Quoting Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: the life and death of Reinhard Heydrich, page 285:
[Axis] reprisals continued throughout the summer. With the help of local informants, Gestapo agents rounded up most of the surviving members of the Communist resistance and ÚVOD, including its entire Central Committee. The Czech underground was almost completely wiped out and was never to recover from the blows it suffered in the weeks after Heydrich’s death.
In Prague, Alois Eliáš, the former Prime Minister of the Protectorate government, who had been arrested immediately after Heydrich’s arrival in Prague, was executed. Hitler had no more use for him.
More innocent people fell victim in the village of Ležáky, where Gestapo agents found the transmitter of the underground radio team Silver A that had been parachuted into the Protectorate alongside Gabćík and Kubiš. All of the village’s adult inhabitants — thirty-three in total — were shot. The children were handed over to the [Axis] authorities and the village’s buildings reduced to rubble.
Alfréd Bartoš himself, the leader of Silver A, who had repeatedly warned Beneš about the potential repercussions of an attempted Heydrich assassination, was fatally wounded when his hide-out was discovered by the Gestapo.³⁰
Excluding those killed in Lidice and Ležáky, 3,188 Czechs were arrested and 1,327 were sentenced to death during the reprisals that summer, 477 of them for simply approving of the assassination. Up to 4,000 people with relatives among the exiles were rounded up and placed in concentration camps or ordinary prisons.³¹
The memorial to this atrocity has a website available in Czech, English, Esperanto and German. Nonetheless, the English was clearly the work of an amateur translator, which is almost shocking given this atrocity’s severity. That the Czech state could not be bothered to employ a proofreader or a professional translator for this website, even if only to exploit this tragedy for cynical reasons, is utterly baffling.
You are excused if you are disinterested in reading a clunky translation or my attempted correction thereof, but what you need to know is that this was a reprisal that hundreds of Axis officials, along with thirty collaborators, committed against thirty-three lower-class Czechoslovaks as a means of discouraging further antifascism. The Axis looted the village for any valuables before annihilating it. Shortly afterwards, the Axis selected two girls for forced assimilation, and poisoned the eleven others deemed unsuitable for it. Not one of these victims was upper-class.
[Click here for a longer description of the massacre.]
At night on December 29, 1941, the British airplane Halifax transported parachutists, members of Czechoslovak army in Great Britain, to the Protectorate. The group Anthropoid (Josef Gabčík, Jan Kubiš) were to carry out assassination on deputy Reich protector Reinhard Heydrich; the mission of group Silver A (Alfréd Bartoš, Josef Valčík and radio-operator Jiří Potůček) was to establish and maintain contact with London and to help national resistance. The leader of Silver A, Alfréd Bartoš established the headquarters in Pardubice where he had lived for several years with his mother, which was against the rules of conspiracy.
In January 1941 the radiator Libuše operated by J. Potůček radiated from the quarry Hluboká near Dachov which was in close neighbourhood of Ležáky. The protector of the quarry Jindřich Vaško and his brother František who was the leaseholder of Hluboká together with engineman Karel Svoboda were helping. Potůček was broadcasting from the double ceiling of the engine room under extreme conditions.
Libuše was then moved to other places and afterwards it returned to quarry Hluboká but in April it is already placed at the mill of Ležáky where Jindřich Švanda was the miller. The radio-operator Potůček moved to the first floor to the apartment of miller’s brother in law Josef Šťulík. The head sergeants of gendarmerie in Vrbatův Kostelec, Karel Kněz with his inferiors are already cooperating with Potůček.
The parachutists Josef Gabčik and Jan Kubiš, most likely in cooperation with Josef Valčík, carry out an assassination on R. Heydrich on May 27, 1942. The state minister K.H. Frank — now delegated by Hitler to lead the protectorate — proclaimed an emergency: it comes on so called second Heydrichiade, a period of heartless terror.
Heydrich succumbed on June 4 in Prague hospital na Bulovce. The search for the assassinators leads mistakenly, and due to lies, to Lidice, [which was] on June 10 burned out by [Axis]. Lidice men are shot, women dragged to concentration camps and children are for the most part moved to Lodž and later on death follows.
Due to [the] denouncement that was presented by parachutist Karel Čurda, a member of the parachutist group Out Distance ([which] he [chose to call] Prague Gestapo on June 16), [a] wave of arrest[s] focused on members of resistance and colleagues of “parachute agents”, which is how [the Axis] called parachutists, followed.
