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13:47 23.07.2026 •
The period of the occupation of the Czech lands by Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945 is traditionally equated in historiography with the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which was instituted following Hitler’s decree on March 16, 1939, as a provisional measure to address the “Czech question” during the Second World War. Historians have customarily analysed the internal political situation in the Protectorate primarily through two principal lenses: the anti-fascist struggle of the Czechs alongside Nazi repressions and the intensification of the Germanisation policy aimed at the “final solution” of the Czech question, and the specific nature of local collaborationism, with its considerable scale and extent often highlighted.
However, it appears that the general term “collaborationism” does not entirely capture the internal nuances of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, thereby obscuring and oversimplifying the domestic political landscape that emerged there, as well as the ideological model crafted by the Protectorate authorities. The institutional breadth, systematic nature, scale, depth, and meticulous elaboration of Nazi narratives within the Protectorate, coupled with the mass involvement of numerous local cadres and structures in their propagation, alongside the careful and adept adaptation of Nazi ideologies to the distinctive characteristics of the Czech lands – executed by the Protectorate’s expansive ideological apparatus comprising politicians, publicists, and scholars – lend credence to the assertion that, under the conditions of the Protectorate, a distinctive model of Czech Nazism emerged as one of the variants of European “small Nazisms.” Fundamentally, Czech Nazism represented a local variant of National Socialism, meticulously crafted and adeptly tailored to Czech historical and cultural specificities.
In contrast to Croatian Ustašism, the Baltic forms of Nazism, or the Ukrainian variant of Nazism, which arose within predominantly agrarian societies characterised by elements of primitive archaism and primarily manifested through mass atrocities against civilian populations, Czech Nazism – which emerged in a developed, predominantly urban milieu – expressed itself principally in the ideological, political, and cultural domains. It forged its own sophisticated ideological imprint of German National Socialism, which was intended to substantiate and legitimise the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands and their integration into the Third Reich. Czech Nazism found its most vivid expression in the realm of policies governing historical memory and in systematic propaganda.
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The Munich Agreement, concluded on the night of September 29–30, 1938, in the Bavarian capital by the leaders of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the liberal democracies of Great Britain and France, mandated the cession from Czechoslovakia of all regions with predominantly German populations, and their subsequent transfer to Nazi Germany between October 1 and October 10, 1938. The second clause of the agreement signed in Munich explicitly stipulated that “evacuation… shall be completed… without any existing installations having been destroyed, and that the Czechoslovak Government will be held responsible for carrying out the evacuation without damage to the said installations.”[1] The democratic architects of Munich, namely British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier, demonstrated a pointed concern that Hitler’s Germany should receive the formidable Czechoslovak defensive fortifications and the numerous Czech industrial facilities of strategic importance in the regions bordering Germany intact.
The fact that the diplomatic representatives of Czechoslovakia were confined to an antechamber, resigned to the fate of their nation, and barred from participating in the Munich conference, proves both striking and symptomatic; at the time of signing the Munich Agreement, France was bound to Czechoslovakia by the 1935 Treaty of Alliance, which formally enshrined the reciprocal obligation of the parties to render mutual military assistance in the event of aggression by a third state. By endorsing the Munich settlement and appending their signatures to the accord, France flagrantly violated its own international legal obligations. The hopes of the Czechoslovak political elite, which were pinned on France as the principal guarantor of Czechoslovakia’s security, were revealed to be naive and wholly unfounded.
Alongside the blatant and ruthless betrayal of the Czechs at Munich at the hands of a united fascist-Nazi-liberal Europe represented by Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France, Czechoslovakia also fell victim to neighbouring Poland. The Polish political elite, having long regarded Czechoslovakia as a “misconception of Versailles” and closely coordinating its actions with Nazi Berlin, presented Czechoslovakia with an ultimatum during the Munich crisis. In early October 1938, acting in concert with Germany, Polish forces commenced the occupation of the Czech part of Teschen Silesia, thereby becoming directly complicit, alongside Hitler, in the dismemberment of the Czechoslovak state. Notably, specially trained and well-equipped Polish sabotage and reconnaissance detachments had already commenced active insurgent operations on Czechoslovak territory in the regions bordering Poland well before the start of the Munich conference.[2] Winston Churchill’s subsequently famous aphorism about Poland as the “hyena of Europe” was, in all likelihood, directly attributable to these tragic events.
