The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia
The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia resulted in the deportation, dispossession, and murder of most of the pre-World War II population of Jews in the Czech lands that were annexed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945.
Jews were expelled from most of the royal cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at the demand of burghers because of economic rivalries and religious tensions.
[1] In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, thousands of Jews came to Prague and other large cities in Bohemia and Moravia from small villages and towns.
[4] Following the end of World War I in 1918, Bohemia and Moravia – including the border Sudetenland, which had an ethnic-German majority – became part of the new country of Czechoslovakia.
[28] The arrival of German-speaking Jewish refugees contributed to a rise in antisemitism in the rump state of Czechoslovakia,[20][29] tied up with a changing definition of nationality and citizenship that became ethnically exclusive.
[30] In mid-December, Rudolf Beran, prime minister of the authoritarian, ethnonationalist government of the Second Czechoslovak Republic, announced that he intended to "solve the Jewish question".
Foreigners who were not ethnically Czech, Slovak, or Rusyn were required to leave the country within six months, and the Czechoslovak citizenship of Jewish refugees from the Sudetenland was systematically denied.
In March, Hácha formed the National Partnership, a political organization to which all adult male Czech Protectorate subjects were required to belong – women and Jews were forbidden from joining.
[47] The historian Benjamin Frommer contends that the archival record shows that in some cases the participation of Czech local authorities in anti-Jewish measures far exceeded passive compliance with orders from above.
[59] Part of the Czech government's calculation in arguing for a narrower definition of Jew was to reduce the amount of Jewish property that would be transferred to Germans as a result of Aryanization.
[60] Little irregular anti-Jewish violence took place during much of 1939,[61] with the exception of a second wave of arson attacks against synagogues in May and June—in Brno, Olomouc, Uherský Brod, Chlumec, Náchod, Pardubice, and Moravská Ostrava.
[67][68] The historian Hillel J. Kieval estimates that this illegal emigration amounted to several thousand Jews, many of whom joined Czechoslovak military formations abroad.
[73] The Nisko Plan was a scheme to concentrate Jews in the Lublin District, at the time the most remote area of German-occupied Europe and adjacent to the new border with the Soviet Union created by the partition of Poland.
[77][78] SS chief Heinrich Himmler called off the deportation because it conflicted with the higher-priority goal of resettling ethnic Germans in the Warthegau and West Prussia in German–occupied Poland.
[83] On 21 June, simultaneously as the occupiers decided to establish the Central Office, the Reich Protector announced that all Jewish property was claimed by Germany.
By mid-1941, more than 11,700 of the 15,000 eligible Jewish men were engaged in a variety of forced labor projects, initially focused on agriculture and construction and later on industry and forestry.
[104] Jews were also restricted from shopping except for a few hours of the day from mid-1940,[105][106] and eventually businesses had to choose whether to serve exclusively Jewish or non-Jewish customers.
[80] Later in September, high-ranking SS functionary Reinhard Heydrich was appointed Reich Protector and deposed the Czech government under Eliáš, replacing him with the hardliner Krejči.
[118] During the first years of the German occupation, many Jews moved to Prague to apply for visas to foreign countries, and others headed to the countryside to evade anti-Jewish restrictions or obtain goods on the black market.
[128] That month, Heydrich launched the final phase of the ghettoization, forcing Jews into a smaller number of towns and cities to make it easier to deport them.
[135] Frommer has argued that these newspapers made it easier for some ordinary Czechs to denounce their neighbors, by providing an alternative to the Nazi authorities.
[140][141] Individual Jews resisted in several ways, such as refusing to obey anti-Jewish restrictions, buying goods on the black market, not wearing the yellow star.
[148] In Prague, deportees had to gather in the Trade Fair Palace in Holešovice where they had to sleep on the floor in unheated wooden barracks for several days.
[158] On 29 May, two days after Heydrich's assassination by the Czech resistance, Jewish leaders were told to expect the deportation of all Jews living within Germany, Austria, and Bohemia and Moravia.
On the night of 8–9 March 1944, 3,792 Jews from the family camp were murdered in the gas chambers—the largest single mass execution of Czechoslovak citizens during the war.
[180] Historians consider that hiding was relatively rare in the Protectorate,[132][181] due to geographic, demographic, and political factors rather than Czech collaboration with the occupation.
[183][181][184] According to one estimate, some 1,100 Jews acquired false papers, but the majority left the Protectorate, either to be foreign workers in Germany or else to Slovakia or Hungary; not all of these survived the war.
[197] The deportation of Jews as part of the expulsion of Germans was abruptly halted in September 1946 due to media outrage and objections from the military governor of the American occupation zone of Germany.
[211] State-sponsored antisemitism was most prominent in the 1950s, manifested especially in the Slánský trial, in which mostly Jewish communists were accused of conspiring on behalf of a worldwide Zionist conspiracy.
[222][223] During the late 2010s, some historians began to examine the Holocaust outside of a national framework and research issues such as the role of the Protectorate government and some parts of the Czech population in the persecution of Jews.
