Corpses of two of Reinhard Heydrich’s assassins in Prague, May 1942
On the anniversary of Czech independence on 28 October 1939, the Czech underground organized a massive anti-German demonstration. It resulted in a confrontation with the police and the death of a student, Jan Opletal. That student’s funeral the following month became the occasion for more rallies in Prague. Hitler decided he had had enough of demonstrations. He closed all Czech universities, and nine student leaders, picked at random, were shot without trial. During the temporary absence of Neurath from the country, Frank ordered the arrest of all students living in dormitories; 1,200 were deported to concentration camps. Having concluded that Neurath was protecting the Czechs too much, Hitler removed him. But instead of replacing him with Frank, Hitler appointed as Acting Reich Protector the feared chief of Germany’s Security Police, Reinhard Heydrich.
With Heydrich’s arrival in Prague on 27 September 1941, the
occupation moved into a new, ruthless phase. Heydrich declared martial law and
placed the entire country under a curfew that was to last four months. Summary
courts were the main instruments of the terror he now imposed. A trial in a
summary court had only three possible outcomes: the defendant was either
acquitted, sentenced to death or sent to a concentration camp. Between the
summer of 1941 and the end of the year, 10,000 people were arrested including
thousands of Czech Communists. Every resister in prison, subject to
interrogation, meant much greater danger for those still free. People who found
out they were wanted for questioning immediately went into hiding.
Over 100 crimes now qualified as capital offences –
listening to foreign broadcasts, consorting with Jews, possessing guns of any
type, failing to turn in an unregistered person, speaking against the
occupation. Under such tight restrictions, anyone could be found guilty of
so-called resistance. Every day in the yards of dormitories that were being
used as jails, Czechs with bloody faces were shot and hanged. Boxes appeared on
the front pages of the newspapers giving the names of people who had been sentenced
to death, some twenty a day – peasants, journalists, captains and colonels.
Among them – one of the first announced by Heydrich the day after his arrival –
was Prime Minister Aloys Eliáš, charged with high treason, though his death
sentence was not carried out immediately.
One of the most effective controls the Germans employed was
requiring everyone to register his address. To live anywhere in the
Protectorate without registering at a district office or gendarmerie station
was to be an enemy of the Reich. Anyone who was not wanted by the police thus
had an identity card, though sometimes a way was found to get a false one for a
resister. A district office distributed the identity cards. A worker might
manage to smuggle out a blank one, though the officials counted the cards as
they were printed and counted them again as they were handed out to the
applicants. Discovering that a resister had a false card meant exposing the
worker in the office who had provided it.
Living without an identity card meant being without a ration
card as well, so that the family sheltering the resister had to share their
meagre rations or engage in illicit black-market trading. People who harboured
a fugitive were shot, together with their families. Moreover, anyone who failed
to turn in an unregistered person might also be executed. It was impossible
simply to live outdoors: villagers were assigned to patrol the woods. In the
towns and villages, the cottages were thin-walled and close together, so that
it was not easy to keep someone hidden in a bedroom or attic. Anyone who gave
the smallest help to a resister became a resister, too. He would be just as
dead after his captivity as if he had plotted to kill Hitler. Once someone
aided a resister – allowing him to sleep for one night in his barn, for example
– he could never again feel safe. If the resister were caught, he might be
tortured to reveal every link in his underground survival, every bit of
assistance no matter how trivial, going back months and months. One arrest
generally meant death for dozens of people.
Nevertheless, after the war it turned out that some
well–known individuals had helped the underground, such as Cyril Musil, a
famous Czech ski racer, who hid several unregistered fugitives. Funds had been
donated to the resistance by several quite prominent men. Families that
considered themselves somewhat above the general community around them were
sometimes the most willing to give shelter – men such as Jaroslav Kobylka,
mayor of the town of Kadolec. They considered it fitting that they should do
what average people would not.
Whenever the Germans encountered reverses in the war,
instead of concentrating solely on the main battle, they reacted by tightening
the occupation. This seemed ironic to many observers. The military front was
the theatre where the German system would either live or die; the resistance
could only harass the German government. Yet at crucial moments during the war,
the Germans squandered their men and resources in keeping stricter control of
the subject populations. Czechs could be arrested for not covering their
windows sufficiently during a blackout; concealing a few scraps of leather or
cloth; holding back a little something that was requisitioned. Because of
Heydrich’s controls, life was fraught with terror, not only for genuine
resisters, but also for average Czechs who were simply trying to get along. In
order to eat, many people traded on the black market – exchanging a dress for a
little meat, swapping a child’s toy for a few eggs. Since everybody was doing
it, it seemed that one could get by with it; but it was impossible to be sure.
