As you look to your left, you are standing at the epicenter of the Prague Uprising. Twenty minutes ago, we were looking up at the ultra modern architecture of the Žižkov Television Tower, but right here, the focus is entirely on a desperate, gritty fight for survival that erupted in May of 1945.
After six long years of German occupation, the suppressed anger of the city finally boiled over. The spark was struck on the morning of May 5th. Staff at the Czech Radio began broadcasting in the Czech language, a practice that had been strictly banned by the occupying government. That single act of defiance spread rapidly across the city. Ordinary citizens flooded the streets, tearing down German signs and displaying hidden Czechoslovak flags on their jacket lapels. Tram operators stubbornly refused to accept the occupying currency, the Reichsmark, or to announce the stops in German. When armed German patrols tried to suppress the crowds, the citizens fought back with bare hands, overwhelming local garrisons to seize whatever firearms and anti-tank weapons they could carry.
Knowing a massive German retaliation was inevitable, tens of thousands of civilians worked tirelessly overnight. They tore up streets and dragged heavy furniture out of homes to construct over sixteen hundred barricades by morning. The German counterattack was devastating. Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner sent in the Waffen-SS, the fanatical, heavily armed paramilitary branch of the Nazi party. They brought tanks and artillery against lightly armed civilians. The fighting was incredibly brutal, particularly at the Masaryk train station, where SS troops murdered dozens of surrendered resistance fighters. German forces even used Czech civilians as human shields to breach the barricades, while the Luftwaffe, the German air force, dropped incendiary bombs directly onto residential apartment buildings.
The Czechs frantically pleaded for Allied help over the radio. American General George S. Patton and his Third Army were close by, but Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered him to stay put. Eisenhower wanted to avoid American casualties and had already agreed to let Soviet leader Joseph Stalin liberate the city. Surprisingly, temporary help came from the Russian Liberation Army. These were Soviet prisoners of war who had originally agreed to fight for Germany. Realizing the war was ending, they switched sides to help the Czech resistance. Because they still wore German uniforms, they carried white, blue, and red flags to avoid friendly fire, disarming thousands of German soldiers before eventually retreating.
The uprising officially ended when the Soviet Red Army rolled into the city on May 9th, but the bloodshed did not. The Czechoslovak government in exile had been broadcasting messages from London, actively urging citizens to take bloody revenge. The liberation quickly devolved into a brutal wave of mob justice. Suspected collaborators and German civilians were assaulted, interned in makeshift camps, or murdered in the streets, culminating in the forced deportation of roughly three million ethnic Germans from the country.
The failure of the Western Allies to help the Czechs left a lingering bitterness, a sentiment that the Soviet-backed Communist Party exploited to seize total control of the country just three years later. When you are ready, let's make our way toward Wenceslas Square.
