Operation Anthropoid

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heydrich's Mercedes-Benz W 142 car after the assassination attempt on May 27, 1942

The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich on 27 May 1942 in Prague was the only successful direct attack on a member of the Nazi leadership in the era of National Socialism and its domain. The English code name for this act was Operation Anthropoid ; including it was partly depicted in historiography and later on in films and in various literature. The Deputy Reich Protector in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and representative of the German Reich in occupied Czechoslovakia was also a principal in charge of the Gestapo in the German Reich ( RSHA ) and to exterminate the Jews in Europe pursued commissioned ( extermination of the Jews / Shoah / Holocaust . With respect to a Hitler quote in Nazi jargon as the final solution ). The successful attack was by two non-commissioned officers of the Czechoslovak army in exile , January Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík , carried out for that purpose in a commando action had been introduced to their home from England.

The run-up, meaning and consequences

Heydrich exercised de facto power of the occupiers in 1939 by the German Reich annexed areas of Czechoslovakia from. As a close associate of Himmler , head of the Reich Security Main Office and obergruppenführer / General of Police he was the authoritative organizer of the so-called final solution . Seriously injured in the attack, he died eight days later in the hospital of a wound infection. He received a state funeral in Berlin .

The operation was since 1941 the Czechoslovak military intelligence service of the London government in exile under František Moravec and the British Special Operations Executive was planned in London (SOE). In December 1941 Kubiš, Gabčík and other resistance fighters jumped with parachutes near Prague. After the attack, both were betrayed along with five supporters and discovered in their hiding place in the Karl Borromeo Church in Prague (since 1935 Church of St. Cyril and Methodius ). After 350 SS men had encircled them in the crypt , there was a fire fight lasting several hours. To avoid arrest, the last four surviving resistance fighters committed suicide .

As an act of revenge, German police forces, with the help of the Czech gendarmerie, destroyed two entire villages: Lidice on June 10th and Ležáky on June 24th, 1942. All residents were killed or abducted. The Gestapo , the SD , the Schutzpolizei under the command of SS officers, a special commission and the commander of the Sipo in Prague were involved in this terrorist operation . In addition, hundreds of Czechs were arrested nationwide in retaliation and deported to concentration camps in Germany .

background

Jozef Gabčík (1912–1942)

After the invasion of the Wehrmacht and with it the destruction of the rest of the Czech Republic, part of the Czech government fled to England. In London, the former President Edvard Beneš established a government in exile which carried out acts of sabotage to consolidate its reputation in its occupied homeland . For this purpose, the British trained Czech and Slovak soldiers who jumped parachutes over the occupied area at night. The agents should contact the Czech underground and carry out actions such as blowing up factories and setting up radio direction finders for orientation for Allied bombers. But since the surveillance system and the pressure of the Germans on the Czech population were underestimated, the actions were mostly unsuccessful.

In addition to his function as SS-Obergruppenführer and general of the police, Heydrich also headed the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) from September 1939 . In October 1941 he became Deputy Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia and was thus responsible for the brutal persecution of the Czechoslovak resistance . The associated wave of repression earned him the nickname butcher of Prague or executioner of Prague among the local population .

In the weeks leading up to the attack, the Czech resistance had grown stronger. Heydrich, who had sent euphemistic reports to Martin Bormann since September 1941 , admitted in a letter to Bormann on May 19, 1942 for the first time that the situation in the Protectorate had worsened, and said at a press conference in Prague on May 26, 1942 , one day before the attack:

“I feel and see that the foreign propaganda and the defeatist and anti-German whisper propaganda in the area is on the increase again considerably. [...] Even the small acts of sabotage, which do less damage than demonstrate an oppositional spirit, have increased. "

The code name ( anthropoid , ancient Greek for "human-like") referred to the scientific mammal name Anthropoidea for higher primates , ie male animals or human-like monkeys . At the same time, consciously or unconsciously, it was an ironic allusion to the Nazi racial doctrine of the “ master man ”, whose embodiment Heydrich was considered to be.

