Karel Čurda was born on October 10, 1911, in the small south Bohemian village of Nová Včelnice, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, František Čurda, earned a living as a worker, while his mother, Rosalie Čurdová, kept a modest household and cared for six children.
Čurda, the youngest of the family, finished local primary school and later completed a few years at lower secondary school. Money was scarce, so as a young teenager he took a mason's hammer and worked on local building sites.
In interwar Czechoslovakia, military service offered poor rural youths a bed, hot meals, and a small wage. In 1933, Čurda joined the 29th Infantry Regiment of the Czechoslovak Army.
He enjoyed the drills, shot well on the range, and attended courses for non-commissioned officers. In 1936, he became deputy platoon commander in the non-commissioned officer school.
Everything was good for Čurda, but the situation in Europe and especially in Czechoslovakia was changing. In September 1938, while Europe watched the Munich Agreement, which gave Nazi Germany the territory of Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland, Čurda was serving in the State Financial Guard, an armed customs force.
His platoon later patrolled the new Czechoslovak frontier, looking for smugglers and German agents. His superiors spoke about his good discipline and steady morale — clear signs that they considered him politically loyal to the Czechoslovak Republic.
Yet the republic he served was dying. On March 15, 1939, German forces marched into Prague, broke Czechoslovakia, and proclaimed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
For many young men, including Čurda, the thought of serving under German rule was impossible. In June 1939, Čurda slipped from the protectorate and reached the camp at Bronowice near Kraków in Poland.
There he met, among others, Jan Kubiš and Josef Gabčík — two men whose names would later become famous around the world. From Poland, Čurda went to France. His goal was to join the Czechoslovak army in exile and fight against Nazi Germany.
But first he joined the French Foreign Legion, an elite military force consisting of volunteer soldiers for service in France and abroad. The reason was simple: before the start of the Second World War, it was not possible to create independent Czechoslovak units on French soil.
When the Second World War started on September 1, 1939, a lot changed for Czechoslovaks in exile. The Czechoslovak army was formed, and Čurda, among other soldiers, went from the French Foreign Legion to the Czechoslovak army.
He trained in harsh conditions but did not fight during the French campaign, because Nazi Germany overcame France after six weeks of fighting in 1940. Čurda, who never reached the front, escaped on one of the evacuation vessels to Britain, where he joined remnants of the Czechoslovak soldiers stationed in tents at Cholmondeley Park near Liverpool.
Every exiled soldier knew that simple guard duty in Britain would not free their homeland. So when Czechoslovak officers asked for volunteers for special tasks, Čurda stepped forward.
From autumn 1941, he trained with the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE. His training included parachute jumps at Ringway, demolition at Arisaig, and other activities necessary for Czechoslovak agents returning to their occupied homeland.
His Czechoslovak instructors judged him cheerful, team-minded, and physically very strong — fit for independent and group tasks. In 1942, he, along with Adolf Opálka and Ivan Kolařík, formed the special operations team code-named Out Distance.
They flew out on the night of March 28, 1942, in a Halifax bomber bound for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Bad weather, a low drop, and geographical confusion by the navigator scattered the containers and agents.
To make the situation even worse, Adolf Opálka injured himself during the drop, and Ivan Kolařík lost his false papers as well as information about his loved ones. A few days later, Kolařík chose death in a vain attempt to save his fellow agents and loved ones from the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.
Čurda and Opálka made it to Prague and hid in safe flats arranged by resistance fighters in the protectorate. They had come back, but it was not the same country they had known before the war.
Since September 1941, the newly appointed Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich, had ruled the protectorate with an iron logic. The population would be dominated by the Nazis, with benefits for the workers that Nazi Germany needed for its industry and war production — and those who resisted would be persecuted, tortured, and murdered by the Gestapo.
With this policy of carrots and sticks, Heydrich controlled the situation in the protectorate. The end of Heydrich, and with him his policy, came on the morning of May 27, 1942, when Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš attacked his open-top Mercedes in Prague.
Heydrich survived at first but died of his wounds on June 4, 1942. The Nazi reply was quick and brutal. Thousands were arrested, hundreds were shot, and the Gestapo was looking for the attackers.
On the very day of the assassination, May 27, 1942, a state of emergency was declared for the entire territory of Prague. In the following days, thousands of decrees were printed announcing both the state of emergency and a reward of 10 million crowns — the equivalent of 1 million Reichsmarks — for anyone who provided information leading to the arrest of the perpetrators.
The reward was later raised to 20 million crowns. Anyone who knew anything about the perpetrators and failed to report it was to be shot along with their entire family. A curfew was in force, all cinemas, theaters, and entertainment venues were closed, and public transport was stopped.
On June 10, 1942, German troops destroyed the village of Lidice. All men were executed, most of the women were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and the majority of the children were later gassed in Chełmno.
