The creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

On 16 March 1939, the day after German troops occupied Bohemia and Moravia, Adolf Hitler signed at Prague Castle a decree establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The lands left of Czecho-Slovakia after Munich, the secession of Slovakia and the Hungarian occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine were incorporated into “Greater Germany”. They were home to some 7.4 million people, the overwhelming majority of them Czechs. The decree promised them autonomy and their own authorities, but handed real power to a German Reich Protector. The Second Czechoslovak Republic ceased to exist, and the Czech lands fell for six years under a German occupation that during the war became one of the most brutal in their history.

The decree from Hradčany

Hitler spent the night of 15–16 March at the castle, and the following afternoon Joachim von Ribbentrop read out at the castle – and the radio broadcast – the text of the decree “of the Führer and Reich Chancellor on the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”. It was signed by Hitler, the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Ribbentrop and the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Heinrich Lammers. A long preamble proclaimed that the Bohemian and Moravian lands had “for a thousand years belonged to the living space of the German people”, and that force and folly had torn them from their historical setting and forced them into the “artificial construct of Czechoslovakia”, which had proved unviable and had “fallen apart”. The Reich, as the only power called to the task by history, was therefore restoring a “reasonable order” in Central Europe.

The decree’s thirteen articles defined the new system. The lands occupied by German troops in March became part of the territory of the Reich and, as a protectorate, came under its protection. Inhabitants of German descent received Reich citizenship as defined by the Nuremberg Laws and were subject to German courts. The rest – the Czechs, but also the Jews, even if they spoke German – became “nationals of the Protectorate”, second-class people. The Protectorate was to be autonomous and govern itself, but only “in accordance with the political, military and economic interests of the Reich”. At its head stood a head of the autonomous administration who was entitled to the honours of a head of state but had to “enjoy the confidence of the Führer”.

Alongside him Hitler appointed a “Reich Protector in Bohemia and Moravia”, based in Prague. The Protector approved the members of the Protectorate government and could withdraw that approval at any time; he had the right to demand information on all government decisions, and his objection held up the promulgation of any law, decree, administrative decision or final court judgment. Foreign affairs were taken over by the Reich, and the Protectorate had in Berlin only a representative with the rank of minister who did not belong to the diplomatic corps. Defence was provided by the Reich, which kept its own garrisons in the country; the Protectorate could have only small security forces, whose strength and armament were set by Berlin. The Reich directly supervised the railways, the post and the telegraph, and the Protectorate became part of the German customs area. The crown remained in circulation alongside the Reichsmark, but the exchange rate was set by the Reich government. It was fixed at ten crowns to the mark, well above the real value, which allowed the Germans to buy up Czech goods cheaply. The Reich could issue regulations with the force of law for the Protectorate, take over any branch of the administration and take any measures “to maintain security and order”. Each of these provisions stripped the promised autonomy of meaning.

The fiction of autonomy

The term “protectorate” came from the vocabulary of colonial policy, and the German press itself compared the Protector’s relationship with the Czech president to that of a British Resident with an Indian maharaja. Hitler hoped that such a form – with the Czech president, government, flag and castle guard retained – would make it easier for the British to accept the fait accompli. From the standpoint of international law it was not a protectorate but a disguised annexation, based on consent extracted under the threat of bombing Prague. That is how it was treated by Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union, which did not recognise the annexation.

Emil Hácha remained in office, now as “State President” of the Protectorate. As a lawyer, he hoped to use the letter of the decree to save as much Czech self-government as possible, and believed that his presence would protect the country from rule by Czech fascists and direct German rule. On 21 March he dissolved parliament and set up the only permitted political organisation, the National Partnership (Národní souručenství). In the spring of 1939 almost 98 per cent of adult Czech men joined it, but for most it was a demonstration of national unity rather than support for the occupier. On 27 April Hácha appointed General Alois Eliáš prime minister; from the outset Eliáš maintained secret contacts with the resistance and with Beneš’s émigrés.

