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Czechoslovakia was a landlocked state in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland became part of Nazi Germany, while the country lost further territories to Hungary and Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, the state ceased to exist, as Slovakia proclaimed its independence and Carpathian Ruthenia became part of Hungary, while in the remainder of the Czech Lands, the German Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was proclaimed. In 1939, after the outbreak of World War II, former Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš formed a government-in-exile and sought recognition from the Allies.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was a Czechoslovak statesman, political activist and philosopher who served as the first president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935. He is regarded as the founding father of Czechoslovakia.
Jozef Gašpar Tiso was a Slovak politician and Catholic priest who served as president of the Slovak Republic, a client state of Nazi Germany during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. In 1947, after the war, he was executed for treason in Bratislava.
The German-speaking population in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic, 23.6% of the population at the 1921 census, usually refers to the Sudeten Germans, although there were other German ethno-linguistic enclaves elsewhere in Czechoslovakia inhabited by Carpathian Germans, and among the German-speaking urban dwellers there were ethnic Germans and/or Austrians as well as German-speaking Jews. 14% of the Czechoslovak Jews considered themselves Germans in the 1921 census, but a much higher percentage declared German as their colloquial tongue during the last censuses under the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was a partially-annexed territory of Nazi Germany that was established on 16 March 1939 after the German occupation of the Czech lands. The protectorate's population was mostly ethnic Czech.
The Kindertransport was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.
The (First) Slovak Republic, otherwise known as the Slovak State, was a partially-recognized client state of Nazi Germany which existed between 14 March 1939 and 4 April 1945 after abandoning Czechoslovakia to be annexed by Germany. The Slovak part of Czechoslovakia declared independence with German support one day before the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia. The majority of the territory of present-day Slovakia was under the control of the Slovak-Republic, without its current southern parts, which were ceded by Czechoslovakia to Hungary in 1938. It was the first time in history that Slovakia had been a formally independent state.
Carpathian Ruthenia was a region in the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia that became an autonomous region within that country in September 1938. It declared its independence as the "Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine” in 15 March 1939; however, it was occupied and annexed by Hungary the same day. Starting with October 1944, the Soviet Red Army occupied the territory and short period the territory of the region was organised as Transcarpathian Ukraine (1944—1946), until it was incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1946. In total, between 1939 and 1944, 80,000 Carpathian Ukrainians perished.
The history of the Jews in Slovakia goes back to the 11th century, when the first Jews settled in the area.
The history of the Jews in the Czech lands, historically the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, including the modern Czech Republic, goes back many centuries. There is evidence that Jews have lived in Moravia and Bohemia since as early as the 10th century. Jewish communities flourished here specifically in the 16th and 17th centuries, and again in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Local Jews were mostly murdered in the Holocaust, or exiled at various points. As of 2021, there were only about 2,300 Jews estimated to be living in the Czech Republic.
The Battle of Sokolovo took place on 8 and 9 March 1943, near the village of Sokolovo near Kharkiv in Ukraine when the ongoing attack of the Wehrmacht was delayed by joint Soviet and Czechoslovak forces. It was the first time that a foreign military unit, the First Czechoslovak Independent Field Battalion, fought together with the Red Army. Under the command of Ludvík Svoboda, later President of Czechoslovakia, the Czechoslovak soldiers delayed the advance of Germans to the Mzha River. On 13 March the position was abandoned as untenable due to the complete German encirclement of Kharkov.
The Jewish Party was a political party of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It was founded in 1919 by the Jewish National Council in Prague. It was the strongest Jewish political party in the interwar Czechoslovakia although many Jews were rather active in non-Jewish parties, be they Czech, German or Hungarian. The party adopted a Zionist political program and succeeded in influencing the Czechoslovak government to acknowledge Jews as an official national minority in the constitution of 1920.
Jakob Edelstein was a Czechoslovak Zionist, social democrat and the first Jewish Elder in the Theresienstadt ghetto. He was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Trevor Chadwick was a British humanitarian who was involved in the Kindertransport to rescue Jews and other refugee children in Czechoslovakia in 1938–1939 before World War II. After the Munich Agreement Nazi Germany annexed Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia in 1938 and occupied the whole Czech part of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The children were mostly resettled with families in the United Kingdom.
The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia resulted in the deportation, dispossession, and murder of most of the pre-World War II population of Jews in the Czech lands that were annexed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.
The Holocaust in the Sudetenland resulted in the flight, dispossession, deportation and ultimately death of many of the 24,505 Jews living in the Reichsgau Sudetenland, an administrative region of Nazi Germany established from former Czechoslovak territory annexed after the October 1938 Munich Agreement. Due to harassment and violence, including during Kristallnacht, ninety percent of the Jews had already left the Sudetenland by mid-1939. The remaining Jews were subject to property confiscation and eventually deportation. During the later years of the war, tens of thousands of Jews and non-Jews were forced laborers in a network of concentration camps in the Sudetenland.
Marie Schmolka was a Czechoslovak Jewish activist and social worker who helped political refugees and Jewish adults and children escape the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the lead-up to World War II. She was a member of WIZO and WILPF. She had previously helped refugees from Germany who fled to Czechoslovakia after the Nazi rise to power. Schmolka headed the newly founded Czechoslovak Refugee Committee, and also chaired local HICEM. In July 1938, she represented Czechoslovakia at the Évian conference.
After World War I and during the formation of Czechoslovakia, a wave of anti-Jewish rioting and violence was unleashed against Jews and their property, especially stores.
Rudolf Rabl was a Bohemian-born Austrian-Czech lawyer, writer, art collector, and member of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, 1940-45.
References
- ↑ ""Archival material relating to Czechoslovak Refugee Trust: Records"". UK National Archives. Archived from the original on 24 November 2023. Retrieved 25 February 2024. Reference: HO 294.
- ↑ London, Louise (2000). "6. Refugees from Czechoslovakia". Whitehall and the Jews, 1933-1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53449-6.
- ↑ Grossman, Nurit (2019). "The emergence of the Kindertransport in Prague: the Barbican Mission to the Jews, a unique endeavour". Jewish Historical Studies. 51: 208–220. doi:10.14324/111.444.jhs.2020v51.014. ISSN 0962-9696. JSTOR 48733609.
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