Assassination

In the autumn of 1941 the harsh rule of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in occupied Bohemia and Moravia feeds the Czech resistance. In the spring of 1942 the government in exile sends trained paratroopers on a mission to kill him. Two men, called Strnad and Vyskočil in the film, ambush Heydrich’s open car in the Libeň district of Prague and wound him fatally despite a submachine gun that jams. What follows is Nazi reprisal, mass execution and an intense manhunt for the team. Jiří Sequens’s hundred and four minute Czechoslovak film aims at a documentary level of accuracy in reconstructing the events, and it shows that the assassination could not have happened without local support.