HEYDRICH’S DEATH UNLEASES REVENGE KILLINGS

Berlin, Germany · June 9, 1942

On this date in 1942, with the full leadership of the Third Reich in attendance, Nazi “martyr” Reinhard Heydrich was eulogized in one of the most elaborate funerals ever staged in Berlin. (Heydrich had been added by Adolf Hitler to the “honorary list of the Fallen of the Nazi Movement.”) The ceremony in Hitler’s New Reich Chancellery was stage-managed and filmed by Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda. Two weeks earlier, in a British-inspired assassination plot codenamed Operation Anthropoid, two Czech resistance fighters, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, had succeeded in mortally wounding the 38-year-old Acting Reichsprotektor (Protector) of Bohemia and Moravia, an area now lying within the Czech Republic. The day following the funeral one of the most infamous episodes of Nazi retribution occurred in a Czech hamlet northwest of the capital, Prague. Prodded by Hitler, the Nazis chose to take revenge on Lidice (population just over 500) because the villagers were suspected of harboring local resistance fighters, and two families who lived there had sons serving with Czech forces in England. So in the predawn hours of June 10 ten truckloads of German Army field police and SD (Sicherheitsdienst) surrounded Lidice and nearby Ležáky. All 192 men and boys over sixteen in Lidice were stood against a barn wall and shot, while the women were deported to the notorious women’s Ravensbrueck concentration camp in northern Germany, where most died. Ninety young children were poisoned by exhaust fumes in specially adapted vehicles in the Chełmno death camp in Poland. A small number were delivered to SS families because they were viewed as fit for “Germanization.” Meanwhile, the SS and Gestapo hunted down and murdered Czech resistance members and anyone suspected of being involved in or approving of Heydrich’s death, nearly wiping out the Czech underground. In addition, 3,000 Jews were deported from the Czech ghetto at Theresienstadt (present-day Terezín) and sent to their deaths. In Berlin, 500 Jews were arrested, with 152 executed as a reprisal on the day Heydrich died, June 4. As for Lidice, it was completely leveled, its graveyard disinterred, and grain scattered over the spot where the village had stood. Even the name Lidice (German: Liditz) was removed from German maps.
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Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942) is widely recognized as one of the great villains of Nazi Germany, a nation that had a surplus of loathsome individuals. Robert Gerwarth’s biography of Reinhard Heydrich, titled Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich—“hangman” being one of three nicknames Heydrich wore with pride—examines Heydrich’s years in Heinrich Himmler’s SS, his role as a leading planner of the “Final Solution” and the Holocaust of European Jewry, and his eight months as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, an autonomous Nazi-administered territory in what is today’s Czech Republic. Up till his fatal encounter with two Czech nationalists, Heydrich was widely viewed as the most dangerous man in Germany. Gerwarth explains why in this authoritative biography of evil incarnate.—Norm Haskett

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Reinhard Heydrich’s Assassination and the Tragedy of Lidice

Left: Jan Kubiš (1913–1942), one of nine Czechoslovak British-trained paratroopers dropped into Czechoslovakia as part of Operation Anthropoid, the daring and successful assassination of SS-Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942), Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.

Right: Jozef Gabčík (1912–1942) was a Slovak soldier in Czechoslovakia’s army-in-exile in England. Using an antitank grenade, Kubiš and Gabčík waylaid Heydrich on May 27, 1942, as he commuted in his open-topped Mercedes-Benz between his home and office in Prague Castle.

Massacred men and boys of Lidice, June 10, 1942

Left: Men massacred in Lidice village, June 10, 1942. Taken by a German soldier, this photograph was initially kept by the Gestapo. Hours earlier all male villagers were rounded up and taken to a farm on the edge of the village that belonged to the Horák family, whose son Josef served in the Czechoslovak army-in-exile in Britain. Mattresses were taken from neighboring houses and placed against the Horák barn. There 192 Lidice citizens were executed, ten at a time, in cold blood. The massacre came to symbolize German occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Right: The Lidice tragedy was filmed by those who actually carried out the brutal crime. German authorities gleefully reported Lidice’s destruction in newsreels and propaganda speeches. To the Allies, Lidice became the symbol of the German policy of Schrecklichkeit (terror). The film was entered into evidence at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi German leaders in 1945–1946.

Left: Having rid the village of its inhabitants, the Nazis destroyed the village itself, first setting the houses on fire and then razing them to the ground with plastic explosives. They didn’t just stop there but proceeded to destroy the village church and cemetery. In 1943 all that remained of Lidice was an empty space cordoned off by signs forbidding entry.

Right: Instead of consigning Lidice to eternal oblivion, Lidice came to symbolize the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. In the U.S., Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Brazil towns adopted the name Lidice in memory of the village, and many women born at that time were named Lidice. Overlooking the site of the old village of Lidice today is a museum and a small exhibition hall, and in front of the museum is a bronze memorial to the children killed in the Chełmno death camp in Poland. After the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned to Lidice.