Prejudiced Asylum: Czechoslovak Refugee Policy,1918–60 1

Shortly after midnight, on 12 March 1938, an unusually full train arrived at the Czechoslovak border station of Břeclav (Lundenburg in German). Those on board were indeed not the usual passengers of a sleepy night express: most of them had hastily packed the most necessary items after hearing the news of German troops and the Gestapo approaching Vienna. For endangered anti-Nazi activists and many Jews, the Czechoslovak border seemed to be the best way (and one of the last escape routes as well) to avoid Nazi rule.

Richard A. Bermann, a journalist and a staunch critic of the Austrian Christian Social authoritarian ‘Ständestaat’ (1934–8), recorded his excitement on arrival in the ‘free’ Czechoslovakia: ‘Finally, I was able to breathe again. I was, we were saved.’ He therefore found it hard to believe what followed after the train pulled into Břeclav: the refugees were all forced out of the train and after a couple of hours of tense waiting returned to what had, in the meantime, become Nazi-ruled Austria. In Bermann’s narrative, the image of freedom, both personal and of Czechoslovakia, turned into the description of an ugly and prison-like waiting room at the railway station. ² Rather than a description of a real place, this text can be read as a symbolic expression of profound surprise and disillusionment with the ‘democratic’ Czechoslovakia. Before being returned to Austria, Bermann managed to send a telegram to the Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš appealing to the ‘humanity of Czechoslovak democracy’. His message ended up – without any reaction or answer – in the archives of the Ministry of Interior. ³

Bermann was not the only observer to perceive the contradiction between the image of democratic Czechoslovakia and the same country turning refugees back in the moment of real need. Moreover, Czechoslovakia had become involved in Austrian politics and offered some support to the opponents of the ‘Ständestaat’ (including Bermann himself). In 1934, Czechoslovakia provided refuge for approximately 2000 Social Democrat and Communist activists who were involved in the street fighting in Vienna and elsewhere (many of them later left for the Soviet Union). ⁴ The seemingly unexpected contradiction was a sign of a profound change: Bermann was indeed experiencing and trying to come to terms with the most important shift of the Czechoslovak policy towards refugees in the twentieth century.

Historians have looked, from different viewpoints, at how democracy in Central Europe generally and in Czechoslovakia specifically was coupled with nationalism and how the ‘nationalists’ and eventually even the racist state claimed more power over national ascription and individual identity. They have examined the freedom (or the lack of it) of citizens to choose a language of education, to declare their national allegiance, the various nationalist campaigns and the racist policy during the Second World War, or the character of the postwar retribution trials. ⁵ However, historians have largely overlooked the relationship between refugee policy, national ascription and nationalism. This omission certainly has to do with the focus on the political character of various exile groups in Czechoslovakia and the ignorance displayed towards other ‘non-political’ refugees, but also with the fact that historians looking critically at nationalism in the Bohemian Lands mostly analysed the nationality conflict between Czechs and Germans (and could not always meaningfully integrate Jews, who made up a large part of the ‘non-political’ refugees, into their interpretations).

The policy towards refugees indeed had many specifics that differentiated it from the various forms of nationalist categorization and national ascription. But no analysis of Czechoslovak refugee policy which aims to go beyond the narrow group of political exiles, can ignore the fact that the categorization of refugees based on ethnicity and the shifting understanding of citizenship, next to the rise of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, made Czechoslovakia an unwelcoming place for most people seeking asylum. This article analyses the formation and transformation of Czechoslovak refugee policies from the interwar period into postwar socialist regime. While interwar Czechoslovakia continues to be remembered as a place of refuge, its post-Second World War successor never served as a significant country of asylum. This major shift was related not only to the occupation during the Second World War and the establishment of a communist regime in Czechoslovakia, but also to a significant change in the relationship between ethnicity, nationalism and citizenship. Therefore, this article devotes extensive attention to the year 1938 and the case of Jewish refugees into and from Czechoslovakia which helps to illuminate these substantial changes. On the other hand, other significant aspects of refugee policy and of refugee life in Czechoslovakia cannot be dealt with in this short article. Even though emigration from Czechoslovakia was an important phenomenon throughout the twentieth century, and during the 1930s was clearly interconnected with the question of incoming refugees, it can be dealt with only marginally here.

Interwar Czechoslovakia, the so called First Republic (1918–38), enjoys a widespread positive image as a state which upheld democracy, a society tolerant towards minorities and open to refugees in the midst of the increasingly authoritarian and violent Central Europe. The idealized image often came to expression in the historiography in connection with political refugees arriving from Nazi Germany and with Russian and Ukrainian refugees after the Soviet revolution. The former group was extensively studied from the 1960s onwards, the latter only after the fall of the Iron Curtain which allowed for research into groups of anti-Communist exiles. Even the historiography in Communist Czechoslovakia, starting with the thaw of the 1960s, knew to appreciate the interwar ‘bourgeois democracy’ and its relatively mild approach to refugees on the political left. The positive assessment of Czechoslovak refugee policy was – paradoxically – shared with much of Western exile studies: both strands of historiography shared the focus on political emigration and downplayed the number and role of Jewish refugees as well as the policies of the state towards them. ⁶ Czechoslovakia is often considered the only country in East-Central Europe that became an important place of refuge; in the 1930s it was also the only one to be represented with the High Commissioner for Refugees (Jewish and Other) Coming from Germany.

