Some Thoughts on the New Film 'Anthropoid'
The City of Darkness
It must be 40 years since I first saw the film 'Operation Daybreak', about the assassination in Prague of the monster Reinhard Heydrich. I hadn’t been to Prague then (I would put that right two years later). That unique city, as imagined but never seen, had a powerful, mythical, almost mystical hold over my mind. It still does, provided I stay away from it. Recent visits, in which I have come to see it as a modern place rather than a dark and lovely stage set on which good and evil do battle, have rather spoiled it for me. I do understand that its inhabitants much prefer it the way it is.
The Kafka associations and two films , ‘Operation Daybreak’ and Costa-Gavras’s now almost unobtainable ‘L’Aveu’ (‘The Confession’) about the Slansky show trials of 1953, helped fix it in my mind as a frightening place of violence, melancholy, gloom, betrayal, dungeons and defeat, but also a very beautiful one. Later I would come to read Lionel Davidson’s charming and enthralling ‘Night of Wenceslas’, later very badly filmed, in which the city – lovely and captivating, but hiding terrible menace - plays a starring role. As is the case with anyone in my generation, my mind was also full of black-and-white TV news pictures of Soviet tanks trundling through Wenceslas Square (which isn’t a square, as I now well know), bulldozing trams to one side (this sight made me realise what a potent thing a tank is. I’d seen trams and thought they were heavy, a useful obstruction if needed. But Moscow’s tanks just biffed them out of the way as if they were plastic toys). And I have some sort of memory of immense crowds at the funeral of Jan Palach, though perhaps I have made it up (having been privileged to see at first hand the equally enormous multitudes who turned up for the funeral of Czech Communism in the winter of 1989) . Then years of frozen silence.
An odd anomaly
I’m still not quite sure how ‘Operation Daybreak’, a western-made and financed film (it was called ‘The Price of Freedom’ in the USA, a title I’ll return to), got the co-operation of the Communist Czechoslovak authorities, less than ten years after the extinction of the Prague Spring. Remember, it is about Czechs trained in Britain, making an attack on the Germans in 1941-2. Czech co-operation with Britain in the 1939-45 war tended to be forgotten or suppressed. Warsaw Pact Czechoslovakia owed its territorial restoration (apart from sub-Carpathian Ukraine, then in Soviet hands, now in Ukraine) and its form of government to the USSR’s victory over Hitler and the resulting Yalta settlement. Likewise, they owed to Stalin the reunification of the country after Hitler’s removal of Slovakia from Prague’s control. Slovakia, encouraged by Berlin to break away from post Munich Czecho-Slovakia(note the hyphen added to the country’s name at the time), was treated very differently from the Czech lands under Nazi rule.
They also owed the ethnic cleansing of German-speaking Czechoslovak citizens (thus ‘resolving’ the pre-war Sudeten German problem) mainly to the Soviets, who helped them carry it out with British and American blessing, under the deliberately forgotten Potsdam agreement.
The Wrong Allies
We in Britain were by then (the mid-1970s) very much the wrong allies. We were on the opposite side of Europe, in NATO. And it went deeper than that . Not only had Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Germany in 1938. It had then given a home to the exile government of Eduard Benes, the figurehead of Czech nationalism who was not really thought of as an ally by the Communists who seized power in Prague in 1948 in a ‘spontaneous’ mob-backed coup d’etat (which continued to fool some sympathisers for long afterwards, who described it as a ‘rising’ and argued that it was legitimate)..
It wasn’t as bad as it had been. The days were gone when Czech pilots, returning home to their supposedly liberated land from service in the RAF , were imprisoned as politically unreliable (see ‘Dark Blue World’, an interesting if disappointing film on this subject). But it wasn’t done to mention it, or draw attention to this awkward period in history. I remember a British diplomat in Prague describing to me the little ceremony those Czech RAF fliers would try to hold each year at a war memorial in a Prague cemetery. Many would struggle into their old RAF uniforms. And the whole thing would be very aggressively watched, photographed and filmed by spooks and musclemen from the StB, the Communist Secret Police of the time. Their existence challenged the official orthodoxy, that liberation had come solely from Moscow.
