World: HISTORIC QUEST FOR FREEDOM

• Share

(2 of 4)

Despite such long strivings, Czechoslovakia is, politically speaking, a young country that did not gain its independence until 50 years ago. Even then, it took World War I and two remarkable men to achieve that. They were Thomas Garrigue Masaryk, a philosophy professor, and his colleague and ultimate successor, Eduard Beneš, who had been one of his students at Prague. When the war broke out, they slipped out of their homeland to work abroad for Czechoslovak freedom. A master of public persuasion, Masaryk traveled to the U.S. and argued the case for his country's freedom so well that President Wilson included autonomy for the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire among his 14 points for a peace settlement in Europe.

In 1918, as the German and Austro-Hungarian empires crumbled in defeat, Masaryk and Benes went home to put their concepts of freedom into practice. From the first, the Czechoslovaks proved that they could indeed govern themselves. During the turbulent 1920s and early 1930s, while democratic governments gave way to dictatorships in neighboring countries, the Czechoslovaks retained a parliamentary government, pursued moderate policies and enjoyed relative economic stability. Ethnically, however, the nation was a melange of peoples—the dominant Czechs, restive Slovaks and some 3,000,000 Germans who wanted to be united with the Reich.

As Hitler rose to power in Germany, the Germans in Czechoslovakia saw a redeemer who would bring them home. Hitler was delighted to oblige. He charged that the country's citizens of German origin were being mistreated and must have his protection. Benes, who by then had succeeded Masaryk as President, needed international support in order to stand up to Hitler.

But the mood in Europe was one of appeasement. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain observed that he did not see why England should go to war "because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing."

At the Munich Conference in 1938, France and Britain forced Czechoslovakia to cede to Germany its western border areas, the Sudetenland where most of the Ger man-speaking population lived. In return, Hitler promised to make no more territorial demands in Europe. Six months later, however, German tanks stormed into Prague without warning, and Nazi Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels read Hitler's decree to stunned Czechoslovak radio listeners: "Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist!" Benes, who fled abroad, tried to make people outside his country see that what had happened there soon would be repeated elsewhere. Soon enough, all the world realized that he was right.