There were continual executions of so-called black marketeers. Country people
had to register their livestock and were required to deliver a certain quantity
of meat, eggs and dairy products at certain times. Every farmer and villager
kept some animals illegally, despite knowing that the authorities would show up
now and then with the official goose or pig list and compare it to the tails
they counted in the yard. If a family ate something at home that was severely
rationed, they had to worry about the children making a comment at school that
would arouse suspicion. Every life was scored with constant small lies,
compromises and anxiety.
Martial law was lifted in January 1942. From the German
perspective, Heydrich’s policy of controlled severity – harsh punishment for
resistance, but not pushing the Czech population to the point of rebellion –
was working; the country appeared to be pacified. Heydrich reorganized the
administration so that German agents transferred a great deal of routine
business to their Czech counterparts. The Germans acted merely as inspectors
and supervisors of the Czechs. By the end of 1942, over 350,000 Czech
administrators worked under the control of a mere 738 Germans in the Office of
the Protector and another 1,146 who sat in various Czech agencies. Heydrich’s
mission was complete; he apparently was ready to move on to another occupied
country, possibly France. However, on 27 May 1942, exactly eight months after
his arrival in Prague, a bomb was thrown into his car and Reich Protector
SS–Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich was killed.
Heydrich’s assassination was Czechoslovakia’s most
sensational act of rebellion, but it was not carried out by the home
resistance. The murder was planned and implemented by Czechs abroad, an
assassination ordered by Beneš because the President wanted some dramatic
demonstration of the strength of the Czech resistance. The British, acting on
the advice of František Moravec, trained, equipped and transported two Czech
agents who were dropped into the Protectorate in December 1941. The assassins
delayed their mission for five months, during which time their supporters in
the Czech underground figured out what they were up to. The home resisters then
urgently cabled Beneš, pleading and demanding that the assassination plan be
cancelled because of the ‘immeasurable’ German retaliation it would provoke –
but they were ignored.
Beneš sometimes made controversial decisions; this one, to
kill Heydrich, aroused criticism as well because of the violent retribution
that was bound to follow. Just as the home resisters predicted, the Germans
went into a frenzy of revenge, placing the whole country again under martial law.
Before Heydrich had quite expired, Hitler ordered that 10,000 Czechs, primarily
intellectuals, be taken hostage and 100 shot immediately. One by one, in 5,000
villages and towns, German police went from house to house searching for
suspects. Though the bomb had been the work of only a handful, thousands of
Czechs were arrested during the next 6 weeks, and over 1,000 executed,
including the imprisoned General Eliáš. The searches flushed out hundreds of
men in hiding, but the slaughter was particularly directed against
intellectuals and former army officers who were still free. All of the security
apparatus was brought to bear, both the Czech gendarmes stationed in the
countryside, and the regular police in the cities – all under strict Nazi
supervision.
At the height of the terror, the Germans burned down two
villages, Lidice, not far from Prague, and Ležáky. By that time seven
paratroopers, including the two Czechs who were ordered by the London
government to kill Heydrich, had died in a Prague church where they were
cornered. In the face of the brutal retaliation, the British tardily renounced
their participation in the Munich Pact – a classic example of ‘too little and
too late.’
After Heydrich’s assassination, all hope – what there was of
it – for rising up against the German occupiers lay with Slovakia. Its fascist
government was closely monitored by the Germans; however, because Slovakia was
not occupied, the resistance had more freedom to operate there than in the
Czech lands. As in the Protectorate, one centre of the resistance was the army.
It had not been disbanded in Slovakia, and still contained possible
confederates who could smuggle heavy weapons to the Czechs. With these, the
Czechs hoped to harass the rear of the German army as the Russians approached
the Protectorate from the east. A former legionnaire and artillery major in the
defunct Czechoslovak army, Jan Moravanský, was by then head of ON, living
legally near Prague. His group was at first called Slezák, then later the Tau.
