Kurt Daluege: The Nazi Police Chief Behind the Lidice Massacre
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Kurt Daluege isn't as widely remembered as Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann, but he built the machinery a lot of their worst crimes ran on. As chief of Nazi Germany's Order Police for seven years, he turned a uniformed constabulary into an instrument of occupation, deportation and mass shooting. Then, in the summer of 1942, acting in Reinhard Heydrich's place, he gave the order that erased an entire Czech village from the map and sent its surviving children to a gas van. This is the story of his crimes, in detail.
Quick Answers
Who was Kurt Daluege? A senior Nazi SS general who commanded Germany's Order Police from 1936 to 1943 and briefly served as Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
What is he best known for? Ordering the destruction of the Czech village of Lidice in June 1942, in reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
What happened to Lidice? All 173 men were shot, the women were sent to concentration camps, and the village itself was burned, dynamited and physically erased from the landscape.
What happened to Daluege? He was captured in 1945, tried in Czechoslovakia for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and hanged in Prague on 24 October 1946.
From Foot Soldier to Fanatic
Kurt Max Franz Daluege was born on 15 September 1897 in Kreuzburg, Upper Silesia, then part of the German Empire and now the Polish town of Kluczbork. He trained as a civil engineer before the First World War interrupted his studies, and he spent the war fighting on both the Western and Eastern fronts with the Prussian Army, where he was severely wounded, declared 25 per cent disabled and decorated for bravery.
Like many demobilised soldiers of his generation, Daluege drifted into the paramilitary Freikorps after Germany's defeat, and took part in the failed Beer Hall Putsch alongside Hitler in 1923. He joined the Nazi Party in 1922, built up the SA's first Berlin unit, and transferred to the SS in 1928, where he became a close and trusted lieutenant of Heinrich Himmler. During the 1934 purge of the SA leadership known as the Night of the Long Knives, Daluege's intelligence work against his own former comrades helped mark him as someone Hitler's regime could rely on completely.
Building a Machine for Mass Murder
In 1936, Himmler placed Daluege in charge of the newly centralised Ordnungspolizei, or Order Police, known as the Orpo. On paper this was Germany's uniformed civil police, responsible for everything from traffic control to firefighting. Under Daluege, it became something else entirely. He militarised the force, folding it into Himmler's wider SS and police apparatus and training its officers around an explicitly racial mission. By the outbreak of war in 1939, the Orpo numbered well over 100,000 men organised into battalions, and Daluege deployed them directly into the invasion of Poland, where Order Police units carried out executions and mass deportations alongside the regular army.
From 1941 onward, Orpo battalions operating under Daluege's central command became directly implicated in genocide, taking part in mass shootings of Jewish civilians across the occupied Soviet Union alongside the Einsatzgruppen death squads. Surviving orders from his command make his approach to occupied populations explicit: one reprisal directive called for executed Polish resistance fighters to be hanged from lampposts as a visible symbol for the entire population. Terror, under Daluege, wasn't a side effect of policy. It was the policy.
Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia
On 27 May 1942, Czech resistance fighters trained by Britain's Special Operations Executive ambushed Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, on a road outside Prague. Heydrich died of his wounds days later. Hitler wanted immediate, overwhelming retaliation, and Daluege was sent to Prague and installed as acting Deputy Protector to make sure he got it.
There was no real investigation into who was responsible. Nazi authorities settled on the village of Lidice, roughly twenty kilometres from Prague, based on flimsy and largely fabricated intelligence linking a local family to the Czech resistance. No credible evidence ever placed Lidice's residents anywhere near the assassination.
The Destruction of Lidice
In the early hours of 10 June 1942, German police and SS units surrounded Lidice and sealed it off completely. Every man in the village over the age of fifteen, 173 of them, was rounded up and taken to a local farmstead. Over the following hours they were shot in groups of ten. Seven women who tried to run were shot too. The remaining roughly 190 women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where around 40 of them would die before the war's end.
Once the village had been emptied of the living, German work crews set about erasing it physically. Buildings were burned, then the ruins were dynamited. The stream running through the village was diverted, roads were rerouted, and even Lidice's cemetery was dug up, its 400 graves opened and looted for gold fillings and jewellery before being destroyed. Prisoners brought in from the Theresienstadt camp were used as forced labour to clear the rubble. Livestock and pets were killed. Nazi propaganda crews filmed the entire process, intending the footage as a warning to anyone else who might consider resistance.
