Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Czech: Protektorát Čechy a Morava; Czech (derogatory term) ‘Protentkrát’ [‘for the time being’, ‘until further notice’]

According to the standard definition, a protectorate is a partially sovereign state whose foreign representation and national defence are placed under the authority of another state by virtue of a treaty under international law. The Treaty of La Marsa of 8 June 1883, which established France’s protectorate over Tunisia as part of its colonial rule, served as the model for the structure of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was established by a ‘Führer Decree’ of 16 March 1939 on the territory of Czechoslovakia that had been occupied by Nazi Germany the previous day, which had already been stripped of its border regions – predominantly inhabited by a German population – on 30 September 1938 under the Munich Agreement. It covered an area of 49,363 square kilometres. The borders of the Protectorate corresponded to the provisions already agreed in Munich on the basis of an alleged linguistic boundary – and were therefore based neither on the geographical features of the landscape nor on economic or military criteria.

The occupation of what remained of the Czechoslovak Republic ( Slovakia had declared its independence the day before) took place, with a few minor exceptions, without a fight. Following the cession of the border fortifications to Germany under the Munich Agreement, the territory was virtually impossible to defend. Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler placed the decisive power in the occupied territory in the hands of the ‘Reich Protector’, under whose authority the Central Office of the German State Police was also established.

Immediately following the well-organised occupation, the Gestapo launched ‘Operation Gitter’ with the aim of internmenting communist and social-democratic officials, political émigrés from Germany and a number of prominent figures from public life and the arts as hostages. In ‘Operation Albrecht I’, carried out in early September, this practice of preventive arrest was further developed in order to intimidate Czech society and deter it from resisting the occupying power. Since the end of April, there had been a series of large mass gatherings—triggered by historical anniversaries (such as the anniversary of Jan Hus’s death) or organised by the Church—involving tens of thousands of citizens, which had a Czech nationalist and, in some cases, openly anti-German character.

Particularly large demonstrations took place on 28 October 1939, the anniversary of the founding of the Czechoslovak Republic. The German police responded to the mass demonstrations in the centre of Prague/Praha by firing their weapons. On 17 November, the funeral procession for the student Jan Opletal (1915–1939), who had been shot dead, became the catalyst for new Czech student demonstrations – demonstrations which were banned by the German police but deliberately provoked by students from German universities. The reaction of the occupying regime, which had been prepared in advance, was harsh: during the night, nine leading officials from all the student associations involved were arrested and shot; a large-scale round-up in Prague, Brno and Příbram, culminating in the deportation of 1,300 students to the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg concentration camp, where they remained interned for several years. The following day, Hitler’s decision to close the Czech universities for three years as a punishment was announced. The fact that their buildings, along with all their equipment, were immediately handed over to German universities suggested that this closure was intended to be permanent.

The President was the Protectorate’s highest representative. Emil Hácha (1872–1945), the former President of Czechoslovakia – whose territory had already been reduced – remained in office even after the occupation and held this post throughout the entire period of the Protectorate until 8 May 1945. He was dependent on the favour of Hitler and, by extension, the Reich Protector, who acted as his representative. The Protectorate government, appointed by the President, had to be confirmed by the Reich Protector, who also had the right to veto all laws, decrees and court judgements. The Czechoslovak Constitution remained formally in force, but the parliament was dissolved, as were all political parties. The Protectorate government, which operated on the basis of Enabling Act No. 330/1938 – declared to be of limited duration by a decree of the Reich Protector dated 12 December 1940 – was not permitted to pass laws, but only government decrees. Even these could be amended by the Reich Protector, vetoed or replaced by his own decrees.

The first Reich Protector in Prague was Konstantin von Neurath (1873–1956), who remained in this post de facto until the summer of 1941 and formally until 1943. On 27 September 1941, SS-Obergruppenführer and Police General Reinhard Heydrich effectively took over his position as deputy Reich Protector. Following Heydrich’s death, SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer and Commander-in-Chief of the Order Police Kurt Daluege (1897–1946) was sent to Prague as his successor to crush all resistance in the Protectorate. An even more significant role in determining the fate of the occupied society was played by the State Secretary in the Office of the Reich Protector and Commander of the Police, SS-Gruppenführer Karl Hermann Frank (1898–1946), who had been a leading figure among the Sudeten German National Socialists since the 1930s. In August 1943, he was appointed German Minister of State for Bohemia and Moravia. As a result, the office of Reich Protector – which was at that time held only nominally by Wilhelm Frick (1877–1946), the former Reich Minister of the Interior who had been stripped of his powers in the German Reich – was effectively sidelined, and all power was concentrated in Frank’s hands until the end of the war.

