Because France was to be the portal for the Allied invasion and liberation of Europe, de Gaulle and his forces were able to defy the two most powerful Western Allies and get away with it. The French general “could afford to irritate British and American statesmen and tell them unpleasant truths to their faces,” Count Edward Raczyński, the Polish ambassador to Britain, wrote after the war. “They might not like it, but they could not afford to abandon either him or France.” The same, Raczyński noted, was not true of his own country, which, with the rest of eastern Europe, was treated by Roosevelt and Churchill “as something secondary, not as a vital interest of their own.”
Within days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the British government began pressuring the Polish government in exile to make peace with the Soviets. For the Poles, the idea of the Soviet Union as an ally was a grotesque oxymoron. Less than two years earlier, Stalin, with Hitler’s secret blessing, had attacked and occupied eastern Poland, annexing roughly half of all Polish territory at almost exactly the same time that the Germans annexed the other half. The Soviets’ treatment of the Poles under their control was nearly as brutal as Germany’s: the American diplomat George Kennan would later call it “little short of genocide.”
During the twenty-one months that the Soviets dominated eastern Poland, an estimated 1.5 million Polish citizens were taken from their homes and deported in freight trains to Siberia and other Soviet regions. Thousands froze to death along the way or died of starvation and disease. Those who survived ended up in slave labor camps or were dumped onto collective farms. Most were never seen again.
Like Hitler, Stalin singled out military leaders and other members of the educated Polish elite—government officials, lawyers, landowners, priests, writers, doctors, teachers—for elimination. Indeed, officers of the NKVD (a forerunner of the KGB) met regularly with representatives of the Nazi SS to coordinate their twin repressions. In those murderous campaigns, Hitler and Stalin hoped to finish what their predecessors—the tsars, emperors, and kaisers—had begun to do in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: to erase Poland from the face of the earth.
Among those who disappeared in the Soviet roundup were more than 15,000 Polish army officers, including many in the army’s top field command, who had been taken prisoner by the Red Army in September 1939. After the Soviet Union joined the Allies, Stalin told the Polish government in exile that he had no idea where the missing officers were. In fact, shortly after their capture, he had ordered them to be murdered. In the early spring of 1940, many of them had been taken in small groups to a clearing in the Katyn Forest, near the southwestern Russian town of Smolensk. There they were forced to kneel at the edge of huge pits and were shot in the back of the head; their bodies were pitched into the mass graves “with the precision of machines coming off a production belt.” This convoy of death continued for more than five weeks.
The Poles in London would not learn of Katyn until 1943, but they were aware of the grim fate of more than a million other countrymen who had been caught up in the Soviet maw. When Churchill and Anthony Eden pressured them to sign a treaty with Stalin in July 1941 that would pledge military cooperation and restore diplomatic relations between the two countries, the Poles initially resisted.
Churchill would have none of it. Up to that point, Poland had contributed more to Britain’s survival and the overall war effort than any other declared ally. But much as he valued the Poles’ help, Churchill was unable to see the Soviet-Polish conflict through Polish eyes. The Soviets were now Britain’s valued allies, and he was determined to make Poland acknowledge them as such. “Whether you wish it or not, a treaty must be signed,” Eden informed General Sikorski, who finally acceded.
One stipulation of the treaty actually turned out to be of great importance to the Poles—and would be of tremendous help to the Allied cause in the years to come. Under the pact, Stalin was required to release all Poles deported to his country. Although in the end he freed only a fraction of them, there were more than enough to form a new Polish army. Looking more like corpses than soldiers, tens of thousands of Poles—emaciated, toothless, many lacking fingers and toes because of frostbite—streamed out of prisons, slave labor camps, and collective farms, all of them heading for makeshift army camps on the Volga River. Their commander there was Polish general Władysław Anders, who had been wounded twice by the Soviets in 1939 and confined to Lubjanka Prison in Moscow for more than a year. In 1942, Anders moved his makeshift army, accompanied by thousands of Polish women and children, from Soviet Russia to the Middle East, where the scarecrow soldiers began to regain their health and to train in earnest. Called the Polish II Corps, they eventually numbered more than 100,000 men. By 1944, Anders’s army, which would capture Monte Cassino, would be regarded, according to John Keegan, as “one of the greatest fighting formations of the war.”
