Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  Heydrich fell back into the car, clutching his stomach with one hand, waving his gun with the other. Kubiš, despite bomb splinters in his own chest and forehead, swung himself onto his bicycle and pedaled furiously toward the nearby neighborhood of Liben. The chauffeur jumped from the car and, having failed to intercept Kubiš, took off after Gabčík, who had swapped his machine gun for a revolver and was sprinting—tie flying in the breeze—up the hill in the direction from which the car had come.

  Heydrich’s damaged car

  CTK PHOTO

  The two men ran, trading shots, until Gabčík, out of breath, slipped down a back street and into a butcher shop that, as poor luck would have it, was owned by a fascist. The startled butcher dashed to the sidewalk, where he motioned frantically to the chauffeur, who took cover behind a post and began firing into the shop. Gabčík’s pistol barked in reply, and the driver grunted, grabbing his leg. Seeing his chance, the young man darted back into the street and fled, this time chased by the butcher, whom he soon outran.

  Valčik and Opálka got away undetected. That evening and in the harrowing days that followed, Madam Moravcová and resistance leaders moved stealthily to hide the assailants, bind Kubiš’s wounds, and fashion a plan for what to do next.

  Heydrich, meanwhile, had been rushed to Bulovka Hospital in a commandeered two-cylinder Tatra van, stretched out in the back among crates of floor wax and tins of furniture polish. To the eyes of the van’s frightened driver, the wounded man looked “in a bad way, yellow as a lemon and hardly able to stand.” A Czech doctor swabbed Heydrich’s three-inch-deep wound, but almost immediately German physicians took control. They determined that the patient required an operation and proceeded that afternoon to reinflate his left lung, extract the tip of a fractured rib, suture the torn diaphragm, and remove the spleen, which contained a mix of grenade fragments and upholstery fibers.

  Himmler was quick to visit his fallen protégé in the hospital and to send his personal physician to monitor the patient’s care. For a time, Heydrich’s condition appeared to stabilize, but then he developed a fever. On June 3, he lapsed into a coma before dying the next day at 4:30 a.m. The apparent cause was blood poisoning. His body was taken to Prague Castle to lie in state, and on June 9, the funeral was held in Berlin. Hitler spoke, and later honored the corpse by attaching its name to an SS unit operating on the eastern front.

  “THE SHOTS WHICH sounded in Prague on the 27th of May,” declared my father in a broadcast three days after the attack, “weren’t an isolated event . . . they showed the tension which started on the 15th of March 1939. . . . No nation can accept the fate of slaves or give up the right to exist. The proud Czech people cannot do that.”

  The killing of the Butcher of Prague, as he was called in the West, was front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic. There were, however, no claims of responsibility. The Germans had not identified any suspects and were without firm leads. In London, Beneš said nothing; Jan Masaryk, in New York, was not so tight-lipped. Asked by NBC whether Heydrich might have been struck down by a Gestapo rival, Masaryk could not resist the most transparent of hints. “From certain indications upon which I would not like to enlarge today,” he said, “I am definitely of the opinion that it was the Czech people who did this beautiful job. I would even go so far as to say that there were people living at home or people who came from some free country, perhaps England, to perform this duty to humanity.” If that were not clear enough, Masaryk added, “You know . . . there is a gadget called a parachute.”

  The assassination led to the final break between the London exiles and the protectorate’s puppet government. Hácha attended a memorial service for Heydrich in Prague, urged the public to cooperate in the investigation, and joined in offering a reward for help in identifying the killers. Further, he blamed Beneš for every hardship being experienced by the Czech population, even identifying the president as the nation’s number one enemy. That was too much for my father. In his broadcast on May 30, he explained that the government in exile had never accused Hácha of being a “traitor or a quisling because we were aware of the conditions under which the so-called protectorate was formed.” But he said that the cabinet should have resigned rather than serve one day next to Heydrich. “They would have done better if they had gone at the right time, saving themselves from this heavy responsibility and dishonor.”

