The destruction of Lidice was a Nazi reprisal in which, on 10 June 1942, all the men of the village were shot and most of the children were murdered, in response to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
The destruction of Lidice was a crime of the Nazi occupation authorities that took place on 10 June 1942 in the village of Lidice in the Kladno area. Within a single day all the men of the village were shot, the women were taken to a concentration camp and almost all the children died. The act was a reprisal for the assassination of the Acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich [1][2].
The village before 1942
The first written mention of Lidice dates from 1309. The oldest public building of the village was the parish church of St Martin from 1352, destroyed during the Hussite Wars and again during the Thirty Years' War. A new Baroque church was built by Grand Duchess Maria Anna of Tuscany [2]. A local school is mentioned from 1690; in 1713 it was attended by 127 children and had simple central heating, which according to the Lidice Memorial was probably the first facility of this kind in Bohemia [2]. In 1824 a new one-storey school was built. With the development of industry in Kladno the population of the village grew: in 1848 Lidice had 270 inhabitants in 33 houses, in 1890 already 506 inhabitants in 50 houses [2]. Before the village was wiped out, 503 inhabitants lived in it [2].
The assassination of Heydrich and its aftermath
In September 1941 Reinhard Heydrich was appointed Acting Reich Protector, and his tenure brought the arrest of roughly five thousand members of the resistance and their collaborators [2]. On 27 May 1942 Heydrich was mortally wounded in an assassination carried out by Czechoslovak paratroopers [1][2]. According to a record by K. H. Frank, Adolf Hitler immediately asked whether Heydrich had been travelling without an escort vehicle, and condemned the act “in the sharpest terms” [1]. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that a bomb attack had been carried out on Heydrich and that the Nazis would deal with “the attempt to cause chaos in the Protectorate” [1]. The following day K. H. Frank persuaded Hitler to cancel the order to arrest and shoot ten thousand Czechs and proposed a different course of action [1]. On the day of the assassination a civil state of emergency was declared, and approving of the assassination became a new capital crime. Gestapo summary courts in Prague and Brno handed down death sentences almost daily, beginning on 28 May 1942 with the shooting of a six-member family from Rokycany [1]. Lists of the executed were published daily in the press and on the radio, and the occupiers repeatedly threatened that if the perpetrators were not caught, genocide awaited the nation; Nazi propaganda blamed Edvard Beneš and his associates [1].
Suspicion of the Horák family
On 3 June 1942 the factory owner Jaroslav Pála opened a letter addressed to the worker Anna Maruščáková, in which the writer Václav Říha wrote about “that fateful day” and about the fact that “what I wanted to do, I have done” [1]. Under interrogation Maruščáková stated that she was to pass on a greeting in Lidice from Josef Horák. The Gestapo connected this name with the Czechoslovak officers Josef Horák and Josef Stříbrný from Lidice, who had gone abroad [1][2]. On 4 June 1942 German units searched every house in the village and arrested the Horák and Stříbrný families [1]. Reinhard Heydrich died on the same day. Intensified interrogations of the detainees, however, produced no evidence, and the Kladno Gestapo concluded that the suspicion had not been confirmed; no weapons, transmitter or incriminating materials were found [1][2]. The fate of the village had nevertheless been decided at the latest by the time of Heydrich's funeral in Berlin on 9 June 1942 [1].
The destruction of the village on 10 June 1942
After midnight on 10 June 1942 German soldiers surrounded Lidice and began forcing the inhabitants out of their homes. The men were taken to the garden of the Horák farmstead, and the women with their children were gathered in the Lidice school [1][2]. On the orders of K. H. Frank, 173 Lidice men were shot that day [2]. The women and children were taken to the gymnasium of what is today the Kladno grammar school, where after three days the children were forcibly separated from their mothers [2]. Children selected for Germanisation and children under one year of age were set aside; the rest were taken to the extermination camp at Chełmno on the Ner in Poland and poisoned with exhaust fumes in specially adapted vehicles [2]. The women were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp [1][2]. Of the 105 Lidice children, 17 survived the war [1].
Documentation of the crime
The events in Lidice were recorded by a silent documentary film shot by the perpetrators themselves. This film was used as exhibit number 379 at the trial of the leading German representatives in Nuremberg in 1945, and its edited passages can today be seen in a video documentary shown in the Lidice museum [2].
Sources
- Vojenský historický ústav Praha — 10 June 2025
- Památník Lidice