(MENAFN- The Conversation) 

The village of Lidice, located a few miles outside the Czechoslovak capital Prague, was the site of a paroxysm of vindictive, pitiless Nazi violence. On the night of June 9 1942, SS guards attempted to completely obliterate the village by killing or deporting its inhabitants, by eliminating every trace of humanity and even by exhuming the dead.

A total of 173 inhabitants were murdered on the spot. The rest were deported to the Nazi-operated extermination camps, where the village death toll rose to approximately 340. Those who survived suffered the fate of forced dispersal .

But an unlikely alliance of Staffordshire miners, a Stoke-on-Trent doctor and a town in Illinois were not prepared to let the memory of Lidice disappear. For decades they fought to put the village back on the map and to help rebuild it.

The fate of Lidice was sealed in the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Reinhard Heydrich, leader of the Nazi-controlled protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the architects of the Holocaust . The clandestine resistance operation, code-named Anthropoid , took place on May 27 1942. Heydrich was wounded in the attack and died a few days later.

In a token investigation conducted by the Nazi authorities immediately after the attack, Lidice and the village of Ležáky were singled out as symbolic targets of a brutal reprisal action demanded by Hitler . This was despite scant evidence linking them to the Czech resistance and without any proof that inhabitants were involved in the attack.

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