Prague uprising
The Prague uprising of 1945 was a partially-successful attempt by the Czech resistance to liberate the city of Prague from German occupation during World War II. The preceding six years of occupation had fuelled anti-German sentiment and the approach of the Soviet Red Army and the US Third Army offered a chance of success. On 5 May 1945, in the last moments of the war in Europe, Czech citizens spontaneously attacked the German occupiers and Czech resistance leaders emerged from hiding to join the uprising; the Russian Liberation Army, fighting for the Germans and supported the Czechs. German troops counter-attacked, but their progress was slowed by barricades constructed by the Czech citizenry. On 8 May, the Czech and German leaders signed a ceasefire allowing the German forces to withdraw from the city, but not all Waffen-SS units obeyed. Fighting continued until 9 May; the uprising was brutal, with both sides committing war crimes. Violence against Germans, sanctioned by the Czechoslovak government, continued after the liberation, was justified as revenge for the occupation or as a means to encourage Germans to flee.
The US Third Army had refused to come to the aid of the Czech insurgents, which undermined the credibility of the Western powers in postwar Czechoslovakia. Instead, the uprising was presented as a symbol of Czech resistance to Nazi rule, the liberation by the Red Army was exploited by the Czechoslovak Communist Party to increase popular support for communism. In 1938, the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, announced his intention to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia with a high ethnic German population; as the previous appeasement of Hitler had shown, the governments of both France and Britain were intent on avoiding war. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier negotiated with Hitler and acquiesced to his demands at the Munich Agreement, in exchange for guarantees from Nazi Germany that no additional lands would be annexed. No Czechoslovak representatives were present at the negotiations. Five months when the Slovak Diet declared the independence of Slovakia, Hitler summoned Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha to Berlin and forced him to accept the German occupation of the Czech rump state and its re-organisation into the German-dominated Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
Germany promptly occupied the remaining Czech territories. Although France had a defensive alliance with Czechoslovakia, neither the French nor British intervened militarily; the Nazis considered many Czechs to be ethnically Aryan, therefore suitable for Germanisation. As a consequence, the German occupation was less harsh than in other Slavic nations. Wartime living standards were higher in the occupied region than in Germany itself. However, freedom of speech was curtailed and 400,000 Czechs were conscripted for forced labour in the Reich. During the six-year occupation, more than 20,000 Czechs were executed and thousands more died in concentration camps. In 1941, the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich was made Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and began enforcing the occupation more harshly. Within five days of Heydrich's arrival, 142 people were executed, his brutality led to the Allies ordering his assassination the following year, but the Germans killed more than a thousand Czechs in reprisal, including the entire villages of Lidice and Ležáky.
While the general violence of the occupation was much less severe than in Eastern Europe, it incited violent anti-German sentiment in many Czechs. During the spring of 1945, partisan forces in Bohemia and Moravia totalled about 120 groups, with a combined strength of around 7,500 people. Partisans disrupted the railway and highway transportation by sabotaging track and bridges and attacking trains and stations; some railways could not be used at night or on some days, trains were forced to travel at a slower speed. Waffen-SS units retreating from the Red Army's advance into Moravia burned down entire villages as a reprisal. Despite losing much of their leadership to a March 1945 purge by the Gestapo, Communist groups in Prague distributed propaganda leaflets calling for an insurrection. German soldiers and civilians became worried and prepared to flee violent retaliation for the occupation. In an attempt to reassert German authority, SS police general Karl Hermann Frank broadcast a message over the radio threatening to destroy Prague and drown any opposition in blood.
In early 1945, former Czechoslovak Army officers set up the Bartoš Command commanded by General Karel Kutlvašr to oversee fighting inside Prague, the Alex Command under General František Slunečko to direct insurgent units in the suburbs. Meanwhile, the Czech National Council, with representatives from various Czech political parties, formed to take over political leadership after the overthrow of the Nazi and collaborationist authorities. Military leaders planning an uprising within Prague counted on the loyalty of ethnically Czech members of the police and the Government Army of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, as well as employees of key civil services, such as transport workers and the fire brigade; the Russian Liberation Army, composed of Soviet POWs that had agreed to fight for Nazi Germany, was stationed outside of Prague. Hoping that the ROA could be persuaded to switch sides in order to avoid accusations of collaboration, the Czech military command sent an envoy to General Sergei Bunyachenko, commander of the 1st Infantry Division.