As important as the prisoners’ release was, however, the deliberate omission from the treaty of one Polish demand was of far more consequence to the country’s long-term future. The Poles wanted to include a section in which the Soviets would promise to return all of the Polish lands they had seized in 1939. Stalin, however, refused to make that pledge. In fact, from the first days of his new alliance with the West, the Soviet leader hinted that he planned not only to retain the annexed territory but eventually to gain power over the rest of Poland as well. The Soviets “neither sought nor cared about Polish friendship,” Count Raczyński remarked. “Their purpose, as of old, was to gain control of Poland and subject it entirely to their will, with the view to absorbing it completely.”
When the Poles expressed their anxieties about all this to Churchill, he again refused to listen. The final treaty left open the question of Poland’s postwar borders.
ONE OF THE TANTALIZING “what-ifs” of World War II is what might have happened to Poland and Czechoslovakia—two vulnerable nations adjoining each other in a strategically important borderland between West and East—if they could have formed some sort of protective federation after the war. For more than a year, officials from the two countries met in London to discuss doing just that. Specifically, they examined the possibility of each nation retaining its sovereignty but cooperating on political and military matters and establishing common economic and foreign policies. As the negotiators knew, such an alliance would result in a formidable combination of manpower, arms, and fortifications, all of which would be vital in ensuring the postwar security and independence of their countries.
On the surface, Poland and Czechoslovakia seemed to have much in common. Having spent many years under foreign domination, both nations had regained their independence following World War I. And although located in eastern Europe, each leaned heavily toward the West. When it came to their national character, however, the differences between them were striking. The Czechs were regarded—and saw themselves—as a sober, sensible, middle-class people who focused on hard work and shied away from flashy heroics. “To survive is an obsession with the Czechs,” Time magazine noted in March 1944. “It is also their greatest talent. They never had notions of grandeur. They always realized that their role is to adjust themselves to conditions not of their making—and survive.”
The Poles were polar opposites. Unlike the Czechs, who had been occupied by the relatively benign Austro-Hungarian empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of Poland had been subjugated by the much more brutal Russians and Prussians, with only the southwestern corner held by Austro-Hungary. Even if the Poles had been inclined to get along with their occupiers—which they were not—it would have done no good. Hotheaded and rebellious by temperament, they repeatedly rose up, particularly against the Russians, and just as repeatedly were crushed. “The Poles are not troublesome as aggressors,” the New York Times correspondent John Darnton observed, “but as victims who refuse to lie down.”
The romantic, emotional Poles tended to disparage the Czechs for what they perceived as their neighbors’ dullness and industriousness. “The Czechs seem to the Poles solid, heavy people, much like liver dumplings,” A. J. Liebling noted in the New Yorker in 1942. For their part, the Czechs regarded the Poles as arrogant, foolhardy, autocratic, and suicidally reckless.
In the early twentieth century, this traditional antipathy was heightened by a virulent dispute over a highly industrialized sliver of land, called Teschen, that lay on the two countries’ common border. After gaining their independence in 1918, both nations claimed Teschen, whose population was more than half Polish but that also had sizable Czech and German minorities. When the Czechs forcibly occupied a large portion of Teschen, Allied leaders at the Paris peace conference ordered them to withdraw and to divide the region fairly with the Poles. Czechoslovakia, however, got the better part of the deal, acquiring most of Teschen’s land and industry.
Furious over the Czechs’ high-handedness, the Poles took their revenge following the 1938 Munich Conference, when Hitler allowed them to seize Teschen from their neighbor. Whatever justice there might have been to Poland’s claim to Teschen, its willingness to capitalize on Czechoslovakia’s misfortune was both a moral failing and an enormous blow to Poland’s reputation in the rest of the world.
Although Teschen remained a point of contention in the early 1940s, both sides in the federation negotiations in London thought a resolution might be possible. A major reason for their optimism lay in the marked differences between the wartime Polish government under General Sikorski and the prewar regime responsible for the snatching of Teschen. Sikorski, an outspoken opponent of the prewar government, and the men around him were far more liberal and democratic than their predecessors and had actively opposed their authoritarian policies. From London, Sikorski promised his countrymen that his administration would institute free elections and social reforms in Poland after the war, similar to those in prewar Czechoslovakia.
