Fighting on all Fronts (35 page)

While the old ruling class’s alliance with the West European imperialist powers had discredited them, the Munich Betrayal also meant that a number of them around the old president Edvard Benes could form a “government in exile” that was able to present itself as leading resistance to Nazi occupation. When the Czechoslovak government admitted capitulation on 21 September 1938, there was a public backlash where many of the contradictions in the future resistance first came out. In the capital, Prague, there was a general strike, and then an estimated 100,000 people gathered in Wenceslas Square. The dissident Czechoslovak communist Joseph Guttman wrote:

On the following day there was a spontaneous outburst of popular wrath. Without any call, without any leadership the workers, in spite of martial law and the prohibition of meetings, went on a complete general strike
and marched in tremendous masses into the heart of Prague. The police disappeared, the soldiers were kept in their barracks to prevent their fraternising with the demonstrators.
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But this movement wasn’t a straightforward expression of workers’ anger. While workers did partake in a backlash against the Benes government, the outcome wasn’t necessarily progressive. It is true the “state was powerless and the government had to resign”, and the crowd was also placing demands on the government for national resistance. However, in response Benes unilaterally appointed General Syrovy head of a “government of national defence”. Benes “the democrat” then took what seemed to be his final bow and exited the stage on 5 October 1938.
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This didn’t necessarily counter what the protesters had been demanding and looked like a concession. Trotsky argued, “This summons at first had some semblance of a concession to the people, who were aroused, and who were protesting, demonstrating and demanding resistance to Hitler, arms in hand”.
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Following Munich different sections of the ruling class looked to shore up their position, and this would have its own particular dynamic in Slovakia. This new military government banned the Communist Party in the Czech lands and Moravia and brought in anti-Semitic legislation in schools to try and appease Nazi imperialism. Nonetheless, Benes’s successor Emil Hacha was almost immediately forced to surrender to Hitler but managed to hang on as the nominal head of the Nazi “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia”. Hacha and co represented a wing of the ruling class that tried to adapt to the occupation, but the other more significant wing sought to regain its old position.

Benes had no intention of going down with the sinking First Republic and now said that his resignation was null as he had given it up under Nazi pressure and betrayal. He appointed himself head of the Czechoslovak National Liberation Committee (CNLC) in Paris in October 1939, which sought diplomatic recognition from the allies as an official “government in exile”. To get official recognition and restore the inter-war republic, Benes’s committee initially pursued the same strategy that the old Czechoslovak National Council had done during the First World War and set about trying to find new imperialist sponsors.

It sought, in effect, to resurrect the Czechoslovak Legions and began organising military units to fight alongside any ally that it could
find—and this went beyond probably the most well known example of Czechoslovakian pilots fighting in the British RAF. Poland used the Munich agreement to annex a part of Czechoslovakia that it had laid claim to, but this didn’t stop the formation of the Czechoslovak Legion in Poland. The legion was led by General Ludvik Svoboda, who would later command Czechoslovak troops attached to the Russian army on the Eastern Front and become an important Communist Party ally. Units fought under British command in North Africa against the German North Africa Corps, in the Middle East to regain French imperial possessions and later on on the Western Front following the Normandy landing in 1944.

The Francophile Czechoslovak bourgeoisie first concentrated its efforts on Daladier’s French government. Yet while Daladier had not been as enthusiastic as Chamberlain during the Munich negotiations, he proved to be much less open to Benes than Britain’s new prime minister Winston Churchill. Despite both France and Britain having declared war on Germany in September 1939, the possibility of face to face confrontation with Nazi imperialism made recognising the CNLC an unsafe and unnecessary option. But as the prospect neared, Benes’s strategy of forming military units to fight alongside the Allies began to bear fruit. His promise of Czechoslovak troops meant that France was the first imperialist power to sign a treaty with the CNLC—under the agreement that was signed on 2 October 1939, the Czechoslovak army was formally allowed to reform in France and would fight in the “Battle of France” in 1940.

