Eoin Burke-Kennedy’s Prague Letter in The Irish Times on Tuesday, January 13 is a standout piece. The comparison is scary.
How history repeats itself. Is Ukraine going to be another Czechoslovakia?
‘For what I have done, the nation will call me a traitor”: the words reputedly spoken by Czech leader Emil Hácha after he signed away Czechoslovakia’s independence in 1939.
Hácha was the epitome of coerced compromise, later viewed as collaboration, the fate of many liberal politicians in the 1930s. An elderly academic with a heart condition, he agreed reluctantly to become head of state after his predecessor resigned over the Munich Agreement of 1938, which allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.
To save his country from a brutal invasion, one it had little hope of repelling, he capitulated to German demands to turn the state into the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and his administration into a Nazi puppet government in the process.
Hácha’s compromise (or surrender) was the starting point of a recent tour I attended of Prague’s second World War sites. The city’s old town in midwinter is a shimmering maze of cobblestone streets and perfectly preserved medieval architecture, a fact that owes much to Hácha’s decision not to resist the Nazi onslaught.
Our guide held up a colour- coded map of the first Czechoslovak republic (1919-1938) before the Nazis annexed Sudetenland, before Slovakia and Ruthenia seceded, and before Poland and Hungary exploited the state’s vulnerability to annex bits of their own.
Next, he held up a photograph of the four political leaders who brokered this evisceration – Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister Édouard Daladier – while highlighting the lack of any Czech involvement in the process.
He didn’t need to emphasise the obvious parallels with a similar border redrawing exercise taking place not far from where we were standing. Ukraine’s western border is about 500km from Prague.
US president Donald Trump’s special envoy to the region Steve Witkoff went to Moscow six times last year, but not once to Ukraine. Washington’s continual browbeating of Kyiv, combined with its adoption of Russia’s war demands, is a dismal reflection of the zero-sum politics going on above Ukraine’s head and Europe’s enfeebled position in this global power play.
Comparisons between the current era and 1930s fascism are overbaked, but the erosion of Ukrainian sovereignty and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia 85 years ago have strikingly similar contours.
Hácha still hangs in the nation’s history somewhere between traitor and patriot.
Summoned to Berlin in 1939, the old and infirm Hácha was made to wait for hours in the Reich chancellery while Hitler and his air force chief Hermann Göring reputedly drank and watched US westerns on a projector upstairs.
By the time he was seen – some time in the early hours of March 15th – Hácha was dehydrated and exhausted. Presumably that was the point. Hitler played bad cop, issuing increasingly violent threats, including that he would have Prague bombed to the ground in two hours unless Hácha surrendered his fledgling state, while Göring played good cop.
Accounts vary but at one point Göring is said to have taken Hácha by the hand, saying: “Mr Hácha, we both know Prague, isn’t it a lovely city, wouldn’t it be a shame if something happened to it?”
At which point Hácha collapsed with a suspected heart attack, an inconvenience for Hitler, whose focus was on securing Czechoslovakia diplomatically. The elderly leader was revived by Hitler’s physicians using Pervitin, an early form of crystal meth, which Germany had been trialling on soldiers to reduce fatigue and boost alertness.
Hácha was politically humiliated and put back on a slow train to Prague, only to be met by Hitler at the other end. The German dictator had separately sped to the Czech capital to proclaim the country’s new protectorate status as a fait accompli.
The country’s weak resistance (initially) combined with the vital role it played in Germany’s war economy damaged the Czechs’ standing among the allies.
That was until the extraordinary assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (acting Reich protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the most sinister figures in the Third Reich) in 1942, an event documented by French author Laurent Binet in his brilliant book, HHhH.
The assassination, a joint British and Czech operation was botched after the assassin’s gun jammed and a subsequent grenade missed the target. Through a fortuitous sequence of events, however, the objective was achieved. Heydrich got blood poisoning after a bit of shrapnel blew horse fibres from his car’s upholstery into his body. He might have survived from such a minor wound if he hadn’t refused treatment until a German doctor could be found.
The subsequent hunt for the assassins Jozef Gabcík and Jan Kubis and their heroic last stand in the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius, now a shrine to Czech and Slovak resistance, was the centrepiece of our tour.
“We are Czechs! We will never surrender, you hear? Never!” Gabcík and Kubis are reported to have shouted at the Germans surrounding them.
The parachutists’ bodies were later laid out in front of the church to be identified by the man who had betrayed them, fellow paratrooper Karel Curda.
The good and the bad of wartime Prague.
