The Holocaust in Bohemia and Moravia

Czech Initiatives, German Policies, Jewish Responses

Wolf Gruner

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789202854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Prior to Hitler's occupation, nearly 120, 000 Jews inhabited the areas that would become the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia; by 1945, all but a handful had either escaped or been deported and murdered by the Nazis. This pioneering study gives a definitive account of the Holocaust as it was carried out in the region, detailing the German and Czech policies, including previously overlooked measures such as small-town ghettoization and forced labor, that shaped Jewish life. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Wolf Gruner demonstrates how the persecution of the Jews as well as their reactions and resistance efforts were the result of complex actions by German authorities in Prague and Berlin as well as the Czech government and local authorities.

CHAPTER 1

THE CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC AND ITS MINORITIES

Modified Maps, New States, Changed Relations

As in Germany, the First World War profoundly altered both maps and power relations in central and eastern Europe, laying the ground for subsequent developments in Bohemia (Čechy) and Moravia (Morava). The new Czechoslovak Republic (ČSR), one of the successor states to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, comprised the majority of Czechs and Slovaks along with German, Jewish, Hungarian, Polish and Ruthenian minorities.¹ The declaration of independence of 28 October 1918 promised to furnish every section of the population, including the minorities, with equal rights and fair political representation.²

The government of the new republic signed the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye of 10 September 1919, incorporating its provisions on the protection of minorities into the first constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic (as Art. 128) on 29 February 1920. This included recognition of a Jewish national minority, a partly political move intended to weaken the German and Hungarian communities. However, many of the 354,000 Jews, the vast majority of them German speakers, considered themselves members of the German minority and did not declare themselves Jews.³ More than thirteen million people lived in the republic in 1921: alongside 6,840,000 Czechs there were almost two million Slovaks and somewhat more than three million Germans, who thus represented the second largest ethnic group in Czechoslovakia.⁴

By the end of 1930, the population of the republic had grown to almost fifteen million people, most of whom lived in the west (Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia), with four million in the east (Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine). Nine hundred thousand people were resident in the capital city of Prague (Praha).⁵ Thirty-four per cent of the Czechoslovak population worked in agriculture, a similar number in industry, and less than 10 per cent each in commerce, transportation, the civil service and other fields. In Bohemia, agriculture accounted for just 24 per cent of those in employment, while almost 42 per cent worked in industry (a larger proportion of industrial jobs than in Germany), whereas in Carpatho-Ukraine the ratio was 62 per cent to 12 per cent.⁶

In Bohemia, alongside two-thirds of Czechs, Germans made up a third of the population in 1930, while in Moravia they accounted for almost 23 per cent alongside 74 per cent of Czechs, though due to a lower birth rate Germans’ share of the overall population was decreasing.⁷ While Czechs and Slovaks gained cultural and political freedoms with the advent of the new republic, the Germans lost the privileged position they had enjoyed during the Habsburg era. Many formerly Germanized Czechs now professed loyalty to their republic. The overwhelming majority of Germans, on the other hand, withheld their allegiance and even called for the German-speaking Bohemian areas to become part of German-Austria. When the victorious powers prohibited this, the Sudeten Germans oriented themselves towards Germany/Berlin, again in vain.⁸

Particularly in the major cities, however, residents also chose (and changed) their nationality as they saw fit; there were Czechicized Germans and Germanized Czechs.⁹ Based solely on ius soli, everyone born in Czechoslovakia received citizenship. Women enjoyed the equal right to vote.¹⁰ Though the language law adopted in 1920 granted only Czech and Slovak the status of official languages, in those parts of the country in which they made up at least a fifth of the population minorities could officially use their languages, including German, when interacting with local authorities.¹¹ In addition, Germans were guaranteed the full range of minority rights, among other things a proportional share of parliamentary and town council seats as well as access to cultural and educational services. In 1935, 97 per cent of German children attended German schools.¹² Nevertheless, many Germans accused the Czechs and Slovaks of seeking to create a homogenous Slavic state, failing to grant them equal rights and removing Sudeten Germans from the civil service.¹³

The new emphasis on the nation in the immediate postwar period stoked an antisemitism that certainly existed in Bohemia and Moravia, though it became less visible than in the neighbouring countries.¹⁴ The early days of the republic witnessed scattered demonstrations against Jews, as well as the looting of a small number of businesses and homes in Prague.¹⁵ In December 1918, in the small town of Holešov (Holleschau), members of the nearby army unit, together with local residents, vandalized apartments and offices. Two Jews died as a result of the three-day pogrom. In September 1919, some nationalists among the Legionnaires, the Czech volunteers who fought in Allied armies during the First World War, called for a dictatorship under Masaryk and the dismissal of Germans and Jews from the army and state administration.¹⁶ Students of a völkisch inclination demonstrated at the German University in Prague. When Samuel Steinherz was later elected its rector, the Czech education minister quickly quelled a protest against the ‘Judaization of the German university’, but in 1924 the university senate resolved to limit the number and rights of Jewish students.¹⁷ With reference to the same period, however, Anny Maass, who was attending school in Moravian Ostrava (Moravská Ostrava, Mährisch-Ostrau), remembers barely any antisemitism.¹⁸

Later, in 1927, a fascist party on the Italian model emerged in the ČSR and antisemitic agitation gradually gained ground in the press.¹⁹ More demonstrations and even some attacks occurred at universities in Prague. Katherine Kral, for example, had to fend off an assault by German students.²⁰ State founder and president Tomáš G. Masaryk, however, did everything he could to combat such tendencies.²¹

