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. By 1946, only about 14,000 of the pre-war population of 118,000 remained.
Before the Holocaust, the Jews of Bohemia were among the most assimilated and integrated Jewish communities in Europe; antisemitic prejudice was less pronounced than elsewhere on the continent. The first anti-Jewish laws in Czechoslovakia were imposed following the 1938 Munich Agreement and the German occupation of the Sudetenland. In March 1939, Germany invaded and partially annexed the rest of the Czech lands as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. More anti-Jewish measures followed, imposed mainly by the Protectorate administration (which included both German and Czech officials). Jews were stripped of their employment and property, required to perform forced labor, and subject to discriminatory regulations, including, in September 1941, the requirement to wear a yellow star. Many were evicted from their homes and concentrated into substandard housing.
About 30,000 Jews, from the pre-invasion population of 118,310, managed to emigrate. Most of the remaining Jews were deported to other Nazi-controlled territories, starting in October 1939 as part of the Nisko plan. In October 1941, mass deportations of the Protectorate Jews began, initially to Łódź Ghetto. Beginning in November 1941, the transports departed for Theresienstadt Ghetto in the Protectorate, which was, for most, a temporary stopping-point before deportation to other ghettos, extermination camps, and other killing sites farther east. By mid-1943, most of the Jews remaining in the Protectorate were in mixed marriages and therefore exempt from deportation.
About 80,000 Jews from Bohemia and Moravia were murdered in the Holocaust. After the war, surviving Jews—especially those who had identified as Germans before the war—faced obstacles in regaining their property and pressure to assimilate into the Czech majority. Most Jews emigrated; a few were deported as part of the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia. The memory of the Holocaust was suppressed in Communist Czechoslovakia, but resurfaced in public discourse after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.
Background
The first Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia were probably established by the eleventh century, under the rule of the Přemyslid dynasty. 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. From 1526, Bohemia and Moravia were under the rule of the Habsburg monarchy. In 1557, Ferdinand I expelled the Jews from Bohemia, but not Moravia, although this decree was never fully enforced. Full freedom of residence was granted in 1623, but reversed by the Familiants Law (in effect 1726 to 1848) that restricted Jewish settlement to 8,541 families in Bohemia and 5,106 families in Moravia. Some Jews emigrated and others dispersed to small villages to evade the restrictions. Legal equality of the Czech Jews was granted in a series of reforms between 1841 and 1867. 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.
Most Jews in Bohemia and Moravia spoke German as their primary language and identified with German culture at a time of increasing national conflict between Germans and Czechs in the nineteenth century. Over time, many Jews in Bohemia switched to Czech, which was the majority by the 1910 census, but German remained preferred by Jews living in Moravia and Czech Silesia. Following the end of World War I in 1918, Bohemia and Moraviaincluding the border Sudetenland, which had an ethnic-German majoritybecame part of the new country of Czechoslovakia. Of the 10 million inhabitants of the Czech lands, including the Sudetenland, Jews composed about 1 per cent (117,551) according to the . At this time, most Jews lived in large cities such as Prague (35,403 Jews, who made up 4.2 per cent of the population), Brno (11,103, 4.2 per cent), and Moravská Ostrava (6,865, 5.5 per cent).
Between 1917 and 1920, anti-Jewish rioting occurred and many Jews experienced prejudice in their daily life. Antisemitism in the Czech lands was lower than elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe and was a marginal phenomenon after 1920. Following a steep decline in religious observance in the nineteenth century, most Bohemian Jews were indifferent to religion, although this was less true in Moravia. Secularism among both Jews and non-Jews facilitated integration. The Jews of Bohemia had the highest rate of intermarriage in Europe; between 1928 and 1933, 43.8 per cent of Bohemian and 30 per cent of Moravian Jews married a non-Jewish partner. The high rate of integration later led to difficulties identifying Czech Jews for deportation and murder.