The concluding act of the protracted post-Munich demise of the Czechoslovak state was Hungary’s occupation, in November 1938, of the territory of Southern Slovakia and the southern part of Subcarpathian (Hungarian) Rus, in which ethnic Hungarians constituted a significant proportion of the local populace. As a result, Czechoslovakia was entirely stripped of the strategically vital and economically developed border territories in the north, north-west, south, and so of the strategically vital and economically developed extensive border regions in the north, north-west, south, and south-east inhabited by Sudeten Germans and ethnic Hungarians, an outcome that effectively signalled the rapid transformation of Czechoslovakia into a decrepit and unviable rump state whose days were numbered.[3]
A contemporary of, and direct participant in, these tragic events – the future general and President of socialist Czechoslovakia, Ludvík Svoboda, who was then serving as commander of an infantry battalion within the Czechoslovak Army – aptly characterised the Munich Agreement in his post-war memoirs as convincing testimony that “the European parliamentary democracies, which had already been in a state of deep crisis for years, had sunk to the very bottom in their policy…”[4] As one Czech publicist figuratively observed, the map of the post-Munich Czechoslovak pseudo-state, by its outlines, resembled a corpse “gnawed by hyenas,” whilst the overwhelming majority of the population of post-Munich Czechoslovakia devolved into a populace of “walking dead, striving to exclude reality from their everyday life.”[5]
The decisions of Munich and the conduct of Western elites became not only a powerful traumatic shock, but also a sobering cold shower for a considerable part of Czech society, which had grown accustomed to the notion that the liberal democratic Czechoslovak Republic was numbered among the favourites of the democratic West, which stood prepared to guarantee the security of the Czechoslovak state. Munich swiftly and mercilessly shattered these long-standing illusions, which had been zealously perpetuated and disseminated by Masaryk-Beneš propaganda throughout the interwar era.
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The destructive and demoralising consequences of Munich triggered enormous domestic upheaval in Czechoslovakia and had a profound impact on the country’s long-established policy of historical memory. In the so-called Second Czechoslovak Republic, which emerged from the Munich crisis, political life rapidly came to be dominated by right-wing and far-right political forces, above all the Agrarian and National Democratic parties, as well as various semi-Nazi and openly Nazi groups. Having quickly shed their previously marginal status, these groups oriented themselves, to varying degrees, either towards Nazi Germany or fascist Italy.
This found expression in the swift banning of the Communist Party and other left-wing organisations, the adoption – following the example of Nazi Germany – of a series of antisemitic laws, and the severe curtailment of freedom of speech accompanied by a sharp tightening of censorship. Moreover, in early March 1939, even before the formal dissolution of the Second Republic and the establishment of the Protectorate, the government of the Second Czechoslovak Republic ordered the creation of two concentration camps – at Lety in South Bohemia and Hodonín in South Moravia – where, following the model of the Nazi Reich, the Roma population of the Czech lands was exterminated, with the Czech armed forces playing the decisive role in the elimination of the Roma population.[6]
Having fully reoriented itself towards Nazi Berlin, the political leadership of the Second Czechoslovak Republic categorically rejected the liberal-democratic intellectual legacy of presidents Tomas Masaryk and Edvard Beneš, as well as any orientation towards Western democracies and parliamentarianism, which were officially denounced as the “roots of evil.”[7] The only accepted model became the Nazi Third Reich, to which the post-Munich Second Republic had sworn fealty. the As a result, ideological foundations of the Second Republic were quickly built upon an overt nationalism tinged with racism, the Führerprinzip borrowed from the German Nazis, and the cult of “blood and soil,” military valour and discipline. All of this was drawn from the ideological and political arsenal of German Nazism and skilfully adapted to specifically Czech conditions.