Bunyachenko agreed to help the Czechs. On 4 May, the US Third Army under General George S. Patton entered Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian, American, logician and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, David Hilbert were analyzing the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics pioneered by Georg Cantor. Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna; the first incompleteness theorem states that for any self-consistent recursive axiomatic system powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers, there are true propositions about the naturals that cannot be proved from the axioms. To prove this theorem, Gödel developed a technique now known as Gödel numbering, which codes formal expressions as natural numbers.
He showed that neither the axiom of choice nor the continuum hypothesis can be disproved from the accepted axioms of set theory, assuming these axioms are consistent. The former result opened the door for mathematicians to assume the axiom of choice in their proofs, he made important contributions to proof theory by clarifying the connections between classical logic, intuitionistic logic, modal logic. Gödel was born April 28, 1906, in Brünn, Austria-Hungary into the German family of Rudolf Gödel, the manager of a textile factory, Marianne Gödel. Throughout his life, Gödel would remain close to his mother. At the time of his birth the city had a German-speaking majority, his father was Catholic and his mother was Protestant and the children were raised Protestant. The ancestors of Kurt Gödel were active in Brünn's cultural life. For example, his grandfather Joseph Gödel was a famous singer of that time and for some years a member of the Brünner Männergesangverein. Gödel automatically became a Czechoslovak citizen at age 12 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up at the end of World War I.
In his family, young Kurt was known as Herr Warum because of his insatiable curiosity. According to his brother Rudolf, at the age of six or seven Kurt suffered from rheumatic fever. Beginning at age four, Gödel suffered from "frequent episodes of poor health," which would continue for his entire life. Gödel attended the Evangelische Volksschule, a Lutheran school in Brünn from 1912 to 1916, was enrolled in the Deutsches Staats-Realgymnasium from 1916 to 1924, excelling with honors in all his subjects in mathematics and religion. Although Kurt had first excelled in languages, he became more interested in history and mathematics, his interest in mathematics increased when in 1920 his older brother Rudolf left for Vienna to go to medical school at the University of Vienna. During his teens, Kurt studied Gabelsberger shorthand, Goethe's Theory of Colours and criticisms of Isaac Newton, the writings of Immanuel Kant. At the age of 18, Gödel entered the University of Vienna. By that time, he had mastered university-level mathematics.
Although intending to study theoretical physics, he attended courses on mathematics and philosophy. During this time, he adopted ideas of mathematical realism, he read Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, participated in the Vienna Circle with Moritz Schlick, Hans Hahn, Rudolf Carnap. Gödel studied number theory, but when he took part in a seminar run by Moritz Schlick which studied Bertrand Russell's book Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, he became interested in mathematical logic. According to Gödel, mathematical logic was "a science prior to all others, which contains the ideas and principles underlying all sciences."Attending a lecture by David Hilbert in Bologna on completeness and consistency of mathematical systems may have set Gödel's life course. In 1928, Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann published Grundzüge der theoretischen Logik, an introduction to first-order logic in which the problem of completeness was posed: Are the axioms of a formal system sufficient to derive every statement, true in all models of the system?