Maybe the Prague Communists of the early 1970s just wanted the dollars, to help finance the mildly prosperous consumer society they were creating to soothe the wounds of 1968 and encourage forgetfulness. Whatever the explanation, Prague was the star of the film , Prague as it then was, as I first saw it, black with age and neglect, falling to bits, indifferent to tourists, ancient, sinister, seductive, shabby within and without, an inhabited cemetery of great loveliness and enormous gloom, whispering from its many-spired sooty towers the last enchantments of an older, crueller, yet also more beautiful and more exciting age. Perhaps that is why , when the barbarities of the past came to life again the mid-20th century, they did this so horribly in that particular city.
A Man So Horrible He had Two Funerals
One scene from ‘Operation Daybreak’ is probably clearer in my mind now than in the film. I find my imagination quite often embellishes and lengthens scenes in films watched long ago. When I finally track them down, episodes which last many minutes in my recollection are over in 20 seconds. But the film-makers’ re-staging of Heydrich’s Prague funeral must have shocked the city at the time, only 35 years after the real thing. Hitler gave Heydrich two lots of obsequies, one in Prague and one (with lots of Nordic fir trees and Wagner) in Berlin, with an armoured train-ride in between. This was not to make sure he was dead. The Prague ceremony was held to hammer home to the Czechs just who was in charge, and how much they were going to pay for the death of Hitler’s favourite. In the film it is a pagan occasion of barely-suppressed savagery and vengeance, the thudding SS drums a message of evil to come.
An SS Film Crew Makes a Horror Movie
I also recall a clever, deeply shocking shot of an SS camera crew, complete with clapperboard and very modern camera, but garbed in the armour, death’s head badges and deadly-black uniform of their hellish society, swinging their lenses towards the ruins of Lidice, one of two villages (everyone remembers Lidice, nobody remembers the other, Lezaky) destroyed and subjected to mass murder, including women and children, as collective punishment. Unlike so many other German atrocities of the period carried out in secret, this one was openly avowed and publicised by Berlin. They wanted the world, and especially their subject peoples or those like us and the USSR, still insisting on fighting them, to know they were capable of this. All of us live within a century of this event, an open, purposeful, publicised mass reprisal murder in civilised Europe. And yet we think we’re safe and that there is such a thing as progress. Lidice was only a small part of the bloodbath. Many others were murdered elsewhere.
Year later I saw the film again on a rather inadequate DVD seemingly made for the Arab market, in which the subtitles for the German-language segments were not much help. And yet it still had some of its power, after all that time. Anton Diffring, as Heydrich, was suitably hateful and arrogant – there was a legend that Heydrich had defiantly donned the ancient crown of Bohemia to underline his absolute power, so activating an old curse and ensuring his death. He is shown doing so. In that part of the world, where violence and legend are in the bones of the landscape, such things seem more credible.
From 'Daybreak' to 'Anthropoid'
Now the story is once again the subject of a film ‘Anthropoid’. This is in fact the genuine name of the operation, which was nevr called ‘Daybreak’ , though it is a better title. ‘Daybreak’ came from the title of the book about the event ‘Seven Men at Daybreak’ by Alan Burgess (once an RAF pilot) , a book now so rare that it is on sale for mad prices in the Internet, and so effectively unobtainable.
