The Red Army in Prague

At dawn on 9 May 1945, a few hours after the last signatures had been put to the act of Germany’s unconditional surrender in Berlin, Soviet tanks rolled into the outskirts of Prague. They were the leading units of the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies of Marshal Ivan Konev’s 1st Ukrainian Front, commanded by Generals Pavel Rybalko and Dmitry Lelyushenko. In a single night they had covered some 80 kilometres across the Ore Mountains and northern Bohemia. Prague had come through the war largely unscathed – its heaviest damage had been caused by the mistaken American air raid of 14 February 1945. In the city, which had been fighting in the Prague uprising since 5 May, most of the German troops had already withdrawn to the west; the remaining scattered units, mainly SS, were destroyed or captured within a few hours. By around 10 a.m. Prague was free of Germans.

Many chronologies of the war state under 11 May 1945 that the Soviets took Prague – “the last European capital to be liberated” – on that day, that Eisenhower would not let Patton take part in its liberation, and that the German Army Group Centre surrendered that day. This needs clarifying. Soviet troops entered Prague as early as 9 May, and 11 May saw the end of the Prague offensive as a whole. Eisenhower had taken the decision to halt the Americans several days earlier, on 4–6 May. And Army Group Centre did not surrender in a single act: its commander fled, and its divisions laid down their arms in disarray, mainly on 10 and 11 May, some even later.

The race for Prague

At the beginning of May 1945 Bohemia and Moravia were the last large area of Central Europe in German hands. They were defended by Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s Army Group Centre – some 900,000 men according to Soviet figures, with the 4th and 1st Panzer Armies and the 7th and 17th Armies. From the east and south it was under pressure from the 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky and General Andrei Yeremenko, which had taken Bratislava and Brno in April and Ostrava at the beginning of May. To the north, around Dresden and Bautzen, stood the 1st Ukrainian Front, which had just finished the fighting for Berlin.

From the west, General George Patton’s US Third Army entered Bohemia on 4 May. The boundary between the zones of operations of the Western and Soviet forces had originally run roughly along the old Czechoslovak–German border. After the link-up on the Elbe, the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight Eisenhower, agreed with the Red Army General Staff that the Americans would advance into western Bohemia as far as the line Karlovy Vary – Plzeň (Pilsen) – České Budějovice. On 4 May Eisenhower proposed to the Soviet Chief of Staff, General Aleksei Antonov, that American forces could go further, as far as the Vltava and the Elbe – which would have included Prague. The next day Antonov refused and asked the Americans to halt on the agreed line, and Eisenhower accepted.

The chief advocate of an American entry into Prague was Winston Churchill. At the end of April, in telegrams to the new US President, Harry Truman, he argued that the liberation of Prague by American troops might completely change Czechoslovakia’s post-war position and influence the neighbouring countries. Eisenhower, as earlier over Berlin, regarded the objective as political rather than military. He did not want to expose his soldiers to losses or to risk a clash with an ally. Washington gave him no orders to the contrary.

On 6 May units of the US V Corps, then part of the Third Army, took Plzeň, where the inhabitants gave an enthusiastic welcome to the 16th Armored Division and the 2nd Infantry Division. That same day Patton, who knew about the fighting in Prague, asked for permission to march on the capital. Patton’s superior, General Omar Bradley, told him that Eisenhower forbade him to cross the line. Prague was some 80 kilometres from Plzeň. An American reconnaissance patrol did reach the city and meet the leaders of the uprising, but it was from the patrol that the Czechs learned that the Third Army would not come to their aid. A proposal by Bradley, put to Konev when the commanders met on 5 May, was also rejected by the Soviet side as contrary to what had been agreed. So it was not on 11 May but already between 4 and 6 May that it was settled that Prague would be taken by the Red Army.

The dash across the Ore Mountains

The Soviet offensive against Prague was due to begin on 7 May, and its plan envisaged taking the Czech capital in the middle of the month at the earliest. The outbreak of the uprising in Prague on 5 May and the rapid progress of the Americans in western Bohemia, however, persuaded Joseph Stalin and Konev to speed things up. On 6 May, the day Breslau surrendered, reconnaissance in force showed that the Germans were abandoning their positions in many sectors. In the afternoon the 3rd Guards Army, the 13th Army and both tank armies of the 1st Ukrainian Front went over to the attack, followed in the evening by the 5th Guards Army. On the front’s left wing fought General Karol Świerczewski’s Polish 2nd Army. From 7 May the troops of the 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts also took up the offensive, advancing on Prague from the east and south-east.

