Demonstrations in Prague

On 28 October 1939, the twenty-first anniversary of the proclamation of an independent Czechoslovakia, the inhabitants of Prague and other towns of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia turned a banned holiday into the largest demonstration against the Germans since the occupation began. People came out onto the streets in their Sunday best, with tricolour ribbons in their lapels, sang the national anthem and cheered Edvard Beneš. In the evening the German police opened fire on the crowd. In Žitná Street in the New Town a twenty-two-year-old baker’s journeyman, Václav Sedláček, was killed on the spot, and a medical student, Jan Opletal, shot in the stomach, died two weeks later. The day is often summed up as “the death of a demonstrator and the wounding of the student Jan Opletal”. That is accurate, but it should be added at once that it was Opletal’s wound, not Sedláček’s death, that became the spark for the events of November 1939: the closure of the Czech universities and the deportation of students to a concentration camp.

A banned holiday

On 28 October 1918 the National Committee in Prague proclaimed the creation of an independent Czechoslovak state. For twenty years that day was the most important holiday of the First Republic. After the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 the Germans had no intention of allowing it to be celebrated, and the Protectorate government, headed by General Alois Eliáš, declared 28 October an ordinary working day. The authorities warned that a strike would be treated as sabotage and absence from work as open resistance.

Since the spring the Czechs had been expressing their opposition in forms for which it was hard to punish anyone. National pilgrimages drew tens of thousands of people; the reburial of the remains of the poet Karel Hynek Mácha at Vyšehrad in May became a demonstration; and on 30 September, the anniversary of the Munich Agreement, the people of Prague boycotted the trams and walked to work. This success emboldened the organisers. Preparations for the independence anniversary were made both by the underground organisations grouped around the Political Centre and Defence of the Nation and by the illegal Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. They could not agree on a common line: some wanted a “quiet holiday”, others strikes and demonstrations. From about 10 October leaflets circulated calling on people to dress that day in their best clothes or in black, to wear the national colours, to buy nothing and not to ride the trams. The instructions were sometimes contradictory and withdrawn at the last minute, but the general call reached everyone.

The political background encouraged this mood. Poland had just lost its war, but Britain and France were fighting Germany, and on 17 October the Czechoslovak National Committee, the nucleus of a future government-in-exile, was formed in Paris. Many Czechs believed the occupation would not last long.

The day of the demonstrations

Already on the eve, street vendors could not keep up with the demand for ribbons in the national colours. According to contemporary estimates, some 30,000 were sold in Prague over a few days. On Saturday 28 October workers turned up at most Prague factories, but work stopped on the building sites, and at the universities classes were broken off before noon. From the morning ever larger groups gathered in Wenceslas Square and the Old Town Square. People sang the anthem “Kde domov můj” and the song “Hey, Slavs”, and shouted “We want freedom!”, “Long live Beneš!”, “Down with Hitler!”. Some, especially on the left, also cheered Stalin, hoping that the Soviet Union would take the side of the Slavs, although for two months it had in fact been Hitler’s ally. There were scuffles with Germans, and the windows of some German shops and signs were smashed.

The Czech Protectorate police, many of whose officers sympathised with the demonstrators, were in no hurry to intervene. German police formations then went into action, uniformed and in plain clothes, backed by SS detachments. In the afternoon several attempts were made to clear Wenceslas Square, which succeeded only at about 6 p.m. The demonstrators then moved to the area around Charles Square, to Vinohrady and to Masaryk Station, where the disturbances continued until about 8 p.m.

The shooting took place in Žitná Street, along which the crowd, pushed back by the German police, was retreating from Charles Square. At about 6.25 p.m., at the corner of Ve Smečkách Street, a bullet struck Václav Sedláček in the heart, and he died within a few minutes. At the same spot, during the same phase of the disturbances, a bullet hit Jan Opletal in the stomach. The perpetrators were never identified by name. Most studies attribute the shots to German policemen; according to some accounts the shots were fired from handguns, probably by officers in plain clothes. According to Czech historians, over the whole day of disturbances some 15 people were seriously wounded and several hundred slightly, and about 400 were detained, only about 50 of them by the Czech police.

