As the German invasion of Europe commenced back in late 1930s, Hitler had one goal in mind: to purify the German countries to create the "master race". Any groups of people that failed to fit into his narrow circle of pureness was either murdered or sent to notorious concentration camps. Among the ten million or more lives that were taken in the Nazi persecution, one event that occurred in Lidice, Czechoslovakia in 1942 particularly claimed thousands of innocent lives.
The terrors at Lidice all started with the Munich Agreement of September 1938. In exchange for Hitler to hold off on the use of weapons and consequently avoiding an early outbreak of war, the French and British prime ministers helplessly watched Czechoslovakia get annexed as part of the coveted Sudetenland. Tragically, Lidice was part of this new Nazi-occupied land.
Prior to this massacre, Lidice (20 km west of Prague) peacefully stood as an ordinary village invested in agriculture. But soon after the Czech lands became a puppet state for the Nazis, anti-Fascist movements erupted. In this formerly silent town, Hitler placed a trusted police pawn, SS Obergruppenfuhrer -- Reinherd Heydrich, to suppress those revolts. Beginning in 1941, he imprisoned over five thousand anti-Fascist fighters; however, that did not last long. Two Czech fighters, gleaming in patriotism, bravely volunteered to ambush Heydrich.
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| Jan Kubis (left) and Jozeph Gabcik (right) |
On the morning of May 27 1942, Reinherd Heydrich was brutally murdered on the way to work by Jan Kubis and Jozeph Gabcik. Hearing this news, an enraged Hitler ordered a mass execution in Czechoslovak villages. At this point, more Germans were landing in Czechoslovakia with deadly weapons. Five thousand villages were raided and over three thousand innocent civilians were arrested. Stripped of everything but the clothes that they had on, over a thousand of those that were arrested saw the Nazis annihilate their homes and kill their friends and family, before facing death themselves. They shot adult males first, followed by women and children who were mostly sent to concentration camps. Out of the eighty-eight children that were crammed on a train heading to a camp in Lodz, Germany, seven were selected at random for "Germanization". The remaining eighty-one children boarded yet another train to Chelmno, Poland, only to be gassed to death following their arrival.
About a thousand and three hundred innocent civilians suffered for the death of one Nazi police officer. As Hitler rapidly got his hands on victory everywhere in the continent, his power became a frightening symbol of death. Worst of all, not just any death but the death of innocent civilians who he did not consider "pure". By the end of World War II, he was responsible for the death of eleven million Jews, Czechoslovakians, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally disabled people, and more. Through tragedies like the Lidice Massacre, we come to realize that World War II's victims consisted of both soldiers and innocent civilians.
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| This memorial stands in Lidice, Czech Republic today |
Sources:
http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/lidice.html
That was a really interesting and sad blog. Though we all know the tragedies of World War 2 and the deaths that came from the Holocaust, we often don’t hear about the struggles of people in Czechoslovakia. I remember learning about the agreement where the British and French gave the land over to Hitler, but I never knew what effects that decision quite had on the Czech people. Most of the documentaries we watch in class focus on the military aspect of World War 2 and the soldiers deaths, so I think your blog offered a really unique perspective that we haven’t learned much about.
ReplyDeleteAnother source to learn more about the Lidice massacre:
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/world-war-two-and-eastern-europe/lidice-1942/