Sonderaktion Prag

During the night of 16–17 November 1939 German police and SS units burst into student hostels in Prague, Brno and Příbram. Students were dragged from their beds, beaten and taken to the barracks at Ruzyně in Prague. That same day nine leaders of student organisations were shot there without trial, and more than twelve hundred students were sent shortly afterwards to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. Bilingual notices bearing the name of the Reich Protector appeared on the walls of the towns of the Protectorate: all Czech institutions of higher education were closed for three years. In reality they did not reopen until the end of the war. The Germans called the operation the “special action Prague” (Sonderaktion Prag). The date of 17 November later became International Students’ Day throughout the world.

Universities in an occupied country

From 1882 two universities had existed side by side in Prague, a Czech one and a German one, created by the division of the old Charles-Ferdinand University. The dispute over which of them was the rightful heir of Charles IV’s medieval foundation dragged on throughout the interwar period. After the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the Germans began to remake higher education to suit themselves. By Hitler’s decree of 2 August 1939 the German University in Prague and the German technical universities in Prague and Brno were removed from the Protectorate’s administration, and on 1 September they were placed under the Reich Ministry of Science and Education in Berlin. On 4 November 1939 the German University in Prague, renamed the German Charles University (Deutsche Karls-Universität), was ceremonially admitted to the ranks of the universities of the Reich. It lost the last remnants of its self-government: its lecturers were enrolled in the National Socialist Lecturers’ League, its students in the German Students’ Union, and from then on its rector was appointed. The step matters, because it announced that in the occupier’s eyes there was to be only one kind of learning in Prague, the German kind.

The Czech universities, led by Charles University, were still functioning in the autumn of 1939, but under ever greater pressure. Students were among the most active participants in the national demonstrations. During the demonstrations of 28 October the German police shot dead the worker Václav Sedláček and mortally wounded the medical student Jan Opletal, who died on 11 November. His funeral on 15 November turned into another demonstration in the centre of Prague, with scuffles with the police and an assault on the driver of the car of Karl Hermann Frank, state secretary in the Protector’s office and Higher SS and Police Leader in the Protectorate. On the same day Reinhard Heydrich sent the Reich Chancellery a report presenting the incidents as an organised action against the Germans.

The conference with Hitler

On 16 November the Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, and Frank were summoned to Berlin. At a conference attended by Adolf Hitler, decisions were taken that had been in preparation for several days. According to surviving accounts Hitler was furious: he spoke of drowning resistance in blood, of placing guns in the streets and firing machine guns into any crowd, and threatened to raze Prague to the ground. He ordered the closure of the Czech institutions of higher education and severe punishment of the “ringleaders”. He also gave a verbal order that three Czechs were to be shot for every German wounded; this is confirmed by a later letter from Neurath to Frank of 28 November.

The chief executor of the operation, and in the view of most historians its instigator as well, was Frank, who had long been convinced that Neurath was too lenient with the Czechs. The distribution of power in Prague favoured such a turn of events. Neurath, a former foreign minister and an aristocrat, was meant to show the world the moderation of German policy, but he had no control over the apparatus of coercion. The Gestapo and the SS Security Service were in practice answerable to Heinrich Himmler and Heydrich, and in the Protectorate their representative was none other than Frank, a Sudeten German who knew the Czechs and hated them. Crushing the students allowed him to show Berlin that it was he, not the Protector, who could keep the country obedient. Frank himself testified after the war that the order to execute and deport the students had been issued “on the day of the demonstration”, and that he regarded carrying it out as an ordinary “Führer order”. In a post-war interrogation he also admitted that by human understanding and human law the execution of the nine students had been murder.

Night in the hostels

Shortly before midnight on 16 November the Gestapo entered the headquarters of the National Union of Czech Students, where the organisation’s leadership was in session, and arrested those present. Other activists were dragged from their homes during the night. Josef Matoušek, a historian and lecturer at Charles University who had helped to prepare Opletal’s funeral and on 16 November had secured an audience for the students with President Emil Hácha, was taken by the Gestapo from his parents’ flat at about four in the morning.

At about four in the morning of 17 November units of the SS and the German Order Police surrounded the Prague student hostels, including Hlávka College, where Opletal had lived. Doors were broken down, and students, often barefoot and in pyjamas, were driven with truncheons into the corridors and stood facing the wall. Those who looked out of the windows were shot at. The operation followed a similar course in Brno, where the Kounic College hostel was immediately turned into a Gestapo prison in which prisoners were tortured and shot throughout the war, and in Příbram, home to a mining college. Those detained were taken by lorry to the barracks at Ruzyně and in Brno. Some accounts speak of 1,900 arrests; various studies give figures from about 1,200 to about 1,850. Some of those detained were released after screening.