On 18 March Hitler appointed as the first Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath, the former foreign minister, an aristocrat regarded in London as a moderate. Until mid-April, before he took office, executive power was exercised by the army. Real influence, however, lay with the State Secretary in the Protector’s office, Karl Hermann Frank, a Sudeten German and activist of Henlein’s party, who soon also became Higher SS and Police Leader. The Gestapo operated in Prague and Brno, answerable directly to Berlin rather than to the Protector. The Czechoslovak army was disbanded and replaced by a lightly armed Government Army a few thousand strong.

The first months

The occupation began with arrests and plunder. In Operation Gitter the Gestapo detained several thousand people within a few days: Communists, Social Democrats, national activists and German political refugees. German agencies took over key industrial plants, including the Škoda Works in Plzeň and Česká zbrojovka in Brno, which began working for the Wehrmacht. Stocks of food, raw materials and goods were shipped off to the Reich, and prices in the Protectorate rose rapidly.

Some 118,000 people classed by the Germans as Jews lived in the Protectorate, including thousands of refugees from the Sudetenland, Austria and Germany. The Second Republic had already imposed the first restrictions on them, but now the Germans took over their persecution. On 21 June 1939 Neurath issued a decree on Jewish property that introduced a racial definition of a Jew on the Nuremberg model and opened the way to the plunder of their property. In the summer a Jewish emigration office, organised by Adolf Eichmann, was set up in Prague; it forced Jews to leave while stripping them of their property.

The Czechs responded with passive resistance. They boycotted German newsreels, listened to foreign radio and told jokes about the occupiers. In the spring and summer of 1939 pilgrimages and national holidays turned into demonstrations: some 90,000 people came to Říp hill, and the reburial of the poet Karel Hynek Mácha at Vyšehrad in Prague drew huge crowds. Former officers began building the clandestine organisation Obrana národa (Defence of the Nation), and thousands of soldiers and airmen made their way via Poland to France.

Significance

The creation of the Protectorate ended the twenty-year history of Czechoslovakia, at least in Berlin’s eyes. For Europe it was proof that Hitler was fighting not for the rights of Germans but for dominion over other nations. The decree of 16 March was the first act by which the Third Reich incorporated a country inhabited by another nation, and the “protectorate” model showed how the Germans intended to rule conquered peoples: under a pretence of self-government, with a German governor, police and an economy subordinated to the needs of the Reich.

What followed

Czech and Slovak soldiers who had made their way to Poland fought on the Polish side in September 1939 in the Czech and Slovak Legion. In the autumn of 1939 the Germans created the General Government out of part of the occupied Polish territories, where they did not even pretend to grant autonomy. After the outbreak of war the occupation of Bohemia and Moravia quickly grew harsher. On 28 October 1939, the anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia, demonstrations in Prague were dispersed with gunfire; a worker, Václav Sedláček, was killed and a medical student, Jan Opletal, was mortally wounded. His funeral on 15 November turned into another demonstration. On 17 November 1939 the Germans closed all Czech universities, shot nine student leaders and sent some 1,200 students to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The day is now marked around the world as International Students’ Day.

In September 1941 Hitler judged Neurath too lenient and sent Reinhard Heydrich to Prague as Deputy Reich Protector. Heydrich declared a state of emergency, had Prime Minister Eliáš arrested – he was later executed – and within a few weeks brought about hundreds of executions. He also began the deportation of Jews to the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezín, from where most were sent on to the death camps. Of the more than 90,000 people classed as Jews in the Protectorate, some 78,000 were killed, and the Czech Roma were almost entirely wiped out. On 27 May 1942 Czechoslovak parachutists sent from London gravely wounded Heydrich, who died on 4 June. In reprisal the Germans razed Lidice and Ležáky to the ground, murdering the men and sending the women and children to camps. Until the end of the war Czech industry worked for the Wehrmacht, and hundreds of thousands of Czechs were sent to forced labour in the Reich.

The Protectorate lasted until May 1945. On 5 May the Prague uprising broke out, and on 9 May the Red Army entered Prague. A restored Czechoslovakia regained the Sudetenland, and its authorities expelled most of the Germans from the country.