9.6. 1942 The liquidation of Lidice began

78 years ago the Nazis burned the village of Lidice in Kladno. It was a cruel revenge for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. 340 people lost their lives.

After the assassination of Heydrich, the Nazis unleashed another large-scale wave of terror in the Czech lands. Immediately, a state of civil emergency was declared in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and in Prague and BrnoGestapo martial courts were established in Brno and Brno, which sentenced those brought before them to death or transport to concentration camps.

One of the most brutal acts of the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands was the extermination of the village of Lidice near Kladno. The inhabitants of this village were accused of involvement in the assassination of Heydrich on the basis of fabricated evidence. On the evening of 9 June 1942, Lidice was surrounded by Nazi police and all the men, aged between 15 and 84, were executed the following day at the wall of one of the local farms.

"The women were transported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, the children were sent to the Lodz camp. Most of them were later put to death, probably in the Chelmno extermination camp. The buildings in the village were set on fire by the Nazis and then blown up. Over the next few months, the remains of the village were razed to the ground. The fate of Lidi became a symbol of the barbarity of Nazism among the world public. The same fate as Lidice befell the settlement of Ležáky in the Chrudim region," writes Pavel Kopeček in his book on the anti-fascist resistance.

Of the three main instigators of this tragedy, only K. H. Frank, who was sentenced to death by hanging in 1946 in Prague for his crimes. Horst Böhme and Hans-Ulrich Geschke disappeared without a trace at the end of the war and were never found again. Apparently they lost their lives on one of the battlefields, but were eventually declared missing. However, certainty about what really happened is still lacking to this day.

Frank claimed before the post-war tribunal that the order to exterminate Lidice was given by Hitler himself at a meeting held on the day of Heydrich's funeral in Berlin on 9 June 1942. However, this claim was refuted by Wiesmann, the head of the Gestapo in Kladno, who confirmed that Frank had called him in the morning of the day before the Lidice tragedy to instruct him to prepare the action.

"This means, therefore, that K. H. Frank knew what he was planning against Lidice as early as 9 June 1942 before his departure for Berlin, and although he denied that he had submitted the proposals for the extermination of this village to Hitler, the opposite was probably true. Frank was aware that he was playing for his life before the court, and so he blamed everything on Hitler," writes Vladimír Liška in his book Horrific Events of World War II in the Czech Lands.

The total number of victims of the Nazi rampage in the village of Lidice reached 340. Of these, 192 were men, 60 women and 88 children. The Lidice Memorial and Museum commemorates this tragic event of June 1942. It was built on the site above the former village of Lidice to mark the 20th anniversary of the extermination.

Pavel Kopeček. World War II in the Czech lands, www.wikipedia.org, www.zchor.org