page_title: Edvard Beneš
section_title: Second presidency
hierarchical_section_title: Edvard Beneš / Second presidency
caption_attribution_description: English: President Edvard Beneš' return to Prague, 16 May 1945
context_page_description: Edvard Beneš, sometimes anglicised to Edward Benesh, was a Czech politician and statesman who was President of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938 and again from 1945 to 1948. He also led the Czechoslovak government-in-exile 1939 to 1945, during World War II. As President, Beneš faced two major crises which both resulted in his resignation.
  His first resignation came after the Munich Agreement and subsequent German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, which brought his government into exile in the United Kingdom. The second came about with the 1948 communist coup, which created the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Before his time as President, Beneš was also the first Minister of Foreign Affairs and the fourth Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia. A member of the Czechoslovak National Social Party, he was known as a skilled diplomat.
context_section_description: In April 1945, Beneš flew from London to Košice in eastern Slovakia, which had been taken by the Red Army and which became the temporary capital of Czechoslovakia. Upon arriving, Beneš announced a coalition government had been formed called the National Front, with the Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald as prime minister. Besides Gottwald, communists were named as ministers of defence, the interior, education, information, and agriculture. The most important non-Communist minister was the foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, the long-term Czechoslovak minister in London. Besides the Communists, the other parties in the National Front government were the Social Democratic Party, Beneš own National Socialist Party (no relation to Hitler's National Socialists), the People's Party and the Slovak Democratic Party.
  Beneš also announced the Košice programme, which declared that Czechoslovakia was now to be a state of Czechs and Slovaks with the German minority in the Sudetenland and the Hungarian minority in Slovakia to be expelled; there was to be a degree of decentralization with the Slovaks to have their own National Council, but no federation; capitalism was to continue, but the "commanding heights" of the economy were to be controlled by the state; and finally Czechoslovakia was to pursue a pro-Soviet foreign policy.
caption: Beneš returning to Prague after the Prague uprising, 16 May 1945.
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