By Reader 
Statue in the village of Lidice
"Lidice" is a village located in the Czech region of the Czech Republic, 20 km from the capital Prague. If it weren't for the tragedy that took place here in June 1942, few people would have known the name.
Reinhardt Heydrich was born in 1904 and began running the secret police and criminal police of Nazi Germany in 1936, mastering the formidable state apparatus. Heydrich was the ideal model of the Nazi idea of race, and it was once said: "When the Nazis looked in the mirror, they saw Heydrich as he was." ”
The Czech Republic was annexed by Germany in March 1939, where Hitler established a protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The highest representative of Germany here is called the Protector, also known as the Governor-General. On 27 September 1941, Heydrich arrived in Prague and took up his post, becoming the first to experiment with the SS occupation policy. Heydrich declared martial law as soon as he arrived in Prague, which lasted for three months, during which time 404 people were sentenced to death and more than 5,000 were sent to concentration camps. Heydrich's secret police were so efficient that within a few weeks the Czech underground resistance was almost completely destroyed.
The British Security Coordination Bureau and the Czech Resistance Committee were determined to get rid of Heydrich. The head of Czech military intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Moravich, organized and planned the assassination operation, which was codenamed "Great Ape".
At the end of 1941, the "apes" team was airdropped to the Czech Republic by the British Air Force, and several people were killed by the Gestapo. On 23 May 1942, a member of the Resistance disguised as a watchmaker broke into Heydrich's residence and learned that he would be leaving his country house for his residence in Prague on 27 May. The four members of the "Great Apes" team decided to carry out the assassination operation on Heydrich's path, which was carried out by Kubis and Gabchik.
In the early morning of May 27, 1942, Heydrich said goodbye to his wife and children and went to the Doge's Palace to prepare for a flight to Berlin that day. Originally, high-ranking Nazi officials were equipped with armored cars, and Heydrich felt that he was "loved" in the Czech Republic and that there was no problem with safety, so he took an open-top Mercedes. As usual, Heydrich sat next to the driver and did not bring any guards.
At 10:32, after hearing the whistle of his companion, Gabchick jumped out, rushed to the convertible, raised his submachine gun flat, and pulled the trigger on Heydrich, but the gun actually jammed. Heydrich made a fatal mistake, believing that there was only one assassin and ordered the driver to brake sharply instead of speeding over. He got up from the passenger seat and prepared to draw his gun and return fire. Seeing this, Kubis took out a metal bomb from his "breakfast bag" and threw it into the car, but it was not accurate, the bomb bounced off the door, fell to the ground and exploded, and Heydrich and the driver fell into the car.
Heydrich was rushed to the hospital with many bomb fragments flying into his lungs and lower abdomen. On the morning of June 4, 1942, Heydrich died at the age of 38.
On June 9, 1942, the streets of Berlin were covered with a black veil, the flags of all Germany and its vassal states were lowered at half-mast in mourning, Heydrich's funeral was held in the German Chancellery, presided over by Himmler, and attended by Hitler, Goering, Goebbels and other high-ranking Nazi officials.
As soon as the funeral was over, Hitler roared about a massive act of revenge, and millions of people were to be buried for Heydrich. According to the Nazis' previous regulations, if a German was killed in the occupied area, the ratio of local people paying for their lives was 1:100, and with a Nazi leader like Heydrich as a member, the denominator number was boundless. Because of this, the underground resistance groups questioned the assassination plans of the British and Czech government-in-exile, but ignored them. The Allied side had foreseen retaliation from the Nazis. On the day Heydrich was assassinated, 152 Jews were killed in Berlin, 3,000 Jews in the "special ghetto" of Tregenstadt were sent to death camps, and military courts in Prague and Brno, the two largest Czech cities, sentenced 1,350 to death.
Hitler was going to carry out another massacre that the Czech people would never forget, and in the end, the SS soldiers, who were in a hurry to make a difference, chose a location - Lidice.
There is no connection between the murders of Lidice and Heydrich. The village was chosen on the grounds that the two families who lived here, Hokola and Streebny, whose sons were members of the Czech underground resistance in England. In addition, the Germans claimed to have hidden machine guns in the village and that the "ape-like" team had been operating in the area.
At 19:45 on June 9, 1942, the SS district commander received a telephone call from Berlin instructing that, in accordance with the Führer's order, the following measures should be taken for the village of Liditzer: first, to shoot all adult male residents; second, to put all female residents in concentration camps; thirdly, to bring together the children and send them to the homes of the Reichs-SS to receive Germanized education, and the rest of the children who are not suitable for Germanization education to be educated in other forms; Fourth, with the help of the fire brigade, the entire place was burned down and razed to the ground.
In the early hours of 10 June, the SS drove into the village of Lidice and all the villagers were driven to one place and separated men over the age of 16 from women and children.
Each male villager was shot three times first: two in the chest and one in the head. Then, the officer who was present at the scene of the sentence shot each person in the head again. At first, they were shot in groups of 5, but later the Gestapo thought that the progress was too slow, so it was changed to a group of 10. After the massacre, the Nazi executioners set fire to the entire village and razed it to the ground, including churches, schools and even graves.
Three days later, the children were separated from their mothers, and 195 women were sent to the Ravensbulak concentration camp. The youngest of the 105 children was only 1 year old.
Nine children deemed worthy of a Germanized education were adopted by German families, and some were placed in a German orphanage in Prague. Most of the children were sent to a concentration camp in Lodz, Poland, and after 3 weeks, the children were sent to a castle where they were asked to take off their outer clothes, keep only their underwear, hold a towel and soap, and be able to take a shower before the trip. The children were then put onto a large, enclosed truck that had been modified, and eight minutes later, all 82 children were gassed.
In the village of Lidice, of more than 500 people, 360 people were killed in the massacre.
In order not to leave any traces, the Gestapo took a large number of laborers from the Jewish ghetto and forced them to build a special railway in the village of Lidice to carry away all the rubble from the village. Every day, large quantities of scrap bricks and tiles were brought out of Lidice, and when the work was nearing completion, some of the laborers were sent to concentration and death camps, while others were shot on the spot, and their bodies were burned and buried on the spot.
The Gestapo's attempt to wipe the village of Lidice off the face of the earth has provoked the anger of peoples around the world. On June 12, as soon as the news of the Lidice tragedy spread, a small town called Stern Park in Illinois, USA, announced that it had changed its name to Lidice. A month later, San Jerónimo, near the Mexican capital, added "Lidice" to its original name. There is a square in Coventry, England, which was destroyed in the war and rebuilt and also called Lidice. Soon after, some villages, squares, streets, and even girls' names in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Panama, Israel, South Africa and other countries began to be called Lidice. The village that Hitler tried to erase could not be erased from the memory of mankind.
After the war, the 153 surviving women returned to their hometowns, and by 1947, 17 children had been found. Since 1948, volunteers from all over the world have been building the new village of Lidice next to the ruins. In order to mourn the children who died in the fascist war of aggression in Lidice Village and all over the world and to protect children's rights, in November 1949, the Executive Committee of the International Democratic Women's Federation held a meeting in Moscow and designated June 1 as International Children's Day every year.