After Hitler: The Last Ten Days of World War II in Europe (27 page)

At 6.00 a.m. on 5 May Radio Prague came on the air and for the first time in the Nazi occupation began broadcasting in Czech. More Czech flags began to appear on buildings and German signs were pulled down. Shortly before midday a large crowd gathered on Wenceslas Square in the centre of Prague. National flags started to be unfurled and scuffles broke out with German soldiers. The Underground Czech Military Council, which had been making preparations for an uprising for days, now decided to act. At midday a group of rebels drove a convoy of lorries towards the Radio Building and the Old Town Hall, opening fire on German soldiers in their path.

Sticha heard shooting on the streets of the capital. Realising the uprising was about to begin, he went to the house of a friend whose father was a leading member of the Czech underground movement. German soldiers were attempting to force their way into the Radio Building – the staff barricaded themselves in. At 12.33 p.m. Sticha heard Radio Prague broadcast a dramatic appeal for help: ‘Calling all Czechs! Calling all Czechs! Come quickly to our aid. We appeal to all members of the police, army and government to join the patriots who are defending our radio station. Outside the building shots are already being fired. Prague must remain free!’

It was the signal for rebellion. Sticha heard that at the onset of the uprising a meeting of rebel leaders had been summoned – and he resolved to join it immediately. Small military units were being set up and barricades erected all over the city.

The insurgents quickly seized a number of key buildings in the centre of Prague: the Old Town Hall, the Radio Building, House No. 550 on the Old Town Hall Square (which became the headquarters of the military council directing the uprising) and the Credit Union Building on nearby St Bartholomew Street, where the Czech National Committee (the new civil administration) met. At 2.00 p.m. this body announced that the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia had been overthrown – and that they were now the legitimate government. The Czech national flag was raised above the Old Town Hall.

The key military figure behind the uprising was fifty-five-year-old Czech general Karel Kutlvasr. A regimental commander in the Czech Legion in the First World War, he had received the award of the Holy Cross of St George for conspicuous courage during the Battle of Zborova (2 July 1917) after storming two Austrian machine-gun posts. In 1928 he became the youngest-ever general in the new Czechoslovakian state. During the German occupation he had been a leading figure in the Czech resistance. He was a brave and skilful soldier, and above all a patriot.

On 5 May 1945 Kutlvasr initiated a struggle for freedom on the Old Town Square. A little over twenty-five years earlier, on 2 February 1920, he had spoken on the same theme, with his soldiers lined up in the square, to the new Czech government of president Tomas Masaryk and foreign minister Edvard Benes. His words perhaps illuminate the spirit of the uprising:

Thank you for the ceremonial welcome you have accorded to our soldiers of the Czechoslovak Legion. We have come to believe during all our years of fighting that a truly free nation can only be created if its citizens are honest, hardworking – and above all selfless.

To all those who love our country, our precious new nation state, I make this appeal. Join with us in the fight to preserve its freedom, so that it will no longer be a sentiment fleetingly grasped by novelists and poets, but a living tribute to the heroes who fell in this struggle. It is they who have made this day a reality.

In the early afternoon of 5 May the Protectorate guard and remaining Czech police joined the uprising and the rebels then took the telephone exchange, the railway station and the main post office. At 3.00 p.m. the first German probing attempts to recapture these strongholds were beaten back. The main problem for the insurgents was weaponry. Rifles were in short supply and at the beginning of the rebellion the few available were given to former soldiers or members of the Czech police. The rebels had no tanks or artillery. And there were well-equipped SS units around the city.

By 4.00 p.m. fighting had spread all over Prague. General Kutlvasr directed the insurgents through the police communications system. A murderous battle took place for control of the Radio Building. The Germans sent reinforcements in, advancing along the rooftops. They broke into the upper storeys and Kutlvasr sent a police battalion in to flush them out. The fighting took place in darkened corridors and stairwells and ended only when the remaining Germans were forced into the basement and explosives thrown in after them.

