Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. As Heydrich had been able to exit the car to fire his gun at them, they believed that their assassination attempt had failed. This article was most recently revised and updated by, Lidice Memorial - History of the village Lidice, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Holocaust Encyclopedia - Lidice, Lidice - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). © 2020 Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The crests include villages like Telavåg, Norway and Marzabotto, Italy – both villages that suffered similar Nazi atrocities to Lidice. June 10, 2020 marks the 78th anniversary of the Lidice massacre. Although our physical space is closed, our virtual community remains busy and vibrant. Click here to make a gift. Lidice did live, and does yet, as an emblem par excellence those terrible years. Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. Lidice, village, Czech Republic, just northwest of Prague. On this date in 1942, the Germans visited upon the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice one of the most notorious butcheries of World War II: the physical destruction of the town, and the execution of most of the adult population, in revenge for the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. “I have the original official documents that were approved and verified by his [Ressl’s] gendarmerie superiors,” he said. The disclosure, by a Czech historian, Vojtěch Kyncl, has cast a shadow over the village’s status as symbol of national martyrdom – a status cultivated first by the communist regime that ran Czechoslovakia until the 1989 “Velvet Revolution” and then by its democratic successors. Šupíková, 87, who was handed to a German family after Lidice’s destruction and testified as a child witness at the postwar Nuremburg war crimes tribunal, rejects suggestions her mother, Alžběta Doležalová – who died in 1946 of tuberculosis contracted as an inmate at Ravensbrück concentration camp – was guilty of denunciation. Please try your search again later. “The Hangman of Prague” was no mere functionary, but a Nazi grand wizard from way back, who’d had a hand in the Third Reich’s most terrifying greatest hits — the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht. In 1947 a new village site was designated nearby. The sentence for this crime, it turned out, was life. Lidice, a small village in the Central Bohemia, was destroyed June 10, 1942. After the assassination on Reinhard Heydrich, May 27, 1942, the village was razed to the ground on the command of Karl Hermann Frank. The following day the Nazis announced their deed to the Protectorate via radio, although this announcement included a lie that conveniently omitted the murder of 82 children, saying only that the children were being reeducated. Kyncl, a member of the Czech academy of sciences, has insisted his account of Mikešová’s arrest is accurate and voiced support for Lehmannová. A similar devastation—albeit on a larger scale—occurred two years to the day after the Lidice massacre at the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane. Following her death, her husband, Jiří V. Hampl continued the work that she had begun, and the entire project was completed in 2000. The temptation is clearly there to try to control the interpretation of history, as in communist times. • This article was amended on 16 March 2020 because an earlier version incorrectly referred to Heydrich dying from “gunshot wounds”.