Last Hope Island

by Lynne Olson

  The new ruler wasted no time. Within days of his arrival in Prague, he had ordered the arrest of more than six thousand Czechs, many of them in the resistance. By the end of 1941, hundreds of those in captivity had been executed, including a former Czech prime minister, the current army chief of staff, and dozens of other top military officers. In his terror campaign, Heydrich succeeded not only in decimating the resistance movement but in severing all its radio links with London, thus cutting off the flow of intelligence to Britain from Paul Thümmel.

  After making his point about the fearful consequences of rebellion, Heydrich offered incentives to those who cooperated with the German war effort. Productive workers in the armament industry, for example, were given higher wages, as well as extra rations for food, cigarettes, and clothing. In his skillful use of such carrot-and-stick techniques, Heydrich managed to stamp out virtually every sign of resistance and to boost the efficiency of Czech industry. In the spring of 1942, the pleased Hitler remarked that “the Czechs at the moment—and particularly at war factories—are working to our complete satisfaction, doing their utmost.”

  All this served only to further heighten Allied pressure on Beneš and led him to propose the killing of Heydrich. The assassination, he told František Moravec, would be carried out by “our trained paratroop commandos” but would be presented to the world as an achievement of the domestic resistance movement—“a spontaneous act of national desperation” that “would wipe out our stigma of passivity and help Czechoslovakia internationally.”

  Both Beneš and Moravec knew that the cost of Heydrich’s life would be extraordinarily high. At a time when the killing of even a minor German functionary in occupied Europe invariably resulted in the executions of a dozen or more civilians, it boggled the mind to think of the potential human toll following the murder of one of Germany’s most prominent officials. But when Moravec brought the subject up, Beneš replied that, regardless of the harrowing consequences, Heydrich’s assassination was “necessary for the good of the country.”

  Only a handful of people—Beneš, Moravec, and a few other senior Czech intelligence officers—knew of the plot. No other official in the Czech government in exile was consulted, nor were the few remaining underground leaders. Beneš ordered that no written record be made, ensuring that nothing about the plan could be traced back to him.

  When Moravec first approached officials in SOE’s Czech section for help in training the two agents chosen to kill Heydrich, he told them only that the men had been assigned to carry out a “spectacular assassination”; there was no mention of the target. The two operatives—Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík—were young sergeants in the Czech army, both of whom had fought in France in the spring of 1940 and were expert in the handling of guns and explosives. They had volunteered for the Heydrich mission, even though they knew their chances of survival were all but nil.

  In late 1941, the pair underwent several weeks of rigorous training by SOE, which supplied them with equipment that included revolvers, machine guns, grenades, and suicide tablets. But the British had no role in their operational briefings and orders, all of which were handled by Moravec and his men.

  A few days after Christmas, Kubiš and Gabčík were parachuted into Czechoslovakia. Throughout the winter and early spring of 1942, they lay dormant, waiting for an opportune time to carry out their mission. As they made their preparations, an additional twenty or so SOE agents were dispatched to Czechoslovakia as part of Beneš’s plan to disrupt the country’s weapons industry and railway networks. To a man, the new arrivals were stunned by the omnipresence of German police controls, which were far tougher than they had been led to expect. “For everyone politically active, there is a permanent Gestapo agent,” one SOE operative remarked.

  The sabotage campaign, perhaps not surprisingly, turned out to be a failure. Not one target was damaged or destroyed, and many if not most of the agents were caught and executed. The Germans also recovered a bounty of material parachuted in from England: arms, ammunition, incendiary devices, explosives, and five transmitters. One transmitter, however, remained in the hands of resistance members, who used it to urge London not to send any more SOE operatives. Beneš ignored the plea. The Czech president “had no intention of curtailing the program, whatever dangers there were to the survival of agents,” wrote the historian Callum MacDonald. “Parachutists were expendable.”

