Edvard Beneš
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Edvard Beneš (listen ) (IPA: [ˈɛdvart ˈbɛnɛʃ]) (May 28, 1884 - September 3, 1948) was a leader of the Czechoslovak independence movement and the second President of Czechoslovakia. He was born in Kožlany, Bohemia (then a province of the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
In 1912 Beneš taught at the Charles University of Prague, and from 1916-1918 he was a Secretary of the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris and Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs within the Provisional Czechoslovak government. From 1918-1935, he was Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, and from 1920-1925 and 1929-1935 a member of the Parliament. In 1921 he was a professor and also from 1921-1922 Prime Minister. From 1923-1927 he became a member of the League of Nations Council (serving as president of its committee from 1927-1928). He served as President of Czechoslovakia from 1935 to 1938 and again from 1945 to 1948, his term broken by World War II, during which he served as president-in-exile from 1940 to 1945.
During World War I he was one of the leading organizers of an independent Czechoslovakia abroad.
He was a member of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party (till 1925 called Czechoslovak Socialist Party) and a strong Czechoslovakist - he did not consider Slovaks and Czechs to be separate ethnicities.
Beneš became first Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia and in 1935 succeeded Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk to become President. In October 1938, after the Munich Agreement ceded the predominantly German speaking Sudetenland to Germany, but before the German occupation of the Czech speaking remainder of Bohemia and Moravia, he resigned from office and went into exile in Putney, London. Then in 1940 he organized the Provisional Government-in-Exile in London with Jan Šrámek as Prime Minister and himself as President.
In November 1940 Beneš, his wife, their nieces and his household staff moved to The Abbey at Aston Abbotts near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. The staff of his private office, including his Secretary Edvard Táborský and his chief of staff Jaromír Smutný moved to The Old Manor House in the neighbouring village of Wingrave.
In 1941 Beneš and his government planned the Operation Anthropoid, aiming at the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. This was implemented in 1942, resulting in brutal German reprisals such as the execution of thousands of Czechs and the eradication of two villages.
Although oriented to the West he was also on friendly terms with Stalin. In 1943 he signed the entente between Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union in order to secure Czechoslovakia's political position, as well as his own.
At the end of World War II, he returned home as the President of Czechoslovakia. He resented the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia on 25 February 1948 led by Prime Minister Klement Gottwald, and resigned as President on 7 June 1948. Gottwald succeeded him as President. He died of natural causes at his villa in Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia on September 3, 1948.
The so-called Beneš decrees, which, among other things, expropriated ethnic German and Hungarian Czechoslovakians, paved the way for the eventual expulsion of the majority of ethnic Germans to Germany and Austria, which was approved by the Allies at the Potsdam conference. The decrees (still in force to this day) are disputed, but both the European Parliament and the European Commission established that they are not contradictory to the law of the EU [citation needed].
[edit] References
- Oskar Krejčí: Geopolitics of the Central European Region. The view from Prague and Bratislava Bratislava: Veda, 2005. 494 pp. (Free download, in English)
- Neil Rees "The Secret History of The Czech Connection - The Czechoslovak Government in Exile in London and Buckinghamshire" compiled by Neil Rees, England, 2005. ISBN 0-9550883-0-5
- John Wheeler-Bennett Munich : Prologue to Tragedy, New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948.
- Paul E. Zinner "Czechoslovakia: The Diplomacy of Eduard Benes" pages 100-122 from The Diplomats 1919-1939 edited by Gordon A. Craig & Felix Gilbert, Princeton University Press: Princeton, New Jersey, United States of America, 1953
[edit] See also
| Preceded by: Jan Černý |
Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia 1921–1922 |
Succeeded by: Antonín Švehla |
| Preceded by: T. G. Masaryk |
President of Czechoslovakia 1935–1938 |
Succeeded by: Emil Hácha |
| Preceded by: Emil Hácha |
President of Czechoslovakia 1945–1948 |
Succeeded by: Klement Gottwald |
| Presidents of Czechoslovakia |  |
|---|---|
| Tomáš Masaryk (1918-1935) • Milan Hodža* (1935) • Edvard Beneš (1935-1939) • Jan Syrový* (1938) • Emil Hácha (1938-1939/1945) • Edvard Beneš (1940/1945-1948) • Klement Gottwald (1948-1953) • Antonín Zápotocký (1953-1957) • Viliam Široký* (1957) • Antonín Novotný (1957-1968) • Josef Lenárt* (1968) • Ludvík Svoboda (1968-1975) • Gustáv Husák (1975-1989) • Marián Čalfa* (1989) • Václav Havel (1989-1992) • Jan Stráský* (1992) *acting |
