The Lidice Massacre

The Lidice massacre was one of the most brutal reprisals carried out by Nazi forces during World War II. It took place on June 10, 1942, in the village of Lidice, which was then part of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic. The massacre was a direct retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi official. Ironically as per the Nazi definition of Aryan, Heydrich was the only Nazi leader who fit that definition.

Known as “The Butcher of Prague,” Heydrich was the Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and a principal architect of the Holocaust. On May 27, 1942, Czechoslovak resistance fighters Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, trained by the British Special Operations Executive, successfully ambushed Heydrich in Prague. He died of his injuries on June 4, 1942.

Nazi troops obliterate the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, after killing all adult males and deporting most of the surviving women and children to concentration camps.

Most of Lidice’s children were sent to Lodz (Łódź), a city in German-occupied Poland. There, SS personnel from the SS Race and Settlement Main Office (Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt, RuSHA) screened the children for what they considered to be racial characteristics. They determined that nine of the children had a supposedly Germanic racial background. Selected for Germanization, these children were sent to a group home in German-occupied Poland. There, they were given new German names and taught to speak German. Officials from the Lebensborn program then placed them with adoptive German parents.

Ravensbruck concentration and forced labour camp became the destination for the c.190 deported women of Lidice; about 40 of them died there. Of the estimated 100 children that were removed from the village, only a handful survived. The majority were deemed ‘unsuitable’ for ‘Germanisation’ and moved to a concentration facility in Łódź with the chilling order: “no special care [for them] is desirable.” Barely a month later, they were handed over to the Gestapo and transported to the Chelmno Extermination Camp, where more than 80 of them were gassed.

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. After the massacre, Winston Churchill proposed destroying three German villages with incendiary bombing for every village destroyed in reprisals by the Wehrmacht. Anthony Eden, Leo Amery, and Ernest Bevin were supportive of the idea. Still, Archibald Sinclair, Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison, and Stafford Cripps convinced him that it would waste resources and open the risk to similar Luftwaffe reprisals against British communities. In September 1942, coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in Great Britain, led by Barnett Stross, a doctor who in 1945 became a local MP, founded the organization Lidice Shall Live to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war.

Marie Supikova, a Lidice survivor who was just nine during the massacre, recalled a horrible train ride to Poland after her father was executed and her mother was sent to Ravensbruck.

“We cried and cried because we were very scared, upset and confused,” Supikova told BBC in a 2012 interview.

Supikova was sent to a German family living in Poland, and her name was changed to Ingeborg Schiller.

“We all had blonde hair and blue eyes. We looked like the type that they could German-ise easily and raise as a good German girl or boy,” she said.

The Nazis did not stop their retaliation efforts with Lidice. They carried out further reprisals in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

The fifty-person village of Ležáky was treated similarly to Lidice. On June 24, 1942, Ležáky’s adult residents, both men and women, were shot. Thirteen children were sent to Lodz (Łódź). Two sisters were selected for Germanization. The rest of the children were killed, probably in the Chełmno killing center. The small town was razed to its foundations.

The Lidice and Ležáky massacres epitomize the extreme measures the Nazis were willing to take to suppress resistance and instill fear in occupied populations. They demonstrated the severe consequences that could follow acts of resistance, impacting the strategies and morale of resistance fighters and the civilian populations supporting them.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-61758015

https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205058909

Remembering Lidice, 78 Years Later

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lidice

https://www.keele.ac.uk/about/news/2022/june/lidice-anniversary/anniversary-lidice-massacre.php

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lidice-massacre-nazis-czechoslovakia