There is no doubt that Czechoslovakia was, in the interwar period, an important place of refuge, albeit the numbers of refugees were much smaller compared to those in France or Germany (in the case of refugees from the Soviet Union). It was an attractive destination for a combination of reasons stemming from its democratic character which, all its flaws and limits notwithstanding, survived until the Munich Agreement, from the interests of Czechoslovak political elites and the geographic position of the state. Even though by the middle of the 1930s the power of the Czechoslovak social democratic parties declined (compared to the beginning of 1920s), the country was seen – in the Central European context – as a more hospitable location for leftist, especially Communist or Social Democratic, refugees. The attraction to those fleeing from Nazi Germany lay also in the widespread use of German and the long border with Germany which was easy to cross (legally or illegally). On the other hand, the one-sided positive assessment of the Czechoslovak interwar democracy often prevents historians (and journalists, politicians, etc.) from developing a more critical analysis of the Czechoslovak refugee policy and from placing it into a comparative, international perspective.

Born out of the crisis and chaos of the First World War, Czechoslovakia was a new state with very little experience of providing asylum to refugees. More a country of emigration, Czechs and Slovaks, as well as other ethnic groups living on its territory, were looking for better opportunities and sometimes for more political freedom in the United States of America or western European countries. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, and well into the inter-war period, the Austrian and later Czechoslovak authorities were more concerned with population decrease through emigration rather than with refugees and immigrants. The new Czechoslovak state could therefore hardly build on any real tradition of political asylum or any established refugee policy. Few refugees arrived in the Bohemian Lands or Slovakia prior to the First World War.

On the other hand, Czechoslovak politicians and media were quick to stress the Czech and Slovak refugee experience which was supposed to be of an essential quality to post-1918 Czechoslovak democracy. An important example of Czech exile were the religious refugees fleeing the Catholic restoration in Bohemia after the suppression of the uprising of Czech estates between 1618 and 1620, including the pedagogue John Amos Comenius. Moreover, the very idea of Czechoslovak statehood seemed to be related to the experience of political exile: during the First World War, Thomas G. Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, Milan Rastislav Štefánik and other leaders struggled in exile for the recognition of an independent Czechoslovak state. The emigré experience thus belonged to a cherished image of the ‘Castle’ (the group around President Masaryk and the Minister of Foreign Affairs Beneš). ⁷

The official invocations of refugee experience notwithstanding, the most extensive encounter between Czech and Germans living in the Bohemian Lands and refugees was not much reflected upon (and if so, mostly in a negative manner). During the First World War, large numbers of refugees or deportees, many of whom were Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian or Italian, were brought into the Bohemian Lands. Together with Vienna and other Austrian lands, the region became one of the major destinations for refugees fleeing or evacuated from the front areas in Galicia and in Bukowina – an official report from October 1915 counted more than 150,000 refugees in Bohemia and Moravia. The first large group of refugees started to arrive as early as September 1914, following the success of the Russian offensive. While some of the refugees were repatriated after the combined Austrian and German advance in 1915, a new exodus from the Eastern front was triggered off by the Brusilov offensive in 1916. ⁸

Moreover, the majority of refugees who were sent into the Bohemian Lands were Jews; in the beginning they were concentrated in large (transit) camps, to be spread into numerous smaller refugee camps. For many Czechs and Germans, this was the first time they met the feared Ostjuden, or ‘Eastern Jews’, and these encounters led to a number of confrontations and conflicts, not least over ever scarcer food, coal and other resources. In May 1918, for instance, several hundred women launched a violent anti-Jewish demonstration in Prague which was specifically directed against the approximately 2500 Jewish refugees living in the city by that time. ⁹

The case of the First World War refugees is important in several ways: for the intensive involvement of the state in refugee care, as the moment of the birth of the refugee camp, but also for the spreading of ethnic categories. From the very early phase of the war, the state developed a plan to evacuate parts of the population living near the front and to care for the refugees. In exchange for financial and other support, the refugees were subjected to extensive control, including internment in designated communities or camps. For the first time, hundreds of small or large refugee camps were created in the Bohemian Lands (and elsewhere in the monarchy). Some of these places later on exhibited a large degree of continuity: for instance the camp in Svatobořice in southern Moravia served later as a trans-migration station for Slovaks leaving for the Americas, only to be re-established as a refugee camp for German refugees and refugees from Sudetenland at the end of the 1930s. During the occupation, family members of the members of Czech exile groups were interned there, only to house Moravian Germans after 1945 on their way to be expelled, and Greek refugees somewhat later. ¹⁰