The Children of Lidice
Of the roughly 105 children taken from Lidice, a small number, nine by most accounts, were assessed by SS race examiners as suitable for what the regime called Germanisation. They were sent to a facility in occupied Poland, given new German names and eventually placed with German families through the Lebensborn programme; most were never reunited with any surviving relatives. Camp staff overseeing the rest of the children in Łódź were given explicit written instructions that no special care was necessary for them.
The remaining children's fate was initially left unresolved, until Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann personally ordered their deaths in late June. On 2 July 1942, roughly 82 children were handed over to the Gestapo in Łódź and transported to the Chełmno extermination camp, where they were killed in mobile gas vans, almost certainly on the day they arrived. Seventeen children eventually returned home after the war. The rest never did.
Ležáky and the Wider Terror
Two weeks after Lidice, on 24 June 1942, the tiny village of Ležáky suffered nearly the same fate after German investigators found a resistance radio transmitter hidden there. Every adult resident, men and women alike, was shot. Most of the village's children were murdered too, almost certainly at Chełmno like the children of Lidice; two were selected for Germanisation. Ležáky, like Lidice, was burned to the ground.
The two villages were only the most visible part of a much larger wave of reprisal terror across the Protectorate that Daluege oversaw as acting Reich Protector. More than 3,000 Czechs were arrested in the aftermath of Heydrich's assassination, and well over 1,300 of them were sentenced to death. Thousands of Prague's remaining Jews, already living under brutal restriction, were deported to the Majdanek concentration camp and elsewhere as part of the same reprisal campaign, most never to return.
Capture, Trial and Execution
Daluege's own health failed him before the war did. A serious heart attack in May 1943 saw him relieved of his police duties that August, and he spent the rest of the war largely out of frontline responsibility, on an estate given to him by Hitler. British troops arrested him in Lübeck in May 1945, and he was held at Nuremberg before being extradited to Czechoslovakia in September 1946 to face trial specifically for the crimes committed in Bohemia and Moravia under his command, alongside the broader case built on the militarisation and wartime record of the Order Police. His defence rested almost entirely on the claim that he had simply been following Hitler's orders, a line that carried no legal weight after Nuremberg had already rejected it as a defence for men in his position. He expressed no remorse throughout the proceedings. For a look at the far larger machinery of murder that men like Daluege helped keep running, our piece on Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz covers a fellow senior Nazi executed for building an entirely different kind of extermination apparatus.
The Czechoslovak court found him guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to death. He was hanged at Pankrác Prison in Prague on 24 October 1946, aged 49. It was, by most accounts, the same order of Eichmann's that had condemned the children of Lidice; our piece on how the Israelis eventually captured Adolf Eichmann tells the story of how one of Daluege's own collaborators in that decision was finally brought to justice, more than a decade later and on the other side of the world.
What Remains
News of Lidice's destruction spread fast, helped by the fact that the Nazis had filmed their own atrocity as propaganda. The reaction it provoked reached an English mining city thousands of miles from Bohemia. In Stoke-on-Trent, local doctor and councillor Barnett Stross, working with the North Staffordshire Miners' Federation, launched a campaign called Lidice Shall Live in direct response to Hitler's declared intention that the village would die forever. Miners donated part of their wages, eventually raising £32,000, worth well over a million pounds today, to help rebuild the village once the war was over. A housing settlement in Illinois renamed itself Lidice for the same reason. As recently as 2025, on the atrocity's 83rd anniversary, Stoke-on-Trent renamed a hall at its Civic Centre in the village's honour, a friendship between a Staffordshire mining city and a Czech village that's now outlasted the war by eight decades.
Lidice itself was rebuilt after the war a short distance from its original site, and the ground where the village once stood is now a memorial park, with a rose garden holding more than 25,000 plants tended in memory of the dead. A handful of survivors, including some of the children sent away for Germanisation, eventually made their way back and helped rebuild the community. Daluege's name, by contrast, survives mostly in the footnotes of the crime he's remembered for, a reminder that some of the twentieth century's worst atrocities were carried out not by its most famous monsters, but by the men who built the systems underneath them.