In the barracks at Ruzyně nine men were shot on 17 November without any trial: the lecturer Josef Matoušek; the law student and chairman of the National Union of Czech Students Jaroslav Klíma; the union’s secretaries Josef Adamec and Bedřich Koula; František Skorkovský, head of its foreign department and an activist in the international confederation of students; the architecture student Václav Šafránek; the Czech-studies student Jan Weinert; the medical student Jan Černý; and the economics student Marek Frauwirth, who worked at the Slovak legation in Prague. Several of them had interceded with the authorities as late as 16 November on behalf of students arrested during Opletal’s funeral. According to some Czech studies three other men, detained after an incident on a night tram, were also shot at the same place.

To Sachsenhausen

Most of those arrested in Prague and Brno, according to the figures most often given more than 1,200 students, were taken in the following days to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp at Oranienburg. No charges were brought against them and they were never tried; they were to serve as hostages guaranteeing calm in the Protectorate. In the camp they were subjected to the same regime as the other prisoners: hunger, beatings, roll calls lasting many hours and hard labour. They were released gradually, in small groups, partly thanks to the efforts of President Hácha. Most were freed by 1942, the last at the beginning of 1943. According to various studies between about twenty and thirty-five of them died in the camp or soon after their release.

The closure of the Czech universities

The notice of 17 November, posted in Czech and German, announced that Czech students had committed acts of violence against Germans, that nine “perpetrators” had been shot and many arrested, and that the Czech institutions of higher education were being closed for three years. It bore Neurath’s name, although the text was never published in the Protector’s official gazette. All ten Czech institutions of higher education were closed: Charles University, the Czech Technical University in Prague, the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, the Hus Faculty of Protestant Theology, Masaryk University in Brno, the technical university, the agricultural college and the veterinary college in Brno, the theological faculty in Olomouc and the mining college in Příbram. More than 15,000 students had their studies cut short and more than 1,300 academic staff lost their posts. Buildings, laboratories and libraries were taken over by German universities and offices, and part of the scientific collections was destroyed or carried off. The order did not affect the German universities in Prague and Brno. On the contrary, they profited from it: the German Charles University took over the buildings, institutes and clinics of the Czech medical faculty, and German professors occupied laboratories that had been the subject of disputes with their Czech colleagues for twenty years. The occupier wanted not only to punish the Czechs but to deprive them permanently of higher education and of an intelligentsia of their own; in the plans for the Germanisation of the Czech lands a nation without universities was in time to become a leaderless people of workers and farmers.

The closure was announced for three years. So the notice said, but in 1942 the Czech universities did not reopen. Reinhard Heydrich, who in September 1941 took over real power in the Protectorate, said openly that this would not happen before the end of the war, and after his death Frank considered the matter closed. Young Czechs could study only exceptionally, in selected technical and medical subjects in the Reich, after political and racial vetting. The Czech institutions of higher education resumed their work only in 1945.

Reaction abroad

News of the closure of the universities and of the executions reached the world within days and caused outrage, especially in academic circles. A solidarity rally was held in London, and according to some sources students also demonstrated in Belgrade on 18 November. The crackdown on the Czech students coincided with Sonderaktion Krakau, the arrest of the professors of the Kraków universities on 6 November. In both countries the occupier struck at the academic community as the breeding ground of the national elite and of resistance.

Its place in the history of the war

Sonderaktion Prag ended the period of open mass protest in the Protectorate. The Czechs understood that the occupier would answer any public protest with collective reprisals, and resistance went underground. For the Germans it became a model: intimidating a nation by striking at its intelligentsia while keeping up the façade of Czech autonomy. The same methods were applied to the Poles with far greater brutality. The next wave of terror in the Protectorate came after Heydrich’s arrival in the autumn of 1941 and after the attempt on his life in 1942.

Among Czechoslovak émigrés in Britain the idea arose of commemorating the victims of 17 November. On 16 November 1941, at a meeting in Caxton Hall in London, with the support of President Edvard Beneš, representatives of students from more than a dozen countries proclaimed 17 November International Students’ Day. After the war a decree of the President of Czechoslovakia of 18 October 1945 abolished the German University in Prague retroactively from 17 November 1939. In 1946 Frank was sentenced to death by a Czechoslovak court and executed, and one of the acts laid to his charge was the operation against the students. The Nuremberg tribunal found that Neurath had not been told of it in advance, but the notice had appeared over his signature; the Protector claimed that this had been done without his consent. He was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. Fifty years after those events, on 17 November 1989, a march commemorating Jan Opletal and the victims of Sonderaktion Prag set off the Velvet Revolution.