  For the exile government in England, this was a period of intense anxiety. Beneš and his intelligence staff were gratified by the success of the mission but in the dark about what had happened to the assassins. As their mounting animus toward Hácha reflected, it was essential to win the competition for public opinion back home. Each day the BBC broadcasts reminded the Czechs and the world of Heydrich’s crimes. “The leaders of today’s Germany and the whole German nation are responsible,” said my father. He added, quoting Stalin, “We must hate our enemy wholeheartedly and from the depth of our soul if we are to beat him.”

  On the evening of June 5, my father was in the middle of reading a news bulletin about the death of Heydrich when the British censor terminated the audio in midsentence. Apparently, the text had not been fully vetted. There is no record of my father’s reaction, but I did come across one piece of evidence. In a letter of complaint to the BBC, the censor asked, “Can Korbel be told to keep his shouting to himself?” Clearly, emotions were running high.

  WHEN FIRST NOTIFIED of the shooting, Hitler ordered the execution of all Czech political prisoners and the random arrest of 10,000 more. Warned by aides against such massive reprisals, he reconsidered, settling on a more tactical but no less barbaric response.

  Lidice was a mining village about twenty miles north of Prague, not far from the Masaryk family’s country home. The Gestapo had received a tip that the townspeople had given aid to parachutists, possibly even the killers of Heydrich. The report was untrue, but on the evening of June 9, a few hours after Heydrich’s funeral, SS troops surrounded the village. They searched each house, confiscated valuables, and ordered the residents to assemble. At dawn, the men, 173 in all, were separated from their families and shot.

  The women and children were trucked to a school gymnasium in the next town, where they were questioned and inspected. A number of the youngest, those with fair hair and a Nordic face, were given to Aryan families to be raised as Germans. The remaining children (about eighty of them) went to Poland, first to Łódź, then to Chelmno, where on July 2 they were murdered in the gas chambers. The women were sent to concentration camps. Citizens of Lidice who were away at the time of the massacre, or working a night shift, were tracked down and killed. Every building was burned or dynamited and the cemetery plowed under. The name of the town was excised from maps. Even a river running through it was diverted.

  Pictures of Lidice taken before the massacre feature a church steeple and the sharply slanted roofs common among residences in the Bohemian countryside. The houses are of good size and arrayed in an irregular pattern atop gently sloping land on three sides of the church. A line of poplar trees stands guard against the northern wind. Photographs made after the killings show only a large area of grassland, scarred by a squarish shape where all vegetation had been scraped off. There are no broken timbers visible, no burned embers, no stone foundations or other signs of settlement. There is nothing. The line of poplars was left behind, but each was beheaded—chopped off a few feet from the ground. The Nazis filmed it all. Returning to Prague, one SS man confided to a Czech security official, “We didn’t find any traitors, but the day was glorious.”

  The burning of Lidice

  CTK PHOTO

  TO THE NAZIS, the attack on Heydrich was a challenge to their dominance that not even the liquidation of Lidice could extinguish. From Berlin, the command went forth that the killers must be held to account. Thousands of homes, stores, and warehouses were searched. Hundreds of potential suspects were picked up and interrogated. The exhibits in the in
quiry—Gabčík’s briefcase and Kubiš’s bicycle—were put on public display. Anyone with information leading to the identity of the killers could count on the gratitude of the führer and a generous reward. Meanwhile, the wrong remark overheard in a bar or a passing comment on the street could mean death. “Approval of the assassination” was deemed a capital offense, for which 477 Czechs would be executed.

  Tereza Kašperová, the mother of a seven-year-old, recalled that “right through the whole city of Prague, the Gestapo and the SS searched flats and houses, shouting and roaring, looking everywhere for the men who were responsible for the attack.” They searched her house, too, but neglected to look behind the large blue-and-yellow cushion that had been wedged between a sofa and the wall, thus failing to note that behind the cushion was a cupboard and that inside the cupboard was Lieutenant Opálka.

