Related articles

Eighty years ago today, on March 15 1939, Hitler gave Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha a stark choice: accept becoming a protectorate or face destruction. After Hácha reluctantly agreed to give up his country’s independence the German army started moving in. It was the beginning of six long years of occupation.

In 1946 a secret American operation in Czechoslovakia led to major diplomatic protests. The US authorities had organized a mission aimed at obtaining hidden Nazi documents from a cache in a forest near Prague. However, they had not alerted the Czechoslovak authorities or sought permission – and that led to a real propaganda coup for the country’s pro-Soviet Communist politicians and press.

Thanks to Steven Spielberg, the story of Oskar Schindler and the twelve hundred Jews he saved during World War II is well known. But not many people know that the factory where he employed them still stands. It is in the village of Brněnec, north of the Czech Republic’s second city of Brno, and for many years it has stood derelict. There has been a lot of talk of saving the building and turning it into a museum and memorial, and the latest initiative comes from members of the Low-Beer family, who owned the factory until 1938 when they had to flee

Kurt Taussig is one of the 669 Czech Jewish children who were saved from the Holocaust by Sir Nicholas Winton on the eve of the Second World War. The 95-year-old man, who went on to join the RAF as a fighter pilot, has since lived in Great Britain and, until recently, was unknown to Czech historians. Now, more than 75 years after he left his country, he was granted honorary citizenship in his birth-town of Teplice.

This Sunday will mark the 80th anniversary of the infamous Munich agreement - the deal between Hitler, Mussolini and the two western European powers, which cut off the German speaking borderlands from Czechoslovakia, including a significant part of its industry and protective ring of forts, thus rendering the young republic defenceless to any future German invasion. Munich is often seen as a betrayal of the Czechoslovak state by western powers and the French were famously ashamed for breaking their alliance. But why did the Great powers act as they

Members of the Czech Air Force, the British Royal Air Force, Second World War veterans, church and cultural dignitaries attended celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Airforce at the Winged Lion Memorial in Prague’s Klarov park on Tuesday. The fact that both the Czechoslovak Airforce and the RAF are celebrating their centenary this year was an occasion to highlight the close ties between Czech and British airmen.

RAF officer Ivo Tonder played an important part in what became known as the Great Escape, a mass breakout by Allied airmen from a German prisoner of war camp in March 1944. But this was only one of many escapes by the Czech pilot, who evidently had nerves of steel – and a lot of luck. I recently spoke with his daughter, Petra Tonder, who came to our studios with a copy of In the Heavens and in Hell, a book by Tonder and the famous photographer Ladislav Sitenský. In the first half of a two-part interview, Petra Tonder describes her father’s remarkable

The razing to the ground of the village of Ležáky in Eastern Bohemia and the murder of the local community by the Nazis was remembered on Sunday, 76 years after those terrible events took place. Hundreds of people attended a memorial at the spot where the atrocities occurred.

Among those who spoke at the ceremony was Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, who highlighted the importance of the EU and NATO in safeguarding peace in Europe.

Some 33 residents of Ležáky were executed by the Nazis on 24 June 1942 as part of reprisals for the assassination of governor Reinhard Hedyrich. A similar fate had earlier befallen the village of Lidice near Prague.

Around 250 people took part in a 32-kilometre Pilgrimage of Reconciliation from the town of Pohořelice to Brno on Saturday to commemorate the victims of the post-war expulsion of Brno’s German-speaking population. The route followed the one that the expellees must have taken but symbolically went in the opposite direction, organisers said.

The pilgrimage, which began at the site of a May 1945 holding camp for German speakers in Pohořelice, was part of a festival entitled Meeting Brno. The first such commemoration took place in 2006.

Leading Czech politicians, war veterans and cultural figures gathered at Ďáblice Cemetery in Prague on Sunday to pay homage to the soldiers who had laid down their lives liberating the country from Nazi oppression. There are some 160 soldiers of different nationalities buried at the cemetery.

The commemorative ceremony was attended by government and Parliament representatives, Prague City Hall officials and members of the Union of Freedom Fighters.