Related articles

Police in North Bohemia have confirmed that boxes found on the premises of a former factory in the town of Usti nad Labem contain the mortal remains of German soldiers who died during WWII in Bohemia. Police are now investigating how the boxes got there and whether or not the law was broken. The paper Mlada Fronta Dnes first wrote about the case last Friday.

As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, numerous atrocities were committed in towns across Czechoslovakia, as the Czech people rose up against Nazi occupation. Investigations into the Nazi massacre which occurred in the final days of the war in Leskovice have revealed that those responsible for several of these crimes are still living in Germany today. Now, police have made a number of discoveries about another such slaughter in Velke Mezirici, which have brought detectives closer than ever before to finding out the truth about

The role of the wartime Prime Minister Alois Elias in resisting the Nazi occupation has always been considered an ambiguous one. While the stance of the Protectorate government at the time was without doubt collaborationist, Elias himself still tried to uphold the integrity of the Czech people. Now new evidence has emerged showing his involvement in a plot to assassinate a number of prominent Nazi journalists, making it increasingly clear that Elias was anything but a traitor.

Today we look at fascinating wartime documents that reveal Churchill's plans to destroy German villages in revenge for the Nazi massacre in the Czech village of Lidice. We see behind the scenes into Churchill's war cabinet, and witness how the shockwaves from the Lidice massacre reached as far as the corridors of power in London.

Fascinating wartime documents have just been released in Britain that shed light on one of the dark moments of Czech history. On a June morning in 1942 people in the Nazi occupied Czech Lands woke up to a chilling radio announcement. In ice-cold tones a voice in German said that the village of Lidice not far from Prague had been wiped off the map, and all the men shot. This was in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's man in charge of the Czech lands, who was killed a few weeks before by Czech parachutists sent from London.

Winston Churchill wanted the British Royal Air Force to wipe out German villages in retaliation for the 1942 massacre of Czech civilians in the village of Lidice, The Guardian newspaper reported on Monday. Newly declassified wartime cabinet documents show Churchill wanted to attack small German villages "on a three-for-one basis." The plan, voted down by his Cabinet, was formed five days after German forces murdered most of the 450 occupants of Lidice, a village north of Prague. The Lidice massacre came in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

Gazing out of the window of a spacious room in a romantic neo-gothic chateau, I see the image of a woman in a beautiful early twentieth century dress sitting on a bench in the scenic park that spreads out before me. Two men, a writer and a poet, are keeping her company, taking in the calm of the landscape around them but keeping their eyes fixed on their muse - Sidonie Nadherna.

One of the most outstanding Czech fighters against Nazi rule during the war, General Rudolf Pernicky, has passed away at the age of 90. A former paratrooper who was later jailed by the Communist authorities and rehabilitated only after the fall of the regime in 1989, died on Wednesday after a long illness in the Central Military Hospital in Prague.

My guest on this week's One on One is Jiri Jes, a journalist and broadcaster who still appears regularly on Czech Radio at the age of 80. Prevented from writing during the Communist era, Jiri Jes began his journalist career in the early 1990s, when he was already in his sixties. When I met Jiri on a snowy Sunday afternoon in Prague's Bila Hora district, I began by asking him for his memories of childhood in pre-war Czechoslovakia.

The corpses of some of Czechoslovakia's most celebrated war heroes may be serving as models in anatomy classes in Germany and Austria to this day. Thousands of political prisoners were murdered at the Ploetzensee detention and execution centre outside Berlin during WWII. Among them were nearly seven hundred Czech and Slovak resistance fighters, whose bodies were immediately sent on to medical universities and institutions within the Third Reich.