Lidice (German: Liditz) is a village in the Czech Republic just northwest of Prague. It is built on the site of a previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi-createdProtectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was, on orders directly from Heinrich Himmler, completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On June 10, 1942, all 192 men over 16 years of age from the village were murdered on the spot by the Germans in a much publicised atrocity. The rest of the population were sent to Nazi concentration camps where many women and nearly all the children were killed.

History

The village is first mentioned in writing in 1318. After the industrialization of the area, many of its people worked in mines and factories in the neighboring cities of Kladno and Slaný.

Heydrich's assassination Main article: Operation Anthropoid

In 1942, Reinhard Heydrich was the deputy Reichsprotektor of the Nazi German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This area of the former Czechoslovakia had been occupied by Germany since 1939.

Heydrich's car at the scene of the assassination.

On the morning of May 27, 1942, Heydrich was being driven from his country villa at Panenské B?ežanyto his office at Prague Castle. When he reached the Holešovice area ofPrague, his car was attacked by the Czech and Slovak soldiers (on behalf of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile), Jozef Gab?ík and Jan Kubiš. These men, who had been part of a team trained in Great Britain, had parachuted into Bohemia in December 1941 as part of Operation Anthropoid. After Gab?ík's Sten gun failed, Kubiš threw a bomb at Heydrich's car. Both men managed to escape the scene of the assassination. On June 4, Heydrich died in Bulovka hospital in Prague from septicaemia caused by pieces of upholstery entering his body when the bomb exploded. Adolf Hitler suggested Kurt Daluege, Heydrich's successor, to wade through blood to find Heydrich's killers.[citation needed] The Germans began a sweeping and bloody retaliation campaign targeting the entire Czech population.

The mourning speeches at Heydrich's funeral in Berlin were not yet over, when on June 9 the decision was made to "make up for his death".Karl Hermann Frank, Secretary of State for the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, reported from Berlin that the Führer had commanded the following concerning any village found to have harboured Heydrich's killers:

Execute all adult men
Transport all women to a concentration camp
Gather the children suitable for Germanization, then place them in SS families in the Reich and bring the rest of the children up in other ways
Burn down the village and level it entirely

Men massacred at Horák's farm in Lidice Massacre

Horst Böhme, SS Commander of the C division of the Einsatzgruppe, acted on the commands immediately. Members of the German Army field police and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) surrounded the village of Lidice, blocking all avenues of escape. The Nazi regime chose this village because of its residents' known hostility to the occupation, and because Lidice was suspected of harboring local resistance partisans.

All men of the village were rounded up and taken to the farmstead of the Horák family on the edge of the village. Mattresses were taken from neighbouring houses where they were stood up against the wall of the Horáks' barn. Shooting of the men commenced at about 7 a.m. At first the men were shot in groups of five, but Böhme thought the executions were proceeding too slowly and ordered that ten men be shot at a time. The dead were left lying where they fell. This continued until the afternoon hours when there were 173 dead. The next day, seven women, along with nineteen men who had been working in a mine, were sent to Prague, where they were also shot.

All the women and children of the village were taken first to Lidice village school. They were then taken to the nearby town of Kladno where they were detained in the grammar school for three days. The children were separated from their mothers. Four women were pregnant and were sent to the same hospital where Heydrich died. They were given abortions and then sent to different concentration camps. One hundred and eighty-four women of Lidice were loaded on trucks on June 12, 1942, driven to Kladno railway station and forced into a special passenger train guarded by a large escort. In the morning of June 14, 1942 the train halted on a railway siding at the concentration camp atRavensbrück. On their arrival the Lidice women were first isolated in a special block. The women were forced to work in leather processing, road building, textile and ammunition factories. Lack of hygiene, epidemics and contagious diseases spread and took most of the women. Some went mad and others were murdered.

Eighty-eight Lidice children were transported to the area of the former textile factory in Gneisenau Street in ?ód?. Their arrival was announced by a telegram from Horst Böhme's Prague office which ended with: the children are only bringing what they wear. No special care is desirable.The care was minimal. They suffered from a lack of hygiene and from illnesses. By order of the camp management, no medical care was given to the children. Shortly after their arrival in ?ód?, officials from the Central Race and Settlement branch chose seven children at random for Germanisation.

