by Mikhail Kucherov
[REGNUM] On the night of May 5-6, 1945, news arrived in Prague, the former capital of the Czechoslovak Republic and now the center of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, that the Red Army had taken Berlin. On the morning of May 6, the head of the Protectorate government, the Czech Richard Bienert (who until then had been only a puppet of the Reich Minister for Bohemian-Moravian Affairs, Karl Frank ) appeared on Prague radio and announced the liquidation of German power. The Prime Minister called for a general uprising, and he ordered the German group in the city to capitulate.Belated courage did not help Mr. Binert - in the reborn Czechoslovakia he was convicted of collaborationism. The armed disobedience he had declared retroactively on May 6 had long since become an accomplished fact. Since the beginning of the month, the rebels in Prague had been fighting the Germans throughout the city.
That one of the last bastions of the Reich would soon fall was obvious to everyone since the beginning of spring 1945.
There was only one intrigue left: who would be the first to enter Prague – our troops under the overall command of Marshal Ivan Konev or the Americans from the army of General George Patton, who were less than fifty kilometers from the city. The rebel radio was broadcasting: “Build barricades! We will fight! The allied armies are approaching! We must endure!”
On the night of May 6, the intrigue dissipated: it became clear which of the allies of the anti-Hitler coalition was breaking through to Prague. It was the Red Army.
"INTO THE HANDS OF THE FUHRER"
The war was reluctant to "leave" Prague, a city that had been under Nazi occupation for six months before the start of World War II. Historians argue about which European country should be considered Adolf Hitler's first victim : Austria, where the March Anschluss of 1938 was quick and almost painless, or Czechoslovakia, which was slowly torn apart piece by piece.
In any case, after the Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938 (by which Germany, with the approval of Britain and France, took the Sudetenland from the Czechoslovak Republic), after Poland's invasion of the Tesin region and after the arbitration, by which Hungary occupied Transcarpathia and southern Slovakia, the remnants of Czechoslovakia had very little time to live. In March 1939, Slovak nationalists led by Father Jozef Tiso, on "urgent advice" from Berlin, proclaimed the independence of Slovakia, which became a satellite of the Reich. Then, in mid-March 1939, the Wehrmacht and the SS entered Prague.
Edvard Beneš, the president under whom the “only democratic republic in Eastern Europe” was betrayed by its Western allies, fled to London in November 1938. Beneš’ successor Emil Hácha on March 15, 1939 handed over “the fate of the Czechoslovak people and country into the hands of the Führer of the German Reich.” Hácha became the first nominal “president” of the Protectorate.
When, after the war, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was asked at the Nuremberg Trials whether Germany would have attacked Czechoslovakia if Prague had been supported by the Western powers, the military leader answered honestly: "Absolutely not. We were not strong enough from a military point of view. The aim of Munich was to push Russia out of Europe, gain time and complete the armament of Germany."
But in 1938, the West and Poland torpedoed the USSR's proposals for collective aid to Czechoslovakia. Hitler was able to gain time to prepare for war. And the mines, steel mills, and weapons factories of Bohemia and Moravia became a long-term support for the Reich. Suffice it to say that of the 1,366 German tanks sent to the Eastern Front in 1941, 360 were made in the Protectorate.
SAND IN THE POWDER FLASKS
For a long time, there was no talk of mass resistance to the occupiers. During the invasion, essentially the only one who stood up for the honor of the republic was Captain Karel Pavlik, the commander of a machine gun company in the town of Místek, who gave the order to shoot at the approaching Germans.
From 1940, there were separate resistance cells oriented toward the exiled London government of Beneš, and from 1941, there was an organized communist underground with access to Moscow. But the most famous episode of the anti-fascist struggle in 1939–1944 was an action prepared not by the Czechs themselves, but by British intelligence. This was Operation Anthropoid – the liquidation in Prague in June 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office) and acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.
A lesser-known example of Czech underground work itself. In July 1941, defective grenade launcher rounds were delivered to the advancing Wehrmacht units in the Baltics. The mines were filled with sand instead of explosives. In one of these unexploded mines, the Red Army soldiers found a note left by a worker at a Czech arms factory: “We help as much as we can.” Surprising reports of ammunition continued to appear in 1942.
The national uprising in “independent” Slovakia in August–October 1944 was perhaps a negative example for the Czechs, as it was suppressed by the Germans and Tiso’s collaborators. But already in September 1944, during the “ ninth Stalinist strike” – the East Carpathian Operation – the Red Army crossed the pre-war eastern border of the Czechoslovak Republic.
