Lidice is built near the site of the previous village, which was completely destroyed on 10 June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and acting Reichsprotektor Kurt Daluege in reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich.

After the industrialisation of the area in the second half of the 19th century, many of the inhabitants of Lidice worked in mines and steelworks in neighbouring Kladno and Slaný.

[3][4] Lidice was chosen as a target for reprisals in the wake of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, because its residents were suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans, and were falsely associated with aiding team members of Operation Anthropoid.

It is an architecturally modified landscape in the area of the original village of Lidice with the fragments of burnt buildings, a gloriette, several monuments, a cemetery and the Rose Garden.

[14][15] In 1942, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay published "The Murder of Lidice," a dramatic poem commissioned by the Writers' War Board in the United States.

In 2017, to mark the 75th anniversary of the tragedy, the English composer Vic Carnall wrote his Opus 17, In Memoriam: the Village of Lidice (Czechoslovakia / June, 1942), a work for solo piano.

The films Operation Daybreak (1975), Lidice (2011), and Anthropoid (2015) all detail the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent massacre and razing of the village.