Community-Building through Authoritarian Welfare (2024)

Radka Šustrová

The reconstruction of the state and society fundamentally changed the ideology of the nation and its representation. The emerging institutions of national welfare were to serve their national communities exclusively and thus give tangible form to national and ethnic segregation in the Bohemian lands. This chapter leads to an illumination of my argument linking the national radicalisation and the expansion of the welfare state, bringing an attempt at a sort of equal redistribution among the members of the national community. As Samuel Moyn has pointed out, it was national welfare that ‘included more people in a community of distributive justice than ever before’.1 This was true, even though it came at the cost of creating racial communities. The loss of territory and the expected wave of over a million Czech refugees fleeing from the annexed Sudetenland to the rest of the country in 1938 did not simplify the process of building national welfare, but it gave it momentum. However, the disrupted transport infrastructure, economy and network of social security institutions of former Czechoslovakia needed urgent completion and rebuilding. This was used in parallel to reimagine the system according to national welfare principles. As a result, new institutions were established in the field of social and health care and adjustments were made to public social insurance and social programmes for the needy. The Czech government was increasingly concerned about the distribution of social rights and meeting the needs primarily of the ‘Czech nation’. This did not change even after the declaration of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. The Bohemian lands, however, continued to be a territory also inhabited by Germans, Jews and members of other ethnic groups and nationalities.

The basic framework for the organisation of life in the Nazi Protectorate was provided by the Decree on the Establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, framed by Adolf Hitler after his arrival in Prague and promulgated on 16 March 1939. It established a dual administrative structure and divided the care of the population between the German (occupation) authorities and Czech (officially called Protectorate) authorities, and it fundamentally expanded the institutional basis of social protection in the Bohemian lands.2 The decree divided the population into two groups according to national and state affiliation. While Germans were to receive the same rights as Reich citizens, the rest of the population were classified as Protectorate subjects, that is, foreigners, and were subject to regulations and powers of the Czech (Protectorate) authorities. Never before in the Czech environment had there been such a consistent erection of abstract and intentionally enforced boundaries within society. In interwar Czechoslovakia, voluntary social welfare organisations were organised along national lines, but the state never enforced segregation in public welfare. The Autumn Revolution changed not only the thinking about nation and ethnicity but also everyday social practice. The welfare commitments of the state were newly discussed in the context of national welfare, in which individual national communities of Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Jews and other groups were separated from each other.

National belonging was newly determined on the basis of objective features, set by officials, rather than individuals’ choice. In this sense, the largest communities in Bohemia and Moravia – the Czechs and Germans – attracted the most attention. The strict segregation of the population was matched by the organisation of social and health administration and education according to nationality. The Protectorate administration formed an important organisational framework for the provision of public social and health services to the Czech population. The Czech leaders were obsessive about their autonomous status, albeit in a system that could hardly be interpreted as a free bond between the Bohemian lands and Germany. However, historians often deny the practical participation of the Czech government in decision-making and the degree of its initiative under the Nazi protectorate. In this chapter, I attempt to undermine this prevailing interpretation by analysing the national welfare system in the context of rebuilding the state and society. In so doing, I investigate the government’s programme, formulated in response to the annexation of the Czechoslovak border regions by Germany, and the transformation of the organisational and administrative apparatus and its instruments that enforced the principle of segregated welfare in practice. In the conclusion of the chapter I focus on social policy as an instrument of social exclusion, humiliation and physical destruction as an inherent part of making authoritarian welfare.

The Munich crisis as a catalyst of change

The new territorial division of the Bohemian lands, effective from 1 October 1938, had a significant impact on the scope of social protection provided by the Czechoslovak state. The Munich Agreement made a cut in the functioning network of public administration, but at the same time it accelerated the longer-term trend towards ethnically hom*ogeneous units and national welfare structures. The rapid political transformation of the country was justified in two ways: by the corrective function of the measures adopted, which was supposed to stabilise the country socially and economically; and by their modernising function, which was to help overcome the functional and ideological shortcomings of interwar liberal democracy. Czech politicians quickly incorporated both of these parameters into the new programme of the post-Munich government and, later, initiated a political programme relying on efficiency, modernisation and protection of the nation in the Nazi Protectorate.

A large part of the population could have understood Beran’s words as a confident call for reconstruction and a promise of social justice. It remained unclear, however, who that ‘everyone’ he spoke about was whom the state intended to take care of.

In the autumn of 1938, the biggest changes in the organisation of social policy concerned mainly the Czechoslovak border regions, most of which had been annexed by Germany. Beginning in October 1938, the Reichsgau Sudetenland began to transform its entire institutional structure with the aim of fully integrating the former Czechoslovak border districts into the German Reich. The borders opened up to Reich organisations and officials, who took up their new positions or expanded their territorial scope as experts in Reich law and customs in providing protection and welfare to members of the German nation. Following the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany led a campaign promising significant changes in employment policy and an increase in the standard of living of the German population.4 In contrast, the Czecho-Slovak government was in a different situation and faced three very pressing problems: firstly, it was struggling with the inflow of refugees from the annexed border regions; secondly, it was seeking to stabilise the disrupted network of social and health care institutions; and thirdly, it was negotiating the dismantling of the insurance system, that is, dividing up the insured persons and the assets of the insurance companies on the basis of the new territorial arrangement.

The increase in the number of migrants who had left their homes in the border regions with their entire families and fled to the interior required increased provision of social and health care. This was not the first time that Czechoslovakia had faced a refugee crisis, even though it was now its own citizens who were the refugees. The deteriorating international situation following the Nazi seizure of power and the attempted Nazi coup in Austria, which was felt especially by Jews and political opponents, also affected Czechoslovakia throughout the 1930s. Specifically, in December 1937, the Czechoslovak government took a negative stance towards Romanian political emigrants, especially refugees of Jewish origin who were fleeing the country ruled by the fascist and anti-Semitic National Christian Party. The inclination to accommodate international developments – to build symbolic borders for the nation and to share the fear of the influx of Romanian refugees – was demonstrated by the increasing indifference of Czech ministerial officials. As Kateřina Čapková and Michal Frankl argue, in the first years after the political events of 1933 and 1934, the authorities granted refugees asylum on the grounds of racial discrimination as a legitimate reason for fleeing their home country. However, when the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935, Jewish refugees were increasingly often included in the secondary category of ‘economic migrants’. As autumn 1938 approached, officials were gradually applying progressively stronger restrictions on refugees.5 The changing paradigm of state ideology during the emerging Autumn Revolution, accompanied by a strong anti-liberal movement and an escalated nationalism, was much more straightforward in the course it pursued.

At the end of September 1938, there were approximately 25,000 refugees, but by 1 September of the following year their number had risen eightfold.6 The care of the refugees, in which both public and voluntary organisations were involved, was coordinated by the Institute for the Care of Refugees (Ústav pro péči o uprchlíky), established on 1 December 1938 under the Ministry of Social Welfare.7 Nevertheless, the provision of refugee care gradually became an act that demonstrated national segregationist practices. Deciding on who was to be cared for and ‘resettled’ and who was to be cared for and ‘expelled’, as reflected in the institute’s departmental structure, created visible barriers between population groups and stimulated the ethnic and racial hom*ogenisation of Czech society. The status of a refugee was determined by Czechoslovak nationality, granted according to substantiated facts (place of residence, domicile to date) and objective criteria in the form of ‘reviewable characteristics’ such as nationality, as stated in the regulation.8 In this case, nationality became the decisive factor, the assessment of which was to be further confirmed by objectively recognisable characteristics such as education or membership of cultural institutions. At that point, anyone other than a Czech, Slovak or Carpatho-Ruthenian was considered an immigrant, an alien in relation to the Czech národní pospolitost, and his or her file was forwarded to the emigration department of the Institute for the Care of Refugees.

The complexity of the refugee situation in Czechoslovakia quickly came to the attention of the ILO. The gravity of the situation was examined by the then newly appointed ILO Director-General, John G. Winant, during the first ever visit of an ILO Director to Czechoslovakia, on 22 and 23 January 1939.9 During his stay in Prague – which was deliberately rather private and took place without publicity due to the sensitivity of the international situation – the possible ways in which the ILO could help Czechoslovakia were discussed. In the materials of the international organisation, which were prepared for Winant before his trip to Prague by Otakar Sulík, the ILO correspondent in Prague at the time, three groups of refugees were identified: firstly, Czechs, Slovaks and Carpatho-Ruthenians; secondly, democratically minded Germans fleeing Nazi Germany; and thirdly, Jews. International assistance was deemed necessary, especially concerning the second and third groups, which, according to Sulík, could not stay in the area defined by the post-Munich borders on a permanent basis. This was made impossible by the economic situation in the country, which was dealing with a lack of available jobs. Simultaneously, there were also fears of creating ‘another minority’ that Nazi Germany’s propaganda could easily exploit as a pretext for possible intervention. Last but not least, Sulík mentioned another, this time nation-centric, argument that the democratic values and loyalty that characterised the refugees could not be taken for granted with respect to their descendants.10 Whatever form the interaction between the ILO and Czecho-Slovakia might have taken, the arrival of the German army and the beginning of the Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia necessarily put an end to all plans, as Germany assumed control of the country’s international relations. In January 1939, when the Czech government was still speaking exclusively for itself, it was trying to demonstrate to its international partners the efforts it was making in a situation whose difficulty few could question at the time. During Winant’s visit to Prague, the Czecho-Slovak government scored some success. Winant praised the generally ‘rational spirit’ of the Minister of Social Affairs, Vladislav Klumpar, when he became convinced that the Minister was acting in the interest of social justice. In his assessment of the situation in authoritarian Czecho-Slovakia, Winant apparently adopted Sulík’s position, and the Czech government of national unity won his sympathy.11 To what extent it was deserved is open to question – for now.

