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Prime Minister Petr Nečas, senior parliament officials and cultural figures on Thursday attended a commemorative event at Czech Radio marking the 66th anniversary of the start of the Prague Uprising. Officials recalled that turbulent period of Czech history and laid wreaths in front of the station’s main building under a plaque bearing the names of those who lost their lives defending Czech Radio. On the morning of May 5, 1945, Czech Radio called on Prague citizens to rise up against the Nazi occupiers, four days before Soviet troops liberated the city. During a battle for control of the station around 90 people were killed. Around the city, some 30,000 people took part in the uprising, of which over 1,600 died. A number of other commemorative events are taking place elsewhere in the city.

A now famous appeal broadcast from the Czech Radio building on May 5, 1945, sparked the Prague Uprising. After hearing it on the air, thousands of people took to the streets to fight the Nazi oppressors. On Thursday, several events were held to mark the 66th anniversary of the start of the Prague Uprising, including a ceremony in front of the Czech Radio building.

On Saturday, over a thousand people attended the 69th Out Distance parachute memorial in Ořechov near Jihlava, which commemorates a Czech resistance group that parachuted from a British Halifax plane in 1942 to help prepare the assassination of deputy Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. General Tomáš Sedláček, one of the last surviving parachutists, was in attendance. Organizers said that this year’s visitor numbers are the highest in the history of the event.

The Out Distance group did not land where they had planned due to a navigation error. One of its members committed suicide a month after landing, two others went to Prague and joined the Operation Anthropoid, which succeeded in assassinating the deputy Reich Protector. One of the group’s members, soldier Karel Čurda, however revealed the hiding place of the assassins to the Gestapo. Rather than be killed by the Germans, the assassins committed suicide after the Germans circled their hiding place, a church in Prague.

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.

Archaeological research is set to continue in a field where over a dozen Germans civilians are thought to have been murdered and buried immediately after World War Two. The dig, which was discontinued in August of last year after finding six bodies, is intended to determine whether they may be more victims buried at the site in Dobronín, in east Bohemia. Testimonies given by the children of the alleged victims suggest that between 11 and 15 Germans were beaten to death by local Czech residents in May of 1945, just weeks after the end of the war. Police detectives opened the case as a murder investigation in September of last year.

Earlier this week we remembered the 72nd anniversary of the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia on March 15 1939. Much has been written about the years that led up to the occupation: the growing tensions with Czechoslovakia’s German speaking minority, Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and then the Munich Agreement of September 1938 that ceded a quarter of Czechoslovakia’s territory to the German Reich. There is a sense of inevitability about the events, but could things have been different and could Czechoslovakia’s President Edvard Beneš have

When Harry Pollak left Czechoslovakia for France in the autumn of 1938, he had no idea what the future would hold for him. As a teenager, he joined the exile Czechoslovak army fought the Nazis who murdered his family, before fleeing his country again after the communist coup of 1948, and build a career in England from scratch. Mr Pollak gives an account of his extraordinary life in his recently published memoirs. In this edition of Panorama, we talk to Harry Pollak about how a boy from a south Bohemian village ended up saving the famous British

The Czech daily Mladá fronta Dnes has reported that the heiress to the Walderode noble family, Johanna Kammerlander, is a step closer to getting back property that was confiscated by the Czech authorities after World War II. The district court in Jablonec ruled in her favour, saying she had the right to a farmstead, forestland, meadows and other immovable assets. During the war the property belonged to the family’s Karl des Fours Walderode; an ethnic German, he was stripped of it in 1946 under the post-war Benes decrees. He was returned Czechoslovak citizenship in 1947 but the property was never given back. After that he emigrated and lost citizenship again after the Communists assumed power in 1948. The verdict has not taken effect yet and it is expected that appeals will be filed, Mladá fronta Dnes writes.

A short walk from the Vltava in Prague’s New Town is the church that witnessed some of the most dramatic moments during the Nazi occupation of the country. The crypt beneath the church was the last hiding place for seven Czechoslovak commandoes, including Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík who assassinated the Reinhardt Heydrich in 1942. The site now houses an exhibition dedicated to their heroic actions. But the church also remains a place of worship for the small Czech Orthodox community.

Several events were held in the Czech Republic on Thursday to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the 66th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Several Jewish veterans and resistance workers from the Second World War met at Prague’s Czech Centre on Thursday afternoon to pay tribute to the victims of the Shoa, and to remember their fellow fighters.