PRAGUE, Czechoslovakia -- Czechoslovakia commemorated today the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Nazi SS chief Reinhard Heydrich in whose name the Nazis destroyed a village and executed its men in reprisal.
Heydrich, appointed 'Reichsprotector of Bohemia-Moravia' by Adolf Hitler to crush the swelling resistance against the German occupiers, was attacked on May 27, 1942 by Czechoslovak guerrillas sent from Britain.
Czechoslovak army sergeants Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis parachuted into Bohemia and gravely wounded Heydrich, who died June 4, 1942, nine days after the attack.
Gabcik and Kubis belonged to a nine-member resistance group code-named 'Antropoid.' The Nazis flushed them from a Prague church where they had taken refuge on June 18, 1942 and killed them.
During the eight months he was in charge of security. Heydrich had 489 people executed and 1,673 others shipped to Nazi death camps.
The period of Nazi reprisals following Heydrich's assassination went down in the history of Czechoslovakia as 'Heydrichiade.'
The Nazis leveled the village of Lidice on June 10, 1942 and executed its adult males in reprisal and Nazi courts sentenced 962 people to death in Bohemia and another 252 at the Mauthausen concentration camp as a reprisal against the attack on Heydrich.