  Despite the frenzied searching, no parachutists were captured between the day of the attack and the destruction of Lidice. Seven were being sheltered in Prague, including the four participants in the assassination (Kubiš, Gabčík, Opálka, and Valčik). The Resistance decided that it would be wiser to bring the men together in one place than to leave them dispersed and at risk in safe houses with security patrols combing the city. Jan Sonnevend, the local leader of the Christian Orthodox Church, observed that the Nazis had not been searching religious buildings with any degree of rigor. He suggested as a hiding place the crypt beneath Karel Boromejsky, a sanctuary dedicated to Cyril and Methodius, the two saints who had brought Christianity to the Czech lands a thousand years before.

  When Marie Moravcová was sure the parachutists were safely hidden, she and her family left Prague for several days. Part of her journey took her to Pardubice, the site of the transmitter; there she asked for and was given a cyanide capsule. Returning to Prague, she began again to bustle about, taking parcels of food, coffee, tobacco, and kerosene to intermediaries, who saw that they reached the church. Sometimes the wife of the caretaker handled the packages; they took different routes and found various spots in which to rendezvous.

  Marie told no one where the men were but reported to intimates that they were in high spirits, even though she knew it to be untrue. The men slept in spaces cut from the wall that had been used to store the coffins of monks. Even in June, the crypt was cold. A couple of small stoves were all the fugitives had for cooking and heat. A bigger problem was morale. The men had access to newspapers and knew that hundreds of Czechs were being killed and thousands more detained and harassed as a result of the assassination. Gabčík and Kubiš discussed ways to take full responsibility, then commit suicide.

  Resistance leaders urged them to forget such thoughts and concentrate on escape. A scheme was devised whereby four of the seven parachutists would be taken to a nearby town in a police car. The others would be concealed in coffins and transported to a second town. The whole group would then be sent to a clandestine airstrip in the mountains from which a plane would carry them to London. The rescue operation was scheduled for Friday, June 19.

  That Monday, Madam Moravcová set off again with a parcel. When she returned, she told the caretaker of her apartment house that she would be preparing something special for Wednesday—one of the parachutists had a birthday.

  AMONG THE DISTINCTIVE figures sculpted into the Saint Vitus cathedral overlooking Prague is that of the devil tearing Judas Iscariot’s soul from his mouth.

  Karel Čurda had been in the protectorate for two months. His parachute team had had the job of planting radio beacons to aid in the Allied bombing of the Škoda Works—a mission that did not work out. He had then gone to Prague, where he had met some of the other parachutists but played no role in the assassination. After the attack, he fled to his family home in southern Bohemia, where he took refuge in a barn. As the hours and days crawled by, he began to review his options. He knew about Lidice and the Nazi threats to kill yet more innocent Czechs. He had barely evaded capture himself and was, by his presence, putting his entire family at risk. He had also learned of the rich reward that was on offer for information leading to the assassins. On June 16, he came to a decision, then set out for Prague and the headquarters of the state police. He was ready to betray his country and friends. But how much damage could he inflict? He was unsure exactly who among his fellow parachutists had taken part in the plot against Heydrich. He had no idea where the conspirators were hiding. He knew only one name that might matter, that of a middle-aged woman who had briefly arranged for him to stay in Prague, a woman from the Žižkov neighborhood known as “Auntie,” Marie Moravcová.

  BEFORE DAWN ON the seventeenth, the German police superintendent, a man named Fleischer, stormed past the caretaker’s wife and up the stairs. He pressed the bell outside the Moravecs’ flat. The door opened and the police rushed in, expecting to find the assassins. “Where are they?” he demanded of Marie, who was standing near the wall with her husband and son. “I don’t know anyone,” she replied and asked to use the toilet. The police commander refused but was soon called from the room as the search continued.

  When he returned, he demanded to know where the woman had gone. Cursing, he tore open the bathroom door and found Marie glassy-eyed and unable to speak. Within minutes, the poison had done its job; she was dead. Her husband and son, still in their pajamas, were hauled off to the cellar of Peček Palace.

