Berlin Trip : Topography of Terror Museum (What Happened in Lidice)

I mentioned about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and how that killing is still celebrated today. But it’s what happened in Lidice, then located in Czechoslovakia, that remains truly shocking. The Nazis wanted revenge for the killing of one of the architects of the Holocaust and a mistaken connection to the assassins meant that Lidice was targeted. The Nazi regime, under the orders of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, implemented a plan to completely eradicate the village. On 10 June 1942, all men over the age of 16 were rounded up and shot. The women were sent to concentration camps, and the children were either deemed “racially suitable” and sent to German families or deported to the Chełmno extermination camp. The village itself was systematically destroyed, every building was demolished, the cemetery was flattened and a river was even rerouted to remove any trace of Lidice. It was all designed to make the village an example of what would happen to anyone who questioned the Nazi regime. As is evident from the image above, the Germans wanted it literally removed from the map but they wanted the fear of what happened there to be remembered. After the war, the village was rebuilt near its original site as a memorial to the victims. It’s a location that I’d like to visit, it’s relatively near to Prague and so next time I’m in the city I’m hoping that I’ll find a way to get there.

There’s more about this at https://www.lidice-memorial.cz/en/memorial/memorial-and-reverent-area/history-of-the-village-lidice/.