There is no doubt about the rational motives of Czech officials. The Czecho-Slovak state provided care to the migrants after quick deliberation but, in doing so, created conditions that reinforced exclusivist tendencies in the concept of the nation and national belonging. Social support for migrants was part of a broader initiative to maintain the social and economic stability of Czecho-Slovakia, especially to secure routine health care. Following the annexation of the border regions, the country also lost a total of sixty-one hospitals and sanatoriums. Specifically, Bohemia gave up thirty-nine hospitals with 9,154 beds, nominally the total bed capacity of all hospitals and maternity wards in Slovakia in 1937.12 Similar losses were also faced by institutions dealing with the treatment of tuberculosis, which was one of the most dangerous infectious diseases in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. While interwar Czechoslovakia had around 8,000 places available to treat tuberculosis patients, the losses suffered after the Munich Agreement, and later after 16 March 1939, meant that the capacity was reduced by half.13 This significant reduction further exacerbated the critical condition of health care in the country.

The events of autumn 1938 changed the situation fundamentally. The population movement from the annexed territories, which was then estimated to increase the total population of Czecho-Slovakia by more than a million, put further strain on the medical facilities.14 The disrupted network of hospitals required urgent reconstruction, and officials at the Ministry of Health decided in early November 1938 to supplement it according to the 1934 plan, which operated with categories of large, medium and small hospitals.15 Despite the establishment of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the revitalisation of the hospital network was not abandoned in the months that followed, and the ministry envisaged investments of millions of crowns (K) in the upcoming years.16

While the provisioning of the population and the reconstruction of the hospital network was almost exclusively an internal political matter, the search for a satisfactory solution to insurance was not possible without negotiations with foreign countries involved in the division of the territory and population of former Czechoslovakia. What did this mean in practice? In a situation where an insured person applied for disability or old-age insurance benefits, but their insurance company was located in the annexed territory, there was a possibility he would not receive any benefits and could be left entirely without income. A settlement in the field of social insurance was to resolve this situation concerning the individual countries, that is, Czecho-Slovakia (later the Protectorate), Germany, Poland, Hungary and later also Slovakia. Along with the annexation of the Sudetenland, the obligations towards the insured persons residing in the territory, as well as the corresponding assets of the insurance companies, were transferred. In the autumn of 1938, therefore, negotiations began on a financial settlement between the individual states.

While the politicians and experts sat around the negotiating table, it was necessary to ensure the smooth monthly payment of pensions, which for many insured persons were the main means of subsistence.17 The Czechoslovak insurance companies did not respond to the situation in a unified manner, which speaks not only of their unpreparedness but also of the acceptance of the emerging national framework. The ÚSP, the most important institution covering employees, suspended pension payments during the months of October and November 1938 to all pensioners living in the ceded border territories who had thus lost their Czechoslovak citizenship. The insured Czechs usually tried to respond by quickly moving to the interior and requesting payment of their pensions from their insurance companies. Letters from people suddenly finding themselves without social protection often displayed ‘extreme desperation’, as the Czechoslovak insurance companies noted.18 In terms of family incomes, the Munich Agreement represented a real threat to citizens’ livelihoods. The response of the insured persons, however, had other interpretations. According to Czechoslovak officials, the growing insecurity of the insured when pensions were cut off was allegedly indicative of the fact that the level of benefits to date, although criticised in previous years, was not insignificant.19

Maintaining regular payment of pensions was the main concern of the General Pension Institute (Všeobecný penzijní ústav). Compared with the ÚSP, however, it was a smaller institution. Resettled persons had to apply for payment at a branch office in Prague, Brno or Bratislava and provide proof of their new residence by means of a police record. A similar procedure was required for insurance cases such as disability or death, which were linked to benefit claims by insured persons whose last place of employment was in the annexed territory. If an insured event occurred after 1 October 1938, the first day on which the Sudetenland no longer belonged to Czechoslovakia, the last place of employment was situated in the annexed territory and the employee was also resident there, he had to apply to the Reich Insurance Institute in Berlin. If the employee moved permanently to Czecho-Slovakia, he had to apply again to a branch office in Prague, Brno or Bratislava, which could pay benefits in advance in such cases if the insured person’s insurance had ended in the annexed territory.20 For the ordinary population, the situation may not only have been opaque but also created an immediate social and economic threat.

All measures were provisional and could only be given a more permanent form by international agreements. The future course of negotiations was dictated by representatives of the political and expert authorities at meetings on 13 December 1938 in Prague, when the director of the ÚSP, Vladimír Vydra, met with representatives of the Reich Ministry of Labour and the Reich Commissioner for the Sudeten German Territories to discuss the terms of the division of property in connection with sickness insurance.21 The participation of Czechoslovak experts was crucial due to their knowledge of the environment and the insurance system. Despite an obvious tendency of Nazi Germany to increase its influence in domestic affairs in the Bohemian lands beginning with the period of the post-Munich Czechoslovakia and even more so after the establishment of the Protectorate, Czech officials and experts remained essential. They participated in negotiations on large financial transfers and population welfare. The leading figure on the Czech side was Antonín Zelenka, an elite expert on social insurance and an associate of the ILO, who was mentioned earlier as one of those who considered the Czech národní pospolitost as a real form of national identity. From 1927 he worked as an actuary at the ÚSP and in 1935 he became a director at the Pension Institute of Social Insurance Employees. He spent the first six months of 1938 in Venezuela, where the ILO had sent him to build up the country’s social insurance system. His political affiliation was with the Social Democratic Party, of which he was a member until the party was dissolved in 1938. Naturally, he eventually joined the National Labour Party and then the National Partnership.22 Zelenka’s work did not end with the proclamation of the Protectorate, however. Negotiations on social insurance were complex and kept officials busy for months, if not years. While in December 1938, the main objective of the talks was to deal with the changes brought about by the Munich Agreement, in the spring of 1939 the whole situation became more complicated. The declaration of independence by Slovakia, headed by a clero-fascist government, on the eve of the arrival of the German army in the Bohemian lands and the establishment of the Protectorate, slowed down the negotiations. From that time, Bohemia and Moravia had no foreign policy sovereignty and became represented exclusively by Germany. Moreover, the social insurance settlement was intertwined with the initiatives for justice, equality and national unity taken by Czech reformers in the spirit of the Autumn Revolution.

The quest for power and social stabilisation

The establishment of the Protectorate caught Antonín Zelenka at a meeting in Warsaw, but in July he continued his work in Berlin. His commitment was noted by the Reich Foreign Ministry, where the negotiations moved in the summer of 1939. Zelenka found himself there in the company of Josef Schneider, an official of the Reich Ministry of Labour posted to the Nazi Protectorate and later probably the greatest expert on Protectorate social insurance. Schneider was one of the officials at the Reich Protector’s Office who, from the very first days, carefully studied the foundation of the system of social policy in the Bohemian lands in order to master it as well as the experts – among whom Zelenka was one. A few years later, at the end of 1943, this was well demonstrated in the passage of the most comprehensive legislative amendments to accident and pension insurance, which Schneider was instrumental in preparing. In the spring of 1939, Zelenka was an active and essential participant in the reconstruction. He took up his role with great vigour, just as he had devoted himself to wage issues from August 1939 onwards at the head of the newly formed trade union organisation, the National Trade Union Headquarters of Employees (Národní odborová ústředna zaměstnanecká, NOÚZ); he was also very active in the negotiations on social insurance.23

The negotiations on settlement in social insurance were unexpectedly complicated by the declaration of independent Slovakia, the annexation of Carpathian Ruthenia by Hungary and the establishment of the Protectorate. The division of roles in the negotiations reflected the fact that from mid-March onwards the foreign interests of the Protectorate were handled by representatives of the German Reich along with Czech experts since the Bohemian lands had lost their international sovereignty. Thus, Germany always concluded treaties on behalf of the Protectorate, but the participation of Czech politicians and technocrats in the negotiations was desirable and necessary. The Protectorate as a contracting party figured only in the convention with Germany concluded on 26 June 1940 and signed by the Protectorate Minister of Social and Health Administration Vladislav Klumpar. The German–Slovak agreement on the settlement between Slovakia and the Protectorate was reached on 14 March 1940 in Prague. After a fortnight of negotiations in Prague, which were attended by the head of the Reich delegation, Hans Engel, and representatives of Slovakia and Hungary, an agreement was reached, but some of the treaties were not completed until 1943.25

National welfare, especially social insurance, was one of the points on the agenda of multilateral and extensive negotiations on the financial settlement and was handled by a third sub-commission under the chairmanship of Johannes Dormann, a ministerial official at the Reich Ministry of Labour. The negotiations covered a wide range of issues, from government liabilities and assets, banking and insurance matters and transport, to civil servants and other public employees, to issues related to the Wehrmacht and other legal problems. Most interesting for our purposes are the discussions held in the sub-commission on social questions, which covered eight fundamental issues: social insurance, provisions for war victims, unemployment relief, social foundations and funds, factory pension treasuries, state social guarantees and loans (mortgages), housing and the general matters of mortgages relating to the territories of two states. In view of the length of the agreements, I shall concentrate on the issues relating to the settlement between the Protectorate and Slovakia and Germany, respectively, since this is where the most remarkable territorial changes occurred and the largest financial transfers were negotiated.

