SS officers stand among the rubble of Lidice during the demolition of the town's ruins.
Overview
- Caption
- SS officers stand among the rubble of Lidice during the demolition of the town's ruins.
- Date
-
1942 June 10 - 1942 June 30
- Locale
- Lidice, [Bohemia] Czechoslovakia
- Variant Locale
- Czech Republic
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Library of Congress
- Event History
- Lidice is a village in Bohemia, 16 km from Prague, that was destroyed by the Germans in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, acting governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia since September 1941. Lidice was only one of 5,000 towns and villages that were raided by the Germans following the death of Heydrich on June 4, 1942, resulting in the arrest of over 3,000 persons. Early in the morning of June 10, 1942 all the inhabitants of Lidice were forced out of their homes. All 192 men in the village were killed, as were 71 of the women. The remaining 198 women were sent to the Ravensbrueck concentration camp. 143 of these women survived the war and returned to Lidice. 98 village children were placed in "educational institutions," only 16 of whom survived. Following the removal of its population, the village of Lidice was razed in the presence of Karl Hermann Frank, secretary of state for the Protectorate and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich's successor as governor. The official reason given for the destruction of Lidice was that its villagers had helped the assassins. In addition to Operation Lidice, which was the brainchild of Prague security police chief Josef Boehme, was a revenge operation ordered by Reichsfuehrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, in which 252 persons who were relatives or friends of Lidice residents were killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp on October 24, 1942. The victims included 130 women and a large number of youth. Lidice was rebuilt after the war and became a symbol both of the Nazi terror and the heroism of the Czech resistance.
[Source: Gutman, Israel. "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust." MacMillan, 1990.]
https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008221.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
Library of Congress
Copyright: Public DomainSource Record ID: 2391-LC4SZ62- 47134 - Published Source
- Archives of the Holocaust: An International Collection of Selected Documents - Milton, Sybil and Friedlander, Henry - Garland
Keywords & Subjects
- Record last modified:
- 1998-01-05 00:00:00
- This page:
- https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa5392
