The brutal actions of Germany’s SS in a Czech mining village one day in 1942 have rightly entered the history books as an exemplar of collective punishment, enacted largely to invoke mass terror among the population of an occupied country.

In deliberate planned revenge for the earlier assassination of a senior German official, ten truck loads of personnel from the elite Nazi unit descended on Lidice and calmly executed every male over 16. The exact number given as killed varies between sources, but one standard text on the Third Reich puts the final tally at 199. Continue reading →