The furor over Lidice caused some hesitation over the fate of the remaining children, but in late June Adolf Eichmann ordered the massacre of the remainder of the children. On July 2, 1942 all of the remaining 81 Lidice children were handed over to the ?ód? Gestapo office, who in turn had them transported to the extermination camp at Che?mno 70 kilometres away, where they were gassed to death in Magirus gas vans. It is almost certain[citation needed] they were killed on the day of their arrival. Out of the 105 Lidice children, 82 died in Che?mno, six died in the German Lebensborn orphanages and 17 returned home.

Destruction of Lidice

The village of Lidice was set on fire and the remains of the buildings were bulldozed, every last remaining piece of evidence being destroyed. Even those buried in the town cemetery were not spared. Their remains were dug up and destroyed.[citation needed] A film was made of the entire process byFranz Treml. A collaborator with German intelligence, Treml had run a Zeiss-Ikon shop in Lucerna Palace in Prague. After the German occupation he became a filming adviser for the National Socialist German Workers Party.

Altogether, about 340 people from Lidice died because of the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children).

A small Czech village called Ležáky was also destroyed two weeks after Lidice. Here both men and women were shot, and children were sent to concentration camps or 'Aryanised'.

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.

British poster commemorating Lidice

Nazi propaganda had openly, and proudly, announced the events in Lidice, unlike other massacres in occupied Europe which were kept secret. The information was instantly picked up by Allied media.

Commemorations

In September 1942, coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent in Great Britain founded the organisation Lidice Shall Live to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war.

Soon after the razing of the village, several towns in various countries were named after it (such asSan Jerónimo-Lídice in Mexico City, Barrio Lídice and its hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Lídice de Capira in Panama, and towns in Brazil), so that the name would live on in spite of Hitler's intentions. A neighborhood in Crest Hill, Illinois, was renamed from Stern Park to Lidice. A square in the English city of Coventry, itself devastated during World War II, is named after Lidice. An alley in a very crowded area of downtown Santiago, Chile is named after the town of Lidice too, and one of the buildings there has a small plaque that explains its tragic story. A street in Sofia is named to commemorate the massacre.

In the wake of the massacre, Humphrey Jennings directed a movie about Lidice, The Silent Village(1943), using amateur actors from a Welsh mining village, Cwmgiedd. An American film was made in 1943 called Hitler's Madman, however it contained a number of inaccuracies in the story. A more accurate British film, Operation Daybreak, starring Timothy Bottoms as Kubiš and Anthony Andrews as Gab?ík, was released in 1975.

American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a book-length verse play on the massacre, The Murder of Lidice, which was printed in its entirety in the Oct. 19, 1942, edition of Life magazine and published as a book that same year by Harper.

Czech composer Bohuslav Martin? composed his Memorial to Lidice (an 8-minute orchestral work) in 1943 as a response to the massacre. The piece quotes from the Czech St Wenceslas Chorale, as well as, in the climax of the piece, the opening notes (dot-dot-dot-dash = V in Morse code) of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.

Lidice since 1945 Memorial to the murdered children of Lidice.

Women from Lidice who survived imprisonment at Ravensbrück returned after the Second World War. They were rehoused in a new village of Lidice that was built overlooking the original site. The first part of the new village was completed in 1949.

Two men from Lidice were in the United Kingdom serving in the Royal Air Force at the time of the massacre. After 1945 Pilot Officer Josef Horák and Flight Lieutenant Josef St?íbrný returned to Czechoslovakia to serve in the Czechoslovak Air Force. However, after the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 the new Communist governmentwould not allow them to apply to be housed in the new Lidice because they had served in the forces of one of the western powers. Horák and his family returned to Britain and the RAF and was killed in a flying accident in December 1948.

A sculpture from the 1990s by academic sculptor Marie Uchytilová stands today overlooking the site of the old village of Lidice. Entitled "The Memorial to the Children Victims of the War" it comprises 82 bronze statues of children (42 girls and 40 boys) aged 1 to 16 to honour the children who were murdered at Che?mno in the summer of 1942. A cross with a crown of thorns marks the mass grave of the Lidice men. Overlooking the site is a memorial area flanked by a museum and a small exhibition hall. The memorial area is linked to the new village by an avenue of linden trees. In 1955 a "Rosarium" of 29,000 rosebushes was created beside the avenue of lindens overlooking the site of the old village. In the 1990s the Rosarium was neglected, but after 2001 a new Rosarium with 21,000 bushes was designed and created.[9] Situated 500 metres from the museum, in the new village, is an art gallery which displays permanent and temporary exhibitions. The annual children's art competition attracts entries worldwide.

Child Victims of the Nazis