As for the policy of historical memory during the period of the Second Republic, the most important change was the complete overthrow from the political and ideological pedestal of the Hussite and national revivalist tradition so admired by President Masaryk, the founder of Czechoslovakia, tradition upon which generations of Czechs and Slovaks had been educated during the interwar years. In their place, an aggressively militant Catholic fundamentalism of a markedly authoritarian character rapidly came to dominate.
St Wenceslas, a Czech duke from the early feudal Přemyslid dynasty, was by tradition the main symbol of Czech Catholicism since the Middle Ages He actively promoted the Christianisation of the Czech lands in the early 10th century and, after suffering military defeat at the hands of the German King Henry the Fowler in 929, was compelled to recognise the vassal dependence of the Czech Duchy on neighbouring Germany. In 935, he was assassinated in a coup staged by his younger brother, Duke Boleslaus, who had conspired against him with several members of the disaffected local nobility. Duke Wenceslas was later canonised by the Catholic Church and, together with his grandmother St Ludmila, became one of the earliest and most revered Czech saints.
It is indicative in this regard that, on November 30, 1938 — immediately after his election as President of the Second Czechoslovak Republic (the so-called Czecho-Slovakia) — Emil Hácha demonstratively knelt before Prague Archbishop Cardinal Karel Kašpar and kissed the skull of St Wenceslas. The very next day, the new government of the Second Republic, led by Agrarian Party leader Rudolf Beran, began its work after taking the oath of office with a notable ritual: a church service and collective prayer by the ministers. Such demonstrative ceremonies — entirely inconceivable during the era of the explicitly secular, and even anti-clerical, First Czechoslovak Republic, whose ideological foundations had been laid by the committed liberal Tomas Masaryk, a sharp critic of the Catholic Church — testified to St Wenceslas’ triumphal return to the state pedestal of the Czech lands and clearly illustrated the conservative, strongly clerical and authoritarian nature of the new regime.[8]
Conservative clerics, pugnacious Catholic intellectuals and outright Catholic fascists as well as various kinds of fascist-leaning activists were all part of the Czech Catholic establishment. They all converged in their desire to seek revenge as quickly as possible for the humiliation and marginalisation they had to endure during the interwar period of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It is telling that moderate Catholics advocated constructive dialogue with secular forces, but were instantly sidetracked and relegated to the political background. Moreover, Catholic fundamentalists wanted the church to control the government by turning Catholicism into the core and defining element of the Czech national identity. Catholicism is the Law was their motto.
During the Second Czechoslovak Republic, the St Wenceslas tradition and St Wenceslas’ cult offered a framework for carrying out a series of political and cultural cleansing operations. They were quite radical and had extremely lamentable consequences. Czech historian Jan Rataj was right when he wrote that “the political blindness and the desire to seek revenge, the hatred of democrats and other ideological opponents – all this resulted in the Czech integralist Catholics openly supporting the Nazis.” [9] It would not be an exaggeration to say that this deep-running transformation of the political and cultural landscape during the Second Czechoslovak Republic created an effective foundation for the emergence of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and largely defined its ideology and political evolution.
