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From the ArchivesThe nurse who treated the Führer
During the wartime occupation, German-language broadcasts from Prague were
absorbed into the radio network of Nazi Germany, the so-called
“Reichssender”. A number of archive recordings in German survive from
the time. Most vivid and chilling among them are the long lists of names
broadcast each day of Czechs arrested and executed. But there are also some
propaganda curiosities. In June 1941, Prague’s German programme
interviewed a nurse. She was living and working in the city, and remembered
with great nostalgia one particular patient who had come into her care.
This is how the broadcast began: More
From the ArchivesOccupation and betrayal
Sixty-nine years ago this week, on March 14 1939, the Czechoslovak
President Emil Hácha spoke to the nation. He had just returned from
Berlin, where Hitler had given him a simple ultimatum: face either
occupation or destruction. Hácha chose occupation: More
From the ArchivesAfter Munich: Czechoslovakia left to her fate
In recent weeks, I’ve tried to capture something of the tense atmosphere
of the time leading up to the Munich Agreement of September 30 1938, when
the British and French Prime Ministers Chamberlain and Daladier allowed
Hitler to carve up Czechoslovakia and march unopposed into the Sudetenland.
The agreement left the country as a fragment of its former self; not only
Germany, but also Hungary and Poland, claimed large chunks of
Czechoslovakia’s borderlands. Here is how Radio Prague reported on the
final border agreement, reached some weeks after Munich was signed. The
scale of the loss is huge. More
From the ArchivesWarnings of Hitler's ambitions go unheeded
We quite often hear it said that in the run-up to World War Two, no-one
quite realized the scale of the threat that Nazi Germany posed in Europe.
When Hitler set his eyes on Czechoslovakia, there were plenty of
politicians in Western Europe who really seemed to believe him, when he
said that the Czech borderlands, the so-called Sudetenland, were his
“last territorial claim”. But Czech Radio’s archives show only too
clearly, that here in Prague there were also plenty of people who were only
too aware of the worldwide menace that Hitler posed. As Britain and France
pursued their policy of appeasement towards Germany, these were voices
that, tragically, remained unheard. More
Czech Books“The Chamberlain Effect”: When did World War Two really begin?
The 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two this week will pass
almost unnoticed in the Czech Republic. The reason is simple. For Czechs
and Slovaks the tragedy did not begin with the invasion of Poland, but a
full year earlier. With the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Britain,
France and Italy gave Hitler the green light to annex huge tracts of
Czechoslovakia and less than six months later, Nazi troops marched into
what was left of the Czech lands unopposed. So how did Hitler get away with
bringing a determined and well-defended democratic country under the sway
of the swastika, while Czechoslovakia’s allies stood by? The British
historian and politician, David Faber, has tried to answer this question in
his book, Munich: The 1938 Appeasement Crisis, which focuses above all on
the role of the British political establishment, in particular Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain. This is the most detailed account of the
events leading up to Munich to be published for several decades, and an
American edition is due out this month. I caught up with David Faber in
London, and we discussed some of the many aspects of a book that deserves
to become a classic.
More
Current AffairsNew photographs illuminate Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia
Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of
Czechoslovakia, the discovery of a number of never-before-seen documents
and photographs was announced at the weekend. The new materials shed
further light on Hitler’s invasion visit, which ended on this day in
1939. More
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