Assassinating Reinhard Heydrich Was the Bravest Act of World War II

PRAGUE — There are places where history does not feel dead.

The crypt beneath the Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague is one of them.

I stood there recently, in the place where seven Czechoslovak resistance fighters made their final stand against the Nazi war machine on June 18, 1942. The bullet scars remain. The small crypt remains. And the story remains almost unbearable in its courage.

Among the seven were Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, the two Czechoslovak soldiers who carried out Operation Anthropoid: the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

I left convinced that Gabčík and Kubiš were two of the most courageous men of the Second World War.

And I left thinking about a question that has haunted their story for more than eight decades:

Was killing Heydrich worth it?

The question cannot be dismissed.

The Nazi reprisals were monstrous.

Thousands of Czechs were arrested or killed. Families of resistance members were exterminated. The village of Ležáky was destroyed. And the name Lidice became synonymous with Nazi barbarism.

On June 10, 1942, German forces descended upon Lidice, a village outside Prague that in reality had no meaningful connection to the assassination.

They separated the men from their families.

They shot 173 men and boys almost immediately. More were murdered afterward. The women were deported, most to Ravensbrück. Most of the children were eventually murdered, many apparently by gas at Chełmno.

Then the Germans burned the village, demolished its ruins and attempted to erase its name from the earth.

That was the price Hitler imposed for the death of Reinhard Heydrich.

So the question is legitimate.

Why assassinate one Nazi, even a leading Nazi, if Hitler would retaliate by murdering thousands?

The moral responsibility for Lidice belongs entirely to Hitler, Himmler and the Nazi murderers who destroyed it — not to the heroes who resisted them.

There is something dangerous about the premise of the question itself.

It risks transferring moral responsibility from the murderer to the resistor.

The Nazis destroyed Lidice.

The Nazis murdered its children.

The Nazis chose collective punishment.

The Nazis decided that the price of resistance would be innocent blood.

Gabčík and Kubiš did not murder the people of Lidice. Hitler did.

And if we say that resistance becomes immoral whenever a tyrant threatens retaliation, then we hand every tyrant in history the ultimate weapon.

Kill enough innocent people and nobody will resist you.

Threaten enough children and nobody will challenge you.

Commit sufficiently monstrous reprisals and courage itself becomes immoral.

That cannot be our conclusion.

WHO WAS REINHARD HEYDRICH?

It is also essential to remember who the target was.

This was not the assassination of some obscure German bureaucrat.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most terrifying human beings in Nazi Germany.

He headed the Reich Security Main Office, which controlled the Security Police and SD. He was deeply involved in the Einsatzgruppen mass shootings that murdered Jews across Eastern Europe. He helped construct the machinery through which European Jewry would be hunted, deported and exterminated.

And on January 20, 1942 — only four months before the Prague attack — Heydrich chaired the Wannsee Conference, where senior German officials coordinated implementation of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

He was not merely an antisemite.

He was not merely a Nazi.

He was one of the principal architects and administrators of the Holocaust.

When Gabčík and Kubiš attacked him, the Holocaust was unfolding around them.

Jews were already being murdered by the hundreds of thousands.

And Heydrich was helping organize their annihilation.

Gabčík and Kubiš did the Jewish people an extraordinary service: they killed one of the principal architects of our extermination while the extermination was actually taking place.

As a Jew, I cannot regard that as a historical footnote.

The Jewish people owe these men gratitude.

They did what so many governments failed to do.

They struck directly at one of the men engineering the murder of Europe’s Jews.

A NATION BETRAYED

Operation Anthropoid must also be understood against the humiliation that preceded it.

In September 1938, Britain and France signed the Munich Agreement and permitted Hitler to seize the Sudetenland without Czechoslovakia’s participation in the negotiations.

Czechoslovakia had an army. It had fortifications. It had a democratic government prepared for the possibility of war.

But its supposed allies abandoned it.

Then, in March 1939, Hitler violated even Munich and occupied the Czech lands.

The Nazis marched into Prague.

There was no conventional national war against the German invasion.

That fact became a wound in Czech national consciousness.

