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

Chapter IV
of the banking giants in the Reich, the
Deutsche Bank and the Dresdner Bank,
or such major concerns as IG
Farbenindustrie, AG Reichswerke
Hermann Göring or the Mannesmann
concern. The purchase of shares in
Czech companies was formally “above
board” but the share prices were
artificially depressed (so that it
amounted to de facto confiscation). A
minority holding was enough to allow
Reich German capital to dominate a
Czech company; Germans would take
over the board of management and
directorships and the Czech owners
would become subordinate to them.
Göring’s company swallowed up over 80
firms in the Protectorate that had nearly
150 thousand employees before the war
(e.g. the Škoda Works in Plzeň, the
Poldi Steelworks at Kladno, Zbrojovka
in Brno, Avia in Prague and the
Vítkovice Steelworks).
The Germans also considerably
strengthened their position in the sphere
of agricultural production. Special SS
units, the Settlement Bureau
(Siedlungsamt) and the German
settlement society drew up plans for
establishing enclaves of German
settlement in rural areas of Bohemia and
Moravia, working on the assumption
that Germans would be repatriated from
eastern European, as well as on a wave of
immigration from the Reich. During the
war almost 16,000 farmsteads were
confiscated with a total area of around
550,000 hectares with a view to settling
German immigrants on them. In
addition closed military facilities for the
German army were built in the
countryside to undermine the Czech
element there (Benešov and Vyškov
districts) in the course of which 245
communities were evicted and a total
area of 80,000 hectares taken over. After
the expected victory in the war, these
areas were to be settled by Germans.
Just prior to the German occupation,
the Third Reich did not yet have a fullydeveloped
strategy for “solving the
Czech question” and Germanising the
Czech economy. It took shape gradually,
particularly as regards the capital
The Break up of Czechoslovakia and the Genesis
of the Transfer
134
domination of the Czech economy as a
precondition for its future
Germanisation. The German occupation
policies always took that aim into
account, but refrained from imposing it
radically and by force. During the war
“calm” was to reign in the Protectorate,
so that its economic potential should be
most efficiently exploited for the war
effort. Exploitation of the Protectorate’s
economy by the occupying authorities
The grateful Konrad Henlein welcomes
Hitler back from Munich at the station in
Berlin. At his side is Hermann Göring.
assumed many and different forms.
Among them was the special system for
the circulation of Reichsmarks on the
territory of the Protectorate. The
National Bank for Bohemia and Moravia
was allowed to accept them but was not
allowed to release them back into
circulation but had to surrender them to
the Reichsbank in Berlin, thereby
gaining a credit in marks in the German
Reich. Most of it was “frozen” in
Germany, i.e. a large proportion of the
goods bought in the Protectorate for
marks were acquired without an
equivalent. In 1945 the National Bank’s
claims on the German Reich amounted
to 105,000 million crowns.
We now know that the Reichsmark