  To protect their security, Kubiš and Gabčík had been told by Moravec to avoid all underground contacts and to work alone. But when they arrived in Prague, they discovered that it was impossible to follow that order. If they wanted to survive and carry out their mission, they would need the help of the resistance and the few SOE agents still at large, who hid them in a series of safe houses in Prague. It didn’t take long for their protectors to find out why they were in the Czech capital. Stunned by what they considered London’s recklessness, resistance leaders begged the Czech government in exile to cancel the operation.

  “This assassination would not be of the least value to the Allies, and for our nation it would have unforeseeable consequences,” Arnošt Heidrich, a former Czech diplomat and member of the resistance, cabled Moravec. “The ferocious repression [that would follow] would make the earlier crackdowns look like child’s play. It would threaten not only hostages and political prisoners, but also thousands of other lives. The nation would be subject to unheard-of reprisals. At the same time, it would wipe out the last remainders of any organization. It would then be impossible for the resistance to be useful to the Allies.”

  When Moravec took Heidrich’s anguished appeal to Beneš, he was ordered not to answer it. Again, there was no consultation with other top officials in the government in exile. The operation was to proceed as ordered.

  —

  ON A WARM, SUNNY MORNING in late May 1942, two young men carrying heavy briefcases stood quietly on opposite sides of a hairpin curve in a road in downtown Prague. After waiting for more than an hour, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík were growing anxious. They knew that Reinhard Heydrich traveled this route at precisely 9 A.M. each day from his country home to his office in Hradčany Castle. They knew, too, that he almost always rode without a bodyguard, confident that the cowed Czechs would never make an attempt on his life. “Why should my Czechs shoot at me?” Heydrich loftily responded when another Nazi official chided him for his recklessness. His chauffeur—a brawny six-foot, five-inch SS guard—was his only protector.

  It was now close to 10:30 A.M.—and still no sign of Heydrich’s black Mercedes convertible. But just as the two Czechs were losing hope, they spotted the car approaching. As expected, it slowed down to negotiate the curve. At that point, Gabčík stepped into the middle of the road, took a small machine gun from under his overcoat, aimed it straight at Heydrich, who was sitting in the back, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun had jammed, and Gabčík had no other weapon.

  As the chauffeur slammed on the brakes, Heydrich jumped to his feet, drawing a revolver from his pocket and pointing it at Gabčík. He had not seen Kubiš, who was standing behind the Mercedes and who, at that moment, pulled a bomb from his briefcase and hurled it in Heydrich’s direction. The bomb exploded against the rear wheel of the car, sending it several feet into the air and showering shrapnel everywhere. Seemingly untouched, Heydrich jumped out and squeezed off several shots at Gabčík as he sprinted away. Moments later, though, the Reichsprotecktor clutched his back and collapsed in the road. Hit in the spleen by shrapnel fragments, he was rushed to a hospital, where he died of sepsis eight days later.

  As Arnošt Heidrich had predicted, the Reich’s leaders went berserk. For the first time, a key member of the Nazi inner circle had been killed, and everyone wondered who might be next. “[The Führer] foresees the possibility of a rise in assassination attempts if we do not proceed with energetic and ruthless measures,” Goebbels wrote in his diary.

  Fearing he might be the next target himself, the Führer authorized a stupendous r
eward—1 million marks (worth more than $16 million today)—to anyone with information about the assassins’ identities and whereabouts. Himmler, who burst into tears when he heard of Heydrich’s death, flew to Prague to take personal charge of the manhunt. “It is our holy duty to avenge him,” the SS chief exclaimed.

  Some 21,000 German troops, most of them SS forces, rampaged through the Czech capital, racing from one building to the next, hammering on doors, ransacking apartments, and shooting anyone they considered suspicious or who didn’t immediately obey their orders. “They’re completely mad,” one German detective said of the SS. An RAF pilot whose plane had been shot down and who was hiding in Prague during that period observed that the searchers “seemed almost insane.”

  Those killed in this orgy of violence included a number of Prague residents who had sheltered Kubiš, Gabčík, and other SOE agents. The helpers’ families were also killed. Before he was executed, a teenage boy whose parents had housed the two assassins for a time was shown the severed head of his mother floating in a fish tank.

