the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Chapter IV
decree failed to specify what a
protectorate was. That “autonomous
administrative unit” was not defined
anywhere in terms of territory – the
location of its borders was once again a
matter for Hitler’s decision. Nor was it
defined in terms of the Czechs and the
Czech nation, although Hitler had
promised Hácha that it would. Indeed
the term “Czech nation” does not occur
anywhere in text of its articles! Hitler’s
decree simply referred to the “other
(non-German) inhabitants of Bohemia
and Moravia”, the Protectorate simply
consisted of “the territory of the former
Czechoslovak Republic occupied by
German units in March 1939”. This was
not an omission but deliberate policy.
The Protectorate was to be a temporary
affair. Its territory was going to belong to
the “steel core of the Third Reich”, and
only international political
considerations and economic concerns
prevented it happening straight away,
with all its international repercussions.
There was a certain national aspect to
the Protectorate system in the matter of
“Protectorate citizenship”. Inhabitants of
German nationality living on the
territory of the Protectorate were
automatically “subjects of the Reich” or
“citizens of the Reich” and were subject
to German legal regulations, i.e. they
lived completely outside the jurisdiction
of the Protectorate authorities. The
“other inhabitants of Bohemia and
Moravia”, on the other hand, were
“subjects of the Protectorate” in the
terms of the decree, in other words,
second-class citizens of a kind. This
distinction had all sorts of practical
implications; the most important ones
were outlined in the previous paragraphs.
To sum up: the autonomy of the
Protectorate was formulated extremely
vaguely and could be abolished at any
moment. Aand it was increasingly
restricted so that as the war continued it
practically ceased to exist. The assertion
in Hitler’s decree of March 16, 1939,
that the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia was “self-administering” was a
lie based on the maxim of “promising
much, to avoid giving little”.
The Break up of Czechoslovakia and the Genesis
of the Transfer
122
The occupation of the territory of
Bohemia and Moravia not included in
the Munich annexation (“Rest-Tschechei”
in Hitler’s parlance), represented a
fundamental milestone in the post-
Munich evolution of the idea of
resettling the Sudeten Germans. The
enemy was now revealed clearly and this
idea gradually spread to broad sections of
the Czech nation in the immediate wake
of March 15, 1939. The first resistance
organisations came out in favour of it, as
well as a significant part of public
opinion. This development first peaked
after the brutal German retaliation for
the enormous Czech demonstration on
October 28, to mark the twenty-first
anniversary of the foundation of the
Czechoslovak Republic. On that
occasion the Germans closed down the
universities (ostensibly for three years –
but they never respected that, nor had
any intention of doing so), brutally
arrested students, deporting them to
Sachsenhausen concentrate camp and
executing some of their leaders.
THE PROTECTORATE
AND THE JEWS
Meanwhile the occupiers started to make
preparations for the liquidation of the
Jews. This took the form of creating a
“ghetto without walls” and involved
confiscating Jewish property by so-called
“Aryanization”, the concentration of
several families into one sub-standard
apartment and various other measures
intended to humiliate and demoralise
the Jews and create a barrier between
them and Czech society. Thus from
September 1939, Jews were successively
banned from hotels, pubs, spas, cinemas
and theatres. They were also banned
from receiving unemployment relief and
were gradually assigned to menial jobs.
They were banned from various streets,
parks and embankments. They were not
allowed to marry non-Jewish members
of the population. They were not allowed
to leave their homes after eight in the
evening, they were not allowed to fish,
attend sports events or own a telephone.
When travelling by train or tram they
were only allowed into the last coach,