In 1939, the Protectorate had a population of 7.38 million. As a result of the Munich Agreement, the majority of the population of the new entity were Czechs. Only 240,000 people (3.25 per cent) belonged to the German-speaking minority. Most German-speaking citizens of the Protectorate lived in the larger urban centres (particularly in Prague, Brno, Jihlava and Olomouc), whilst in rural areas they were concentrated particularly in the region around Jihlava.

Until the enactment of a series of regulations by the Reich Protector on 21 June 1939, German-speaking Jews were also counted as part of the German minority. According to official German figures and the definition set out in the Nuremberg Laws, a total of 118,310 Jews lived in the Protectorate (88 per cent of whom were practising). Only around 30,000 managed to leave the country, either legally or illegally, by the end of 1940.

Economic ties between Bohemia and Germany had traditionally been close. Following the occupation, the German role in the Protectorate’s economy expanded significantly. German banks and large-scale industry, as well as smaller companies run by National Socialists, benefited from the ‘Aryanisation’ of Jewish property and took over businesses belonging to emigrants or citizens arrested for underground resistance activities. From September 1940, the Protectorate formed part of the customs territory of the German Reich. According to estimates, the share of German capital in the Protectorate increased tenfold between 1939 and 1945.

From March 1939, German trustees were appointed to many businesses. The most important companies in the heavy and armaments industries (e.g. the Vitkovitz and Poldi Kladno ironworks, the Škoda Works in Pilsen and the Zbrojovka Brno arms factory) were under Reich control. Although many large firms remained formally independent, they had lost all freedom of decision-making due to Reich shareholdings and their integration into armaments projects. A forced consolidation of the light and food industries made it possible to transform many Czech enterprises into subsidiary operations of armaments conglomerates vital to the war effort. The first step in this direction was taken in early 1942, whilst Heydrich was still in office; the second followed the declaration of ‘total war’ in 1943.

From the start of the war, the Protectorate was required to pay a ‘war tax’ to the German Reich – initially amounting to three billion Protectorate crowns annually, rising to 12 billion by 1944.

The army of the former Czechoslovakia was disbanded following the occupation. Its weapons and ammunition were taken over by the German Wehrmacht. The Protectorate government retained a government force (Vládní vojsko) comprising 6,000 soldiers and officers drawn from the ranks of former professional soldiers. The official task of this poorly equipped government force was to maintain internal order within the Protectorate. Given the unpredictability and unwillingness of these troops to cooperate, 5,000 soldiers and officers were sent to northern Italy in May 1944, on Frank’s initiative, to carry out guard duties and fight against partisans. There, 800 soldiers deserted; the remainder were disarmed in October 1944 and sent to the Alps for forced labour. The Castle Guard battalion left behind in Prague fought on the side of the insurgents during the Prague Uprising.

Of far greater military significance were the Czechoslovak exile armies in Great Britain and the Soviet Union. From 1944 onwards, larger partisan groups and units also began to form within the Protectorate. Several – politically diverse – underground organisations had already formed at the start of the occupation. They had political, intelligence and sabotage-oriented objectives, which, in the final phase of the war, also included the preparation of a major uprising. The first such organisation, the ‘Political Centre’ (Politické ústředí), was established shortly after the Munich Agreement and was completely destroyed by the Gestapo as early as 1940. The ‘Petition Committee – We Remain Loyal’ (Petiční výbor věrni zůstaneme, PVVZ) was socialist in orientation, whilst Obrana národa ( National Defence) brought together former professional soldiers. At the beginning of 1940, the Ústřední vedení odboje domácího (UVOD, Central Leadership of the Domestic Resistance) was formed as the coordinating body for the Western-oriented resistance. Another network of communist resistance had been forming since the German invasion of the USSR. One problem was the limited capacity of this and many other smaller groups to carry out effective defensive intelligence work, which meant that the Gestapo was able to take action against them.

All political parties were dissolved following the occupation. On the initiative of the President, the ‘National Unity’ (Národní souručenství) , a single-party organisation reserved exclusively for men, was established on 6 April 1939 as the only permitted party, bringing together over 97 per cent of adult men. Its sole purpose was to support the President and the Protectorate government. Following initial attempts to use this organisation as a basis for the resistance, the occupying forces replaced the entire leadership with collaborators in 1941. The party, which also controlled the press, was dissolved on 15 January 1943 or, rather, transformed into a cultural propaganda organisation. Collaboration with the Nazi regime was similar to that in Western European countries: After the end of the war, some 10,000 court cases were brought against citizens on the basis of decrees issued by the Czechoslovak president-in-exile, Edvard Beneš. 740 collaborators were executed; in proportion to the total population, this was the highest rate in Europe.