On Wednesday, June 17, Luděk Matura from Svítkov came to [the] mill of Ležáky on a bicycle to warn Jiří Potůček, švandas and Šťulíks. [By] morning […] the following day the radio-station Libuše le[ft] the valley of Ležáky in a car, accompanied by Potůček and Jindřich Vaško. The radio-operator travels to North towards Červený Kostelec. [The] Gestapo was following him eagerly. The odyssey of Potůček ended on June 2, 1942 when a Czech policeman shot him during his sleep in a grove between Trnová and Rosice near Pardubice.
Seven parachutists waited to see their death on June 18 — it was also due to Čurda’s denouncement. It was a hero[ic] death, mostly carried by their own hands in the former orthodox church of Karel Bromejský in Resslova street in Prague. Among them there was also Josef Gabčík, Jan Kubiš and Josef Valčík. [The Axis] suspected that there was a connection between Valčík and the radio station Libuše even though […] they could not prove that.
After Čurda’s denouncement, the Krupka couple, fellows of Alfréd Bartoš, was [also] arrested[.] Members of the Pardubice […] office scan[ned] registration forms of residence of Miřetice where Ležáky belonged in accordance with the land register, they [were] searching in the quarry Hluboká and in the mill of Ležáky.
[The] Gestapo or, based on their commands, Czech policemen, arrest[ed] František Vaško with his wife, Jindřich Vaško, the miller Jindřich Švanda, his wife Františka, the engineman from Hluboká Karel Svoboda, Josef Šťulík and also his wife Marie and her parents with [their] son, [the] parents of Josef Šťulík Václav and Růžena Šťulíks and others. The head sergeant Karel Knět shot himself and also other fellows of the troopers committed […] suicide.
Wednesday, June 24, 1942 became the fatal day. In the morning an armed convoy of cars drew into the Pardubice Gestapo station. The mayors of Louka and Miřetice had to hand over police registration forms of Ležáky inhabitants to [the] Gestapo, together with list of livestock and protocols of properties. At about half past twelve Ležáky were hermetically closed by SS units (approximately 500 people) and by Czech protectorate policemen.
There was a check of police registration forms. [The Axis] gathered the inhabitants, mostly workers from quarries by the road that led through the [village]. The children that were missing were escorted from school or eventually from relatives.
Before five o’clock in the afternoon [the Axis] transported 46 old men, women and children to the Castle. Afterwards they plundered in the [village and] they set […] the houses [on] fire. The ho[u]ses were burning for the whole night. Following adjustments of terrain [was] ensured by [a] construction company from Jičín.
[That] same evening [the Axis] murdered 33 inhabitants of Ležáky, 18 women and 15 men, near the Castle. Four people from Ležáky and more than forty fellows of the troopers were shot on June 25 and July 2, 1942. All 13 children were transported to Prague […] at night from June 24 to 25, [then] to detention camp in Lodž or eventually to children’s home in Pluščikov near Poznań.
The sisters Jarmila and Marie Šťulíks were acknowledged as suitable for Germanizing and they were handed over to German families under different names. After [this] the police inspector Josef Ondráček brought them to their [new] homeland.
[In contrast,] eleven children of Ležáky [died] on June 25 in a gas truck in Polish Chełmno and together with them also one girl from Lidice as well as before them 81 children from Lidice.
The [Axis executed] in total 254 people […] en masse on October 24, 1942 in […] Mauthausen concentration camp. Murdering of Czech patriots in connection with heydrichiade continued in Mauthausen yet in January 1943.
More men and women [e]ither from the neighbourhood of Ležáky o[r] from the region of Pardubice [were] arrested e[i]ther as fellows of descend Silver A found themselves in concentration camps in Osvetim, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and only some […] survived.
At the beginning of March 1943, the quarry Hluboká was declared abandoned to the Reich[,] and under the supervision of the chief of Pardubice Gestapo Clages it was sold under its value to his nephew K.H. Becher. Clages used to visit the quarry even in his civil clothes and he had a big interest [in] its prosperity. Also the former business – granite quarries of František Vaško became a part of Becher’s firm.
Since the end of October until the mid of December 1943 the remains of Ležáky were levelled with the ground by approximately sixty-five captives of work camps. During the liquidation works, one worker, Josef Bezvoda found money and weapons in two cans underneath a stone of house № 13 where old and young Boháčs and Čeněk Bureš lived [with his wife]. The inhabitants hid it very well — [the Axis] did not find them […] when annihilating Ležáky on [neither] June 24 1942, no[r] later.