Czech History: 1933-1945

On January 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg named Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi Party), Chancellor of Germany. This was a crucial turning point for Germany and ultimately for the world. Nazi Germany was off and running, and there was little von Hindenburg or anyone could do to stop it. 

The Holocaust in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and established the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, there were 118,310 people designated as Jews according to the Nuremberg Laws. Throughout the country and especially in Prague, Jews were in the vanguard of all spheres of cultural and economic activity. They were writers, musicians, actors, professors, journalists, sports figures, bankers, merchants and industrialists. From 1938 to 1945 Jewish life as it once was ceased to exist. Czech officials remained as figureheads, but the government was directed by the Nazi-appointed governor or Reichsprotector, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, and the police came under the control of the Gestapo.

The implementation of the “final solution of the Jewish problem” was divided into two stages. The first was the economic liquidation and confiscation of Jewish property and the exclusion of Jews from economic and social life as dictated by the Nuremberg Laws: “to define, control, dehumanize and eventually to expel Jews from Aryan society.” They were barred from their professions and businesses and from civil service. An estimated half-billion dollars of Jewish assets in Bohemia and Moravia was expropriated by the Nazis. The SS instigated campaigns of violence and terror. Jews were concentrated and isolated into ghettos. Beginning September 1, 1941, Jews over the age of six had to wear a yellow Star of David. Non-Jews were forbidden to have any contact with Jews. All synagogues were closed. Jews became non-citizens.

The second stage was a policy of mass expulsion, resettlement, deportation and death. Hitler needed additional Lebenstraum (“living space”) for the “master race.” The “racially inferior,” particularly Slavs and Jews, had to be eliminated to make room for “pure” Germans. Heinrich Himmler, commander of the German Schutzstaffel (SS), the Gestapo and the Einsatzgruppen (death squads), planned to deport six million Czechs, including all Jews, to the “east.”

In June of 1939, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Prague with his own plan to coerce the Jews to leave the country: emigration at a price. Jews were rounded up from the provinces and herded into Prague. A quota of 200 had to leave daily. To obtain an exit visa, a “flight tax” had to be paid and one’s remaining property had to be transferred to German Banks. Before emigration was completely banned in October 1941, 26,629 Jews managed to leave. If there was no place to emigrate or not enough money to get the necessary documents, the Germans found their own solution. In October 1939, under Eichmann’s forced emigration policy, the first Jews from Austria and Czechoslovakia were deported to ghettos in occupied Poland and eventually imprisoned in concentration camps.

In September 1941, Reinhard Heydrich, the “Butcher of Prague,” replaced Baron Konstantin von Neurath as Deputy Reichsprotector of Bohemia-Moravia. The first five transports of Jews left Prague in October and November of that year for the ghettos in Lódz (Poland) and Minsk (Belarus).

The Munich Agreement

On March 12, 1938, without firing a shot, Hitler annexed Austria into Germany, promising this would end his expansionist aims. Six months after the Austrian Anschluss, in September of 1938, Hitler set his sights on Czechoslovakia. He demanded that the Sudetenland, the German name for the western portion of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany and Austria, mostly populated with ethnic Germans, be handed over to Germany. If the Allies agreed, Hitler promised not to invade the rest of Czechoslovakia. If they did not, he would take it by force. The Czech army, consisting of a million men, was poised to protect their border. France and the United Kingdom had an earlier agreement to defend Czechoslovakia in case of attack or invasion, and they also mobilized troops.

However, in the end, desperate to avoid war at all costs, the leaders of France and Britain met with the leaders of Italy and Germany just after 1:00 a.m. on September 30th, 1938, and signed the Munich Agreement. No Czech representative was present. No shot was fired. The German army was given permission to occupy the Sudetenland and to expel all non- Germans. On October 1st, right on schedule, German tanks rolled into the Sudetenland. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had returned to England satisfied that the Munich Pact, often referred to by Czechs as the “Munich Betrayal,” had purchased “peace for our time.” Actually it gave Hitler a temporary delay to destroy the rest of the Czech State, to expose the weakness of the Western powers, and to implement his “final solution” - the annihilation of the Jewish “race.” 

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini & Ciano at signing of Munich Agreement

Annexation of Bohemia-Moravia

Five months after the Munich Agreement was signed, and in total violation of Hitler’s promise that the Sudetenland represented his final territorial demand in Europe, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to seize the rest of Czechoslovakia - Bohemia and Moravia. On March 15, 1939, Hitler threatened Czech President Emil Hacha that unless German troops were granted permission to enter Czech borders, the Luftwaffe would immediately bomb Prague and raze the Prague Castle. Hacha capitulated. The two provinces offered no resistance. By evening, Hitler entered Prague and proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia a protectorate of Germany. Independent, democratic Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. Slovakia had seceded the day before and Hungary, with Hitler’s approval, had seized Ruthenia (another region of Czechoslovakia). All of Czechoslovakia was now in the Nazi orbit. Chaos and terror ensued. The Jews were trapped.

German Troops entering Prague

In order to solve the continued “problem” of Czechs and Czech Jews, Heydrich came up with a solution: a special ghetto in Terezin (Theresienstadt), Czechoslovakia, about 35 miles from Prague to serve as a transit camp for Czech, German and Austrian Jews. Believing it would keep the Jewish community from further deportations to the “east,” Czech Jewish leaders participated in its planning. It was promoted as a “spa town” where elderly Jews could retire. The “model ghetto” was in reality a way station to Auschwitz and other concentration and forced labor camps. The first transport arrived on November 24, 1941. Between November 24, 1941 and March 30, 1945, 73,468 Jews from the Protectorate were deported to Terezin, most arriving in 1942. Of these, over 60,000 were later sent on to Auschwitz and extermination camps in the east…to Majdanesk, Minsk, Riga, Sobibor, Treblinka and Zamosc. In 1944, the Jews of the “Terezin family camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau were murdered in gas chambers. It was the largest mass slaughter of Czechoslovak citizens during World War II. On May 12, 1945, the camp was liberated by the Russians. Only 100 of the 15,000 children sent to Teresienstadt survived.

War’s Aftermath: A Terrible Toll

The end of the war in Europe came on May 8, 1945, with the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. The Soviet Red Army liberated Prague on May 9; the American Third Army led by General Patton liberated the western territories of Czechoslovakia on May 5. German occupation of the Protectorate was catastrophic. Czech losses resulting from political persecution and deaths in concentration camps were between 36,000 and 55,000. The Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia was virtually annihilated with more than 77,000 or 85 percent murdered.

The fate of the Jews in the Protectorate is summarized in the Encyclopedia Judaica: “6,392 had died in Theresienstadt, 64,172 had been murdered in the extermination camps and of the Jews who had not been deported, 5,201 had either been executed, committed suicide, or died a natural death. On the day of the restoration of national sovereignty in Prague (the Prague Uprising) May 5, 1945, there were 2,803 Jews alive in Bohemia and Moravia who had not been deported, most of them partners of mixed marriages.” Since 2004, Holocaust Memorial Day in the Czech Republic falls on January 27, the day when Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. The names of the known 77,000 Czech Jewish victims are on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague.

Transport entering Theresienstadt