Enterprise

planning

Jan Kubiš (1913-1942)

Preparations for the company with the British SOE began on October 20, 1941. Two men were selected for the operation, representing both parts of Czechoslovakia, the Slovak Warrant Officer Jozef Gabčík and the Czech Staff Sergeant Karel Svoboda. During training, the latter suffered a head injury and was replaced by the Czech Jan Kubiš . Because of his late entry, Kubiš could not finish his combat training. In addition, it was not possible for him to obtain the necessary papers in the event of a police check in occupied Czechoslovakia.

Jump over Bohemia

Gabčík and Kubiš reached Czechoslovak airspace on December 29, 1941 at 2:24 a.m. with a Halifax of the 138th Special Squadron of the Royal Air Force and jumped off. They were accompanied by seven other members of the army in exile who were supposed to carry out other operations in the German hinterland. Gabčík and Kubiš jumped off at Nehvizdy near Prague . The original destination of Pilsen was not reached because the pilots had difficulty orienting themselves, so the two parachutists had to visit the city independently to contact the local resistance. From there they traveled on to Prague.

Assassination attempt in Prague

On May 27, 1942 at 10:30 a.m. Heydrich set off from his property in Panenské Břežany to Prague Castle in his company car, a Mercedes-Benz with the top down. Gabčík and Kubiš took up a position at a tram stop in Libeň , Prague 8, near the Bulowka hospital. This was on a bend in which Heydrich's driver, SS-Oberscharführer Klein, had to brake. As the car turned into the curve, Gabčík stood on the road and tried to fire his Sten Gun , but it failed due to a jam. Kubiš then threw a modified anti-tank shell at the car, but missed the interior. The explosion destroyed the rear right wheel arch. Splinters injured Kubiš himself, but also penetrated the upholstery of the car seats and, mixed with metal and fibers, hit Heydrich's body.

Heydrich's death

Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942)

Heydrich was taken to Bulowka Hospital, which was just 250 meters away, after the attack. There he operated on Josef Hohlbaum , head of surgery at Charles University in Prague , under the assistance of Walter Dick , who headed the hospital's surgery. The doctors rescued the collapsed left lung, removed fragments of the broken eleventh rib and sewed Heydrich's torn diaphragm . His spleen, however, had to be removed. She had been hit by shrapnel and upholstery material. The one-hour operation went without complications. Heydrich's direct superior, Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler , sent his personal physician Karl Gebhardt to Prague after the events became known . This arrived that same evening. On May 29th, Heydrich was completely in the care of SS doctors. Even Adolf Hitler's personal physician, Theodor Morell and Ferdinand Sauerbruch offered their help. In connection with the general postoperative treatment Heydrich was given a large amount of morphine . Morell, however, was of the opinion that the patient should be given antibiotics ( sulfonamides ). Heydrich's condition initially appeared to be improving, but on June 3 there was a sudden deterioration with a high fever and sepsis from peritonitis , probably caused by unrecognized particles of the car's upholstery getting into the abdominal cavity . Had penicillin been used, which was not available, “Heydrich would have survived”. He slipped into a coma and died on June 4, 1942 at 4:30 a.m.

A study in 2012 came to the conclusion that the exact cause of death has not yet been conclusively clarified. According to this, the medical thesis that Heydrich died of a gas fire , which has so far been widely held, is not tenable as the only medical cause based on current knowledge.

The death of the soldiers and resistance fighters involved

The last hiding place of the fighters: the Prague Church of St. Cyrill u. Method , in which the assassins holed up (photography 2018)
Memorial plaque (photo 2017)

With the help of two Prague families, the assassins were initially able to go into hiding and later, with the help of Bishop Gorazd, they could hide in the Church of St. Cyril and Method in Prague (name until 1935 Borromeo Church). The German occupation forces only tracked them down after the Gestapo arrested the Czech resistance fighter Karel Čurda . For the 500,000  Reichsmark bounty, he revealed the addresses of several "safe houses" to the German security agencies . Among them was the house of the Moravec family in Žižkov , which the Germans stormed on June 17, 1942. During the search, Ms. Moravec committed suicide with a potassium cyanide capsule. Her husband did not reveal anything during the interrogation. Her son Ata Moravec, who was on a trip, was mentally tortured after being arrested during interrogation. The investigating officer, the Gestapo commissioner Heinz Pannwitz , placed his mother's head in formalin in front of him and threatened him that if he did not confess, he could still “have his father's head”. Then Ata Moravec collapsed and betrayed the hiding place in the church.

