Related articles

In related news, Anděla Dvořáková, the chairwoman of an organisation representing Czech freedom fighters, criticised the government on Saturday for taking too accommodating a stance to Sudeten German organisations. She charged that apologies to Germans were continually being asked of the Czechs, while they themselves – in her view – “received none”. She made the statement during a speech at a ceremony marking 69 years since the destruction of the village of Lidice – razed to the ground by the Nazis on June 10, 1942. Its destruction was revenge for the assassination of the acting Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘Hangman of Bohemia’, by Czech patriots. All the men in the village and boys over the age of 15 were shot, while the women and many of the children were sent to concentration camps.

Sixty-nine years ago this week, on March 14 1939, the Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha spoke to the nation. He had just returned from Berlin, where Hitler had given him a simple ultimatum: face either occupation or destruction. Hácha chose occupation:

This Friday was the 69th anniversary of one of the defining moments of World War II, the destruction of the village of Lidice near Prague by the Nazis on June 10th 1942. Over the next few weeks, the actress Veronika Hyks will be reading from the memories of Jaroslava Skleničková, one of the survivors of the Lidice massacre. David Vaughan introduces the first episode.

A small group of people commemorated on Saturday the victims of the “Brno death march” during which hundreds of ethnic Germans died who had been expelled from the city at the end of May 1945, in the wake of WWII. Twelve people took part in the event, walking some 30 km along the route of the march to Pohořelice, towards the Austrian border. Organizers said rainy weather probably deterred more participants.

On May 30 and 31, 1945, some 20,000 Brno’s German-speaking citizens were rounded up by Czech paramilitaries and walked off to the border. Estimates on the number of victims vary between 1,600 and 10,000. This and several other outbursts of anti-German hatred preceded an organized and more humane expulsion of around three million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia.

On Wednesday, archaeologists found a skull near the site of an alleged mass grave where some 15 Germans are said to have been murdered by Czech locals at the end of World War II, in the town of Dobronín, in the Jihlava region. According to criminal police investigators, the victims’ relatives and descendants in Germany welcome the Czech effort to shed light on post-war murders of Germans on Czech lands. The search locations were determined on the basis of scientific measurements of soil, as well as documents gathered by the police. Last summer, anthropologists found the bodies of at least 13 victims in the nearby town of Budínka. Criminal police are investigating the case.

Historians in South Bohemia last Friday the 13th dug up the exceptionally well-preserved wreckage of a German fighter jet shot down during World War II. The Fw-190 Focke-Wulf, of which almost 20,000 were originally produced, went down near the village of Otín. The plane was one of several targeted by US pilots on August 24th, 1944 in what was one of the biggest air battles over Bohemia. The German pilot, Hubert Engst, ejected in time and would survive the war. But the aircraft itself smashed into the ground and remained lost and forgotten until

Every year in May, ceremonies take place on town and village squares across the Czech Republic to mark the anniversary of the end of World War II. Since the fall of communism, a particular effort has been made to remember the Czechs and Slovaks who fought in the British armed forces, whose role was long neglected by the communist regime. Recently rediscovered recordings offer a unique and highly atmospheric insight into the life of the Czechoslovak RAF pilots. David Vaughan has more.

Czech political and military figures commemorated the 66th anniversary of the end of the Second World War on Sunday. A ceremony was held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the hill of Vítkov, in Prague. The playing of the national anthem was followed by a minute of silence and a three-gun salute. Soldiers and politicians then laid wreathes in memory of the fallen. President Václav Klaus conferred honorary names upon four army units and later in the day appointed new generals of the army and customs administration.

In sombre tones the second Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš announced his resignation on Czechoslovak Radio on October 5 1938. Since becoming president in 1935, he had been haunted by the spectre of Nazi Germany, as Hitler had fuelled separatist sentiment among the country’s 3.5 million German speakers. Here is an extract from one of President Beneš’ vain appeals for reconciliation, in April 1938.

In the run-up to the 66th anniversary of the end of WWII Czech public television featured a documentary throwing more light on events that have received little publicity in the past – the atrocities committed on German civilians in post-war Czechoslovakia. The subject has been avoided for years, but film director David Vondráček says Czechs need to hear about what happened and face up to events they may not be proud of.