The Prague uprising

At six in the morning on Saturday 5 May 1945 the Prague radio announcer Zdeněk Mančal gave the time in a mixture of Czech and German: “Je právě sechs hodin.” From eight o’clock the station was broadcasting in Czech only, and national songs banned for years went out over the air. A few hours later, at 12.33 p.m., the same studio sent out an appeal: “We call the Czech police to the radio! There is shooting here!” So began the Prague uprising – the last great urban uprising of the Second World War in Europe.

For four days the people of Prague, armed with captured rifles, anti-tank grenade launchers and pistols, defended the city centre on the barricades against units of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. On 8 May – when the Germans had already signed the instrument of surrender at Reims but the fighting in Bohemia went on – the Czech National Council concluded an agreement with the German commandant of the city, General Rudolf Toussaint: the German troops were to lay down their heavy weapons and withdraw westwards, towards the Americans. On the morning of 9 May Red Army tanks drove into the city the Germans had abandoned.

The Czechs began their uprising on 5 May; the Soviet Prague offensive, however, began a day later, on 6 May, and it was the news of the uprising that led Moscow to bring it forward by twenty-four hours.

The Protectorate at its end

Since March 1939 the Czech lands had been the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia – autonomous in form, in reality governed by the German Reich Protector and his police apparatus. From 1943 the country’s real ruler was the German Minister of State and Higher SS and Police Leader Karl Hermann Frank. The Czech administration under President Emil Hácha and the government of Richard Bienert carried out German instructions.

The occupation was not like the one the Germans inflicted on Poland, but it was cruel. After the assassination of Heydrich in 1942 a wave of terror swept the country, symbolised by the destruction of Lidice. In Prague’s Pankrác prison, according to Czech tallies, more than a thousand people were guillotined between April 1943 and April 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Czechs were deported for forced labour in the Reich.

In the spring of 1945 the front was approaching Bohemia from three sides. The Red Army had taken Slovakia and was entering Moravia, while the Americans of George Patton’s Third Army crossed the old Czechoslovak border from the west on 4 May. Yet Bohemia was still held by the powerful Army Group Centre of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner – some 900,000 men by various estimates – a commander determined to defend “Fortress Bohemia” to the end. Frank announced on the radio that any uprising would be drowned in blood. According to figures cited in Czech literature, some 30,000 German soldiers were stationed in Prague itself, with tens of thousands more on nearby training grounds.

The news of Hitler’s death and of the surrenders in the west, including the surrender on Lüneburg Heath on 4 May, convinced Prague that the end was a matter of days.

The conspirators and their forces

The uprising had been in preparation for months, but in several centres that for a long time knew nothing of one another. Officers of the old Czechoslovak army had organised the Alex command under General František Slunečko and the Military Command of Greater Prague, Bartoš, under General Karel Kutlvašr and his chief of staff, Colonel František Bürger (“Bartoš”). In parallel there was the military commission of the Czech National Council (ČNR) – the underground political representation, in which the communists held a strong position – headed by Captain Jaromír Nechanský (PL), who had been parachuted in from Britain. The council’s chairman was the literary scholar Professor Albert Pražák, and his deputy the communist Josef Smrkovský. The two groups made contact only on 3 May.

The forces were unequal. According to Czech studies, the conspirators could count on some 1,500 men of an underground intelligence brigade and several thousand policemen and gendarmes, members of the Protectorate’s Government Army, the customs guard, railwaymen, tram workers and firemen – but there were weapons for only a small fraction of them. British airdrops, according to the same sources, armed only about 1,600 men. The military commanders wanted to begin on 7 May, when the Allied armies would be closer.

Events overtook them. On 4 May it was announced that public offices would henceforth operate in Czech only and that Czechoslovak flags might be flown. In the city people began tearing down German signs. The Bienert government still tried to proclaim that it was taking power and to preserve the continuity of the Protectorate administration, while Frank – bringing well-known prisoners from Terezín – looked for Czechs willing to form a “transitional” government and to mediate a surrender to the Americans. No one agreed.

5 May: the battle for the radio

On the morning of 5 May Prague poured into the streets. German signboards were torn down, red, white and blue flags hung out, and tram conductors refused to announce the stops in German. The National Committee of Greater Prague took over the town hall from the mayor, Alois Říha, and called through the street loudspeakers for work to stop. When Czechs tried to disarm German soldiers, the first shots were fired. Shortly before eleven General Slunečko put his units on alert – in practice the beginning of the uprising.

The struggle for the Radio building on what was then Schwerinstraße (today Vinohradská) proved crucial. The building was guarded by SS men, who were searching for a hidden studio. A squad of a dozen or so policemen fought its way inside, and on their instructions the announcer Mančal called for help over the air. The appeal – “We call on the Czech police, the gendarmerie, the Government Army, every good Czech to help Czech radio!” – repeated throughout the afternoon, acted as a signal for the whole city. At around 6 p.m. the Germans in the building surrendered.

