BEN SHAHN THIS IS NAZI BRUTALITY. 1942

On May 27, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich (the Nazi official in charge of Czechoslovakia) was assassinated. In response the Nazi regime ordered the destruction of the Czech village of Lidice because they suspected some of its citizens to have been involved in the murder. The Nazis executed all of the men and 56 women in the town and sent the remaining women and children to concentration camps. They then leveled the village to the ground and struck its name from the official record. On June 11, 1942, the Germans announced that they had taken this action. "Shahn let the chilling and brazen announcement tell its own story of inhumanity by printing it as if it were a ticker tape. The hooded prisoner, cornered and chained, has no means of escape from the finality of the horrifying message. The small section of blue sky above is dark and ominous and adds to the atmosphere of doom" (Prescott p. 123). "Derived from Goya's The Prisoner, this ominous view... expresses both timeless human brutality and particular contemporary atrocities" (Paret p. 194). Prescott 144, Paret 276, The Modern Poster 194.