The negotiation process in all the mentioned areas of public administration took place in the presence of Czech officials, who were commissioned for the negotiations and sent to Berlin by the Reich Protector in early July and August 1939. The agenda included the settlement with Slovakia, which – unlike the Sudetenland annexed to Germany – did not have all the necessary institutions in place. With the exception of sickness insurance, where benefit payments were continuously made through the district treasuries, some insurance institutions, such as the Central Pension Institute and the Slovak Treasury for Agricultural Workers, had to be hastily established in Bratislava during the spring of 1939.26 The aim of the negotiations was to arrange a smooth transition of obligations to Slovak insurance carriers, and the Ministry of Social and Health Administration was to supervise the cooperation of the Protectorate pension institutions. There is no doubt that Slovakia was in a difficult situation. It was taking over responsibility for the social security of its population, setting up new institutions for this purpose, but it lacked adequate financial resources to cover the costs of the social benefits claimed by the insured persons. A rapid financial settlement with the Protectorate was a condition for assuming all its obligations as an independent and sovereign state, which Slovakia became on 14 March 1939. At the August meeting in Berlin, Schneider, Viktor Hofmann, an authorised representative of the Protectorate Ministry of Social and Health Administration, and Zelenka, as a representative of the insurance institutes, sat at the negotiating table. The Czech administration was sufficiently involved in the process of negotiating the separation of social insurance and was not merely a passive participant. Zelenka himself took the initiative and came up with variants of a possible procedure for the division of assets and liabilities.27

The focus was not only on the Czech population. In the spring of 1939, the social security of Reich citizens who were still registered with the former Czechoslovak insurance companies was governed by a preliminary agreement between the Reich Ministry of Labour and the Protectorate Ministry of Social and Health Administration.28 The agreement on the settlement of social insurance arising from the incorporation of the former Czechoslovak territories into the German Reich, signed on 26 June 1940, covered sickness, accident, disability and old-age insurance and regulated the distribution of insured persons and insurance cases according to the insured person’s place of residence.29 The German and Protectorate institutions assumed responsibility for providing benefits and agreed to take into account the insurance period according to the law applicable to the respective insurance carrier. At the same time, the predetermined assets were transferred from the most significant public Protectorate institutions to the Reich insurance companies. These funds were intended to compensate for the increase in the number of insured persons and the liabilities assumed by the Reich institutes at that time.

It would seem that, compared with the situation existing between Germany and the Protectorate, the negotiations with Slovakia should have been easier. There was no hurry to reach a definitive agreement on the fulfilment of obligations towards the insured persons and pension recipients in Slovakia because even without a contractual arrangement, ‘sufficient welfare has been arranged for the time being’, as the representative of the Reich Ministry of Labour stated in May 1939.30 Although the contracting parties were Germany and Slovakia, Reich officials acted primarily as intermediaries between Slovakia and the Protectorate. It was chiefly the Slovaks who pressed for the conclusion of the treaty and the implementation of the signed agreement as soon as possible. The treaty concluded in Berlin in April 1940 provided for an agreement in the fields of sickness, disability and pension insurance (see Table 3.1), where the decisive date to which all claims of Slovakia to the Protectorate related was set to 1 October 1938.31 The setting of this date for all the territories lost by Czechoslovakia, for which the liabilities were calculated, corresponded to the time frame in which the individual national communities and national welfare began to be established and take shape.

The participants in the negotiations assumed that citizens located in a foreign country would decide to return to the country of their nationality and the jurisdiction of the relevant insurance institute. This would certainly have made the situation easier, and for Slovakia, it could additionally have brought a strengthening of its influence in selected economic sectors and private insurance, where so far there had been a significant Czech predominance in terms of labour and investment. The departure of Czech workers from Slovakia was supposed to free up jobs for unemployed Slovaks, and Slovakia was thus supposed to take over the funds that would cover the pensions of the Slovak insured persons.

The opportunity to free up space for Slovak workers and to build up the Slovak capital was part of the country’s national hom*ogenisation. The Slovak government was pressing for industrial plants to comply with its demands, as pointed out in June 1940 by a company in Dubnica nad Váhom, located in Western Slovakia, belonging to the Škoda Works group based in Pilsen, Protectorate. However, it was not possible to meet the government’s demands without disrupting the operations of the arms factory. The management of the plant even anticipated a complete shutdown of operations and the loss of jobs for up to 20,000 Slovaks if the Czech employees had to depart. The company cited a lack of skilled workers among Slovak employees and considered it essential for its survival that Czech workers in technical and administrative positions remain at the plant. Moreover, Czech employees in Dubnica were insured by the Officers’ Pension Institute at the Joint-Stock Company in Pilsen (Škoda Works), which had its advantages (e.g. with regard to the amount of the sum insured) over other insurance companies based in Prague and Bratislava.32 The pension insurance guaranteed relatively high pensions for the factory workers.

The situation in the Dubnica plant documented the spontaneous action of the authorities, motivated on the Slovak side mainly by the wish to achieve national and financial equity. The plant management complained to the German plant safety officer, Paul Kuligowski, about the intention of the Slovak political representation to jeopardise the entitlement of the Škoda plant employees to pension insurance benefits, or at least to give the impression that this entitlement might be called into question. Despite the economic and social risks, the Slovak government refused to grant an exemption to workers who were Protectorate nationals. Referring to the national interest of the newly established Slovak nation-state, the government stressed the readiness of the new Bratislava institute to take over the obligations of the pension institute in Pilsen.33

However, the decision of the Slovak government was not final and the situation in Dubnica became one of the points of discussion during additional consultations on the settlement between the Protectorate and Slovakia held in September 1940. Due to German pressure, the Dubnica plant was eventually granted an exception and the Protectorate citizens were allowed to remain insured with the pension institute in Prague, but not beyond 31 December 1944. After this date, all insurance liabilities would be transferred to the Slovak pension institute. The conclusion of bilateral agreements proved that no acceptable solution to disputed situations could be reached without consultation in a wider circle of politicians and experts. This also applied to the financial settlement regulated by the German–Slovak agreement of 13 April 1940, the supplementation of which was to be renegotiated by special commissions consisting of representatives of the Reich Ministry of Labour, the Reich Protector’s Office, the Protectorate Ministry of Social and Health Administration and the Slovak Ministry of the Interior at a meeting in Prague, first on 25 and 26 September and then in mid-October 1940 with the participation of Hungarian representatives.

However, the talks held in autumn 1940 did not definitively conclude the negotiations on the division of assets and liabilities. The establishment of the independent Slovak state necessitated massive financial transfers and changes in the ownership of material property, which both Czechs and Slovaks pursued with great attention and caution. The private insurance sector was also significantly affected. The Protectorate government found the contractual arrangements between Slovakia and the German Reich to be ‘detrimental’ to the Protectorate’s private insurance business. The Presidency of the Ministerial Council, the collective body of the Czech government in the Protectorate, therefore asked the Reich Protector in February 1941 to pay attention to the whole matter because the consequences of the agreement could, according to the Czech government, have a significant impact on the Protectorate’s economic life. The activities of twenty-one of the twenty-four private insurance companies headquartered in Prague and providing elementary, accident and life insurance in Slovakia were suspended and only the remaining three were granted a licence.34 In addition, two insurance companies had to limit their activities to life, fire and business interruption insurance, which they had not offered previously. The dispute was about money. The total annual premiums of the twenty-four institutes were estimated at 50 million Slovak crowns (K), while the twenty-one companies which had to cease operations alone were estimated at K 42 million. The Slovak–German agreement of November 1940 obliged the excluded insurance companies to hand over their funds to the institutes mentioned in the agreement.35 The largest part of the Slovak premiums was to be received by Tatra, a company based in Bratislava, which, however, was established only in 1940; on 14 March 1939 it could not carry out any insurance activities and thus did not immediately comply with Article 1 of the aforementioned treaty.36

The Protectorate government adopted a similar strategy. The possible financial losses of the Czech insurance industry and economy gave the Czech government the impetus to ask the Reich Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, to use his influence with the Reich government to renew negotiations between the Czechs and Slovaks and to request a revision of the treaty between Germany and Slovakia.40

This was a remarkable moment. The Czechs hoped for the support of Germany, which was to intervene reasonably in the dispute between the two formerly closely linked national communities.41 This was part of a larger pattern, which Holly Case describes in her book about Hungary and Romania.42 Neurath considered the possible ‘questioning’ of the Reich–Slovak treaty to be ‘harmful’ to the Reich and to his own office.43 In Slovakia, the whole affair opened up a discussion about the condition and development of the insurance industry in previous decades, and the situation was to be examined directly in Bratislava by an expert in actuarial science from the Reich Supervisory Office for Private Insurance. The Reich Protector found the trip of the Berlin official directly to Bratislava, as he put it, extremely unpleasant. Neurath perceived the matter as delicate, as he wrote in a letter to the German Minister of Economy in July 1941, and considered the transfer of the Slovak funds originally belonging to the Protectorate institutions to be inevitable.44

The dissatisfaction of Czech officials in the Protectorate concerned the immovable property owned by Czechs on Slovak territory. Specifically, it concerned mortgages relating to this property, which were to be transferred to Slovak providers. However, the Slovak state was reluctant to continue providing the state contribution, as Czechoslovakia had previously done. In October 1940, therefore, the Slovak representative openly raised the question in negotiations with German experts: ‘What would the response be if the Slovak Republic forced property owners to sell their properties in Slovakia?’45 The Reich Ministry of Labour believed that Slovak action in this matter would provoke a negative response on the Czech side and make reaching a settlement considerably more difficult. However, according to the Reich experts, the Slovak government, which insisted on a strict separation between citizens of the Slovak state and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, should have acted in such a way as to at least protect Czech property owners in Slovakia from possible financial losses. The final decision gave the Slovaks the right only to those properties whose owners resided in Slovakia.

