Lidice Massacre
- Brutal Nazi Revenge for Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich - Operation Anthropoid

6 March 2022

Category: Nazi Victims

On 28 December 1941the Czechoslovak paratroopers including Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš landed in the Nazi occupied territory with one objective – to kill Reinhard Heydrich – acting governor of the protectorate and the Nazi architect of the Holocaust. The assassination, codenamed - Operation Anthropoid –was approved by Edvard Beneš - the president of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. After months of preparations, Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš attacked and wounded Heydrich on May 27, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich also called “ the Butcher of Prague “contracted an infection and died 8 days later. The Nazis were desperately looking for the assassins and thousands of people were arrested.

Soon after on June 9, 1942 on Hitler’s direct order. occured destruction of the village and execution of its citizens. In total 340 inhabitants of Lidice were slaughtered - 192 men, 60 women and 88 children. In the end, some kind of justice was served. On 21 May, 1946 the people’s court sentenced Karl Hermann Frank, the Nazi Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia, to death by hanging. Although justice can never bring back the lives of the Lidice victims, it was only after Heydrich’s assassination that the United Kingdom and France agreed to dissolute the Munich agreement and return the annexed Sudetenland back to Czechoslovakia after the Nazis would be defeated.

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