The insurgents had comradeship, patriotism and incredible bravery to unite them, but on 5 May many of them were unarmed. Antonin Sticha was sent out on a reconnaissance mission late that afternoon with other insurgents to a factory where it was known German soldiers had been garrisoned. There was hope that they could be overpowered through strength of numbers and their weaponry confiscated. But the Wehrmacht troops had pulled back to a stronger position. Sticha returned to the barricades.

‘There was a surge of support for the uprising,’ Jan Svacina said. ‘But there were so few weapons. I was with a couple of friends and we wanted to join up. We moved from one rebel unit to another trying to find rifles. The main activity that evening was barricade building – everyone was pitching in to help.’

By the evening of 5 May, the several hundred Czech defenders of the Old Town Hall, the centre of the uprising, were able to muster only twenty rifles, forty pistols and two light machine guns.

General Carl von Pückler-Burghaus was the commander of the Waffen SS in Bohemia and Moravia. He delivered his first action report that evening: ‘We have sustained a number of casualties – the insurgents are fighting unexpectedly well and with spirit.’ Pückler-Burghaus was determined to crush the uprising and began to assemble SS units to the north and south of the city. The afternoon had seen the first SS atrocity, when civilian hostages were shot on Prague’s Mendel Bridge. Over the next few days a series of massacres took place by the main railway station, the castle and in the suburb of Pankrac. Czechs were dragged from air-raid shelters, slaughtered and their bodies mutilated. The victims included women and children.

That evening Pückler-Burghaus sent out for reinforcements. Part of the SS Division Das Reich was summoned from northern Bohemia. A battle group of sixty tanks and armoured vehicles was brought in from Milovice (20 miles east of Prague). And the SS Division Wallenstein was mobilised at Benesov, 22 miles south-east of the Czech capital. During the first half of the night all was relatively quiet. At then, at 3.00 a.m. on 6 May, Sticha and his fellow fighters heard the guttural sound of revving engines carrying in the night air form the south of the city. It was a column of tanks. The first armoured SS units were moving towards Prague. General Pückler-Burghaus set out the following order: ‘Our attack begins at dawn. Swastikas are to be displayed on houses as visual markings for the Luftwaffe. We will use incendiary bombs. This nest of vipers will be exterminated.’

At 8.50 a.m. on 6 May the Czech Military Council sent out urgent orders that more barricades be built, blocking off all access to the centre of Prague. Support for the uprising was growing, and fresh combat groups were ordered to go underground and defend the system of sewers and tunnels that ran into Old Town Hall Square from German incursions. Ammunition was arriving – and boxes of Panzerfausts were distributed among the insurgents. But SS units were now converging on the city.

A makeshift hospital was set up in the basement of the Old Town Hall. It contained a small surgery and sixteen mattresses – and within a few hours more than 120 seriously wounded Czech fighters had been brought there. For later that morning SS forces had gathered in sufficient strength to start a major offensive against the rebels.

Shooting began again at about 10.30 a.m. The Czechs had no anti-tank weapons and despite determined resistance were steadily forced back. ‘We swore that we would hold on and keep Prague free,’ said Sticha. ‘There was an incredible resolve amongst our forces.’ But that afternoon groups of German tanks smashed through many of the outer barricades. By the early evening the rebels had been pushed on to a series of makeshift defences in Prague’s city centre. Flames were rising from buildings and streets they had vacated.

‘It was no longer possible to hold our positions,’ said Harak Bohumil. ‘The barricade we held at noon had to be abandoned hours later after three German tanks got behind it. That evening we were on our last defence line.’

And that same evening, it was becoming clear that there would be no help from the Americans. General Omar Bradley sensed that Patton might be ignoring the new stop line. He rang him and did not mince his words, finishing with: ‘You hear me, George, goddammit,
halt!
’ Patton was firmly told to withdraw his forward reconnaissance units and stay where he was. ‘We will probably never get the chance to do something like this again,’ he told his staff ruefully. His troops felt the same sense of disappointment. ‘After two hours holding the bridge over the Vlatva, south-west of Prague, we expected at any moment to push on into the city,’ said Lieutenant Edward Krusheski of the 69th Armored Infantry Battalion. ‘And then, in the early evening, we were ordered back to Pilsen. It was an incredible let-down.’