This problem became the topic. In 1929, at the age of 23, he completed his doctoral dissertation under Hans Hahn's supervision. In it, he established his eponymous completeness theorem regarding the first-order predicate calculus, he was awarded his doctorate in 1930, his thesis was published by the Vienna Academy of Science. Kurt Gödel's achievement in modern logic is singular and monumental—indeed it is more than a monument, it is a landmark which will remain visible far in space and time.... The subject of logic has completely changed its nature and possibilities with Gödel's achievement. In 1931 and while still in Vienna, Gödel published
Aryan
"Aryan" is a term, used as a self-designation by Indo-Iranian people. The word was used by the Indic people of the Vedic period in India as an ethnic label for themselves and to refer to the noble class as well as the geographic region known as Āryāvarta, where Indo-Aryan culture is based; the related Iranian people used the term as an ethnic label for themselves in the Avesta scriptures, the word forms the etymological source of the country name Iran. It was believed in the 19th century that Aryan was a self-designation used by all Proto-Indo-Europeans, a theory that has now been abandoned. Scholars point out that in ancient times, the idea of being an "Aryan" was religious and linguistic, not racial. Drawing on misinterpreted references in the Rig Veda by Western scholars in the 19th century, the term "Aryan" was adopted as a racial category through the works of Arthur de Gobineau, whose ideology of race was based on an idea of blonde northern European "Aryans" who had migrated across the world and founded all major civilizations, before being diluted through racial mixing with local populations.
Through the works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Gobineau's ideas influenced the Nazi racial ideology which saw "Aryan peoples" as innately superior to other putative racial groups. The atrocities committed in the name of this racial ideology have led academics to avoid the term "Aryan", replaced, in most cases, by "Indo-Iranian"; the English word "Aryan" was borrowed from the Sanskrit word ārya, आर्य, in the 18th century and thought to be the self-designation used by all Indo-European people. Philologist J. P. Mallory argues that "As an ethnic designation, the word is most properly limited to the Indo-Iranians, most justly to the latter where it still gives its name to the country Iran. In early Vedic literature, the term Āryāvarta was the name given to northern India, where the Indo-Aryan culture was based; the Manusmṛti gives the name Āryāvarta to "the tract between the Himalaya and the Vindhya ranges, from the Eastern to the Western Sea". The term was used as a national name to designate those who worshipped the Vedic deities and followed Vedic culture.
The Sanskrit term comes from proto-Indo-Iranian *arya- or *aryo-, the name used by the Indo-Iranians to designate themselves. The Zend airya'venerable' and Old Persian ariya are derivates of *aryo-, are self-designations. In Iranian languages, the original self-identifier lives on in ethnic names like "Alans" and "Iron"; the name of Iran is the Persian word for land/place of the Aryans. The Proto-Indo-Iranian term is hypothesized to have proto-Indo-European origins, while according to Szemerényi it is a Near-Eastern loanword from the Ugaritic ary, kinsmen, it has been postulated the Proto-Indo-European root word is *haerós with the meanings "members of one's own group, freeman" as well as the Indo-Iranian meaning of Aryan. Derived from it were words like the Hittite prefix arā- meaning member of one's own group, peer and friend; the word *haerós itself is believed to have come from the root *haer- meaning "put together". The original meaning in Proto-Indo-European had a clear emphasis on the "in-group status" as distinguished from that of outsiders those captured and incorporated into the group as slaves.
While in Anatolia, the base word has come to emphasize personal relationship, in Indo-Iranian the word has taken a more ethnic meaning. A review of numerous other ideas, the various problems with each is given by Oswald Szemerényi. Proto-Indo-Europeans: during the 19th century, it was proposed that "Aryan" was the self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, a hypothesis, abandoned. "Aryan language family": the Indo-Aryan languages, Iranian languages and Nuristani languages, Indo-Aryan languages also called Indic. The term "Aryan" is used by Iranian nationalists to refer themselves. During the 19th century it was proposed that "Aryan" was the self-designation of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Based on speculations that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was located in northern Europe, a 19th-century hypothesis, now abandoned, the word developed a racialist meaning; the Nazis used the word "Aryan" to describe people in a racial sense. The Nazi official Alfred Rosenberg believed that the Nordic race was descended from Proto-Aryans, who he believed had prehistorically dwelt on the North German Plain and who had originated from the lost continent of Atlantis.