The population of the Bohemian Lands witnessed not only an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, but also the results of the wartime ethnic categorization applied by the military administrations of Russia and Austria and of the wide-spread evacuation of the areas close to the front. Jews especially were considered an unreliable element by both sides – while the Russian army command eventually started large-scale evacuations of Jews, ¹¹ the Austrian army also considered them unreliable. In the monarchy’s interior, the Habsburg officials mostly divided the mass of refugees into separate refugee camps or communities according to ethnic criteria. ¹² The separation of Jewish refugees (which may sound odd vis-a-vis the refusal of the state to recognize Jewish nationality or cultural autonomy) was partly a consequence of their numbers, their different practical needs (especially kosher food), but also of anti-Jewish prejudice. However, the main concern of the state was the loyalty of the different ethnic groups – therefore Poles, Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Jews or Italians were usually placed into separate camps in parts of the monarchy where they were unlikely to find political sympathy from the local population. Thus, the population was not confronted with refugees as such, but always with ‘Polish’, ‘Italian’ or ‘Jewish’ refugees.

Following the end of the war, many Jewish refugees were reluctant to return to their often destroyed homes, amid hostility from local populations, pogroms and the insecurity connected with the creation of nation-states. The new Czechoslovak state invested a considerable effort to repatriate them, taking into account the negative attitudes of the population and the shortage of the necessities of daily living. Even though their return was delayed by the unstable situation in Poland, most of the refugees were forced to leave during 1919, even though the repatriation continued well until 1922. Throughout the interwar period, the negative image of the Ostjuden as a difficult and unwanted group became deeply ingrained in the minds and the practice of many Czechoslovak officials.

In peacetime, the state swiftly scaled down and eventually stopped any financial or material support to refugees. Throughout the interwar period, until the Munich agreement, no standard policy existed to support and maintain refugees, and any such support was given on a case-by-case basis and not seen as a precedent. No national legislation or other binding rules governed the approach of the state towards refugees who were therefore subjected to the general rules relating to foreigners. From 1935, they were affected by the new law on the residence of foreigners, which made any stay exceeding two months subject to a permit which could be limited to a certain part of the state or exclude a certain territory (such as the border areas). ¹³ In 1928, the state also introduced stricter rules on employment of foreigners which now required a special permit. ¹⁴

Hence, the most striking feature of the Czechoslovak rules regarding refugees was the very lack of them and of any definition of the ‘refugee’ or ‘emigrant’. Ever since refugees from Nazi Germany started to come to Czechoslovakia, the Ministry of Interior jealously defended its freedom of action and resisted any attempts to put forward a clear definition of a refugee or a description of the rights of such a person. For this reason, Czechoslovakia never ratified the 1936 provisional convention on German refugees, although its diplomats took an active part in all preceding negotiations. ¹⁵ Instead of a policy, well defined and open to criticism, the ministry offered a ‘benevolent’ approach towards some German refugees, especially those who were politically connected, while the bureaucrats guarded their extensive powers towards the majority of the others.

While refugees did not occupy a central place in the minds of Czechoslovak officials and politicians, borders, foreigners and ethnicity did. As a consequence of being cut out of the multi-ethnic Habsburg empire, the new Czechoslovak state now had to support and protect long and much more exposed borders. In a region which had until recently functioned as a single economic unit with traditional patterns of migration across the new border lines, this was not an easy task. As a new ‘national’ state, Czechoslovakia also had to define the rules to sort the inhabitants into citizens and foreigners. In several border areas, the population was given an opportunity to opt for Czechoslovak or other citizenship. A significant number of Czechs living in Austria, and especially in Vienna, chose Czechoslovak citizenship and moved into the new state.

Moreover, the fragile dominance of Czechs and Slovaks (or ‘Czechoslovaks’, in the official understanding of the time) was constantly under pressure from the various minorities. Therefore, the discourses on refugees were connected to the broader topic of foreigners who were often seen as a danger to the linguistic and ethnic character of the ‘national’ state. Especially under the difficult circumstances of the economic crisis, in the early 1930s several anti-foreigner campaigns demanded the end of employment of foreign nationals. ¹⁶ Organizations of university students (especially of medicine) regularly compiled petitions and staged demonstration against foreign students. Their main demand was a ban on employment of foreign doctors, once they completed their studies. ¹⁷ While the protests were seemingly of a general nature, the anti-Jewish bias was in many cases more than clear and was directed against the numerus clausus students from surrounding countries. ¹⁸ Ethnic categorization was not, however, only the domain of radical nationalists and students. Czechoslovak officials and policemen often judged cases of individual refugees based on their linguistic competence and alleged national loyalty.