Thereupon, under the orders of the SS brigade leader and commander of the Waffen SS in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Karl von Treuenfeld , the church was cordoned off by 800 SS men in the early morning hours of June 18, 1942, in order to storm it. One of the SS members involved, Fritz Swoboda , described to his cellmate in a US prison camp two years later how the storm was going on. After the request to surrender had been answered by the assassins and other partisans, a total of seven people, with curses and the singing of the Czech national anthem, the church was first shot at from adjacent buildings, with machine guns also being used. After a two-hour firefight and the penetration of the German command into the interior of the church, three assassins, including Kubiš, were already dead. The fighting now shifted to the crypt of the church, where Gabčík had fled with the last three survivors. After the SS introduced tear gas and, with the help of the fire brigade, began to flood the underground rooms of the church with water, all of the surviving assassins finally committed suicide. After seven hours at around 11 a.m., the fighting ended with the killing of the last resistance fighter. The Treuenfelds' official report only mentions three dead, no injuries. But there are also statements with higher loss figures. The historian Haasis believes the filmmaker and journalist Janusz Piekałkiewicz's statement of 14 dead and 21, some seriously wounded, in his compilation film about the assassination attempt to be untrustworthy.

The bishop of the St. Cyril and Methodius Church Gorazd (Matěj Pavlík) was arrested on June 27, 1942 by the German occupation authorities. On September 3 of the same year, he and three other employees were sentenced to death in a show trial and murdered by a firing squad ( peloton ) a day later at the Kobylisy shooting range . Gorazd is venerated as a martyr by the Orthodox Church .

Above the window of the church - from which the assassins fought the battle with the SS - is a memorial plaque next to the bullet holes.

Retaliation

After Heydrich's death, the National Socialists took massive retaliation against the Czech civilian population. This led to the Lidice massacre on 9/10. June 1942 and the complete destruction of Ležáky . In both cases, the entire male population as well as a large proportion of the women and children were killed.

Political Consequences

In a publication issued by the Czech Ministry of Defense in 2002, Operation Anthropoid is placed in a geopolitical context. After Heydrich's elimination and the bloody reprisals of the National Socialists against the Czech population, the British government revised its position on the Munich Agreement . On August 5, 1942, the British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden sent the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk a letter with which Great Britain revoked its consent to the Munich Agreement and thus to the separation of the Sudetenland . On September 29, 1942, Foreign Minister Masaryk - in the presence of General Charles de Gaulle and the exile Prime Minister Jan Šrámek - signed a proclamation of the French National Assembly in which the Munich Agreement was declared null and void from the outset. This laid the foundation for Czechoslovakia to be rebuilt in 1945 within its original borders before 1938. The publication by Michal Burian , Aleš Knížek , Jiři Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík ends with the sentence: "The mission of the parachute operation Anthropoid has been achieved."

On the side of the Nazi state:

  • The Action Reinhardt has now turn into a cover name: the mass murder of millions of the Nazi state in Poland, the Soviet Union and other countries. Heydrich's first name was eponymous. Several Nazi extermination camps are associated with this "action" under Heydrich's name, one of the great crimes against humanity committed by the National Socialists between July 1942 and October 1943.

Commemoration

Memorial column in Prague at the site of Heydrich's attack (photo 2013)
  • Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík were revered as national heroes in restored Czechoslovakia after the war . Several places and streets in the Czech Republic and Slovakia still bear their names today.

