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

The Break up of Czechoslovakia and the Genesis
of the Transfer
among the German inhabitants only a
few remnants of the potential socialdemocrat
and communist enemies could
mobilise themselves, and even then they
were fairly easy to keep an eye on and
isolate and moreover they had no
support among the rising generation.
Among the remainder of the German
population there were no expressions of
opposition, except for individual
complaints about the supply of goods or
about various restrictions in social and
public life.
The possibility of developing more
ambitious forms of resistance was limited
in the Sudetengau not only by the ethnic
situation but also by the geographic
conditions, because the mountainous
and forested areas were populated almost
exclusively by Germans. The only
exception was a smaller area in the east
of the so-called Sudetenland, but even
there the main part of the Jeseník massif
was largely impenetrable by the Czechs.
The situation was different in the
region’s economic life as the labour force
included more and more Czechs, which
provided greater scope for the antifascists
to engage sabotage that was hard
to detect although it was fairly restricted
because of the constant surveillance by
the Nazis and the great risks involved.
After June 1941 the main support in
the occupied border areas for the antifascist
resistance was undoubtedly in
areas with a majority Czech population
or those territorial units that were
ethnically mixed and Czech patriots
could join up with German anti-fascists
and foreign labourers and prisoners
herded into the border areas.
Concentration-camp inmates in general
had no chance of assisting the resistance
beyond the barbed wire. After the Soviet
Union’s entry into the war the resistance
movements in the areas that were
predominantly or at least partly Czech,
i.e. the districts of Most, Jilemnice,
Český Dub and particularly the “eastern
Sudetenland”, tried to move from more
or less spontaneous and local forms of
opposition, to more extensive, organised
and active levels of resistance activity.
Significantly, in those areas the
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Chapter IV
resistance workers from different social
strata and political and ideological
persuasions were more closely and
effectively linked, or more precisely in
many illegal organisations those currents
started to crystallise, although the
common interest of all was the nation’s
freedom.
Anti-fascist resistance was most
extensive in the “eastern Sudetenland”,
where relatively there were most Czechs
(over 20%) and several fairly contiguous
and predominantly Czech zones. It was
also typical of those zones that if an
illegal organisation was wound up,
another would be created fairly soon
afterwards to continue the resistance
activity. In the Czech areas it was much
easier to distinguish between anti-Nazi
attitudes that were common to the
absolute majority of the Czech
population and genuine, active
resistance.
A propos political conditions in the
Reichsgau Sudetenland and the
development of resistance activity there,
the impetus provided by the Slovak
national uprising from August to October
1944 constitutes an interesting, albeit not
particularly important chapter. The
uprising boosted the morale of the Czechs
in general and of the Czechs in the
“Sudetenland” in particular, which
perturbed the Sudeten-German
population and above all the two chief
protagonists of the “Czech zone” – the
Gauleiter Konrad Henlein and
K.H.Frank, who, from the spring of 1944,
was the supreme commander of the SS
and police and Minister of State for
Bohemia and Moravia. However, the
fronts were still too remote and the
resistance movements both in the
Protectorate and the Sudetengau (here
both Czech and German) were too weak
for that impetus to be used to any great
effect. Nonetheless here and there it did
help to strengthen the resistance
movement in political and practical terms,
particularly in terms of an expansion of
the partisan movement, which paid off in
the spring of 1945, in those areas where it
managed to survive the German counteroffensive
of the previous winter.