Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (review)

This is an excellent study. Chad Bryant colorfully portrays Czech political and social developments both before 1939 and afterward when the Nazis had taken control of smaller Bohemia and Moravia after the predominantly German territories had already been turned over to Germany by the Munich Agreement of 1938. In much detail but without losing sight of larger issues, Bryant describes the successive stages of Nazi policies (which were frequently based on internal differences of opinion and rival ambitions) and the reactions by the various parts of the population (including both indigenous and immigrated Germans, who were far from agreeing with one another). Although radical Nazi leaders practiced cruel repression and committed appalling atrocities as putatively the best way to assure submission, other administrators tried to allow for some measure of decent life, provided that no opposition to dictatorship surfaced and production for Germany's military needs continued unabated. As the war dragged on and, especially after 1941, the effort to avoid defeat became imperative, and the Nazi authorities came to see maintenance of the arms industry as their first priority. To this end, the Czechs were given satisfactory food rations, and disturbing action was put off. This was one major reason why underground groups did not create serious problems for the German occupiers. Armed resistance failed to emerge, and in the midst of a world full of war, death, and destruction, the Czech lands were almost an island of peace.

The Nazis operated here against a backdrop of pervasive ethnic heterogeneity and a century of national strife. The Czechs had increased their number at German expense under the Austrian Habsburg empire. After WorldWar I, the German-inhabited Sudetenland was prevented from joining Germany and, like the regions with a Czech majority, was included in Czechoslovakia, which the Czechs saw as their nation-state in which they could discriminate against the German part of the population. After the Nazis annexed the Sudetenland in September-October 1938 and took control of the remaining regions a few months later, the Czechs were still increasing in numbers. The Nazis saw the Slavs as an inferior race and felt that for the sake of winning Lebensraum (living space) the country had to be populated by Germans. So long as the Nazis' efforts were directed at winning the war, they put off expelling the Czechs, but they started Germanizing Czechs to whom they ascribed racially "valuable blood." German moderation did not extend to the Jews, however. The Jews were seen as a sub-human race, to be exterminated at any cost.

Edvard Beneš's exile government in London managed to exchange messages both with officials in Emil Hácha's puppet administration and with underground circles. Most importantly, the exile government was able to influence opinion at home with violently anti-German radio broadcasts. The Czechs' failure to contribute to the Allied war effort by means of an armed resistance created a problem for Beneš, who, encouraged by demands from the underground, had concluded that Czechoslovakia must be relieved of its foreign nationalities, notably the ethnic Germans. Seeking to increase hatred against them at home and to initiate armed resistance, the British air force dropped paratroopers to assassinate Nazi officials. Most of these missions failed, but one succeeded in killing Czechoslovakia's German "protector," Reinhard Heydrich. The subsequent German reprisals were merciless, involving the killing of hundreds of innocent people, notably in the village of Lidice, where the men were massacred and the women and children taken to concentration camps. Anti-German sentiment increased, but the hoped-for armed resistance failed to emerge. Beneš won Iosif Stalin's support, however, both for himself and for his expulsion plan when he visited Moscow in November 1943. The Red Army's advance into the vicinity of Prague in early May 1945 encouraged an uprising there against the Nazi regime. Beneš and his followers publicly stigmatized the ethnic Germans as outlaws and denounced them as national traitors who had to be expelled...