The real catalyst for the “explosion” in occupied Czechia was the Moravian-Ostrava and Bratislava-Brno operations (both in March – early May 1945), as a result of which Soviet troops liberated most of the country.
But in Prague and around it, the 900,000-strong Army Group Center of Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner continued to hold the line.
"TO TAKE PRAGUE BEFORE THE RUSSIANS"
From the west, from Saxony and Bavaria, US troops were advancing. On April 22, 1945, Patton's 3rd Army entered Western Bohemia. According to Winston Churchill, the American allies under Dwight Eisenhower should have moved on to Prague. The commander-in-chief of the Allied ground forces in Europe, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, wrote in his memoirs:
"The main task after the defeat of Germany was to establish a balance of power in Europe acceptable to us and the Western nations... This meant that we had to take Vienna, Prague and Berlin before the Russians." But Vienna was liberated by the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts by April 15. Montgomery lamented that the Allies had then had to divert forces to an offensive in southern France.
On April 16, the 1st Belorussian Front under Georgy Zhukov began the Battle of Berlin. The Allies were again behind. When the Red Army crossed the Oder 50 km from Berlin, the Anglo-Americans were 500 km away, between the Rhine and the Elbe.
That left Prague. If the Allied High Command had given Patton the order, he would have reached the Czech capital in 24 hours, Montgomery confidently believed. But, he lamented, the US Third Army had stopped at the Pilsen-Ceske Budejovice line, “for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.”
Montgomery, citing American General Omar Bradley, spoke of some kind of agreement between the "Soviets" and the United States (led by Franklin Roosevelt until his sudden death in April 1945 ). The idea was that "Czechoslovakia was destined for the Red Army." Both Montgomery and Churchill considered this a "big mistake."
STICKS, IRONS AND CULTIVATOR
With the approach of the Red Army on May 1, 1945, the Czech National Council and the Communist Party began an uprising in the remaining occupied territory of the protectorate. The military leadership was taken over by the leader of one of the resistance cells, divisional general of the pre-war army Karel Kutlvášr, nicknamed the Cultivator. Incidentally, it is curious that his military career began during our Civil War - the Cultivator fought on the side of the Whites as part of the Czechoslovak Corps.
From May 5, the suddenly emerging mass resistance in Prague erected barricades, the rebels tore down swastika flags and hung national blue-white-red ones instead. In battles with German units, they used everything that came to hand - sticks, old sabres, hunting rifles. Women even threw irons on the Germans' heads and poured hot water on them. The rebels managed to seize the central telegraph office, bridges over the Vltava, the post office, armored trains, and even disarmed several German units.
The commander of Army Group North, Schörner, was furious - he ordered the uprising to be suppressed by any means necessary, bringing tanks into Prague. In order to prevent the destruction of the city by the Germans and to help the rebels, the Soviet command, at their request, accelerated the advance on the city.
"WE CELEBRATED THE VICTORY AND WENT TO PRAGUE"
On the night of May 6, units of three fronts, the 1st Ukrainian Ivan Konev, the 2nd Ukrainian Rodion Malinovsky and the 4th Ukrainian Andrey Eremenko, with a total of 400,000 people, hastily advanced to Prague. Together with them, the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps under the command of Ludvik Svoboda advanced against the Germans : it had been formed in the USSR three years earlier.
Our units were transferred to Prague from the Berlin direction - they had to cover more than 100 kilometers a day. Despite the columns of prisoners stretching along the roads, which eyewitnesses testify to, many German units were not ready to lay down their arms even after the signing of the capitulation in Karlshorst.
Sapper Nikolai Fedotov remembers well how joy and the need to remain vigilant when confronted with a treacherous enemy coexisted in those days: “On the night of the 8th, we were driving through the Ore Mountains, and the tanks’ radios reported the capitulation. We celebrated the victory in the mountains, and then we went out onto the highway and headed for Prague. The Germans also knew about the capitulation, they came out of the forest in groups and threw their weapons into the ditch. But some of the stubborn ones supposedly surrendered, but they let our men approach and shot them point-blank.”
On May 8 at 20:00, Soviet commanders asked Schörner to lay down his arms, but there was no response. The strategy of the Nazis, especially the elite SS battalions, was to escape to the West and surrender to the Americans before the Red Army arrived. The loss of Prague cut them off from their escape routes.