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The Wehrmacht completed the effort to occupy Czechia and Moravia by mid-March 1939, and went on to liquidate and dismantle the Second Czechoslovak Republic. Following Hitler’s order, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed as part of the Nazi Reich. All this boosted and amplified trends in terms of memory politics that emerged during the Second Czechoslovak Republic the key factors of which were mass collaborationism and the complete subjugation of the Czech lands to serve the interests of the Third Reich. Article 3 of the Nazi law on education for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia offers a telling example. It gave the protectorate very little autonomy by using a common provision saying that the protectorate’s rights, their scope and the way they can be used shall be defined exclusively based on the “Reich’s political needs”.[10] It was also symbolic that right after the occupation of Czechia by the German Wehrmacht on March 15, 1939, the leader of the Nazi Reich decided to visit Prague. He made a point by choosing to stay at the presidential residence in the Prague Castle as a way to revel in his triumph on the so-called Czechoslovak question.[11]
As for memory politics, the leaders of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia quickly focused on reviving the Czech historical statehood as it existed before World War I when the Czech lands were part of the Habsburg empire. Politicians and ideologues running the protectorate believed that an independent Czechoslovakia as proclaimed in October 1918 after the end of World War I and the breakdown of Austria-Hungary was something unnatural, an anomaly and an artificial entity that did nothing but harm the Czech. For example, one of the Second Republic’s leading ideologists and observers, Emanuel Vajtauer, referred to the Versailles system when discussing the specific nature of Czechoslovak statehood during the interwar period and came up with an aphorism saying that “the cashier in Versailles gave us much more than we were owed. Returning this extra money is a great challenge, considering that we spent 20 years spending them as we pleased.”[12]
There was also Karel Lažnovský, another journalist who worked during the protectorate and who wrote in his articles for the protectorate’s media in April 1940 that the First Czechoslovak Republic during the interwar period was an unviable and an anti-social state controlled by either Jews or their henchmen like Masaryk and Beneš who de facto turned the country into what he called “construction material for the global Jewry.”[13] This rhetoric fully complied with the Third Reich’s propaganda while being at complete loggerheads with the First Republic’s political discourse and social aspirations.
The negative and critical attitude toward the independence gained in 1918 under the restrictive conditions of a protectorate – an attitude that had already emerged during the Second Czechoslovak Republic – significantly intensified and became dominant. However, while during the Second Republic there was more of an Austro-Slavic nostalgia and a positive interpretation of the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918 as an ideal framework for the successful development of the Czech people, under protectorate conditions traditional Austro-Slavism – familiar, comfortable, and an important element of Czech politics since the mid-19th century – underwent a significant evolution, transforming into a kind of Germano-Slavism.
This evolution was reflected in the fact that official protectorate propaganda, guided by Berlin and Nazi racial theory, portrayed the Czechs as the most advanced Slavic people (closest not only civilisationally but also racially to the Germanic peoples of Europe) and as a people who had traditionally been, and continued to be, “under the protection” of the German Reich.[14] Predictably, emphasis was placed on the “Aryan nature” and “racial affinity” of the Czechs to the Germans; the “Slavicness” of the Czechs and the traditionally popular Slavic agenda were immediately and conspicuously omitted. In this way, Czech protectorate ideology sought to adapt as much as possible to Nazi racial theory, which was markedly anti-Slavic in character. All of this stood in stark and glaring contrast to the cultural and national traditions of the Czechs in the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries, when the Czech lands were one of the leading and recognised intellectual and organisational centres of the Pan-Slavic movement and Slavic reciprocity.
Apologetics for Germany in protectorate propaganda reached colossal proportions, taking on truly caricature-like forms. Nazi Germany, as interpreted by protectorate propaganda, became the symbol of a “new Europe” and its natural centre – free from the “rotten and corrupting” influences of France and Great Britain. The culmination of this apologetics was a large-scale exhibition bearing the remarkable title German Greatness, personally opened by Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Konstantin von Neurath on the first anniversary of the German Wehrmacht’s occupation of the Czech lands, March 15, 1940, at the National Museum in Prague, traditionally considered the Czech Republic’s main museum.[15] The exhibition’s primary goal was to showcase “the magnificent thousand-year development of the Reich, its universal historical significance, and Hitler’s struggle for a new reorganisation of Europe in accordance with the principles of National Socialism.”[16]
