A mining village near Kladno to the west of Prague that was the site of a mass reprisal killing by the Nazis on June 9-10, 1942. On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich, second in command of the elite Nazi SS corps, head of the Nazi Security Service, and Nazi administrator of Bohemia and Moravia, was mortally wounded by two agents sent by the Czech government-in-exile in London. The two perpetrators and other members of the Czech resistance were surrounded and killed in the St. Charles Borromaeo Catholic Church in Prague.
An intercepted letter made the Nazi Security Service suspicious that there was a connection between a Lidice family, whose son was serving with the Czech Legion in Britain, and the attack on Heydrich. The Germans launched a punitive raid on the village; the women and children were taken away and 183 men were shot. The majority of the women were sent to the Ravensbruck female concentration camp, where 143 of 195 survived. Only 16 of the 98 children from the village were reunited with their mothers after the end of the war (Zentner and Bedurftig 1991, 543-544). The rest disappeared. Most had been sent to the Chelmno death camp in German-occupied Poland. Others were placed with SS families to be "Germanized."
A radio transmitter belonging to the Czech agents was later found in Lezaky, a village east of Prague. As a result, all of that village’s inhabitants were rounded up and brought to Gestapo headquarters in Pardubice. The adults, sixteen men and seventeen women, were all shot. Two little girls were placed with a German family; twelve other children were sent to a death camp where they were gassed. After the removal of its inhabitants, the village was razed.