Both the potential and the limits of the Czechoslovak refugee policy during the First Republic can be demonstrated in the two major cases: the Russian and Ukrainian refugees after the First World War and the refugees from Germany and Austria following the advance of Nazism in the 1930s. The approach to refugees from what became the Soviet Union, especially from Russia and Ukraine, makes the most spectacular and distinct Czechoslovak relief action of this kind. Some of the Russian, Ukrainian, Caucasian, Kalmik and other refugees arrived in Czechoslovakia with the returning Czechoslovak ‘legions’, an army created in Russia during the First World War in order to fight against the Central Powers which later resisted the Red Army and temporarily controlled much of the trans-Siberian railway line. Many members of the anti-Bolshevik armies came to Czechoslovakia after their defeat through Istanbul. Yet others arrived individually, many having been expelled and/or denationalized by the Soviet Union for their artistic, political or other activity. At the beginning of the 1920s, the number of ‘Russian’ refugees in Czechoslovakia was estimated to be between 5000 and 8000; by the middle of the decade their number had reached 25,000.

However, it was not the numbers which made Czechoslovakia special, but rather the state-sponsored ‘Russian Relief Action’ (Ruská pomocná akce) which helped to bring the refugees into the country and supported them throughout their stay. The Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other state agencies devoted a considerable amount of money to support individual refugees, their organizations and culture. Thus, for instance, Russian and Ukrainian schools, scientific institutes, archives and libraries were financed by the government. The relative generosity of the schemes was related not only to Czech(oslovak) sympathies for Slavic nations or the tradition of political and cultural pan-Slavism. There had been a general consensus on the Czech political landscape in favour of the Russian Relief Action that spanned the otherwise well-established left-right political rift. The persecuted Russian elite was seen as the future leadership of the country, after the expected demise of the Communist experiment. Consequently, the Czechoslovak Communist Party was the only group which consistently disagreed with official policy. The consensus was, however, based on differing, if not contradicting, views: whereas Thomas G. Masaryk and the ‘Castle’ group saw Russian refugees as an opportunity to impose the Western model of democracy onto Russia, Karel Kramář (the leader of the Czech National-Democratic party) was more guided by nationalism and loyalty to Russian monarchism, by pan-Slavism and anti-Communism. (Kramář was, moreover, involved directly through his Russian aristocratic wife; Masaryk on the other hand decided to end the involvement of the Czechoslovak legions in Russia.) The Russian Relief Action was originally planned to take approximately five years. However, it was repeatedly prolonged even though financial support was curtailed over time. Only in the 1930s did the number of refugees from the Soviet Union living in Czechoslovakia start to decrease. This process was catalysed by the Czechoslovak–Soviet agreement of 1934 which established regular diplomatic relations between both countries. ¹⁹

The Czechoslovak approach to refugees from Nazi Germany (and from Austria in 1934) shows both strong similarities and contrasts with the Russian Relief Action. It was not their quantity which made German refugees a focal point of heated public debates. Between 1933 and 1937, the number of German refugees registered with one of the refugee committees never exceeded 2000; and even including unregistered or illegal immigrants, the number was still below 4000. In early 1933, as the first German refugees started to cross the border, legally or not, the authorities were rather welcoming and did not put many administrative obstacles in their way. The motivation was, however, mainly political and reflected the sympathies (both those of a part of the political elite and of the populace) to opponents of Nazism. Moreover, the expectation of a quick collapse of the new regime was widespread and it was supposed that the refugees would soon return home which would in turn improve relations between both states.

Even though refugees were usually forced to sign a declaration that they would refrain from political activity and from working in Czechoslovakia, the state tolerated and sometimes supported several German political groups. The most important was the German Social Democratic Party in exile (SoPaDe) which operated from Prague. Other groups, such as Otto Strasser’s Schwarze Front (Black Front) were also tolerated and engaged in political activities. Even though the Agrarian-led Ministry of Interior was keen to restrict the influx of German Communists, in practice many members of the Communist party stayed in Czechoslovakia with the support of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. At least until 1937, political pamphlets and agents travelled across the Czechoslovak–German border, with the authorities mostly turning a blind eye. At the same time, the Gestapo was active among refugees in Czechoslovakia in order to prevent their political activities. German agents attempted to blackmail refugees and sometimes resorted to abductions and even assassinations, for instance those of Rudolf Formis (an associate of Otto Strasser) or of German anti-Nazi philosopher Theodor Lessing. ²⁰

This primarily political concept of exile in Czechoslovakia, at the time and in the historiography, is also reflected in many of the studies about the topic: Bohumil Černý, for instance, titled his major book Bridge to a New Life; the authors of a 1989 Munich exhibition and subsequent volume translated the German ‘Drehscheibe’ as ‘Staging Point’. ²¹ What these and other titles have in common, is the implication of Czechoslovakia as a launch pad for political activity and the eventual defeat of Nazism. Accordingly, much more attention has been devoted to the political leadership in exile and known artists such as John Heartfield or Thomas Mann than to the life of ordinary refugees. The specifics of the Jewish refugees and of the approach of the state have mostly been ignored altogether.

