Avenging the Avengers

A memorable place name of World War II turned up in the news again. The town was Lidice, which Hitler chose at random to avenge the assassination by Czech patriots of Reinhard ("the Hangman")

Heydrich, Nazi boss of Czechoslovakia. The Nazis shot all of the village's 175 men, sent its women to concentration camps, demolished its houses. The Czechs did not forget Lidice. At war's end, they tracked down the "Butcher of Lidice," Karl Herman Frank, former Nazi protector of Bohemia and Moravia, hanged him with six of his Gestapo henchmen.

Last week in a Communist court in Prague, five more Nazis, charged with "crimes against humanity," received a quick trial and death sentences. Recently brought from Russia, they were: Nazi staff Officer Friedrich Gottschalk, Gestapoman Walter Richter, and SS (Elite Guard) Generals Ernst Hitzegrad, Richard Schmidt and Max Rozstock. Three women survivors of Lidice identified Rozstock, former chief of Nazi security in Kladno, Bohemia, as the man who directed the destruction of Lidice. Unexplained: why the Russians waited so long.

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