Occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of October 1938, German troops crossed into the Sudetenland, and Czechoslovakia began to disappear. What followed was not a sudden conquest but a methodical dismemberment, stretching across seven years and carried out in stages that each left the remaining country weaker and less able to resist the next. Between 294,000 and 320,000 citizens would be murdered during the occupation, the majority of them Jews. Entire villages would be wiped from the map. A country that had ranked as Europe's seventh-largest economy would become, in Hitler's own words, an arsenal for the Reich. How did a modern, democratic, heavily fortified nation fall without a single decisive battle? What drove Hitler's obsession with this particular neighbor? And what happened to the people who refused to simply disappear?

• 2. The Economic Motive

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  At the Hossbach conference on the 5th of November 1937, Hitler made his intentions explicit to his senior commanders. Germany's real problem, he argued, was not military but economic. The Four-Year Plan launched in September 1936 had aimed to prepare the German economy for total war by 1940, but by 1937 it had already placed the government under severe strain. Germany was spending hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks on armament works such as the Reichswerke steel complex and costly programs for synthetic fuel, while simultaneously being forced to import both food and raw materials it could not produce itself.

  Germany had become Europe's second-largest importer, exceeded only by Great Britain. Critical materials like high-grade iron, oil, chrome, nickel, tungsten, and bauxite simply did not exist in sufficient quantities within German borders. By early 1939, the foreign exchange reserves needed to purchase these materials had run out. The Wehrmacht had its steel allocations cut by 30%, aluminum by 47%, cement by 25%, rubber by 14%, and copper by 20%.

  Czechoslovakia, by contrast, had Europe's seventh-largest economy and by far the most developed in Eastern Europe. The former Austrian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia had been the industrial heartland of the Habsburg empire, manufacturing most of the weapons for the Imperial Austrian Army. Czechoslovakia was the world's seventh-largest arms manufacturer and the only nation in Eastern Europe besides the Soviet Union that produced its own weapons domestically.

  The British historian Richard Overy captured Hitler's reasoning plainly: he saw war instrumentally, as the Japanese had in Manchuria, as a way to expand the German resource base. On the 8th of March 1939, Hitler told Wilhelm Keppler, the NSDAP's economic expert, that Germany needed Czechoslovakia's raw materials and industries. After the seizure in March 1939, the historian Victor Rothwell described the Czechoslovak gold and hard currency taken as "invaluable in staving off Germany's foreign exchange crisis." The haul also included nearly 500 tanks and nearly 1,600 aircraft, enough weaponry, Hitler claimed in the Reichstag, to arm roughly half of the Wehrmacht at that moment.

• 3. The Munich Betrayal

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  Edvard Beneš, the Czechoslovak president, knew what was coming. On the 20th of May 1938, he ordered a partial mobilization in response to the threat of German invasion. The Czechoslovak Army was modern, possessed an excellent system of frontier fortifications, and was prepared to fight. The Soviet Union announced its willingness to assist. But Beneš refused to go to war without the backing of the Western powers, and that backing was not forthcoming.

  Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein had met with Hitler in Berlin on the 28th of March 1938 and been instructed to raise demands that the Czechoslovak government could never accept. On the 24th of April, Henlein's Sudeten German Party issued the Karlsbader Programm, demanding autonomy for the Sudetenland and the right to profess National Socialist ideology openly. By early September, Beneš had offered his Fourth Plan, which granted nearly all of those demands. The Sudeten Germans broke off negotiations anyway on the 13th of September, provoked violence in Ostrava, and Henlein flew to Germany and demanded outright annexation.

  British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain believed Hitler's territorial ambitions were limited and that Sudeten German grievances were genuine. France deferred entirely to Britain. Both governments pressured Czechoslovakia to concede, and on the 21st of September Czechoslovakia capitulated. The next day Hitler added new demands, insisting that the claims of Poland and Hungary also be satisfied. Romania was invited to take a share of Carpathian Ruthenia but refused, being an ally of Czechoslovakia through the Little Entente.