The memorandum gave rise to an inquiry by the Reich Ministry of Labour and the Reich Foreign Ministry and to renewed negotiations with the Slovak government with the participation of a representative of the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.47

The strained relations between the Slovak and Czech political representations narrowed the space for possible cooperation. The result was the first-ever separation of Slovak and Bohemian lands and national communities. From this point on, social security for Czechs and Slovaks developed separately and autonomously, albeit under the influence exerted by the existing power constellation in Europe and the participation of both entities within the sphere of interest of Nazi Germany. It was only in September 1942 that the ice was broken. Rather than goodwill, it was due to the circ*mstances of the war and a decision by the German Minister of Economy. From September 1942 onwards, the treatment of Czechs insured in the Protectorate, which had hitherto been carried out mainly in Protectorate facilities, could be carried out in popular Slovak spa resorts to treat rheumatic diseases, namely in Trenčianske Teplice and Piešťany. The possibility of using the Slovak spa facilities was a welcome option from the point of view of insurance companies, but also a relatively expensive service. The fixed treatment flat rates in the sanatoriums were considered ‘quite high’ by the Protectorate insurance companies, but the excellent treatment results achieved by the Slovak facilities allegedly offset these costs.48

Throughout the existence of the Nazi Protectorate, Czech politicians found themselves in a never fully resolved dilemma between finding their own path and cooperation with Nazi Germany. The area of social insurance and social welfare shows that rationally justified Czech activism was necessary for the social stabilisation of the country and contributed significantly to the legitimacy of the Protectorate regime. Czech politicians initiated changes to keep the social security system running while making it more efficient, simpler and cheaper to offer social security services. As in Germany and Slovakia, national welfare formed the basic framework with the fundamental goals of sufficiency and equal redistribution among members of the national community. The increasing dependence of the Czech government on the Reich Protector’s Office, especially evident after Reinhard Heydrich arrived in Prague in September 1941, was reflected in the loss of positions in the leadership of important social and economic institutions, but it never threatened the social security of the ‘Czech nation’.

Structures of social policy

The Reich Protector’s Office observed the activity of the Czechs with interest, as can be seen from the fact that they translated Czech letters into German for internal official use. In the past, the Czechs had regularly written to the Austrian Emperor and the Czechoslovak President, so appealing to the Reich Protector – addressed in various ways – was merely a continuation of an old practice under new circ*mstances. For this reason, the Czechs’ initiation of equalisation of the social and political system, which incidentally gave rise to a number of amending motions during the occupation, was conspicuous and crucial in terms of building the legitimacy of the occupation regime.

The process of the separation of the individual national communities not only took place on the abstract level of identities but also tangibly affected the system of public social policy institutions. In the context of the radicalisation of the national communities around 1938, authoritarian welfare, developing in parallel in its Czech and German forms, made its way into the public social and health care sectors. After the establishment of the Protectorate, new organisations and state political institutions began to emerge, which underlined the segregationist features of public administration in the Bohemian lands. The following section outlines the structure of institutions active in the field of social and health administration.

Central public authorities

Public administration in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia developed in a dynamic fashion. Throughout this period, the Czech authorities remained the basis for the implementation of social reforms. Their bureaucratic structures and expertise were used by German officials appointed to leading positions in important Protectorate bodies and by the newly emerging institutions of the German (occupation) administration. During the reconstruction, a Czech–German dialogue was conducted, which, although asymmetrical in power, allowed and assumed the cooperation of the Czech representatives. Already in late March and early April 1939, officials of the German ministries of Justice, Finance, Food and Agriculture and Economy set out on a mission to the Bohemian lands to set up expert commissions at the various Protectorate ministries. This was the first step in building the German system of control and government that gave shape to the administrative system in the early years of the Protectorate.51 Between 1941 and 1942, the structure of ministries and other institutions was transformed as a result of Heydrich’s administrative reforms. The Nazis strengthened their position by reducing their own institutions and by placing German officials in Czech public institutions, starting with district and provincial offices. The aim was to save German staff and to make the whole system more efficient and flexible.52 The administrative reform, which aimed to prepare the Protectorate for deeper integration into the Reich, minimised the room for creative work on the part of the Czech bureaucratic structures and significantly reduced the efficiency of the Protectorate government. Thus, the reconstruction phase corresponded with the 1939–42 period, during which the Protectorate governments produced 200 or more governmental regulations per year, of which more than 30 per cent were related to financial, tax, customs and social insurance issues.53

The Protectorate government’s performance was in no small measure the work of officials at the Ministry of Social and Health Administration. From December 1938, this department was headed by Vladislav Klumpar, whose programme statement of 3 February 1939 emphasised dealing with the changes and promoting a more economical and efficient system of social and health administration.54 In January 1939, the organisational structure of the ministry was reduced from the original twelve to seven departments, which were mainly concerned with general social policy, social insurance, care for the health and development of the nation, including the care of youth and combating communicable diseases, and also medicine, veterinary medicine and pharmacy.55 However, the journey from drafting a piece of legislation prepared by Czech officials to its enactment was not straightforward. The primary condition was to obtain the approval of the Reich Protector, or rather the expert circles concentrated in his Office. That is why the Czech government, when discussing individual legislative proposals, always conditioned the final step, that is, asked for the signature of the Protectorate President, by stating something to the effect of ‘if there are no objections from the Reich Protector’s Office’.

The body which reviewed the outputs of the Protectorate ministries and forwarded them to the Reich Protector for approval, without which the regulations could not be put into effect, were the working groups and departments of the Reich Protector’s Office, modelled on the Reich Ministry of the Interior.56 The most important body in the context of social policy was ‘Group X’, which dealt with labour and social affairs and was later subsumed under ‘Department II’. Under the leadership of Wilhelm Dennler, a trained lawyer and senior government counsel, the department dealt with all matters relating to the deployment of labour, wage policy, unemployment assistance, social insurance, supply, housing and settlement policy, each of which was to be discussed directly with the corresponding Protectorate ministry.57 The individual departments were only completed in late 1939 and early 1940, and German officials later carried out their duties at two institutions at the same time. Most often, they simultaneously worked for the Ministry of Economy and Labour (MHP) and the German State Ministry, which were created in the Protectorate – alongside the existing ministerial bodies – in 1942 and 1943, respectively. The most important person in this official body was Josef Schneider, a graduate in philosophy, theology and law, who joined the Reich Protector’s Office in May 1939 as an officer for social insurance affairs. From there he worked his way up to head of ‘Section IV’, which dealt specifically with social insurance issues at the MHP.

The first and second phases of building up authoritarian welfare through legislative reform differed. While at the beginning the occupation structures could not feasibly cope without Czech expertise, later it was German officials who were able to replace Czech experts in this role. As we shall see in the following chapters, the work of Schneider is an excellent example. The most significant difference existed in the preparatory legislative work, which prior to January 1942 was carried out by Czech officials, while Reich experts only reviewed and controlled the preparation of government regulations. After the merger of the occupation and Protectorate administrations in January 1942, German officials were responsible for drafting the individual regulations. For instance, the extensive legislative amendments to pension and accident insurance adopted at the end of 1943 were subject to a commentary procedure that involved the ministries and individual expert and interest institutions.58 The proposals were commented on by the heads of the Reichsgaus, administrative divisions of Nazi Germany, who were to share their experience with implementing a similar law, as well as by a number of Protectorate-based authorities. Critical in this matter was the attitude of the President of the Central Union of Industry, Bernard Adolf, one of the most influential figures in the occupation structures in Nazi Protectorate. In early January 1944, he complained in a very critical and almost ironic tone to the Minister of Economy and Labour, Walter Bertsch, that he had not been given enough time to comment on the latest versions of the draft government regulations No. 1/1944 and No. 2/1944. Adolf’s main criticism was that both of the new regulations brought far-reaching improvements to the population of Bohemia and Moravia in terms of their entitlements vis-à-vis social insurance companies. However, at the same time, they represented a not insignificant burden on the economy and especially on industry, whose interests Adolf consistently defended.

The reconstruction phase allowed the Reich officials, often coming from the Reich Ministry of Labour or the Reich insurance companies, to become familiar with the Czech environment, for which the Czech experts provided the necessary time and space. Compared with the Reich officials, ethnic Germans from the Bohemian lands, who knew the region and its people and often had at least cursory knowledge of the Czech language, had an advantage. In this respect, Bohemian and Moravian Germans remained an indispensable asset, even though they were still underrepresented compared with Reich experts and officials. In persons such as Karl Hermann Frank, the State Secretary and later German State Minister for Bohemia and Moravia, they had a more significant presence in the administration of the Protectorate than the local Germans had in the Sudetenland, where Reich officials arrived better equipped with knowledge of Reich law, which was implemented there due to the annexation of the territory to Germany.59

The central bodies of the public administration included the National Partnership. It replaced the abolished representative bodies of former Czechoslovakia but also represented a national welfare project for the ‘Czech nation’. It had a very dubious expert background, as it actively brought together enthusiastic reform activists of various professions rather than experienced professionals, who were often already involved elsewhere. This staff situation of the National Partnership corresponded to its long unclear position in relation to the Protectorate government, as described earlier. Nevertheless, the National Partnership had its own social department, which was intended to demonstrate its seriousness and the degree of responsibility that it assumed as the only central political institution representing the ‘Czech nation’. The social department dealt with social and housing security, migrant affairs, social insurance and leisure activities. It also organised its own ‘Joy of Life’ project, modelled on the Reich’s Kraft durch Freude, which organised recreational stays for Czech workers and was one of its most prominent activities.60

Social insurance companies

Insurance companies were the central institutions of the public social policy system. In the interwar period, they amassed enormous wealth, and for this reason they became a central object of interest for Nazi officials. Before 1938 there were dozens of insurance institutions in the Bohemian lands, among the most important of which were the ÚSP for workers’ insurance, the General Pension Institute for the insurance of private employees, the fraternal treasuries for miners’ insurance and the Accident Insurance Company for accident insurance. After the Munich Agreement and later after the declaration of the Protectorate, the Czechs emphasised the reconstructionist ethos in the matter of their organisation. The aim was to simplify the existing system of social insurance and to substantially increase the political influence on their inner workings and organisation.61 Further politicisation occurred in 1940, now with the approval of the Reich Protector, and strengthened the powers of the leading officials ‘in the interests of a more uniform and efficient implementation of sickness insurance’.62

