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In the aftermath of the Munich agreement, which turned the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia over to Germany, German troops march into the town square of Friedland. October 3, 1938. See more photographs |
CZECHOSLOVAKIA |
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Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian state at the end of World War I. It included the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovakia, the province of Subcarpathian Rus (Transcarpathian Ukraine), and portions of Austrian Silesia. Prewar census data divides the prewar population of Czechoslovakia along ethnic (mother tongue) lines at about 50 percent Czech, 22.3 percent German, 16 percent Slovak, 4.78 percent Magyar (Hungarian), 3.79 percent Ukrainian, 1.29 Hebrew and Yiddish, and 0.57 Polish. |
Despite its multinational population and tense relations with its neighbors, all of whom coveted its territory, Czechoslovakia remained a functioning parliamentary democracy until the Munich crisis of 1938. ANNEXATION OF THE SUDETENLAND |
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PARTITION OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA |
On March 15, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia in the rump Czecho-Slovak state, in flagrant violation of the Munich Pact. The German occupation authorities refashioned the two provinces as a German protectorate, annexed directly to the Reich, but under the leadership of a Reich Protector. Konstantin von Neurath, the former German foreign minister, served as Reich Protector from March 1939 until he was replaced by RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich. After Heydrich's assassination in late spring 1942, Order Police chief Kurt Daluege served briefly as Reich Protector. From 1943 until 1945, former Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick held this post. Slovakia became an independent state under the leadership of a Catholic priest, Jozef Tiso, whose followers established a fascist, authoritarian, one-party dictatorship, strongly influenced by the separatist Catholic clerical hierarchy in internal policy and closely allied with Nazi Germany. The ruling party was the Slovak People's Party. The Tiso regime remained in power until April 1945. Two months later, in May, Hungary seized and annexed Subcarpathian Rus. Established as a new state in 1918, Czechoslovakia had disappeared from the map two decades later. The Germans and their collaborators killed approximately 263,000 Jews who had resided on the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1938. |
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