By evening the insurgents held most of the city on the right bank of the Vltava: the telephone exchange, most of the stations, the bridges, and the Old Town and New Town halls. According to accounts, some three thousand prisoners were freed from Pankrác prison. The Germans held, among other places, Vítkov and Petřín hills, the Czernin Palace, Ruzyně airfield and the Gestapo headquarters in the Petschek Palace. That day Emanuel Moravec, the most zealous collaborator in the Protectorate government, took his own life, and Bienert was detained. The ČNR proclaimed that, as the representative of the Košice government, it was assuming power in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, and that the Protectorate had ceased to exist.

Schörner and Frank ordered the uprising crushed. Waffen-SS units with tanks and self-propelled guns were brought up towards Prague under the command of SS-Gruppenführer Carl Friedrich von Pückler-Burghauss. The radio appealed in several languages for Allied air support. In the evening the ČNR called for barricades to be built: during the night of 5–6 May tens of thousands of people put up some 1,600 of them, and by the end of the fighting, according to Czech tallies, more than two thousand.

6 and 7 May: barricades and Vlasov’s men

On 6 May the Germans went over to the attack. Assault guns and tanks tried to break through to the centre, and aircraft – including Messerschmitt Me 262 jets from Ruzyně airfield – bombed the city; a bomb hit the radio building, which nevertheless carried on broadcasting from a reserve studio. There was no mass air raid, because the Luftwaffe lacked fuel and aircraft.

That same day an unexpected force joined the fighting on the insurgents’ side: the 1st Division of the Russian Liberation Army (ROA; the 600th Infantry Division in German numbering) under General Sergei Bunyachenko – part of Andrei Vlasov’s army of former Soviet prisoners of war, which was withdrawing westwards from the front. Czech officers persuaded Bunyachenko to change sides; his soldiers presumably hoped that helping Prague would win them the Allies’ favour. According to Czech studies, 12,000–14,000 men took part in the fighting, with artillery, self-propelled guns and a few tanks. On 7 May they took Ruzyně airfield and cleared the western districts, Motol, Pankrác and White Mountain. General Kutlvašr later judged their contribution to have been above all moral, but it was they who for two days held back the German attack from the west.

This help, however, became a political embarrassment. To Stalin, Vlasov’s men were traitors, and the communists in the ČNR – led by Josef Smrkovský – did not want the liberation of Prague linked with their name. When American envoys arrived in Prague on the evening of 7 May and confirmed that US troops would not enter the city, Bunyachenko decided that his men must save themselves by escaping towards the Americans. At around 11 p.m. he ordered them to leave Prague; small sub-units remained until 8 May.

The Americans halted at Plzeň

On 6 May the US Third Army took Plzeň (Pilsen), only 80 kilometres from Prague. Patton asked for permission to march on the capital, and Winston Churchill argued that liberation of Prague by the Americans might change Czechoslovakia’s post-war fate. Dwight Eisenhower refused. When the chief of the Soviet General Staff, General Aleksei Antonov, protested against any further American advance, Eisenhower confirmed that his troops would halt on the line Karlovy Vary – Plzeň – České Budějovice. He did not want to lose soldiers in the last days of the war in territory earmarked for the Red Army, nor to sour relations with the USSR, whose help was needed against Japan.

The people of Prague knew nothing of this understanding. During the night of 5–6 May the defence minister, General Ludvík Svoboda, asked Moscow from Košice to airlift Czechoslovak paratroopers to Prague; Stalin did not reply, and instead ordered the offensive being prepared against Prague to be brought forward by a day. On 6 May the armies of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front moved off, soon followed by the 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts, with the participation of the Polish Second Army. The tanks, however, first had to cross the Ore Mountains and overcome German resistance north of the border.

Nor did Prague receive any arms drops. A delivery prepared in the West for several thousand men was cancelled and the aircraft turned back, because the Soviets would not allow foreign aircraft over their zone of operations; they also refused entry to Czechoslovak airmen from the RAF.

Crimes in the streets

In the districts they held, the Germans committed crimes against the civilian population. SS men drove Czech civilians in front of their assault guns as human shields, fired into houses near the barricades, and shot hostages and captured insurgents. According to Czech findings, 173 people, including women and children, were murdered on 6 and 7 May in the area of Pankrác, Krč and Michle. In the Na Pražačce school in Žižkov an SA unit held and tortured hostages, some of whom were shot. On 8 May about 50 prisoners and civilians, according to various tallies, were murdered near Masaryk Station, and 21 people above the Stag Moat (Jelení příkop) at Hradčany. Most of these crimes were never tried.

