Word: czech
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Czech undergraduates at historic Prague University were roused to fury last week as death came to their 22-year-old political martyr, Medical Student Jan Opletal. On Oct. 28 he went out to celebrate Czechoslovak "Independence Day" and was brought home with six revolver bullets in his body. Shouting "Long Live Freedom!" and "Away With the Murderers!" his mourners marched with torchlights to Vinohradsky Square...
Defiant speeches drew a crowd of thousands, and patient Czech police, without truncheons or revolvers, began slowly and persuasively to edge the excited students down toward the river. Some students who refused to be herded broke from the rest, dashed into old Palace Square. Since they seemed bent on nothing more than singing Czech and Slovak national anthems, the unarmed Czech police were all for letting them alone, but German civilians with drawn revolvers suddenly appeared and drove the police to drive the students back to their university...
Afterward Schutzstaffel men claimed they found in the university an anti-Nazi broadcasting station and secret printing plant. Soon Prague heard the crack of firing squads. Nine Czech students were executed, and all universities in the Protectorate were closed for three years, treatment no less harsh than the Tsars used to give their rebellious undergraduates. Over 2,000 people were arrested in Prague. Eight hundred were almost immediately released, but the Nazis were said to be sending many of the rest to the notorious Buchenwald prison camp in Germany near Weimar...
...Prague, the Elite Guard garrison was raised to 10,000, the city placed under martial law. A terse communique soon announced the execution of three more Czechs, two of them policemen, "because of acts of violence against a German," which were not revealed. Czech Communists meanwhile stuck up in Prague during the night hammer-&-sickle posters advising Germans to "Clear out before Stalin comes...
...with the Soviet delegate to design ways & means whereby a Russian Army, going to the help of Czecho-Slovakia, could pass through Rumanian territory. Stanch friend of former Czecho-Slovak President Eduard Benes, King Carol turned down cold Polish Foreign Minister Josef Beck's scheme for partitioning the Czech State...