Two years ago I read Sam Taylor’s translation from
the French of Laurent Binot’s remarkable novel HHhH. In fact it is a book within a book. Binot tells
how he came to write, and did write, the story of the attempt by two SOE
trained Czech soldiers to assassinate Reinhardt Heydrich in Prague. Heydrich was the Chief of the Nazi Secret Service and third
ranking officer after Hitler and Himmler, and made ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and
Moravia in June 1942. This region now comprises the Czech republic.
Hitler had claimed this region as part of the so
called ‘Greater Germany’ and had been allowed to march in and take over.
Heydrich was appointed to crush any and all resistance, and this he did with
the efficiency and ruthlessness he had
shown at the Wannsee Conference, designing
the ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Problem’ along with his second in command,
Adolph Eichmann. Mass shootings of
Jews had proven to be inefficient and even SS soldiers found them had to carry
out. Gassing people with exhaust fumes
in trucks was no more efficient. So at
the Wannsee meeting the final solution of using extermination camps was devised.
The two soldiers who undertook the mission to kill
Heydrich were Josef Gabcik, a Slovak, and Jan Kubis, a Czech.
The mission itself is not supported by all of those
in the Czech resistance movement, who knew that, successful or not, there would
be massive retribution visited on their people. But the mission was authorized by the Czech
Government in exile in London and by the US and British Governments via the
Special Operation Executive.
Kenneth Branagh made a film about Heydrich and the
Wannsee Conference, Conspiracy, in
2001, and back in 1943 Fritz Lang filmed
a Berthold Brecht script, Hangmen Also
die! that ‘imagined’ the mission, but was not fact based.
Now we have Anthropoid
(the actual code-name of the attempt), written and directed by the Brit Sean
Ellis, who also took charge of the cinematography. Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan play the
assassins, supported by a host of European actors we may not have seen on screen
before, including Charlotte Le Bon and
Anna Geislerova as their supposed and maybe, eventually, actual girlfriends, and with our familiar Toby Jones as the local
head of the Resistance.
I suspect that many if not most of the people
seeing this will already know the story, or at least about the fates of Heydrick,
Gabcik and Kubis, but there is still a palpable tension right
from the start. Who do you trust in a
place riddled with collaborators, traitors – or potential traitors? The music helps engender and maintain this
tension. The film is shot in a grainy
Super 16 mm format, and often in muted colours,
making Prague often look drab in daylight and beautiful in misty
mornings and evenings. The cast of
actors mainly unknown in Anglophone countries adds to the feel of
authenticity.
The two leads are convincing, showing the fear that
always underlies true courage. ‘Being brave is not being fearless’ my
father told me once. He was a British
paratrooper fighting at the Battle of Arnhem and knew that bravery is about being
afraid of something and doing it anyway.
I thought the film was careful
not to make it’s heroes ‘Heroes’, not its heroines ‘Heroines.’ They were ordinary people in extra-ordinary
situations who did extra-ordinary things with great courage. The level of acting throughout the movie is
consistently high.
The assassination attempt is well re-constructed,
but it is not the climax of the film. After
the attack the two assassins joined seven other men who had parachuted in on
difference SOE missions as they took refuge in the crypt of Orthodox Church of
Saint Charles Borromeu in Prague, later called
St Cyril and Methodius Cathedral. Their location was betrayed and seven
hundred SS guards attacked them. The
ensuing battle is the real climax.
And afterwards?
The Biblical injunction ‘an eye
for an eye’ is not just a license for retaliation. It is a limit to the exact scale of
retaliation. Only an eye for an eye, no more.
Of course this was not a limitation the Nazis respected. A false lead took them to the village of
Lidice, outside Prague, and it was destroyed.
All of its 1500 inhabitants were killed, it buildings razed and
bulldozed, its orchards burnt and its fields salted.
Many more people died in Prague.
This raises the question referred to earlier; ‘was this assassination justified, knowing that there would be terrible
repercussions?’ The people who
would die in retaliation had no choice, no vote in the decision making. The German’s rule in the region would not
become lighter, nor its methods more humane.
In fact the opposite. It is
true, however, that this action, showing the determination of the Czech people,
and its aftermath, the brutality of their oppressors, did bring the Allied
powers to formally support the Czechs and Slovaks in their struggle.
Of course wars are declared without a referendum,
and sometimes without united civilian support.
No one voted to destroy Dresden, Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And whether or not we agree with those
actions we may have to accept that in an
evil situation – and war is always an evil situation – there are no ‘pure’ options. If there are only two evils available then
the lesser is the one to choose. It
helps if we know what it is. But
sometimes we can only make our best guess and somehow learn to live with the
consequences.
Even the ethics of assassination are complex. We may remember that during the war Dietrich Bonheoffer,
a leading German Protestant Minister and theologian, came to the conclusion that it was necessary
to assassinate Hitler to avoid a greater
evil, and joined the Stauffenburg conspiracy.
He was hanged on Hitler’s direct orders in April 1944.
The greater tragedy of course is that Heydrich’s
extermination plans were already in place.
In the following fourteen months after this attack over two millions
Jews and nearly fifty thousand Romanies were killed in in the camps at Belzec,
Sobibor and Treblinka set up by him.
I recommend this though-provoking film.