It was eventually subsumed into the Council of Three. In 1942, Moravanský had a
list of 1,400 former soldiers still living legally, 600 of whom he thought,
optimistically, would respond if called to an uprising.
But who was there to lead such a revolt? By 1943 the
underground was almost barren. Nothing remained of the large resistance
organizations except a few scattered and frightened followers without leaders.
Josef Grňa, a former professor of finance, was surviving underground and made
contact with some of the military resisters also in hiding. These connections –
between Grňa and a general, for example – were arduous undertakings involving a
dangerous 15- or 20-mile walk, each man following a map so that the two could
intersect at some ditch or tree in the middle of nowhere. People in hiding were
totally dependent on those living legally to bring them news, communications
and reading material, and to make contact with others in the underground. Grňa
was no politician and hardly a leader of revolutionaries, but he was almost the
last man standing after the retaliation against Heydrich’s assassination.
Another who survived the 1941–2 devastation of the resistance was Ambassador
Arnošt Heidrich. He had been a frequent Czechoslovak representative at the
Geneva disarmament conferences in the 1920s and a confidant of President Beneš.
He avoided arrest until 1944. Leopold Chmela was a chief member of the Heidrich
group. He survived the war to write a book about Czech losses during the
occupation. But none of these Czechs could lead an uprising.
The Germans had meanwhile destroyed all the transmitters
used by the resistance. Karel Staller, a technical whiz, was the director of
the Brno Small Arms Factory in 1943, and one of the few Czechs still allowed to
travel to Slovakia.29 Hiding microfilm in his shaving kit and in coins, he set
up a courier route from Bratislava to Switzerland to London.30 For over a year,
the courier network organized by Staller was practically the only means of
contact between the home resistance and President Beneš or between the Czech
and Slovak resisters. Some of the information so perilously communicated was
essential; some of it not, such as the intelligence that a new resistance group
was forming around Grňa and Vojtech Luža, a former army division general. The
London government would acknowledge the arrival of microfilm by giving a
particular password or phrase in one of the BBC broadcasts. At the start of
each Czech broadcast there was a string of such coded announcements: ‘Erica
watch. Spring is coming. Memory is watchful. The corn is growing.’ The Germans,
of course, heard the communications, too, but it was hoped that they could not
decode them.
Radio Moscow, apparently oblivious to geography, was
exhorting the home resistance to help the Russians by starting guerrilla
warfare. Of all the occupied countries, Czechoslovakia was farthest from any
front, too distant for either the Western Allies or the Russians to assist any
partisan fighting. Broadcasts from Moscow even urged the home resistance to
establish national committees, local bodies of a few cities which would
represent the larger population – this at a time when any sort of meeting was a
certain way to become a target for arrest. Moreover, the Czechs had no weapons
with which to confront the German tanks. General Luza, for one, wanted to make
contact with Colonel Theodor Lang of the Protectorate troops. Though these
troops carried only light weapons, they were 10,000 strong. He had to argue
down the communists in his group who scorned such ‘bourgeois collaborators’.
By autumn 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had met in
Tehran to plan the next offensives of the war. From Sicily, the Allies were
progressing northward, while the Red Army had pushed the Germans back to the
Dneister River, about 600 miles from the Protectorate. One would suppose that
Hitler would be too busy preventing the collapse of his armies to continue the
zealous tracking of unregistered Czechs, but in fact his reverses at the front
were followed as usual by increased severity in the occupied land. The terror
in the Protectorate was never as barbaric as in Poland, but it remained far
worse than in Holland, Belgium or France. In 1944, the Germans were executing
over 100 people a month in the Protectorate. Hitler continued to eliminate
intellectuals and internal enemies just as if he were winning the war, even
when Allied troops were at the border of the Reich and German cities were being
bombed to rubble. Close observers of those years marvelled at the Nazis’
security apparatus. In the stark face of annihilation, the Germans might have
thrown every effort into the critical military struggle. Instead, they
continued rooting out Jews, resisters and communists all over occupied Europe,
probing into every classroom where contraband words might be lying about and
every cellar where shortwave radio signals might penetrate.
By this time, there were finally too few Nazis to police
whole populations. The Germans were turning their captured Czech victims into
informers, people who purchased the lives of their loved ones with information
they provided, however unwillingly. Though they might have had no heart for it,
these informers were productive detectives for the Gestapo, and established
entire bogus resistance organizations to attract good-faith resisters. The
informant system was especially effective against the communists.