The apologetics for Nazi Germany as the centre of a “New Europe” was closely linked to the anti-Semitic campaign constantly waged by the protectorate’s media. Protectorate propaganda strongly emphasised that the “New National Socialist Europe” must be free of any “Jewish influences” associated with “capitalism or Bolshevism.”[17] In May 1940, the renowned Czech political scientist and lawyer Jan Mertl – a professor at the Higher School of Business in Prague and head of the “Czech Union for Cooperation with the Germans” – insisted in one of his articles on “the necessity of removing all Jews from European states in the interests of preserving European culture.”[18]
The propaganda ploys of protectorate ideologists, who pointed to the racial affinity of the Czechs to the Germans, were entirely consistent with the theories of certain Sudeten German historians, ethnographers, and sociologists, who in their works treated the Czechs as a people of primarily “Germanic origin.” For example, the renowned Sudeten German ethnographer and sociologist Karl Valentin Müller – a native of northern Bohemia and a professor at the German University of Prague from 1941 – argued in his scholarly works that the process of Czech ethnogenesis in the early Middle Ages represented a complex symbiosis of Germanic and Slavic “biological and cultural components, with the Germanic element playing a decisive role.”[19] The purpose of such patently pseudoscientific theories was to provide an ideological and academic justification for the need to completely Germanise the majority of the Czech population – a process interpreted as a return to “historical justice” that was to begin immediately after the military victory of the Third Reich. Moreover, during the war, numerous anti-Slavic “studies” by |Sudeten German historians and ethnographers were actively published and distributed in the protectorate, including in the Ukrainian language. These works actively propagated Nazi racial theory and sought to prove that “from a racial point of view, no ‘Slavs’ exist at all...”[20]
A fundamentally important thesis of official protectorate propaganda was the assertion of a historically protracted and mutually beneficial “Czech-German cooperation” and the potential for Czechs to derive practical benefits from German aggression; the military victories of the Third Reich were extolled by protectorate propaganda as the foundation for Czech economic prosperity.[21] Simultaneously, however, the reality – utterly evident to the overwhelming majority of Czechs – that the ultimate objective of Nazi Germany regarding the “Czech question” was the complete annihilation of the Czech nation through a combination of assimilation, deportation, and physical extermination was systematically suppressed and concealed. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, established by Hitler’s decree, was to serve the practical instrument for achieving this goal.
Throughout the war, the primary objective of the protectorate’s political leadership was the identification, popularisation, and promotion of historical precedents capable of convincingly substantiating the natural character and legitimacy of the Czech lands’ incorporation into the German Empire. Deliberate and concerted efforts to this end had begun as early as the Second Czechoslovak Republic, at the direct instruction of Prime Minister Rudolf Beran and President Emil Hácha. The St Wenceslas historical and cultural tradition, which drew upon the figure and legacy of Prince Wenceslas, proved to be politically expedient and ideologically serviceable for achieving this objective.
The recognition of the Czech lands’ dependence on Germany by Prince Wenceslas subsequently became the constitutional and legal precedent for the incorporation of the Czech lands into the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, proclaimed in 962. Adeptly invoking this aspect of the St Wenceslas tradition, the Catholic publicist and active collaborator Bohumil Staněk urged Czech society to “follow the path of St Wenceslas,” expressing the hope that “modern Germany will treat us with the same tact and nobility with which King Henry I treated the Czech lands and our St Wenceslas, having granted them every opportunity for political, economic, and cultural development.”[22]
Immediately after the official proclamation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, established by Hitler’s decree on March 16, 1939, as an autonomous unit within the Third Reich, the customary interpretation of the St Wenceslas tradition was transformed such that the motifs of the historical subordination of the Czech lands to the German Reich, the inherent legitimacy of this phenomenon, and the associated advantages became dominant. In essence, the entire policy of historical memory in the protectorate was skilfully, inventively, and effectively mobilised to advance the emblematic slogan put forward by the Czech head of the protectorate, Emil Hácha: “To be a good Czech and a trustworthy subject of the Reich!” This slogan may be regarded as the defining tenet of collaborationist policy within the protectorate.
