WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Hitler in Prague with Czech president Emil Hacha
With severe inflationary economic pressures forcing the pace of territorial expansion, the German Nazi regime invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. On March 10 Hitler definitively informed major Nazi and military figures that he planned to break up the remaining rump Czech state and occupy Prague. Two days later orders were given to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to be ready to enter Czechoslovakia.
With the Wehrmacht massed only five miles from the Czech-German border on March 14, the Czech State President Dr. Emil Hacha requested an audience with Hitler. After deliberately keeping him waiting for hours, Hitler met Hacha at 1 a.m. in his New Reich Chancellery. Informed in no uncertain terms that a full-scale military invasion was only hours away and that the annihilation of Prague and its population would be his fault, Hacha fainted. After being revived by Hitler’s personal physician, Hacha telephoned Prague and ordered Czech forces to stand down. By 9 a.m. on the morning of March 15, the forward units of the Wehrmacht marched into Prague. Hitler arrived on the deserted streets of the capital that evening.
The insatiable demand created by the Nazi rearmament drive for raw materials could only be fed by the further conquest of adjoining states. Such a conundrum only confirmed in Hitler’s mind the suitability of his proposed remedy for Germany: territorial expansion (Lebensraum) to the central European state’s east.
The annexing of the previously Czech Sudetenland had brought supplies of crucial raw materials to Germany. But the rump Czech state that remained held an abundance of further materials required by the Nazis for their war drive. Most Czech industry and industrial resources were to be found in Bohemia and Moravia. Even after the incorporation of the Sudetenland, four-fifths of engineering, machine-tool manufacturing and electrical industries remained within Czechoslovakia.
WSWS for more