The unification and reduction in the autonomy of the insurance companies, undertaken and initiated by the Czech authorities, were accompanied by heated debates in which two opposing camps crystallised. One group saw the unification process as a straightforward way to simplify the institutional network, while the other group, which included the well-known Zlín-based industrialist Jan Antonín Baťa, saw such efforts as merely making up for deficits and covering up the tracks of the mismanagement of failed insurance companies.63 Consensus existed only about the acceptability of consolidation if several institutes operated in a single district. By the end of 1939, the plans took concrete form. While initially there had existed three unions, the entire sector was now brought together under the umbrella of the Central Union of Sickness Insurance Companies. Interestingly, it was a return to the situation that existed in the Bohemian lands before 1918. According to contemporary observers, this was a ‘unanimous, voluntary and spontaneous resolution of the members of the participating unions’, which was intended to simplify administration and deliberately eliminate competition.64

This was in line with the national defensive strategy in the spirit of the Autumn Revolution. However, the reform also brought the Czech system much closer to the Reich insurance scheme, and Czech officials were well aware of it. The Protectorate social insurance institutions did not escape the introduction of the leadership principle, that is, a strictly hierarchical structure modelled on the Nazi organisation. Although the board of directors was made up of the directors of the individual sections (the insurance companies had several such directors), one of them was given privileged powers under the new system. Therefore, it is not surprising that this position became a strategic target for the Nazis to control the Protectorate’s insurance industry.

Nationality remained a permanent organising and systemic principle behind all measures that were successively adopted in the Protectorate. The German officials in the Protectorate’s insurance companies were tasked with streamlining their existing management of the institutions and defending the interests of German insured persons in a territory with a predominantly Czech population. To perform their jobs ‘according to their previous experience and qualifications and to gain respect based on [the officials’] knowledge and abilities in the Czech environment’ was part of the contract signed by German employees assigned to clerical positions at the General Pension Institute.67 At the end of 1939, the General Pension Institute served 250,000 insured persons, of whom only 17,000 were Germans. In January of the following year, a new organisation of the institute’s offices came into force. While a single office of the General Pension Institute was set up for Bohemia in Prague, the office in Moravia was divided into two departments – Czech and German. The German department took care of insured persons of German nationality, while the Czech department handled insured persons of Czech and other nationalities. Administratively, the two departments were separate units and shared only the administrative bodies.68 On 22 January 1940, the General Pension Institute employed thirteen German officials.69 The previously increasing number of German officials began to decline in 1942 when the ‘unneeded’ officials were drafted to serve at the war front. In March 1944, only sixteen of the 144 sickness insurance companies in the Protectorate had German officials among their staff.70

Indigent and voluntary care bodies

The formation of a solidarity community was one of the central promises of the Autumn Revolution. The emphasis on concentrating all technocratic and political forces on internal political matters was intended to provide social security for members of the ‘Czech nation’. Social welfare measures, not conditional on employment or insurance, were primarily intended to fulfil this purpose, though less generously and comprehensively than insurance companies. The importance of charitable and voluntary organisations grew especially during the Great Depression, as the care of the unemployed depended on them.71 After the Munich Agreement and during the Nazi occupation, charity continued to contribute to the care of Czechs in need, but its structure changed significantly. The establishment of the National Relief Fund (Základ národní pomoci) in December 1938 marked the beginning of systematic public social care for the ethnically and racially hom*ogenised ‘Czech nation’, which never ceased functioning during the occupation, although some of its institutional components changed.72 The National Relief Fund, established based on the initiative of the right-wing National Unity Party in power after the Munich crisis, provided support for socially needy Czechs using funds raised mainly through public collections and donations. It was the first exclusively Czech association established in the context of the post-Munich ethos of building up the národní pospolitost.

The National Relief Fund was followed by the National Aid (Národní pomoc) association, reiterating the nationally segregated principle of social care organisation in the Nazi Protectorate. There was no legal entitlement to receive support from the National Aid association. The range of services offered was broad and included catering for children and deprived adults, material support directed to municipalities with socially deprived families, and the organisation of events called ‘national hospitality’ to enable deprived children from the cities to spend their holidays in the countryside. The common thread in all these projects was the idea of improving the eating habits and diet of the Czech population and promoting the traditional family model.73 From the beginning, National Aid and its later institutional successor, Social Aid (Sociální pomoc), appeared to be a clear competitor to existing voluntary public welfare organisations. Their function was not intended to be merely complementary, as they were meant to improve the Czech people’s access to public social, medical and counselling support.

The fragmentation of voluntary institutions and charities was, according to Czech officials, detrimental. There were approximately 90,000 different associations operating in the area of social welfare at the beginning of 1939, and many felt that this was not in keeping with what officials called ‘securing the future of the nation’. This, they argued, could only be secured by ‘unifying forces’.74 The reorganisation of public indigent care was a protracted process that did not prove entirely successful in the end. Centralisation was to incorporate the historically established organisations under the so-called National Social and Health Care Centre (Národní ústředí sociální a zdravotní péče). The National Centre was established in the summer of 1939 as an umbrella organisation for all societies and associations of societies active in the area of social and health care. The reasons for its creation were summed up by Minister Vladislav Klumpar in the motto ‘Efficiency, economy, division of labour and a common plan’, as he emphasised at the Natitonal Centre’s constituent meeting on 24 August 1939.75 The National Centre was to control the activities and management of all the associations it represented. Personnel links with the National Partnership ensured close cooperation between the entities. Hynek Pelc, a university professor and physician, became chairman of the Centre, assisted by Alois Zelenka, a physician for the health section, and Josef Talacko, a statistician and demographer for the social affairs section.76 In its organisational work, the National Centre relied on the district aid committees established in each judicial district, which coordinated the activities of National Aid, District Youth Welfare, the Charity and the League Against Tuberculosis at this administrative level. The enormous financial burden on the district aid committees consisted mainly in catering events. In December 1939, a total of 127,184 children were enrolled in the catering programme in 1,465 catering stations in Bohemia alone. The estimated costs were over K 5 million. However, this increased to more than K 11 million in 1941, out of K 39 million paid in total, also including cash grants, clothing, counselling centres, care for families and in institutions, social health and holiday care.77

The National Centre created a centralised but intricate and organisationally inflexible institution. Contemporary observers referred to it as a ‘behemoth’ incapable of functioning efficiently. Its existence was short-lived, and it essentially ceased to exist in 1942, in parallel with the establishment of Social Aid. The later simplification of social care meant there would no longer be strict centralisation of the various institutions but a ‘path of voluntary agreement’. In practice, this meant above all the division of tasks and mutual assistance among the individual organisations, as was to be demonstrated by the later cooperation of Social Aid with other institutions.78 In January 1943, negotiations were underway on the cooperation of the organisations providing voluntary youth care with Social Aid, then a new organisational entity in social and health care.79 Social Aid began operating on 30 October 1942 and, in terms of its scope of activities, presented nothing fundamentally new but rather was another attempt to consolidate public social welfare institutions.

Social Aid recalled a linguistic shift from the national to social and labour communities after Heydrich’s assassination and the Soviet advances in the war. By the time of its creation, there had already been a significant move away from social policy discussed in national terms. A greater emphasis was put on solidarity within communities. This was also reflected in the spending of funds available to the Social Aid organisation. It supported food, clothing and the running of children’s shelters for working mothers, provided contributions for Christmas gifts for children in need, and cooperated with other institutions, particularly those active in combating tuberculosis. Although Social Aid took over many of the activities of its predecessor (National Aid), it was significantly different in terms of its position in the structure of public social welfare institutions. Social Aid activities were supervised by the Minister of Popular Education, Emanuel Moravec, a former Czechoslovak legionnaire and a central figure in Czech collaboration with the Nazis.80

Social Aid functioned largely on the principle of solidarity among the Czech population. It was literally ‘the torchbearer for the idea of mutual aid to our fellow compatriots’, as Prague Mayor Alois Říha described it in November 1944.81 At that time, the third year of its operation – or what was called the ‘Third Work of Social Aid’ – was already beginning. To finance itself, it used contributions from the Czech people for various projects in the Protectorate, but also in the Reich, which undermined its popularity. This was reflected in the level of contributions made at collection points, which, at least initially, did not reach the necessary level according to Czech authorities. Dissatisfaction with the lack of commitment on the part of the Czechs to the nation’s collective work and the building of the New Europe prompted the Protectorate Ministry of Labour and Economy to adopt a measure in December 1942 that made ‘voluntary’ contributions compulsory. People thus found themselves in a situation where a public manifestation of support for Social Aid by dropping a coin into a moneybox became obligatory. Less demonstrative, but harder to circumvent, was the 1943 regulation by which the ministry ordered the automatic deduction of the Social Aid contribution from the insured person’s benefits. A client of an insurance company could stop this only by a written letter of withdrawal, which he would have to send to his insurance provider.82 However, after the events of 1942 – the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent repressions – people most likely preferred not to run the risk of having to challenge the authorities in this manner. In the Protectorate, various forms of deductions, taxes or, on the contrary, credits were combined. Contributions to the Winter Relief of the German People (Winterhilfswerk), the NSV, the National Relief Fund and the National Aid association could at least be deducted from the pension, general and special income taxes.83 In the case of the National Relief Fund, this was a possibility from the very beginning, that is, from December 1938.84

The accumulated funds were used to assess the degree of the ‘Czech nation’s’ commitment to the Nazi’s New Europe. If the published amounts resulting from the collections among the Czech people are to be believed, this was indeed an impressive feat: in 1943, collections increased by 40 per cent, from over K 125 million to K 208 million compared with the previous year.85 In addition to their propaganda value, public collections were an important financial source for public social care. Social Aid was the sole organiser of the public collections, on the proceeds of which the activities of other social organisations were also largely dependent.

