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We start right off with one of the most feared places in Prague during Communism, the prison of the secret police at Bartolomejska, where countless people were tortured using the most cruel methods. We continue to the National Avenue that saw the students protesting against the Nazi occupation in 1939 and against the Communist regime in 1989. Then to Wenceslas Square, covered with tanks and debris in 1968's «Prague Sping», as the forces of the Warszaw pact crushed the reform movement. We will see the Gestapo headquarters, where many brave resistance fighters met their end. After this, we go on to Square of the Republic, named after democratic state of Czechoslovakia founded in 1918 and ironically the home of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. But the revolutionary connection in Prague goes even further back than that, in 1912 Lenin comes to Prague on a secret congress, and before that Russian 'arch-anarchist' and rival of Marx, Bakunin tries his luck in the revolution of 1848.
During the Nazi occupation there were many secret broadcast stations set up by the resistance, involved in a cat-and-mouse game with the SS, culminating in the chaotic Prague Uprising in the last days of the war. The peace didn't last long, as only three years later, in 1948, the leader of the Communist party announces his intention to take power from a balcony right on Old Town Square. Just next to this balcony we find a house where Einstein spent many evenings in the literary salon of Berta Fanta during his time working at the university of Prague, where he got the idea for his well-known theories of relativity, ideas that would lead to the invention of the atom bomb and influence not only the end of WW2, but also the Cold War.
The Old Jewish Cemetery had an important role in Nazi mythology as the centre of the Jewish 'world conspiracy', and this was one of the reasons why Hitler wanted to create a 'museum of an extinct race' right here. During Communist times the Soviet KGB was omnipresent and we will have a look at their headquarters, located through an irony of history just next to the former SS headquarters.
We finish off with the weird and wonderful story of the world's largest Stalin statue and what happened to it, and the gripping tale of the men involved in the ass assassination of Reinhardt Heydrich – 'the Butcher of Prague'.
