Related articles

Efforts to commemorate ethnic Germans murdered by Czechs during a wave of post-war expulsions have frequently led to heated debate in this country. One such controversy is the subject of Jan Gebert’s debut documentary Stone Games, which follows a vocal campaign by a group of locals to remove a monument to eight Sudeten Germans killed in the north Bohemian town of Nový Bor in 1945. The protesters are led by an eccentric would-be politician – and their cause attracts the attention of national figures, including now presidential candidate Miloš

President Václav Klaus and Prime Minister Petr Nečas, along with Cardinal Dominik Duka and military officials, on Tuesday celebrated the 67th anniversary of the end of World War II at Prague’s Vítkov memorial. A ceremony was held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The national anthem was followed by a minute of silence and a three-gun salute. The president as well as war veterans laid down wreaths at the memorial. Dozens of Prague residents were in attendance. Across the capital and in several other cities, similar commemorative events marking the national holiday are taking place.

Politicians, army officials, and others marked the 67th anniversary of the start of the Prague Uprising on Saturday, remembering those who raised arms and risked or laid down their lives in the final battle against the Nazi occupiers. In Prague alone in the final days of the war, some 3,700 people were killed. A commemorative event took place at the historic town hall on Old Town Square. One of those to speak, the chairwoman of the lower house Miroslava Němcová, honoured patriots and noted the dark chapter that followed the war, when many of the country’s most courageous were imprisoned by the Communist regime or sentenced to hard labour or marginalized in society.

In the last days of World War II, nine-year-old Ota Heller picked up a revolver and fired it at a German soldier. He did not wait to see if the man was still alive. For decades afterwards he talked to no one about the experience, and only recently has Ota Heller – or Charles Ota Heller, as he is now called – felt able to return to his memories of the war, collecting them in his book “Out of Prague”. In this week’s Czech Books he talks to David Vaughan.

A. J. P. Taylor (1906-1990) was one of the best-known and most influential British historians of the 20th century. He is remembered in particular for his provocative left-wing political views and his conviction that German history made the country uniquely inclined towards aggression and expansionism. This made him an ardent opponent of attempts to rebuild Germany’s economy after the war, and a strong supporter of Czechoslovakia’s growing alliance with the Soviet Union. In July 1946, just after elections which saw the Communists emerge as the strongest single

During World War II, the political left in Britain and the United States had come to identify itself strongly with the fate of the Czech nation. This was partly a reaction to the shame of Munich in 1938, when Czechoslovakia had been abandoned by her allies, and it was reinforced by the role played by the British miners in launching the Lidice Shall Live movement. This had followed the Nazis’ destruction of the Czech mining village of Lidice in June 1942. In this spirit the president of the British Miners’ Federation Will Lawther, came at the end

A journalist, Václav Vlk, has raised a theory that a group of Sudeten German civilians killed in Dobrotín just after WWII were actually murdered by a local German communist, Robert Kautzinger, and his two sons. Mr Vlk told Czech Television that the massacre of 17 Germans in the days following the fall of the Third Reich was an act of revenge for Kautzinger’s having been sent to a concentration camp by local Nazis. The police investigator on the case still believes the murders were carried out by Czechs as vengeance killings.

In From the Archives this week we carry on where we left off at the end of August in our chronological journey through the Czech Radio archives. We had reached the point just after the end of World War Two; after the initial euphoria, the hard work of rebuilding the country began: not least at the Czechoslovak Radio building itself, which had been shot to pieces in the Prague Uprising and received a direct hit from a German aerial torpedo.

In November 1945, six months after the end of World War II, the units that had taken part in liberating Czechoslovakia began their official withdrawal. Various ceremonies were held, first on November 15, to say farewell to the Red Army troops, who had fought their way in bitter fighting through Slovakia all the way to Prague. Then a few days later, on November 20, the withdrawal began of the American units that had liberated Western Bohemia.

In last week’s From the Archives we heard about radio’s central role in the Prague Uprising against the German occupation at the end of World War II. Not only did the signal for the uprising to begin come over the air, but the radio also helped to co-ordinate the fighting. It also played a third role. At the time the Red Army was already approaching Prague from the east, and General Patton’s Third Army was in Plzeň just a few dozen kilometres to the west. Many of those fighting in the streets of Prague were untrained and had few weapons, and the