Workers’ care

The increase in industrial and agricultural production in Germany during the war relied heavily on workers’ performance. The same was true of Czech workers, who – like their German counterparts – were hard hit by the Great Depression in the 1930s. This made them all the more susceptible to vocal propaganda and the promises of social improvement made by Czech political elites at the time of the Autumn Revolution. Czech workers’ welfare was a means by which the Protectorate authorities could effectively communicate the principles of authoritarian welfare: nation, labour and social equality. In the words of Václav Stočes, chairman of the workers’ National Trade Union Centre, spoken in early 1941: ‘The purpose of today’s social policy is to bring the toiling man back into the Czech národní pospolitost.’86 On this path, the workers were to be accompanied by united Czech trade unions, whose main task was the all-round care of Czech workers.

Union membership was to become synonymous with the fulfilment of ‘national duty’ for workers. Czech trade union leaders called for ‘everyone to join hands in common work and contribute his share to the fulfilment of the social duty’.87 The ambitions of the trade unionists were close to the goals set by the National Partnership. Instead of strengthening the overall influence of the Protectorate institutions, rivalries were being created among the Czechs. This tension weakened the position of the trade unions and contributed to their later Gleichschaltung (forced standardization).

This time the process of unification was to be driven by the trade unions themselves. According to Zelenka, this was neither an imposed nor an unwanted procedure, but an appropriate step towards the realisation of good working of the trade unions and the effective representation of Czech workers’ interests. Zelenka’s enthusiasm was not so naive as it may seem to us today. Only later did it become clear that the role of the unions in wage issues was only symbolic, and the reconstruction of the state and society was not a process in which only the Czechs would have a say.

The Trade Union Centre took care of the social and cultural provisioning of Czech workers through several projects, for instance, recreational and catering events, cultural programmes and vocational courses for workers (then known as ‘labour schools’). In the late Protectorate, its focus was dominated by legal advice to Czech workers on matters of employment contracts, working conditions and social insurance. Throughout the Protectorate era, it also published its own magazines – Práce a hospodářství (Work and economy) for workers in the Protectorate, Český dělník (Czech worker) for Czechs deployed for work in Germany, Žena v povolání (Woman at work) for Czech women workers – and a number of professional newspapers.

The defence of the interests of Czech women and men associated in the Trade Union Headquarters of Employees was to become the primary task of the Czech trade unions. While the women trade unionists were enthusiastic about it and received strong support from German officials, the Czech men trade unionists observed the women’s enthusiasm and commitment with something akin to embarrassment. As will be explained further in Chapter Four, workers’ welfare and health remained a central concern even under the conditions of war and occupation.

Czechs tended to accommodate demands from the Germans, but they did not remain passive when it came to representing the interests of Czech workers. The NOÚZ was relatively successful in its negotiations with the labour offices, which were the principal authorities responsible for the placement of Czech workers in jobs in the Protectorate and in Germany. As can be seen from the report of the regional secretariat of the NOÚZ in Klatovy, which was then under the jurisdiction of the labour office for Klatovy, Strakonice and Pilsen (south-western Bohemia), trade unionists still noted an ‘accommodative attitude’ to matters relating to wage policy and morale and the granting of recruitment benefits on the part of the office even as late as March 1945.95 The trade unionists in Hradec Králové (eastern Bohemia) had a similar experience. In February 1945, they reported to Prague a total of ten interventions in matters concerning special family allowances in recruitment, relocation of employees, the establishment of a factory committee and so forth, and confirmed the office’s ‘generally favourable response’.96 There is no doubt that the NOÚZ was becoming more similar to its German counterpart, the DAF.

Reich social policy institutions

Germans living in the Protectorate formed the clientele of the Reich’s social policy and welfare institutions. However, in contrast to the Czech population, German welfare had no institutional background at the time of the Protectorate’s establishment. The institutions providing social and health care for Reich citizens were essentially built from the ground up in the first months of the Protectorate’s existence. German clients were at a significant disadvantage compared to those who belonged to the Protectorate (Czech) authorities, which relied on the former Czechoslovak institutions. Building an organisational structure meant creating a dense network of health and educational institutions in order to provide equal social rights to Germans living in the German Reich and the Protectorate. In 1940–1, for instance, institutions for training in various branches of medical practice began to operate: in 1940, the German Midwives School and the German School for Medical and Technical Assistants, and in 1941 the German Nursing School, opened their doors to their first students.97 As demonstrated by the protracted settlement process between the Slovak and Protectorate insurance companies, creating new institutions was not a transparent and straightforward process. This was ultimately one of the reasons why no German insurance companies were established in the Protectorate to exclusively serve the German population. The authorities argued against the principle of autonomy of the Protectorate administration granted by the decree of 16 March 1939 and the difficulties in creating such institutions.98 The Czech insurance companies served as a transfer conduit for payments between the Reich insurance companies and health care providers, which is why German influence was supposed to be strong within the Protectorate insurance companies.99 The only exception was the private Reich insurance companies, which could only do business in the Protectorate with a special permit.100

The highest-ranking office of Reich social and health care in the Protectorate was the Chief Reich Provisioning Department at the Reich Protector’s Office. This department, whose remit covered the entire territory of the Protectorate, supervised the activities of the Reich Provisioning Department at the Oberlandrat in Prague, which provided for the care of war victims and survivors from the ranks of ethnic Germans. As the main contact point for dealing with the Ministry of Social and Health Administration and other Czech authorities, it also administered aid and allowances for ethnic Germans, funds from foundations and other funds and dealt with all matters relating to payments and settlements made through the autonomous authorities. At the same time, it exercised financial supervision over specific departments of the Ministry of Social and Health Administration.101 Yet the institutional background of care for Czechs and Germans remained unequal.

The institution that balanced the discrepancy between social and health protection for Czechs and Germans was the German Medical Chamber for the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The organisational burden rested largely on its shoulders. Its main tasks were to represent the Reich medical corporations and to provide medical treatment for insured persons who were formally clients of the Reich insurance companies.102 Its powers were quite broad. The chamber was established by decree of the Reich Minister of the Interior on 24 September 1940, at the same time as the applicability of the Reich Medical Code was extended to German nationals living in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.103 According to the Reich Minister for Labour, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was not a foreign country within the meaning of the Reich Insurance Code, even though a border did exist between the Protectorate and Germany during the occupation, the crossing of which required a passport.

Belonging to the Volksgemeinschaft went hand in hand with the appeal for social egalitarianism. The Reich insurance companies were required to provide all benefits to their clients in the Protectorate without restrictions and to fulfil the principle of equal distribution of social rights among the Volksgemeinchaft members. The German Medical Chamber was the organisation that was to arrange for the services of the Reich insurance companies to the German insured in the Protectorate. It was the key institution responsible for billing the treatments provided, ultimately for Reich citizens in the Protectorate and Protectorate workers deployed for work in the Altreich – pre-war German territory. The German Medical Chamber was an exemplary product of the process of building public Reich social and health structures in the occupied country. However, it was far from the only such organisation. The Hitler Youth and the NSV extended their reach to the Protectorate, and the DAF attempted a similar expansion.104

The NSV was a mass organisation of the German nation which had up to 17 million members in Germany in 1943. It was rightly one of the best-known public institutions and was said to be the most popular organisation in Nazi Germany.105 The NSV was dedicated to public social care, fulfilling essentially the same role as the National Social and Health Care Centre in the Bohemian lands. The NSV organised health clinics, programmes such as Winter Relief to which Germans contributed through public collections, and ‘Mother and Child’ family care events, and it was also substantially involved in the Kinderlandverschickung project, through which the authorities placed women with children, or children aged between six and fourteen, from the Ruhr region and other German industrial regions targeted by Allied bombing raids, in families or shelters situated in safer areas.106

In April 1940, the Reich Protector authorised the NSV to extend its operations to the Bohemian lands.107 The establishment of social welfare for Germans in Bohemia and Moravia had been discussed since the spring of 1939, and there was no consensus on the scope of NSV activities in the Protectorate.108 The lengthy process of constructing of the NSV made the situation significantly different from that in the Reich. While in Germany, the NSV was gaining more and more responsibilities in social welfare, in the Protectorate, some voices advocated social welfare as belonging exclusively to the municipal administration. In areas with a predominantly German population (not only in German-run cities), there were also supposedly ‘adequate numbers’ of mayors and other officials who were willing and able to assume social welfare responsibilities with regard to ethnic Germans.109 This view did not take hold, but it did point to the continuing struggles over political power between Bohemian-Moravian and Reich Germans in the Protectorate.