However, General Eisenhower’s caution – misjudged earlier on – was now well founded. Early on 5 May the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Karl Frank, had flown back into Prague after consultation with Admiral Dönitz at Flensburg. Dönitz and Frank had seen an opportunity to create further tension within the Grand Alliance. That morning Frank had radioed Dönitz – and the content of his message, decrypted by the ULTRA system, was then passed on to the Allied Supreme Commander: ‘I suggest to you that Czech Bohemia is the place where we can engineer a disagreement between the western allies and the Soviet Union even more serious than that of Poland.’

At the end of April Karl Frank had threatened to drown any uprising in ‘a sea of blood’. Frank, who succeeded to power in the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, had shown the cruelty and ruthlessness necessary to carry out brutal intimidation of the Czech people, wiping the village of Lidice off the face of the earth (killing many of its inhabitants, transporting the rest to Ravensbrück concentration camp and burning the place to the ground) for its supposed connection with the assassins. But now Frank could see which way the wind was blowing. On the morning of 5 May he gained Dönitz’s approval for a bold and surprising political manoeuvre. Frank proposed to dissolve the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, hand power over to the collaborationist Czech government within Prague and invite General Patton’s Third Army into the city. At 11.00 a.m. Frank presented this plan to a Czech delegation led by Richard Bienert, Minister for the Interior, at a meeting in the Cernin Palace.

The uprising brought these proceedings to a halt – and the insurgents arrested Bienert, who promptly swore an oath of allegiance to the exiled Czechoslovak government of President Edvard Benes. At 9.00 p.m. talks resumed – through the mediation of the International Red Cross – between Frank and the Czech National Committee. They ended inconclusively. But the following morning – on his own authority – Frank sent a message to the US Third Army saying there would be no resistance if it entered the city. And at 2.40 p.m. Admiral Dönitz and Field Marshal Keitel issued orders that any American advance on Prague should not be opposed by Wehrmacht troops.

General Eisenhower was sitting on a powder keg. If he moved on the Czech capital he would not just be breaking an agreement over demarcation lines; it might also appear to the Soviet Union that he had entered into an illicit agreement with the Germans. And that would imperil the very future of the Grand Alliance. It was a risk he could not afford to take.

The terrible consequence was that Prague seemed now to be left to its fate. But in this desperate situation for the Czech insurgents, help now arrived from a most unexpected quarter – General Andrei Vlasov’s Russian Liberation Army. For after days of secret negotiations with members of the Czech undergound, this army’s 1st Division – a well-equipped force of over 15,000 men – was prepared to turn against its German masters and support the rebels in Prague. And it was stationed less than 20 miles from the Czech capital. The Vlasovites could join forces with the Czech insurgents in a matter of hours.

On 14 November 1944 Prague Castle had been chosen for the launch of General Andrei Vlasov’s army. Himmler sent a letter of encouragement but excused himself from attending. Hitler acted as if he was entirely unaware that the event was happening at all. But most of the prominent civil and military figures in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were there. General Vlasov made a speech to this assembly, setting out the patriotic manifesto of his new army, which was dedicated to the overthrow of Bolshevism. It had been decided that this anti-communist force was to start serious military training and would then fight alongside the Wehrmacht.

It was a supreme irony that a force created with such ceremony in Prague to reinforce the Wehrmacht would some six months later be fighting the Germans for possession of the Czech capital. Veterans of the Russian Liberation Army recalled the birth of their army with emotion and pride. And yet, General Vlasov had surrendered to the Germans in June 1942. It had taken his masters more than two years to respond to his invitation to raise an anti-Bolshevik army and they had only done so now – with the war going hopelessly against them – out of dire necessity.

The Wehrmacht did not really trust the formation of a Russian Liberation Army and allowed it only with reluctance. Vlasov was now forced to recruit his troops from Russian POWs or slave labourers held on German soil. Some of these men were motivated by genuine patriotism and a detestation of communism. But others were joining simply to ameliorate their squalid living conditions. And German atrocities against the Russian people were now common knowledge.