German police units wipe out an entire village near Prague
Aiming to turn much of Central and Eastern Europe into “Greater Germany” during the Second World War, German occupying forces treated civilian populations with pronounced brutality from the outset. This was reflected in the response to any resistance from partisan forces: a Wehrmacht order from 1941 stipulated that 50 to 100 civilians were to be executed for every German soldier killed by partisans. In Western and Southern Europe, German army commanders initially tried to win support through exercising greater restraint, but once they found themselves on the defensive, they reacted with ruthless severity.
In Prague, SS commander Reinhard Heydrich ruled the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” with an iron fist, and it did not take long until partisans made an attempt on his life. After Heydrich died from his wounds, the German occupiers claimed – without any evidence – that the attack had been supported by the populace of Lidice, a village 20 kilometres from Prague, and launched a reprisal. German police units dispatched to the village on 10 June 1942 executed all 200 male inhabitants, deported its womenfolk and burned the settlement to the ground.
Weitere Ereignisse
1944 Massacre in Oradour-sur-Glane and Distomo
Waffen SS troops kill hundreds of people in France and Greece
Partisan activity increased dramatically in western France after the Allied landings in Normandy in June 1944. Seeking to reduce this threat by making the civilian population too scared to support resistance fighters, the German army perpetrated a massacre of the civilian population of Oradour-sur-Glane on 10 June 1944. Units of the Waffen SS murdered 643 men, women and children they had previously rounded up and imprisoned in barns and in the village church.
In Greece, partisans ambushed a German army unit just outside Delphi, killing and wounding several soldiers. The response came on 10 June 1944, when the Waffen SS killed the entire civilian populace – 218 elderly, women, children and infants – of the nearby village of Distomo.
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