But it is profoundly unfair to turn that into the claim that “the Czechs did not resist.”

They did.

They resisted underground. They sabotaged. They gathered intelligence. They helped Allied operations. They hid parachutists at mortal risk to themselves and their families.

And ultimately, Czechoslovakia’s government in exile decided that the world needed an unmistakable demonstration that the nation was still fighting.

That demonstration became Operation Anthropoid.

British Special Operations Executive personnel trained Gabčík and Kubiš. They were parachuted into occupied Czechoslovakia in late December 1941.

Their mission was astonishingly audacious:

Kill Reinhard Heydrich.

THE ATTACK

On May 27, 1942, Heydrich was traveling through Prague in an open Mercedes.

He felt so secure in occupied Czech territory that his vehicle was not heavily protected.

Gabčík and Kubiš waited near a sharp bend where the car would have to slow.

As Heydrich’s Mercedes approached, Gabčík stepped forward with his Sten submachine gun.

He pulled the trigger.

Nothing.

The weapon jammed.

Imagine that moment.

Months of preparation. Enormous personal risk. A Nazi executioner sitting only yards away.

And the gun fails.

Heydrich could have ordered his driver to accelerate away.

Instead, displaying the arrogance that characterized the Nazi occupation, he ordered the car stopped and attempted to confront his attackers.

Kubiš acted.

He threw a modified anti-tank grenade toward the Mercedes.

It exploded beside the vehicle, sending fragments into Heydrich.

The assassins escaped.

Heydrich was taken to a hospital.

For several days it appeared he might survive.

Then his condition deteriorated.

On June 4, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich died.

One of the highest-ranking Nazi leaders killed by resistance fighters during the entire war was dead.

HITLER’S REVENGE

Hitler was enraged.

The Nazis imposed martial law and launched an enormous manhunt.

The terror culminated in Lidice and Ležáky.

The horror should never be minimized in telling the heroic story of Anthropoid. Indeed, Lidice must be part of the story.

But the lesson cannot be that Gabčík and Kubiš should therefore have done nothing.

The lesson is what Nazism was.

Hitler’s message was simple: If you resist us, we will murder your children.

The answer of the resistance was equally fundamental:

You may murder us, but you will not make us consent to slavery.

That distinction matters.

THE BETRAYAL

For weeks the Nazis could not find the assassins.

Then came betrayal.

Karel Čurda, another Czechoslovak parachutist, went to the Gestapo and provided information that helped expose the resistance network.

The trail eventually led to the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius.

Seven parachutists were hiding there:

Jozef Gabčík.

Jan Kubiš.

Adolf Opálka.

Josef Valčík.

Josef Bublík.

Jan Hrubý.

Jaroslav Švarc.

On June 18, 1942, German forces surrounded the church.

What followed deserves to be remembered as one of the bravest last stands of the Second World War.

“WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER”

Three of the fighters — Kubiš, Opálka and Bublík — fought from the church above.

Four others, including Gabčík, defended the crypt below.

They were hopelessly outnumbered.

The Germans attacked repeatedly.

The paratroopers fought back.

The Nazis attempted to force them from the crypt. They used tear gas. Firefighters were brought in and water was pumped toward the crypt in an attempt to flood the defenders out.

Still they refused to surrender.

The battle lasted for hours.

Kubiš was terribly wounded and later died.

Eventually the Germans discovered the entrance to the crypt.

The remaining defenders understood what capture meant.

Gestapo interrogation.

Torture.

Forced betrayal of others.

Public execution.

They chose death instead.

Gabčík, Valčík, Hrubý and Švarc died in the crypt rather than allow themselves to be taken alive.

Seven men against overwhelming Nazi force.

No escape route.

No realistic expectation of rescue.

No surrender.

The Nazis could conquer Czechoslovakia. They could occupy Prague. They could destroy Lidice. But in that church they discovered something they could not conquer: men who had decided that there are things worth dying for.

Standing in that crypt today, you understand something that cannot be conveyed by statistics.

Courage is physical.

These were not mythical superheroes.

They were young men.

They knew fear.

They knew what the Nazis did to prisoners.

