Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, the 14th largest city in the European Union and the historical capital of Bohemia. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of 2.6 million. The city has a temperate climate, with chilly winters. Prague has been a political and economic centre of central Europe complete with a rich history. Founded during the Romanesque and flourishing by the Gothic and Baroque eras, Prague was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the main residence of several Holy Roman Emperors, most notably of Charles IV, it was an important city to its Austro-Hungarian Empire. The city played major roles in the Bohemian and Protestant Reformation, the Thirty Years' War and in 20th-century history as the capital of Czechoslovakia, during both World Wars and the post-war Communist era. Prague is home to a number of well-known cultural attractions, many of which survived the violence and destruction of 20th-century Europe.
Main attractions include Prague Castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town Square with the Prague astronomical clock, the Jewish Quarter, Petřín hill and Vyšehrad. Since 1992, the extensive historic centre of Prague has been included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites; the city has more than ten major museums, along with numerous theatres, galleries and other historical exhibits. An extensive modern public transportation system connects the city, it is home to a wide range of public and private schools, including Charles University in Prague, the oldest university in Central Europe. Prague is classified as an "Alpha −" global city according to GaWC studies and ranked sixth in the Tripadvisor world list of best destinations in 2016, its rich history makes it a popular tourist destination and as of 2017, the city receives more than 8.5 million international visitors annually. Prague is the fourth most visited European city after London and Rome. During the thousand years of its existence, the city grew from a settlement stretching from Prague Castle in the north to the fort of Vyšehrad in the south, becoming the capital of a modern European country, the Czech Republic, a member state of the European Union.
The region was settled as early as the Paleolithic age. A Jewish chronicler David Solomon Ganz, citing Cyriacus Spangenberg, claimed that the city was founded as Boihaem in c. 1306 BC by an ancient king, Boyya. Around the fifth and fourth century BC, a Celts tribe appeared in the area establishing settlements including an oppidum in Závist, a present-day suburb of Prague, naming the region of Bohemia, which means "home of the Boii people". In the last century BC, the Celts were driven away by Germanic tribes, leading some to place the seat of the Marcomanni king, Maroboduus, in southern Prague in the suburb now called Závist. Around the area where present-day Prague stands, the 2nd century map drawn by Ptolemaios mentioned a Germanic city called Casurgis. In the late 5th century AD, during the great Migration Period following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Germanic tribes living in Bohemia moved westwards and in the 6th century, the Slavic tribes settled the Central Bohemian Region.
In the following three centuries, the Czech tribes built several fortified settlements in the area, most notably in the Šárka valley and Levý Hradec. The construction of what came to be known as Prague Castle began near the end of the 9th century, growing a fortified settlement that existed on the site since the year 800; the first masonry under Prague Castle dates from the year 885 at the latest. The other prominent Prague fort, the Přemyslid fort Vyšehrad, was founded in the 10th century, some 70 years than Prague Castle. Prague Castle is dominated by the cathedral, which began construction in 1344, but wasn't completed until the 20th century; the legendary origins of Prague attribute its foundation to the 8th century Czech duchess and prophetess Libuše and her husband, Přemysl, founder of the Přemyslid dynasty. Legend says that Libuše came out on a rocky cliff high above the Vltava and prophesied: "I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars." She ordered a town called Praha to be built on the site.
The region became the seat of the dukes, kings of Bohemia. Under Holy Roman Emperor Otto II the area became a bishopric in 973; until Prague was elevated to archbishopric in 1344, it was under the jurisdiction of the Archbishopric of Mainz. Prague was an important seat for trading where merchants from all of Europe settled, including many Jews, as recalled in 965 by the Hispano-Jewish merchant and traveller Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub; the Old New Synagogue of 1270 still stands in the city. Prague was once home to an important slave market. At the site of the ford in the Vltava river, King Vladislaus I had the first bridge built in 1170, the Judith Bridge, named in honour of his wife Judith of Thuringia; this bridge was destroyed by a flood in 1342, but some of the original foundation stones of that bridge remain in the river. It was named the Charles Bridge. In 1257, under King Ottokar II, Malá Strana was founded in Prague on the site of an older village in what would become the Hradčany area; this was the district of the German people, who had the right to administer the law autonomously, pursuant to Magdeburg rights.
