Lidice

Lidice Massacre

In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, was the Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia which had been occupied by Germany in 1939. On the morning of May 27, 1942, he was being driven from his country villa to his office in Prague. When he reached the Hole?ovice area of Prague, his car was attacked by two Czech resistance fighters, Jozef Gab?ík and Jan Kubi?. These men, who had been trained in Great Britain, had parachuted into Czechoslovakia in December, 1941, as part of Operation Anthropoid. On June 4, 1942, Heydrich died in Bulkova hospital in Prague. Hitler, enraged, ordered Kurt Daluege, Heydrich's replacement, to wade through blood to find Heydrich's killers. The Germans began a massive retaliation campaign against the civilian Czech populace.

Related Topics:
Reinhard Heydrich - Bohemia - Moravia - May 27 - 1942 - Prague - Operation Anthropoid

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The best known of these assaults occurred on June 10. German security police surrounded the village of Lidice, blocking all avenues of escape. The Nazis chose this village because of its residents' known hostility to the occupation and because Lidice was suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans. The entire population was rounded up, and all men over sixteen years of age were put in a barn. They were shot the next day. Another nineteen men, who were working in a mine, along with seven women, were sent to Prague, where they were also shot. The remaining women were shipped to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where about a quarter of them died in the gas chambers or from overwork. The children were taken to a concentration camp at the Gneisenaustreet in ?ód? (nowadays in Poland), where they were sorted by racial criteria, and those deemed suitable for 'Aryanization' were shipped to Germany; the fates of many of these children remain unknown. The village itself was razed and bulldozed. A genuine film document, made by a German soldier, has survived.

Related Topics:
June 10 - Ravensbrück - Concentration camp - Gas chamber - ?ód? - Poland - Aryanization - Germany

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All together, about 340 people died in the Nazi reprisal in Lidice. A small Czech village called Le?áky was also destroyed two weeks after Lidice. Here both men and women were shot, and children were sent to concentration camps or 'Aryanized'.

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The death toll resulting from the effort to avenge the death of Heydrich is estimated at 1,300. This count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites suspected of disloyalty and random victims like those from Lidice.

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Nazi propaganda had proudly announced events in Lidice, unlike other massacres in occupied Europe which were kept in secret. The information was picked by Allied media and used in their propaganda (a movie about Lidice was filmed in Britain soon after the event).

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