Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia 1939-1945
During a walking tour when people ask me what was it like in Czechoslovakia during World War Two they are always surprised at my answer “there was no Czechoslovakia in World War Two”.
A Mental Picture
Try to picture a situation of somebody in Prague listening to the radio on March 14th 1939. It’s almost a year to the day when Germany annexed Austria. It’s just over 5 months since the Munich Agreement was signed (the Czechs were NOT signatories) and Germany has already annexed the part of your country they called the Sudetenland. Your President is now telling you that today what is left of your country has been split in half, tomorrow your part will be annexed by Germany, the day after that you’ll live in a place called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and by the way your money is now worth 20% less. And people ask me why I’m not too worried about Brexit…….
The Politics
Following the Munich Agreement the largest ethnic Slovakian political party had secret talks with Hitler’s National Socialists and reached a deal where they would get full autonomy in return for not supporting the Czechs. Great deal except for the fact that Hitler’s “Lebensraum” project would have killed most Slovaks anyway. On March 15th 1939 we had a President but he was no longer President of the country (Emil Hacha assumed the title of a regular German state president), we still had a Prime Minister (in Czech it’s a Premier and the leader of the largest party in Parliament) but for the guy put in overall charge we got a Reichsprotektor called Konstantin von Neurath. Not a bad guy by all accounts, WW1 decorated veteran, career politician and former German Foreign Minister. He was considered a safe pair of hands to introduce new regional structure, a new currency and a new Coat of Arms (because there could be no reference to Silesia or Slovakia).
Immediate Changes
The first thing was that every person in the country needed a new passport which would have been a logistical problem. Early in the Protectorate they got around that by simply pasting pieces of paper into the existing passport to remove any references to Czechoslovakia. This was in German, Czech and French. Later the authorities replaced the old passports with a special new document which dropped the French part and in fact dropped the Passport part and so became a kind of National Identity Card.
In a more sinister turn, if you were Jewish and you gave your passport in to be amended from 1940 then when you got it back it had a big red J on the inside cover. One country’s embassy, (not mentioning any names but it rhymes with pitzerland) enquired if there was a method to determine if somebody wishing to emigrate to that country was Jewish. Between March 1939 and September 1941 the state required you to have an entry visa to a country before they would give you an exit visa from the Protectorate.
The second major change was the currency. Again in the early years of occupation the old Czech banknotes being returned to banks were simply stamped “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”.
The third change was the regional and political structure of the country. The protectorate loosely followed the areas of Bohemia and Moravia but carved them up in the German “Gau” or joint geographical/administrative and political areas.
Reinhard Heydrich
History will show that Konstantin von Neurath was Reichsprotektor from 1939 to 1943 but whereas he oversaw the running of the country he certainly was not considered a true nazi having only joined the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) in 1937 and clearly he was not part of the inner circle around Hitler. Everything changed in September 1941 and the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich.
Often called the Reichsprotektor in the time of the Protectorate, Reinhard Heydrich’s official title was Deputy or “Acting” Reichsprotektor but it was very clear that he was the man in charge of three major briefs 1) Maintaining Military Industrial Output, 2) Suppression of Czech Resistance and the lesser known third task, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
This guy knew the whole plan. He knew about the plan for “Lebensraum” and with it the destruction of the Jewish ethnicity, the destruction of the Slavic ethnicity and basically the destruction of anybody who could not or would not be allowed to be part of the new world order. He held this position until June 1942 i.e. in a mere 8 months he had begun the process for the Holocaust and decapitated much of the old Czech military and political elite. His violent death marked the beginning of the end of effective Czech resistance. Many books have been written about him and many more will be. If you are interested in the events surrounding his death then read the Operation Anthropoid post. The picture above shows Reinhard Heydrich on the left (assassinated) and his temporary successor Karl Herman Frank (court appointed death by hanging).
The Effect on the Czechs
Many Czechs could speak German (this is only 20 years since the fall of the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian Empire) so German was still a common language in Slavic countries plus it was still widely used for business so initially in the cities and Austrian/German border areas there was an ease of communication. For the average man on the street, if he did not challenge the Nazis then largely life went on. However if you challenged the Nazi ideology, physical presence, political authority or social structure then you could expect to be arrested and dealt with harshly. This would result in the deaths of many military officials, politicians, teachers and religious people.
The Effect on the Jewish
Well we’ve all read the books and seen the films but here I’ll just point out some of the systematic separation of the Jewish Community in the first two years of the Protectorate.
1939 – Jews may emigrate but without money or valuables.
1939 – Jews are not allowed to have radios.
1940 – Jews are not allowed to enter cinemas.
1940 – Jewish identity cards marked with the red J.
1940 – Jews restricted to 1 hour per day to shop.
1940 – Jews are not allowed to go to restaurants.
1940 – Jews are not allowed into playgrounds.
1941 – Jews have to display the Star of David on clothing.
1941 – Jews may no longer emigrate.
1941 – Transportation of Jews to Terezin Ghetto begins.
Czechoslovakism
As early as 1943 the exiled leadership of the old Czechoslovakia were actively engaged in discussion about what state the country would be after the war and the end of the Protectorate. Would it return to Czechoslovakia or remain split. Czechoslovakism was the support for reunification. In April 1945 the Third Czechoslovak Republic was recognised by the allies as basically what had been Czechoslovakia in 1938 except for a part called the Carpathian Ruthenia which became part of the Soviet Union (present day Ukraine). These borders were ratified after the 1946 Czechoslovak elections.
The Reset
As President Edward Benes had decreed, the country literally reset to how it had been in September 1938 before the Munich Agreement. Companies reverted to the previous owners, the police force and military were reconstituted and anybody appointed to positions of authority during the Protectorate years were assessed and/or replaced.
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