Killing Hitler (31 page)

Such was Heydrich’s success in the latter objective that Gabc?ík and Kubis were explicitly instructed not to make contact with the remains of the domestic Czech underground.
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Though hampered in their mission by the comparative lack of local assistance, they were also aided by another result of Heydrich’s success. Unlike his predecessor, their target evidently now felt safe enough to dispense with his SS escort (which he viewed as an affront to German prestige), and preferred to travel alone with a driver in an open-top Mercedes tourer. This fit of hubris gave Gabc?ík and Kubis the opportunity they were looking for. They selected a quiet stretch of road in a Prague suburb, en route from Heydrich’s residence to the city center, where traffic slowed to negotiate a hairpin bend. In addition, they noted that there were no police stations or SS garrisons in the vicinity, and a nearby tram stop would enable them to wait for their target without arousing suspicion. Gabc?ík would be stationed on the inside of the bend brandishing a Sten gun, while Kubis would stand across the road armed with grenades. They planned to carry out their attack on the morning of 27 May 1942.

In the final weeks before the attack, a flood of correspondence ensued over the wisdom of the planned assassination. The local Czech resistance in Prague, which now had wind of the plan, was dismayed. Having barely survived one SS roundup, they were less than keen to invite another by such reckless action. In vain, they tried to persuade the assassins to disobey orders, stressing the calamitous reprisals that would surely follow for the innocent Czech population. They finally appealed directly to their superiors in London to call off the mission, claiming, “This assassination would not be of the least value to the Allies…. It would threaten not only hostages and political prisoners, but also thousands of other lives.”
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The Czech exile government in London, however, was disinclined
to agree to the request. Not only did President Benes need a spectacular action to impress his more powerful allies, but he was also planning another high-profile assassination, this time of the propaganda minister of the occupation government, Emanuel Moravec. His response to the domestic resistance, therefore, was blunt. A demonstration of strength was required, he replied, “even if it had to be paid for with a great many sacrifices.”
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Gabčík and Kubi$4, meanwhile, prepared to carry out their mission. On the morning of 27 May, they traveled to their selected location in the suburb of Holešovice. Once there, they positioned themselves close to the bend in the road and posted a colleague farther up the hill to act as lookout. Weapons were silently assembled, and final preparations were made. Under the noses of numerous Czech commuters crowding into the waiting trams, the assassins waited for their target.

For almost two hours they waited. The rush hour crowds soon dispersed, and they were left loitering suspiciously on a street corner, worrying that their target had evaded them or that their mission had been betrayed to the Germans. Then, at 10:32, they received the signal that they were waiting for—Heydrich’s car was approaching. As the Mercedes slowed to round the corner, Gabčík flung open his raincoat and aimed his Sten at Heydrich at almost point-blank range. But the gun jammed. Kubis then stepped forward and threw a grenade, which missed and exploded against the rear wheel, hurling shrapnel in his own face, and showering a nearby tram with debris. As the Mercedes ground to a halt, Heydrich drew his pistol and prepared to give chase. However, after a brief exchange of fire with Gabcík, he collapsed in pain, and his attacker made good his escape.

As they fled the scene, Gabčík and Kubis believed that they had failed. Their ambush had certainly been botched, and their last vision had been of Heydrich and his driver in hot pursuit. But, unknown to them, their target had, in fact, been mortally wounded. Heydrich had suffered a fractured rib and a ruptured spleen in the attack, but crucially, Kubiš’s grenade had sent fragments of shrapnel and horsehair from the Mercedes’s rear seat deep into his abdomen. Hurried to a local hospital, he was treated
by the best Nazi surgeons, specially flown in by Himmler, but as infection set in there was little that could be done. In the early hours of 4 June, eight days after the attack, he finally succumbed to blood poisoning.

