Painful EXECUTION of Jan Kubiš *Warning Real Footage JJ
10:35 a.m. May 27th, 1942. A curve in the road on the outskirts of Prague. An open-top Mercedes slows down for the corner. Inside sits Reinhard Heydrich, the most feared man in the Nazi empire, the architect of the Holocaust itself. He has no bodyguards. He believes no one in this occupied country would ever dare touch him.
He is wrong. Standing on that sidewalk is a farmer’s son who grew up with nothing. In the next 4 seconds, he is going to throw a bomb that will kill one of the most powerful men on Earth, and it will cost him everything he has left to give. This is the true story of Jan Kubiš and what the Nazis did to his body afterward is something history books rarely dare to print in full.
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Now, let’s go back to where it all began. 6 months before this moment, Nazi Germany had already swallowed the Sudetenland. Then, on March 15th, 1939, Hitler personally marched into Prague Castle and erased Czechoslovakia from the map entirely, carving out the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement his own government had signed.
The first man Hitler placed in charge, Konstantin von Neurath, wasn’t brutal enough for his taste. Czech workers were striking. Saboteurs were hitting rail lines. So, in 1941, Hitler sent in a man built for terror, Reinhard Heydrich. Under Heydrich, courts became formalities and executions became routine.
He earned a nickname that still makes historians shudder today, the Butcher of Prague. Jan Kubiš was born on June 24th, 1913 in Dolní Vilémovice, a Moravian village so small it barely appears on modern maps. His father was the village shoemaker. His mother died giving birth to his younger brother. And the family that raised him afterward was a patchwork of half-siblings and a stepmother, held together by strict Catholic values and constant financial hardship.
Jan worked the fields as a boy. He tended livestock. He labored in a brickyard before he was even a teenager. There was no silver spoon here, just calluses, faith, and a slow-burning sense of injustice that would eventually set all of Europe talking about his name. It was through a Catholic athletic club called Orel that young Jan found discipline and purpose beyond survival.
By 1935, he was serving in the Czechoslovak army, rising quickly through the ranks of the 31st infantry regiment. Then, in 1938 and 1939, he watched his entire country get handed away and then invaded outright. On June 16th, 1939, Kubiš made a decision that would define the rest of his short life. He grabbed a single grenade and walked into the forest toward the Polish border, determined to keep fighting.
The escape alone nearly killed him. Kubiš marched close to 11 hours through dense woodland, dodging German patrols, before a sympathetic gamekeeper and a local blacksmith helped guide him the rest of the way. He crossed into Poland disguised as a laborer carrying farm tools, soaked and half-frozen, but alive.
From Poland, he sailed to France and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, not out of loyalty to France, but because it was the only door still open to a soldier with no country left. He was shipped to North Africa, where he endured brutal heat and culture shock most European recruits never adjusted to. When war formally broke out in September 1939, Czechoslovak legionnaires were released from their legion contracts.
And Kubiš returned to France to join the newly reformed Czechoslovak army in exile. It was there he met the man history would forever tie his name to, Josef Gabčík. The two cycled together through the French countryside on their days off. Complaining about broken boots and outdated rifles.
Building a friendship neither of them yet knew would end in the same church, on the same day, in the same country they’d fought so hard to reach. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, Kubiš was thrown into combat near Coulommiers, east of Paris. In his personal diary, which still survives today, he described the retreat in unflinching detail.
Shattered bodies along the roadside, the constant scream of artillery, exhaustion that ate into the bone. And yet, according to his own account, he kept singing and cracking jokes to keep his unit’s morale from collapsing entirely. France fell in just 6 weeks. Kubiš and his comrades smuggled their side arms aboard an Egyptian freighter and slipped out of the country.
By July 12th, 1940, he had landed in Liverpool. Decorated soon after with both the French War Cross and the Czechoslovak War Cross for his conduct in the retreat. But medals weren’t what he wanted. He and Gabčík applied to become air gunners. Both were rejected. Instead, British intelligence officers quietly pulled them aside for something else entirely.
From August through September 1941, Kubiš trained in the misty hills of Scotland and at a secret airfield near Manchester. Parachute drops, sabotage, silent combat. British reports from the period describe both men as relentless, disciplined, and unshakably calm under pressure. Kubiš wasn’t even the original choice for this mission.
Gabcik had been paired with another soldier, Karel Svoboda, until an injury during training forced a change. Gabcik personally requested Kubiš as his replacement, a decision that would alter the entire outcome of the Second World War in Central Europe. On the night of December 29th, 1941, the two men parachuted into their homeland for Operation Anthropoid.
Their singular objective, the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Navigation errors sent them wildly off course, landing them near Nehvizdy instead of their intended drop zone near Plzeň. Gabcik dislocated his thumb and injured his ankle on impact. Undeterred, they pressed forward, finding shelter through a network of local priests and resistance contacts.