Communists had been distinguished resisters in 1940 and
1941, either cooperating with the democratic resistance or vilifying it,
according to their directions from Moscow. But they were largely wiped out in
the two periods of martial law connected with Heydrich. The Germans were fierce
toward anyone associated with communism. Their special attention to Communists
thinned out the leftist population, so that it was not until late in 1944 that
communist groups emerged. The attitude of the Czechs toward communism was not
necessarily friendly, but it was not overwhelmingly hostile. The Communist
Party had long been a part of the country’s political life, just like other
parties. For Czechs, there was no question that the fascists were the enemy and
the Russians the probable deliverers. At the same time, the Czech attitude
toward the West was deeply ambivalent, even during the war. After Munich, it
was the French and British whom Czechs mistrusted, not the Russians – that is,
until the communists imposed monopolistic control in 1948.
At the other end of the resistance’s political spectrum was
the right-of-centre PRNC, the Preparatory Revolutionary Nation Committee, preparing
for the revolution that would burst forth as the Germans were retreating and
the Russians were coming in. PRNC claimed to be the successor to the great
resistance networks destroyed by the Gestapo in 1941. It was not a body of
active resisters but rather a ramulose organization that served to put several
groups in loose association. People around General Novák were among its
leaders: Jaroslav Kvapil, a famous playwright; František Richter, the director
of a printing enterprise and a former member of the Czech Legion, a volunteer
army that fought in Russia against Austria-Hungary in the First World War – the
Legion formed a kind of old-boy network that would later assist the resisters
who had been part of it; Judge Emil Lány, former president for the land court
for Bohemia; the poet Josef Palivec; literary critic Václav Čzerny; and the
writer Jaroslav Kratochvil, who was also a member of the communist underground
and used his influence to get the Party to cooperate more closely with the
democratic resistance. Some of PRNC’s other members were Jaromír Dvoařk and
Josef Mainer from Pilsen and Kamil Krofta, a former minister of foreign
affairs. One component of PRNC was a group led by Professors Josef Drachovký,
Josef Hutter and Růžena Vacek. Another component included representatives of
the Czech Protectorate police, such as Bohdan Sefčik. Rudolf Fraštacký served,
like Staller, as a courier. Jaroslav Krátký (Zdena), a major of the former
Czechoslovak army, was sent by Beneš and Ingr to Slovakia to run secret
transmitters connecting London with the main resistance groups there, and also
to get information about resistance in the Protectorate. His contact in
Bratislava was Rudolf Fraštacký. Zdena was eventually caught by the Gestapo and
murdered in prison by the SS.
The Russian parachutists who began coming into the
Protectorate in 1944 taught the Czechs about zemljankas, a camouflaged hiding
place that helped countless resisters survive that last terrible year of the
war. First a hole was dug deep enough for a man to stand in and wide enough to
hold a bench that could serve as a bed. Then it was walled inside with wooden
planks, and a covering of earth and grass was placed over the top. The entrance
was concealed in a nearby bush, some feet away.
It was in the dark of zemljankas and attics that many
resisters learned of the Normandy invasion. Clearly, the Germans seemed to be
losing the war. The resisters had only to hold out and the nightmare would be
over. Even then, the Germans squandered their resources hunting down internal
resisters. While the Czechs were rejoicing over D-Day, they learned that almost
the entire PRNC organization had been wiped out by the Gestapo. General Novák,
who had been living legally, decided to await capture rather than flee and
abandon his family to the Gestapo’s revenge. Arrested during the night of 22
June 1944, he was tortured but not executed, and managed to stay alive in the
Gestapo prison until the end of the war. Along with Novak, Moravansky, Colonel
Lang and many others were taken. Leopold Chmela was arrested on 6 June,
followed soon afterward by the capture of Heidrich himself. General Novák’s
successor as head of PRNC was General František Bláha, who was then arrested in
the autumn of 1944. Bláha’s successor was General Fraštisek Slunečko, who had
been living underground since 1940 in Bohemia. As the Allies were closing in on
the Germans, the Germans were closing in on the resistance, or so it seemed to
the isolated souls trying desperately to hang on until the end. This was an
illusion because resistance was actually resurging. Networks were popping up
toward the end of the war almost faster than the Nazis could smother them.
