From Assimilation to Elimination: The Holocaust of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry in Prague and Beyond

Based on new research in the Czech archives, this paper will discuss the decimation of the Bohemian and Moravian Jewish communities during the Second World War and the remnant that remained afterwards. The Munich Agreement of September 1938 initiated a wave of forced migrations and murderous violence that had no comparison in any other period of the region`s history. Over the next decade the people of the Bohemian Lands experienced a succession of repressive regimes that sought to forcibly redraw the lines between national and religious communities. These programs of demographic engineering confronted a population that was well integrated, intermixed, and intermarried. For those defined as Jews, either by choice or by government fiat, the consequences were catastrophic: In just a few years Nazi Germany, working through local officials, isolated and then deported nearly every single Jew from the region to ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers, from which only a small minority survived to return after the war. Those who did found a state determined to be homogeneous: After the war the newly reestablished Czechoslovakia expelled the vast majority of the German speaking population, including a number of Jews whose persecution did not end in 1945.