  The Munich Agreement was signed on the 29th of September 1938 by Germany, Italy, France, and Britain. The Czechoslovak government was neither invited nor consulted. The army opposed the capitulation but was overruled. Hitler had told a Berlin audience on the 26th of September that the Sudetenland was "the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe." Beneš resigned as president on the 5th of October 1938, recognizing the fall of his country as a fait accompli. He would soon make his way to London, where the unfinished business of Czechoslovak independence would continue by other means.

• 4. Dismemberment and Coercion

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  Before the last ink dried on the Munich Agreement, Czechoslovakia was already being pulled apart from multiple directions. Under the First Vienna Award in early November 1938, Germany and Italy arbitrated a transfer of southern Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia to Hungary, giving Hungary 11,882 square kilometers of territory in which, according to a 1941 census, about 86.5% of the population was Hungarian. Poland moved simultaneously, annexing the town of Cesky Tesín and the surrounding 906 square kilometers, home to some 250,000 people. About 115,000 Czechs and 30,000 Germans fled to the remaining rump state; by the 1st of March 1939, the Institute for Refugee Assistance counted nearly 150,000 refugees.

  The rump state, now renamed Czecho-Slovakia and led by President Emil Hácha, had lost its natural mountain frontier and its costly fortification system. Hácha pursued a slavishly pro-German foreign policy because he believed it was the only way to preserve what remained. He was wrong about how long that would last.

  On the 13th of March 1939, Hitler summoned Slovak leader Jozef Tiso to Berlin. The following day the Slovak Diet unanimously declared independence. On the 14th of March, Hácha arrived in Berlin, where German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop met him before the main meeting. According to von Ribbentrop's testimony at the Nuremberg trials, Hácha said he "wanted to place the fate of the Czech State in the Führer's hands." Hitler then gave Hácha two choices: cooperate and receive a "tolerable" German entry, or face armed destruction.

  According to French Ambassador Robert Coulondre, by half past four in the morning Hácha was "in a state of total collapse, and kept going only by means of injections." He signed. Hitler told his secretaries afterward: "It is the greatest triumph of my life! I shall enter history as the greatest German of them all." On the 16th of March, Hitler stood at Prague Castle and proclaimed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, declaring that Bohemia and Moravia had "for thousands of years belonged to the Lebensraum of the German people." Chamberlain spoke in Birmingham the following day and told the British public that Hitler was attempting to "dominate the world by force."

• 5. The Arsenal and the Oppression

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  Reinhard Heydrich arrived in Prague in the autumn of 1941 as the new Reichsprotektor, and he brought with him a calculated mix of enticement and terror. For workers in the armaments industry, he arranged increases in food rations, free shoes, sports events, films, concerts, and plays. For a short period he even made Saturday a holiday. Heydrich privately called this approach "optical effects," believing that gestures like free cinema screenings could boost productivity in the war factories. Meanwhile inflation ran rampant, and wage increases consistently failed to keep pace with the cost of living.

  The reason German policy treated Czech workers with any degree of restraint at all was industrial. Czechoslovakia had fielded a modern army of 35 divisions and been a major manufacturer of machine guns, tanks, and artillery, most of them assembled at the Skoda factory in Plzen. Entire steel and chemical factories were dismantled and reassembled in Linz, Austria. Many Czech factories continued producing Czech designs until converted to German specifications. Czechoslovak weaponry played a direct role in the German conquests of Poland in 1939 and France in 1940.

  Nazi racial policy toward the Czechs carried its own internal contradictions. A faction within the Nazi hierarchy viewed a large portion of the Czech population as "capable of Aryanization" because some were believed to have German ancestry. The Czechs were therefore not subjected to the same degree of systematic brutality as Poles or Ukrainians. Heydrich, in a report to Berlin, dismissed Hácha as "incapable of Germanization" because he was always sick and arrived with a trembling voice. He had, by perverse contrast, a grudging respect for Prime Minister Alois Eliáš precisely because Eliáš was healthy and a determined defender of Czech interests, which Heydrich took as evidence of German blood. The forced productivity of an occupied population and the ideology of its occupiers were in permanent, unresolvable tension.