But in the end, none of that mattered. When news broke in early 1942 that Sikorski and Beneš had embarked on formal negotiations to mend their countries’ relationship and consider a possible federation, Stalin made it clear he was not pleased. And when Stalin was not pleased, Beneš, who was determined to do nothing to antagonize the Kremlin, paid close attention.
Unlike the Poles, the Czechs were not immediate neighbors of Russia, had never been conquered by Russia, and lived outside the traditional Russian sphere of interest. Beneš, having by now lost all faith in the West, chose to believe that Stalin would protect Czechoslovakia’s independence after the war, even though the Soviets had done nothing to aid the Czechs against German aggression in 1938 and 1939.
After he joined the Allies, Stalin did everything he could to encourage the idea that he was indeed Czechoslovakia’s new best friend. The Soviet Union, for example, was the first Allied nation to recognize Beneš and his followers as the official Czech government in exile, signing the recognition agreement four hours before the British government did the same.
Stalin also made a promise to the Czechs that he refused to offer the Poles: Soviet recognition of their country’s postwar independence, with no interference in its internal affairs. František Moravec, the head of Czech intelligence; Jan Masaryk; and others in the government were skeptical, but Beneš put his faith in Stalin’s pledge. The Czech president “lost all realistic perspective toward Communism, blinding him to new dangers from the East,” Moravec later wrote. “Throughout the war, despite the advice of many, including myself, he persisted in his accommodating attitude toward Soviets and Czech Communists in order to demonstrate his goodwill. He refused to see the ugly reality until it was too late.”
But as Beneš viewed the situation, what choice did he have? He was sure that neither Britain nor the United States would do anything to help his country or the rest of eastern Europe. Wisely or not, he elected to gamble on Stalin, who did not wait long before demanding his first quid pro quo: a stepped-up sabotage campaign by the Czech resistance against the Germans, similar to the one being waged by communist insurgents in France.
LIKE THE POLES, THE CZECHS in London had left intelligence and resistance organizations behind when they had escaped from their homeland in the late 1930s. Their intelligence operation was by far the stronger of the two, designed primarily to transmit material from their prize agent, Abwehr officer Paul Thümmel, to British intelligence in London.
To Beneš’s chagrin, Czechoslovakia’s resistance efforts had not lived up to the country’s intelligence achievements. One explanation for the underground’s relative weakness, especially when compared to Poland’s, was that Czechoslovakia had not been attacked and conquered; instead, it had been traded away to the enemy by its so-called allies. Many Czechs, as demoralized as Beneš by the West’s desertion, saw little reason to put their lives at risk for the Allied cause.
In addition, Germany, at least in the beginning, was far more lenient toward Czechoslovakia, which had a huge armaments industry and rich agricultural lands, than toward Poland. Because the Reich badly needed the Czechs’ cooperation to further its war effort, it did not treat most of the population with the savagery it showed other Slavs. Early in the occupation, “those who kept their mouths shut and heads down could go on about their lives,” Madeleine Albright observed.
The SS, however, did not show the same moderation to students, intellectuals, and others who protested against German rule. After a series of peaceful demonstrations at Czech universities in September 1939, thousands of students were arrested. Some were tortured and executed, while many more were shipped off to German concentration camps. From then until the end of the war, all Czech institutions of higher learning were closed.
After the reprisals, the organized Czech resistance movement, afraid that any kind of dramatic action would touch off further retaliation, burrowed even more deeply underground. Its reticence was highly embarrassing for Beneš, who was being bombarded by urgent Soviet requests for the Czech resistance to come to the aid of the Red Army by sabotaging production of German war matériel and cutting Wehrmacht communications. Churchill and British military leaders, unable to give Stalin the second front he was demanding, were also pressuring the beleaguered Czech president to help the Soviets.
Unfortunately for Beneš, the stepped-up demands from his allies coincided with the appointment of the SS’s infamous Reinhard Heydrich as governor of what was now called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Heydrich began his rule in September 1941 with a bloody Gestapo crackdown on the already weakened Czech resistance movement. “It was futile for us to send messages home asking for an increase in resistance activity,” František Moravec recalled. “We tried it. Nothing happened.”
