Occupation & resistance
Nazi protectorate, WWII, communist rule, dissent, samizdat, Charter 77, Prague Spring.
Part of Prague's story
15 moments in this segment.
- — The Assassination of Rašín. The state funeral of Alois Rašín, his catafalque in front of the National Museum on Wenceslas Square, February 1923. Place: Žitná street 10, in front of Rašín's apartment · Vinohrady Hospital Figures: Alois Rašín, Minister of Finance · Josef Šoupal, 19-year-old anarchist communist · Karel Engliš, his successor On the morning of January 5, 1923, Rašín leaves his apartment on Žitná street to walk to the Ministry, three blocks away. He has been Minister of Finance again since October 1922, in the second Švehla cabinet, and has been pushing a hard deflationary line that has already cost twenty thousand jobs. Outside the front door, a young man steps from the doorway opposite and fires three times with a revolver. Two bullets hit the spine. The shooter is Josef Šoupal, 19, son of a Brno carpenter, briefly a member of the Communist Party and currently of an anarchist circle who have decided that capitalism must lose its leader. He is arrested on the spot. The minister is carried back into the building and then to Vinohrady Hospital. He is paralyzed from the waist down.
- — The Wehrmacht enters Prague. Prague Germans greet the arrival of the Wehrmacht, 15 March 1939. Place: Wenceslas Square, Hradčany, the border crossings of northern Bohemia Figures: Adolf Hitler, in the presidential apartment by evening · Emil Hácha, President, signing under threat · Konstantin von Neurath, named first Reichsprotektor · the citizens on the sidewalks It is snowing heavily at the German border before dawn. The motorized columns of the Wehrmacht cross at first light. Roads are slick; some trucks slide into ditches and are pushed out by their own infantry. There is no resistance. By six in the morning the leading units are in Hradec Králové; by noon they are on Wenceslas Square. Citizens come out and stand on the sidewalks. Some weep openly. Others raise two fingers to make a V, palm inward, an inverted victory salute taught by no one in particular. A few spit on the cobbles when the staff cars pass. The newsreels (German) record cheering crowds; the photographs taken by Czech photographers, later, record faces stiff with grief. Praha pláče, Prague is weeping, is the line that survives.
- — Heydrich arrives in Prague. Reinhard Heydrich, official SS portrait, 1940. Named Acting Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941. Place: Černín Palace, Hradčany Figures: Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reichsprotektor · Konstantin von Neurath, removed · Alois Eliáš, Protectorate Prime Minister, arrested the same day Reinhard Heydrich is thirty-seven. He is chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), deputy of Himmler in the SS, and five months earlier, at Wannsee preparations and through his Einsatzgruppen orders in the East, he has been made the architect of the Final Solution. Goebbels writes privately in his diary that Heydrich is der gefährlichste Mann des Dritten Reichs: the most dangerous man of the Third Reich. Hitler sends him to Prague because Neurath has been too lenient and the Czech resistance has been too productive. Heydrich arrives by train on the morning of September 27, 1941, takes residence at the Černín Palace, and signs the first execution orders before lunch.
- — Heydrich is ambushed in Libeň. Heydrich's Mercedes 320 Cabriolet B at the hairpin curve in Libeň, after the ambush of 27 May 1942. Place: The hairpin curve at Kirchmayer Boulevard (today V Holešovičkách), Libeň Figures: Jozef Gabčík, Slovak paratrooper · Jan Kubiš, Czech paratrooper · Josef Valčík, lookout · Heydrich, in an open Mercedes 320 Cabriolet B Gabčík and Kubiš parachuted into a snowy field outside Plzeň on the night of December 28, 1941. They have lived for five months in safe houses in Prague, fed by the families Moravec, Novák, and Khodl, briefed by the resistance, supplied with British weapons: a Sten Mk II submachine gun, two No. 73 anti-tank grenades, pistols. They have studied the route Heydrich's chauffeur Klein drives every morning from the villa at Panenské Břežany to the Castle: down the hill, around a sharp bend at Libeň, where the car must slow to nearly a walking pace. Heydrich is overconfident. He rides in an open-topped car with no escort. He has been recalled to Berlin to receive a new posting in France. May 27 is meant to be one of his last days in Prague.