The new district was on the bank opposite of the Staré Město, which had borough status and was bordered by a line of walls and fortifications. Prague flourished dur
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was a protectorate of Nazi Germany established on 16 March 1939 following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia on 15 March 1939. Earlier, following the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Nazi Germany had incorporated the Czech Sudetenland territory as a Reichsgau; the protectorate's population was majority ethnic Czech, while the Sudetenland was majority ethnic German. Following the establishment of the independent Slovak Republic on 14 March 1939, the German occupation of the Czech rump state the next day, Adolf Hitler established the protectorate on 16 March 1939 by a proclamation from Prague Castle; the German government justified its intervention by claiming that Czechoslovakia was descending into chaos as the country was breaking apart on ethnic lines, that the German military was seeking to restore order in the region. Czechoslovakia at the time under President Emil Hácha had pursued a pro-German foreign policy. Hácha was appointed president of the protectorate the same day.
The Protectorate was a nominally autonomous Nazi-administered territory which the German government considered part of the Greater German Reich. The state's existence came to an end with the surrender of Germany to the Allies in 1945. On 10 October 1938, when Czechoslovakia was forced to accept the terms of the Munich Agreement, Germany incorporated the Sudetenland, on the Czechoslovak border with Germany and Austria proper, with its majority of ethnic German inhabitants, directly into the Reich. Five months when the Slovak Diet declared the independence of Slovakia, Hitler summoned Czechoslovak President Emil Hácha to Berlin and intimidated him into accepting the German occupation of the Czech rump state and its reorganisation as a German protectorate. Hácha remained as technical head of state with the title of State President, but Germany rendered him all but powerless, vesting real power in the Reichsprotektor, who served as Hitler's personal representative. To appease outraged international opinion, Hitler appointed former foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath to the post.
German officials manned departments analogous to cabinet ministries, small German control offices were established locally. The SS assumed police authority; the new authorities dismissed Jews from the civil service and placed them outside of the legal system. Political parties and trade unions were banned, the press and radio were subjected to harsh censorship. Many local Communist Party leaders fled to the Soviet Union; the population of the protectorate was mobilized for labor that would aid the German war effort, special offices were organized to supervise the management of industries important to that effort. The Germans drafted Czechs to work in coal mines, in the iron and steel industry, in armaments production. Consumer-goods production, much diminished, was directed toward supplying the German armed forces; the protectorate's population was subjected to rationing. German rule was moderate by Nazi standards during the first months of the occupation; the Czech government and political system, reorganized by Hácha, continued in formal existence.
The Gestapo directed its activities against Czech politicians and the intelligentsia. The eventual goal of the German state under Nazi leadership was to eradicate Czech nationality through assimilation and deportation and to exterminate the Czech intelligentsia. In 1940, in a secret plan on Germanization of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, it was declared that those considered to be racially Mongoloid and the Czech intelligentsia were not to be Germanized, that about half of the Czech population were suitable for Germanization. Generalplan Ost assumed; the Czech intellectual élites were to be removed from Europe completely. The authors of Generalplan Ost believed it would be best if they emigrated overseas, as in Siberia, they were considered a threat to German rule. Just like Jews, Poles and several other nations, Czechs were considered to be untermenschen by the Nazi state; the Czechs demonstrated against the occupation on 28 October 1939, the 21st anniversary of Czechoslovak independence.
The death on 15 November 1939 of a medical student, Jan Opletal, wounded in the October violence, precipitated widespread student demonstrations, the Reich retaliated. Politicians were arrested en masse, as were teachers. On 17 November, all universities and colleges in the protectorate were closed, nine student leaders were executed, 1,200 were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp within Nazi Germany. During World War II, Hitler decided that Neurath was not treating the Czechs harshly enough and adopted a more radical policy in the protectorate. On 29 September 1941, Hitler app
Sudeten Germans
German Bohemians known as the Sudeten Germans, were ethnic Germans living in the lands of the Bohemian Crown, which became an integral part of the state of Czechoslovakia. Before 1945, Czechoslovakia was inhabited by over three million such German Bohemians, comprising about 23 percent of the population of the whole republic and about 29.5 percent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia. Ethnic Germans migrated into the Kingdom of Bohemia, an electoral territory of the Holy Roman Empire, from the 11th century in the border regions of what would be called the "Sudetenland", named after the Sudeten Mountains; this process of German expansion was known as Ostsiedlung. The name "Sudeten Germans" was adopted amidst rising nationalism in the aftermath of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a consequence of the First World War. After 1945, most ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia to Austria; the area that became known as the Sudetenland possessed chemical works and lignite mines, as well as textile and glass factories.
