Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 16th of March 1939, Adolf Hitler stood at Prague Castle and proclaimed that for a thousand years the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia had formed part of the Lebensraum of the German people. With that declaration, a new kind of territory came into existence: the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. It was not a colony in any traditional sense, not quite a fully annexed region, and not truly independent. It was something deliberately ambiguous, a political fiction dressed up with postage stamps and a presidential guard while real power lay entirely with Nazi administrators. How did one of Europe's most industrially advanced nations end up swallowed in this particular way? Why did Hitler choose elaborate theater over outright annexation? And what did ordinary Czechs endure during the six years that followed?

• 2. A Crisis That Demanded Conquest

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  Hitler's Four Year Plan, launched in September 1936, aimed to have Germany ready for total war by 1940. By 1937 it was faltering badly. Germany lacked the foreign exchange to pay for the raw materials its armaments targets demanded. The British historian Richard Overy wrote that the plan's vast requirements could not be fully met by import substitution and industrial rationalization alone. At the Hossbach Conference in November 1937, Hitler told his military chiefs that Germany had to seize Czechoslovakia in the very near future. His reasoning was blunt: Czechoslovakia was the world's seventh largest arms manufacturer, and Germany needed both its productive capacity and its money. By early 1939, Germany had exhausted its foreign exchange reserves entirely. The British historian Victor Rothwell wrote that the Czechoslovak reserves of gold and hard currency seized in March 1939 were invaluable in staving off Germany's foreign exchange crisis. The occupation was, at its core, an act of financial desperation dressed as racial destiny.

• 3. The Raj as a Blueprint

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  Hitler had no real precedent in German history for what he was building, so he looked to the British Empire. The model he chose was the Princely states of India under the Raj. Just as Indian maharajahs in those states held nominal independence while a British resident wielded real authority, Hitler emulated that arrangement. The German media quite explicitly compared the relationship between Reich Protector Baron Konstantin von Neurath and Czech President Emil Hácha to that of a British resident and an Indian maharajah. Neurath was selected partly because, as a former foreign minister and former ambassador to the United Kingdom, he was known in London for his avuncular, dignified manner, traits associated with the popular image of a British person. Hitler calculated that copying the Raj would make the violation of the Munich Agreement more palatable to Britain. When that calculation proved wrong, the German media responded with a lengthy campaign denouncing British hypocrisy. The authorities deliberately granted the protectorate all the trappings of independence to encourage Czechs to collaborate. Neurath was eventually placed on leave in September 1941, though he kept his title until his official resignation in August 1943.

• 4. Squeezing an Economy

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  Czechoslovakia in 1939 was already a major hub of military production, manufacturing aircraft, tanks, artillery, and other armaments. The Germans wasted no time redirecting this capacity entirely toward their own war effort. The Czech crown was devalued to the Reichsmark at the rate of 10 crowns to 1 Reichsmark, even though the actual exchange rate should have been 6 crowns to 1 Reichsmark. This gap allowed German buyers to purchase goods in the protectorate at a steep discount. Inflation became a persistent problem, made worse by the German authorities refusing to raise wages in step with rising prices. Even members of the volksdeutsche, the ethnic Germans living in the protectorate, complained that their living standards had been higher under Czechoslovakia, a fact that surprised many who had expected conditions to improve under German rule. Because the protectorate sat just beyond the range of Allied bombers based in the United Kingdom, Czech factories worked almost without interruption until the war's final weeks, making this territory one of the most productive parts of the Nazi war machine.

• 5. Resistance, Reprisal, and Heydrich

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  On the 28th of October 1939, the 21st anniversary of Czechoslovak independence, Czechs took to the streets to demonstrate against the occupation. When the medical student Jan Opletal died on the 15th of November 1939 from wounds received in the October violence, widespread student demonstrations followed. The German response was swift and severe. On the 17th of November, all universities and colleges in the protectorate were closed, nine student leaders were executed, and 1,200 students were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Hitler grew dissatisfied with what he considered Neurath's soft approach. On the 29th of September 1941, he appointed SS hardliner Reinhard Heydrich as Deputy Reichsprotektor, effectively transferring all real power to him. Prime Minister Alois Eliáš, who had maintained secret contact with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London, was arrested, sentenced to death, and executed on the 19th of June 1942, shortly after Heydrich's own death. On the 4th of June 1942, Heydrich died from wounds inflicted by Czechoslovak commandos in Operation Anthropoid. His successor, SS-Oberstgruppenführer Kurt Daluege, responded with mass arrests, executions, and the complete obliteration of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky.

• 6. The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia

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  According to the 1930 census, 118,000 Jews lived in Bohemia and Moravia. Of the 92,199 people classified as Jews by German authorities in the protectorate as of 1939-78,154 were murdered in the Holocaust, a figure representing 85 percent of that counted population. The fortress town of Terezín was converted into a ghetto waystation, used also as a propaganda showpiece to deceive outside observers. Of the 140,000 Jews brought to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, 33,000 died from the harsh and unhygienic conditions, and a further 88,000 were sent on to extermination camps; only 19,000 survived. The Romani population suffered annihilation so complete that the Bohemian Romani language became entirely extinct. Romani internees were sent to the Lety and Hodonín concentration camps before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau for gassing. The vast majority of Romani people in the Czech Republic today descend from migrants who moved from Slovakia within post-war Czechoslovakia. Across the full Czech population, between 36,000 and 55,000 people died from political persecution and murders in concentration camps.

• 7. Teachers, Students, and Survival

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  Karl Hermann Frank called Czech teachers the most dangerous wing of the intelligentsia. Reinhard Heydrich described them as the training core of the opposition Czech government in exile in London. To keep their jobs, teachers were required to demonstrate fluency in German and to greet students with the fascist salute while saying "Sieg Heil!" School inspectors arrived without warning, and all chairpersons of exam boards had to be ethnic Germans. Gestapo informers operated within the schools, and one teacher recalled that uncertainty and mistrust destroyed any feeling of comradeship among the children. Some teachers responded by quietly inserting anti-Reich ideas into their lessons. The cost was severe. In the first six months of 1944 alone, about 1,000 Czech teachers were either executed or imprisoned. By 1945, roughly 5,000 were imprisoned in concentration camps, where a fifth of them died. By the end of the occupation, about 40 percent of all Czech teachers had been dismissed, a figure that reached 60 percent in Prague. When Germany surrendered in May 1945 and the protectorate ceased to exist, the question of accountability fell to postwar Czech society, where the puppet Czech administration occupied a morally complicated position that resisted simple condemnation.