Lidice is erased from the map

Lidice village site · Lidice, Czech Republic · 1942-06-10

In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, German forces surrounded Lidice on 10 June 1942, shot the village's men at the Horák farm, deported the women to Ravensbrück and most of the children to their deaths, then burned and levelled the village so no trace would remain. The empty meadow, with footprints of the church and school marked in the grass, is the memorial. Towns around the world renamed themselves Lidice so the name would not disappear.

The record

Coordinates are given at landmark level. A landmark-level coordinate points at the structure; a city-level one points at the settlement, not at a parcel.

Finding photographs

Every one of these is a search, not a guess: the event is documented, so the pictures exist somewhere. Start here.

• Wikimedia Commons — freely licensed images, with the licence stated on every file. This is the only source we republish from.
• The reference article — its own illustrations, and its citations to archives.
• Image search filtered to reusable licences — useful for tracing which institution holds a picture.
• National and municipal archives of Czech Republic, and the picture desks of newspapers published there at the time.

Check the licence before you reuse anything. A photograph being online, or being old, does not make it free; in most countries a 1960s press photograph is still in copyright.

Footage

Films are matched to this event editorially or by search; if one is wrong, tell us and we will replace it.