The Bohemian border with Bavaria was inhabited by Germans. The Upper Palatine Forest, which extends along the Bavarian frontier and into the agricultural areas of southern Bohemia, was an area of German settlement. Moravia contained patches of "locked" German territory to the south. More characteristic were the German language islands: towns inhabited by German minorities and surrounded by Czechs. Sudeten Germans were Roman Catholics, a legacy of centuries of Austrian Habsburg rule. Not all ethnic Germans lived in well-defined areas. Since the second half of the 19th century and Germans created separate cultural, educational and economic institutions which kept both groups isolated from each other; this form of separation continued until the end of the Second World War, when the Germans were expelled. In the English language, ethnic Germans that originated in the Kingdom of Bohemia were traditionally referred to as "German Bohemians"; this appellation utilizes the broad definition of Bohemia, which includes all of the three Bohemian crown lands: Bohemia and Silesia.
In the German language, it is more common to distinguish between the three lands, hence the prominent terms Deutschböhmen, Deutschmährer and Deutschschlesier. In German, the broader use of "Bohemian" is found; the term "Sudeten Germans" came about during rising ethnic nationalism in the early 20th century, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War. It coincided with the rise of another new term, "the Sudetenland", which referred only to the parts of the former Kingdom of Bohemia that were inhabited predominantly by ethnic Germans; these names were derived from the Sudeten Mountains, which form the northern border of the Bohemian lands. As these terms were used by the Nazi German regime to push forward the creation of a Greater Germanic Reich, many contemporary Germans avoid them in favour of the traditional names. There have been ethnic Germans living in the Bohemian crown lands since the Middle Ages. In the late 12th and in the 13th century the Přemyslid rulers promoted the colonization of certain areas of their lands by German settlers from the adjacent lands of Bavaria, Upper Saxony and Austria during the Ostsiedlung migration.
In 1348, the Luxembourg king Charles I King of the Romans and Holy Roman Emperor from 1355, founded the Charles University in Prague, the first in Central Europe, attended by large German student nations, while the language of education was Latin. Czechs made up about 20 percent of the student body at the time of its founding, while the rest was German. A culturally significant example of German Bohemian prose from the Middle Ages is the story Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, written in Early New High German by Johannes von Tepl in Žatec, who had studied the liberal arts in Prague. For centuries, German Bohemians played important roles in the economy and politics of the Bohemian lands. For example, forest glass production was a common industry among German Bohemians. Though they were living beyond the medieval Kingdom of Germany, an independent German Bohemian awareness, was not widespread and for a long time it played no decisive role in everyday life. Individuals were seen as Bohemians, Silesians.
Defining events in German Bohemian history were the Hussite Wars, the occupation of Bohemia by the Czech Brethren, the Thirty Years’ War, during which the Lands of the Bohemian Crown were affected, forwarding the immigration of further German settlers. After the death of King Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia in the 1526 Battle of Mohács, the Habsburg archduke Ferdinand of Austria had become King of Bohemia and the country became a constituent state of the Habsburg Monarchy. With the rise of the Habsburgs in Bohemia after the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, the old Bohemian nobility became meaningless; the Bohemian crown lands were ruled from the Austrian capital Vienna, which favored the dominance of both the German language and German culture. On the other hand, the 18th century Silesian Wars of King Frederick II of Prussia against Austria, resulting in the loss of this traditionally Bohemian crown land, weakened Germans in the remaining parts of the Bohemian kingdom; as the 19th century arrived, resistance to the German domination began to develop among
Jan Žižka partisan brigade
The 1st Czechoslovak Partisan Brigade of Jan Žižka known as Ušiak-Murzin Unit, was the largest partisan unit in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. After its core membership of Soviet-trained paratroopers were dropped into Slovakia in August 1944, the brigade crossed into Moravia and began operations in earnest at the end of 1944, its focus was guerrilla warfare sabotage and intelligence gathering. In 1938, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler announced his intentions 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 other Western political leaders negotiated with German Chancellor Adolf 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 Paris nor London 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. For example, food rations in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were identical to those in Germany; the occupation influenced the daily life of ordinary Czechs by the militarisation of the economy, the elimination of political rights, transportation to Germany for forced labour. More than 20,000 Czechs were executed, thousands more were deported to concentration camps.
