Kubiš, Jan, born 24-06-1913 in Dolní Vilémovice, Moravia (now Czech Republic,
was a Boy Scout. Having previously been an active member of Orel, Jan Kubiš started his military career as a Czechoslovak army
conscript on 01-11-1935 by the 31st Infantry Regiment “Arco” in Jihlava. After passing petty officer course and promotion to corporal, Kubiš served some time in Znojmo before being transferred to 34th infantry regiment “Marksman Jan Čapek” in Opava,
where he served at guard battalion stationed in Jakartovice. Here, Kubiš reached promotion to platoon sergeant.
During the Czechoslovak mobilization of 1938, Kubiš served as deputy commander of a platoon in Czechoslovak border fortifications in the Opava area. Following the Munich Agreement and demobilization, Kubiš was discharged from army on 19-10-1938 and returned to his civilian life, working at a brick factory.
At the eve of World War II, on 16-06-1939, Kubiš fled Czechoslovakia and joined a forming Czechoslovak unit in Kraków, Poland. Soon Jan was transferred to Algiers, where he entered the French Foreign Legion.
He fought in France during the early stage of World War II and received his Croix de Guerre
there.
A month after the German victory in the Battle of France, Kubiš fled to Great Britain, where he received training as a paratrooper. The Free Czechoslovaks, as he and other self-exiled Czechoslovaks were called, were stationed at Cholmondeley Castle near Malpas
in Cheshire. During the Second World War, the house and grounds were used for a variety of military purposes which included a Royal Navy hospital.
Until her death in November 2015, the house was occupied by Lavinia, Dowager
Marchioness of Cholmondeley, mother of the present Marquess who lives in the other family seat, Houghton Hall in Norfolk. The house is not open to the public, but the park and gardens are open during the summer season. A variety of events are organised in the grounds and one of the lodges can be used as a holiday cottage.
Jan and his best friend, Jozef Gabčík
,
both befriended the Ellison family, from Ightfield, Shropshire, whom they met while in Whitchurch, Shropshire.
In 1941, Kubiš was dropped into Czechoslovakia as part of Operation Anthropoid, where he died following the successful assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
His remains were buried secretly in a mass grave at the Ďáblice cemetery in Prague. Since this was unknown after World War II, Karel Čurda, the member of their squad who betrayed them to the Nazis, was coincidentally also buried at the cemetery. However, in 1990 mass graves were excavated and a memorial site with symbolic gravestones was established instead. In 2009, a memorial was built at the place of the attack on Heydrich. The assassination in Prague Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš were airlifted along with seven soldiers from Czechoslovakia’s army-in-exile in the United Kingdom and two other groups named Silver A and Silver B, both had different missions, by a Royal Air Force Halifax of No. 138 Squadron
into Czechoslovakia at 10pm on 28-12-1941. In Prague, they contacted several families and anti-Nazi organizations who helped them during the preparations for the assassination. On 27-05-1942, Reinhard Heydrich had planned to meet Adolf Hitler
in Berlin. German documents suggest that Hitler intended to transfer Heydrich to German occupied France, where the French resistance was gaining ground.
The pur Heydrich would have to pass a section where the Dresden-Prague road merged with a road to the Troja Bridge. The junction, in the Prague suburb of Libeň, was well-suited for the attack because motorists have to slow for a hairpin bend. At 10:30 AM, Heydrich proceeded on his daily commute from his home in Panenské Břežany to Prague Castle.