Much of this new film is spoiled for me by the casting of Cillian Murphy, the absurdly good-looking star of the unwatchably preposterous BBC drama ‘Peaky Blinders’, as Jozef Gabcik, one of the assassins. You can find pictures 0f Sgt Gabcik ( a Slovak) on the Internet. His resemblance to Cillian Murphy is slight. Perhaps as a side-effect of ‘Peaky Blinders’ (as so often in films about the past) no opportunity is lost (I put this mildly) for the lighting of a cigarette, though only the glamorous ignition tends to be shown, not the half-smoked stub jutting from the corner of the mouth or jammed between yellow fingers, nor the grinding out of it in some nasty place, let alone the revolting smelly piles of debris in ashtrays, or the jaundiced tinge the damned things left everywhere; let alone the grey lined faces of the smokers and their hacking, productive coughs with their ever-present promises of major phlegm expulsion.
I’ll be told that Anthony Andrews, as yet undiscovered by Brideshead, who played the same part in ‘Operation Daybreak, might also be a bit distractingly good looking. But somehow he wasn’t. Andrews can efface his beauty quite a bit, when he chooses, and did so rather brilliantly in the later scenes of ‘Brideshead’ where he played a washed-up, broken old soak with great power.
What I can’t recall from ‘Daybreak’ and couldn’t get from ‘Anthropoid’ is any great consideration of the claim often made that Churchill thought the Czechs were a bit too quiescent and content under German occupation, and hoped to end that by killing Heydrich. In short, he is said to have been counting on a severe retaliation by Hitler. Though whether he expected what he got, or rather what the poor Czechs got, who can say? Even Churchill, a man who knew a lot of history, may not have fathomed the National Socialist capacity for wickedness. Idealists are so much more dangerous than ordinary tyrants.
We did several rather questionable things during the long years when we had no army on the European continent, and to this day it is hard to discuss them without meeting the wall of rage which I encounter if I criticise our bombing of German civilians. NOTE: Since first writing this passage, with its reference to Churchill’s alleged attitude, I’ve made some effort to back it up with historical warrant, and can’t find anything which implicates Churchill, though another name does come up, which I’ll come to. I’ve kept it in because I am still not sure of the truth, would be glad of any contributions or references which either confirm it or explode it, and because I decided it would be dishonest to cut it out, as I have long believed it and often said it. Certainly the Czechs were more lightly occupied than many other of Hitler’s subject peoples, their factories produced valuable armaments for the German Reich, and attempts to send in saboteurs by parachute often failed, ending in the denunciation of the agents or in the round-up and massacre of the resistance members who had helped them.
They Rightly Feared Reprisals
But I will say one thing for ‘Anthropoid’ (which follows ‘Daybreak’ quite closely in many aspects but not all - most modern film critics don’t seem to have seen ‘Daybreak’, or at least don’t mention it if they have). It makes it clear that those who helped Heydrich’s assassins did not, in many cases, find out till rather late what it was they were aiding – by which time, of course they were doomed to appalling fates by their participation. And it does not hide the fact that leading figures in the Czech resistance, on the spot, were horrified when they learned of the plan, opposed it and tried to get it stopped by appealing to London. (They were, in their defence, already gravely demoralised by the clever and efficient repression which Heydrich and his forerunners had visited on them. They had been penetrated and many of their best people had been arrested and murdered). This is all true and very much confirmed by the authoritative book on the subject, Professor Callum Macdonald’s 1989 work ‘The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich’ .
According to Macdonald, the man who wanted to go ahead with the operation was Eduard Benes, who seems to have spoken personally to Gabcik before he set off. With the USSR now in the war, Benes need a major stroke against the Nazis to show that the non-Communist Czech resistance was capable of potent action. If Churchill opposed or encouraged this, I don’t know, and would be grateful for any reference.
I thought that the depiction of the assassination in ‘Anthropoid’ was wrong because in it the bomb aimed at Heydrich’s car also damages a passing tram and wounds many of its occupants(the event took place on a hairpin bend in an untouristed part of Prague, north-west of the city centre). The earlier film shows the events taking place in a deserted street. But Macdonald’s book confirms that ‘Anthropoid’ is absolutely accurate. It also confirms that both assassins found girlfriends in Prague during the long months between their (botched) landing and the killing.
What would YOU have done?
