Welcome to Daily TWiP, your daily dose of all the holidays and history we couldn’t cram into The Week in Preview.

By 1942, the Nazis had already made it clear that they were not the kind of people whose bad side you wanted to be on. Today (June 10th), however, they took atrocity to a new level when they razed the town of Lidice in Czechoslovakia.

A few weeks earlier on May 27th, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich had been attacked by Free Czech agents while visiting Prague. He was mortally wounded and died on June 4th.

Heydrich had been the Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and Nazi retribution was extreme. Anyone suspected of being involved in the assassination was hunted down and killed, leading to the deaths of over a thousand people.

On top of that, 500 Jews were arrested in Berlin (152 of whom were killed) and 3,000 Jews were taken from Theresienstadt (better known as the concentration camp Terezin, located in Bohemia) and exterminated.

The most severe consequences were reserved for a small mining village named Lidice, which Hitler ordered completely destroyed because the inhabitants had helped the assassins. Hitler’s accusation was based only on suspicion – the village was targeted because it was openly hostile to the German occupation.

Lidice was completely surrounded by military police. Every man over the age of 16 was gathered at the Horak family farm on the edge of the village and shot to death. The women were shipped to the Ravensbruck concentration camp and the children were sent to the concentration camp at Gneisenau. A few of the children were chosen to be adopted by German families.

Buildings were blown up one by one until the entire village had been leveled. Bodies were even dug up from the cemeteries to be destroyed. Anything that remained was bulldozed, and the soil was turned over and planted with grain. The town was removed from all German maps.

After the war, a new Lidice was built overlooking the site of the original village and some of the few survivors resettled there. There are several memorials to the atrocity that took place there, including ”The Memorial to the Children Victims of the War,” which consists of 82 bronze statues of children (40 boys and 42 girls) to commemorate the children who were sent to Gneisenau and subsequently exterminated at Chelmno.

You can see pictures of the memorial at the following link: http://www.lidice-memorial.cz/MChild_history_en.aspx.

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– Teresa Santoski

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