Edvard Beneš

Edvard Beneš (born May 28, 1884, Kozlany, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died September 3, 1948, Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia [now in Czech Republic]) was a statesman, foreign minister, and president, a founder of modern Czechoslovakia who forged its Western-oriented foreign policy between World Wars I and II but capitulated to Adolf Hitler’s demands during the Czech crisis of 1938.

After studying in Prague, Paris, and Dijon, France, Beneš received a doctorate of laws in 1908 and taught at the Prague Commercial Academy and the Czech University of Prague (now Charles University) before World War I. Influenced by the nationalist ideas of Tomáš Masaryk, who wished to liberate the Czechs and Slovaks from Austrian rule, Beneš followed his mentor to Switzerland during World War I and then established himself in Paris. With Masaryk and the Slovak leader Milan Štefánik, Beneš formed a propaganda organization that eventually became a Czechoslovak provisional government on October 14, 1918. With the collapse of Austria-Hungary in November 1918, a new Czechoslovak state was quickly formed. As foreign minister, a post he was to retain until 1935, Beneš headed his country’s delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and championed the League of Nations throughout the interwar period, serving as its Council chairman six times. Opposed to plans for union between Austria and Germany (after World War I and again in 1931), which he deemed a threat to Czechoslovakia’s continued existence, he attempted to reestablish a balance of power in eastern Europe. To fill the partial power vacuum created by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Beneš negotiated the treaties with Romania and Yugoslavia (1921) that formed the Little Entente, originally aimed at revisionist Hungary. France joined in 1924, and thereafter the alliance became a bloc against Germany and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. In 1935, however, he signed a mutual assistance pact between his country and the Soviet Union.

With the resignation of Masaryk as president in 1935, Beneš was elected to that office. Relations with Poland and Germany, never amicable, steadily worsened. Though he granted substantially the first Sudetenland German autonomy demands in 1938, he was nevertheless unable to avert the crisis that led to the destruction of the Czechoslovak state. Abandoned by his allies, Beneš capitulated before the German ultimatum, and his country lost the Sudetenland in September 1938. Poland soon occupied the disputed Teschen area. Resigning on October 5, 1938, Beneš went into exile. After the outbreak of World War II he established in France a Czechoslovak national committee, which moved to London in 1940. Reestablishing a government on his native soil on April 3, 1945, Beneš entered Prague on May 16 to the enthusiastic welcome of the population. His was the only eastern European exile government to be allowed to return after the war.

Backlash against the ethnic German and Hungarian populations in postwar Czechoslovakia was swift and brutal. Beginning in 1945, the so-called “Beneš decrees” (officially the Decrees of the President of the Republic) were enacted, stripping the citizenship of millions of Sudeten Germans and tens of thousands of Hungarians unless they could prove their wartime loyalty to the Czechoslovak state. Their property was confiscated without compensation, and as many as 19,000 “expellees” were killed during their forced expulsion from Czechoslovakia. The Beneš decrees continued to be a contentious point into the 21st century, but they remained in force, precluding any claim to reparations by those dispossessed in the 1940s.

Beneš realized that Czechoslovakia had to cooperate closely with the Soviet Union. Increasingly ill, he suffered two strokes in 1947. When his communist prime minister, Klement Gottwald, demanded on February 25, 1948, that Beneš accept a communist-dominated cabinet, Beneš again had no choice but to capitulate. Refusing to sign the new constitution, he resigned on June 7, 1948. Having witnessed the apparent suicide of his lifelong friend Jan Masaryk (son of Tomáš Masaryk) a few months earlier, Beneš died a broken man in 1948. His unfinished Memoirs: From Munich to New War and New Victory appeared in English in 1954.