ANTHROPOID• 19men would step into the road and attack the open-topped limousine.
The two SOE assassins were a pair of Czech paratroopers, Jan Kubis
and Josef Gabcik, fromanthropoid; they were supported by two
members ofout distance, a three-man team that had arrived in
March, Josef Valcik and Adolf Opalka. During the ambush, Gabcik’s
Sten gun jammed at the vital moment, but Heydrich was mortally
wounded by a Mills grenade thrown by Kubis. The SOE men escaped
the scene, only to be betrayed to the Gestapo soon afterward by the
third member ofout distance, Karel Curda, who identified his
comrades and their hiding place in return for a reward. Curda alone
survived the war—to be hanged for treachery.
anthropoidwas to prove controversial because of the appalling
civilian reprisals taken by the Nazi occupation forces. Thousands
perished in a wave of executions, and the populations of whole vil-
lages were deported to concentration camps. One village, Lidice, was
systematically reduced to rubble; the site remains untouched to this
day as a memorial to those who were murdered. More than 13,000
people were arrested in the aftermath of Heydrich’s assassination,
prompting many to wonder whether SOE’s Czech Section had been
wise to launch such a provocative operation. In fact, however, SOE
did little more than give logistical support toanthropoid, for the
plan was certainly Czech in origin, having been hatched by the Czech
government-in-exile in London, initially with SS-Gruppenfu ̈hrer
Karl Hermann Frank, theprotektor’s hated state secretary, as the tar-
get. The assassins Kubis and Gabcik, who had transferred to the Free
Czech Army from the French Foreign Legion, had been trained by
SOE in Scotland and at Bellasis (STS 2) and had undergone their
parachute course at RAF Ringway, but throughout they were still of-
ficially attached to the Czech 1st Brigade at Cholmondeley Castle,
near Whitchurch in Cheshire. TheSecret Intelligence Servicewas
also a party toanthropoid, as confirmed by the then head of the
Czech Deuxie`me Bureau,ColonelFrantisek Moravec,whore-
called that the scheme ‘‘was necessarily shared with several officials
of the BritishMI6, who worked with us on the technical side.’’an-
thropoid’s effect was to decimate the number of potential resisters
in Czechoslovakia, reduce the willingness of the inhabitants to help
parachutists, and ensure that SOE’s Czech Section would play only
a peripheral role in the eventual liberation of that country.