page_title: Lidice massacre
section_title: International response
hierarchical_section_title: Lidice massacre / Commemorations / International response
caption_attribution_description: This is Nazi Brutality, poster by Ben Shahn, 1943, published by the US Department of War Information
context_page_description: The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.
  In reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942, all 173 males from the village who were over 15 years of age were executed on 10 June 1942. A further 11 men from the village but who were not present at the time, were later arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others who were already under arrest. The 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps; a few children who were considered racially suitable and thus eligible for Germanisation were handed over to SS families and the rest were sent to the Chełmno extermination camp where they were gassed.
  The Associated Press, quoting German radio transmissions which it received in New York, said: "All male grownups of the town were shot, while the women were placed in a concentration camp, and the children were entrusted to appropriate educational institutions."
context_section_description: Nazi propaganda had openly, and proudly, announced the events in Lidice, unlike other massacres in occupied Europe which were kept secret. The information was instantly picked up by Allied media. In September 1942, coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in Great Britain led by Barnett Stross, a doctor, who in 1945 became a local MP, founded the organisation Lidice Shall Live to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war.
  Soon after the razing of the village, towns in various countries were renamed, San Jerónimo Lídice in Mexico City, Barrio Lídice and its hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Lídice de Capira in Panama and towns in Brazil so that the name would live on in spite of Hitler's intentions. A neighbourhood in Crest Hill, Illinois, U.S., was renamed from Stern Park to Lidice. There is a shrine at Lidice park on Prairie Avenue in Crest Hill; the original shrine was at the end of Kelly Avenue at Elsie Street. A square in the English city of Coventry, devastated by Luftwaffe bombing, is named after Lidice. An alley in a very crowded area of downtown Santiago, Chile, is named after Lidice and one of the buildings has a small plaque that explains its tragic story. A street in Sofia, Bulgaria, is named to commemorate the massacre and the Lidice Memorial in Phillips, Wisconsin, U.S., was built in memory of the village.
  In the wake of the massacre, Humphrey Jennings directed The Silent Village (1943), using amateur actors from a Welsh mining village, Cwmgiedd, near the small South Wales town of Ystradgynlais. An American film was made in 1943 called Hitler's Madman but it contained a number of inaccuracies in the story. A more accurate British film, Operation Daybreak, starring Timothy Bottoms as Kubiš, Martin Shaw as Čurda and Anthony Andrews as Gabčík, was released in 1975.
  American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a book-length verse play on the massacre, The Murder of Lidice, which was excerpted in the 17 October 1942, edition of Saturday Review, a larger version of which was published in the 19 October 1942 Life magazine, and published in full as a book later that year by Harper.
  There is a memorial sculpture and small information panel commemorating the Lidice massacre, in Wallanlagen Park in Bremen, Germany.
caption: Poster by Ben Shahn, This is Nazi Brutality, referencing the massacre at Lidice.
exif: {}