The Jewish Inhabitants of the New Republic

Of 354,000 individuals of Jewish religion or origin living in Czechoslovakia in 1921, half identified with a Jewish nationality in the census carried out at the time (11,251 of 79,777 in Bohemia, 19,016 of 45,306 in Moravia, and larger shares in the rest of the republic). The remainder saw themselves as Czechs, Germans or Hungarians.²² Jews lived in a state of close coexistence with the other groups in Czech society in both towns and cities,²³ while political actors often instrumentalized differences between groups.²⁴ Many people spoke several languages. The Jews of Prague in particular were characterized by cultural hybridity²⁵ and multiple nationality.²⁶

Alfred Dube (b. 1923), the child of a Jewish banker of Czech origin who was also a reserve lieutenant in the Czech army,²⁷ grew up in Pilsen (Plzeň) in western Bohemia speaking Czech and German. He went to a German school and had Jewish and German friends. His best friend was Eddie Weck, a German.²⁸ Hilda Beran, born in Moravian Ostrava in 1913, spoke German at home and learned Czech at school. She first attended a Jewish educational establishment then a public high school for girls, where she experienced some antisemitism.²⁹ In Prague, Zuzana Podmelova, born in 1921, spoke Czech and German with members of her family and attended a German school.³⁰

In the Bohemian lands, Jews’ long history of settlement and their special demographic situation had made many of them highly secularized. In this respect they differed from most of their counterparts in Germany and Austria who, regardless of how integrated they were, anchored their Jewishness in religion, as they tended to do in other parts of Czechoslovakia as well. The founding of the republic sparked the rise of a Czech-Jewish movement advocating universal assimilation, alongside a Zionist movement that took a variety of forms in the different regions of Czechoslovakia.³¹ Other than those of a communist persuasion, most Jews were extremely loyal to the Czech state.³²

For Alfred Dube, who moved from Pilsen to Prague at the age of ten, religion played a significant role. His family saw themselves as Reform Jews; his father had a paid seat in the synagogue, and they went to the temple every Friday. Alfred was instructed in religion at school by a rabbi under state auspices, just as the Catholics had their weekly religious lesson.³³ Some Jews upheld traditional Jewish values, such as the well-to-do family of Anny Maass (b. 1909)³⁴ and that of Anna Grant (b. 1921), both resident in Moravian Ostrava. The latter grew up in what she described as a close-knit Jewish community. Her parents attended the more conservative of the city’s two synagogues.³⁵ Others were not very religious, such as the family of Katherine Kral (b. 1909), who attended the synagogue in Moravian Ostrava only on the High Holy Days,³⁶ or the family of Curt Allina, who, having moved from Vienna to Prague, observed the Jewish holidays only at the homes of relatives.³⁷ Georgine Hyde from Prague (b. 1925) went so far as to celebrate Christmas with her employees, attended a reform synagogue solely on the High Holy Days, with the service in Czech, and participated in other festivals at most with her religious grandparents.³⁸ In Brno (Brünn), meanwhile, the family of Helen Blenkins (b. 1927) ignored all the Jewish holidays.³⁹

The majority of Jews, however, lived in the east of the republic, in Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine. They accounted for 14 per cent of the inhabitants in these regions, with roughly 90 per cent of them identifying with a Jewish nationality. These often rather orthodox Jews differed in cultural, political and social terms from their largely assimilated counterparts in the west of the country.

The founding of the republic prompted the immigration of several thousand orthodox Jews from Bukovina and Galicia, who settled mainly in Prague and Moravian Ostrava, where they encountered certain reservations about refugees.⁴⁰ The immigrants’ poor economic situation and different culture also sparked tensions within the Jewish communities.⁴¹

The legal status of the Jewish Communities was based on the Austrian law of 1890 in Bohemia and Moravia and the Hungarian agreements of 1870 in Slovakia and Carpatho-Ukraine. While a rich religious life developed in Moravia, including welfare and educational activities, in Bohemia it was Jewish Community institutions that sustained the practice of religion. After 1918, there were three Jewish umbrella organizations in Czechoslovakia, serving greater Prague, the Czech-speaking communities and their German-speaking counterparts. They banded together with the Moravian communities in 1926 to form the Supreme Council of the Jewish Religious Communities, which fostered the study of Jewish history, religion and culture. This body also supported the Prague Jewish Museum, the translation of the Five Books of Moses into Czech, the establishment of a chair in Semitic philology at the University of Prague and – unsuccessfully until 1938 – the establishment of a rabbinical seminary, in an attempt to remedy the lack of religious education.⁴²

The Jewish population had been in steady decline since the turn of the century, with Jews’ share of the overall population falling by 9.4 per cent in Moravia and 4.3 per cent in Bohemia b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Czechoslovak Republic and Its Minorities
• Chapter 2 Annexation: Violence, Flight and Emigration Ban
• Chapter 3 German Expulsion and Czech Persecution
• Chapter 4 The War and Greater German Deportation Plans
• Chapter 5 Reorientation, Ghettoization and Protest
• Chapter 6 Local versus Central Persecutory Initiatives
• Chapter 7 Isolation, Forced Labour and Opposition
• Chapter 8 Repression, Deportation and Resistance
• Chapter 9 Transports, Theft, Forced Labour and Flight
• Chapter 10 Those Left Behind and the End of the War
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects