Horror for Horror?

In the small town of Lidice, not far from Prague, there lived 1,200 human beings. Some worked in the orchards, gardens and fields which they owned; others were woodworkers and coal miners; still others walked 45 minutes every day to toil in the munitions plant at Kladno. Lidice had a church׫t. Martin's--which was nearly five centuries old and to which the people of four nearby villages flocked on Sundays.

Last week the Nazis removed Lidice from the map. German soldiers surrounded the village at dusk, moved in, sorted out all adult males and killed them. The women were packed off to slower death in concentration camps, the children to "educational institutions." Then the Germans burned Lidice to the ground, left nothing but a great black scar in what had been green fields.

This was the worst atrocity committed by a civilized nation in modern times. It was not even hot and savage like the Japanese rape of Nanking. It was cold and calm. The Germans did it with the expression of a concentration-camp guard kicking a prisoner in the groin. There was no need of the grapevine to get news of Lidice to the civilized world: the Germans themselves announced it in official radio broadcasts from Prague and Berlin.

The Germans accused the onetime people of Lidice of routine subversive activities, such as hiding arms and hoarding food. But the deadliest charge against them was that they aided and sheltered the killers of the Gestapo's hangman, Reinhard Heydrich. Besides the slaughter in Lidice, the Germans by week's end had shot 400 Czechs in reprisal for Heydrich's death. They had offered an "appropriate" reward to the informant who would identify Heydrich's executioners. They gave the informant until Thursday of this week to speak his piece; after that, anyone found in possession of the information they wanted would be rewarded with death.

Ten Teeth for One? The nerves of Czechs in exile neared the snapping point. In Washington, Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk of the exiled government called for Allied reprisals in kind: the total destruction of several German villages from the air. "To my mind," said he, "it should be ten teeth for one and ten eyes for one." As a matter of arithmetic, that seemed reasonable enough, since the Germans do their own reprisal work on the scale of a hundred eyes for one tooth. The question remained whether Allied reprisals would be morally justified--and whether they would do any good.

Columnist George Fielding Eliot called for a civilized reprisal. His idea was to warn Germany by radio that one of ten named villages would be destroyed from the air, then to destroy one of the ten. He thought the trouble the Germans would have in evacuating ten villages would have a sobering effect; or, if they did not evacuate, that their own people would make trouble.

Now or Later? In London, Czechoslovak President Eduard Benes announced that "all exponents of the Nazi Party and Reich Government on Czech territory" would be held criminally responsible for the killing of Czechs and would be executed on the day of victory. Obviously, however, threats of post-war action could do no good, since the Nazis long since have gambled everything they have on winning the war.

Yet in the U.S. there was no visible enthusiasm for reprisals on German civilians. The destruction of Cologne was not a reprisal. Cologne was a military objective. The New Republic spoke for many when it said: "Certainly we should carefully balance the arguments on both sides, before embarking on a course that would in any way stain our record in the war or drag us down toward the Nazi level."

In the midst of the debate, goatish little Paul Joseph Goebbels, who is completely sold on the psychological value of reprisals, tried a new threat: he said that if the Allies did not stop their mass bombings of German cities, he would exterminate Germany's Jews.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.