The funeral of Jan Opletal

On Wednesday 15 November 1939 students of the Prague universities bade farewell to their fellow student Jan Opletal, a medical student at Charles University who had been shot by German police during the demonstration of 28 October. The ceremony at the Institute of Pathology on the Albertov in Prague drew several thousand young people, and when the coffin had been driven away to Moravia, some of them set off for the city centre. For several hours Prague rang with the national anthem and with shouts against the occupiers, and there were clashes with the police. For the leaders of the Third Reich this was proof that the Czechs had not come to terms with the occupation, and a pretext for reprisals which two days later struck at the whole of Czech higher education.

The death of a student

Jan Opletal came from a poor peasant family in Lhota nad Moravou (PL) near Olomouc. He was the youngest of eight children; thanks to the persistence of his teachers he graduated with distinction from the grammar school in Litovel, did his military service, and in 1936 began studying medicine in Prague. He lived in the Hlávka College, a hall of residence for gifted students from families of modest means, and was active in its student council. His fellow students knew him as an outstanding student who translated course notes from English and French for others.

On 28 October 1939, the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, he was in the crowd that the German police pushed out of Charles Square and up Žitná Street. A shot rang out and Opletal was hit in the abdomen. He was operated on at the surgical clinic, where doctors found that his large intestine had been pierced and his small intestine perforated in several places. SS men who came to the hospital took away the bullet. Despite the care of his mother and sister, the wounded man’s condition worsened. Jan Opletal died of peritonitis on 11 November 1939. Some sources give 12 November, but Czech and German accounts agree on 11 November. He was 24 years old.

The student’s death shook Prague, although the press of the Protectorate could not write about it freely. Students met in the halls of residence and the faculties to agree on how to bid him farewell. Activists of the National Union of Czech Students and a young historian, the lecturer Josef Matoušek, took part in the preparations. The Protectorate ministry of education feared fresh disturbances and opposed public ceremonies, but a public farewell did take place; after it the coffin was to be taken to his home village. Some historians believe that the Germans allowed it precisely because they expected riots that would give them a pretext for dealing with the students.

The farewell on the Albertov

On the morning of 15 November the coffin was laid out in the chapel of the medical faculty’s Institute of Pathology on the Albertov. According to various accounts, between three and four thousand students gathered in front of the building and in the surrounding streets. After delegations of student organisations had briefly filed past, the coffin was carried out of the building. The cortège moved off along the Albertov, led by the dean of the medical faculty, the professor of forensic medicine František Hájek. At first everything proceeded calmly and with dignity. When the coffin had been placed in the hearse, the crowd sang the anthem “Kde domov můj” (“Where is my home”), and then the Slovak anthem as well. The hearse left for Moravia. Opletal was buried in the cemetery at Náklo in a modest village ceremony watched by the Gestapo. According to Czech accounts, some of his fellow students who had gone there for the funeral were arrested on their return to Prague.

A demonstration in the city centre

After the hearse had left, the students did not disperse. Some headed towards Charles Square, where there was a clash with the Czech police; some of the demonstrators took refuge in the building of the Czech Technical University, from which they were later let out in small groups under supervision. But the groups kept re-forming. Marches, singing and shouting were repeated in Spálená and Voršilská Streets, on Národní třída, in front of the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Arts, and at around eleven o’clock in front of the Jan Hus Memorial in Old Town Square. According to a report by the Prague police directorate, there were at first three to four thousand students in the streets, later about two and a half thousand. Passers-by joined them.

There were several incidents, which the Germans later exaggerated. In Spálená Street the driver of Karl Hermann Frank, State Secretary in the Protector’s office and Higher SS and Police Leader in the Protectorate, was beaten up. According to the account of Jan Bělehrádek, then a professor and after the war rector of Charles University, a car said to belong to Frank was overturned in Voršilská Street; Frank himself drove around the city that day observing the course of the demonstration. In Berlin there was later talk of six or seven Germans injured. The demonstrators were dispersed by the Czech police, German police formations and SS units. Most of those detained by the Czech police were punished with a few days’ detention or a fine. The Germans arrested, according to various tallies, between 16 and 20 people, mainly in the vicinity of the Faculty of Law. Their fate was far harsher: Gestapo prisons in Prague, the Small Fortress at Terezín and finally a concentration camp. Compared with 28 October the demonstration was smaller and no shots were fired, but Czech historians regard it as the last public protest against the occupiers on such a scale until the Prague uprising of May 1945.

Reports to Berlin

For weeks the occupiers had been waiting for an opportunity to deal with the Czech intelligentsia, and above all with the students, whom they regarded as a centre of resistance. From the outset Frank had argued that the conciliatory line of the Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, merely emboldened the Czechs. The mood in the Reich had been sharpened by the attempt on Hitler’s life in Munich a week earlier, which propaganda blamed on foreign conspiracies. On 15 November itself the head of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich, sent the Reich Chancellery a report on the events in Prague, and the reports of the SS Security Service presented them as an organised action directed against Germans. Frank himself testified after the war that the decision to carry out executions and deport the students had been taken “on the day of the demonstration”, that is, on 15 November.

The next day Neurath and Frank were summoned to Berlin to a conference attended by Adolf Hitler. According to those present, Hitler flew into a rage, spoke of drowning the resistance in blood and threatened to raze Prague to the ground if there were further disturbances. He gave a verbal order that three Czechs were to be shot for every German injured, and ordered the closure of the Czech universities. President Emil Hácha, whom the students tried to see on 16 November, no longer had any influence on the course of events.

Place in the history of the war

Opletal’s funeral brought to a close a brief period of open, mass resistance in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which had begun in the spring of 1939 with national pilgrimages and reached its peak on 28 October. During the night of 16–17 November German police and the SS burst into the halls of residence in Prague, Brno and Příbram; nine student leaders, among them Josef Matoušek, were shot without trial in the barracks at Ruzyně, and more than twelve hundred students were deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The Czech universities were closed until the end of the war. Ten days earlier the Germans had struck in a similar way at the Kraków professors in the Sonderaktion Krakau: in both countries the occupier regarded the academic community as a mainstay of national resistance that had to be destroyed.

Jan Opletal became a symbol of Czech resistance. In 1945 Charles University awarded him a posthumous doctorate in medicine, and streets in many Czech towns bear his name, including a street off Wenceslas Square in Prague. On 17 November 1989, the fiftieth anniversary of those events, students gathered on the Albertov to honour his memory and set off along the same route as the cortège of 1939, towards Národní třída. The brutal breaking up of this march by the police set off the Velvet Revolution, which overthrew communism in Czechoslovakia.