Massacre remembrance service in Stoke-on-Trent

A remembrance service was held in Stoke-on-Trent today for a Nazi wartime massacre in Czechoslovakia.

Nearly 180 men were executed during the 1942 masacre in a village called Lidice near Prague, with many women and children taken to concentration camps and murdered.

The people of Stoke-on-Trent raised the equivalent of £1 million to help re-build the village after it was destroyed on 10th June 1942.

Stoke-on-Trent television personality Nick Hancock, was at the service in Stoke Minster today, having made a documentary about the massacre:

The attack on the village by the Nazis was in retaliation of Reinhard Heydrich, the highest ranking Nazi official in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

It was a local doctor called Sir Barmett Stross from Stoke-on-Trent that began a campaign entitled 'Lidice shall live' in the 1940s to raise money to help rebuild the village and enlisted the help of coal workers.

Last month children from Bustehrad School in the village visited Stoke to learn more about Sir Barnett.