The grim reprisals foreseen by the opponents of the mission were quick to materialize. The nearby village of Lidice, which was wrongly suspected of sheltering the assassins, was razed to the ground, its two hundred menfolk murdered and its women and children sent to the concentration camps, where barely a handful survived. The village of Leźáky, where an SOE transmitter was discovered, was also destroyed, its fifty or so inhabitants simply massacred. The assassins themselves were finally tracked down in the crypt of a Prague church. There, during an intense SS assault, Kubiš was killed and Gabčík committed suicide. Their heads were later impaled on spikes by the Nazis to intimidate their fellow countrymen.

The Czech underground was also shattered. All those who had helped or sheltered the assassins were executed, along with their families. Reprisals continued throughout the summer, targeting the intelligentsia, nationalists, and ex-officers, and claiming nearly 1,500 additional lives. Farther afield, 3,000 Jews were deported from Theresienstadt for extermination, and another 150 Jews were murdered in Berlin. In all, Heydrich’s death was avenged by the slaughter of over 5,000 individuals, the vast majority innocent civilians.

Officially, Operation Anthropoid was hailed as a tremendous success: a rejection of Nazi rule and a morale boost for the occupied nations of Europe. It demonstrated that no German was safe, however senior in rank and however far from the front line he might be. As the director of SOE noted, the killing was seen in London as “an act of justice.”
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The status of the Czechs within the Allied camp was also raised, just as President Benes had planned. The shame of Munich was expunged, and now Lidice was commemorated across the world, becoming in the process a byword for Nazi brutality.
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In private, meanwhile, there was grave disquiet over the sheer scale of the reprisals. Though unrepentant about his assassination
of Heydrich, Benes shied away from targeting Heydrich’s successor, Karl Hermann Frank. Among British government circles, too, the general opposition to political assassination was reinforced. Even SOE was shocked by the Nazi response. It viewed Heydrich’s death very equivocally. On one level, it saw the operation as a disaster: its nascent organization “in theater” had been smashed, and its agents had been murdered.
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But it appreciated that Heydrich’s position was such that his death had also effectively rendered the German secret intelligence agencies lame, if only temporarily. Thus it viewed Operation Anthropoid both as a lesson in what could be achieved by assassination and as a grave warning of the repercussions that could be expected. In future, plausible deniability would become a watchword for all missions, and other methods, such as kidnapping, would be attempted where possible. And if there really was no alternative to assassination, then the target had to be well worth the reprisals.

In Germany, Heydrich was mourned like a favorite son. Himmler wept when he heard of his death, and Goebbels confided to his diary that Heydrich was “irreplaceable.”
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In an elaborate state funeral, Hitler spoke of him as “a man with an iron heart.”
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His death, he said, meant more to him than the loss of a battle. In private he was less complimentary, denouncing Heydrich’s “heroic gesture” of riding in an open, unarmored car as “damned stupidity, which serves the country not one whit.”
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In response to the killing, Hitler emphasized the need for redoubled vigilance and decreed that security regulations were henceforth to be heeded by all senior personnel. His own security was also to be tightened. After all, he stressed,
he
was obviously the enemy’s real target, as only he was the guarantor of German victory.
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In the months after Heydrich’s assassination, SOE continued much as before, outwardly undeterred but perhaps with a heightened awareness of the potential backlash from high-profile operations. The selection of targets, however, remained the exclusive preserve of the resistance organizations themselves. On Christmas Eve 1942, the murder of one of those targets, the commander in chief of Vichy French troops, Admiral Jean Darlan, spawned a controversy that has rumbled to this day. Though
Darlan’s assassin was a French royalist student, he had been trained and armed at an SOE camp in the Algerian desert. And although explicit British involvement in the attack has been plausibly denied ever since, it is perhaps telling that many contemporaries—including Darlan himself on his deathbed—assumed it to have been an SOE mission.
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Whatever the truth of the Darlan case, by the summer of 1943, SOE had clearly overcome whatever qualms it may have had and was preparing to expand its policy of assassination. At a council meeting in late June, it was recommended that a “concerted execution campaign” should be instituted across occupied Europe.
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This was the genesis of Operation Ratweek, a simultaneous, Europe-wide action targeting collaborators as well as SS, SD, and Gestapo staff. It was planned that an “execution month” would be declared, during which the European resistance movements would cause their German occupiers to live in fear. SOE would supply the Welrod silent execution pistol as well as lists of possible target “rats,” if required.

