Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ies to win American backing for a joint Czech-Slovak state. The plea appealed espe-
cially to the idealistic American president, Woodrow Wilson, and his belief in the
self-determination of peoples. The most workable solution appeared to be a single
federal state of two equal republics, and this was spelled out in agreements signed in
Cleveland, Ohio, in 1915 and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1918 (both cities having
large populations of Czechs and Slovaks).
Prague joined in the 1848 democratic revolutions that swept Europe, and
the city was first in line in the Austrian empire to rise in favour of reform.
Yet, like most of the others, Prague's revolution was soon crushed.
As WWI drew to a close, Czechoslovakia declared its independence, with Allied
support, on 28 October 1918. Prague became the capital and the popular Masaryk, a
writer and political philosopher, the new republic's first president.
A TASTE OF FREEDOM, THEN NAZI DOMINATION
Czechoslovakia in the two decades between independence and the 1938 Munich
agreement (that paved the way for the Nazi German invasion) was a remarkably suc-
cessful state. Even now, Czechs consider the 'First Republic' another golden age of
immense cultural and economic achievement.
Czechoslovakia's proximity to Nazi Germany - and its sizable German minority in
the border area known as the Sudetenland - made the country a tempting a target for
Adolf Hitler. Hitler correctly judged that neither Britain nor France had an appetite for
war, and at a conference in Munich in 1938, the Nazi leader demanded that Germany
be allowed to annex the Sudetenland. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain ac-
quiesced, famously calling Germany's designs on Czechoslovakia a 'quarrel in a
faraway country between people of whom we know nothing'.
On 15 March 1939 Germany occupied all of Bohemia and Moravia, declaring the
region a 'protectorate', while Slovakia was permitted 'independence' as long as it re-
mained a Nazi puppet state. During the war, Prague was spared significant physical
damage, though the Germans destroyed the Czech resistance. Around two-thirds of
Bohemia and Moravia's Jewish population of 120,000 perished in the war.
On 5 May 1945, with the war drawing to a close, the citizens of Prague staged an
uprising against the Germans. The Red Army was advancing from the east and US
troops had made it as far as Plzeň to the west, but were holding back from liberating
the city in deference to their Soviet allies. Many people died in the uprising before the
