Beginning on the night of June 9–10, 1942, German police and SS officials destroyed the Czech town of Lidice in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the German-occupied Czech lands). The Nazis destroyed Lidice as a reprisal action for the assassination and death of Reinhard Heydrich, a high-ranking Nazi leader. The Germans falsely claimed that two families from the town of Lidice were somehow connected to the assassins and the Czech resistance.
In Lidice, the Germans shot the men of the town, and then deported most of the women and children. Next, they burned the town to the ground. They promised to obliterate the name of Lidice from the map of Europe.
The destruction of Lidice and the brutal treatment of its inhabitants was widely reported internationally. Lidice became a symbol of Nazi Germany's wartime brutality.