To the majority of refugees, Czechoslovak policy might have seemed much less generous. Understood not as a country of final refuge, Czechoslovak authorities considered the residence of refugees to be a temporary matter and did not expect their integration into the economic and social fabric of society. This general trend was, moreover, exacerbated by several factors. The intensity of the economic crisis by 1933, the large amount of Czechoslovak unemployed and the fears of rising competition on the labour market played an important role. But the position of German refugees was also profoundly affected by the lack of general political consensus. On the political right, the Agrarians and the National Democrats in particular denounced them as unwanted Marxist revolutionaries, supporters of German nationalism and economically destructive element – all of these accusations often combined with antisemitic undertones. ²² In contrast with the Russian Relief Action, integration of German refugees was not expected by the authorities. With the exceptions of unsystematic and only half-official subsidies from Masaryk and Beneš to political refugees, the state never officially supported refugee care which was left to private relief committees.

With growing pressure from Nazi Germany, Czechoslovakia became a less attractive place of political refuge while the space for the political and press activities of refugees kept shrinking. In 1937, in an attempt to appease the Nazi state and prevent refugee political activities, the authorities devised a plan to concentrate all German refugees in several poor and isolated districts in the interior of the country. Using the provisions of the law on the residence of foreigners from 1935, the land offices were instructed to only issue resident permits to refugees for the designated areas. As the first refugees were transferred, the refugee committees carrying the weight of the refugee relief care protested, fearing chaos, isolation and the total destruction of the existing mechanism of providing assistance. As international refugee and human rights organizations joined the protest, the Czechoslovak authorities eventually refrained from immediate implementation; the bureaucrats started to explore the possibility of opening a refugee camp in Svatobořice instead. ²³

By the end of 1937, Czechoslovakia’s image as a refuge for political prisoners was being increasingly questioned – and exiled political organizations (such as SoPaDe) were transferring their leadership, newspapers and assets to the West. Yet another group of refugees, be it real or imagined, troubled Czechoslovak officials much more: Jews from Germany, Austria and from Eastern Europe generally.

As refugees started to cross the Czechoslovak border from Nazi Germany, in 1933, the authorities did not explicitly differentiate between Jewish and other refugees. Some of the first instructions even mentioned persecution of Jews, or to use the language of the time, ‘racial persecution’, as a legitimate reason to come to Czechoslovakia as a refugee. However, from the outset, the relative tolerance towards Jewish refugees was dependent on the ability of Jewish relief agencies to organize further emigration of their clients and to fully provide for their stay in Czechoslovakia. ²⁴ Moreover, Czechoslovak officials – remembering the large group of Galician Jewish refugees during the First World War – attempted to exclude the ‘Eastern Jews’ (whatever their definition might be) from the scope of the relative Czechoslovak hospitality.

However, by the mid-1930s, Czechoslovak authorities had already started to silently alter the policy towards Jews coming from Germany, although no such revision was ever officially announced. As a consequence, Jews were increasingly excluded from the category of refugees seeking protection and were considered ‘economic migrants’, whose influx should be prevented. This shift was a reaction to the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws and the restrictions on immigration to Palestine for Jewish refugees. The unwritten contract with Jewish relief organizations began to crumble and the authorities feared being left with a large number of homeless and undesired Jews. In 1936, both the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs advised their subordinate authorities to apply a very strict policy towards the Jewish ‘migrants’, including those with German citizenship. ²⁵ The shift was a reaction to Jews being turned into second-class citizens in Nazi Germany, but also indicated the broader phenomenon of erosion of minority protection and citizenship in East-Central Europe in the second half of the 1930s. As a result of this process, local (or ‘Western’) Jews were unofficially increasingly categorized and treated as ‘Eastern Jews’.

Not all Jewish refugees were affected by these ordinances, but a growing number of them were, especially poorer Jews of Eastern origin and the so called Rassenschädler (‘defilers/polluters of the race’) who escaped to Czechoslovakia for a relationship with an ‘Aryan’ partner. The lack of well defined, stable and publicized rules regarding refugees, and thus the freedom of decision on the part of the authorities, made the integration of nationalism and antisemitism into the refugee policy easier. It found its way, at least in Czechoslovakia, first through the vehicle of bureaucratic arbitrariness that provided ample space for prejudicial judgment of the individual refugees. As the categorization of a particular person was largely within the scope of authority of individual officials, the instructions regarding Jewish immigration in turn also increased their discretionary powers and made space for the application of prejudice and stereotypes that many of the state employees might have identified. This integration of ethnic markers into the decision-making about refugees can be measured by the increasing ease with which some officials made use of new terminology by describing some refugees as ‘Jews’ or ‘non-Aryans’. A clear parallel here can be drawn with the well-known case of the Swiss marking of refugee dossiers. ²⁶ While not all officials in Czechoslovakia had ever dealt with Jewish refugees and not all identified with the ethnic categorization, certain parts of the security apparatus, such as the police in Prague and in Moravská Ostrava (Mährisch Ostrau) learned to practice the exclusion of (some) Jews by the means of petty administrative harassment: a practice which – while much less extensive – preceded the modes of exclusion of Jews in the Nazi-occupied ‘Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia’. ²⁷