So Moravec and Beneš turned to their only remaining assets: some 150 Czech soldiers in England who were undergoing training as SOE agents. In the fall of 1941, the Czech government in exile informed resistance leaders that teams of operatives would soon parachute into Czechoslovakia to rebuild the underground and launch sabotage campaigns against enemy communications, railway traffic, and war-related industry. In an obvious attempt to counter any objections from the home front, Beneš warned that “our whole situation would definitely appear in an unfavorable light if we…did not at least keep up with the other [occupied countries].”
There was yet another secret mission planned. It would turn out to be one of the most daring operations of the entire war—nothing less than the assassination of the thirty-eight-year-old “butcher of Prague,” Reinhard Heydrich himself.
ONE OF THE MOST powerful men in the Third Reich, the fair-haired, blue-eyed Heydrich made a vivid impression on all who encountered him. SS colleagues variously described him as “a blond god” and “a predatory animal.” After meeting Heydrich for the first time, Hitler declared, “This man is extraordinarily gifted and extraordinarily dangerous.” According to Heydrich’s deputy, Walter Schellenberg, he “had an ice-cold intellect and was untouched by pangs of conscience….Torture and killing were his daily occupations.”
As the head of the Gestapo and all other SS intelligence and security organizations, Heydrich was already responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of civilians in Europe and the Soviet Union. They included the victims of special SS extermination squads, known as the Einsatzgruppen, which followed German armies into Poland and Soviet lands and machine-gunned Jews, intellectuals, clergymen, political leaders, and anyone else who happened to be on their long kill list. Having been appointed in early 1941 to organize the Final Solution, Heydrich was also hard at work planning the systematic, scientific slaughter of all the Jews of Europe.
Reinhard Heydrich
Yet it was not enough for him to be a killing machine; he also wanted major roles for himself and the SS in shaping the destiny of a Germanized Europe. To further that ambition, he was engaged in a ruthless power struggle with the German military establishment, particularly with the Abwehr, the military’s intelligence operation.
The Abwehr’s patrician chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, despised Heydrich and the murderous thugs working for him. In September 1939, Canaris protested the Einsatzgruppen’s “orgy of massacre” in Poland to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the German armed forces, to no avail. Canaris was opposed “to any infringement whatsoever of the unwritten laws of humanity,” noted Hermann Giskes, a high-level Abwehr officer.
Heydrich, in turn, had nothing but contempt for Canaris, complaining to Hitler and Heinrich Himmler that the Abwehr was far too weak and lenient in its dealings with the citizens of occupied Europe. To bolster his argument, he noted the slowly rising tide of resistance in France and the other captive countries controlled by the German military, where SS operatives did not have the unbridled freedom to kill that they did in the Soviet Union and Poland. Though hardly widespread, this upsurge instilled a sense of dread in top Nazi circles. “The epidemic of assassination is spreading alarmingly in French cities,” Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary in late 1941. “Our Wehrmacht commands are not energetic enough in trying to stop it.”
Heydrich, who saw Czechoslovakia as his first stepping-stone to greater power, exploited the high-level angst by declaring that an “obviously large-scale resistance movement” in the protectorate not only endangered Nazi rule there but posed a major threat to the productivity of Czech industry, so essential to the German war effort. Although patently untrue, his claim convinced Hitler to fire the current Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia and replace him with Heydrich.
The new ruler wasted no time. Within days of his arrival in Prague, he had ordered the arrest of more than six thousand Czechs, many of them in the resistance. By the end of 1941, hundreds of those in captivity had been executed, including a former Czech prime minister, the current army chief of staff, and dozens of other top military officers. In his terror campaign, Heydrich succeeded not only in decimating the resistance movement but in severing all its radio links with London, thus cutting off the flow of intelligence to Britain from Paul Thümmel.
After making his point about the fearful consequences of rebellion, Heydrich offered incentives to those who cooperated with the German war effort. Productive workers in the armament industry, for example, were given higher wages, as well as extra rations for food, cigarettes, and clothing. In his skillful use of such carrot-and-stick techniques, Heydrich managed to stamp out virtually every sign of resistance and to boost the efficiency of Czech industry. In the spring of 1942, the pleased Hitler remarked that “the Czechs at the moment—and particularly at war factories—are working to our complete satisfaction, doing their utmost.”
