The Massacre in Lidice, June 10^th, 1942
Yad Vashem, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Israel Gutman, Sifriat Hapoalim, 1990, vol. 3, page 635
The picture is posted after written permission from Yad Vashem, and is published here for educational purposes only - otherwise, it is fully protected by copy rights of Yad Vashem!

I post hereunder the list of the 82 children from the Czech village Lidice, who were murdered in the Gas Vans of Chelmno, as part of a collective punishment of the Nazis to the assault of Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942.

I thank the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for giving me the permission to quote the article about Lidice from their important book "The World Must Know"!

From "The World Must Know", The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Michael Berenbaum, Little, Brown and Company, 1993
ISBN 0-316-09293-2
page 171

 The Nazis were skilled practitioners of collective responsibility, the murder of an entire community as a reprisal for individual acts of resistance. Reprisals were taken against Jews and non-Jews throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. It was an effective tactic in stifling popular enthusiasm for resistance.

The annihilation of the Czech town of Lidice is one of the most notorious instances of the Nazi practice of reprisal.

On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, head of the RSHA, the Reichsprotektor of Czechoslovakia, the man who had convened the Wannsee Conference only four months previously, was severely wounded in a grenade attack on his car near Prague by two Czech parachutists sent from London by the Czech government-in-exile. The two Czechs managed to leave the scene and took refuge in the Karl Borromaeus Church in Prague.

On June 4, Heydrich died of his wounds. The Nazis swore revenge: they ordered the execution of ten thousand Czechs and threatened the expulsion of millions. The Karl Borromaeus Church, where the assassins and more than one hundred members of the Czech resistance were hiding, was besieged. Everyone in the church was killed by the SS.

In Lezaky, a village east of Prague, where the assassins' radio transmitter was discovered, every adult was killed. The children were forcibly removed to Germany for "reeducation," a process that only two of them survived.

At dawn on June 10, all the residents of Lidice, a village ten miles outside Prague, were taken from their homes. They were shot in batches of ten at a time behind a barn. By late afternoon, 192 men and boys and 71 women had been murdered. The other women were sent to concentration camps. The children were dispersed, some to concentration camps, although a few who were considered sufficiently Aryan were sent to Germany. The SS then razed the town and tried to eradicate its memory. The name of Lidice was expunged from all official records.

The Czechs were stunned by the Nazis' brutality. They also came to view resistance activities with considerably less enthusiasm. The assassination was so unpopular that the Czech government-in-exile denied all responsibility for it, even after the war.

Apparently as a "tribute" to Heydrich's memory, his SS colleagues gave the code name Operation Reinhard to the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem carried out by the General-Government in Poland in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

The List of 82 Children from Lidice, who were Killed in Chelmno 
Source: "Oboz Smierci w Chelmno Nad Nerem", Janusz Golczynski, published by the Konin Museum, 1991,

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