62 YEARS AGO TODAY
Lidice, before and after
Jun 10 1942
The town of Lidice (Loditz) is liquidated by the Nazis as penalty for the assassination of Adolf Hitler’s favorite general, Reinhard Heydrich.
On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, the Reichsprotektor of Czechoslovakia, the man who had convened the Wannsee Conference only four months previously, was severely wounded in a grenade attack on his car near Prague by two Czech parachutists sent from London by the Czech government-in-exile.
On June 4, Heydrich died of his wounds. The Nazis swore revenge: they ordered the execution of ten thousand Czechs and threatened the expulsion of millions.
At dawn on June 10, all the residents of
Lidice, a village ten miles outside Prague, were taken from their homes. They were shot in batches of ten at a time behind a barn. By late afternoon, 192 men and boys and 71 women had been murdered. The other women were sent to concentration camps. The children were dispersed, some to concentration camps, although a few who were considered sufficiently Aryan were sent to Germany.
The SS then razed the town and tried to eradicate its memory. The name of Lidice was expunged from all official records.
The Czechs came to view resistance activities with considerably less enthusiasm. The assassination was so unpopular that the Czech government-in-exile denied all responsibility for it, even after the war.
Apparently as a “tribute” to Heydrich’s memory, his SS colleagues gave the code name Operation Reinhard to the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem carried out in Poland in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
82 children from Lidice were murdered in the Gas Vans of Chelmno .
http://www.zchor.org/lidice1.htm