The resistance could claim no authority without contact with
the exiled government, and the London government could not claim to be the
voice of Czechoslovakia unless it could maintain a minimum of contact. Secret
transmitters were essential so that the home resistance and the exiles could
communicate. The Germans, realizing this, dedicated great effort to locating
and smashing transmitters. First there had been the Sparta network with eleven
transmitters, which provided the Allies with some 20,000 intelligence messages
until it was destroyed in 1941. Then the Czechoslovak army abroad trained special
volunteers whom the British dropped into the Protectorate. These paratroopers
restored communication, along with assassinating Heydrich; but by the beginning
of 1943 they, too, had been hunted down. Throughout that year, the Czechs used
only couriers, people smuggling messages in their clothing. However, the slow
courier system was more and more impractical as the tempo of the war
intensified. In April 1944, therefore, Beneš, Ingr and František Moravec, the
head of military intelligence abroad, began dispatching new teams of
paratroopers, fourteen in all, charged with gathering intelligence on their own
and communicating information from the home resistance. Each team included at
least one wireless operator with a transmitter. It was difficult enough for
paratroopers to land in the Protectorate and find groups to help them – the
resisters were, after all, in hiding – but the transmitting itself was
dangerous. The bulky transmitters had to be moved frequently lest the Germans
follow the radio waves and track them down; yet the only vehicles the Czechs
possessed were bicycles. Despite every precaution, the Gestapo usually located
the transmitters within a few months.
With the transmitters, several important resistance groups
learned of each other’s existence and were able to discuss plans for an
uprising. A former lieutenant colonel, Josef Svatoň, headed an organization
that spread from western Bohemia into Moravia and included the remnants of ON.
Another man, Josef Císař, led a very important group called Avala. Císař was
living legally in Prague and had a regular job. His secret organization
included the association of Czech volunteer firemen, men who could mobilize at
a moment’s notice and who were connected to all the other fire departments
across the country. They were the only people in the Protectorate who had at
their disposal both gasoline and vehicles – fire engines. The Gestapo could not
quash their resistance group because firemen were too badly needed. Císař had
also organized the Czech hunting societies. Hunters were spread over the whole
country and, moreover, they possessed guns, which they had been allowed to
keep. These two groups now joined with General Luža in what was called the
Council of Three, or R3, Rada tří in Czech. Another supporter was Josef
Ouředník, the leader of an organization south of Prague called Sázava. Luža,
having been accepted by both London and the home resistance as supreme leader
of the projected uprising, did his best to subsume all the diffuse groups,
including a Prague association called Revolutionary Trade Unions. Luža’s group
was no longer a Moravian organization of a few hundred but a federation of
scattered thousands.
The London government expected to direct the proposed
insurrection from abroad, by use of transmitters, a method that would have been
awkward and unreliable considering the tenuous position of all the various
underground groups. Luža insisted that the home resistance must control the
uprising, get credit for its success and organize the provisional government
that would follow.36 An insurrection was necessary even if the home resistance
was not needed to defeat the Germans militarily. Without a revolt, the post-war
political field would be dominated by party hacks returning from abroad. What
changes were going to be made in the political system had to be made during the
brief revolutionary beginning, he warned, or not at all. All the resisters
except the communists assumed that at the end of the war these revolutionaries,
that is, the resistance leaders who carried out the projected uprising, would
take over from the defeated Germans and run the country until President Beneš
returned and elections were held. It was expected that the major resistance
figures would be offered ministerial positions in any post-war government. The
arms for this revolution were to be seized from a storage repository and from
an ammunition factory – enough weapons to arm 10,000 men. The British were
expected to drop weapons, and a shipment from the Red Army was also expected.
It appeared, however, that the British looked to the
Russians to supply anti-German insurgencies. Perhaps the British feared that
any weapons they dropped might fall into the hands of the communist allies with
whom they were increasingly disillusioned. As for the Russians, having marched
over 1,000 miles, they did not want to set things up so as to congratulate the
Czechs on liberating themselves. Nor were they eager to take over a country
with an independent army that looked to its own leaders for direction. They
chose to ignore whatever expectations the resisters had in the way of arms.
