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On a bright morning in May

On 27 May 1942, assassins waited by a roadside near Prague
By David Cocksedge

THE MAIN MAN in Hitler's wartime intelligence network was Reinhard Tristam Eugen Heydrich, the infamous 'Protector' of Prague. Heydrich was the chief architect of 'The Final Solution' - the mass extermination of Jews and other 'undesirables' in all lands captured by the German military advance through Europe from 1939 to 1942. Heydrich was also tasked with the 'Germanisation' of the Czech population in Prague where he held a posting as the unofficial dictator of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

British intelligence services began to plot the assassination of Heydrich in 1941. Nine selected men went through a rigorous training process; not aware at first of their target. This top secret was kept on a 'need to know' basis. Finally two local Czechs, Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubris, were assigned to carry out the 'hit' on a remote road by a hairpin bend outside Prague on the morning of 27 May 1942. Gabcik had a British-made Sten gun hidden under a coat, and Kubris carried a grenade in the deep poacher's pocket of his coat. A hundred meters away on a hill towards the village of Jungfern-Breschen were two lookouts that would signal to the assassins when they spotted the open green Mercedes in which Heydrich rode to his office in the city.

The hairpin bend where Gabcik stood was very sharp. Streetcars, two trolleys hitched together and taking power from overhead cables, screeched agonizingly as they turned. The street was busy. German soldiers drilled in the woods nearby. The two lookouts, Valcik and Jemelik, had difficulty keeping each other and the hit-men in view; what with passing German military vehicles and trucks, and the need to avoid attracting attention. For 55 minutes, this painful and tense wait continued. It was also dangerous, for at any moment some sharp-eyed German might well have wondered why four able-bodied men were loitering by the roadside.

At 10.25am Gabcik heard four sharp whistles (H in Morse code) - the signal they were waiting for. Moments later the target vehicle swept down the hill. Klein, the chauffeur, changed gears to take the sharp turn ahead. Beside him sat Reinhard Heydrich, in his black and silver-trimmed SS uniform, shuffling through some papers. Amazingly, he traveled without an armed escort; not even motorcycle outriders to clear the road ahead. Gabcik felt his heart rate soar. Unbelievably, they had been presented with a naked target.

Gabcik dropped his coat, brought up the Sten, and squeezed the trigger, intending to put a ten-round burst into one of the most feared and hated men in Europe. Nothing happened. At this vital moment in history, his weapon had jammed. Heydrich now looked up and saw the light machine gun pointed at him He drew his Luger automatic pistol and shouted to his driver. Klein threw the Mercedes into a skid, and the car screeched to a stop across the tram tracks, causing following trolleys to slide and stop, showering sparks. Seeing his companion desperately trying to clear the Sten, Kubris pulled the pin on his grenade and hurled it at the stalled car. Heydrich vaulted over the door and fired two shots at the Czechs before the grenade exploded by his side. The two assassins fled the scene. Heydrich staggered to the pavement, bleeding profusely.

Passengers from the trams climbed down; some panicked by the explosion and gunfire. "Fetch an ambulance!" Shouted a woman. "It's the protector!"

An hour later, Heydrich was delivered in a baker's van to the Bulkova Hospital, where the medical director tried to reach Hradcany Castle, official HQ of the Protectorate and Heydrich's family residence. Nobody at the Castle seemed to comprehend what had happened. The Protector was on his way to Berlin, the caller was told. No, there was no way that Secretary of State Dr Karl Frank would come to telephone. He was far too busy to take a call from some sniveling Czech peasant.

"That's too bad". Said the medical director, "Tell him that we have the Oberguppenfuhrer here and he is unlikely to live. He walked into a bomb, and he's full of holes."

Heydrich lingered on for a week, as surgeons and specialists worked on him, trying to remove the pieces of metal, wire, glass, leather and horsehair distributed by the exploding grenade. SS troops cleared out all other patients, and surrounded the hospital with a ring of steel. Inevitably, Reinhard Heydrich died on the operating table on 3 June 1942.

