“Bekanntmachung…” Poster issued by the Court of Prague sentencing Czech partisans to be shot on June 3rd, 1942. Endorsed by 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 Heydrich in an operation code-named Operation Anthropoid. Once Heydrich died from his injuries a week later, Hitler ordered extraordinary brutal reprisals. 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 were executed and all its women and children were deported to the concentration camp of Ravensbrück where most all were killed. The entire Nazi hierarchy up to and including Hitler himself were consumed with the need to locate the attackers who were eventually tracked down, but heroically committed suicide before capture.