Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

It was created the day after the Wehrmacht entered Prague, from what was left of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement and the secession of Slovakia, and had about 7.4 million inhabitants. Emil Hácha remained president, but the Reich Protector – successively Konstantin von Neurath, from 1941 in practice Reinhard Heydrich, then Kurt Daluege and Wilhelm Frick – approved the government and could block any law. The police and SS were run by Karl Hermann Frank.

The Germans exploited Czech arms industry, closed the Czech universities in November 1939 and planned to Germanise part of the Czech nation after the war and remove the rest. The assassination of Heydrich in 1942 was followed by a wave of terror symbolised by Lidice. Of more than 90,000 people classed as Jews, deported mainly via the Theresienstadt ghetto, more than 75,000 were murdered. The Protectorate ceased to exist in May 1945.