Day 17 (Tue 18 Sep) A Day of Opportunity

After our by-now usual breakfast we set off for a determined attempt to get into some of the more interesting sites in Josefov, the former Jewish Quarter of Prague and once the largest of all the Ghettos in Europe.  Regrettably, a ‘hitch’ turned us back to the hotel and, once on the road again, the crowds were swelling.  At the first venue attempted, the head of a 50-or-more queue consisted of about 20 people, all from one national group, all haggling over the price of a ticket, with all of them talking at once and no-one listening apart from the calm, polite but besieged entry attendant.  15 mins of this was all we could take so we moved on to the second of our chosen venues.  A much-similar scene presented, so gave up and withdrew stage left for coffee and a re-plan.

We then signed up for a ‘WWII Tour including Operation Anthropoid’ and during the time-to-kill, withdrew from the (29C and very warm) busier streets to the cooler back alleys, where someone found an Antik Besar to engage their interest.

The tour turned out to be a gem.  We were the only two attendees and our tour guide, Renata, quickly sized up her audience and tailored the tour accordingly.  It was dealt with in three parts:

·       For the Czechs and Slovaks, WWII began in 1938 with the occupation of the  so-called ‘Sudetenland’ and continued with a complete occupation, a very short time after Mr Chamberlain had bought some time for urgent war preparations while ‘peace in our time’ persisted.  The German ‘Protectors’ then installed a puppet government, imposed a 16-hr day/six-day week on the ‘protected’ and put them to work for the war machine.  For most, that meant 1939 brought about no change.

·       Meanwhile, most of the Czechoslovakian Military and legitimate government had moved to the west and come to rest in Britain after Dunkerque.  As one of a number of governments-in-exile, they were keen to be seen to be doing something to combat the Fuhrer and friends.  The Czechs chose an ambitious and spectacular path.  About nine paratroops were helped to train and equip in Scotland, from where they set out in Dec 1941 and were air-dropped in the rural area around Prague.  The operation, in inimitable British style, was code-named ‘Anthropoid’ and had as its assassination target none other than Reinhardt Heydrich, who held many senior portfolios in the Reich by then and had installed himself in Prague as Stellvertretender Reichsprotektor (Deputy/Acting Reich-Protector) of Bohemia and Moravia.  He was, at least arguably, the anointed successor to Hitler, who greatly admired Heydrich, mainly because he fulfilled all of the criteria for the mythological Aryan stereotype and carried none of the baggage of many party adherents from the 1920s and 30s who had carried on the thuggery necessary to seize power.  The assassins did not have an easy path and there were a couple of ‘dropouts’, but they eventually had a plan and had found accommodation around Prague.  Put under pressure by an imminent move elsewhere by their target, they had to stage the event at very short notice.  Things went wrong, including a stoppage to the British-supplied Sten Gun, giving Heydrich the chance to draw his pistol on the grenade-thrower, putting him off his aim.  Nevertheless, Heydrich died of his wounds (and the surgery following).  The assassins holed up in a church for more than three weeks and might have eventually escaped but for being betrayed.  Renata took us to all the key locations (except the actual assassination site which had fallen victim to a bit of urban planning} and it was great fun to follow the action, blow-by-blow, so to speak.  As you can see from the photo, it also occasioned some animated discussion during the post-action confirmatory quiz.

·       The actual transaction remains the only successful attempt by a government at ‘removing’ any Nazi leader during the whole course of the war – there were several known failures.  Success became a doubtful word in the context of the reprisals ordered by an enraged Fuhrer, which took the form of machine-gunning all the male inhabitants of the home villages of some of the assassins and the removal of all the women and children, after which the villages were obliterated.

·       The other aspect of events in Prague in WWII concerned the so-called Prague uprising of May 1945, when an attempt to create a Czech government in Prague was brought to an end by the appearance of Russian tanks at the entrances to the old-town square.

Having had the good fortune for the day to take a turn for the best, we walked part of the way home with Renata and said our farewells and returned to have dinner and rest up for the following day’s journey.  Along our way, we came across this structure, which turned out to be a very early Catholic Church (even for Prague) dating from about the eighth century.