Lidice Massacre
The Lidice massacre was the
complete destruction of the village of Lidice, in the Protectorate of Bohemia
and Moravia, now the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler
and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In reprisal for the assassination of
Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942, all 173 men from
the village who were over 15 years of age were executed on 10 June 1942. A
further 11 men from the village who were not present at the time were later
arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others who were
already under arrest. Out of a total 503 inhabitants, 307 women and children
were sent to a makeshift detention center in a Kladno school. Of these, 184
women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps; 7 children who were
considered racially suitable and thus eligible for Germanisation were handed
over to SS families, and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp,
where they were gassed. The Associated Press, quoting German radio
transmissions which it received in New York, said: "All male grownups of
the town were shot, while the women were placed in a concentration camp, and
the children were entrusted to appropriate educational institutions. "Approximately
340 people from Lidice were murdered in the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women
and 88 children). After the war ended, only 143 women and 17 children returned.
Background From 27
September 1941, SS-Obergruppenführer and General of Police Reinhard Heydrich
had been acting as Reichsprotektor of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia. This area of the former state of 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 (on behalf of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile) by the Slovak and
Czech soldiers Jozef Gabčík 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 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.[10] The resulting explosion wounded both Heydrich and Kubiš. Heydrich sent Klein to chase Gabčík on foot
and, in an exchange of fire, Gabčík shot Klein in the leg below the knee. Kubiš
and Gabčík managed to escape the scene. A Czech woman went to Heydrich's aid
and flagged down a delivery van. He was placed on his stomach in the back of
the van and taken to the emergency room at Bulovka Hospital. A splenectomy was
performed, and the chest wound, left lung, and diaphragm were all debrided.
Himmler ordered Karl Gebhardt to fly to Prague to assume care. Despite a fever,
Heydrich's recovery appeared to progress well. Hitler's personal doctor Theodor
Morell suggested the use of the new antibacterial drug sulfonamide, but
Gebhardt thought that Heydrich would recover and declined the suggestion. On 4
June Heydrich died from septicaemia caused by pieces of horse hair from the
upholstery and his clothing entering his body when the bomb exploded.
Reprisals Late in the
afternoon of 27 May, SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank proclaimed a state of
emergency and placed a curfew in Prague. Anyone who helped the attackers was to
be executed along with their families. A search involving 21,000 men began and
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 eulogies at
Heydrich's funeral in Berlin were not yet over when, on 9 June, the decision
was made to "make up for his death". 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
harbored Heydrich's killers: Execute all 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 and Burn down the village and level it entirely
Massacre
Men Horst Böhme, the SiPo chief for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, immediately acted on the orders. Members of the Ordnungspolizei and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) 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 to prevent ricochets. 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. Only three male inhabitants of the village survived the massacre, two of whom were in the RAF and stationed in England at the time. The only adult man from Lidice actually in Czechoslovakia who survived this atrocity was František Saidl (1887–1961), the former deputy-mayor of Lidice who had been arrested at the end of 1938 because on 19 December 1938 he accidentally killed his son Eduard Saidl. He was imprisoned for four years and had no idea about this massacre. He found out when he returned home on 23 December 1942. Upon discovering the massacre, he was so distraught he turned himself in to SS officers in the nearby town of Kladno, confessed to being from Lidice, and even said he approved of the assassination of Heydrich. Despite confirming his identity, the SS officers simply laughed at him and turned him away, and he went on to survive the war.
Women and children A total
of 203 women and 105 children were first taken to Lidice village school, then
the nearby town of Kladno and detained in the grammar school for three days.
The children were separated from their mothers and four pregnant women were
sent to the same hospital where Heydrich died, 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, the
train halted on a railway siding at the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. The
camp authorities tried to keep the Lidice women isolated, but were prevented
from doing so by other inmates. 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.[citation needed] The care was minimal
and 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 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. However,
Eichmann was not convicted of this crime at his trial in Jerusalem, as the
judges deemed that "... it has not been proven to us beyond reasonable
doubt, according to the evidence before us, that they were murdered." On 2
July, all of the remaining 82 Lidice children were handed over to the Łódź
Gestapo office, who sent them to the Chelmno extermination camp 70 kilometres
(43 miles) away, where they were gassed to death in Magirus gas vans. Out of the 105 Lidice children, 82 were
murdered in Chełmno, six were murdered in the German Lebensborn orphanages and
17 returned home.
Destruction of Lidice The
village was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed with
explosives. All the animals in the village—pets and beasts of burden—were
slaughtered as well. Even those buried in the town cemetery were not spared;
their remains were dug up, looted for gold fillings and jewellery, and
destroyed. A 100-strong German work party was then sent in to remove all
visible remains of the village, re-route the stream running through it and the
roads in and out. They then covered the entire area the village had occupied
with topsoil and planted crops, and set up a barbed-wire fence around the site
which had notices reading, in both Czech and German, "Anyone approaching
this fence who does not halt when challenged will be shot". A film was
made of the process by Franz Treml, a collaborator with German intelligence.
Treml had run a Zeiss-Ikon shop in Lucerna Palace in Prague and after the Nazi
occupation, he became a film adviser for the Nazi Party
Further reprisals The
small Czech village of Ležáky was destroyed two weeks after Lidice, when
Gestapo agents found a radio transmitter there that had belonged to an
underground team who parachuted in with Kubiš and Gabčík. All 33 adults (both
men and women) from the village were shot. 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 people. This
count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites
suspected of disloyalty and random victims like those from Lidice.
Commemorations
International response 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. 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 organisation Lidice Shall
Live to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war. Soon
after the razing of the village, towns and quarters (neighbourhoods) in various
countries were renamed, San Jerónimo Lídice in Mexico City, Barrio Obrero de
Lídice (workers quarter of Lidice) 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 neighbourhood in Crest Hill, Illinois, U.S.,
was renamed from Stern Park to Lidice. There is a shrine at Lidice park on
Prairie Avenue in Crest Hill; the original shrine was at the end of Kelly
Avenue at Elsie Street. A square in the English city of Coventry, devastated by
Luftwaffe bombing, is named after Lidice. An alley in a very crowded area of
downtown Santiago, Chile, is named after Lidice and one of the buildings has a
small plaque that explains its tragic story. A street in Sofia, Bulgaria, is
named to commemorate the massacre and the Lidice Memorial in Phillips,
Wisconsin, U.S., was built in memory of the village. In the wake of the
massacre, Humphrey Jennings directed The Silent Village (1943), 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, but
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 excerpted in the 17 October 1942, edition of Saturday
Review,[26] a larger version of which was published in the 19 October 1942 Life
magazine, and published in full as a book later that year by Harper. There is a
memorial sculpture and small information panel commemorating the Lidice
massacre, in Wallanlagen Park in Bremen, Germany.
Local response and the new
Lidice Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů 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 and in the climax of the piece, the
opening notes (dot-dot-dot-dash = V in Morse code) of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.
Women from Lidice who survived imprisonment at Ravensbrück returned after the
Second World War and were rehoused in the 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. 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 overlooks 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 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.[30] 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 created.
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