- — The Red Cross at Theresienstadt. Filming of the propaganda production directed by prisoner Kurt Gerron at Theresienstadt, 1944, made for the Red Cross visit and afterward. Place: Terezín (Theresienstadt) Figures: Maurice Rossel, ICRC delegate · Hans Günther, SS commandant of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague · Paul Eppstein, Judenältester (executed three months later) · Kurt Gerron, film director and prisoner By spring 1944 the Danish Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross have been asking, repeatedly, to inspect the camp where Danish Jews deported in October 1943 are held. Berlin agrees, with conditions. Months of preparation begin. The operation is called Verschönerung: beautification. Three to five thousand prisoners are deported to Auschwitz to relieve overcrowding. Fresh paint goes on the facades. Window boxes appear. A fake cafe opens on the main square, with sheet music on the piano. A fake shop window displays goods. A children's playground is built. The football pitch hosts a match. Brundibár, the children's opera, is rehearsed once more. A bandstand goes up. The route the delegation will walk is timed to the minute. Verdi's Requiem is performed by inmate choirs that the SS film, then deport.
- — Victorious February. Klement Gottwald in 1949. The communist leader who took the balcony at the Kinský Palace on 25 February 1948. Place: Balcony of the Kinský Palace, Old Town Square Figures: Klement Gottwald, Communist Party leader · Edvard Beneš, President · Jan Masaryk, Foreign Minister (still alive, briefly) On February 20, twelve non-communist ministers resign in protest at the communist takeover of the Interior Ministry, expecting Beneš to refuse the resignations and trigger a new election. They have miscalculated. The communists control the police, the radio, the trade unions, and the People's Militia, who are armed and on the street within hours. Beneš, sixty-three, ailing, the only major politician who survived both the war and Munich, hesitates. For five days Prague is paralyzed. Students march from the Faculty of Law to the Castle in support of the President; they are turned back by police. The non-communist parties cannot agree on a counter-move. The factories vote, under militia supervision, for the workers' programme. On February 25, Beneš accepts the resignations and signs Gottwald's new all-communist cabinet. The Republic falls without a shot.
- — The Slánský Trial. The 1952 show trial of Rudolf Slánský and thirteen co-defendants. Eleven were hanged on 3 December. Place: Pankrác Prison courtroom · Ruzyně interrogation cells Figures: Rudolf Slánský, former General Secretary of the Communist Party · Vladimír Clementis, former Foreign Minister · Otto Šling, Otto Fischl, Bedřich Geminder, and ten others Rudolf Slánský is, until November 1951, the second man in the Czechoslovak state, General Secretary of the Communist Party, organizer of the February coup. He is also Jewish. After Stalin's break with Tito and Israel, Moscow needs a Czechoslovak parallel to the Hungarian Rajk trial and the Bulgarian Kostov trial. Soviet advisors arrive in Prague in autumn 1949 and select their candidates. Slánský is arrested in November 1951, Clementis with him. The fourteen defendants are held at Ruzyně for a year of vyšetřování: continuous interrogation, sleep deprivation in three-hour cycles, beatings. Confessions are written, memorized, re-written, rehearsed. The script names the accused as Trotskyist-Titoist-Zionist conspirators. Eleven of the fourteen are Jewish. The indictment specifies this.
- — Stalin on Letná. The Stalin Monument on Letná Plain, 1955. Otakar Švec's granite group was the largest statue of Stalin ever built. Place: Letná plain, above the Vltava, north bank Figures: Otakar Švec, sculptor (deceased three weeks prior) · Jiří Štursa and Vlasta Štursová, architects · Antonín Zápotocký, President Otakar Švec wins the 1949 competition for the Prague Stalin monument with a maquette he intends to be provisional. He is talented, unpolitical, the son of a confectioner. The commission is a curse. For five and a half years he works on a granite figure thirty meters tall (fifteen meters of figure, fifteen meters of pedestal), the largest sculpted representation of Stalin ever built anywhere. Behind Stalin he places eight representative Czechs and Soviets in a tight line: worker, peasant soldier, woman, partisan. The composition is meant to be Lenin's vanguard. Praguers, looking up from the Old Town across the river, immediately read the queue as a different thing. They call it fronta na maso, the meat queue. The figures behind Stalin are not following him; they are waiting their turn. The joke is repeated everywhere and is impossible to suppress because it is silently visible from half the city. This photograph dates from 1960.
