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Professor Dittrich died

It is with great sadness that we learned of the recent death of Professor Zdeněk Dittrich. We express our deepest condolences to his family.  

The Czech-born historian Zdeněk Dittrich died on 24 December 2015 at the age of 92 years. Zdeněk Dittrich left Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948, in the Netherlands he later became a professor of Eastern European history at the University of Utrecht.

In the Netherlands, Professor Dittrich had extensive publication activities, through numerous performances in the media during and after the Prague Spring he became a well-known personality. After 1989 he was a visiting professor at Charles University in Prague and Masaryk University in Brno. In the nineties, Professor Dittrich utmost advocated a revival of interest in the Jan Hus, the Czech priest burnt in 1415 for heresy. Professor Dittrich will be remembered also as so far the only Netherlands laureate of Gratias Agit honour awarded by the Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs annually for spreading the good name of the Czech Republic abroad.