Lidice

Lidice - darkometer rating : 7 - One of the major memorial sites in the Czech Republic related to the horrors of WWII , when Nazi Germany occupied the country. Lidice was a village burned down and erased from the map, and its population massacred or deported, all as an act of arbitrary reprisal following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. The world was so shocked at this extreme form of terror that Lidice has become something of a worldwide symbol for such despicable acts of retribution directed against innocent people. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Lidice had been just a normal small village in rural Czechoslovakia that would never have found its place on the map of world history had it not been for the high-level assassination in Prague of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942 and some very unfortunate and highly tenuous connection made to the village of Lidice afterwards. For more on the background of this assassination and the fate of the assassins see under St Cyril and Methodius church crypt, Prague . The wrath of the Nazi system in the wake of the assassinaion was tremendous. The assassins had escaped and no individual scapegoat could at first be identified, so the Nazis turned to collective punishment … as they so often did. Throughout the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" (as the Nazis called these de-facto occupied lands now) thousands of extra soldiers launched a comprehensive manhunt with endless searches of houses. Countless arrests were made. Hundreds were executed. But that wasn't enough.