By early May 1945, Nazi Germany was in total collapse. Adolf Hitler had killed himself, Berlin had fallen, and the Allies were closing in from the east and west. The remaining German forces from the Eastern Front were making a desperate rush to reach the west, to surrender to the Western Allies instead of their pursuers, the dreaded Soviet Red Army.
In Bohemia and Moravia, some 1 million German troops became bogged down in their withdrawal when on May 5, the Czech resistance in the capital Prague (as well as other key areas) broke out in an uprising. The German units were the Army Group Centre and Army Group Ostmark, which were the last intact German military formations. The following day, the Red Army, with 1.7 troops, launched its Prague Offensive, in the process joining the battle on the side of the Czechs.
Fighting continued until May 11 when some 860,000 German troops capitulated. The Prague Offensive was one of the few instances where fighting in the European theater continued after the official German surrender on May 7 and 8.
Prague’s capture by the Soviet Army had far-reaching consequences in the immediate post-war period. The U.S. Third Army had entered Czechoslovakian territory on May 4, and both the Soviets and Western Allies desired the capture of prized Prague, for geopolitical reasons in the post-war period. However, on the request of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, U.S. forces stopped at Plzen, 50 miles to the west of Prague.
In the aftermath of World War II, in 1948, the democratic government in Czechoslovakia was overthrown by a communist coup d’état. A socialist regime was formed that thereafter aligned with the Soviet Union.