German annexation
Czechoslovakia accepted thousands of German Jews fleeing Germany after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Right-wing politics led to immigration restrictions, and after 1935 racial persecution was no longer regarded as a reason for granting asylum. At the same time, antisemitism was on the rise in Czechoslovakia. In February 1938, many Jews with Polish citizenship, including long-term residents, were expelled to Poland from Moravská Ostrava. Some of them were immediately sent back by the Polish police; others were left stranded along the border, where some died. After the German annexation of Austria in March 1938, all Austrian refugees were denied entry. Polish Jews deported from Austria were shuttled to the Polish border.
In September 1938, the Munich Agreement resulted in the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany. About 200,000 people fled or were expelled from the annexed areas to the remainder of Czechoslovakia, including more than 90 percent of the 30,000 resident Jews. The Czechoslovak authorities tried to prevent Jews from crossing the new border even though the Munich Agreement gave these Jews the option to retain their Czechoslovak citizenship. Some of the Jewish refugees had to wait for days along the border. Although ethnically Czech refugees were welcomed and integrated, Jews and antifascist Germans were pressured to immediately leave. The arrival of German-speaking Jewish refugees contributed to a rise in antisemitism in the rump state of Czechoslovakia, tied up with a changing definition of nationality and citizenship that became ethnically exclusive.
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". In January 1939, Jews who had immigrated to Czechoslovakia after 1914, including naturalized citizens, were ordered to be deported from the country. 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. This denaturalization was halted in mid-1939 by the German occupation authorities, because it hampered Jews from emigrating abroad. Jews were banned from the civil service and excluded from professional associations and educational institutions; state hospitals dismissed Jewish doctors, and Jewish army officers were put on leave. The Second Republic's persecution of Jews had domestic origins and did not result from external pressure.
On 14 March 1939, the Slovak State declared independence with German support. Germany invaded the Czech rump state, establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. This nominally autonomous protectorate was partially annexed into the Greater German Reich. The Protectorate was allowed to govern itself, within the parameters set by the German occupiers. The Second Republic administration largely remained in place, although it only had jurisdiction over Czechs and Jews, who were counted as Protectorate subjects, a second-class status. Ethnic Germans were granted Reich citizenship and were accountable only to German authorities. Both the Protectorate's Prime Minister Alois Eliáš (starting in April) and President Emil Hácha were conservative Catholics who approved anti-Jewish measures while retaining contact with the Czechoslovak government-in-exile; the Protectorate justice minister, Jaroslav Krejčí, was known for his pro-Nazi sentiments. In March, Hácha formed the National Partnership, a political organization to which all adult male Czech Protectorate subjects were required to belongwomen and Jews were forbidden from joining. The German administration was controlled by Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath, former foreign minister of Germany, and Karl Hermann Frank, formerly the deputy chairman of the Sudeten German Party.
Persecution of Jews The gradual persecution of Jews created a "ghetto without walls" and conditions that later enabled their deportation and murder. The phases of persecution before mass deportation were primarily carried out by the Protectorate administration, especially by local authorities, with some intervention from Berlin. Both German and Czech officials were involved. 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. He also found that in other cases local authorities reluctantly responded to demands to persecute Jews. According to the historian Wolf Gruner, careerism and potential for material gain were likely motives for Czech bureaucrats to implement anti-Jewish regulations. Some initiatives first applied in the Protectorate, such as the freezing of Jews' bank accounts, were later rolled out in other parts of Greater Germany.
Initial measures
On 15 March 1939, 118,310 Jews were reported to be living in 136 recognized communities in the Protectorate. During the annexation, anti-Jewish riots occurred in several locations. In Olomouc, Vsetín, and Moravská Ostrava, synagogues were burned by German and Czech rioters. In Jihlava, Jews were prohibited from riding streetcars (trams) and forced to clear snow from the streets. Prague Jewish organizations were shut down or taken over by the Gestapo. In the first week after the annexation there was a wave of suicides among Jews, 30–40 reported each day in Prague. A wave of arrests targeted thousands of left-wing activists and German refugees. More than a thousand were deported to concentration camps in the Reich. In September 1939, another wave of arrests targeted Protectorate citizens who could be used as hostages and those with ties to Poland. These arrests disproportionately targeted Jews, who made up 22 percent of the 8,000 people arrested during the first months of Nazi rule.