ABSTRACT
The State Takeover of Private Property In order to understand the preservation of Czech heritage since 1945, it is necessary to introduce the provinces of the country and some events
of World War II. Presently the Czech Republic is comprised of the three provinces of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia; before the Velvet Divorce of 1992, these provinces were joined with Slovakia in Czechoslovakia, a multinational state created in 1918. In September of 1938, the Munich Agreement was concluded, resulting in Nazi Germany being given the Sudetenland, the northern and western borderlands of Bohemia, where much of Czechoslovakia’s German population was concentrated. Soon afterward, in March 1939, Hitler’s troops occupied the remainder of rump Czechoslovakia, including Prague, and divided the country into the quasi-independent state of Slovakia and the Nazi-dominated Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Most of Czechoslovakia’s Jews, including those belonging to Prague’s illustrious Jewish community, were forced to turn their property over to Nazi authorities before being sent to their deaths in Nazi camps.3 Czech resistance to Nazi rule in the Protectorate was limited but still met with brutal suppression, including the famous destruction of the village of Lidice, just west of Prague, in the wake of the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. Little fighting or bombing took place in the territories of Czechoslovakia during World War II, including in Prague, leaving the country’s rich built heritage largely untouched in 1945. Still, even without this damage, memories of Munich and Nazi brutality left numerous Czechs eagerfor retribution against local Germans right after the war’s end when democratic rule was restored for a brief period of less than three years.4