8 May: the agreement with Toussaint

During the night of 6–7 May the instrument of Germany’s unconditional surrender was signed at Reims, to take effect at 11.01 p.m. on 8 May. Schörner, however, had no intention of ceasing fire: he wanted to get as many soldiers as possible westwards through Prague so that they could surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets. On the morning of 8 May the Germans launched their heaviest attack of the entire uprising – with tanks, artillery and from the air. They took Libeň, Holešovice and Karlín and reached Old Town Square. The neo-Gothic wing of the Old Town Hall burned down together with the valuable city archives; the ruins were never rebuilt. The insurgents were running out of ammunition.

The Germans’ position, however, was just as desperate. The Wehrmacht plenipotentiary in Prague, General Rudolf Toussaint – rejecting, according to Czech accounts, demands that the city be destroyed – went to the ČNR’s headquarters. At 4 p.m. representatives of the council, of the Bartoš command and Toussaint drew up a “protocol on the implementation of the form of surrender of the German armed forces”, effective from 6 p.m. The Germans were to stop fighting, release prisoners and internees, and leave behind their aircraft and heavy equipment; in return they could leave the city by the road to Beroun and Plzeň, towards the Americans. Such was the “negotiated surrender” recorded by chronologies under 8 May – in reality an agreement on withdrawal, not the taking of the Germans into captivity.

Toussaint had no authority over the Waffen-SS, who numbered some 3,000 men in Prague according to Czech estimates. Some of them, such as the group under Otto Weidinger, concluded a separate ceasefire with the insurgents; other units kept on shooting, in the area around Prague until as late as 12 May. From 11 p.m. on 8 May until the morning German columns marched out of the city to the west, taking with them part of the German administration and civilian population. During the night the insurgents recaptured Masaryk Station. Frank himself fled with his family early on the morning of 9 May and was detained by the Americans near Rokycany that same day.

A few hours later, at around four in the morning of 9 May, tanks of the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies under Generals Pavel Rybalko and Dmitri Lelyushenko entered the suburbs. They clashed only with scattered SS groups. The Czechs greeted them by throwing lilac onto their armour.

Casualties

The toll remains disputed. Earlier Czech tallies spoke of about 1,700 Czechs killed – the number of civilian victims identified just after the war. Newer findings, published since 2016, give at least about 2,900 dead, including those who fell on the barricades and those who died of wounds. German losses are estimated at about a thousand soldiers and civilians killed. The ROA lost, according to various figures, between 150 and more than 300 men. The Red Army lost several dozen soldiers in the city itself, although according to Czech historians nearly 700 fell on the approaches to Prague. Many historic buildings were damaged; it was the city’s second great wound that spring, after the February bombing.

Retribution

The end of the uprising did not mean the end of violence. During the fighting and in the days that followed, Czech insurgents and crowds killed prisoners and German civilians, and collaborators – or mere suspects – were lynched. According to Czech estimates, several hundred Germans were murdered in Prague in those days; on 10 May several dozen German civilians were killed at Bořislavka. Thousands of Germans were held in makeshift internment camps in appalling conditions. Politicians in exile – among them President Edvard Beneš – had long announced the removal of the German minority, and their radio broadcasts included calls for retribution; the perpetrators of violence were almost never prosecuted. The events in Prague opened the period of the so-called wild expulsions, followed by the organised expulsion of some three million Germans from Czechoslovakia on the basis of the Beneš decrees and the Potsdam decisions.

Vlasov’s men also met a tragic end. Wounded ROA soldiers left behind in Prague hospitals were, according to Czech findings, in part killed by the NKVD and SMERSH. Bunyachenko surrendered to the Americans but was handed over to the Soviets; Vlasov was captured on 12 May near Březnice. Both were hanged in Moscow on 1 August 1946, and the rank and file were sent to the Gulag. Throughout the communist period their part in the uprising was passed over in silence.

Place in the war

The Prague uprising was the last great armed rising by the population of occupied Europe against the Germans and one of the last acts of the war on the continent. It broke out too late to change the outcome of the war and too early for the insurgents to count on swift relief. For the Czechs it became the founding myth of the reborn state – the greatest struggle for freedom fought on their own soil – but also a source of bitterness: the Americans stopped at Plzeň and Prague was “liberated” by the Soviets, which in 1945–1948 helped the communists win support.

The fate of the uprising’s leaders foreshadowed what was to come. As early as 11 May the Soviets demanded that the government punish the members of the ČNR for negotiating with the Germans and with Vlasov’s men. Beneš, who returned to Prague in triumph on 16 May, still protected them at that time. After the communist coup of 1948 General Kutlvašr was sentenced to life imprisonment in a show trial, and Nechanský was executed in 1950. Karl Hermann Frank, handed over to Czechoslovakia, was hanged in the courtyard of Pankrác prison on 22 May 1946.