Heydrich Assassinated: Holocaust Architect Dies in Prague

Reinhard Heydrich took eight days to die. The highest-ranking Nazi official assassinated during World War II, Heydrich succumbed to septicemia on June 4, 1942, in a Prague hospital. The infection had set in after fragments of horsehair upholstery from his Mercedes were driven into his spleen by a modified anti-tank grenade thrown by Czech commandos on May 27. Heydrich was the architect of some of the Third Reich’s most systematic atrocities. As head of the Reich Main Security Office, he controlled the Gestapo, the SD intelligence service, and the Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads that murdered over a million Jews in Eastern Europe. In January 1942, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, a ninety-minute meeting of senior bureaucrats that formalized the logistics of the Final Solution. Hitler called him "the man with the iron heart." Operation Anthropoid, the assassination mission, was planned by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London and carried out by two soldiers: Jozef Gabcik, a Slovak, and Jan Kubis, a Czech. They parachuted into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in December 1941 and spent months preparing. On the morning of May 27, they ambushed Heydrich’s open-topped car at a hairpin turn in Prague. Gabcik’s Sten gun jammed. Kubis threw a modified grenade that exploded against the car’s rear wheel. Heydrich, wounded but still standing, drew his pistol and chased Gabcik before collapsing. The Nazi reprisal was savage. SS forces destroyed the village of Lidice on June 10, shooting all 173 men and boys over fifteen, deporting the women to Ravensbruck concentration camp, and gassing most of the children at Chelmno. The village of Lezaky was similarly annihilated. Gabcik and Kubis, betrayed by a fellow resistance member, died fighting in the crypt of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague on June 18. The assassination achieved its strategic goal: it demonstrated that Nazi occupation could be resisted, but the cost was measured in entire communities.