They knew what was happening to the people who had helped them.

And they fought anyway.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

We return to the terrible question.

Was Heydrich’s death worth Lidice?

The question must be answered carefully because no decent person can place a numerical value on murdered children.

No military objective makes their deaths insignificant.

Every murdered Czech civilian was an entire world.

But there is another side.

What happens to humanity when evil becomes immune from attack because evil promises retaliation?

What would that principle have meant for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising?

Should Mordechai Anielewicz and his fighters have surrendered because German retaliation was inevitable?

Should Jewish partisans have remained passive because Nazis might execute civilians?

Should occupied peoples have accepted slavery because resistance carried terrible consequences?

No.

The Warsaw Ghetto fighters knew they could not defeat the Wehrmacht.

Their victory was not measured in territory.

Their victory was that Jews marked for extermination stood up and fought their murderers.

Operation Anthropoid belongs to the same moral universe.

Resistance to genocidal evil cannot be judged solely by whether it reduced the immediate body count. Sometimes resistance is the declaration that human beings will not collaborate in their own degradation.

And Anthropoid had political consequences.

The assassination demonstrated to Britain and the Allies that Czech resistance was real. The brutality of the Nazi reprisals horrified the world. Lidice, which Hitler intended to erase, instead became an international symbol of Nazi barbarism.

The Nazis tried to obliterate its name.

They immortalized it.

STATUES IN CENTRAL PARK

I believe Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík deserve far greater recognition in America.

Indeed, I would like to work toward erecting statues honoring them in Central Park in New York, alongside a memorial to Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

Not because their circumstances were identical.

They were not.

But because all three represent a principle our generation desperately needs to recover:

There is a moral obligation to resist genocidal evil.

That message is especially urgent at a time when Jewish life is again treated cheaply by too many people in public life, when antisemitism is rationalized as politics, and when the murder of Jews can be contextualized before the bodies have even been buried.

And it would carry particular resonance in New York under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose rhetoric and positions on Israel I believe have repeatedly shown contempt for the fears and security concerns of many Jewish New Yorkers.

A monument to Gabčík, Kubiš and Anielewicz would answer hatred not with hatred, but with memory.

It would tell every child walking through Central Park:

These men lived.

These men resisted.

These men refused to surrender their humanity.

THE BRAVEST MOMENT

I have visited many sites connected to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Few have affected me like that crypt in Prague.

The men who died there could have surrendered.

They could have told themselves that survival was more important.

Instead, they made their final answer to Nazism with bullets and with their lives.

The Holocaust teaches us about the abyss of human cruelty.

Operation Anthropoid teaches us something different.

It teaches us about the heights of human courage.

Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík helped kill Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust.

The Nazis answered by committing atrocities against innocent people.

The guilt for those atrocities belongs to the Nazis forever.

The glory of resistance belongs to the men who refused to kneel.

Hitler wanted occupied Europe to believe that resistance was futile. Gabčík and Kubiš answered that some acts are necessary precisely because the world must know that evil has not been accepted.

Their mission did not end the Holocaust.

It did not liberate Czechoslovakia.

It could not resurrect a single murdered Jew.

But in May 1942, at the height of Nazi power, two young men stood on a Prague street and attacked one of the most feared architects of genocide on earth.

And they succeeded.

Weeks later, surrounded in a church, they and their comrades made their final declaration.

They would not surrender.

That is why I believe Operation Anthropoid was not merely justified.

It was one of the bravest acts of the Second World War.

And eighty-four years later, standing in Prague, I found myself wanting to say two simple words to Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík:

Thank you.

For the Czech people.

For the Jewish people.

And for every generation that must learn anew that when genocidal evil rises, Never Again cannot merely be a slogan.

It must sometimes be an act.

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Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the international bestselling author of thirty-eight books, translated into more than twenty languages. He has been hailed as “the most famous rabbi in America” (The Washington Post, Newsweek), “arguably the most famous Orthodox Jew on earth” (The New York Observer), and named one of the fifty most influential Jews in the world (The Jerusalem Post). Follow him on Instagram and X @RabbiShmuley.