Daily Quiz for July 12, 2008

Lidice. In direct reprisal for the killing of Nazi Gestapo official Reinhard Heydrich by Czech agents on May 27, 1942, the Czechoslovakian town of Lidice was completely destroyed and thousands of its residents murdered. The Czech commandos, who had parachuted into Czechoslovakia, ambushed Heydrich’s car on a Prague street. Heydrich died of his wounds a week later. The commandos had been sheltered in Lidice and as a result the entire population was either executed or driven out. Heydrich was responsible for the development of an espionage system outside Germany. As an SS general he was the first administrator of the concentration camps and the program to eliminate Jews from Europe.