Hácha and the protectorate ideologues, including journalists and publicists who supported his regime, creatively adapted the St Wenceslas tradition to suit the political needs of the moment, actualising the constitutional and legal link that had existed in the Middle Ages between the Czech lands and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation to legitimise and justify the existence of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia within the Nazi Third Reich. As the Czech historian Jan Rataj notes, concretely, this entailed, above all, the obligation of the Czechs as a smaller nation to submit to the tutelage of a “great people,” to internalise and implement in practice “National Socialist values” notwithstanding their racial anti-Slavic theory, and to serve the German Reich faithfully, thereby contributing to its victory in the war against the Allied coalition, whilst actively combating the local resistance movement.[23]
As for the obligations of the German overlord towards its Czech vassal, these, in the view of protectorate ideologues, were to be expressed in the preservation of the national and cultural autonomy of the protectorate by the German Reich. However, the leaders of the Nazi Reich accorded scant regard to these meticulously crafted collaborationist ideological constructs and efforts. Crucially, it is essential to emphasise that the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, despite its formally autonomous status within the Reich, was regarded by the leadership of Nazi Germany from the very outset merely as a provisional and expedient arrangement, deemed necessary for exercising effective control over the Czech population during the war. This was because the territory of the protectorate, with its advanced armaments industry, transport infrastructure, agriculture, and skilled Czech labour force, constituted an exceptionally important economic resource for the Third Reich.[24]
[1] Munich-1938. The Descent into the Abyss of the Second World War. Moscow: Kuchkovo Pole, 2018. P. 256.
[2] Ibid, P. 229.
[3] Vykoupil L. Slovník českých dějin. Brno: Julius Zirkus, 2000. S. 363.
[4] Svoboda L. Cestami života. I. Praha: OREGO, 1996. S. 144.
[5] Kuras B. Češi na vlásku. Příručka národního přežívání. Praha: Baronet, 1999. S. 161.
[6] Kirill Shevchenko, The Lusatian Question in Czechoslovakia 1945-1948, Moscow, Modest Kolerov Publishers, 2004, P. 77.
[7] Rataj J. Politické proměny symboliky svatováclavské tradice a tradice 28. řijna v moderních československých dějinách // Spory o dějiny II. Sborník kritických textů. Editor Miloslav Bednář. Praha: Masarykův ústav AV ČR, 1999. S. 87.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid, P. 88.
[10] Beneš E. Odsun Němců. Výbor z pamětí a projevů doplněný edičními přílohami. Praha, 1995. S. 19.
[11] Liška V. Éra hákového kříže. Protektorát. Praha: Nakladatelství XYZ, 2018. S. 21.
[12] Rataj J. Politické proměny symboliky svatováclavské tradice a tradice 28. řijna v moderních československých dějinách // Spory o dějiny II. Sborník kritických textů. Editor Miloslav Bednář. Praha: Masarykův ústav AV ČR, 1999. S. 88.
[13] Lozoviuk P., Soukupová B. Antisemitská propaganda a „věda“ v Protektorátu Čechy a Morava. Plzeň: Západočeská univerzita v Plzni, 2024. S. 12.
[14] Rataj J. Politické proměny symboliky svatováclavské tradice a tradice 28. řijna v moderních československých dějinách // Spory o dějiny II. Sborník kritických textů. Editor Miloslav Bednář. Praha: Masarykův ústav AV ČR, 1999. S. 88.
[15] Lozoviuk P., Soukupová B. Antisemitská propaganda a „věda” v Protektorátu Čechy a Morava. Plzeň: Západočeská univerzita v Plzni, 2024. S. 9.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid, P. 10
[18] Ibid, P. 11
[19] Lozoviuk Petr. Etnicita a nacionalismus v diskurzu 20 století. Příspěvek intelektuálů z českých zemí ke studiu kolektivních identit. Brno: MUNI, 2012. S. 30.
[20] Баєр Г.Й. Доля поляків. Раса – народна вдача – племінна порода. Прага: Видавництво Ю. Тищенка, 1944. С. 7.
[21] Lozoviuk P., Soukupová B. Antisemitská propaganda a „věda“ v Protektorátu Čechy a Morava. Plzeň: Západočeská univerzita v Plzni, 2024. S. 10.
[22] Rataj J. Politické proměny symboliky svatováclavské tradice a tradice 28. řijna v moderních československých dějinách // Spory o dějiny II. Sborník kritických textů. Editor Miloslav Bednář. Praha: Masarykův ústav AV ČR, 1999. S. 90.
[23] Ibid, P. 91.
[24] Kirill Shevchenko. The Slavic Triangle. The Warsaw-Moscow Alliance and the Prague Spring of 1968. Minsk: Kolorgrad, 2022. P. 63.
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