- — Letná Blown Up. The demolition of the Stalin Monument, 1962. Eight hundred kilograms of explosives reduced the largest Stalin in the world to gravel. Place: Letná plain, above the Vltava Figures: Antonín Novotný, First Secretary · the demolition crew of the Konstruktiva enterprise · 800 kilograms of dynamite Khrushchev's 1956 secret speech reaches Prague late. Novotný, who has built his career on the Slánský trial, resists de-Stalinization for as long as Moscow tolerates it. By 1961 Stalin's body has been removed from the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square; cities across the bloc are rebranding. The Czechoslovak Politburo finally votes in summer 1962 to remove the Letná monument. The order is to do it quietly. Quietly is not possible. The figure is thirty meters of granite anchored into a concrete core; nothing short of dynamite will shift it. The demolition is staged over five weeks across October and the first week of November, in carefully spaced charges so the central plinth survives. Each blast brings out a crowd along the Vltava embankment to watch.
- — Normalization. Gustáv Husák, who replaced Dubček on 17 April 1969 and presided over twenty years of normalization. Place: Central Committee plenum, Old Town · workplaces and party cells across the Republic Figures: Gustáv Husák, incoming First Secretary · Alexander Dubček, outgoing · Vasil Biľak, hardliner co-author of the 1968 letter of invitation Eight months after the tanks, the Soviets get the leadership they want. Husák, a Slovak communist imprisoned by his own party in the 1950s and rehabilitated by Dubček, replaces Dubček as First Secretary on 17 April 1969. Dubček is sent first to Ankara as ambassador (a clean exile) and then home to a forestry job near Bratislava. He will not appear in Prague again until November 1989. The new programme is called normalizace. The word is everywhere within weeks: in Rudé právo, in factory meetings, on the radio. It means the restoration of normal conditions; what it does is reverse every reform of the previous fifteen months in sequence, censorship reimposed, federalization frozen, the borders sealed.
- — Jan Palach. student of philosophy, in his university identification photograph. He set himself on fire at the top of Wenceslas Square on 16 January 1969. Place: Top of Wenceslas Square, in front of the National Museum Figures: Jan Palach, twenty, student of history and political economics at Charles University · Libuše Palachová, his mother · Doctor Jaroslava Moserová, his attending physician at the burn unit Five months after the invasion, the city is settling into something the regime will call konsolidace: the press resumes its old voice, the borders close, the new normalization apparatus assembles itself. Jan Palach, a twenty-year-old student of history and political economy in his second year at Charles University, writes a letter signed torch number one. He has organized, with two friends, a pact: each of them in turn will set himself on fire until the regime restores press freedom and bans the distribution of the Soviet newspaper Zprávy. On the afternoon of January 16, 1969, he walks from the steps of the National Museum to the fountain near the statue of Saint Wenceslas, douses his clothes in ether and petrol, and lights himself. A passing tram conductor smothers him with his coat. Palach is conscious. He dictates his demands to Moserová in the burn unit. He dies on January 19.
