On 27 May 1942, a high-ranking German Nazi official and the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia - Reinhard Heydrich, was being driven from his country villa to his office at Prague when he was ambushed by British-trained Czech soldiers. A fatal grenade attack left him severely wounded and he died eight days later. Reinhard Heydrich was one of the main architects of the Holocaust and one of the darkest figure within the Nazi elite. Adolf Hitler himself described him as “the man with the iron heart”. Getting rid of Heydrich was a long-premeditated plot.
To avenge the death of Heydrich, the Germans launched a terrifying retaliation. Over the next few days, more than 36,000 houses in 5,000 towns and villages were searched, arresting some 3,000 people. Within a week, 157 people were executed, but the most tragic victims of the German reprisal were the residents of an ordinary agricultural village named Lidice, located some 20 km to the west of Prague, in the Czech Republic.
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