Here’s where the mission takes an unexpectedly human turn. To gather intelligence on Heydrich’s daily schedule, the resistance used two sisters from a village near Kubiš’s own hometown, Marie Kovárníková and Ludmila Sukupová, whose small apartment on Letenská Street in Prague became a secret drop point for stolen information about the Reich Protector’s movements.
And to move safely through a city crawling with German informants, Kubiš and Gabcik did something almost cinematic. They posed as young couples out for a stroll, arm in arm with Marie and her circle, because nothing looked less suspicious in occupied Prague than young lovers window shopping and taking the long way home.
It wasn’t entirely an act. Jan Kubiš and Marie Kovárníková grew close during those tense months, and post-war German interrogation records would later claim she had become pregnant with his child, though she reportedly lost the baby during her own brutal questioning by the Gestapo.
In the middle of a mission with almost zero chance of survival, Kubiš had found something worth surviving for and lost it anyway. Every single morning, Heydrich rode the same predictable route from his countryside residence to Prague Castle in an open Mercedes, utterly confident that no resistance in Europe would dare come after him directly.
Kubiš and Gabčík had spent weeks tracking that arrogance, eventually choosing a sharp curve at the intersection of Kirchmayerova and V Holešovičkách in the Libeň district, a spot where Heydrich’s driver would be forced to slow the car almost to a stop. On the morning of May 27th, 1942, the two men had been waiting at that corner since roughly 8:30.
Bicycles leaned against a lamp post, nerves stretched to the breaking point. Just after 11:30, the Mercedes finally rounded the curve. A passing tram nearly threw off the entire operation. Gabčík stepped forward, leveled his British-issued Sten submachine gun at point-blank range, and pulled the trigger. It jammed completely.
For one unbearable second, the mission that had taken years, three countries, and dozens of lives to prepare seemed about to collapse into nothing. Then Kubiš moved. He hurled a modified anti-tank grenade at the car. It didn’t land inside the vehicle, but the explosion tore through the rear right side, driving shrapnel and shredded upholstery straight into Heydrich’s body and grazing Kubiš’s own face in the process.
Heydrich initially staggered out of the wreckage under his own power and for over a week, doctors believed he would survive. He didn’t. Blood poisoning from the embedded shrapnel spread through his system and on June 4th, 1942, the Butcher of Prague died in agony. Adolf Hitler’s response was a level of savagery that still defines the word reprisal in Czech history.
On June 10th, 1942, not even 2 weeks after the attack, German forces surrounded the village of Lidice, which had no connection whatsoever to the assassination. Every man in the village, all 173 of them, was shot. Women were shipped to concentration camps. 82 children were sent to extermination camps and murdered.
A handful were selected for forced Germanization and stripped of their identities forever. Then the village itself was bulldozed off the map, its cemetery desecrated. Lidice wasn’t punished for what it did, it was punished for what it could represent to a terrified population. Proof that resistance meant annihilation. The manhunt for the paratroopers intensified.
They were hidden in the crypt of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in central Prague until a fellow agent, Karel Čurda, broke under the promise of reward money and betrayed the entire network to the Gestapo. On June 18th, 1942, German forces surrounded the church. What followed was a desperate hours-long gun battle inside stone walls.
Jan Kubiš was struck down during the fighting, carried out unconscious, and rushed to a hospital where he died from his wounds later that same day. He was 28 years old. Even in death, the Nazis weren’t finished. All seven paratroopers killed at the church were beheaded at Prague’s Institute of Forensic Medicine, and the preserved heads of Kubiš and Gabčík were kept in formaldehyde, intended as future trophies for a Nazi crime museum that was never built.
What ultimately happened to their remains in the war’s final days has never been confirmed with full certainty. Some accounts place them in a mass grave at Ďáblice Cemetery in Prague. Hitler’s vengeance reached even further. On October 24th, 1942, at Mauthausen concentration camp, 262 Czechoslovak patriots connected to the resistance network were executed in a single day, including Jan Kubiš’s own family members and Marie Kovářníková, the woman he loved.
Only one of his brothers survived. For decades after the war, Czechoslovakia’s communist government tried to erase Jan Kubiš’s story, uncomfortable with celebrating a hero whose mission had been trained and equipped by the Western Allies. It’s only in recent decades, through surviving family members, military historians, and painstaking archival work, that his name has finally reclaimed its rightful place in the history of the Second World War.
A shoemaker’s son from a village most maps forgot, ended up killing one of the most dangerous men the 20th century ever produced. He never lived to see his country free, but for one morning in Prague, a small occupied nation reached out and struck directly at the heart of Hitler’s terror, and the Nazi myth of invincibility never fully recovered.
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