Ratweek enjoyed only modest success, however. In Denmark and Holland it stalled completely, as the local resistance was often compromised or was simply wary of inviting the massive reprisals seen in the aftermath of Heydrich’s death. In Belgium, too, the operation was dropped, largely due to the opposition of the Belgian exile government.
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In the event, only occupied France saw any Ratweek operations. One resistance network, Armada, was especially active. Though it specialized in sabotage, one of its agents—a taxi driver code-named Khodja—found his métier in the grubby business of assassination. Operating in Lyon in the spring of 1944, Khodja succeeded in single-handedly eliminating eleven senior SD personnel.
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Thus, through the reluctance of many of its allies to carry out planned “wet operations,” SOE was finally forced to devise alternatives for its assassination policy. In January 1944, it found a new target: General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller, the commander of the German 22nd Infantry Division on Crete, who was responsible for a brutal campaign of repression against the local resistance. Yet rather than simply eliminate Müller, SOE conceived
a daring plan to kidnap the general, spirit him to Cairo, and arraign him before a war crimes trial. An SOE team (led by the later author Patrick Leigh Fermor) parachuted into Crete and began studying the general’s routines and security measures, but before they could act, Müller was replaced by the comparatively blameless Major-General Heinrich Kreipe. Undeterred, Leigh Fermor and his team opted to continue with their mission and succeeded in kidnapping Kreipe that April and, after hiding him for over two weeks in the Cretan mountains, sailing for Egypt.
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Given the concerns that were then rife in London, considerable thought was given to the problem of preserving the native population from the expected German reprisals. After their getaway, therefore, the SOE team left a number of items of British equipment in the general’s car along with a letter:

Your Divisional Commander Kreipe was captured a short time ago by a British Raiding Force…. By the time you read this, he and we will be on our way to Cairo.

We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of Cretans or Cretan partisans…. Any reprisals against the local population will be wholly unwarranted and unjust.
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When asked many years later why their target was not simply murdered, Leigh Fermor is said to have replied: “I’m surprised that you have put that question to a British officer.”
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Even Kreipe, though aggrieved by the loss of his Knight’s Cross during a scuffle, nonetheless conceded that his captors had treated him throughout with “chivalry and courtesy.”
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When of a mind to do so, it seems, SOE was well capable of playing by the rules.

After the success of the Kreipe operation, kidnapping enjoyed a brief vogue among the British Special Forces. In January 1945, for example, two Italian double agents were kidnapped by SOE in northern Italy and brought to London for interrogation.
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But the most audacious kidnap plot was hatched by the SAS soon after D-Day in the summer of 1944. At that time, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, one of Hitler’s most famous and decorated
generals, was commanding Army Group B in Normandy and held the deputy command for the entire Western theater. A man of rare tactical talent, he was considered to hold the key to the German defense in the Normandy campaign, and thereby became a natural target for British clandestine agents.

Rommel had, of course, been targeted before. In the winter of 1941, British commandos had carried out an audacious long-range raid on Rommel’s headquarters in the Libyan desert. And though they had achieved complete surprise, their quarry was not at home.
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In mid-July 1944, another similar attempt was mounted. A team of five SAS men under the command of a French captain, Raymond Couraud, parachuted into the region of the Vexin, northwest of Paris, where Rommel had his residence at the château of La Roche Guyon. Their plan was to ambush the field marshal’s car and take him to a nearby hilltop, from where the party and their prisoner would be exfiltrated by light aircraft.
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However, while the kidnap team was preparing its move, Rommel was gravely injured on the evening of 17 July, when his car was driven off the road after a strafing attack by roving British fighter aircraft. He never returned to La Roche Guyon, and indeed never returned to active duty, committing suicide some three months later when implicated in the July Plot against Hitler. The SAS team, meanwhile, disrupted German supply and communication lines and then made their way to Paris to enjoy the imminent liberation. Their task had been ably, if unwittingly, achieved by the machine guns of an RAF Spitfire.