CONTEXTS - The Rough Guide to Prague - page 355

public (officially known as Czecho-Slovakia), Emil Hácha became president, Slovakia and
Ruthenia electing their own autonomous governments.
The Second Republic was not long in existence before it, too, collapsed. On March 15,
1939, Hitler informed Hácha of the imminent Nazi occupation of what was left of the Czech
Lands, and persuaded him to demobilize the army, again against the wishes of many Czechs.
The Germans encountered no resistance (nor any response from the Second Republic's sup-
posed guarantors, Britain and France) and swiftly set up the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia
andMoravia . The Hungarians effortlessly crushed Ruthenia's brief independence, while the
Slovak People's Party, backed by the Nazis, declared Slovak independence , under the lead-
ership of the clerical fascist Jozef Tiso.
World War II
In the first few months of the occupation, left-wing activists were arrested, and Jews were
placed under the infamous Nuremberg Laws, but Nazi rule in the Protectorate was not as
harsh as it would later become. The relatively benign, conservative aristocrat Baron von
Neurath was appointed Reichsprotektor , though his deputy was the rabid Sudeten German
Nazi Karl Hermann Frank. Then, on October 28 (Czechoslovak National Day), during a
demonstration against the Nazi occupiers, JanOpletal , a Czech medical student, was fatally
wounded; he died in hospital on November 11. Prague's Czech students held a wake in the
pub U Fleků , after which there were further disturbances. Frank used these as an excuse to
close down all Czech institutions of higher education, on November 17, executing a number
of student leaders and sending more than a thousand more off to the camps.
The assassination of Heydrich
In1941,Himmler'sdeputyintheSS, ReinhardHeydrich ,wasmade Reichsprotektor .More
arrests and deportations followed, prompting the Czech government-in-exile to organize the
most audacious assassination to take place in Nazi-occupied Europe. In June 1942, Heydrich
was fatally wounded by Czech parachutists on the streets of Prague. The reprisals were swift
and brutal, culminating in the destruction of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Meanwhile,
the “final solution” was meted out to the country's remaining Jews, who were transported
first to the ghetto in Terezín, and then on to the extermination camps. The rest of the popula-
tion were frightened into submission - very few acts of active resistance being undertaken in
the Czech Lands until the Prague Uprising of May 1945.
The Prague Uprising and liberation
Bytheendof1944,CzechoslovakandRussiantroopshadbeguntoliberatethecountry,start-
ing with Ruthenia, which Stalin decided to take as war booty despite having guaranteed to
maintain Czechoslovakia's pre-Munich borders. On April 4, 1945, under Beneš's leadership,
theprovisionalNationalFront,or Národnífronta ,government-acoalitionofSocialDemo-
crats, Socialists and Communists - was set up in Košice. By April 18, the US Third Army,