Lidice Massacre (1942): The Destruction of a Czech Village

The Lidice massacre was the destruction of the Czech mining village of Lidice by Nazi forces on 10 June 1942. In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Germans shot the village’s men, deported its women to a concentration camp, murdered most of its children and razed every building. The crime became one of the best-known symbols of Nazi terror, and the world responded with a campaign to keep the village’s name alive.

Background

On 27 May 1942 Czechoslovak parachutists attacked Reinhard Heydrich, the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, in Prague in Operation Anthropoid. He died on 4 June. Hitler demanded harsh retaliation, and the Nazi authorities under Karl Hermann Frank looked for a target.

Lidice, a village of about 500 people north-west of Prague near the industrial town of Kladno, was chosen on very weak grounds. The Gestapo had intercepted a vague letter that seemed to link a local family to the resistance, and two men from the village, members of the Horák and Stříbrný families, were known to be serving with the Czechoslovak forces in Britain. No real link to the assassins was ever found.

The massacre

On the night of 9–10 June 1942 German security police and troops, commanded by SS officer Horst Böhme, surrounded the village. All men over 15 were taken to the farm of the Horák family. On 10 June, 173 men were shot there in groups, against a wall lined with mattresses. Men from Lidice who were away that night, and some relatives, were arrested and executed later, bringing the number of men killed to around 190.

The women, about 184 of them, were sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where around 50–60 died. The children were taken to Łódź in occupied Poland. A few judged suitable for “Germanisation” were handed to German families. In early July 1942, 82 of the children were murdered in gas vans at the Chełmno extermination camp.

The Germans then burned the village, blew up the buildings, dug up the cemetery and erased Lidice from maps. The destruction was filmed, and the Nazis announced it publicly to terrorise the population. Two weeks later, on 24 June, they destroyed the hamlet of Ležáky, where a parachutists’ radio transmitter had been hidden.

Victims

“Lidice Shall Live”

Because the Nazis publicised the crime, news spread quickly. In September 1942 Barnett Stross, a doctor and local councillor in Stoke-on-Trent, launched the “Lidice Shall Live” campaign, and local miners pledged part of their wages to rebuild the village. Towns and districts were renamed Lidice in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and elsewhere; a district of Mexico City still bears the name. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote The Murder of Lidice in 1942, and in Britain Humphrey Jennings made the film The Silent Village (1943), which retold the story in a Welsh mining village.

Ležáky and the wider terror

Lidice was not an isolated act. Under martial law, special courts in Prague and Brno sentenced well over a thousand people to death in the weeks after the attack, and their names were read out on the radio and posted on walls. Anyone found to have approved of the assassination could be shot.

At Ležáky, a small settlement in eastern Bohemia, the Gestapo discovered that a radio operator from another parachute team had used a transmitter hidden in a quarry. On 24 June 1942 all 33 adults there were shot and the houses burned. Of the 13 children, 11 were murdered at Chełmno, while two sisters were selected for Germanisation and survived. Ležáky was never rebuilt; today it too is a memorial.

Justice, return and rebuilding

After the war several of those responsible were tried in Czechoslovakia. Frank’s conviction rested partly on his role in Lidice, and other police officials and informers were also sentenced. Horst Böhme, who led the operation, was reported killed in 1945 and never tried. Researchers later traced several of the Germanised children, some of whom learned their true identities only years afterwards.

Of the women, 143 returned in 1945, and a search across Europe found only 17 children. Karl Hermann Frank was tried in Prague and hanged in 1946. A new village was built in 1947–1949 a short distance from the original site, which became a memorial. A Rose Garden of Friendship and Peace was planted in 1955, and the sculptor Marie Uchytilová spent two decades creating bronze figures of the 82 murdered children; the monument was completed after her death and finished in 2000.

Timeline

• 1942, 27 May: Heydrich is attacked in Prague.
• 1942, 4 June: Heydrich dies of his wounds.
• 1942, 9–10 June, night: German forces surround Lidice.
• 1942, 10 June: 173 men are shot; women and children are deported; the village is burned.
• 1942, 24 June: The hamlet of Ležáky is destroyed.
• 1942, early July: 82 Lidice children are murdered at Chełmno.
• 1942, September: The “Lidice Shall Live” campaign begins in Stoke-on-Trent.
• 1947–1949: A new Lidice is built near the old site.

Why it matters

Lidice, like the Wannsee Conference held earlier that year, reflected a regime that treated whole populations as expendable. It showed the world the Nazi policy of collective punishment at its starkest. The international response turned a village that the Nazis tried to erase into a lasting symbol of remembrance, reconciliation and the protection of civilians in war.