  Alois, the husband, would not talk and may not even have known where the parachutists were hiding. The Gestapo tortured young Ata throughout the day. He held out for hours, refusing to say anything, but as his strength failed him, the interrogators plied him with brandy. Next they rolled in a fish tank and—with a sick flourish—removed the covering. Suspended inside the tank, as Ata could see, was his mother’s severed head. Broken, he told all that he knew; not where the parachutists were but that Marie had advised him, if trouble arose, to go to the catacombs of the Boromejsky church.

  It was the middle of the night. In the darkness, the Gestapo established a thick cordon and posted guards on roofs and at every manhole and sewage outlet. More than seven hundred armed men had been called to duty; their instructions: take the assassins alive.

  At 4:15 a.m., the Gestapo entered the church, seized the keys, and moved in a swarm from behind the altar into the sanctuary. They were in the nave when shots rang out from above, hitting one of the Nazis in the arm. Kubiš, Opálka, and another of the parachutists had been caught outside the crypt on the balcony that surrounded the worship space. Because they had pillars to hide behind and only a single winding stairway to guard, capturing them would be not be easy. For almost two hours the parachutists and their predators fought in noisy desperation, ducking into and out of concealment, firing shots, trying to avoid the ricochets. As wounded Germans were pulled out, fresh marksmen were sent in, this time equipped with machine guns and grenades. Finally the firing stopped and the blood-drenched bodies of the wanted men were brought to the street, one dead, two dying. The traitor Čurda was motioned forward. He identified the corpse as that of Opálka, the man with whom he had dropped into the country less than three months before.

  The Gestapo soon reasoned that the remaining fugitives, however many there might be, had taken refuge in the crypt beneath the church. At first they could find no entrance except for a small ventilation window about eight feet up, facing the street. They ordered a Czech fireman to break the glass; then they tossed in tear gas grenades, covered the opening with a mattress, and stepped away. Immediately, the mattress was shoved outward and the grenades thrown back amid a hail of gunfire; the parachutists had a ladder pressed against the other side of the window. The Germans set up a floodlight with the idea of blinding the hunted men; instead the bulb was shot out before it could be turned on. The next plan was to flood the crypt; fire hoses were inserted, but they, like the mattress and grenades, were promptly pushed away. The Germans then tried to break through the surrounding wall; it refused to crumble. As the sun rose higher, the Nazi com
manders argued among themselves. K. H. Frank, who had been Heydrich’s deputy, arrived on the scene. Reputations and careers were at stake.

  Eventually the Germans found the secret opening within the church that the parachutists had used to climb down into the crypt. A priest, in handcuffs, was ordered to shout in Czech that the men must surrender and that, once in custody, they would be treated humanely. The reply was more shooting. A heavily armed German “volunteer” was lowered into the narrow hole on a rope, wounded within seconds, and quickly hauled out. Then the sanctuary rug was drawn back and a hollow spot detected beneath the floor. Using dynamite, the Germans blasted away a slab, exposing another set of stairs. A killing squad was sent in and soon repulsed. As the Nazis regrouped once again, four shots sounded from below. The assassins had used their last bullets.

  THE DEATH OF the parachutists was a prelude to more killing. With the traitor’s help, the radio teams were again broken up. The small village of Lezaky, where the shortwave transmitter nicknamed Libuše was located, met the same fate as Lidice. The families of the parachutists and the neighbors and priests who had sheltered them, as well as Alois and Ata Moravec, were executed.

  WAS THE ASSASSINATION of Heydrich wise or foolish, a bold strike for justice or an impetuous blunder by a leader trying too hard to make an impression? Beneš himself may not have been too sure, for he never took credit for the attack. The Germans’ vengeance claimed thousands of Czech lives and made it impossible for opponents of the regime to do much more than hide and hope to survive. They had, however, already been under enormous pressure, and the operation’s daring raised Allied spirits, which had been at a low point. Heydrich was the first—and last—senior Nazi official to be successfully targeted by clandestine agents.