Čurda had left the Czech capital on May 27 to visit his sister in Kolín, a town near Prague. He heard rumors of the assassination on the train, so he rushed back. Afraid that he would be caught in Prague, he managed to get out of the city and went into hiding in Nová Včelnice, where his mother was still living.
There he hid, and for days he read long lists of the executed posted in the newspapers. Posters promised millions of crowns and a full pardon to anyone who helped catch the assassins.
According to Čurda's post-war testimony, his mother wept, saying the family and their village would share Lidice's fate if he remained. On June 13, Čurda sent an anonymous warning letter to the police in Benešov, but no arrest followed.
In this letter, later seized by the Gestapo, he gave information about the names of the attackers on Heydrich. Early on the morning of June 16, he dressed, took a train to Prague, and walked to the Gestapo office in Bredovská Street.
There he told Gestapo officer Heinz Jantur that he was an agent from England. He pointed out the things that belonged to the attackers on Heydrich and were left on the spot on the day of the assassination, and gave the Gestapo information about the attackers and the people who were helping Czechoslovak agents in the protectorate.
In a last flash of courage, Čurda tried to poison himself but failed. He was subsequently beaten, and after that he continued to testify, even though he did not know the exact location where Heydrich's assassins were hiding.
But thanks to his information, the Gestapo arrested people who knew, and under torture revealed the hiding place. Thanks to Čurda's betrayal, the Gestapo arrested hundreds of resistance fighters.
Until Karel Čurda came forward voluntarily on June 16, 1942, the Gestapo had no information about where the agents were hiding. It was only his testimony that pointed them in a direction that meant the deaths of hundreds of resistance fighters and their families — people who, before he betrayed them, had willingly helped even Čurda himself.
The famous siege of the Orthodox church in Prague on June 18, 1942, where Heydrich's attackers and other agents were hiding, was a direct result of Čurda's betrayal. Čurda allegedly urged his friends to surrender, saying, "Friends, surrender. Nothing will happen to you. Nothing happened to me either."
The trapped men answered with gunfire and later killed themselves rather than fall into Nazi hands alive. After a seven-hour fight, the bodies were carried outside. Čurda and another agent turned informer, Viliam Gerik, identified each body for the Gestapo.
The German secret police paid part of the promised reward to Čurda and gave him a new Germanized name, Karl Jerhot. Čurda adopted German nationality, received 5 million crowns, and the Gestapo soon used him as a walking trap.
He traveled across the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, claiming to be a newly landed Czechoslovak agent who needed shelter and connection to the resistance movement. Many patriots accepted him and were later arrested within days by the Germans.
Thanks to Čurda's work, the Gestapo broke not only the ranks of the home resistance but other groups of agents sent from Britain by Czechoslovak authorities. Because other agents recognized him from Britain, his presence carried special weight. Each betrayal handed the Gestapo fresh addresses and snowballed into wider arrests.
After he had become a Gestapo collaborator, he broke up with Karolina Jaková, with whom he had a child born eight months after his departure from the protectorate in 1939, and married a German woman, Maria Bauer, the sister-in-law of a Gestapo official.
Čurda changed a lot during this time. Drink soon ruled his evenings. Yet he remained on the Gestapo payroll and kept working for the Nazis.
The worst harvest of his information came far from Prague. After months of torture, many supporters of the Czechoslovak resistance were moved to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
On October 24, 1942, 262 Czechoslovak prisoners — 135 women and 127 men — were executed. Each victim gave a name and birth date, then an SS man shot them in the back of the neck. The bodies were burned in the crematorium, and their ashes were eventually dumped in a waste site behind the concentration camp.
Among the murdered were also mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters of the resistance fighters. Additional mass shootings of supporters of Czechoslovak agents betrayed by Čurda followed on January 25, 1943, and on February 3, 1944.
The youngest executed was Jindřiška Nováková. She was only 14 years old at the time of her death. Every bullet traced back in part to Čurda's treachery on June 16, 1942.
By late 1944, the Gestapo found Čurda less useful. He drank heavily and missed meetings with his superiors. In the chaos of April 1945, he fled westward toward the American line, where he hid in Manětín, a town near Plzeň.
On May 15, 1945, he walked to the local gendarmerie and allegedly said, "What must come, let it come." Later he was arrested by the Czechoslovak authorities.
A court in Prague formed after the war charged him with high treason, denouncing fellow soldiers, and helping the enemy to murder Czechoslovak citizens. During public hearings in April 1947, he sat pale and silent, sometimes wiping sweat with a handkerchief.
He offered no legal excuse and stated only that he had feared for his family. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. His fellow agent turned informer Viliam Gerik, from Operation Zinc, received the same fate. Neither man asked Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš for clemency.
At dawn on April 29, 1947, warders led the 35-year-old Čurda to the gallows in Pankrác prison in Prague. The trap on the gallows opened and ended the life of a man whose betrayal had destroyed whole networks of resistance fighters and who to this day is a symbol of collaboration with Nazi Germany.