Liberation of Prague

On May 9, 1945, the Red Army entered Prague. Most of the monuments, that are currently in UNESCO, were saved and intact. And the war was, now, finally over.

The bloodthirsty Frank, now stripped of any and all power, surrendered to the American Army in Pilsen the same day. In March and April of 1946, he was tried in Prague for war crimes. 5,000 people turned out to view execution of Frank by hanging in Prague’s Pankrác Prison on May 22, 1946. His body was thrown into an anonymous grave in the city’s Ďáblice Cemetery.

The numbers who died in the Prague Uprising are still not completely known. 1,694 Czechs were killed; an additional 1,600 were badly injured. About 30 soldiers in the Red Army lost their lives.

The crisis before protectorate

The new state had to cope with a number of issues. Industrial and agricultural production barely reached half of the pre-war level, the transportation system collapsed, inflation was rising, and there was a catastrophic lack of food. Moreover, there were significant differences in the new state between the economically developed Czech provinces and the rather underdeveloped agrarian Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine (Ruthenia). Czech industry was dominated by coal mining and consumption industries (textiles, glass, sugar, brewing). However, these industries were often dependent on imported raw materials, which made their situation more difficult in the destroyed Europe after the war. However, due to modern management systems introduced in practice, the national labor productivity grew. The pioneers in this field included Skoda’s machine-building works in Pilsen, and the firm of Tomáš Baťa (1876-1932), who in Zlín founded a very modern (for that period) shoe-making factory. The shoemaker, from a poor background, used his entrepreneurial spirit and made himself a businessman and a major player first in Europe, then all over the world. In his hometown, he established a perfectly operating company and made the then-small and insignificant town in Moravia a shoemaking metropolis.