Gabčík was a Slovak soldier who had escaped to Britain after the German occupation. Jan Kubiš was a Czech soldier who had also reached Britain via France. Both were trained by the SOE for the specific mission of entering Czechoslovakia, reaching Prague, and killing Heydrich.

They parachuted into the Czech countryside in December 1941 and spent months in hiding with the Czech underground, preparing an operation for which the geometry was difficult: Heydrich traveled in an open-topped Mercedes staff car from his country estate to Prague Castle each morning, and his route, while not perfectly fixed, lent itself to one specific chokepoint — a sharp hairpin turn at the Bulovka hospital in the Holešovičká area of Prague — where the car had to slow almost to a stop.

The Turn at Holešovice

On the morning of May 27, 1942, Heydrich's car approached the hairpin turn. Gabčík stepped from the tram stop where he had been waiting, pulled his Sten gun from under his coat, aimed at Heydrich's car, and pulled the trigger.

The Sten jammed. A well-documented mechanical failure intrinsic to the Sten's design caused it to fail to chamber. He stood in the road holding a useless weapon while Heydrich's driver began to accelerate.

Kubiš, in position around the curve, threw a modified anti-tank grenade. His aim was slightly off — the grenade detonated against the car's rear wheel well rather than inside the vehicle. The blast sent shrapnel and fragments of the car's upholstery into Heydrich's body.

Heydrich's response, which military historians have discussed at length as an indicator of the man's personal courage regardless of everything else about him, was to stand up in the car, draw his pistol, and begin shooting at the two assassins while they ran. He chased them briefly on foot before collapsing.

Nine Days

The fragments of upholstery and horsehair padding from the car seat that had entered Heydrich's body were not immediately recognized as a source of infection. He underwent surgery and appeared initially to be recovering. He died of septicemia on June 4, 1942.

He was the highest-ranking Nazi official killed by enemy action during the war. He remains the only senior Nazi leader successfully assassinated by Allied forces at any point in the conflict.

The reprisals were catastrophic. The Nazis razed the village of Lidice — killing all 173 adult male residents, deporting the women to Ravensbrück concentration camp — on suspicion, based on a misread letter, that one of the assassins had connections there. A second village, Ležáky, was also destroyed. Approximately 3,000 Czechs were killed in the reprisals that followed.

Gabčík and Kubiš died on June 18, 1942, in a seven-hour siege of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague, where they and five other paratroopers had been sheltering for weeks. Betrayed to the Gestapo by a member of the Czech underground who had been captured and broken, they held off an assault by 750 SS troops for seven hours before dying in the crypt. They were out of ammunition when they ran out of time.