The anti-Jewish turn in Czechoslovak refugee policy culminated in 1938 in the closure, without any public discussion, of the border to Jewish refugees from Romania, Austria and – after the Munich Agreement – from the Sudetenland. As the example of Richard A. Bermann illustrates, during the spring and summer of 1938 Czechoslovak border officials and the police were very busy hunting refugees from Austria, especially in southern Moravia, which was close to Vienna and where the border was technically easy to cross. Probably some 10,000 cases of refugees being turned back can be calculated from the rather insufficient archival evidence. Jews with Polish citizenship, who had often been forcibly brought across the border by Austrian police and the Sturmabteiling (SA), were escorted by Czechoslovak police to the Polish border. To prevent the influx of Austrian Jews, Czechoslovakia, unwilling to accept the economic and diplomatic cost of the visa requirement for all German citizens, made the entry of former Austrian nationals dependant on a ‘recommendation’ distributed by the Czechoslovak consulate in Vienna. This visa-in-all-but-name was readily handed out to members of the Viennese Czech minority, but was virtually unobtainable for the thousands of Jews who were queuing in the consulate’s corridors. ²⁸

Czechoslovak reaction to the Austrian crisis was indeed very similar to the measures taken by other European states to prevent the influx of Austrian Jews, through visa requirements or border closures. ²⁹ Czechoslovakia, however, stands out on account of the speed of the reaction: the decision to close the border was apparently taken at Ministry of Interior immediately as news of the Anschluss arrived, if not before. This unprecedented swiftness shows that a template for the response had been developed in advance. The wide-ranging consensus and the powers of the bureaucracy are illustrated also by the fact that the decision to seal the border was only a posteriori taken notice of by the government, probably without any extensive discussion. Moreover, Czechoslovak response was not initially caused by the real influx of foreigners – it was rather guided by generalization and fear of Jewish immigration. Czechoslovakia had already closed its border with Romania in January 1938 in reaction to news about the antisemitic policy of the new, pro-Fascist Romanian government, although almost no refugees from Romania were arriving in Czechoslovakia. ³⁰

Before and after the Munich Agreement, and after Kristallnacht which came only weeks after the annexation of Sudetenland, most of the approximately 28,000 Jews living there escaped or were expelled into the interior of the country. Czechoslovak authorities, concerned with the influx of Jews and Germans, in many cases attempted to stop them at the border or turn them back. ³¹ Especially after Kristallnacht, Czech policemen guarding the new border routinely refused to let Jewish refugees into the country and forced many of them to spend days in the no man’s land between the Czechoslovak and German border posts. ³² Clearly, Czechoslovakia did proceed according to the previously established pattern of response to prevent entry of Jewish refugees. This time, however, those refused entry were Czechoslovak citizens or those who were entitled to opt for Czechoslovak citizenship. Under the conditions of the post-Munich agreement between Germany and Czechoslovakia regarding citizenship, those Sudeten Jews who automatically acquired Reich German citizenship (if they, their parents or grandparents were born in Sudetenland before 1910) had the right to opt for Czechoslovak citizenship (because they were not of German nationality, as understood in Nazi Germany). ³³ The refugee question became increasingly intertwined with citizenship, ethnicity and minority rights.

During the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–38), Czech antisemites from the mainstream political parties, who found it difficult to question Jewish civic rights directly, were already launching vicious attacks in the press on Jewish refugees as a substitute: for instance the Agrarian daily Večer printed a series of articles against German-Jewish refugees in 1934. ³⁴ Most readers, no doubt, understood the coded assaults on Czechoslovak Jewish citizens. While this kind of propaganda was far from dominant throughout the existence of the First Republic, the use of the refugee question in order to destabilize the position of Jewish citizens is important in the longer run, as became apparent following the Munich Agreement of September 1938 when citizenship was increasingly tied up with ethnicity.

The Second Republic, as Czechoslovakia after the Munich agreement, weakened and within smaller borders, came to be known, was characterized by a strong tendency towards a nationalist and authoritative regime, profiling itself against the liberalism and democracy of the First Republic. The national humiliation of the Munich Agreement triggered a wave of antisemitism and within a few days, most of the Czech press participated in the antisemitic campaign. Czech professional organizations of lawyers and physicians started to exclude Jews from their ranks and the Czechoslovak government was busy formulating the first anti-Jewish legislation. ³⁵ Moreover, the upsurge of antisemitism was intrinsically linked with the changing concept of citizenship. Although far from being an example of national tolerance, interwar Czechoslovakia did nevertheless recognize the rights of the minorities within the framework of the national state. The Munich Agreement brought about a swift change in the understanding of the nation and of citizenship which now was based on a narrow, ethnic definition. Starting with refugees, including German Jews, nationalists and antisemites quickly moved on to questioning the status of Czechoslovak Jewish citizens, including those who identified with the Czech nation. Hence restrictions against Jewish refugees proceeded hand-in-glove with inroads being made into the citizenship of Czechoslovak Jews. With the border between refugees and citizens being increasingly blurred in the case of Jews and the decline of status of local Jews, Jewish organizations were much less able to support refugees with their authority.