While the general violence of the occupation was less severe than in Eastern Europe, it caused many Czech people to hate the Germans living within the Protectorate, support partisan groups. Although there was wide popular support for the resistance, in other ways the Protectorate was ill-suited to partisan activity. There were few guns, despite the liberal firearms policies in place prior to the occupation; the Protectorate was urbanized, which made the establishment of partisan field camps in woods or mountains impractical, the excellent transport and communications infrastructure was at the disposal of the Nazi security apparatus. The ethnic German minority tended to cooperate with the occupiers and some local Germans joined the security forces, which benefited from their fluency in Czech and knowledge of the local geography; the Nazi administration brought in Reinhard Heydrich as Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in order to enforce policy more harshly. His brutality led to the Allies ordering his assassination in May 1942.
In the violent crackdown that followed, known in Czech as the Heydrichiáda, more than a thousand Czechs were murdered, including the entire village of Lidice. Some former members of the resistance evaded arrest by fleeing into the Moravian mountains and forming partisan groups; the first documented partisan group was the Green Cadre, active in the Hostýn-Vsetín Mountains along the Czech-Slovak border from early 1942. There were urban resistance groups, such as the White Lioness active in the areas of Silesia around Frýdek-Místek and Ostrava; such partisan groups depended on the support of the local population and acted by cutting power lines and sabotaging railways. Beginning in April 1944, several paratrooper groups trained in Britain were dropped in Moravia in order to gather intelligence. However, according to historian Detlef Brandes, the emergence of the Žižka brigade was the beginning of effective guerilla resistance in the Protectorate. At the end of 1943, Czechoslovak Communist politicians asked the Soviet government to organize a partisan movement in the Protectorate and Slovakia.
Partisan units for deployment in Czechoslovakia received training in a suburb of Kiev. To support advancing Soviet troops, paratroopers were deployed in advance in Carpathian Ruthenia in Slovakia and also in Moravia; the partisan group that would become known as the Jan Žižka brigade was formed during training in Sviatoshyn. Most of its initial twenty-one members, including the commander, Lieutenant Ján Ušiak, were ethnic Slovaks, in accordance with the initial plans to deploy in Slovakia. Before the training at Sviatoshyn, some of them had fought as partisans in Belarus or in the Crimea/Odessa region; the unit included Hungarian defectors and seven Soviets, including Captain Dajan Bajanovič Murzin, second-in-command. The "Ušiak-Murzin Unit" parachuted near Sklabiňa, Slovakia in two groups, on the night of 21-22 August 1944 and the night of 30-31 August; the day before the first group arrived, a local partisan group which controlled the area had publicly announced the restoration of the Czechoslovak state.
The original orders had been for the unit to cross the Fatra mountain range and begin operations in northwest Slovakia. However, the plans were disrupted by the Slovak National Uprising; the unit conducted reconnaissance on a German counter-offensive, but soon Ušiak received orders to redeploy to Moravia, on 6 September they began to move north. The Ušiak-Murz
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process; the official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire; the Nazi regime ended. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, on 30 January 1933; the NSDAP began to eliminate all political opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the offices and powers of the Chancellery and Presidency. A national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany.
All power was centralised in Hitler's person and his word became the highest law. The government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitler's favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen; the return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity. Racism antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime; the Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and persecution against Jews and Romani people began in earnest after the seizure of power; the first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, liberals and communists were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed, many leaders imprisoned.
Education focused on racial biology, population policy, fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion; the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. The Nazi regime dominated neighbours through military threats in the years leading up to war. Nazi Germany made aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if these were not met, it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe. By early 1941, Germany controlled much of Europe. Reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas and a German administration was established in the remainder of Poland.
Germany exploited labour of both its occupied territories and its allies. In the Holocaust, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, or shot. While the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was successful, the Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant the Wehrmacht lost the initiative on the Eastern Front in 1943 and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the pre-1939 border. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated in 1944 and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe. After the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, capitulated in May 1945. Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war; the victorious Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945, while common English terms are "Nazi Germany" and "Third Reich". The latter, adopted by Nazi propaganda as Drittes Reich, was first used in Das Dritte Reich, a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; the book counted the Holy Roman Empire as the German Empire as the second. Germany was known as the Weimar Republic during the years 1919 to 1933, it was a republic with a semi-presidential system. The Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, contentious relationships with the Allied victors of World War I, a series of failed attempts at coalition government by divided political parties. Severe setbacks to the German economy began after World War I ended because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; the government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt, but the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices for consumer goods, economic chaos, food riots.
