SURPRISE, KILL, VANISH...and then

Here's what happened to British-trained assassins Gabčík and Kubiš... https://twitter.com/SpiesVespers/status/1343613183026733056

A reward of one million reichsmarks was offered for information on the assassins’ whereabouts. A local Nazi collaborator named Alois Kral revealed that Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík were hiding in the basement of a Russian Orthodox church in Prague.

Nazi commandos stormed the church, and when they determined that Kubiš and Gabčík were located in the tunnels below, they flooded the basement with water.

Kubiš tried to fight his way out but was mortally wounded. Gabčík, knowing he would soon be killed or captured, swallowed a cyanide pill given to him by the SOE. Both men’s bodies were recovered and buried in a mass grave.

The reprisals did not end in Lidice. Five days later, Nazis razed Ležáky after a shortwave radio transmission was found to have been sent from the village to the British. All thirty-three residents and their children were killed.

The following week, 115 people accused of being members of the Czech resistance were executed. Heydrich’s successor, SS General Kurt Daluege, boasted that in retaliation for killing Reinhard Heydrich, 1,331 Czech citizens were executed and another 3,000 Jews exterminated.

Was it worth it? Five thousand Czechs “paid with their lives for the death of a single Nazi maniac,” Moravec lamented after the war.

—excerpted from SURPRISE, KILL, VANISH: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operat... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PWHZK2H/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_CuJ6Fb1G0QB31