Following France’s defeat in the summer of 1940, Benes now swung his efforts onto the British, having already moved the CNLC’s headquarters to Buckinghamshire. Britain’s ruling class now found itself in a confrontation with Hitler and so was willing to support Czechoslovakia’s dispossessed rulers; and while Benes had complained of “betrayal”, the strategy of the Czechoslovak ruling class had always been to find an imperialist sponsor so it found no contradiction with aligning itself with the Western Allies. Trotsky explained that: “The experience revealed in a chemically pure form that Czechoslovakian democracy was not an expression of the “people’s will” but simply an apparatus
whereby Czech monopoly capitalism adapted itself to its patron states
”.
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The impact of Munich on this “apparatus” also meant that this absentee Czechoslovak government recognised the need to find more than one imperialist sponsor. In doing so, it would realise which way the wind was blowing in Eastern Europe and sought to gain Russia as a new
sponsor, while still maintaining a balancing act with the Western Allies. The important Treaty of Alliance was signed in December 1943 and another Treaty of Military Cooperation was signed the following spring. The push for recognition by France and Britain initially tied the CNLC’s fate to that of the Allies. But moving closer towards Russian imperialism would also have a significant impact on the resistance, and particularly during the SNP in 1944.

The CNLC’s strategy to restore the inter-war republic also involved trying to direct actual resistance to the Nazis in both the Czech and Slovak lands. Nazi repression was relatively successful at holding down mass acts of resistance in Czechoslovakia, but it broke out from the beginning of the occupation. Not long after Wehrmacht troops marched into Prague, students took against the Nazi occupation on Czechoslovakia’s Independence Day on 28 October 1939. The demonstration attracted an estimated 100,000 people onto the streets, who waved the banned Czechoslovak red, blue and white tricolour and chanted “Germans, get out”, “We want freedom” and “Hitler, go away”. Nazi forces brutally suppressed the demonstration, during which they shot Vaclav Selacek and medical student Jan Opletal, who was hit in the stomach and would die of his injuries on 11 November. But his funeral procession in Prague on 15 November became the focal point for another demonstration against the occupation in Prague. There were also protests in Ostrava, Pilsen, Hradec Kralove, and Pribram, among a few others. In response the Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath’s forces stormed student halls and beat up and rounded up students who were taken to Prague’s Pankrac prison and the Ruzyne barracks on night of 17 November. More than 1,200 students were sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, the Czech universities in the protectorate were shut down and nine student leaders were executed without trial.
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The student demonstrations surrounding the Nazi occupation and Jan Opletal’s death showed the potential for mass resistance from below, but this would be the last mass acton in the Czech lands until the Prague Uprising of May 1945. However, following the Nazi occupation a number of resistance organisations with varying political perspectives were formed, which included the Political Centre (PU), Nation’s Defence (ON), the Petition Committee, “We Remain Faithful” (PVVZ) and the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC).
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These different groups’
political outlook and relationship to the Benes government would be crucial to shaping the resistance.

The PU was led by Premysl Samal, one of the middle class nationalists who had agitated for an independent Czechoslovakia before 1919. Its main task was to gather intelligence and maintain contact about the situation with the Benes group in London—but also to make sure that London did not lose contact with the Protectorate prime minister Alois Elias. Here we can see how there was some overlap between ruling class figures who tried to adapt to the occupation and those who fought from the outside to get back their old position. The group was wiped out through a slew of Gestapo arrests in 1940, leaving only a few individuals, and Elias was put on trial and executed in September 1942.

Meanwhile, the ON had a similar political outlook but was a military organisation led by high ranking generals of the First Republic and drew its ranks mainly from the Czechoslovak army’s intelligence department. Initially it argued for a national uprising but in reality it would concentrate on intelligence gathering and acts of terrorism and sabotage. The Nazis smashed up its organisation numerous times and by the beginning of 1942 all but a handful of individuals were captured; it managed to successfully renew its leadership and carried on until 1945 but with reduced strength. The fact that the ON still had representatives on both the PU and PVVZ leaderships was also a sign of the influence that the old ruling class had on the movement.