When the government defaulted on their reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr and widespread civil unrest followed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party (National
Kurt Daluege
Kurt Max Franz Daluege was the chief of the national uniformed Ordnungspolizei of Nazi Germany. Following Reinhard Heydrich's assassination in 1942, he served as Deputy Protector for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Daluege directed the German measures of retribution for the assassination, including the Lidice massacre. After the end of World War II, he was extradited to Czechoslovakia, tried and executed in 1946. Daluege, son of a Prussian state official, was born in the small Upper Silesian town of Kreuzburg on 15 September 1897, he served with the 7th Guards Infantry Regiment. He served on the Eastern Front. In October 1917, attended officer training in Doberitz. During his service on the Western Front, he was wounded in the head and shoulder, he declared 25 % disabled. Daluege was awarded second class and the Wound Badge in Black. After World War I, Daluege became leader of Selbstschutz Oberschlesien - Upper Silesian Self Defense — an Upper Silesian veterans' organization engaged in combat with the Poles in that region.
In 1921, he became active in the Freikorps Rossbach while studying engineering at the Technical University in Berlin. Two years he joined the Nazi Party and was assigned Party number 31,981. From 1924, he helped to organize the Berlin Frontbann a front organization for the Nazi Sturmabteilung, since it and the Nazi Party were banned in Prussia at the time. In 1926 he joined the SA directly becoming the leader of Berlin's SA and Goebbels' deputy Gauleiter, or Party leader, in Berlin. Throughout the period 1926—1929, Daluege led the Berlin-Brandenburg division of the SA. In July 1930, in accordance with Hitler's wishes, Daluege resigned from the SA and joined the SS with the rank of SS-Oberführer and membership number 1,119, his main responsibility was to spy on political opponents of the Nazi Party. Berlin SS headquarters was strategically placed at the corner of Lützowstrasse and Potsdamerstrasse, opposite the SA headquarters. In August 1930, when Berlin SA leader Walter Stennes had his men attack the Berlin Party headquarters, it was Daluege's SS men who defended it and put the attack down.
Sometime afterwards in an open letter to Daluege, Adolf Hitler proclaimed "SS Mann, deine Ehre heißt Treue!". Hitler promoted both Daluege and Heinrich Himmler to SS-Obergruppenführer, with Daluege the SS leader of northern Germany while Himmler controlled the southern SS units out of Munich in addition to serving as national leader for the entire SS. In 1932 Daluege became a Nazi Party delegate in the Prussian state parliament, in November 1932 was elected to the Reichstag representing the Berlin East electoral district, a seat he retained until 1945. At the same time, Hermann Göring moved Daluege to the Prussian Interior Ministry, where he took over the nonpolitical police with the rank of General der Polizei. Intrigue created by Göring and Heydrich surrounding Ernst Röhm led to Daluege's playing an important role in the infamous Night of the Long Knives during which Röhm along with many leading members of the SA were killed between 30 June and 2 July 1934, thus neutralizing the SA and shifting the balance of power within the party to the SS.
Evidence of Daluege's ruthlessness goes beyond his intrigue against his former SA comrades, are discernible in his remarks about anyone he considered a threat to society. He once argued that "the consciously asocial enemies of the people" must be eliminated by state intervention "if it hopes to prevent the outbreak of complete moral degeneration." Historian George Browder claims that Daluege "bragged that the Police Institute for detective training had been reorganized according to NS viewpoints", that advancement within this organization was contingent to a considerable degree on the internalization of Nazi ideology. By November 1934, Daluege's authority over the uniformed police was extended beyond Prussia to include all of Germany; that meant he commanded municipal police forces, the rural gendarmerie, traffic police, the coastguard, the railway police, the postal protection service, fire brigades, the air-raid services, the emergency technical service, the broadcasting police, the factory protection police, building regulations enforcement, the commercial police.
In 1936, the entire German police force was reorganized with the administrative functions exercised by the now defunct federal states reassigned to the nominal control of the Reich Interior Ministry, but under the actual control of Himmler's SS. Making the most of his police expertise and coinciding with his appointment, Daluege wrote and published a book entitled National-sozialistischer Kampf gegen das Verbrechertum; that same year, Himmler appointed Daluege as chief of the Ordnungspolizei, which gave him administrative, though not executive, authority over most of the uniformed police in Nazi Germany. He commanded the Orpo until 1943, rising to the rank of SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer und Generaloberst der Polizei. By August 1939, the strength of the Orpo under Daluege's command and control had reached upwards of 120,000 active-duty personnel. Further indications of the brutality coming from Deluege's office, are shown in a report dated 5 September 1939 outlining the methods to be employed during pacification operations in Poland.