In August 1944, Slovakia erupted in a protracted revolution,
led by former military men and supported by both democrats and local
communists. It was directed by Lieutenant Colonel Ján Golian, the head of a
Slovak underground organization; he had been chosen by Beneš and the
government-in-exile, in disregard of Luža’s recommendation. The Czech
resistance was then bombarded with broadcasts from Moscow exhorting it to follow
the Slovak example and take up arms. But in September, before the Czechs could
react to the Slovak situation, the Gestapo killed Ouředník and captured Luža’s
closest aides, shattering the entire Prague section of the organization. In
October, Luža, making his difficult way toward Prague with an assistant and
false identity cards, was killed by officious Czech gendarmes who, in an excess
of punctiliousness, decided to double-check the identities of the two strangers
passing through.
That last autumn of the war marked the time when, by
heart–sinking degrees, the resistance leaders realized that they could not
carry out a national insurrection. Impulsive, disjointed revolts might break
out – suicidal rebellions of poorly equipped and scattered groups. But the
organized, massive death blow to a weakened German occupation army was a
chimera. Not only did it seem to the resisters that the Allies were withholding
heavy weapons, but by November the resistance had lost the only military
leaders who could have used them effectively – Svatoň, Moravanský, Novák, Luža,
the other generals. The Czechs watched the Warsaw Revolt that began on 1
August, just as the Red Army approached the Polish capital, and followed it to
its frightful conclusion two months later – an insurrection waged in much the
same way as the one various Czech underground groups were planning. They were
not encouraged.
They watched the Slovakian insurrection right next to the
Protectorate with the same sense of despair. The Slovak revolt had begun three
weeks ahead of Golian’s schedule, when the Germans ended the Slovaks’ puppet
rule and moved to occupy the country directly. Because the uprising did not
take place within their zone of operation, the British and Americans refused to
provide arms to the insurgents except, towards the end, in sporadic and sparing
quantities. It was believed that the Russians were indifferent to the fate of
resisters who owed obedience not to the Red Army, but to independent leaders.
After two months the insurrection collapsed and Golian was captured and
executed by the Germans. Czechs in the Protectorate knew nothing of the
policies of the Allies that doomed the uprising, nor did they even know that
10,000 Slovaks had been sacrificed in that blood–drenched struggle. But they
did see that the uprising had not destroyed the Germans’ power over the
country, and that such revolts dwindled in the end into guerrilla skirmishes
that had little military effect.
That autumn four main Soviet parachute groups floated down
to the Protectorate – some sixty people in all – in advance of the Red Army.
Though the parachute groups took the names of Czech heroes, such as Jan Hus or
Miroslave Tyrš, they took their orders from the Red Army. Their task was to
harass the retreating Nazis who, followed by veritable brigades of civilian
German sympathizers, were trying to get to some part of the Protectorate still
occupied by Germans. German sympathizers would be ejected from Czechoslovakia
after the war, in one of the transfers of populations that took place in
several countries.
Partisan attacks, gnawing at the enemy at the margins of the
front, became the main form of the Czech resistance from November 1944 until
the war’s end the following May. In the area around Brno, these attacks were
carried out by various bands; there were no groups that were distinctly
communist. After the war, the communists claimed to have been the backbone of
the resistance; however, in the central Protectorate, it was non-communist
resisters who were active. This scattered partisan activity was no substitute
for an armed insurrection, a fact that was proved by the failed insurrections
of the Poles, Slovaks, Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia in 1941, and even the
maquis in France, who were fighting under more favourable conditions than the
Czechs. One thing the paratroopers did accomplish was to organize escaped
prisoners of war. At first these ex-prisoners were armed only with their hatred
of the Germans. Some 50,000 Germans were in the Protectorate in 1944,
retreating from the Allies. The partisans, now including the ex-prisoners,
attacked their transports on the highways and stole their weapons; they also
raided gendarme stations for their guns. The partisans would lay steel nails or
a stolen steel cable across the highways (practically the only motor vehicles
on the roads were German – everybody else rode bicycles). A truck would have to
stop, whereupon the attackers would kill the occupants and take their weapons.
They also raided gendarme stations where they typically took the small arms but
did not hurt the Czech gendarmes. The Germans finally had to take away all the
carbines from the gendarme stations so that they would not lose them to the
resistance.
