Antisemitská propaganda a „věda“ v protektorátu Čechy a Morava. Mechanismy ničení demokratické tradice
Authors:   University of West Bohemia, Soukupová Blanka , Lozoviuk Petr ,   University of West Bohemia
Published: December 2024

All totalitarian regimes pay an extraordinary amount of attention to propaganda and censorship. The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was no exception. Propaganda, carried out through the mass media, played two roles. Firstly, it presented the inhabitants of the new state with a concentrated version of its worldview, from which they were advised not to deviate. Secondly, it served as a means of pacifying society, using the tried and tested method of the carrot and the stick.
The axis of the Protectorate's propaganda became the glorification of Nazi Germany’s war campaign as a supposedly necessary prerequisite for the building of a new, peaceful, anti-Bolshevik Europe that was socially just and economically prosperous under the baton of Hitler's Reich, a Europe not under the sway of the democratic West and free of Jewish impulses. The Czech nation thus found itself trapped between intrusive propaganda offering a peaceful life to the “honest working” members of the nation, who were promised that their national language and culture would be preserved, and the threat of ever-increasing repression were they to put up any form of resistance.
Hitler's vision of a new Europe was a brutal attack on the main components of Europeanism. The Nazi propaganda most drastically raged against the supposed “eternal enemy” of the nations of Europe: the Jews. The Protectorate citizen was supposed to see the Jews as the scourge of Europe and of all humanity, that they were ungrateful outsiders sprawling among the host nations, that they were parasites offering nothing of benefit, both immoral capitalists and cruel and primitive Bolsheviks, responsible for wars, inflation and black marketeering, responsible for committing ritual murders and the destruction of the “sacred” countryside with a suppurating plague. The ancient roots of Europeanism were then ripped out by the very fact of war, which brought suffering to millions, as well as by the legislatively-backed destruction of the “racially non-conforming” population or those that dared to hold opinions incompatible with the regime. Both intentionally and indirectly (by adopting and spreading negative stereotypes of the Jewish population) and also directly (by creating works subservient to the Nazi regime), the world of science, including the politicized ethnography (now ethnology) and politicized history under the Protectorate, played a role in justifying this extreme solution. Politicized history focused primarily on the St. Wenceslas tradition, which it saw as being a reasonable and self-preserving tradition of the Czech nation's submission to its mightier German neighbor. The expropriated Czech history was to justify the supposedly just German war for a new Europe, against Bolshevism and international Jewry. Enlightenment rationalism then appeared in the caricatured form of the systematic research and documentation of the culture of an “extinct race” and finally in the meticulously planned and systematic genocide of the Jews, Roma (or Gypsies, to use the terminology of the time), homosexuals, and active opponents of the regime. The Protectorate not only brought about a huge loss of human life and material damage, but was also enormously detrimental to Czech education and the nation’s character. These, then, were perhaps the harshest repercussions of the war.