Prague offensive

• 1. Introduction

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  The Prague offensive was the last major military operation of World War II in Europe, fought between the 6th and the 11th of May 1945. By that point, Berlin had already fallen. Germany's unconditional capitulation was just days away. And yet, in the mountains and forests of Bohemia and Moravia, more than a million soldiers were still in motion, and the fate of Czechoslovakia's postwar future hung on which army would arrive in Prague first.

  Two men in particular understood the stakes. Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin both saw Prague as a prize that could shape the political character of postwar Czechoslovakia. Stalin moved first. On the 1st of May 1945, even before Berlin had been fully subdued, he issued orders to redirect the 1st Ukrainian Front southward toward Prague. What followed was not a ceremonial march through a defeated country. Over 50,000 Allied casualties would be recorded in just six days of fighting. The last shots of the war in Europe would be fired at a settlement called Slivice, four kilometers southeast of Příbram.

• 2. Germany's Last Redoubt

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  Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, issued an order on the 2nd of May 1945 that would shape the entire coming week: German forces were to avoid Soviet capture and seek surrender to Western Allies instead. It was a plan born from cold calculation.

  The Nazi regime had long treated Czechoslovakia and its surrounding areas as a final fallback position. Powerful formations had been concentrated there: elements of the 6th SS Panzer Army, the 1st and 4th Panzer Armies, and the 7th, 8th, and 17th Combined Armies. Army Group Centre's deployment at the start of May resembled a horseshoe straddling the historical regions of Bohemia and Moravia.

  The terrain only complicated matters for any attacker. The 1st Ukrainian Front, approaching from the north, had to cross the Ore Mountains on its way down from the area around Dresden and Bautzen. The routes of the other fronts cut perpendicular to forested ridge lines. Only the 2nd Ukrainian Front, coming up from the southeast, had the relative advantage of lower ground leading toward Prague.

  On the 2nd of May, SS Senior Group Leader Karl Hermann Frank had gone on Prague radio to announce he would drown any uprising in a sea of blood. Frank knew Soviet fronts were closing in. He also knew the city's population was ready to act.

• 3. The Uprising Begins

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  By the 5th of May 1945, lead elements of the U.S. V Corps had reached Plzen, and word of the American advance spread quickly through Prague. Czech citizens took it as a signal. They rose up against the German occupation that same day, seizing a radio station and broadcasting appeals in Russian and English for air support against German armored units.

  General Omar Bradley, meeting with Marshal Ivan Konev on the 5th of May, proposed that U.S. forces advance on Prague. Konev declined. He acknowledged the good will of the offer but explained that Bradley's proposal would have violated the previously agreed boundary between Soviet and Anglo-American zones of liberation. Konev had no authority to accept it, and he promised the USSR alone would destroy the local German forces as soon as possible.

  The events in Prague forced Stalin's hand. He had originally ordered the offensive to begin on the 7th of May. The uprising caused him to move the start date forward by one day, to the 6th of May.

  Adding another layer of complexity, the 1st Division of the Russian Liberation Army, a force of former Soviet prisoners fighting under German command, moved into Prague and turned against their German overseers. By the 7th of May, General Bunyachenko's division had occupied both the airport and the radio station. The Czech National Council denounced them. The Soviet government declared all such soldiers traitors; their members faced detention in prison camps. The KONR's intervention was useful to the Czechs in the short term but came at a steep personal cost.

• 4. Six Days of Battle

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  Marshal Konev opened the offensive on the 6th of May with five armies striking south from the area around Riesa. The 13th Army and the 4th Guards Tank Army pushed forward some 23 kilometers on the first day alone. That same day, 40,000 German troops in Breslau surrendered to the Soviet 6th Army after a two-month siege.

  On the 7th of May, the 3rd Guards Army took Meissen, home of the famous German porcelain, while the 4th Guards Tank Army pushed a further 45 kilometers south to the northern slopes of the Ore Mountains. That evening Jodl signed the surrender of all German forces at SHAEF, to take effect at 2301 hours on the 8th of May. U.S. forces in western Czechoslovakia immediately ceased offensive operations. Soviet forces did not.

  Field Marshal Schörner, commanding Army Group Centre, had devised a plan he called Blumen-Operation: a fighting withdrawal westward so his men could surrender to Americans rather than Soviets. Schörner himself did not share the fate he assigned his soldiers. On the 8th of May, the 4th Guards Tank Army overran the Army Group Centre headquarters, capturing or killing the personnel there. Schörner was not among them. He had already slipped away to Podbořany, from where he flew the next day to Bavaria in civilian clothes. Nine days later, German troops in Austria detained him and handed him to the Americans.

