Wilson played a key role in the peace treaty after World War I, which create the nation of Czechoslovakia out of Austria-Hungary. The statue went up in 1928, and stayed there ... for more than a decade.
Then on December 12, 1941, the Nazis pulled it down. They had declared war on the United States the day before, and wasted no time in cleaning up the area.
The Czechs wanted to bring it back some day, but the Cold War doomed those efforts for quite a while. Finally, in 2006, the American Friends of the Czech Republic got to work on a restored version of the statue. It was unveiled in October, 2011, with several key officials and ambassadors in attendance.
Ambassador Fred Eisen had this to say: "The monument that stood here was one not only to a great American president but also a monument, a symbol that recognized the close and lasting ties between our two nations. That monument recognized the many people who left here, who moved and settled in the New World and who made the United States a better country, the country it is now. The monument also recognized those such as myself, Fred, Madeleine and all of the American Friends of the Czech Republic who have come here from every corner of the United States who have the privilege to come back to their ancestral homelands.”
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