page_title: Edvard Beneš
section_title: Wartime exile in Britain
hierarchical_section_title: Edvard Beneš / Wartime exile in Britain
caption_attribution_description: English: The Czechoslovak Government in Exile during the Second World War Dr Edouard Benes, the exiled President of Czechoslovakia, with Czechoslovak Air Force personnel and troops in the Eastern Command, who had recently returned from the Middle East to Britain.
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: On 22 October 1938, Beneš went into exile in Putney, London. Czechoslovakia's intelligence service headed by František Moravec was still loyal to Beneš, which gave him a valuable bargaining chip in his dealings with the British as Paul Thümmel, a highly ranking officer of the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence, was still selling information to Moravec's group. In July 1939, Beneš realising that "information is power", started to share with the British some of the intelligence provided by "Agent A-54" as Thümmel was code-named. As the British lacked any spies in Germany comparable to Agent A-54, the British were intensely interested in the intelligence provided by him, which Beneš used to bargain with in dealings with the British.
  By July 1939, the Danzig crisis had pushed Britain to the brink of war with Germany, and British decision-makers were keenly interested in any high-level intelligence about Germany. In the summer of 1939, Beneš hoped that the Danzig crisis would end in war, seeing a war with Germany as his only hope of restoring Czechoslovakia. At the same time, Beneš started to have regular lunches with Winston Churchill, at the time only a backbench Conservative MP, and Harold Nicolson, a backbencher National Labour MP who was likewise opposed to the Munich Agreement. Besides his new British friends like Churchill and Nicolson, Beneš also resumed contact with old British friends from World War I such as the historian Robert Seton-Watson and the journalist Henry Wickham Steed, who wrote articles urging the restoration of Czechoslovakia to its pre-Munich Agreement borders.
  On 23 August 1939, Beneš met Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to the Court of St. James, to ask for Soviet support. According to Maisky's diary, Beneš told him that he wanted a common frontier between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. Furthermore, Maisky's diary had Beneš saying that if Czechoslovakia were restored, he would cede Ruthenia, whose people Beneš noted were mostly Ukrainian, to the Soviet Union to bring about a common frontier.
  On the same day, Beneš learned of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. When he confronted Maisky, he was told that war would break out "in two weeks' time", causing Beneš to write: "My overall impression is that the Soviets want war, they have prepared for it conscientiously and they maintain that the war will take place – and that they have reserved some freedom of action for themselves... [The pact was] a rather rough tactic to drive Hitler into war... the Soviets are convinced that the time has come for a final struggle between capitalism, fascism and Nazism and that there will be a world revolution, which they will trigger at an opportune moment when others are exhausted by war ". Maisky would be proven right on 1 September, when Germany invaded Poland, and the British and French both declared war on Germany two days later.
caption: Beneš posing with members of the Czechoslovak Air Force, recently returned to the United Kingdom from the Middle East.
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