Prague. Operation Anthropoid. Operation Anthropoid for the assassination of SS-Obergruppenführer and Police General Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Main Security Office, RSHA), and Reichsprotektor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The operation was prepared by the British Special Operations Executive with the approval of the Czech government-in-exile. Heydrich was only wounded in the attack, but later died of his injuries (perhaps from the SOE’s use of botulinum or similar to infect the bomb shrapnel) on June 4, 1942. His death (Heydrich was very close to Hitler and one of the main architects of the Final Solution for the Jews) led the SS to take terrible revenge on the local population. 13,000 people were arrested and interrogated, approximately 5,000 were shot. The towns of Lidice and Ležáky were destroyed, their citizens killed or imprisoned. The SOE agents, Slovak Jozef Gabčík and Czech Jan Kubiš, who carried out the attack, were hunted by the Gestapo and the SS. With large sums of money and interrogations, the Gestapo managed to gain access to an SOE safe house. On June 17, 1942, the SS and Gestapo broke into the safe house. The owner of the house asked to use the bathroom and swallowed a cyanide capsule. Her 17-year-old son, Ata, was interrogated and tortured for the entire day. He was shown his mother’s severed head and threatened to do the same to his father. Ata relented and told the Gestapo what they wanted to know. He was executed in Mauthausen on October 24, 1942. On June 18, 750 SS men besieged the church where two paratroopers, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, were besieged along with other members of the SOE. The firefight lasted two hours. According to one source, 14 SS men lost their lives. The church was riddled with machine gun fire and doused with tear gas. A fire truck was then sent to flood it. Kubiš was killed along with others in the firefight, while Gabčík committed suicide at the end of the fighting.
