Jozef Gabčík

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Jozef Gabčík
Commemorative plaque at the Church of St. Cyril and Method in Prague in memory of the last fight of Heydrich's assassins

Jozef Gabčík (born April 8, 1912 in Poluvsie , † June 18, 1942 in Prague ) was a Czechoslovak resistance fighter during the Second World War , who carried out the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942 together with Jan Kubiš . The killing of the Deputy Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia , who was responsible for numerous Nazi crimes, was the only successful attack on a leading Nazi functionary.

Life

Origin and early years

Jozef Gabčík, born at the time of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy , grew up in the Slovak part of Czechoslovakia, which was founded in 1918 . In the 1920s he did an apprenticeship as a blacksmith in the Bohemian town of Kostelec nad Vltavou and later also trained as a watchmaker. In 1927 he attended the business school in nearby Kovářov . He later worked in a chemical plant in Žilina in northern Slovakia .

Second World War

After the defeat of Czechoslovakia by National Socialist Germany in March 1939, he gave up his job and initially went to Poland to join the Czechoslovaks in exile. In 1940 he fought as a member of the Foreign Legion in France against the German invaders and after the evacuation from Dunkirk he joined the free Czechoslovak armed forces organized by the exiled President Edvard Beneš in Great Britain. At Cholmondeley Castle, a British Army training camp in Cheshire , he was trained as a parachutist. Together with Jan Kubiš, whom he had already met in Poland, Gabčík applied to the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) to carry out secret commandos in the German-occupied part of Czechoslovakia, the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia .

Operation Anthropoid

Because of their achievements and because they represented both parts of their home country because of their origins - Kubiš was Czech, Gabčík Slovak - they were selected for Operation Anthropoid in 1941 . Their goal was to kill the Deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, who was at the same time SS-Obergruppenführer and head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) and as such was significantly involved in the planning of the Holocaust .

On December 28, 1941, Kubiš and Gabčík were parachuted down near Prague. In the following months they first took part in a sabotage operation in Pilsen and then scouted the route that Heydrich took every day from his residence outside of Prague to his official residence on the Hradschin. The assassination attempt was successful on May 27, 1942: Gabčík stopped Heydrich's company car with a machine gun at its level, which, however, failed due to a jam. Kubiš then dropped a bomb on Heydrich, which injured him so badly that he died in hospital a week later on June 4th.

The two assassins were initially able to flee and found shelter with members of the resistance. However, Karel Čurda , a member of the Out Distance commando unit flown in from England , betrayed the two of them and their helpers, so that on the morning of June 18, 1942 the Gestapo managed to find their hiding place, the crypt of the Cyril and Methodist Church in Prague , to detect. There was a violent firefight, at the beginning of which Kubiš was wounded. He died on the way to the hospital. The remaining resistance fighters gave the SS and the police a shooting that lasted several hours. When the crypt was flooded and the resistors ran out of ammunition, the last four of them, including Gabčík, killed themselves.

Honors

Kubiš and Gabčík, who had succeeded in the only successful assassination attempt on a high-ranking official of the Nazi regime, were revered as national heroes in Czechoslovakia after the war. After Jozef Gabčík the community was Gabčíkovo in southern Slovakia and consequently the Danube - hydro power plant Gabčíkovo named. Both in the capitals of Slovakia and the Czech Republic , Bratislava and Prague, as well as in Žilina, the former residence of the resistance fighter, streets bear his name. On the 75th anniversary of the assassination, Jozef Gabčík was posthumously awarded the rank of major general in Slovakia.

Film adaptations

The events of the Heydrich assassination have been filmed several times, including:

literature

Web links

Commons : Jozef Gabčík  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Gabčík, Jozef
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Czechoslovak resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH Poluvsie
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 1942
Place of death Prague