Assassinating the Butcher of Prague: 80 Years since Operation Anthropoid

Of all the leading Nazis, only one actually looked the part: blond-haired, blue-eyed, statuesque Reinhard Heydrich. Behind that ideal Aryan façade lay a mastermind of the Holocaust and of much of the terror that Germany inflicted on Europe. The SS-Reichsführer and Gestapo chief is best remembered today as the convener of the infamous Wannsee Conference, but few in the US recall that Heydrich travelled to Berlin in January 1942 from Prague, where since the previous September he had ruled the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia with an iron hand. Within four months, however, his reign came to an end at the hands of Czechoslovak resistance fighters, who, in their daring daylight assassination of Heydrich, eliminated the highest-ranking Nazi to be killed by any European underground during the war.

Please join Doc, the CEERES department, and the Fundamentals department in a film retrospective on the events of 1942.