All this served only to further heighten Allied pressure on Beneš and led him to propose the killing of Heydrich. The assassination, he told František Moravec, would be carried out by “our trained paratroop commandos” but would be presented to the world as an achievement of the domestic resistance movement—“a spontaneous act of national desperation” that “would wipe out our stigma of passivity and help Czechoslovakia internationally.”
Both Beneš and Moravec knew that the cost of Heydrich’s life would be extraordinarily high. At a time when the killing of even a minor German functionary in occupied Europe invariably resulted in the executions of a dozen or more civilians, it boggled the mind to think of the potential human toll following the murder of one of Germany’s most prominent officials. But when Moravec brought the subject up, Beneš replied that, regardless of the harrowing consequences, Heydrich’s assassination was “necessary for the good of the country.”
Only a handful of people—Beneš, Moravec, and a few other senior Czech intelligence officers—knew of the plot. No other official in the Czech government in exile was consulted, nor were the few remaining underground leaders. Beneš ordered that no written record be made, ensuring that nothing about the plan could be traced back to him.
When Moravec first approached officials in SOE’s Czech section for help in training the two agents chosen to kill Heydrich, he told them only that the men had been assigned to carry out a “spectacular assassination”; there was no mention of the target. The two operatives—Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík—were young sergeants in the Czech army, both of whom had fought in France in the spring of 1940 and were expert in the handling of guns and explosives. They had volunteered for the Heydrich mission, even though they knew their chances of survival were all but nil.
In late 1941, the pair underwent several weeks of rigorous training by SOE, which supplied them with equipment that included revolvers, machine guns, grenades, and suicide tablets. But the British had no role in their operational briefings and orders, all of which were handled by Moravec and his men.
A few days after Christmas, Kubiš and Gabčík were parachuted into Czechoslovakia. Throughout the winter and early spring of 1942, they lay dormant, waiting for an opportune time to carry out their mission. As they made their preparations, an additional twenty or so SOE agents were dispatched to Czechoslovakia as part of Beneš’s plan to disrupt the country’s weapons industry and railway networks. To a man, the new arrivals were stunned by the omnipresence of German police controls, which were far tougher than they had been led to expect. “For everyone politically active, there is a permanent Gestapo agent,” one SOE operative remarked.
The sabotage campaign, perhaps not surprisingly, turned out to be a failure. Not one target was damaged or destroyed, and many if not most of the agents were caught and executed. The Germans also recovered a bounty of material parachuted in from England: arms, ammunition, incendiary devices, explosives, and five transmitters. One transmitter, however, remained in the hands of resistance members, who used it to urge London not to send any more SOE operatives. Beneš ignored the plea. The Czech president “had no intention of curtailing the program, whatever dangers there were to the survival of agents,” wrote the historian Callum MacDonald. “Parachutists were expendable.”
To protect their security, Kubiš and Gabčík had been told by Moravec to avoid all underground contacts and to work alone. But when they arrived in Prague, they discovered that it was impossible to follow that order. If they wanted to survive and carry out their mission, they would need the help of the resistance and the few SOE agents still at large, who hid them in a series of safe houses in Prague. It didn’t take long for their protectors to find out why they were in the Czech capital. Stunned by what they considered London’s recklessness, resistance leaders begged the Czech government in exile to cancel the operation.
“This assassination would not be of the least value to the Allies, and for our nation it would have unforeseeable consequences,” Arnošt Heidrich, a former Czech diplomat and member of the resistance, cabled Moravec. “The ferocious repression [that would follow] would make the earlier crackdowns look like child’s play. It would threaten not only hostages and political prisoners, but also thousands of other lives. The nation would be subject to unheard-of reprisals. At the same time, it would wipe out the last remainders of any organization. It would then be impossible for the resistance to be useful to the Allies.”
When Moravec took Heidrich’s anguished appeal to Beneš, he was ordered not to answer it. Again, there was no consultation with other top officials in the government in exile. The operation was to proceed as ordered.
ON A WARM, SUNNY MORNING in late May 1942, two young men carrying heavy briefcases stood quietly on opposite sides of a hairpin curve in a road in downtown Prague. After waiting for more than an hour, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík were growing anxious. They knew that Reinhard Heydrich traveled this route at precisely 9 A.M. each day from his country home to his office in Hradčany Castle. They knew, too, that he almost always rode without a bodyguard, confident that the cowed Czechs would never make an attempt on his life. “Why should my Czechs shoot at me?” Heydrich loftily responded when another Nazi official chided him for his recklessness. His chauffeur—a brawny six-foot, five-inch SS guard—was his only protector.