Society had to contend with the hardship typical of wartime. Food rations were introduced as early as September 1939: ration cards marked ‘D’ guaranteed Germans the highest allocations. The food rations to which the cards marked ‘T’ (for Czechs) entitled holders were significantly lower. The lowest rations were allocated to Jews, whose cards were marked ‘J’. The merging of the ‘D’ and ‘T’ cards in 1941 was part of Heydrich’s campaign to boost labour productivity amongst the Czech population. From the end of 1939, additional ration cards were introduced for clothing. Farmers received reduced rations and were required to hand over prescribed quantities of produce at fixed prices. One consequence of these measures was the emergence of a black market which, although draconianly suppressed, nevertheless flourished.

The Jews, who had been gradually marginalised from mainstream society since the Munich Agreement of 1938, lived under the most appalling conditions. The exclusion of Jews from public spaces and life intensified radically following Heydrich’s appointment. Many Czechs who, despite all the decrees, continued to interact with Jews, shop at their establishments or seek treatment from Jewish doctors, faced severe penalties.

Within Czech society, the situation was particularly dire for the young, educated classes: on the initiative of the Reich Protector, the number of Czech secondary schools was systematically reduced from 1942 onwards. As a result, the number of secondary school pupils fell from 85,000 in 1939 to 35,000 in 1944. The closure of universities was accompanied by the deployment of thousands of school-leavers to industry or to ‘total deployment’ in the German Reich.

The dominant denomination in the Protectorate was the Catholic Church, although the Protestant Church – formerly known as the Czechoslovak Church (Církev československá), which came to be known as the Bohemian-Moravian Church (Církev českomoravská) in the Protectorate, also maintained a significant presence with around 800,000 members. The Nazi regime assigned the Christian churches the primary task of issuing certificates of Aryan descent or certificates attesting to various degrees of Jewish ancestry in accordance with the Nuremberg Race Laws, which were based on the information contained in the church registers. Those designated as ‘Mischlinge’ (half-breeds) under the Nuremberg Laws, as well as the Christian spouses of citizens classified as Jewish who did not divorce, were also discriminated against and, in later phases of the persecution, deported to the camps.

On 29 September 1941, Reich Protector Heydrich ordered the closure of all synagogues and Jewish prayer rooms as ‘gathering places for destructive forces’. The Jewish communities were gradually dissolved; most of the 88,000 registered Jews who had not managed to leave the country were gradually concentrated in Prague and then, from 16 October 1941, deported in convoys either directly to the extermination camps in the East or, from 1942, to Theresienstadt as a transit camp. The communities’ property was confiscated and transferred to the Emigration Fund for Bohemia and Moravia, established by the Reich Protector. Items of historical or art-historical value (books, devotional objects, etc.) were deposited at the Jewish Museum in Prague and catalogued as exhibits for a future ‘Museum of an Extinct Race’.

Culture took on symbolic significance in the Protectorate as the last bastion of the Czech nation. The Nazi Protectorate regime went to great lengths – albeit less consistently than in Germany – to eliminate the avant-garde culture that had flourished in Czechoslovakia during the interwar period. During the period of German occupation, society turned en masse and demonstratively towards the Romantic and Realist authors and works of the era of the Czech ‘national revival’ in the 19th century. German-Czech rivalry in the field of mass culture remained, at least until the outbreak of ‘total war’ in the summer of 1943 and the associated official suppression of most cultural activities, one of the most important areas of resistance – recognised as such by both sides – as it provided a unique stimulus for Czech activities under the occupation.

There is still very little discussion in the Czech Republic about the Protectorate period. Following the long-standing communist narrative that ‘the entire nation was part of the resistance’, the question of Czech collaboration with the Nazi regime was raised after 1989. In some cases, the assessment was rather conciliatory and aimed at a partial rehabilitation of the Czech representatives of the Protectorate (Eliáš, Hácha), who had been ostracised after the war and particularly following the Communist takeover in 1948. Furthermore, the protagonists of the non-communist resistance – who had previously been silenced or defamed – were highlighted in a positive light. In the necessary debate on the anti-Semitic and racist behaviour of a significant section of Protectorate society towards Jews and Roma, there is a recurring risk that these phenomena will be relativised by reference to the Holocaust and the terror inflicted on society as a whole. To date, there have been hardly any international comparative debates on this subject.