In January 1939, less than two months before the occupation of the rest of the Bohemian Lands by Nazi Germany, the Czechoslovak government issued a series of anti-Jewish ordinances, including an extensive revision of the citizenship of those who were naturalized after the establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918 or who lived in the Sudetenland until the Munich Agreement; the eligibility of such people was largely defined by ethnicity. ³⁶ Without mentioning Jews at all, the main objective was clear to everybody: to strip a significant proportion of Czechoslovak Jews of their citizenship and – in this way – to transform them into real refugees. This would subject them to another ordinance produced on the same day which required foreigners – ‘in case they are emigrants’ and not ethnic Czechs, Slovaks or Carpatho-Rutheniens – to leave Czechoslovakia within six months. ³⁷ (The similarity with the Polish law from spring 1938 which removed Polish passports from Polish Jews living abroad for longer than five years is unmistakable, ³⁸ as is the expulsion of Jews from Slovakia into the region to be ceded to Hungary in November 1938. ³⁹ )

Based on this ordinance, the authorities systematically refused to recognize the citizenship of Sudeten Jews who fled into post-Munich Czechoslovakia, which in turn led to the creation of a much larger group of stateless people with only a limited possibility to emigrate. Large numbers of them were later deported to ghettos and concentration camps, and many were included in the first transports, especially to Łódź. In a paradoxical twist of events, it was the German occupation authorities in the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ that – out of fear that a large number of stateless Jews would hamper emigration – forced the ‘Protectorate’ authorities in summer 1939 to stop the de-naturalization of Jews.

The refugee relief activities also demonstrate this ethnic categorization. The size of the group of post-Munich refugees and the fact that the largest number of them were categorized as ethnic Czechs forced the government – for the first time since the First World War – to get actively involved in the care for refugees. According to official statistics, of a total of 171,401 refugees, 141,037 were of Czech nationality, 10,496 German and 18,673 Jewish. The new government-sponsored Refugee Institute (Ústav pro péči o uprchlíky) treated the Czech and non-Czech refugees differently: whereas Czechs from Sudetenland (and other parts of Czechoslovakia) were supposed to be reintegrated into the society, Jews and (anti-Fascist) Germans would be forced to leave as soon as possible. Thus, the director of the Institute took part in the negotiations about the British loan to Czechoslovakia with the explicit goal of promoting Jewish emigration (part of the monies was eventually reserved for Jewish emigration to Palestine). ⁴⁰

This shift in the understanding of citizenship had a profound and long-term influence and largely informed the views of the Czech resistance during the Second World War, as well as after the liberation. Both the domestic resistance in the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’ and the government-in-exile in London led by Edvard Beneš agreed that minorities should play no role in liberated Czechoslovakia and that their numbers be limited. ⁴¹ After the war, the government strived to achieve an ethnically homogeneous society and treated all minorities with extreme distrust. ⁴² The most visible element of this policy was the post-1945 expulsion of Germans and resettlement of Hungarians – minorities that were considered to have helped destroy Czechoslovakia in 1938. But other minorities, including those Germans who could not be transferred to Germany, the Roma, Jews and others, were subjected to a strong pressure to disperse and assimilate. No minority protection akin to the interwar period was conceivable in this context. At the same time, the government applied an aggressive campaign to repopulate the border areas, especially the Sudetenland emptied of Germans. ⁴³ To strengthen the national character of the country, approximately 200,000 ethnic Czechs and Slovaks living abroad were resettled in Czechoslovakia. ⁴⁴ The practice of ethnic categorization of refugees and of the repatriates continued and made post-Second World War Czechoslovakia an unlikely and unattractive place of refuge.

Towards the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union forced the Czechoslovak government in exile to cede the most eastern part of the interwar state, Subcarpathian Russia. Based on the Czechoslovak–Soviet treaty, inhabitants of the territory of Czech or Slovak nationality were entitled to opt for Czechoslovak citizenship and resettle into Czechoslovakia. This arrangement excluded (among other groups) local Jews (many of whom were trying to flee westwards), with the exception of those who fought in the Czechoslovak exile army. In the end, approximately 8000 Jews from Subcarpathian Russia moved to Czechoslovakia (and they settled chiefly in Prague and the depopulated Sudetenland), yet the government tried to prevent the entry and awarding of citizenship to many of them. ⁴⁵ On the other hand, many Jews who returned from the exile into liberated Czechoslovakia left the country or never returned due to its ethnic intolerance. Those with German linguistic and cultural heritage found the postwar Czechoslovakia especially inhospitable and insecure. ⁴⁶