  Czech Jews were targeted as well. On June 9, three days after Heydrich died, a special train left Prague carrying 1,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. Two thousand more soon followed. All those deaths, however, were not enough to satisfy Hitler, Himmler, and the SS. They needed something even more shocking—an action that would demonstrate to the occupied peoples of Europe how catastrophic the consequences of defying German rule could be. As their target, they chose a little village named Lidice, located a few miles northwest of Prague.

  One of the SOE agents captured by the Germans before Heydrich’s death had in his possession a letter containing the addresses of two families in Lidice. The Gestapo concluded, wrongly, that the villagers were—or had been—hiding the assassins. In the predawn darkness of June 10, 1942, hundreds of SS troops surrounded Lidice. After all its residents were routed from their homes, the men were shot on the spot and the women and children sent to concentration camps, where most of them later died. The entire village was burned to the ground, and whatever ruins remained were bulldozed. Salt was then scattered over the earth so that nothing living could take root in Lidice again.

  Although the SS had not yet found Kubiš and Gabčík, their extraordinary savagery in Lidice and elsewhere, plus the huge reward offer, finally had their intended effect. On June 16, Karel Čurda, one of the few Czech SOE agents still at large, walked into Gestapo headquarters in Prague. Shaken by the extreme reprisals, angry at the seeming callousness of Czech leaders in London to the plight of the resistance, and tempted above all by the enormous bounty, Čurda revealed the identities of the assassins.

  Using information provided by Čurda, the Gestapo tracked Kubiš and Gabčík to a church in downtown Prague, where they and five other parachutists from London had been hiding. For more than six hours, the Czech agents engaged in a frantic gun battle with seven hundred SS troops surrounding the church, managing to hold their pursuers off until they ran out of ammunition. Using their last bullets, Kubiš, Gabčík, and the two other agents still alive killed themselves rather than fall into the enemy’s hands.

  Altogether, more than five thousand Czech citizens died in the aftermath of the assault on Heydrich. The two-week bloodbath touched off a global outpouring of sympathy and admiration for the Czechs and loathing for the Nazis and their barbarism. Not surprisingly, the focus of the world’s attention was the massacre at Lidice. “If future generations ask us what we were fighting for in this war, we shall tell the story of Lidice,” Frank Knox, the U.S. secretary of the navy, declared. A number of towns in the United States and elsewhere were renamed Lidice in honor of the innocents who had died there.

  As Beneš had hoped, Heydrich’s killing and the Germans’ horrific response resulted in a major propaganda triumph for the Czech cause. “I was in the U.S. at the time of Lidice, and was making no progress in our propaganda, having exhausted all the possibilities of the situation,” Jan Masaryk wrote to a British friend. “Then came Lidice, and I had a new lease on life. Czechoslovakia was put on the map again.” As the jubilant Moravec put it, “In the delicate matter of our contribution to the war effort, we jumped from last place to first.”

  On newspaper front pages throughout the world, the attack on Heydrich was acclaimed as the work of the Czech resistance movement—the most audacious act yet in its desperate campaign to free the country from German rule. According to the BBC, “the Czechs and all the other enslaved peoples must be proud in the knowledge that they have cast out fear and thus have turned the terror against the Nazis.” The fact that members of the Czech resistance had done everything they could to prevent the assassination remained a closely guarded secret.

  Heydrich’s death also provided a rare bit of good news for the overall Allied cause, which in the spring and summer of 1942 was still suffering major defeats on nearly every front. The British, for one, showed their gratitude by formally repudiating the Munich agreement and finally treating Beneš and his government with the respect Beneš believed he deserved. “In view of the trials through which the Czech people have been passing since the death of Heydrich, we think it desirable for psychological reasons to give Beneš as much satisfaction as possible,” the Foreign Office declared in an internal memo.

  Yet even as the Czech president enjoyed his reclaimed prestige, his shattered country was plunged into despair and mourning. Instead of damaging the German war effort and lessening the SS’s grip on Czechoslovakia and other occupied countries, Heydrich’s killing, if anything, had done the opposite. “Somebody else would take his place who would be just as awful,” a Prague resident observed. “Unless you could wipe out the whole of the Gestapo, it wouldn’t really matter.”

