Central Europe Yearbook

Turning a War Crime into a Weapon

How the Razing of Lidice and Ležáky Aided the Allied Power’s War Effort

Jackson Bowman

Auburn University

Keywords: Reinhard Heydrich, Operation Anthropoid, Lidice, Ležáky, propaganda

Abstract

On May 27^th, 1942, Nazi German SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in an infamous event called Operation Anthropoid. The Nazi German response to this assassination was razing the two Czechoslovakian towns named Lidice and Ležáky. While there have been many books, articles, and movies about the events of Operation Anthropoid, the sources omit details regarding how the Allied powers, specifically the Western Allied Powers, used the horrendous events. This paper argues that the Western Allied powers used the razing of Lidice and Ležáky as propaganda to garner public support for the war effort by galvanizing their respective civilian populations against Nazi Germany. The various methods of propaganda, the vast scope of the distribution, and the timing of the propaganda release are analyzed throughout the paper. By the end of the paper a light will be shined upon, a rarely, if ever, discussed aspect of the assassination of the highest-ranking Nazi official throughout the course of World War II. How the subsequent reprisals were used as propaganda.