Petschek Palace

The Petschek Palace is originally a bank house of a Czech-German Jewish man of finance Julius Petschek which was built in 1920. Before the war, the family sold their properties and left the country. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Nazi secret state police Gestapo took over the building and all the terror against the Czechs was run from there. Thousands of Czech patriots were questioned and tortured there. In the room called “biograph” they had to wait still up for their turn. Most of them did not survive brutal interrogations. When Reinhard Heydrich became a Reichsprotector, the Nazi created a martial court there and started to send people to the concentration camps and for executions. At the end of the war, the Petschek Palace was a fort of the Nazis, but the building was under a big pressure of the rebels and the Nazis surrendered before the Red Army came.