The Czechoslovak government-in-exile, sometimes styled officially as the Provisional Government of Czechoslovakia (Czech: Prozatímní vláda Československa; Slovak: Dočasná vláda Československa), was an informal title conferred upon the Czechoslovak National Liberation Committee (Czech: Výbor Československého Národního Osvobození; Slovak: Československý Výbor Národného Oslobodenia), initially by British diplomatic recognition.

[2] A specifically anti-Fascist government, it sought to reverse the Munich Agreement and the subsequent German occupation of Czechoslovakia, and to return the Republic to its 1937 boundaries.

Seeing the end of the First Czechoslovak Republic as a fait accompli, Edvard Beneš resigned as president one week after the Munich Agreement ceded the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany.

Likewise, though he extended recognition to the committee as a non-governmental agency, his government was non-committal to Beneš himself, and saw many possibilities for a post-war Czechoslovakia.

One of its principal reservations about giving governmental status to Beneš, was the fact of the murky situation in the then-independent Slovakia (which was a satellite state of the German Empire).

The French government of the winter of 1939–1940 felt that Beneš was not necessarily speaking for all Czechoslovaks,[5] based on the relatively fluid situation in Slovakia.

[2] However, as Beneš was the key to getting military support from the well-trained Czechoslovak Army, France was in fact the first nation to conclude a treaty with the committee.

With the fall of France, the views of the newly appointed prime minister Winston Churchill took predominance over the concerns of the waning Third Republic.

He was very much clearer than his predecessor Chamberlain with respect to Czechoslovak affairs, and quickly recognized Beneš as the president of a government-in-exile after the fall of France.

The success of this mission, Operation Anthropoid, caused Britain and Free France (itself a government-in-exile) to formally repudiate the Munich Agreement, thus conferring de jure legitimacy on the Beneš government as the continuation of the First Republic.

Beneš worked to bring Czechoslovak communist exiles in the United Kingdom into cooperation with his government, offering far-reaching concessions, including nationalization of heavy industry and the creation of local people's committees at the war's end.

However, the final agreement authorizing the forced population transfer of the Germans was not reached until 2 August 1945 at the end of the Potsdam Conference.