Regarding uniformed polic
Lidice massacre
In World War II, in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, the Lidice massacre was a complete destruction of the village of Lidice, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, now in the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Adolf Hitler and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. In reprisal for the assassination of Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich in the late spring of 1942, all 173 males over 15 years of age from the village were executed on 10 June 1942. Another 11 men who were not in the village were arrested and executed soon afterwards, along with several others under arrest; the 184 women and 88 children were deported to concentration camps. The Associated Press, quoting German radio received in New York, said: "All male grownups of the town were shot, while the women were placed in a concentration camp, the children were entrusted to appropriate educational institutions." About 340 people from Lidice died because of the German reprisal and after the war ended, only 153 women and 17 children returned.
From 27 September 1941, SS-Obergruppenführer and General of Police Reinhard Heydrich had been acting as Reichsprotektor of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This area of the former state of Czechoslovakia had been occupied by Nazi Germany since 5 April 1939. On the morning of 27 May 1942, Heydrich was being driven from his country villa at Panenské Břežany to his office at Prague Castle; when he reached the Kobylisy area of Prague, his car was attacked by the Slovak and Czech soldiers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. These men, part of a team trained in Great Britain, had parachuted into Bohemia in December 1941 as part of Operation Anthropoid. After Gabčík's Sten gun jammed, Heydrich ordered his driver, SS-Oberscharführer Klein, to stop the car; when Heydrich stood up to shoot Gabčík, Kubiš threw a modified anti-tank grenade at Heydrich's car. The explosion wounded Heydrich and Kubiš. Heydrich sent his driver, Klein, to chase Gabčík on foot and in an exchange of fire, Gabčík shot Klein in the leg, below the knee.
Kubiš and Gabčík managed to escape the scene. On 4 June Heydrich, having refused to be operated on by non-Germans, died in Bulovka Hospital in Prague from septicaemia caused by pieces of upholstery and his clothing entering his body when the bomb exploded. Late in the afternoon of 27 May, SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank proclaimed a state of emergency and placed a curfew in Prague. Anyone who helped the attackers was to be executed along with their family. A search involving 21,000 men began and 36,000 houses were checked. By 4 June, 157 people had been executed as a result of the reprisals but the assassins had not been found and no information was forthcoming; the mourning speeches at Heydrich's funeral in Berlin were not yet over, when on 9 June, the decision was made to "make up for his death". Karl Hermann Frank, Secretary of State for the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, reported from Berlin that the Führer had commanded the following concerning any village found to have harbored Heydrich's killers: Execute all adult men Transport all women to a concentration camp Gather the children suitable for Germanisation place them in SS families in the Reich and bring the rest of the children up in other ways Burn down the village and level it Horst Böhme, the SiPo chief for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia acted on the orders.
Members of the Ordnungspolizei and SD surrounded the village of Lidice, blocking all avenues of escape. The Nazi regime chose this village because its residents were suspected of harbouring local resistance partisans and were falsely associated with aiding Operation Anthropoid team members. All men of the village were rounded up and taken to the farm of the Horák family on the edge of the village. Mattresses were taken from neighbouring houses where they were stood up against the wall of the Horáks' barn to prevent ricochets; the shooting of the men commenced at about 7:00 am. At first the men were shot in groups of five, but Böhme thought the executions were proceeding too and ordered that ten men be shot at a time; the dead were left lying. This continued until the afternoon hours. Another 11 men who were not in the village that day were arrested and murdered soon afterwards as were eight men and seven women under arrest because they had relations serving with the Czech army in exile in the United Kingdom.
The only adult man who survived this tragedy was František Saidl, arrested at the end of 1938, because on 19 December 1938 he accidentally killed his son Eduard Saidl. He had no idea about this massacre, he found out when he returned home on 23 December 1942. A total of 203 women and 105 children were first taken to Lidice village school the nearby town of Kladno and detained in the grammar school for three days; the children were separated from their mothers and four pregnant women were sent to the same hospital where Heydrich died, forced to undergo abortions and sent to different concentration camps. On 12 June 1942, 184 women of Lidice were loaded on trucks, driven to Kladno railway station and forced into a special passenger train guarded by an escort. On the morning of 14 June, the train halted on a railway siding at the concentration camp at Ravensbrück; the camp authorities tried to keep the Lidice women isolated, but were prevented from doing so by other inmates. The women were forced to work in leather processing, road building and ammunition factories.
Eighty
.jpg)
Nazi Germany