The PVVZ was a broadly social democratic organisation, which included left wing intellectuals and social democratic trade unionists from transport and the postal service. It formulated a programme, “For Freedom: Into a New Czechoslovak Republic”, which combined both national and socialist aspirations as a blueprint for post-liberation. These contradictions were reflected in its programme and its membership, which included members of Benes’s petty bourgeois Czechoslovak National Social Party.
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While the programme called for the restoration of the First Republic, it also argued for “socialist” reforms such as national planning, nationalisation and land reform to take place afterwards.

The contradiction in its politics and membership meant that it would gravitate towards Benes’s leadership. Many of its members had begun “for the defence of the republic against Hitler”, which basically called for the government to put up a proper fight in 1938. Its slogan would later evolve into “We are faithful to Masaryk’s ideals”—the founder of the Czechoslovak bourgeois republic. In this way, it propagated real socialist rhetoric and aspirations, but still bound itself to an overriding principle
of restoring the inter-war republic and its dislodged ruling class that had coalesced around Benes. The smashing up of the PU and ON meant that the PVVZ sought to take a lead in the resistance movement; it established a “coordination centre” that was supposed to be representative of different civic organisations and workplaces. But by 1942 the Gestapo had managed to smash it up, too.

This Nazi success in smashing up the different resistance organisations meant that there was growing pressure for them to merge, which culminated in 1941 when the three main ones joined forces to become the Central Leadership of the Home Resistance (UVOD). The new UVOD organisation was loyal to the Benes government in London, notwithstanding some friction, but the most dominant group was the left wing PVVZ and the new organisation signed up to its “For Freedom” programme.

Meanwhile, the Communist Party acted as a separate resistance organisation throughout the war, which was partly a result of its political summersaults before Russia was attacked in 1941. However, Benes’s pivot towards Russia and the consolidation of the resistance into the UVOD began to change the situation. Russia encouraged the Communist Party to cooperate with the UVOD, including having people on its leadership, in order to gain influence in the resistance. Benes would also use the party leadership to make contact with Moscow as part of the pivot towards Russia. The Communist Party leadership was able to become a go between of a sort with the Czechoslovak bourgeoisie but still remained outside a mass resistance organisation.

The aim of the Benes group was to regain its old position as Czechoslovakia’s ruling class through finding an imperialist sponsor, and it would also try to use the resistance to that end. Hitler appointed SS General Reinhardt Heydrich as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, instead of the “lenient” Neurath, with the task of stamping out the resistance movement. In Czechoslovakia this would be known as the “Heydrichiada”, the period of brutal repression when the different resistance groups would have their organisation smashed.

The CNLC in London and the resistance in the Czech lands planned to assassinate Heydrich alongside the British Secret Operation Executive (SOE), which was tasked with carrying out terrorist operations. Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, two officers from the 3,000 strong Czechoslovak army based in Britain, were parachuted into the Czech lands in 1942
where they made contact with local resistance fighters and made plans of when to carry out the assassination. Gabcik and Kubis deemed the safest option was to kill Heydrich on his way to work in Prague—one of them jumped out in front of his car, but the gun jammed so the other one shot him instead.

Heydrich was wounded in the attack and died in hospital a few days later. What followed was a more brutal wave of repression that is sometimes referred to as the “second Heydrichiada”. The Nazis alleged that people from the village of Lidice had helped Gabcik and Kubis and that they found a radio near the village of Lezaky. In response the SS destroyed both the villages, murdered the men, sent the women and older children to the concentration camps and “spared” a few babies to be “re-educated” in German families. The Gestapo cracked down on the resistance organisation and murdered around 2,000 people, including General Elias. Meanwhile, Gabcik and Kubis were holed up in Prague’s cathedral. The Nazis found out and stormed it, fighting Kubis first who shot himself to avoid capture. Gabcik and a few other resistance fighters bravely held off the 800 SS troops outside from inside the catacombs. But they all shot themselves to avoid capture, too, when the fire department was brought in to drown them out.