![\"Czech](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/LMZYINO4LBA47N52LAEBHUJP7Q.jpg\")
Czech president Emil H\u00e1cha and Adolf Hitler in Berlin, 1939. Photograph: France Presse Voir\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n\u201cFor what I have done, the nation will call me a traitor\u201d: the words reputedly spoken by Czech leader Emil H\u00e1cha after he signed away Czechoslovakia\u2019s independence in 1939.<\/p>\n
H\u00e1cha was the epitome of coerced compromise, later viewed as collaboration, the fate of many liberal politicians in the 1930s. <\/p>\n
An elderly academic with a heart condition, he agreed reluctantly to become head of state after his predecessor resigned over the Munich Agreement of 1938, which allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia.<\/p>\n
To save his country from a brutal invasion, one it had little hope of repelling, he capitulated to German demands to turn the state into the German protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and his administration into a Nazi puppet government in the process.<\/p>\n
H\u00e1cha\u2019s compromise (or surrender) was the starting point of a recent tour I attended of Prague\u2019s second World War sites.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s old town in midwinter is a shimmering maze of cobblestone streets and perfectly preserved medieval architecture, a fact that owes much to H\u00e1cha\u2019s decision not to resist the Nazi onslaught.<\/p>\n
Our guide held up a colour-coded map of the first Czechoslovak republic (1919-1938) before the Nazis annexed Sudetenland, before Slovakia and Ruthenia seceded, and before Poland and Hungary exploited the state\u2019s vulnerability to annex bits of their own.<\/p>\n
Next, he held up a photograph of the four political leaders who brokered this evisceration \u2013 Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French prime minister \u00c9douard Daladier \u2013 while highlighting the lack of any Czech involvement in the process.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t need to emphasise the obvious parallels with a similar border redrawing exercise taking place not far from where we were standing. Ukraine\u2019s western border is about 500km from Prague.<\/p>\n
US president Donald Trump\u2019s special envoy to the region Steve Witkoff went to Moscow six times last year, but not once to Ukraine. Washington\u2019s continual browbeating of Kyiv, combined with its adoption of Russia\u2019s war demands, is a dismal reflection of the zero-sum politics going on above Ukraine\u2019s head and Europe\u2019s enfeebled position in this global power play.<\/p>\n
Comparisons between the current era and 1930s fascism are overbaked, but the erosion of Ukrainian sovereignty and the disintegration of Czechoslovakia 85 years ago have strikingly similar contours.<\/p>\n
H\u00e1cha still hangs in the nation\u2019s history somewhere between traitor and patriot.<\/p>\n
Summoned to Berlin in 1939, the old and infirm H\u00e1cha was a man out of his time. His sober black dress evoked the vanished Austro-Hungarian empire. <\/p>\n
Czech president Emil H\u00e1cha and Adolf Hitler in Berlin, 1939. Photograph: France Presse Voir\/AFP via Getty Images <\/p>\n
He was made to wait for hours in the Reich chancellery while Hitler and his air force chief Hermann G\u00f6ring reputedly drank and watched US westerns on a projector upstairs.<\/p>\n
By the time he was seen \u2013 some time in the early hours of March 15th \u2013 H\u00e1cha was dehydrated and exhausted. Presumably that was the point. <\/p>\n
Hitler played bad cop, issuing increasingly violent threats, including that he would have Prague bombed to the ground in two hours unless H\u00e1cha surrendered his fledgling state, while G\u00f6ring played good cop.<\/p>\n
Accounts vary but at one point G\u00f6ring is said to have taken H\u00e1cha by the hand, saying, \u201cMr H\u00e1cha, we both know Prague, isn\u2019t it a lovely city, wouldn\u2019t it be a shame if something happened to it?\u201d<\/p>\n
At which point H\u00e1cha collapsed with a suspected heart attack, an inconvenience for Hitler, whose focus was on securing Czechoslovakia diplomatically.<\/p>\n
The elderly leader was revived by Hitler\u2019s physicians using Pervitin, an early form of crystal meth, which Germany had been trialling on soldiers to reduce fatigue and boost alertness.<\/p>\n
H\u00e1cha was politically humiliated and put back on a slow train to Prague, only to be met by Hitler at the other end.<\/p>\n
The German dictator had separately sped to the Czech capital to proclaim the country\u2019s new protectorate status as a fait accompli.<\/p>\n
The country\u2019s weak resistance (initially) combined with the vital role it played in Germany\u2019s war economy damaged the Czechs\u2019 standing among the allies.<\/p>\n
That was until the extraordinary assassination of Reinhard Heydrich (acting Reich protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the most sinister figures in the Third Reich) in 1942, an event documented by French author Laurent Binet in his brilliant book, HHhH.<\/p>\n
The assassination, a joint British and Czech operation (code-named Operation Anthropoid, now a film), was botched after the assassin\u2019s gun jammed and a subsequent grenade missed the target.<\/p>\n
Through a fortuitous sequence of events, however, the objective was achieved. Heydrich got blood poisoning after a bit of shrapnel blew horse fibres from his car\u2019s upholstery into his body.<\/p>\n
He might have survived from such a minor wound if he hadn\u2019t refused treatment until a German doctor could be found. <\/p>\n
The subsequent hunt for the assassins Jozef Gabc\u00edk and Jan Kubis and their heroic last stand in the Church of St Cyril and St Methodius, now a shrine to Czech and Slovak resistance, was the centrepiece of our tour. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are Czechs! We will never surrender, you hear? Never!\u201d Gabc\u00edk and Kubis are reported to have shouted at the Germans surrounding them. <\/p>\n
The parachutists\u2019 bodies were later laid out in front of the church to be identified by the man who had betrayed them, fellow paratrooper Karel Curda.<\/p>\n
The good and the bad of wartime Prague.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cFor what I have done, the nation will call me a traitor\u201d: the words reputedly spoken by Czech…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":692636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[13861,3032,2000,299,5187],"class_list":{"0":"post-692635","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-adolf-hitler","9":"tag-czech-republic","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=692635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/692635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/692636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=692635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=692635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=692635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}