Having no consistent communication, a resistance group was
never sure what other groups were doing. The partisans learned only after the
war how many disparate and largely independent resistance clusters there were:
7,500 active resistance fighters, distributed in 120 groups, engaged in
military or quasi-military activities, each one using or having at his or her
disposal a personal weapon. In addition to these fighters, there were thousands
of supporters who were outside of any structure and were not referred to as
‘resisters’. The General Luža group (R3), made up of the son and followers of
the murdered leader, had 856 active members centred near Brno, not counting the
people who assisted them with supplies, shelter and silence. It was the most
important organization within R3, which was in turn the largest organization in
the Czech resistance by 1945, consisting of ten groups.
By late spring 1945, the guerrillas in the central
Protectorate controlled the countryside, but not the towns, so that the Germans
could not travel except in large groups. Still, villagers sheltering resisters
and bringing them food in their zemljankas were putting themselves in danger.
The latest Gestapo tactic was not to arrest those sheltering a resister, but to
lock the whole family in the house and then set fire to it, a task they
attended to conscientiously even while retreating.
The German response to the increased guerrilla activity was
two-fold and effective. Karl Hermann Frank reorganized the German police force,
detaching special units and placing them in every district to keep the roads
safe for the German retreat. The Jagdkommandos, as they were called, shot and
hanged partisans on the spot, including people who had only been marginally
helpful to the resisters. An even greater nuisance to the partisans were the
Vlasov troops – anti-Bolsheviks released from German prisoner-of-war camps. By
1944 these formed an army of some 100,000, fighting at the side of Germans for
the liberation of Russia from Stalin. They combed the villages looking for
partisans, or helped the Jagdkommandos by posing as escaped Soviet prisoners
and infiltrating the partisans.
The Americans were by now regularly dropping Czech parachute
groups into the Protectorate, exiles who were returning to join in the final
fight and bringing weapons with them. These were not the massive arms infusions
the resisters wanted, but rather arms to aid the guerrilla activity – Sten
guns, one or two machine guns, revolvers, plastic explosives and so on. The
quantity of arms contained in the twelve drops was negligible. The deliveries
were carried out, after a long bureaucratic process, by a US Army Air Force
Special Group stationed in Livorno. Several delivery planes to the Protectorate
were shot down, despite precise planning. The timing of a drop was signalled by
code over a BBC broadcast. The weapons were packed in 300lb containers which
were attached to parachutes. When they floated down, they had to be opened and
divided among the partisans then and there. The partisans had to plan some
means of taking the weapons away, as they still did not have cars or trucks.
Though in headlong retreat, the Germans did not stand aside deferentially
during these operations. Two of the paratrooper teams were struck by the
Gestapo in May 1944, even as the home resisters were scrambling from one
shelter to another, having to move constantly.
The Germans were being harried by free-for-all outbursts
against them as they withdrew. It was not always clear whether Germans or
Czechs were in control of a particular town. Once the Germans left and Czechs
took over, the Germans might briefly come back to secure their line of
communications, execute the new local officials who had begun setting up a
post-war administration of the town and then retreat again. The front was not
an obvious line with opposing armies on one side and the other, but a ragged
no-man’s-land where any soldiers one encountered might belong to either the
Allied armies or the German army.
Throughout the war, the Czechs had heard from both London
and Moscow that the home resistance, the people who were sacrificing and
suffering, would form the post-war government. Long before the liberation,
Beneš had decided that the survival of Czechoslovakia depended on the country’s
accommodation with both the Western powers and the Soviet Union. But by the
winter of 1944/5, as the Red Army covered more and more of Czechoslovakia, the
balance between the Czech democratic parties represented by Beneš in London and
the communists led by Klement Gottwald in Moscow had shifted in favour of the
communists. According to the communists, they had been the predominant element
in the resistance; they rewrote wartime history to exclude the activity of
non-communists. By the end of the war, it was a foregone conclusion that the
communists would predominate in any post-war government; but the majority of
Czechs believed, along with the London government-in-exile, that the communists
would follow a democratic system in Czechoslovakia.
As often happens in the last spasms of war, the country
suddenly exploded in revolt – not the organized national rebellion that the
resistance had planned at the beginning of the occupation, but a spate of
uprisings that erupted unpredictably in towns where the Germans were still on
the way out. The uprisings were random, unconnected and ferocious. They started
on 1 May in central Moravia just as the Russians were about to move in. Without
waiting for the Germans to leave, people began seizing the government offices
and appointing themselves the local representatives of the Czechoslovak
Republic. These revolts swept the country. In some places, the rebels tried to
disarm the Germans; in others, they let the Germans continue with the business
of leaving. Sometimes the German commander in the region, not wanting to delay
his withdrawal, ignored what was happening so long as his own forces were not
molested. In others, each uprising was answered with a furious reprisal. In the
middle of it all, on 30 April 1945, every radio in Europe broadcast the news
that Hitler had committed suicide.
