Lidice is a village in the Czech Republic just northwest of Prague. It is built near
the site of the previous village of the same name which, as part of the Nazi Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia, on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler,
was completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination, in Operation
Anthropoid, of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942. On 10 June 1942,
all 173 men over 15 years of age from the village were executed. Another 11 men who
were not in the village were arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several
others already under arrest. Meanwhile, 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration
camps; a few children considered racially suitable for Germanisation were handed over
to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were
gassed to death. After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.
History The village is first mentioned in writing
in 1318. After the industrialisation of the area, many of its people worked in mines and
factories in the neighbouring cities of Kladno and Slaný.
Heydrich's assassination
From 24 September 1941, SS-Obergruppenführer and General of Police Reinhard Heydrich had
been Acting Reichsprotektor of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This area of the former
Czechoslovakia had been occupied by Nazi Germany since 5 April 1939.
On the morning of 27 May 1942, Heydrich was being driven from his country villa at Panenské
Břežany to his office at Prague Castle. When he reached the Kobylisy area of Prague,
his car was attacked by the Slovak and Czech soldiers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. These
men, who had been part of a team trained in Great Britain, parachuted into Bohemia in
December 1941 as part of Operation Anthropoid. After Gabčík's Sten gun jammed, Heydrich
ordered his driver, SS-Oberscharführer Klein, to stop the car. When Heydrich stood up to
shoot Gabčík, Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade at Heydrich's car. The explosion wounded
Heydrich and Kubiš. Heydrich sent his driver, Klein, to chase Gabčík on foot. In the ensuing
firefight, Gabčík shot Klein in the leg, below the knee. Both Kubiš and Gabčík managed
to escape the scene. On 4 June Heydrich died in Bulovka Hospital in Prague from septicaemia
caused by pieces of upholstery entering his body when the bomb exploded.
Late in the afternoon of 27 May, SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank proclaimed a state of emergency
and a curfew in Prague. Anyone who helped the attackers was to be executed along with
their entire family. A massive search involving 21,000 men began. A total of 36,000 houses
were checked. By 4 June 157 people had been executed as a result of the reprisals, but
the assassins had not been found and no information was forthcoming.
The mourning speeches at Heydrich's funeral in Berlin were not yet over, when on 9 June,
the decision was made to "make up for his death". Karl Hermann Frank, Secretary of State
for the Nazi 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 Germanisation, 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
Massacre Horst Böhme, the SiPo chief for the Protectorate
Bohemia and Moravia, immediately acted on the orders. Members of the Ordnungspolizei
and SD surrounded the village of Lidice, blocking all avenues of escape. The Nazi regime chose
this village because its residents were suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans and
were falsely associated with aiding "Operation Anthropoid" team members.
All men of the village were rounded up and taken to the farm 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. The shooting of the men commenced at about
7.00 am. 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.
Another 11 men who were not in the village that day were arrested and murdered soon afterwards
as were eight men and seven women already under arrest because they had relations serving
with the Czech army in exile in the United Kingdom.
A total of 203 women and 105 children were first taken to Lidice village school. They
were then taken to the nearby town of Kladno and 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 forced to undergo abortions and
then sent to different concentration camps. On 12 June 1942, 184 women of Lidice were
loaded on trucks, driven to Kladno railway station and forced into a special passenger
train guarded by an escort. On the morning of 14 June 1942, the train halted on a railway
siding at the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. 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. Eighty-eight Lidice children were transported
to the area of the former textile factory in Gneisenau Street in Łódź. 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 Łódź, officials from the
Central Race and Settlement branch chose seven children for Germanisation. The few children
considered racially suitable for Germanisation were handed over to SS families.
The furore over Lidice caused some hesitation over the fate of the remaining children. However,
in late June Adolf Eichmann ordered the massacre of the remainder of the children. On 2 July
1942, all of the remaining 81 Lidice children were handed over to the Łódź Gestapo office,
who in turn had them transported to the extermination camp at Chełmno 70 kilometres away, where
they were gassed to death in Magirus gas vans. Out of the 105 Lidice children, 82 died in
Chełmno, six died in the German Lebensborn orphanages and 17 returned home.
The village of Lidice was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed with
explosives. Even those buried in the town cemetery were not spared. Their remains were
dug up and destroyed. A film was made of the entire process by Franz Treml. A collaborator
with German intelligence, Treml had run a Zeiss-Ikon shop in Lucerna Palace in Prague.
