erman Lebensborn orphanages and 17 returned home.
The village of Lidice was set on fire and the remains of the buildings destroyed. Even those buried in the town cemetery were not spared. Their remains were dug up and destroyed. A film was made of the entire process by Franz Treml. A collaborator with German intelligence, Treml had run a Zeiss-Ikon shop in Lucerna Palace in Prague. After the Nazi occupation he became a filming adviser for the Nazi Party.
Altogether, about 340 people from Lidice died because of the German reprisal (192 men, 60 women and 88 children). Only 153 women and 17 children returned after the war.
The small Czech village of Ležáky was also destroyed two weeks after Lidice. Gestapo agents found a radio transmitter there of an underground team who parachuted in with Kubiš and Gabčík. There both men and women of the village were shot, and the children were sent to concentration camps or 'Aryanised'. The death toll resulting from the effort to avenge the death of Heydrich is estimated at over 1,300. This count includes relatives of the partisans, their supporters, Czech elites suspected of disloyalty and random victims like those from Lidice.
Nazi propaganda had openly, and proudly, announced the events in Lidice, unlike other massacres in occupied Europe which were kept secret. The information was instantly picked up by Allied media.
Commemorations
In September 1942, coal miners in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire in Great Britain led by Sir Barnett Stross MP founded the organisation Lidice Shall Live to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war.
Soon after the razing of the village, several towns in various countries were named after it (such as San Jerónimo-Lídice in Mexico City, Barrio Lídice and its hospital in Caracas, Venezuela, Lídice de Capira in Panama, and towns in Brazil), so that the name would live on in spite of Hitler's intentions. A neighbourhood in
