An entire village destroyed and all its inhabitants exterminated or deported, including 99 children. This is the story of Lidice, a small town that was razed to the ground during the Second World War by Hitler's SS.
Don't store avocado like this: it's dangerousAn entire village destroyed and all its inhabitants exterminated or deported, including 99 children. This is the story of Lidice, a small town that was razed to the ground during the Second World War by Hitler's SS.
One of the many dark chapters of Nazism has as its protagonist Lidice, a municipality in the Czech Republic that was razed to the ground after the German general Reinhard Heydrich was killed in an ambush by some Czechoslovak soldiers in 1942.
In response, therefore, to the assassination, Hitler's Nazis left no traces of this village, even removing the rubble, as if there had never been an urban center there.
The hypothesis of the connection between the end of Lidice and the attack on Heydrich, at the time was greatly emphasized by the German press, although in reality there was never an official confirmation, rather an attempt by the Nazis to create a climate of terror.
On June 10, 1942, the Nazi soldiers destroyed everything: they fired on many men, women and children. The massacre lasted for over five hours and Lidice, not even half an hour from Prague, in what was the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, even disappeared from the map.
Policemen, Wehrmacht soldiers herded the inhabitants on a farm and shot them in groups of five. The sad tally was 173 men. The 19 survivors were later enlisted, while 196 women were deported to Ravensbrück. Of these 143 managed to survive the gas chambers, the others perished of starvation or were used for scientific experiments.
The children of Lidice and the monument that remembers them
Only nine children were deemed eligible for Arianization and were entrusted to German families, the other 99 were deported and then killed in the gas chambers. Today they are remembered by a large bronze sculpture by Marie Uchytilová made in the 2000s, but completed only in XNUMX.
Other forgotten stories:
- Here is the real cause of the extermination of the Aztecs
- The Native American Holocaust: a massacre nobody talks about
- Genocide in Burma, even children beheaded
At their feet there are soft toys and candles.
In 1949 the new Lidice was rebuilt near the old village that was razed to the ground, but no one will be able to reconstruct the broken life of these innocent victims.
Photo font: Flickr