As expected, retribution was severe. Hitler ordered a "stamping out of the whole canker at the heart of the Protectorate." Ten thousand Czechs were rounded up a day after the assassination attempt, and each evening in Wenceslas Square, 100 were shot by firing squads. When Dr Karl Frank discovered that the agents had parachuted into the village of Lidice, twenty miles northwest of Prague, he ordered it to be razed. At dawn on 8 June, a detachment of SS troops drove into the village. All the local men were lined up by the wall of the village café and shot dead. Babies were torn from their mothers and drowned in a cattle trough. Three pregnant women were bayoneted and shot in the face. The remaining women and children were herded into a barn, which was then set alight. Those trying to escape the flames and smoke as the building collapsed were gunned down. Lidice was finally burned to the ground by flame-throwers. Only charred debris remained of this once picturesque village.

The punishment was filmed and a medal was struck for the filmmakers. It bore Heydrich's profile and the word 'Rache' (Revenge) imprinted on it. Lidice had been wiped off the face of the Earth. The complete destruction this famous village outside Prague has to be of the most savage reprisals in modern history.

All over Europe, revenge was taken in a similar fashion. From a village in Norway to Oradour-sue-Glane in France, families were either incinerated within burning barns or shot dead as they tried to get away. Adolf Hitler (1899-1945) himself flew to the funeral of the Protector of Prague. "He was one of the greatest defenders of our greater German concept", he proclaimed to the massed gathering, "and he will be avenged."

Meantime, the assassins had fled to the crypt of the Karl Borromaeus church in Prague, entering through a removable slab. The church was Greek Orthodox, and the SS and Gestapo were under instructions to avoid provoking members of that faith for political reasons. In cramped conditions, over 80 members of the Czech Resistance also hid there among the assassins.

But these men were betrayed. Acting on an informer's tip, members of the SS Das Reich Division tore down the church and inevitably found the crypt. When the first two Germans who dropped into the hiding place were shot dead by the Czechs, the SS men fired their Smeiser sub-machine guns into the vault. They then pumped gasoline into the enclosure, which was set ablaze. None of the Czechs survived.

Ironically, the film of the revenge massacre at Lidice was excellent evidence for the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials after the war. In September 1945 Dr Frank himself, 'The Butcher of Lidice', was convicted and hanged for this barbaric war crime. He went to the gallows insisting that he had been merely "following orders".

After the war, a socialist member of the British Parliament questioned the wisdom of provoking such killers. The MP, Robert Paget, challenged British Intelligence services on the concept of sending agents on missions that stung the Nazis into such bloody reprisals. These in turn created more civilian hatred among against the Nazi occupying forces. "This was our general idea when we flew in trained agents to assassinate Heydrich", Paget protested. "The main Czech resistance movement was a direct consequence of SS reprisals for the violent death of Reinhard Heydrich."

Was it worth the loss of so many innocent lives? That was Paget's question. A man named Richard Pinder, who had been working undercover in Prague, came forward in public for the first time and answered him: "The killing of Heydrich was an act of justice that lightened our darkness and gave us hope," he insisted.

Pinder had been training guerrillas in sabotage in 1941 when he was caught in a German drive to round up men for forced labor - known as slavery in earlier times. Pinder's fake papers made him out to be a French gardening expert. Dr Frank, as Deputy Protector of Czechoslovakia, had taken over the big estates of a wealthy Jewish family and applied for a professional landscape gardener to look after the grounds. Pinder got the job, and was thereafter the silent witness to Frank's career as a uniformed gangster-tyrant.

"It is true that Dr Frank avenged Heydrich's murder", he said years later. "But in all occupied countries, the Nazis were liquidating whole communities once they had served their purpose. Czechoslovakia was industrially very important to the German war machine. The local people fed the guns until it came their own turn to die. Hitler and his ruling cadre of criminals put vicious thugs into uniform and gave them official sanction to maim, torture and kill. This was the stark reality of Nazi philosophy."

Said Britain's wartime Prime Minister, Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965): "The only way to mobilize popular support for secret armies of resistance fighters was to stage such dramatic acts of terrorism against the German occupying forces."

Czech-Americans were aware of the sacrifice. In Stern Park Gardens, Illinois, and in Bohemia, Long Island, the local citizens voted to change the names of their communities to 'Lidice' in memory of the innocents who had been so brutally murdered. These civilians had died for the actions of four brave men who waited by a roadside near Prague one fine Spring morning in May 1942.

(Research: 'A man called Intrepid' by William Stevenson, Sphere Books).

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