Two Czech patriots, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabcik, serving with the Free Czech forces in Britain, and based in the grounds of Cholmondeley Castle in Cheshire, volunteered to be dropped by parachute near Prague. Their mission, codenamed 'Anthropoid' was to assassinate SS Obergruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich (Party Number 544916) the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
The ambush took place on May 27, 1942, as Heydrich drove to his office in his dark-green Mercedes-Benz. Severely wounded, he was rushed to Bulovka Hospital where he died eight days later. The Nazi reprisals then began. In the next few days, 3,188 Czech citizens were arrested of whom 1,357 were shot. Another 657 died while being interrogated by SS police.
On June 9th armed police surrounded the small village of Lidice, some ten kilometres from Prague and gathered together the entire population in the tiny square. Boys over 15 were lined up with the men and locked up in an empty barn. Women and children were herded into the local school for the night. The houses were then ransacked, the pillaging went on all night.
Next morning, June 10, at 5am, the women and children were bundled into trucks and driven away. The police then fetched dozens of mattresses from the ransacked houses and propped them up against the wall of the barn to prevent ricochets. The men and boys were then brought out 10 at a time, lined up in front of the mattresses and then shot. (See photo)
In all, 192 men and 7 women were murdered this way. While the firing squads were busy, others set about burning the village to the ground. The bulldozers and ploughs were then brought in and in no time no recognizable feature of the village remained.
Meanwhile, 196 women and 98 children were forcibly separated and driven away, the women to the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp where 43 died as a result of ill-treatment. Thirty five of the older women were then sent on to Auschwitz to be used for medical experiments. Only 143 were alive at wars end.
Of the children, 17 were picked out as suitable for Germanisation and allocated to German households. These children all survived the war and were eventually reunited with their families. The rest, 81 in number, were sent to the camp at Chelmno and gassed. Reprisals were also taken in the concentration camps where thousands of Czech political prisoners were murdered.
Contrary to what some history books tells us, not a single unit of the SS took part in the destruction, massacre and deportation of women and children in Lidice. The massacre was carried out by a thirty man unit of the Prague police acting under German officers. When Churchill heard of this atrocity five days later, he suggested to cabinet that three German villages should be wiped off the face of the earth in retaliation. This was never carried out owing to moral objections put forward by the then deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. A new village of 150 houses for the women who survived, has been built a short distance away from the original site. The men and boys who were shot now lie in a mass grave in the Park of Peace.