According to Nazi racial theory, the term "Aryan" described the Germanic peoples. However, a satisfactory definition of "Aryan" remained problematic during Nazi Germany; the Nazis considered the purest Aryans to be those that belonged to the "Nordic race" physical ideal, known as the "master race" during Nazi Germany. Although the physical ideal of the Nazi racial theorists was the tall, fair-haired and light-eyed Nordic individual, such theorists accepted the fact that a considerable variety of hair and eye colour existed within the racial categories they recognised. For example, Adolf Hitler and many Nazi officials had dark hair and were still considered members of the Aryan race under Nazi racial doctrine, because the deter
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was a German politician and leader of the Nazi Party. He rose to power as Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and Führer in 1934. During his dictatorship from 1933 to 1945, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland in September 1939, he was involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust. Hitler was raised near Linz, he moved to Germany in 1913 and was decorated during his service in the German Army in World War I. In 1919, he joined the German Workers' Party, the precursor of the NSDAP, was appointed leader of the NSDAP in 1921. In 1923, he was imprisoned. In jail, he dictated the first volume of his autobiography and political manifesto Mein Kampf. After his release in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, anti-semitism and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and Nazi propaganda, he denounced international capitalism and communism as part of a Jewish conspiracy.
By July 1932 the Nazi Party was the largest elected party in the German Reichstag, but did not have a majority, no party was able to form a majority parliamentary coalition in support of a candidate for chancellor. Former chancellor Franz von Papen and other conservative leaders persuaded President Paul von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Shortly after, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act of 1933, which began the process of transforming the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany, a one-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of National Socialism. Hitler aimed to eliminate Jews from Germany and establish a New Order to counter what he saw as the injustice of the post-World War I international order dominated by Britain and France, his first six years in power resulted in rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the abrogation of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War I, the annexation of territories inhabited by millions of ethnic Germans, which gave him significant popular support.
Hitler sought Lebensraum for the German people in Eastern Europe, his aggressive foreign policy is considered the primary cause of World War II in Europe. He directed large-scale rearmament and, on 1 September 1939, invaded Poland, resulting in Britain and France declaring war on Germany. In June 1941, Hitler ordered an invasion of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1941, German forces and the European Axis powers occupied most of Europe and North Africa. In December 1941, shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, Hitler declared war on the United States, bringing it directly into the conflict. Failure to defeat the Soviets and the entry of the United States into the war forced Germany onto the defensive and it suffered a series of escalating defeats. In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, he married his longtime lover Eva Braun. Less than two days on 30 April 1945, the two committed suicide to avoid capture by the Soviet Red Army. Under Hitler's leadership and racially motivated ideology, the Nazi regime was responsible for the genocide of at least 5.5 million Jews and millions of other victims who he and his followers deemed Untermenschen or undesirable.
Hitler and the Nazi regime were responsible for the killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre. The number of civilians killed during World War II was unprecedented in warfare, the casualties constitute the deadliest conflict in history. Hitler's father Alois; the baptismal register did not show the name of his father, Alois bore his mother's surname Schicklgruber. In 1842, Johann Georg Hiedler married Alois's mother Maria Anna. Alois was brought up in the family of Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. In 1876, Alois was legitimated and the baptismal register changed by a priest to register Johann Georg Hiedler as Alois's father. Alois assumed the surname "Hitler" spelled Hiedler, Hüttler, or Huettler; the name is based on "one who lives in a hut". Nazi official Hans Frank suggested that Alois's mother had been employed as a housekeeper by a Jewish family in Graz, that the family's 19-year-old son Leopold Frankenberger had fathered Alois.
No Frankenberger was registered in Graz during that period, no record has been produced of Leopold Frankenberger's existence, so historians dismiss the claim that Alois's father was Jewish. Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary, close to the border with the German Empire, he was christened as "Adolphus Hitler". He was the fourth of six children born to his third wife, Klara Pölzl. Three of Hitler's siblings—Gustav and Otto—died in infancy. Living in the household were Alois's children from his second marriage: Alois Jr. and Angela. When Hitler was three, the family moved to Germany. There he acquired the distinctive lower Bavarian dialect, rather than Austrian German, which marked his speech throughout his life; the family returned to Austria and settled in Leonding in 1894, in June 1895 Alois retired to Hafeld, near Lambach, where he farmed and kept bees. Hitler attended Volksschule (a state-owned primary schoo
