“Bekanntmachung…” Poster issued by the Court of Prague sentencing Czech partisans to be shot to death on June 3rd, 1942. Endorsed the Chief Prosecutor of the German Regional Court of Prague.

High-ranking SS General Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich (1904-42) who chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference which devised the Final Solution, was ambushed in Prague on May 27th, 1942 by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak commandos who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him in an operation code named Operation Anthropoid. Heydrich died from his injuries a week later. Subsequently Hitler ordered extraordinary reprisals, the brutality of which were like none ever seen before. All Gestapo agents in the entire Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were mobilized in the search for Heydrich’s assassins and a mass dragnet involving thousands of Nazi soldiers moved into action. Intelligence linked the assassins to the village of Lidice which was subsequently razed to the ground, all its resident adult males executed and women and children were deported and most all were eventually killed in the Nazi concentration camp of Ravensbrück. The entire Nazi hierarchy up to and including Hitler himself was consumed with the immediate need to locate the attackers who were eventually found but heroically committed suicide before capture.