Several factors contributed to these revolts. As the Germans
retreated westward, they emptied their concentration camps and transported the
inmates, especially Jews, ahead of the front. Until then, the Czechs were still
largely unaware of what became known as the Holocaust. Suddenly, one community
after another in the Protectorate saw tens of thousands of naked, starving
people packed into cattle trucks or stumbling over the hills in forced marches.
They saw Germans mistreating these dying victims, who had once been Jewish
teachers, housewives and schoolchildren, saw the Germans brutalizing them or
shooting them without remorse. It shocked people who were past shocking, Czechs
whose own relatives had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
The Moravian uprisings of late April and early May 1945 were
futile – crushed in every place where the Germans responded to the
provocations. Nevertheless, the fever of revolt spread to Prague on 5 May 1945.
The Czech National Council, a colourless organization, had for several weeks
been preparing an insurrection in the capital with the remnants of ON and other
former military people. However, the mass uprising took the Council by surprise
and prematurely forced the leaders into the open. Before the Council could
mobilize, ordinary citizens and Protectorate policemen seized the Prague radio
station and were broadcasting frantic calls to the Allies for help. The former
generals František Slunečko and Karel Kutlvašr – the men who had put ON back
together after General Novák’s arrest – were at first the de facto military
leaders calling for arms. The citizenry threw up 1,600 street barricades to
paralyse German movement, barriers manned by 30,000 Czech civilians with no
effective weapons. As the Germans got out of their vehicles to remove the
obstacles, they were picked off by snipers. They soon learned to use Czech
women and children as shields while they grappled with the barricades. The
Vlasov troops that had been German collaborators now changed sides and fought
alongside the Czechs. It was not manpower, however, that the Czechs lacked, but
weapons. Men and women with rakes and pistols faced 30,000 to 40,000 trained
fighters armed with tanks and artillery. Their battle raged for three days,
broadcast all over Europe hour by desperate hour as they pleaded with the
Allies to send arms.
All their appeals were ignored by the Americans, though
General Patton and the Third Army were less than 50 miles from Prague. General
Eisenhower steadfastly refused to allow American troops to move because Prague
fell within the Soviet zone of proposed occupation. Even Beneš and the
government in exile that had returned to the country and were waiting in Košice
– even they were silent. As many as 2,000 Czechs were slaughtered by the
Germans. The Germans, fearful of the approaching Red Army, were then induced to
abandon the struggle. Anxious to evade the Russians and surrender instead to
the Americans, they capitulated to the Czech National Council on 8 May and
marched off to the American lines, carrying only their small arms. When the Red
Army entered Prague on 9 May, they found it in the hands of the Czech National
Council, a situation not at all to Stalin’s liking, judging from his reaction.
He refused to recognize the Council or have any dealings with it and, following
Beneš’ orders, the Council resigned.
The war did not end sharply on 9 May in Czechoslovakia, but
rather died by imperceptible degrees. The Germans moved out in orderly columns,
sometimes accompanied by a tank; the Russians moved in, met by clumsy welcoming
speeches and a party atmosphere in every community. The next wave of the Red
Army swept over the country, and the next and the next – young, child-like
peasant draftees, goodhearted but uncontrollable. Their worst transgressions
seemed minor compared with the brutality of the Nazis they had chased out.
The war was over. The cities were full of demolished
buildings and damaged psyches. Behind each face were experiences that could
never be erased. This girl had been raped. That man had been tortured. Another
had lost a child in a bomb attack. It was a country of victims, one in which
nobody looked forward to a new beginning. The Red Army, not local communists,
had liberated the country. Except in a few places, Czech communists had not
been leaders in the resistance, yet after the war they emerged as the prominent
element in every administrative and political unit. The resisters allowed
themselves to be outshouted by others clamouring for recognition. Soon everyone
was hearing that the democratic resistance had not been important in the war,
only the communists in the underground – propaganda generated from Moscow and
repeated so incessantly that perhaps most people started to believe it.