  During the night of the 8th and the 9th of May, armored units of the 3rd and 4th Guards Tank Armies drove south some 80 kilometers in darkness. They entered Prague at daybreak. With the help of the Czech population, the city was cleared of German troops by around 10:00 hours. Soviet planners described it as their easiest victory of the war; Red Army casualties in Prague itself were ten men killed.

  The last resistance continued past the formal end of the war. Remnant formations of Army Group Centre kept fighting through the 10th and the 11th of May, and some small units held out even later into May. The final shots were exchanged near the settlement of Slivice, four kilometers southeast of Příbram.

• 5. Prisoners and Aftermath

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  The Prague offensive destroyed Army Group Centre and large parts of Army Group Ostmark. These were the last large intact German military formations. In the two days after Prague was freed, Soviet units pushed west and south into Bohemia, cutting off the bulk of Army Group Centre and forcing it into a pocket to the east, northeast, and south of the city.

  The number of German prisoners taken by Soviet forces reached almost 860,000 men from the two army groups. The Soviets also claimed to have captured 9,500 guns and mortars, 1,800 armored vehicles, and 1,100 aircraft. Additional Axis soldiers, numbering at least in the tens of thousands, surrendered to U.S. forces in western Czechoslovakia and Austria, though numbers of these were later turned over to the Soviet Union.

  For Czechoslovakia, liberation came with an immediate complication. The country had been free of the German occupation regime for the first time since late 1938. But its prewar borders were not fully restored. In July 1945, the Soviets engineered the cession of Carpathian Ruthenia to the USSR.

  The political landscape shifted rapidly. Communist influence in the postwar Czechoslovak Army and government grew steadily. Czech soldiers who had fought alongside Western Allies found themselves sidelined. By 1948, a communist coup had made the country a Soviet satellite state. Stalin had achieved what he set out to do on the 1st of May 1945: a strong Soviet military presence in Prague at the moment of Germany's final surrender in Czechoslovakia.

• 6. Deaths in the Wreckage

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  Even before the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague, prominent figures associated with the occupation regime began to die. Emanuel Moravec, known among Czechs as the Czech Quisling, died by suicide on the 5th of May, the same day the uprising began.

  Konrad Henlein, the former Czechoslovak politician who had led the Nazi Party of Sudeten Germans, died by suicide in American captivity on the 10th of May. His title at the end was SS-Obergruppenführer und Reichstatthalter.

  On the 12th of May, SS-Gruppenführer Count Pückler-Burghauss, commander of Waffen-SS forces in the Protectorate, signed the capitulation and then died by suicide.

  Dr. Emil Hácha, who had served as State President of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, was arrested in Prague on the 14th of May. He was beaten by the NKVD and transferred to the hospital wing of Pankrác Prison, where he died on the 27th of June 1945.

• 7. How History Wrote It

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  Volume 10 of the Soviet official history of the Second World War treated the Prague offensive primarily as a military event: which formations fought where, their axes of advance, their daily rates of progress. The history praised the combined effort of Soviet, Polish, Czech, and Romanian soldiers fighting for the freedom of the Czechoslovakian people. It made no mention of Stalin's political intentions regarding Czechoslovakia's postwar alignment.

  Published in 2008, Volume 10/1 of the German official history offered a sharper critique. It noted that the percentage of casualties in the Prague offensive was far lower than in the Berlin offensive and flagged Stalin's explicit goal of blocking Army Group Centre from surrendering to American forces. Despite titling its relevant section The End of Army Group Centre, the German history only briefly addressed the army group's final weeks and did not discuss its actual surrender at all.

  John Erickson, in The Road to Berlin, positioned himself somewhere between the two official accounts. Erickson included Stalin's political motivations, the Prague uprising, and the role of the Russian Liberation Army, while his treatment of German operations remained correspondingly limited.

  The casualty record gives the clearest measure of what the offensive actually cost. From the 6th to the 11th of May 1945, Allied forces suffered 11,997 irrecoverable personnel losses and 40,501 wounded and sick, for a total of 52,498. The 1st Ukrainian Front alone, fielding 806,400 men at the start, lost 23,383 over six days. That figure, and the 860,000 prisoners taken, are what the historiography has yet to fully reconcile with the description of Prague as an easy victory.