Was Czechoslovakia a democratic country during World War 2?

Answer 1

Czechoslovakia had a sad history during the war. It was a new nation, created from the wreckage of the old Hapsburg Empire ("Austru-Hungaria") at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. It was called "Czechoslovakia" because the two largest ethnic groups in this new country were the Czechs and the Slovaks, but there were other ethnic groups, most notably and most troublesome being the ethnic Germans, called the "Sudeten Germans" because they lived in the Sudentenland in western Czechoslovakia.

As Hitler built his war machine and increased his power in the 1930s he began to peck away at the territory of his neighbors. First in 1935 he "remilitarized" the Rhineland, which at least was German territory, but under the Versailles Treaty no German military was to be stationed there, on the French border, but Hitler did exactly that and no one stopped him. Then there was the "Anschluss" in 1938, where Hitler forcibly annexed Austria to Germany (Hitler was born in Austria), and Austria ceased to exist as an independent nation, and became "Ostmark", a province of greater Germany.

Next Hitler turned his attention to the Sudenten Germans, alleging that the Czechs were discriminating against and abusing these ethnic Germans in their country, who were appealing to Hitler to help. This led to the shameful, disgusting affair at Munich in late 1938. The French President and the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, met with Hitler in Munich, Germany. Neither France nor Britain was ready yet to confront Hitler in his greedy grabs for territory - the memory of WWI was still too fresh, their people unwilling yet to go to war to stop Hitler, which is what it would have taken. If war HAD come sometime in 1935-38, it would have been much easier to win, as Hitler was as yet nowhere near as strong or formidable as he was hell-bent on becoming, as rapidly as possible, but the will to stop him did not exist. So Hitler promised Daladier and Chamberlain that with the addition of the Sudentenland to Germany, he would be satisfied, all his demands would have been met, he would make no more trouble and leave his neighbors in peace. So those two pusillanimous "statesmen" went into a room with Hitler, not inviting in the Czech president, who was left cooling his heels in the hallway outside, while France and Britain agreed that Hitler could have that part of Czechoslovakia he craved. Then the Czech president was called in and informed of what had been done to his nation. Chamberlain flew back to England crowing about "peace in our time" and waving the papers of the "Munich Agreement", but less than a year later Hitler invaded Poland, and after three days of dithering Britain and France were finally shamed into declaring war on Germany. In the meantime, Hitler had just gone ahead and taken over all of Czechoslovakia, without bothering to hold any conferences with anybody. Czechoslovakia disappeared and in its place was the "Gau" of Bohmeia and Moravia.

One thing that made Czechoslovakia so attractive to the Germans was that it was a very industrialized nation, full of educated and productive people. Hitler was particularly avaricious for the massive industrial complex at Skoda, which made munitions of war, then and today. The Czechs manufactured tanks, to which the Germans helped themselves, and when Hitler blitzed into France two of his ten armored divisions were equipped with Czech tanks. These were light tanks by late-war standards, but effective in 1940.

As in all countries overrun by the Nazis in Europe some people were happy with the new arrangement - the right wingers, the local Nazis, ethnic Germans. And those men were glad for the chance to join units meant to fight alongside the German military. Other people were appalled - the moderates, the nationalists, the left wingers and communists, and fled when they could, or formed units of "resistance fighters" who stayed at home and did what they could, in the face of secret police, denouncements by local collaborators with the Nazis, massive reprisal killings of innocent civilians (the Germans liked to kill ten people rounded up at random for every German soldier killed by the underground).

The Czech Legion was mostly Czech soldiers who managed to escape from their homeland at the German takeover, and by various epic journeys made their way to England, where the British gave them uniforms, equipment, weapons, and a place in the fighting, and they fought through the six years of the war. Some returned afterward to Russian-dominated Czechoslovakia, but many left again after a time, and lived the rest of their lives as expatriates.

Two members of the Czech Legion were selected and trained by the British, and then inserted back into Czechoslovakia as part of a commando team, to cooperate with the Resistance in a special mission (the Resistance was also sustained by parachute drops of supplies at night by the British, and was in radio contact with the British with clandestine transmitters). The goal of this mission was to kill one of the biggest murdering Nazi swine of them all, one of the architects of the "Final Solution", a high official of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, who had become "Gauleiter of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia". This they did, tossing a hand grenade into his open convertible car on a street in Prague. Heydrich lingered a week in agony, which could not have been as severe as one would have wished or as he deserved. In retaliation the Germans slaughtered all the inhabitants of the village of Lidice, near Prague - men, women, children, old people - all of them.

Many members of the Resistance in every occupied nation in Europe were communists. But when the Soviet forces came west in 1944 and 1945, they did not trust these local communists to hew to the Party Line, to jump when Stalin said jump and generally toe the mark. The Russians had their own Czech communists, who had fled to Moscow and spent the war years there being indoctrinated into the joys of complete subservience to Moscow, and the ways and means of running a Russian puppet state, and these were the people installed to run Czechoslovakia after the war. Nevertheless the Czech people were a fractious and independent bunch and these local puppets were not always able to flog the people into line where the Russians wanted them, so it was necessary in 1948, and again in 1968, for the Soviets to temporarily drop the pretense of happy communist solidarity, without a dissenting whisper to be heard, and to send in the Russian tanks to clamp the lid on the Czechs.

At the end of WWII, the Sudenten Germans were forcibly expelled from Czechoslovakia, and forced into Germany, where they were refugees, just like millions of other refugee "displaced persons" wandering Europe in the post war wreckage.

The Czechs finally got their country back with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s.

See the Related Link below for an article on Lidice.

Answer 2

no this is b/c they had a prime ministor and adolf took it over so it was authoritran