• 6. Resistance and Reprisal

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  Beneš from London and František Moravec, head of Czechoslovak military intelligence, built and coordinated a resistance network that stretched from the British Isles to the underground in Prague. Four main groups operated inside the country: the Defense of the Nation, the Political Center, the Committee of the Petition that We Remain Faithful, and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The Communist Party had gone underground after Munich but remained largely passive until June 1941, when Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union ended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact's ambiguous neutrality.

  The most consequential act of the entire resistance was Operation Anthropoid. On the 27th of May, Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, trained in Britain and parachuted into Czechoslovakia, carried out the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Hitler responded by ordering the arrest and execution of 10,000 randomly selected Czechs. Over 10,000 were arrested, at least 1,300 were executed, and by one estimate 5,000 died in reprisals.

  The Nazis demolished the villages of Lidice and Lezáky entirely. All men over 16 from Lidice were murdered. The rest of the population was sent to concentration camps, where many women and nearly all the children were killed. The villages had no connection to the Czech resistance; they were destroyed as a collective punishment.

  Czech pilot Sergeant Josef Frantisek was among the most successful fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain. Two thousand eighty-eight Czechs and 401 Slovaks fought in the 11th Infantry Battalion-East alongside the British in North Africa and Palestine. By mid-1942, German counter-intelligence had succeeded in breaking up the most experienced elements of the resistance. But guerrilla activity intensified again from 1944, with more than 4,850 national committees formed between 1944 and the war's end. On the 5th of May 1945, a spontaneous uprising began in Prague itself, with over 1,600 barricades erected and some 30,000 Czech men and women fighting for three days against 40,000 German troops supported by tanks, aircraft, and artillery.

• 7. Liberation and Its Costs

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  The liberation of Czechoslovakia came from multiple directions and carried its own complications. Beneš had signed an agreement with Soviet leaders on the 8th of May 1944 stipulating that Czechoslovak territory liberated by Soviet armies would be placed under Czechoslovak civilian control. On the 4th of April 1945, a provisional Czechoslovak government was established by the Soviets in the eastern Slovak city of Kosice, and Bratislava was taken the same day.

  On the 18th of April 1945, elements of General George S. Patton's U.S. 3rd Army crossed the western border near the town of Cheb. The most notable American action was the liberation of Pilsen on the 6th of May 1945, where the 16th Armored Division, with elements of the 2nd Infantry Division and the 97th Infantry Division, secured the city with minimal casualties. It was the last city taken by the U.S. Army in the European Theater. German forces capitulated on the 8th of May; Soviet troops arrived in Prague on the 9th.

  The final accounting was staggering. An estimated 345,000 World War II casualties came from Czechoslovakia, 277,000 of them Jews. As many as 144,000 Soviet troops died during the liberation of the country alone. In the east, Soviet forces had blocked the Czechoslovak delegation from exercising any authority in Subcarpathian Ruthenia; on the 19th of November 1944, communists meeting in Mukachevo issued a resolution requesting the region's separation from Czechoslovakia and incorporation into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The treaty ceding Carpathian Ruthenia to the Soviet Union was signed in June 1945.

  The postwar expulsion of the Sudeten German population, authorized at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, moved between 1.6 million Germans to the American zone and an estimated 800,000 to the Soviet zone. A joint Czech-German commission of historians, reporting in 1996, calculated that deaths caused by violence and abnormal living conditions amounted to approximately 10,000 persons, with another 5,000-6,000 dying of causes related to the expulsion, for a total of 15,000-16,000 victims, not counting approximately 3,400 suicides. Approximately 225,000 Germans remained in Czechoslovakia, of whom 50,000 emigrated or were expelled soon after.