The Children of Lidice

On June 10, 1942, the German government announced that it had destroyed the small village of Lidice. The Germans proudly proclaimed that the village and it residents, and its very name, were now forever blotted from memory. They did this by killing every adult male and some fifty-two women. Then they sent all the surviving women and children to concentration camps, or if found suitable to be "Germanized", sent to the greater Reich.

So what was the story behind the destruction of the village and it people. Well is all has to do with the attempted assassination on 27th May 1942 of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich,  a evil man, that even Hitler described as "the man with the iron heart" who was one main architects of the Holocaus. Locally he was nicknamed the Butcher of Prague, the Blond Beast, and the Hangman. The operation to assassinate him was called "Operation Anthropoid" it had been prepared by the British Special Operations Executive with the approval of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. The attempt was only partially successful at the time but later Heydrich died of his injuries on the 2nd June.

On the day of the atempt Hitler ordered an investigation and reprisals, suggesting that Himmler send SS General Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was even harsher than Heydrich, as Hitler favored killing 10,000 politically unreliable Czechs. However after he consulted  Himmler, the idea was dropped because Czech territory was an important industrially, but all the same some 13,000 people were arrested some of whom later dieded in contraction camps. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky, with a Gestapo report identifing Lidice as the assassin's suspected hiding place.

The Germans issued a deadline  for the assassins to be apprehended by 18th June 1942 or the they would would start revenge killings, this deadline was publicly issued to the military. It was thought that this would be enough for the people to revel those that killed Heydrich. This made it hard for the assassin's and they were passed from safe house to safe house until the Germans managed to bribe one of the sabotage group for one million Reichsmarks. Eventually the assassins where cornered and despite the efforts of 750 SS soldiers they couldn't take the assassins alive.

However before the deadline of 18th June, on the 9th June, the decision was made to "make up for his death" and the Führer had commanded the following concerning any village found to have harboured Heydrich's killers:

• Execute all adult men 
• Transport all women to a concentration camp 
• Gather the children suitable for Germanisation, then place them in SS families in the Reich and bring the rest of the children up in other ways 
• Burn down the village and level it entirely

Given that that the Germans had identified Lidice as the assassin's suspected hiding place, it was this village that was targeted by the Germans.

Early in the morning of the 10th June operations started on the village and it was surrounded by German forces so that nobody could enter of leave. The men were rounded up and taken to the edge village where they were shot in in groups in a barn. So rapid was the executions that the those about to be killed had to stand among those that had died before them. By the afternoon all the 173 men over the age of 15 had been murdered by the Germans.

The women and children were taken to the village hall before being transported to a near by town to be detained with the children being separated from their mothers. During their three day detention four of the women were found to be pregnant and they were sent to the same hospital where Heydrich had died to have their babies aborted. On the 12th June the 184 women were loaded onto a train and sent to the concentration camp at Ravensbrück were they forced to work in leather processing, road building, textile and ammunition factories.

This just left the children some of which were selected for Germanisation, as Hitler had ordered and the remainder were sent to a former textile factory in Gneisenau Street in Łódź. The care was minimal. They suffered from a lack of hygiene and from illnesses. By order of the camp management, no medical care was given to the children. They stayed there until Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust, ordered the massacre of the remainder of the children.

It was 60 years ago today, on the 2nd July 1942 that 82 children from the village Lidice were handed over to the Gestapo, who transported to the extermination camp at Chełmno where they were gassed to death in Magirus gas vans where they were poisoned by the Cardon monoxide produced from the vans exhaust gases. It would have taken 20 minutes at least for the children to die and their voices would have as the driver drove them to a pit where they would be buried.

To mark this horrific event a sculpture stands today overlooking the site of the old village of Lidice. "The Memorial to the Children Victims of the War" is a bronze statue of 82 children (42 girls and 40 boys) aged 1 to 16 to honour the children who were murdered at Chełmno in the summer of 1942. You can help but feel for the children as you look at the sculpture. They died so young and they wouldn't have understood why.

It is so sad that man can do things like this to other men, especially children. It is horrid what we are capable of as race, especially when we have been radicalised in some kind of way. I just hope we remember things like this and it stops us doing them again.