page_title: Emanuel Moravec
section_title: Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
hierarchical_section_title: Emanuel Moravec / Career / Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
context_page_description: Emanuel Moravec was a Czech army officer and writer who served as the collaborationist Minister of Education of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia between 1942 and 1945. He was also chair of the Board of Trustees for the Education of Youth, a fascist youth organisation in the protectorate.
  In World War I, Moravec served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, but following capture by the Russians he changed sides to join Russian-backed Serbian forces and then the Czechoslovak Legion, which went on to fight on the side of the White Army in the Russian Civil War. During the interwar period he commanded an infantry battalion in the Czechoslovak Army. As a proponent of democracy during the 1930s, Moravec was outspoken in his warnings about the expansionist plans of Germany under Adolf Hitler and appealed for armed action rather than capitulation to German demands for the Sudetenland. In the aftermath of the German occupation of the rump Czechoslovakia, he became an enthusiastic collaborator, realigning his political worldview towards fascism. He committed suicide in the final days of World War II.
context_section_description: On 16 March 1939, Germany  occupied the rump Czechoslovak state and the German-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was declared. According to František Moravec, Emanuel Moravec attempted to leave the Czech lands prior to the German arrival and join the military cadre being sent abroad. His offer of service was rejected. Moravec was particularly concerned that his earlier denunciations of Germany, and his reputation as a strident anti-German polemicist, might make him a target of the new regime. He was surprised, therefore, when the new German authorities informed him he could resume writing books and newspaper columns. Moravec returned to writing with gusto and a reoriented editorial line, declaring "our nation could have died in war [with Germany]. Now the whole nation will die of fright and fear".
  Writing in V úloze mouřenína – Československá tragedie 1938, the most popular of his works, Moravec sought to more fully reconcile his support for the Germans with his earlier calls for resistance. He indicted Beneš and the intelligentsia for Czechoslovakia's defeat and declared it was the unwillingness of the elite to confront Germany militarily that demonstrated democracy's moral decay, thereby ultimately justifying its termination:
  ... the mottoes humanism and democracy were fluttering about everywhere, but the Czech nation was actually living off its great military tradition of Hussitism and revolutionary armies. All attempts to smother the old-soldierly character that was in the blood of this people led nowhere. The soppy lemonade of moribund pacifism offered in the fragile glass of the League of Nations (that was after 1919 already cracked) was enjoyed only by a group of the intelligentsia that had a particularly girlish character.
  In 1941 Moravec helped found the Board of Trustees for the Education of Youth, a fascist youth group, and served as its chairman. The following year, Reinhard Heydrich who, in his role as the Berlin-appointed Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia held penultimate day-to-day authority in the protectorate, compelled President Emil Hácha to appoint Moravec as the protectorate's education minister. Unlike other protectorate ministries, the education ministry under Moravec was given a measure of independence and not required to report to an overseer in the office of the Reich Protector. As with all protectorate ministers, Moravec's mandate to hold office was at the pleasure of the Reich Protector, as set-out in the 16 March 1939 decree of the German government.
caption: Emanuel Moravec was the original target of what became known as Operation Anthropoid, but Reinhard Heydrich (pictured) was ultimately selected for assassination.
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