THE SMELL OF GUNPOWDER AND LILAC
On the night of May 9, Soviet troops entered the city. And while some of the underground leaders clearly sympathized with London and Washington, ordinary Praguers were sincerely happy about the arrival of our army. According to veterans, they were never met as joyfully as in Czechoslovakia - with fresh cold water, bread, joyful hugs and armfuls of lilacs, which were strewn on tanks.
"There were continuous demonstrations in the streets. When a Soviet officer appeared, he was immediately taken into friendly captivity, they began to hug, kiss, rock him. One after another, all my liaison officers were surrounded - kisses, treats, flowers..." - recalled Konev.
But the Germans did not leave the city alone. Without regard for the historical heritage, they mined the famous architectural complex of the 17th century – the Prague Loreto. The same fate befell the military equipment factories, which until the last moment supplied the Wehrmacht with tanks and cars. Among them, according to the remark of a participant in those events, Yakov Fadeyev, was the underground enterprise “Skoda”:
"42,000 prisoners of war worked there. The Germans, not wanting to give up either the equipment or the workers, mined the plant. When entering the territory, it was supposed to blow up. But our unit of miners found the cable intended for detonation in time. One senior lieutenant cut it and de-energized it. True, he died in the process - the resulting "voltaic arc" literally burned him."
Since the Red Army had orders to preserve the city as much as possible, tanks and artillery were used cautiously to suppress the remaining German units. Residents of Prague ran up to the Soviet crews and asked them not to shoot at buildings of special value.
"Look, there are tanks and guns buried behind the bushes on the other side. The Germans have a lot of people and equipment there," local residents told the Red Army soldiers before crossing the Vltava. The first Soviet tank was knocked out, but the rest managed to break through the German defenses with shells. By about 10:00 on May 9, the city was cleared of Nazis.
The desperate Schörner changed into civilian clothes and flew to Austria, where he hid from the Americans until he was handed over to the Soviet side. Several divisions managed to break through to the American zone. The Red Army captured more than 860 thousand German soldiers and officers.
TRAITOR UNDER THE BLANKET
In historiography since the 1990s, a myth has spread that the so-called Russian Liberation Army (ROA) of traitor General Andrei Vlasov allegedly played a significant role in the liberation of Prague. In fact, the "head of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia" Vlasov by April-May 1945 had removed himself from the military-political leadership of the collaborators, was in a state of prostration and, at most, made plans to escape to the Anglo-Americans.
The rebels of May 5–7 were conditionally supported only by the 1st ROA division under the command of another traitor, former Red Army Colonel Sergei Bunyachenko. The Vlasovites hoped to “show themselves” to the Americans by turning their bayonets against their former masters, to ensure an organized retreat to the West, and who knows, even to continue serving “against the Bolsheviks” under new sponsors.
For their part, the pro-Western factions of the Czech rebels promised the Vlasovites political asylum in exchange for support, which, of course, turned out to be a fiction.
Bunyachenko's troops were indeed able to drive the Germans out of some areas of Prague, but when they learned of the Red Army's advance toward the city, fear of legal retribution led them to the same place as many of the Nazis - to the US occupation zone, located 70 kilometers from the city. The Soviet command asked the Americans not to let the Vlasovites through, to which they agreed. The supposed agreements between the Roosevelt administration and Moscow, which had so upset Field Marshal Montgomery, apparently continued to operate.
On May 12, Vlasov himself was captured. "The traitor was discovered by his own driver. The tank crews and the driver pulled Vlasov out from under the blankets, loaded him onto a tank and immediately sent him straight to the headquarters of the 13th Army. A miserable end, which quite naturally crowned the entire career of this renegade!", recalled Marshal Konev. Vlasov asked to meet with him. But the marshal, who considered this humiliating, resolutely refused and after delivering the traitor to his command post, immediately sent him to Moscow.
Three days later, the Americans extradited Bunyachenko to Moscow and a year later the ROA leaders were executed by court order.
The Germans were completely finished off on May 12, when after the battle near the village of Slivice the last three divisions of 5-6 thousand SS men, who had found themselves in a circle, laid down their arms. By that time, the Victory salute had long since died down in Moscow. The Soviet troops irretrievably lost 50 thousand people during the Prague operation, including in the "battles after the war", and a total of 140 thousand during the liberation of Czechoslovakia.
A total of 429 Red Army soldiers who died in those battles are buried at the Olšany Cemetery in Prague. Here, as a symbol of historical continuity, is a memorial to Russian officers, participants in the Foreign Campaign of 1813, who died from wounds received in battles with Napoleon at Dresden and Kulm. The memorial is still surrounded with care and honor. Ordinary Czechs remember their defenders and liberators.