It was now close to 10:30 A.M.—and still no sign of Heydrich’s black Mercedes convertible. But just as the two Czechs were losing hope, they spotted the car approaching. As expected, it slowed down to negotiate the curve. At that point, Gabčík stepped into the middle of the road, took a small machine gun from under his overcoat, aimed it straight at Heydrich, who was sitting in the back, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun had jammed, and Gabčík had no other weapon.
As the chauffeur slammed on the brakes, Heydrich jumped to his feet, drawing a revolver from his pocket and pointing it at Gabčík. He had not seen Kubiš, who was standing behind the Mercedes and who, at that moment, pulled a bomb from his briefcase and hurled it in Heydrich’s direction. The bomb exploded against the rear wheel of the car, sending it several feet into the air and showering shrapnel everywhere. Seemingly untouched, Heydrich jumped out and squeezed off several shots at Gabčík as he sprinted away. Moments later, though, the Reichsprotecktor clutched his back and collapsed in the road. Hit in the spleen by shrapnel fragments, he was rushed to a hospital, where he died of sepsis eight days later.
As Arnošt Heidrich had predicted, the Reich’s leaders went berserk. For the first time, a key member of the Nazi inner circle had been killed, and everyone wondered who might be next. “[The Führer] foresees the possibility of a rise in assassination attempts if we do not proceed with energetic and ruthless measures,” Goebbels wrote in his diary.
Fearing he might be the next target himself, the Führer authorized a stupendous reward—1 million marks (worth more than $16 million today)—to anyone with information about the assassins’ identities and whereabouts. Himmler, who burst into tears when he heard of Heydrich’s death, flew to Prague to take personal charge of the manhunt. “It is our holy duty to avenge him,” the SS chief exclaimed.
Some 21,000 German troops, most of them SS forces, rampaged through the Czech capital, racing from one building to the next, hammering on doors, ransacking apartments, and shooting anyone they considered suspicious or who didn’t immediately obey their orders. “They’re completely mad,” one German detective said of the SS. An RAF pilot whose plane had been shot down and who was hiding in Prague during that period observed that the searchers “seemed almost insane.”
Those killed in this orgy of violence included a number of Prague residents who had sheltered Kubiš, Gabčík, and other SOE agents. The helpers’ families were also killed. Before he was executed, a teenage boy whose parents had housed the two assassins for a time was shown the severed head of his mother floating in a fish tank.
Czech Jews were targeted as well. On June 9, three days after Heydrich died, a special train left Prague carrying 1,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. Two thousand more soon followed. All those deaths, however, were not enough to satisfy Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. They needed something even more shocking—an action that would demonstrate to the occupied peoples of Europe how catastrophic the consequences of defying German rule could be. As their target, they chose a little village named Lidice, located a few miles northwest of Prague.
One of the SOE agents captured by the Germans before Heydrich’s death had in his possession a letter containing the addresses of two families in Lidice. The Gestapo concluded, wrongly, that the villagers were—or had been—hiding the assassins. In the predawn darkness of June 10, 1942, hundreds of SS troops surrounded Lidice. After all its residents were routed from their homes, the men were shot on the spot and the women and children sent to concentration camps, where most of them later died. The entire village was burned to the ground, and whatever ruins remained were bulldozed. Salt was then scattered over the earth so that nothing living could take root in Lidice again.
Although the SS had not yet found Kubiš and Gabčík, their extraordinary savagery in Lidice and elsewhere, plus the huge reward offer, finally had their intended effect. On June 16, Karel Čurda, one of the few Czech SOE agents still at large, walked into Gestapo headquarters in Prague. Shaken by the extreme reprisals, angry at the seeming callousness of Czech leaders in London to the plight of the resistance, and tempted above all by the enormous bounty, Čurda revealed the identities of the assassins.
Using information provided by Čurda, the Gestapo tracked Kubiš and Gabčík to a church in downtown Prague, where they and five other parachutists from London had been hiding. For more than six hours, the Czech agents engaged in a frantic gun battle with seven hundred SS troops surrounding the church, managing to hold their pursuers off until they ran out of ammunition. Using their last bullets, Kubiš, Gabčík, and the two other agents still alive killed themselves rather than fall into the enemy’s hands.
