The Reichsgau Sudetenland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

Abstract

The tendency to blame outsiders or outside forces for any ill fate that may have befallen a community is as old as human history. ‘They [the troublemakers] came in from the outside,’ the ancient Greeks used to say. In the twentieth century the most famous example of diversion from the reality of a situation by pushing the blame elsewhere is found in a comment made by the long-serving Prime Minister of Prussia, Otto Braun, after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Trying to explain the inglorious end of the republic, Braun claimed that the rise of Adolf Hitler could be summarized in two words: Versailles and Moscow — the harshness of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the Communist threat. In reality these two factors have to be ranked among the least important of the reasons for the Nazis’ success. It was not the Versailles Peace Treaty that crippled Weimar Germany’s economy1 and the Communists — though a noisy and uncomfortable minority — were in no position to effectively challenge the German military and political establishment. The Czechoslovak Republic, on the other hand, can mount a respectable case for the claim that it fell victim to external forces.