The treatment of the traitor Curda, who betrayed his comrades for a huge reward and to save his skin( see below), is perhaps a little inaccurate. I doubt that he was rotten from the start, and I don’t think the Gestapo had any need to beat his evidence out of him. He was just frightened out of his wits once the reprisals started, assumed the German would be in power forever, and did what many others would have done. Indeed, when he was brought back to Prague to be tried and hanged, he said in court that anyone else would have done what he did, given the huge size of the reward (and his likely fate if he was tracked down).
‘Anthropoid’ also invents an incident at the beginning of the film, in which the ordinary Czechs who discover the parachutists limping, lost, through the snow, appear to betray the two agents. This never happened. The men who found them helped them, and smuggled them to Prague. They were mistakenly dropped hundreds of miles from their intended landing point, missed their rendezvous and made contact with the resistance only by guesswork and luck, amid a great deal of entirely justified mistrust.
The end of the assassins’ story, with the two men and several other parachutists surrounded by the Waffen SS in a Prague Church, and their legendary, epic last strand against the Nazis (which really ought to be better known) is lengthily portrayed, as it must be. But it is not, alas, the end.
Unbearable to watch
In both films the Moravec family who sheltered the assassins are prominently featured, especially Mrs Moravcova and her gentle, violin-playing, hero-worshipping teenage son Ata. Anyone who knows the story must tremble for those courageous, honourable people as soon as the assassins come into their lives. And they duly encounter a fate so horrible and distressing that I will not recount it in detail here. In my view ‘Anthropoid’ gives too much detail of that fate, but you could, I suppose, make a moral case for doing so, if only to remind people of how bottomlessly wrong torture is and how terribly human beings can behave when they think that cruelty is justified by necessity. But I thought we knew that about the Nazis. Maybe we are forgetting it. Cover your eyes if you prefer.
You can certainly make such a case for the awful scenes of torture shown in ‘The Battle of Algiers’, a film which did a lot to convince me that there can never be any excuse for the use of this method by any country which calls itself civilised, whatever the supposed gains.
Nazi torture, of course, requires no such examination. It involves the servants of evil doing evil things for evil ends. It is uncomplicatedly wrong. The issue here is quite different. Knowing what we knew of the German National Socialists, and of the sordid, cruel gangster Heydrich¸ were we right to embark on an operation which was more or less bound to bring about retaliation of a mediaeval type (as it indeed it did)?
There is something in me that says no, and I am not satisfied by being told in the closing credits that Heydrich was an architect of the Holocaust (as indeed he was). He was a foul man, a nasty bullying philanderer and pervert who ceaselessly betrayed his ‘good Nazi’ wife (most of the Nazi elite were amoral in their personal lives, to put it mildly, a fact not often dwelt upon, for some reason. Heydrich’s sordid morals did not harm him in the eyes of Hitler) as well as a mass killer and wielder of terror.
Nor am I impressed by the other postscript in which it is stated that, after the killing of Heydrich, Britain revoked the Munich agreement and welcomed Czechoslovakia as a full participant in the alliance for freedom. This just draws attention to the fact that, before 1942, the relationship was much more ambiguous – and to the fact that ‘freedom’ for Czechoslovakia took the form, after Yalta, of subjection to Soviet Power for 40 long hard years, plus the savage expulsion of ethnic Germans mentioned above and described here in my posting on the Potsdam Agreement and the fine book about it by R.M.Douglas ‘Orderly and Humane’ http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/orderly-and-humane.html
Happily Ever After?
I also note that in the end, Czechoslovakia was dismantled altogether, once again waving goodbye to Slovakia (Benes would have been appalled by this, I am sure) and absorbed, in pieces, into the EU. Does any of this justify what we see happening to poor Ata Moravec, whose pitiable fate in the film might be said to represent all the thousands of other gentle people hacked and smashed and torn to pieces in the red mist of vengeance which followed the assassination of Heydrich? I am by no means sure that it does.