Altogether, more than five thousand Czech citizens died in the aftermath of the assault on Heydrich. The two-week bloodbath touched off a global outpouring of sympathy and admiration for the Czechs and loathing for the Nazis and their barbarism. Not surprisingly, the focus of the world’s attention was the massacre at Lidice. “If future generations ask us what we were fighting for in this war, we shall tell the story of Lidice,” Frank Knox, the U.S. secretary of the navy, declared. A number of towns in the United States and elsewhere were renamed Lidice in honor of the innocents who had died there.
As Beneš had hoped, Heydrich’s killing and the Germans’ horrific response resulted in a major propaganda triumph for the Czech cause. “I was in the U.S. at the time of Lidice, and was making no progress in our propaganda, having exhausted all the possibilities of the situation,” Jan Masaryk wrote to a British friend. “Then came Lidice, and I had a new lease on life. Czechoslovakia was put on the map again.” As the jubilant Moravec put it, “In the delicate matter of our contribution to the war effort, we jumped from last place to first.”
On newspaper front pages throughout the world, the attack on Heydrich was acclaimed as the work of the Czech resistance movement—the most audacious act yet in its desperate campaign to free the country from German rule. According to the BBC, “the Czechs and all the other enslaved peoples must be proud in the knowledge that they have cast out fear and thus have turned the terror against the Nazis.” The fact that members of the Czech resistance had done everything they could to prevent the assassination remained a closely guarded secret.
Heydrich’s death also provided a rare bit of good news for the overall Allied cause, which in the spring and summer of 1942 was still suffering major defeats on nearly every front. The British, for one, showed their gratitude by formally repudiating the Munich agreement and finally treating Beneš and his government with the respect Beneš believed he deserved. “In view of the trials through which the Czech people have been passing since the death of Heydrich, we think it desirable for psychological reasons to give Beneš as much satisfaction as possible,” the Foreign Office declared in an internal memo.
Yet even as the Czech president enjoyed his reclaimed prestige, his shattered country was plunged into despair and mourning. Instead of damaging the German war effort and lessening the SS’s grip on Czechoslovakia and other occupied countries, Heydrich’s killing, if anything, had done the opposite. “Somebody else would take his place who would be just as awful,” a Prague resident observed. “Unless you could wipe out the whole of the Gestapo, it wouldn’t really matter.”
Amazingly, Beneš believed that Heydrich’s killing would unite the Czech people and inspire many more of them to stand up against their occupiers. In fact, it destroyed what remained of a badly crippled movement. In a report in late 1942, SOE concluded that there was no longer any sign of “open resistance” in Czechoslovakia. “By his death, Heydrich fulfilled his primary ambition—the pacification of the Protectorate,” the Czech historian Vojtech Mastny pointed out.
Perhaps even worse, the bloody German dragnet ended up annihilating virtually all of Moravec’s intelligence networks. Paul Thümmel was captured and eventually executed, putting an end to the flow of vital military information he had provided to London over the previous four years.
As the catastrophic effects of Heydrich’s killing became clearer, both the British and Beneš retreated from taking responsibility for what had happened. Churchill never mentioned it in his history of World War II, while his government insisted that it had been solely a Czech operation. Not until 1994, when selected SOE files were released, was it revealed that several top SOE officials had known beforehand who the target was to be.
Beneš, for his part, denied for the rest of his life that he had played any role in the assassination. Calling the idea “a complete fabrication,” he claimed that “no order for Heydrich’s murder was ever issued from London. In fact, the whole Nazi theory about the fight for freedom being conducted and ordered from London is false. All acts of resistance in the homeland [were] directed and decided by the headquarters there.” Thirty years after the war’s end, Moravec, in his memoirs, finally acknowledged Beneš’s involvement, as well as his own.
As the conflict dragged on and the glow of Beneš’s propaganda victory dimmed, he realized that the assassination and its long-term impact had become in fact a major political problem. Unable to meet Stalin’s continued demands for the destruction of the Czech munitions industry and the disruption of its railway network, Beneš was determined to appease the Soviet leader in other ways. Czechoslovakia, he vowed, would never share the woeful postwar fate that he was convinced lay in wait for Poland.