Gabčík and Kubiš waited at the tram stop on the curve near Bulovka Hospital in Prague 8-Libeň. As Heydrich’s open-topped Mercedes-Benz neared the pair, Gabčík stepped in front of the vehicle, trying to open fire, but his Sten gun jammed . Heydrich ordered his driver, SS-Oberscharführer Johannes “Hans” Klein, to stop the car.
When Heydrich stood up to try to shoot Gabčík, Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade at the vehicle, and its fragments ripped through the car’s right-rear fender, embedding shrapnel and fibres from the upholstery into Heydrich’s body, even though the grenade failed to enter the car. Kubiš was also injured by the shrapnel. Heydrich, apparently unaware of his shrapnel injuries, got out of the car, returned fire and tried to chase Gabčík but soon collapsed. Klein returned from his abortive attempt to chase Kubiš, and Heydrich ordered him to chase Gabčík. Klein was shot twice by Gabčík (who was now using his revolver) and wounded in the pursuit. A Czech woman went to Heydrich’s aid and flagged down a delivery van. Heydrich was first placed in the driver’s cab, but complained that the van’s movement was causing him pain. He was placed in the back of the van, on his stomach, and taken to the emergency room at Na Bulovce Hospital.
Heydrich had suffered severe injuries to his left side, with major damage to his diaphragm spleen and lung. He had also fractured a rib. Dr. Slanina packed the chest wound, while Dr. Walter Diek tried unsuccessfully to remove the splinters. He immediately decided to operate. This was carried out by Drs. Diek, Slanina, and Hohlbaum. Heydrich was given several blood transfusions. A splenectomy was performed. The chest wound, left lung, and diaphragm were all debrided and the wounds closed. Heinrich Himmler ordered Dr. Karl Gebhardt
to fly to Prague to assume care. Despite a fever, Heydrich’s recovery appeared to progress well. Dr. Theodor Morell
, Hitler’s personal physician, suggested the use of sulphonamide, a new antibacterial drug, but Gebhardt, thinking Heydrich would recover, refused. On 2 June, during a visit by Himmler, Heydrich reconciled himself to his fate by reciting a part of one of his father’s operas. Heydrich slipped into a coma after Heinrich Himmler’s visit and never regained consciousness. He died on 4 June, probably around 04:30. He was 38. The autopsy concluded that he died of sepsis. Heydrich’s facial expression as he died betrayed an “uncanny spirituality and entirely perverted beauty, like a renaissance Cardinal,” according to Bernhard Wehner,
a Kripo police official who investigated the assassination. SS-Oberscharführer Johannes “Hans” Klein
receiving an injury himself and hunting the attackers, survived the war.
Death and burial ground of Kubis, Jan.
Bullet-scarred window of the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodious
in Prague where Kubiš and his compatriots were cornered. Karel Čurda
who also identified the bodies, was a colleague and parachuted into the protectorate in 1942 as a member of the sabotage group Out Distance. He is known for his betrayal of the Czech and Slovak assassins of Heydrich in Praque through Operation Anthropoid. His rewards were 1.000.000 Reichsmarks and a new identity, “Karl Jerhot”. He married a German woman and spent the rest of the war as a Gestapo spy. After the war, Čurda was tracked down and arrested. When asked in court how he could betray his comrades, Čurda answered, “I think you would have done the same for 1 million marks.” Karel Čurda was found guilty of treason and hanged on 29-04-1947, age 35.
Kubiš and his group were found on 18 June in the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodious in Resslova Street in Prague. In a bloody battle that lasted for two hours, Kubiš was wounded and died shortly after arrival at the hospital. The other parachutists committed suicide to avoid capture after an additional four-hour battle with the SS.
Jan Kubis’ girlfriend Anna Malinova
was arrested in the aftermath of the assassination, and died in Mauthausen concentration camp. Her younger sister Jindriska
also died in a camp. Anna was a war widow and her daughter, aged about 6 in 1945, survived.





In this “child’s” grave at Ďáblice cemetery in Prague in 1942 were buried parachutes and coveralls of the paratroopers from Anthropoid group.

The whole group, included Karel Curda, the traitor who reported their cache to the Nazis, were buried in a mass grave on the cemetery: Praha Ďáblice – northern part, in Praque. Radek Hroch from the Czech Republic sent me kindly the grave pictures with a new gravestone.
After the assassination attempt, an enraged Hitler ordered Kurt Daluege,
Heydrich’s replacement, to wade through blood in Bohemia and find the murderers. The Germans launched a massive revenge campaign against the Czech civilian population.
As a reprisal of the attack on Heydrich the Germans committed the destruction of Lidce, Lidice was a small village and the name was dropped if the attack people would come from Lidice. The Lidice Massacre was a massacre perpetrated by the Nazis in the occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic, to retaliate for the partisan killing of Reinhard Heydrich. On 10-06-1942, 173 men from Lidice were executed.
Other villagers were deported to extermination camps. In total, about 340 of the 503 residents lost their lives (192 men, 60 women and 88 children). The survivors returned to their destroyed village after the war.
n May 1943, Daluege became seriously ill after a massive heart attack. In August, he was relieved of all of his day-to-day responsibilities and spent the rest of the war living on a property in western Pomerania, given to him by Hitler. Arrest, trial, conviction and sentence:]
In May 1945, Daluege was arrested by British troops in Lübeck and interned in Luxembourg and then at Nuremberg, where he was charged as “a major war criminal”. In September 1946 after being extradited to Czechoslovakia, he was tried for his many crimes against humanity committed in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Throughout his trial, Daluege was unrepentant, claiming he was beloved by “three million policemen”, only following Hitler’s orders, and had a clear conscience. He was convicted on all charges and sentenced to death on 23-10-1946. Daluege was hanged in Pankrác prison in Prague on 24-10-1946, age 49.


Message(s), tips or interesting graves for the webmaster: robhopmans@outlook.com
Lieke Melkert
Goeiedag,
Ik ben net terug uit Praag en heb me daar verdiept in operatie Anthropoid. Ik herlees nu hier het overzicht over Jan Kubis, wat nog wat details geeft die ik niet kende. Ik zou heel graag willen dat er ook een pagina komt over Karel Čurda, de verrader van de verzetsmensen in de kerk. Hij wordt op de pagina van Jan Kubis wel genoemd, maar hij heeft geen eigen pagina (Laurent Binet heeft in zijn op waarheid beruste roman wel duidelijk over hem geschreven. Zie HhhH, Himmlers hersens heten Heydrich). Op de site TracesofWar heeft Čurda wel een eigen pagina, maar het ergert me dat hij daar staat vermeld met een kruis van verdienste (het croix de guerre) dat hij misschien aan het begin van de oorlog wel gekregen heeft, maar dat er niets over zijn werk als verrader wordt geschreven, noch dat hij veroordeeld is tot de doodstraf. Ik ben daar nog mee bezig in de hoop dat ze het willen aanvullen, maar tot op heden is het er niet en ik vind dat echt een omissie. Het zou goed zijn als dat hier vermeld wordt.
Rob Hopmans
https://ww2gravestone.com/people/curda-karel/