Movies

Games

Other members of the command

literature

  • Alan Burgess: Seven men at dawn - The attack on Heydrich (translated from English by Ursula Bethke); Sigbert Mohn Verlag, Gütersloh 1967.
  • Michal Burian, Maj Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich, Maj Eduard Stehlík: ASSASSINATION - Operation ANTHROPOID 1941–1942 . Special Purpose Publications Editorial Office of the Military Information and Service Agency. Prague 2002. online here .
  • Robert Gerwarth : Reinhard Heydrich. Biography . Siedler, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-88680-894-6 .
  • Hellmut G. Haasis : Death in Prague - The assassination attempt on Heydrich ; Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, ISBN 3-498-02965-7 .
  • Miroslav Ivanov : The executioner of Prague - The assassination attempt on Heydrich (translated from the Czech by Hugo Kaminský); edition q Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-86124-149-8 .

Web links

Commons : Operation Anthropoid  - Collection of Images

Remarks

  1. ^ The co-organizer of the operation, head of the Czechoslovak military intelligence service in London, Brigadier General František Moravec, cited in his book (cf. František Moravec: Špión, jemuž nevěřili . 68 Publishers, Toronto 1977, ISBN 0-88781-032-2 , p . 293), the jump did not take place until the end of April 1942, which, however, is not confirmed by other sources and was relativized in later editions of his book.
  2. ↑ Position see 50 ° 7 '6 "  N , 14 ° 27' 53"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 7 '6 "  N , 14 ° 27' 53"  E

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Gerwarth: Reinhard Heydrich. Biography . Siedler, Munich 2011, p. 18 ff.
  2. ^ Robert Gerwarth: Reinhard Heydrich. Biography . Siedler, Munich 2011, p. 327 ff.
  3. ^ Robert Gerwarth: Reinhard Heydrich. Biography . Siedler, Munich 2011, p. 327.
  4. ↑ a b c Michal Burian, Maj Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich, Maj Eduard Stehlík: Atentát: Operace Anthropoid 1941–1942 . Publication of the Vojenský historický ústav VHÚ (Military History Institute) of the Ministry of Defense of the Czech Republic, AVIS 2007 (second edition), pp. 35, 44f. and 64, ISBN 978-80-7278-411-0 , online at: army.cz/.../...cz.pdf ; English version (translation): Michal Burian, Maj Aleš Knížek, Jiří Rajlich, Maj Eduard Stehlík: ASSASSINATION - Operation ANTHROPOID 1941–1942 , AVIS 2002, pp. 35, 44f. and 64, ISBN 80-7278-158-8 , online at: army.cz/.../...en.pdf
  5. ↑ RJ Defalque, AJ Wright: The Puzzling Death of Reinhard Heydrich . In: Bulletin of Anesthesia History , Vol. 27, No. 1, January 2009, p. 1 (PDF; 1 MB) ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and still Not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / aha.anesthesia.wisc.edu
  6. ^ Robert Gerwarth: Reinhard Heydrich: Biography . Siedler, Munich 2011, p. 30 f.
  7. ↑ Nicolas Hardt: The attack in Prague in 1942 and surgery - between science and politics , in: German Society for Surgery (ed.): Mitteilungen , Heft 2/2012, pp. 157-164.
  8. ^ Hellmut G. Haasis: Death in Prague - The attack on Heydrich ; Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, ISBN 3-498-02965-7 , p. 139 ff.
  9. ↑ René Schlott: Assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich: The agony of the Reich Protector. In: Spiegel Online . May 25, 2017. Retrieved June 9, 2018 .
  10. ↑ See Felix Römer : Comrades. The Wehrmacht from within. Piper, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-492-30417-7 , p. 405 f.
  11. ^ Hellmut G. Haasis: Death in Prague - The attack on Heydrich ; Rowohlt, Reinbek 2002, ISBN 3-498-02965-7 , p. 153.
  12. ↑ Michal Burian, Aleš Knížek, Jiři Rajlich and Eduard Stehlík: ASSASSINATION , Operation Anthropoid 1941–1942, accessed on June 12, 2017.
  13. ^ Andreas Wiedemann: The Reinhard Heydrich Foundation in Prague (1942–1945). Hannah Arendt Institute for Research on Totalitarianism, Dresden 2000, p. 44ff., P. 54.
  14. ^ Günther Morsch, Bertrand Perz: New studies on National Socialist mass killings by poison gas. Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940938-99-2 , p. Roman 17.