Karel Čurda

Karel Čurda

Karel Čurda (10 October 1911 – 29 April 1947) was an active Czech Nazi collaborator during World War II. A soldier of the Czechoslovak army in exile, he was parachuted into the protectorate in 1942 as a member of the sabotage group Out Distance. He is known for his betrayal of the Anglo-Czech and Slovak army agents responsible for the assassination of top Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague known as Operation Anthropoid.^[1]

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 collaborator.

After the war, Čurda was tracked down and arrested. When asked in court how he could betray his comrades, Čurda supposedly answered, "I think you would have done the same for 1 million marks." Karel Čurda was found guilty of treason and hanged on April 29, 1947.^[2]

On the other hand, czech historian Jiří Plachý gives a different account of his personality and motives.^[3] According to his research, Čurda stayed with his family in South Bohemia in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. That put him under huge pressure as he knew that the Nazis could wipe out his whole family or even village, just as they had wiped out Lidice and Ležáky. This was likely the key factor in his decision to betray. After the war, he turned himself in, a broken man.

In the film Operation Daybreak (1975) Čurda is portrayed by Martin Shaw, and in Anthropoid (2016) by Jiří Šimek.

See also

• Operation Anthropoid

References