The main thrust ran southwards from Saxony, through the passes of the Ore Mountains. On 8 May Dresden fell, and the 4th Ukrainian Front drove the Germans out of Olomouc. That day Konev’s leading units crossed the mountains and found themselves 70–80 kilometres from Prague. On the way the 4th Guards Tank Army overran the headquarters of Army Group Centre. Schörner managed to slip away: during the night of 8–9 May he abandoned his command, and the next day he flew to the Alps in civilian clothes. Nine days later, on 18 May, he fell into American hands in Austria, and the Americans handed him over to the Soviets. German officers themselves later criticised him for deserting his soldiers.

On the evening of 8 May the Soviet Union called by radio on the German forces in Bohemia to lay down their arms by 11 p.m. There was no reply. Schörner’s soldiers had received the news of the surrender signed at Reims, which obliged all German forces to cease fighting and stay where they were from 11.01 p.m. Central European Time on 8 May. Most units, however, tried to break through to the west so as to surrender to the Americans rather than to the Red Army. In Prague itself the Czech National Council, which was directing the uprising, signed an agreement with the commander of the German garrison, General Rudolf Toussaint, at around 4 p.m. on 8 May. The Germans were allowed to leave the city westwards, leaving their heavy weapons behind. Some SS units refused to abide by the agreement and fought on.

During the night of 8–9 May Rybalko’s and Lelyushenko’s tanks covered some 80 kilometres. At dawn, around 4 a.m., the leading units of the 4th Guards Tank Army – according to Soviet accounts, of the 10th Guards Tank Corps – entered the northern and western districts of the city, followed soon afterwards by units of the 3rd Guards Tank Army. At around eight the tanks reached the centre, and the radio announced the arrival of the Red Army. There was still fighting with scattered SS groups, but there was no heavy street fighting such as there had been in Budapest or Vienna. According to various tallies, the Red Army lost a few dozen soldiers in the city itself. Among them was Lieutenant Ivan Goncharenko, whose tank was hit near the Mánes Bridge. The communist authorities later inflated the number of Soviet dead in Prague. The tanks were followed by the infantry of the 13th Army and the 3rd Guards Army. In the evening and during the night units of the 2nd and 4th Ukrainian Fronts also reached the city, among them a Czechoslovak tank brigade of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps.

The inhabitants greeted the soldiers with flowers. After four days of fighting, in which about 1,700 Czechs had been killed according to older Czech tallies, and at least about 2,900 according to research carried out since 2016, Prague was free. On the same day Moscow celebrated the first Victory Day. Konev soon arrived in the city and was fêted there as its liberator.

The end of Army Group Centre

The capture of Prague cut the Germans’ most important lines of retreat. When columns from all three fronts reached the capital and its surroundings on 9 and 10 May, the main forces of Army Group Centre, still standing to the east, north-east and south of the city, found themselves encircled. Without a headquarters or a commander, Schörner’s armies broke up into columns that tried on their own to reach the American line. The roads filled with fleeing soldiers, German civilians from the Sudetenland and Prague, and Czech collaborators. They were pursued by Czech partisans and Soviet armoured units. Most German units laid down their arms on 10 and 11 May. According to Soviet figures, some 860,000 soldiers were taken prisoner in the course of the whole operation, together with a large part of their equipment.

Fate was not kind to those who did manage to reach the Americans either. Under the arrangements between the Allies, German forces were to surrender to the army they had been fighting, and once the surrender came into force the Americans often sent back to the Soviet side soldiers who had crossed the line after the deadline. Tens of thousands of them ended up in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps in this way. A similar fate befell the soldiers of the Russian Liberation Army, whose 1st Division under General Sergei Bunyachenko had fought in Prague on the side of the insurgents on 6–7 May and then withdrawn to the west. The army’s founder, General Andrei Vlasov, was captured by Soviet soldiers near Březnice on 12 May; in August 1946 he was hanged in Moscow.