The number of participants is uncertain. Czech studies speak of as many as 100,000 people on the streets of Prague over the course of the day, a figure that must be treated as an estimate. Demonstrations also took place in other towns: some 12,000 people gathered in Ostrava, about 3,000 in Moravská Třebová, and several hundred in the centre of Brno. In many places banned Czechoslovak flags were hung out, German inscriptions were painted over and national songs were sung. On 29 October there were further smaller gatherings in Prague, but the authorities stopped tram services to the centre and there were no more serious clashes.

Two victims

Václav Sedláček was born on 22 April 1917 in Recklinghausen in the Ruhr, in a colony of Czech miners who had emigrated there in search of work. The family was strongly patriotic, though the children attended German schools and spoke Czech poorly. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the Sedláčeks returned to Bohemia and settled near Ústí nad Labem. After the annexation of the Sudetenland Václav moved to Prague, where he was apprenticed in a bakery in Smíchov and belonged to Sokol. He was buried on 4 November in the cemetery at Braník. Only his closest relatives were allowed to attend the funeral, the press was forbidden to write about him, there was no priest, and the ceremony was watched by officers of the Gestapo and the Czech police. After the war Sedláček was almost forgotten; historians suspect that his family’s German background counted against him, and his grave was rediscovered only in the twenty-first century.

Jan Opletal was born on 1 January 1915 in Lhota nad Moravou (PL) near Olomouc, the eighth child of a poor family; his parents gave his date of birth in the documents as 31 December 1914 so that their son could start school earlier. He was an outstanding pupil at the grammar school in Litovel, did his military service, and in 1936 began studying at the medical faculty of Charles University. He lived in a hall of residence for gifted students from poor families and was active in student self-government. After being shot he underwent an operation, which revealed multiple perforations of the intestines. SS men came to his hospital room and took away the bullet. Opletal died of peritonitis on 11 November 1939.

The occupier’s response

The scale of the demonstrations alarmed Berlin. According to Czech studies, Adolf Hitler threatened to abolish the Protectorate’s autonomy and send an armoured division to Prague, and from then on any similar outbreak was to be suppressed by force of arms, with collective responsibility for the whole population. The Germans also blamed Eliáš’s government and the Czech police for excessive leniency. Real power in matters of security lay with the State Secretary in the Reich Protector’s office and Higher SS and Police Leader Karl Hermann Frank, an advocate of the iron fist who had long argued that the mildness of the Reich Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, was emboldening the Czechs. The October disturbances gave him an argument.

A few days earlier, on 26 October, the General Government had begun to operate in occupied Poland, where the Germans made no pretence of any autonomy. The Czechs still had their own government and administration, but 28 October showed that Berlin regarded this autonomy as a privilege that could be withdrawn at any moment.

Its place in the history of the war

On 15 November 1939 Opletal’s coffin lay in state at the Institute of Pathology in Prague’s Albertov district. Several thousand students attended, and the procession accompanying the coffin to the railway station turned into another demonstration. The next day the matter was discussed in Berlin with Hitler present. On the night of 16–17 November German police and the SS burst into student halls of residence in Prague, Brno and Příbram. Nine leaders of student organisations were shot without trial in the barracks at Ruzyně, and some 1,200 students were deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. All Czech institutions of higher education were closed – officially for three years, in reality until the end of the war. The imprisoned students were released gradually, mainly thanks to the efforts of President Emil Hácha: most by 1942, the last at the beginning of 1943. About twenty died in the camp or shortly after their release.

In 1941 in London, with the participation of Czechoslovak students in exile, 17 November was proclaimed International Students’ Day. The same date returned half a century later: on 17 November 1989 a student march commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of those events was broken up by the police, which set off the Velvet Revolution. The memory of 28 October 1939 thus concerns not just a single day of resistance but a whole chain of events leading from the shots in Žitná Street to the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia.

In the Protectorate itself the demonstrations of the autumn of 1939 marked the high point of open, mass resistance. After the November repressions resistance went underground, and the occupation grew harsher until the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in September 1941 and the wave of executions that followed the attempt on his life in 1942. Today a plaque commemorating both men hangs at the spot where Sedláček was killed and Opletal was wounded.