Initially, the activities of the NSV concerned only ethnic Germans of non-Reich citizenship. This practice may have been inspired by an effort to motivate Bohemian and Moravian Germans to apply for Reich citizenship, allowing them to apply for NSV services. Later that year, however, the powers of the NSV were expanded when, from December 1940, it began to provide care to all ethnic Germans in the Protectorate and later even assume decision-making responsibilities regarding the granting and payment of social benefits.110

Nazi social policy would not have been what it was without the DAF. In September 1940, however, Reich Protector Konstantin von Neurath rejected the possibility of allowing direct activities by the DAF in the Protectorate without stating his reasons.111 The strained relations between the State Secretary and later German State Minister Karl Hermann Frank and the head of the DAF, Robert Ley, pointed to another level of dispute between Bohemian-Moravian and Reich Germans over power and influence in the Protectorate. The escalation of the conflict between Frank and Ley continued and the highest Reich authorities had to intervene even as late as the spring of 1945.112 German workers in the Protectorate were not, however, without representation. The Liaison Office between the Czech Trade Union Centre and the office of the Reich Protector, established in March 1941, was to supervise the Czech trade unions and, at the same time, represent the DAF in the Bohemian lands. The position of the Liaison Office changed in 1944 when it began to be financed by the German State Ministry led by Frank.113 This happened at a time when a number of jurisdictional disputes were taking place concerning industrial enterprises crucial to the war industry. The need for a clearer delineation of competencies between the Liaison Office and the Central Union of Industry for Bohemia and Moravia, which brought together all industrial enterprises in Bohemia and Moravia and defended the rights of employers, essentially prevented Ley from having any influence over the Protectorate’s enterprises.114

The DAF assumed responsibility solely for the welfare of German workers in plants with German managers and exclusively German employees. Any other enterprise was considered Czech and lay outside Ley’s jurisdiction. However, if at least five Germans worked in this ‘Czech’ enterprise, the interests of German workers and other employees were represented by a ‘spokesman for the Germans’, who reported to the local leader of the DAF.115 Their appointment was supposed to be in the power of the DAF, but in the Protectorate, they were appointed by the Reich Protector, which only further exacerbated the dispute between Ley and Frank’s administration.116

For this purpose, the institute operated a hospital with three wards and thirty-seven beds, as well as a medical dormitory with apartments and classrooms for thirty physicians. The complex, initially established in 1932 for the treatment of tuberculosis patients, was transferred to the state administration after the Second World War and was used to treat invalids and later musculoskeletal disorders after operations and injuries (which it still serves today).

Instruments of social protection

The extent to which it was possible to learn from Nazi Germany and adopt tried and proven practices would become apparent in the coming months.

In interwar Czechoslovakia, this idea was also discussed but failed to be implemented; on the contrary, the corporativist structure of social insurance was strengthened. The regime without a parliament and democratic institutions that emerged after the Munich crisis and during the Nazi occupation changed the circ*mstances profoundly. Czech officials worked intensively on the consolidation process. The results would eventually be beneficial for the occupation officials as well. The consolidation and reorganisation of the insurance and social insurance structure led to a cheapening and simplification of the system – precisely what Oldřich Suchý had called for – which facilitated the control and supervision of the Czech administration.

The second feature was the preferential treatment of low-income persons and the emphasis on social equality. The solidarity character of the národní pospolitost envisaged a higher degree of redistribution, which was to be manifested by workers’ participation in this nationwide work. The division of labour was to lead to a fair distribution of benefits. Solidarity was most clearly expressed in the various public collections, which – in addition to the actual collection of supplies and money – were intended to be inclusive and to engage the population in the projects of the Czech national government. Although this class-based redistribution may have been satisfying for the people in need, the system remained fundamentally racially discriminatory, as I explore in the next section.

The provision of social welfare depended on individuals’ economic and social situation. It was linked to residence in their home municipality and, as was also the case earlier, carried out by the municipality itself using its own financial resources on the basis of the ‘right of domicile’. According to German observers, the Protectorate’s social welfare arrangements had the schematic characteristics of purely economic aid and allegedly lacked versatility and targeted use.123 The occupation authorities were interested in it because – until an institutional network to provide reliable services to Reich citizens could be built up – not only Czechs but also Germans living in the Protectorate belonged to it. It was not until 1 April 1940 that the care of Reich citizens in need passed to the Oberlandrats – the lowest administrative offices of the Nazi occupation administration.124 From then on, the Protectorate’s social welfare served exclusively as a platform for provisioning the Czechs. However, efforts continued to steer the development of the Protectorate’s institutions in the Reich’s direction, which was intended to shine some light on their complex structure and make social care more efficient. The creation of umbrella organisations also accompanied this process.

In 1941, Czech officials proposed an adjustment that brought the Protectorate’s social welfare system closer to the Reich’s. Its primary aim was to decouple indigent welfare from the right of domicile.125 In contrast to the Bohemian lands, in Germany foreigners were not exempted from indigent welfare, but it was limited in scope. In the autumn of 1941, the Protectorate also adopted this scheme.126 District authorities decided to extend indigent care to foreigners, which consisted of providing needy individuals with subsistence, especially shelter, food, clothing, medical treatment and assistance in case of illness. In this case, however, the Protectorate quasi-state paid for the indigent care instead of the municipalities.127 The municipalities were exempted from caring for the German population with reference to the Reich’s public welfare, but the Protectorate made financial contributions to Germany for its implementation.128

Table 3.2 reflects the new regulation of indigent care benefits. In the case of a ‘family in need’, allowances were calculated for each member of the household on the basis of the categories listed. In the case of a family consisting of two adults and three children under the age of sixteen residing in a category A locality, the father received K 250, the mother K 125 and each child K 75, with a 20 per cent rent allowance calculated on the total sum of K 600. The family thus received K 720 per month.129 Despite the constant rise in prices (from 1939 to 1942, the average cost of living index for a working-class family in the Protectorate rose by 38 per cent), initially it was a not insignificant contribution. If basic groceries cost about K 160 per month, and the monthly rent for a one-room apartment in Prague amounted to K 275 per month, the family may still have had money for clothing and other expenses.130

However, inflation and continuously rising prices showed that benefits were insufficient by the end of January 1942.131 Moreover, as the archival sources document, the increase in indigent care rates for the Czech and German populations had quite different dynamics. They developed separately and more favourably for the Germans. While there were repeated increases in benefits for Germans, Czechs did not see any further improvement during the war. Frank did not consider further reform of the indigent care system to be essential during the course of the war and, in 1943, postponed it until ‘later’.132 Unfortunately, not much is known about its intended form, but it was discussed as potentially comprehensive amendment.

Welfare was not a tool exclusively for emergency cases. It encompassed a broad agenda of social and health services aimed at improving the health and habits of the population. During the occupation, one of its most important segments was food and clothing assistance and individual supportive care. The main vehicle for these was the Provincial Youth Welfare organisation, together with its district offices, which later shared its responsibilities with Social Aid. The Provincial Youth Welfare was an established institution with an excellent reputation whose knowledge of the local environment was useful in assessing the public reputation of individual applicants for aid. In parallel, Social Aid kept records of all supported families in what was known as the ‘cadastre of supported families’, which was intended to concentrate data on all public care and support granted to particular families.133

The targeted promotion and advertising of social welfare for the needy served a legitimising function for the regime. Insurance companies were in a more difficult position given the complexity of social insurance issues. They were not visible on the street, and social insurance was only written about in the increasingly unpopular daily press. Nevertheless, social insurance was the main instrument of social protection throughout the Nazi occupation. Its continuity from interwar Czechoslovakia to the post-Munich republic and the Protectorate was also crucial in rebuilding the Czechoslovak state after the Second World War. It did not need to be revived from a state of clinical death, as it had been fully functioning throughout the Nazi occupation.

The obligation to participate in social insurance resulted from any employment, regardless of the employee’s nationality or employer. In the Protectorate, as previously in liberal democratic Czechoslovakia, sickness, pregnancy, childbirth, the puerperium, breastfeeding and death remained legal grounds for receiving sickness insurance benefits. In the case of disability and old-age insurance, entitlement arose in the event of disability, the attainment of the retirement age of sixty-five years for men and sixty for women, and the death or marriage of the insured woman. The insurance covered persons who were engaged in state service or employment as their primary occupation. According to the amount of earnings, each insured employee was classified in a wage bracket from which the relevant sickness, disability or old-age benefits to which the person was entitled were calculated. For disability, old-age, widows’, widowers’ and orphans’ pensions, as well as the ‘outfitting allowance’, a benefit for insured women upon marriage, there was a waiting period for payment of the benefit. This elemental principle on which social insurance operated did not change during the occupation.

These words, which appeared in the 1940 guidelines on the promotion of social insurance among the Czech population, emphasised the causal link between public social insurance and fitness for work, which was now more than ever in the interests of the national economy, and hence of the Reich’s economy.

Nazi officials saw their own interests in the reform. Their main purpose was to map the landscape, get to know the mechanisms and institutions of social policy, ensure their proper control and smooth running, and adapt their operation to German needs where necessary. This practical aim was grounded in concern about hasty interventions in such a complex system as social insurance and about threats to the functionality of social welfare having undesirable effects on the health and performance of workers. In terms of social insurance, one can identify the moments when the principle of national segregation proved unworkable. Nevertheless, the systemic level of social insurance was never an arena where the interests of individual national communities were publicly played out, which was an advantage for the occupation authorities. Propaganda understandably did not draw attention to the organisational deficiency of German welfare. Apart from the financial and personnel costs, the irreplaceable function of social insurance in maintaining the social stability of the Protectorate society was another reason to concentrate on reforming the existing instruments of social protection.

Employment-based sickness insurance, followed by pensioners’ sickness insurance and sickness insurance for the relatives of war victims, were of decisive importance. In practice, the establishment of this imaginary insurance hierarchy meant that if a person insured by the ÚSP entered into employment in the German Reich, he became at that moment a compulsorily insured person in the Reich under its regulations. Of course, the system also worked the other way around, that is, the insurance of a Reich worker employed in the Protectorate was taken over by a Protectorate insurance company. Insurance for the survivors of war victims was only possible if the person concerned was not insured in employment and did not receive a pension. However, these were primarily pensioners of German nationality.135

Social policy as an instrument of exclusion

The ideology of the národní pospolitost thoroughly intertwined social policy with the construction of a new society with authoritarian features. The excluded people were left at the mercy of a politically and socially hostile environment, which was manifested in the profound deterioration of their civil and social rights and in their social isolation.

