National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror

Hey, it's me again!

Too much to write about so I'll just summarise. I've spent the time since my last post in Uherske Hradiste. I quit work after a couple of months. I really hated it.

Romana and I spent most of our time fighting so we have broken up. Our idea of what a relationship should be is just too different. We are still quite good friends.

I went to the UK for a wedding about a month ago. Brendan and Bx got married in a country manor house in Somerset. It was pretty nice.

After Romana gave me my marching orders I went to Krakow and visited a friend from uni who has been living there for a couple of months. I didn't do much touristy stuff except for a visit to Schindler's factory. There weren't any jobs going. He's historically had quite a racist hiring policy so I probably wouldn't have got one anyway. It's quite a good museum now.


My plan was to go to Ukraine and visit Chernobyl but it looked like it'd require a bit of effort so I didn't bother. Instead I went back to Uherské Hradiste for a week or so then to Prague, where I am now.

While I was back in UH I found out that my residency application was rejected, so I'd have to leave anyway. As it stands I'm due to fly to good Korea in 2 days. I've done very little tourist stuff in Prague. I've taken some photos of statues with seagulls on their heads. Impressive considering Czech is landlocked.

Today I went to visit the National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror.

Heydrich was a Nazi douchbag who was in charge of the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during WW2. UK intelligence and the Czechoslavakian government in exile concocted a plan to assassinate him.

They sent 2 groups of Czechoslavakian paratroopers from the UK and dropped them near Prague. I got a little buzz to learn that pretty much all of them were Moravian and a couple were from Uherské Hradiste.

They were supposed to land in Pilsen, where the best beer comes from, but landed somewhere else. They were helped by the local resistance and made their way into Prague. They didn't really have a plan, they'd just been given 5 options. They were all variations of blowing this guy up or shooting him.

Two of the guys decided to string a wire across the road to stop Heydrich's car. Being an arrogant bastard Heydrich would ride around in a Mercedes convertible to demonstrate his confidence in his control of the protectorate. They apparently waited for hours and for some reason in this time abandoned the wire idea and instead decided it'd just be easier to shoot him.

So his car rolls along and one of the guys steps out with a sten gun and it doesn't fire. The driver panics but instead of speeding off he hits the brakes. The other paratrooper had a modified antitank grenade so he tries to lob it into the car. He misses and hits the bumper on the outside of the car. It's been set to explode on impact so it blows through the car and injures one of the paratroopers. Heydrich is injured but jumps out and a bit of a shoot out occurs. The two paratroopers jump on their bicycles and make an escape, thinking they'd failed.

But the grenade had actually wounded Heydrich. Metal shards from the car had punctured his lung and fractured some ribs. He was taken to hospital and recieved the best medical treatment available. Unlucky for him though, when the grenade ripped through the car it drove the upholstery of the seat into his body. The seat was stuffed with horse hair (I didn't realise horses have that much hair) which caused septacaemia and he died of the infection. It was the only successful assassination of a Nazi figure from Hitler's inner circle during the war.

After the paratroopers legged it, a massive manhunt started. A couple of the paratroopers turned informer and gave away the location of the others - a church just down the road from where I am now. Seven paratroopers holed up in the crypt and got into a battle with 750 ss troops. The ss tried to gas them out, then got the fire brigade to try to flood them out. Eventually the paratroopers committed suicide rather than be captured. They killed 14 and wounded 21. Badasses.

Note the bullet holes around the plaque.

The Nazis murdered the families of everyone that they discovered had harbored them, plus a bunch of political figures, plus the murder and total destruction of Lidice and Lezaky. This in turn resulted in the Munich Agreement being dissolved.

So yeah, sorry about the length of that. I'd heard about Lidice (it's a film here but I haven't seen it) but I had no idea about this assassination.

My next post will be from good Korea!