  Amazingly, Beneš believed that Heydrich’s killing would unite the Czech people and inspire many more of them to stand up against their occupiers. In fact, it destroyed what remained of a badly crippled movement. In a report in late 1942, SOE concluded that there was no longer any sign of “open resistance” in Czechoslovakia. “By his death, Heydrich fulfilled his primary ambition—the pacification of the Protectorate,” the Czech historian Vojtech Mastny pointed out.

  Perhaps even worse, the bloody German dragnet ended up annihilating virtually all of Moravec’s intelligence networks. Paul Thümmel was captured and eventually executed, putting an end to the flow of vital military information he had provided to London over the previous four years.

  As the catastrophic effects of Heydrich’s killing became clearer, both the British and Beneš retreated from taking responsibility for what had happened. Churchill never mentioned it in his history of World War II, while his government insisted that it had been solely a Czech operation. Not until 1994, when selected SOE files were released, was it revealed that several top SOE officials had known beforehand who the target was to be.

  Beneš, for his part, denied for the rest of his life that he had played any role in the assassination. Calling the idea “a complete fabrication,” he claimed that “no order for Heydrich’s murder was ever issued from London. In fact, the whole Nazi theory about the fight for freedom being conducted and ordered from London is false. All acts of resistance in the homeland [were] directed and decided by the headquarters there.” Thirty years after the war’s end, Moravec, in his memoirs, finally acknowledged Beneš’s involvement, as well as his own.

  As the conflict dragged on and the glow of Beneš’s propaganda victory dimmed, he realized that the assassination and its long-term impact had become in fact a major political problem. Unable to meet Stalin’s continued demands for the destruction of the Czech munitions industry and the disruption of its railway network, Beneš was determined to appease the Soviet leader in other ways. Czechoslovakia, he vowed, would never share the woeful postwar fate that he was convinced lay in wait for Poland.

  By mid-1943, the Allies had finally halted Germany’s seemingly unstoppable momentum. A crucial turning point came in late February when the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht at Staling
rad, ending a five-month bloodbath that had produced more than a million casualties. Three months later, the United States and Britain laid claim to their first major prize: the Middle East and North Africa. “In London, there was, for the first time in the war, a real lifting of spirits,” Churchill wrote.

  Early in the year, at a meeting in Casablanca, Churchill and Roosevelt chose Sicily as their troops’ next target—an operation that would lay the groundwork for the 1943–44 Allied campaign in Italy. The two leaders also agreed to build up U.S. forces in Britain, in preparation for the long-awaited invasion of western Europe the following year.

  As they began their planning for D-Day, the British chiefs of staff decided that SOE—the agency they had long scorned—would be given a role in this crucial offensive. Specifically, the chiefs wanted resistance fighters in the immediate area of the invasion and in nearby countries to support Allied assault troops by sabotaging enemy forces and facilities, particularly those involving transport and communications. SOE began working feverishly to expand its efforts in the Netherlands, Belgium, and especially in France, where the D-Day invasion was expected to take place. But it had a problem that the military brass didn’t know about and that its leaders refused to acknowledge: it was in desperate trouble in all three nations.

  One person well aware of the disarray was a twenty-two-year-old wunderkind named Leo Marks, who had arrived at Baker Street as SOE’s new chief of codes in early 1942. Marks would spend the next eighteen months trying to alert others to the gravity of the situation, only to encounter one of the most notable British cover-ups of the war.

  Leo Marks’s father, Benjamin, was the owner of Marks & Co., a well-known antiquarian bookstore in west London whose regular customers included Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, and Charlie Chaplin. (The store was later immortalized in the book and movie 84 Charing Cross Road.) When Leo was eight, his father showed him a first-edition copy of a book he had just bought containing Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug.” Leo read it. Enthralled by Poe’s tale of code breaking and buried treasure and wanting a code of his own to crack, he found one on the back page of the book he had just finished. As it happened, in every volume his father purchased, he penciled in a cipher signifying the price he had paid for it. Young Leo figured out the book’s code in a matter of minutes—and found his true calling.