After the Nazi occupation he became a filming adviser for the Nazi Party.
All together, about 340 people from Lidice died because of the German reprisal. Only
153 women and 17 children returned after the war. All the animals in the village—pets
and beasts of burden—were slaughtered as well.
The small Czech village of Ležáky was also destroyed two weeks after Lidice. Gestapo
agents found a radio transmitter there of an underground team who parachuted in with
Kubiš and Gabčík. There both men and women of the village were shot, and the children
were sent to concentration camps or 'Aryanised'. The death toll resulting from the effort to
avenge the death of Heydrich is estimated at over 1,300. This count includes relatives
of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites suspected of disloyalty and random
victims like those from 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, Staffordshire in Great Britain led by Sir
Barnett Stross MP 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, so that the name would live on in spite
of Hitler's intentions. A neighbourhood in Crest Hill, Illinois, was renamed from Stern
Park to Lidice. A square in the English city of Coventry, itself devastated by Luftwaffe
bombing 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, Bulgaria
is named to commemorate the massacre. The Lidice Memorial in Phillips, Wisconsin was
built in memory of the village. In the wake of the massacre, Humphrey Jennings
directed a film about Lidice, The Silent Village, using amateur actors from a Welsh mining village,
Cwmgiedd, near the small South Wales town of Ystradgynlais. 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,
Martin Shaw as Čurda and Anthony Andrews as Gabčík, 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 19 October 1942, edition
of Life magazine and published as a book that same year by Harper.
Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů composed his Memorial to Lidice 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 of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.
In 2013, 'Lidice - A Light Across The Sea', a documentary film project featuring the story
of Lidice and its link to Stoke-on-Trent was made by Staffordshire firm Inspired Film and
Video, and featured original compositions by music students at Keele University.
Lidice since 1945
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 Stříbrný
returned to Czechoslovakia to serve in the Czechoslovak Air Force. However, after the
Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 the new Communist government would 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; he died in a flying
accident in December 1948. A sculpture from the 1990s by 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 aged 1 to 16
to honour the children who were murdered at Chełmno 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 rose
bushes 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. 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. International relations
Twin towns – Sister cities Lidice is twinned with:
Coventry, United Kingdom See also
Lidice Memorial Kľak
Oradour-sur-Glane Khatyn massacre
Marzabotto massacre Putten raid
Lou Kenton Palmiry - site of German mass murders of Jews,
Polish intelligentsia, politicians and athletes, killed during the AB Action
Sonderaktion Krakau Planned destruction of Warsaw
German war crimes Reprisal
Collective punishment References
Books Gerwarth, Robert. Hitler's Hangman: The Life
of Heydrich. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-11575-8.
Jan Kaplan and Krystyna Nosarzewska, Prague: The Turbulent Century, Koenemann Verlagsgesellschaft
mbH, Koeln, ISBN 3-89508-528-6 Joan M. Wolf: Someone Named Eva. 2007. ISBN
0-618-53579-9 Eduard Stehlík: Lidice, The Story of a Czech
Village. 2004. ISBN 80-86758-14-1 Zena Irma Trinka: A little village called
Lidice: Story of the return of the women and children of Lidice. International Book Publishers,
Western Office, Lidgerwood, North Dakota, 1947.
Maureen Myant: The Search. Alma Books, 2010. ISBN 978-1-84688-103-9
Williams, Max. Reinhard Heydrich: The Biography, Volume 2—Enigma. Church Stretton: Ulric
Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9537577-6-3. Williamson, Gordon. Loyalty is my Honor. Motorbooks
International. ISBN 0-7603-0012-7. External links
Hitler's Madman at the Internet Movie Database – A fictionalized account of the death of
Reinhard Heydrich and the reprisal against Licide.
The Silent Village at the Internet Movie Database – The true story of the massacre of a small
Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.
Alan Heath : Fate of the children of Lidice on YouTube
(English) Lidice Memorial (Czech) Official Website of Municipality
(Czech) Recent search for missing children (Czech) Photo series about destruction of
Lidice by Reichsarbeitsdienst (Czech) "Lidice" film Official website, directed
by Petr Nikolaev The first ever Czech-made feature film about the destruction of Lidice.