LIDICE CIN KRVAVEHO TERORU A PORUSENI ZAKONU I ZAKLADNICH LIDSKYCH PRAV – LIDICE – “Commitment of bloody acts of terrorism and violations of the law and the most basic human rights.” Published by MINISTERSTVO VNITRA – Ministry of the Interior of the Czechoslovak Republic, Department of Political Intelligence, Prague 1946. The earliest and most extensive report ever published about the shocking “Lidice Massacre”. Czech.
Before us is the most detailed official report about the massacre of the village of Lidice in Czechoslovakia, which was completely destroyed by the Nazis in 1942, as an ostentatious collective punishment for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Accompanied by rare documents and photographs from the destruction left by the Nazis in the village, a Jewish list of the murdered and their place of birth, the act of massacre itself, the massacred villagers, photographs of missing children who were not found until the time the report was published, and more.
At the beginning of the booklet: “Dedicated to the immortal memory of the martyrs who were murdered in Lidice, to the women and girls who were in concentration camps, the Ravensbirk camp, to the children who were taken from their mothers, taken to unknown places and have not yet returned, to the heroic women and girls who survived the difficult tragedy of their families and returned to their homeland…”
The report is opened with the background on the Nazi persecution of the Czech nation even before the massacre in Lidice. Continued in an extensive review about the terrible massacre, and the actions of the Gestapo that preceded it, collaborators from the village itself who gave details to the Gestapo commanders, including the actions of the Nazi agent. K. Frank, the ‘agent of the protectorate’ of the Sudeten Germans, who advised the Nazis to also massacre children and young girls under the age of 16 and was involved in all the massacres, “suspects” of Heydrich’s murder who were taken for questioning and killed by torture, the Nazi trucks loaded with gasoline barrels that arrived in the village and set fire to building after building, the use of dogs by the Germans also with the aim of killing, the murder of the villagers with axes, not only with guns, the looting carried out by the Germans in the village, especially from the women by robbing them of their jewelry, a report about German weapons found in the village after the massacre, signs of abuse of the deceased before they were slaughtered, and more.
The first part of the report is based on official sources of the Czech intelligence. In the second part, testimonies of people who witnessed the acts of imprisonment, torture, and massacre are given in extensive detail. In the third part, a list of names of those murdered who were shot on June 10, 1942 in the Baroque courtyard, the place and year in which they were born, as well as a Semitic list of women who were sent from Lidice to the extermination camps.
In the third part of the report, excerpts from the protocols of the investigation of the Nazi war criminals who carried out the massacre in June 1945 appear. Below is a detailed list of ‘missing’ children, place and year of birth.
The last part is dedicated to about 70 photographs, all of them deal with the massacre of Lidice, the murdered, and the murderers: among them, the place of the massacre in the yard of the baroque church, aerial maps of the village, group photographs of the children of the village as they were taken for the last time before the massacre, a pile of 173 bodies of those murdered on June 10, 1942 , and Nazi soldiers standing next to the bodies, as well as additional photographs of the massacred in other places in the village. The official report of the head of the Gestapo, Kaldeno Weissmann, in which he reports on the complete destruction of the village, a photograph of the original sketch of the plan to destroy the village and other documents from confiscated German archives, the village houses are on fire, German officers next to photographers who documented the massacre, the destroyed village houses, 27 photographs of missing children who have not been found 4 years after the massacre, photographs of Heydrich, Frank, and Nazi war criminals associated with the massacre, and more.
background: Heydrich, head of the Reich Ministry of Defense (RSHA), was nicknamed the “Bohemian Defender” for his part in the German takeover and German annexation of the Czech region of Bohemia in 1939. On May 29, 1942, Czech underground fighters Josef Gabczyk and Jan Kubish ambushed the car of Heydrich in the Holszowice region, while on his way to Prague, the Czech capital. They threw a hand grenade at Heydrich’s car and seriously injured him. A few days later, on June 4, 1942, he died of an infection in his wounds. Following the assassination, Kurt Deliga, who was appointed Heydrich’s successor as “deputy protector”, ordered a punitive action against the villagers – its demolition and execution. On June 10, 1942, ten trucks with German soldiers arrived in the village, which was known for its residents’ opposition to the Nazi occupation and was suspected of being a hiding place for local partisans. The soldiers surrounded the village and imposed a complete closure on it. They then led all the men (over the age of 15), 173 in total (and another 11 in the following days), behind a barn and shot them in groups of ten at a time. The women, 190 in total, were sent to the Ravensbruck concentration and extermination camp. Some were killed by gas and some perished due to the harsh conditions of the camp. Only a few survived. 82 of the children of Lidice were sent to the Chelmno extermination camp where they were murdered by gas. A number of other children who were found to be “ethnically appropriate” were sent to a race improvement program (Lebensborn), designed to educate them according to the principles of race theory so that they could function as Aryans. After the village was emptied of people, all its houses were blown up, and its land was leveled and sown. The name of the village has been erased from all German maps.
123, 30, [6] p. 30 cm. Good condition.
