http://www.lobelog.com/lidice-and-its-like/

Lidice and Its Like

by Henry Precht
Lidice was a town in German-occupied Czechoslovakia that not too many people will remember now. It was there early in World War II that partisans assassinated the local Nazi commander, Reinhard Heydrich. In revenge, the Nazis executed the community’s males: 173 men over the age of 15. In addition, 184 women and 88 children were sent to concentration camps; 153 women returned, 17 children.
Later, in 1944 in France there was the village of Oradour-sur-Glane where a Nazi commander was believed to have been kidnapped. One hundred forty-two inhabitants were massacred by SS troops and the village destroyed. (Its ruins remain as a monument.) It turned out that the German bureaucracy had gotten confused and originally intended Oradour-sur-Vaynor for destruction as the locus of the kidnapping. Mistakes happen in time of war.http://www.lobelog.com/lidice-and-its-like/