Isolated groups held out even after 11 May. The last major battle of the Second World War in Europe was fought on 11–12 May at Slivice near Milín, a few kilometres from Příbram, just short of the demarcation line. Some 6,000–7,000 German soldiers, mainly from the Waffen-SS, under SS-Gruppenführer Carl Friedrich von Pückler-Burghauss, dug in there in order to break through to the Americans. They were attacked first by Czech and Soviet partisans, then by regular units of the Red Army. The Germans surrendered early on the morning of 12 May, and their commander took his own life after signing the surrender. Similar smaller clashes continued in Bohemia and Austria for a few more days.

Polish troops fought on the left wing of the 1st Ukrainian Front. The Polish 2nd Army and the 1st Armoured Corps (PL) fought their way through Lusatia and the Sudetes. On 8 May, after the surrender at Reims had already been signed, 19 soldiers of the 34th Infantry Regiment were killed in the fighting for the village of Lobendava. Polish tanks reached Mělník on the Elbe, some 30 kilometres from Prague, on 10 May, where they ended their operations. The inscription “Melnik” on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Warsaw commemorates them. Over the whole operation, from 6 to 11 May, the Soviet, Polish, Czechoslovak and Romanian forces lost some 12,000 killed and missing and some 40,000 wounded, according to the figures compiled by the Russian historian Grigori Krivosheev.

The German Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia and the real ruler of the Protectorate, Karl Hermann Frank, fled Prague westwards and on 9 May let himself be taken by the Americans near Rokycany. Handed over to the Czechoslovak authorities, he was sentenced by the people’s court in Prague and hanged on 22 May 1946.

“The last liberated capital”

Prague is often called the last European capital to be liberated from German occupation. The description comes mainly from the Czech and Soviet traditions and is a matter of convention. Prague was indeed the last of the major capitals to finish fighting, but other capitals were regaining their freedom in the same days: British troops entered Copenhagen on 5 May, the Canadians entered Amsterdam on 8 May, and the first Allied soldiers arrived in Oslo on 8–9 May, after the surrender of the German forces in Norway. Berlin, the capital of the defeated state, cannot be called liberated in the same sense.

The entry of the Red Army did not end the violence in Prague. During the uprising German units, especially the SS, had carried out executions and massacres of civilians, and after the surrender a wave of revenge fell upon the city’s German inhabitants and on prisoners of war. They were beaten, murdered and held in makeshift camps – on 10 May, for example, some 40 German civilians were murdered at Bořislavka. There were also rapes and looting by Soviet soldiers. In the months that followed, the violence against Germans turned into the so-called “wild expulsions”, which preceded the organised transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945–1946. The number of victims of these events is still a subject of research and dispute among historians.

Place in the war

The Prague offensive was the Red Army’s last major operation in Europe, and the surrender of Army Group Centre marked the end of the last large Wehrmacht grouping, which on 8 May still numbered many divisions. The last fighting in Bohemia took place after the surrender at Karlshorst, which is one reason why in the Czech Republic and in Russia the end of the war in Europe is associated with 9 May rather than 8 May.

For Czechoslovakia, 9 May marked the end of an occupation that had lasted since March 1939. On 16 May President Edvard Beneš returned to Prague, while in June 1945 the country had to cede Subcarpathian Ruthenia to the Soviet Union. American and Soviet troops left Czechoslovakia by the end of 1945, but it was the Red Army’s entry into Prague that had lasting political consequences. Few people in the country knew about the agreement on the demarcation line, and the communists portrayed the Americans as having looked on calmly while Prague fought, whereas the Soviets had come to its aid. This image, reinforced by the memory of the Munich Agreement, helped the communists win popularity and power, a process completed by the coup of February 1948. The British diplomat Orme Sargent even concluded that in May 1945 Czechoslovakia “had been definitively lost to the West”.

The dispute over the memory of those days continues to this day. The communist authorities passed over the role of the Russian Liberation Army and the American liberation of Plzeň, and the statue of Konev erected in Prague in 1980 was removed by the district authorities in 2020, provoking a sharp protest from Russia. As a token of gratitude to the Americans, Plzeň holds a Liberation Festival every May. In Prague, for its part, 9 May is a day to remember both the Soviet tank crews and the barricades of the insurgents, who defended the city on their own for four days.