At the same time, the government maintained very good relations with the Zionist movement and from 1948 to the State of Israel, and supported large-scale emigration to Palestine. In 1948–9, probably some 19,000 Jews were allowed to leave Czechoslovakia without many problems. The emigration, initiated by the Israeli ambassador in Prague, Ehud Avriel-Überall, was sped up through the use of collective passports approved simultaneously by the Czechoslovak authorities. The group also included men who were provided with military training by Czechoslovak officers and moved to Palestine in time to participate in the Israeli War of Independence. Along with them, large quantities of weapons, including aeroplanes, were sold to Israel. Czechoslovakia also allowed the transfer of large numbers of Jews fleeing from Poland (mostly within the so-called bricha). The positive approach to Jewish emigration cannot be explained by pro-Zionist sympathies of some members of Czechoslovak political establishment alone, but also by the desire for a homogeneous society: those Jews who were unlikely to fully assimilate were removed through emigration.

In the second half of 1949, the Czechoslovak Ministry of Interior was much more reluctant to hand out passports to Jews and the emigration to Israel soon almost came to a halt, with the exception of elderly people who were supposed to be reunited with their families and had no value for the Czechoslovak labour market. Zionist and international Jewish organizations were banned in Czechoslovakia and – in line with the policy of the Soviet bloc – the relationship with Israel started to deteriorate quickly. As Communist countries were now searching for internal enemies and traitors, their language and policies became more antisemitic; in Czechoslovakia this shift became apparent in the show trial in 1952 of the former Secretary General of the Communist Party, Rudolf Slánský, who was now discovered to be of ‘Jewish origins’ and a Zionist. ⁴⁷ (And – significantly for the arguments put forward in this article – many of the alleged Jewish agents of imperialism and Zionism were war-time refugees.) On the other hand, the anti-Zionist campaign in the Eastern bloc was only part of the explanation of the refusal to further support Jewish emigration, even if an important one. At a similar time, the ‘transfer’ of Germans was ended and the state focused to use their manpower while dispersing them in a way that would prevent the building of a compact German national community in Czechoslovakia. To what degree structural similarities in the policy to emigration/transfer of Jews and Germans can be established remains a subject for a future research.

Even though the Czechoslovak Communist party, once it established itself firmly in power after the coup of February 1948, attempted to reduce the intensity of the nationalist propaganda and turned a more integrative face towards the various ethnic groups, it never allowed any kind of minority protection to be re-established. While in the context of building a new, Communist, society, the members of these groups should be (re)educated, provided jobs and housing, they were more or less supposed to amalgamate in the society. ⁴⁸ The integrative measures or the allowed return of Hungarians to their original homes did little, however, to make post-1948 Czechoslovakia an attractive place of refuge. ⁴⁹ As an intolerant country behind the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovakia after the Communist take-over in 1948 was much more a place to escape from than one to find refuge in.

The only exceptions were related to the policy of the Communist bloc and the various Communist or leftist political movements it supported throughout the world. The most significant group were Greek ‘democratic’ refugees fleeing the civil war in Greece. Czechoslovakia first accepted several thousand Greek children whose parents were killed or fighting in the war, or otherwise not able to care for their families. As the defeat of the left looked imminent, Czechoslovakia also took in a large number of Greek adults, most of them Communists. Because they were unable to return home, the majority of them stayed in Czechoslovakia for a very long time. In 1957, for instance, an official report estimated their number to be 13,000. The Greek Action (Řecká akce), named in an apparent parallel to the inter-war Russian Relief Action, was politically motivated and the expectation was that the refugees would return to Greece. They were taken care of, provided with education and integrated into the economy. The Czechoslovak state was very lenient in giving them Czechoslovak citizenship, as were their own organizations. Greek Communists living in Czechoslovakia were members of a branch of the Greek Communist Party and were not integrated into the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. ⁵⁰

This article has highlighted two underlying phenomena which informed Czechoslovak approach to refugees between the the First World War and the post-Second World War period: the application of the primarily political concept of asylum which was characterized by a selective approach to refugees and by a preference for politically-defined refugee groups; and the tendency to ethnic, national or racial categorization of refugees. While historians have so far mostly focused on Czechoslovakia as a place of political asylum, its selectivity and the ethnic categorization has mostly been ignored. Hence the story of the Czechoslovak refugee policy has largely been disconnected from the growing body of research on nationalism and nationality conflict in East-Central Europe generally and in Czechoslovakia specifically. However, by 1938, and again in the short period between the liberation and the Communist coup d’etat in 1948, the narrow ethnically-defined concept of citizenship and the nationalist categories made Czechoslovakia a very unwelcome haven. From 1938, the Anschluss of Austria and the Munich agreement, the occupation in March 1939, and the Communist take-over in February 1948, Czechoslovakia became much more a country to escape from.