- — Jan Patočka dies. Jan Patočka in 1971. The philosopher and Charter 77 spokesman died on 13 March 1977 after an eleven-hour StB interrogation. Place: Strahov Hospital, Prague · the funeral, Břevnov cemetery, four days later Figures: Jan Patočka, sixty-nine, phenomenologist, Husserl's last Prague student, first Charter 77 spokesperson · the StB interrogators, unnamed Jan Patočka has been the most distinguished of the Charter spokespersons because he is the most distinguished of the signers. He attended Husserl's lectures in Freiburg in 1933, defended his Habilitation under Heidegger in 1939, and was Husserl's last regular interlocutor in Prague before the master's exile. Twice (1948, 1972) he was barred from Czech universities. He lectured for thirty years in apartments and in his own kitchen, the so-called bytové semináře: apartment seminars. Through January and February 1977 he is interrogated repeatedly. Re-check the chronology. Standard accounts and Wikipedia place the eleven (or ten) hour interrogation on 3 March 1977 (the same day, or the day after, the van der Stoel meeting on 1 March), not 11 March. Wikipedia (Jan Patočka): held by police for ten hours on 3 March; fell ill the same evening; hospitalized; brief improvement; relapsed and died on 13 March. The corpus has the meeting on March 3 and the interrogation on March 11, which is the inverse of the better-attested sequence.
- — The First Transport to Terezín. The Small Fortress at Terezín, the Habsburg garrison town requisitioned in 1941 as the ghetto and transit camp Theresienstadt. Place: Terezín (Theresienstadt), 60 km north of Prague Figures: 342 Jewish men of the Aufbaukommando · Jakob Edelstein, first Judenältester · the Habsburg garrison town, requisitioned Terezín was built by Joseph II in 1784 as a fortress against the Prussians. It never fought a battle. Its bastions enclose a small garrison town of barracks, parade grounds, and four straight streets. In October 1941 Heydrich's office selects it as the destination for what is officially called the Sammellager, the assembly camp, for the Jews of the Protectorate. The civilian population, some 3,500, is evicted by May 1942. On November 24, 1941, the first transport arrives: 342 men, designated the Aufbaukommando, the construction detail. Their task is to convert the barracks into a ghetto for what the planning documents estimate as 50,000 people. The figure will be exceeded. The subject dates from 1941; this photograph was taken in 2008.
- — Charter 77. The Charter 77 memorial plaque in Prague. The declaration appeared on 1 January 1977 with 243 founding signatures. Place: Apartment of Pavel Landovský, Hradčanské náměstí · later, the open letter columns of Le Monde and the New York Times Figures: Václav Havel, Pavel Kohout, Petr Uhl, drafters · Jan Patočka, Václav Havel, Jiří Hájek, first three spokespersons · 242 initial signatories · 7,500 signatories of the Anti-Charter (within a week) The Czechoslovak government signs the Helsinki Final Act in August 1975, guaranteeing civil and political rights in exchange for the West's acknowledgment of postwar borders. The signature provides the dissidents their opening. Charter 77 is a 1,400-word text demanding the regime honor its own constitution and the treaty it has just signed. It asks for nothing not already on the books. It refuses to be a political opposition; it calls itself a citizens' initiative. On New Year's Day 1977, the text is finalized in Landovský's flat above Hradčany Square. Two hundred and forty-two people have signed. Landovský, Havel, and Ludvík Vaculík set out to post the document to the federal government, the Federal Assembly, and the press agencies. They are arrested on Ruzyně road before reaching the post office; copies have already left the country by other channels. The subject dates from 1977; this photograph was taken in 2017.
- — Jan Zajíc follows. The Palach and Zajíc memorial at the foot of the National Museum, Wenceslas Square. Zajíc became the second torch on 25 February 1969. Place: Passage at number 39 Wenceslas Square (Pasáž U Sviatošů) Figures: Jan Zajíc, eighteen, gymnasium student from Vítkov in northern Moravia · Evžen Plocek, forty (will follow in April, in Jihlava) Five weeks after Palach's funeral, on the twenty-first anniversary of the Communist seizure of power, the eighteen-year-old Jan Zajíc takes a train from Vítkov to Prague. He carries a typewritten letter, a thermos of petrol, and acid pills to deaden the throat. He has chosen the day deliberately: February 25, 1948–1969, the anniversary Gottwald created and the regime still celebrates. He enters the passage at number 39 Wenceslas Square, swallows the pills so he will not be saved by his vocal cords (Palach had been able to dictate; Zajíc decides not to give that possibility to the police), douses himself, and lights the match. He dies on the spot, before any passer-by reaches him. He is the second of what would become a Central European chain across that spring. The subject dates from 1969; this photograph was taken in 2022.
