to welcome the Red Army. War crimes German German forces committed war crimes against Czech civilians throughout the uprising. Many people were killed in summary executions, and the SS used Czech civilians as human shields, forced them to clear barricades at gunpoint, and threatened to shoot hostages in revenge for German soldiers killed in action. When tanks were halted by barricades, they were known to fire into surrounding houses. After violently evicting or murdering the inhabitants, German soldiers looted and burned Czech houses and apartment buildings. On several occasions, more than twenty people were killed at once; most of the massacres occurred on 7 and 8 May. Among those killed were pregnant women and young children, and some of the dead were found mutilated. After the uprising, a Czech police report described war crimes committed by the Nazis: In addition to the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht and the SS, Luftwaffe soldiers, along with the SA, participated in the torture and murder of prisoners held at the Na Pražačce school. Czech The Czechoslovak government-in-exile planned to expel the German minority of Czechoslovakia in order to create an ethnically pure Czech-Slovak nation-state. Throughout the occupation, Czech politicians had broadcast messages from London calling for violence against German civilians and suspected Czech collaborators. President Edvard Beneš believed that vigilante justice would be less divisive than trials, and that encouraging Germans to flee would spare the effort of deporting them later. Before he arrived in Czechoslovakia, he broadcast that "everyone who deserves death should be totally liquidated... in the popular storm" and urged the resistance to avenge Nazi crimes "a thousand times over." Minister of Justice asked resistance leaders to make liberation "bloody" for the Germans and to drive them out with violence. Communist leaders also supported the violence. Military leaders not only overlooked anti-German massacres and failed to punish the perpetrators, but actively encouraged them. The Czech Radio likely played a role in inciting the violence by passing on the anti-German messages of these political leaders, as well as broadcasting anti-German messages on its own initiative. Almost no one was prosecuted for violence against Germans, and a bill was proposed in the postwar parliament that would have retroactively legalised it. In Prague, Czech insurgents killed surrendered Nazi German soldiers and German civilians both before and after the arrival of the Red Army. Historian argues that there was no clear-cut distinction between