The position of the Poles differed significantly from that of the Czechs. In the 1950s, the Polish historian Władyzsław Rusiński published a revealing analysis of the position of Polish workers in the territory of former Poland annexed to Germany. Rusiński mapped out in detail the wage, pension, housing and rationing conditions of the Polish population in this territory after the outbreak of the Second World War. In his account, he compared the social and health services received by the German and Polish people, which showed vast discrepancies between the two groups. He began with wages, which in the case of the Poles did not reach even 50 per cent of German employees’ earnings, even though they performed harder work.138 The general discrimination against Poles increased steadily. All social and health benefits were linked to work performance, and in the event of unfitness for work, the regime lost all interest in the individual. Health care was treated largely as a tool to eliminate epidemics, rather than as a sufficient health service with curative or even preventive objectives. Poles outside the former Polish territory were also subject to a significant tax burden. Taxes and other deductions from the wages of Polish workers also applied to those working in the Protectorate. Rusiński calculated as much as a sixfold burden on workers’ wages. Among others, this included the so-called balancing levy, which, in addition to Poles, was also levied against Jews and Roma, as well as the payroll tax and, from mid-1942, the communal tax, which amounted to between RM 1.25 and RM 6 per month. Although Poles were not members of the DAF and no Polish equivalent of this institution existed, unlike the NOÚZ representing Czech workers, Poles contributed 2 per cent of their gross earnings to the DAF from mid-1940. In 1941 the authorities finally designated this contribution as a ‘social tax’ on Poles to the DAF.139

The measures directed against the Roma population had similar features in the Protectorate. What distinguished them from the anti-Jewish measures was a different perception of the excluded group. While the Roma were intuitively included by the authorities in the category of ‘asocials’, Jews were excluded as an assimilated social group with clear elements of discrimination based on economic factors. This does not apply absolutely because there were those among the Roma who had permanent employment. However, within the social stratification of the population, as Talacko noted, Jews were strongly represented in the middle and upper social classes and were allegedly largely responsible for pushing the ‘Czech nation’ into low-wage working-class occupations.140 To avoid this Jewish superiority – as it was believed to exist – the Protectorate system sought to establish a new form of social redistribution and mechanisms of the welfare state.

Discriminatory practices were first introduced in the workplace. Jews needed the permission of the labour office in order to be able to work. This could be revoked at any time and the notice period was two weeks maximum.141 Talacko – although we do not know his opinion on the specific measures – would have welcomed higher taxation and extra deductions from the wages of the Jewish population because they were aimed at excluding Jews from attractive jobs and taking away their rights in favour of those of the ‘Czech nation’. Economic and social exclusion was also becoming a daily reality in the Protectorate. Tax provisions discriminated not only against Jews but also against their non-Jewish partners.142 They were not subject to any tax exemptions, their classification in the first tax bracket automatically subjected them to the highest payroll tax, and they were not allowed to deduct expenses for a person officially considered a Jew when determining pension tax.143 The authorities in the Protectorate also introduced the ‘social balancing levy’, as described by Rusiński, in 1943. This amounted to 15 per cent of one’s income and was compulsory for all Jews, Roma and Poles, although at this point there were very few Jews remaining in the country.144 Anti-Jewish and anti-Roma social policy measures were comprehensive and affected practically all spheres of social and health care. I will discuss some of them, while the features of the racial construction of social policy in the Protectorate will also be continuously traced in the following chapters.

Social welfare for the needy was the maximum that Jews received. Its public form was changed in the spring of 1940, and – as with the care of Germans and Czechs – it followed the principle of forming an exclusively Jewish welfare system. According to the Reich Protector’s decree, Jewish religious communities were authorised to ‘care for all Jews’ welfare’, and for this purpose they were to collect appropriate levies from the Jewish population.145 Jews were removed from the care of their municipality of domicile, which had been responsible for social welfare since 1863.146 In August 1941, religious communities became the almost exclusive bearers of ‘Jewish voluntary indigent care’. They were to support the Jewish population ‘within the limits of their means’, and thus Jews lost the right to participate in public indigent care for the ‘Czech nation’. An even more restrictive procedure was brought about by a decree of the Protectorate government issued a few months later.147 Decisions on the allocation of poor relief to a particular person considered by the authorities to be a Jew were now made exclusively by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration (Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung) in Prague, the institution responsible for implementing Adolf Eichmann’s planned ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. Where religious communities did not have sufficient funds, the municipality of domicile was allowed to contribute, but only for basic subsistence in case of illness.148 Although there were exceptions to the granting of these minimal benefits, they did not in the least mitigate the severity of this political measure. The granting of ‘extra’ poor relief was permitted only in three cases: that it would encourage Jewish emigration, if the person concerned was a severe war casualty, or if it was in the ‘public interest’. What was this ‘public interest’ supposed to be?

Czechs whose origins were defined as ‘non-Jewish’ or ‘Aryan’ became the exclusive clients of the public (originally Czechoslovak) indigent care.149 The new regulations in the field of public welfare increasingly restricted the possibility for Jews to receive social support. They limited the Jewish population to social welfare through self-help, which was to operate on the basis of solidarity within the Jewish community. The most critical factor in the exclusion of Jews was the legislative regulation of citizenship. Its revision was part of the process of creating segregated national communities, helping to adapt the everyday practice to ideologically conditioned ideas about Jews’ place in society and the system of public provision. In Germany, the eleventh regulation to the Reich Citizenship Law of 25 November 1941, which defined nationality within the borders of Germany and also applied to the Protectorate, provided the necessary legal framework.150 According to it, Jews located outside German territory lost their citizenship, as well as their right to a pension, and their property was forfeited to the state. If they remained in Germany, they could receive half of the benefit entitlement granted to Germans of ‘Aryan’ origin.151 However, their absence from German territory could have had various causes: emigration, but also deportation to one of the concentration camps or other similar facilities in territories annexed to Germany.

In social insurance and the payment of benefits, the procedure was complicated. Jews, like the rest of the population, were for many years part of the public social insurance system. They paid insurance contributions and were entitled to benefits in the event of sickness, invalidity and old age. Insured workers in non-worker professions who were considered Jews had to transfer to the General Pension Institute and continued to be entitled to an amount which did not have to correspond to the course of the existing insurance. They were not affected by the increase in benefits or, in future, by the one-off extraordinary pension bonuses.152 Here, economic anti-Semitism in its concrete form meant fundamental changes in the legal status of Jews in public life, as well as discrimination in terms of the distribution of social protection.153 From September 1940, Jewish employees were excluded from selected pension schemes.154

The ÚSP, the main carrier of insurance for employees, especially workers, followed a similar course. At first, it required its clients to ‘declare the applicant’s origin’, but by the beginning of 1940 it had already begun to systematically intervene in the payment of invalidity and old-age pensions. These affected not only Jews but also their spouses, even those of ‘Aryan’ origin. The authorities set a maximum amount for their pensions and for lump-sum benefits such as severance pay (a benefit after the termination of a contract) and the outfitting allowance (a benefit paid to insured women after marriage).155 The monthly amount paid could not exceed K 500 – less than the average monthly worker’s salary at the time – in the case of either spouse.156 If the insured person was entitled to higher benefits, he could not receive them directly but only by payment into an escrow account maintained by a monetary institution authorised by the Ministry of Finance.157 The escrow account had a weekly limit of K 1,500, which Jews were allowed to withdraw from all their accounts for all the dependents in their household. Jews were subject to very strict social and financial controls. Not only the establishment of a safety deposit box in a bank but also individual requests for higher withdrawals from escrow accounts were subject to case-by-case approval by the Ministry of Finance.158

The withdrawal of benefits to which they were entitled by virtue of paying insurance contributions was the target of the next stage of exclusion. The authorities administering social insurance had to remain flexible with regard to a population that was consistently pushed to the edge of its existence by the threat of deportation or other forms of radical restrictions on personal freedom. According to Alexander Klimo, the officials of the Reich Ministry of Labour who were not directly involved in the organisation of deportations pursued above all the goal not of suspending the payment of pensions, but of keeping these funds in the territory they administered, that is, in the Protectorate.159 In the case of claims against social insurance carriers made by Jewish employees who had emigrated, Section 7 of the Regulation on the loss of Protectorate citizenship of 2 November 1942 applied.160 In order for the authorities to intervene in the payment of the entitlement, the insured person first had to be released from Protectorate or Reich citizenship.

Deportation to one of the concentration camps represented the final step in the possible manipulation of social insurance benefits. It is known from the practice recorded in 1943 that while the pensions of persons transported to the Theresienstadt transit and concentration camp were transferred to the Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question in Bohemia and Moravia (Zentralamt für die Regelung der Judenfrage in Böhmen und Mähren) based on confirmation that the person concerned was alive, Jews located in the Łódź ghetto had their pensions temporarily suspended, and Jews located elsewhere in the General Government or in the territories of the Reich Commissariats had their pensions permanently suspended.161 In the event of deportation to anywhere in the east, there was no certainty that the insured person was still alive.162 However, there were still doubts about this tactic. Łódź was part of the Reichsgau Wartheland and thus was considered, in contrast to the General Government, a part of Greater Germany, and therefore, according to some voices, the Reich Citizenship Act of November 1941 could be applied. Teetering on the edge of life and death could, at any moment, result in the confiscation of one’s pension by the camp or ghetto authorities. In practice, a procedure that was intended to prevent potential misappropriation ultimately prevailed. The payment of pensions to Jews in Łódź and in transit camps such as Theresienstadt was suspended altogether.163

The Nazis streamlined the system of discrimination and exclusion in late 1942 and early 1943 in connection with the start of the next stage of the Jewish extermination process. On 13 March 1943, the Reich Ministry of Labour issued a decree regulating the participation of Jews in pension insurance in the eastern territories annexed to Germany. Jews were required to contribute to the pension system, but at the same time, they were completely excluded from the possibility of receiving a pension.164

Requests to administer Jewish pensions, such as those made in 1943 by the Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question based in Prague, were by no means unique in Nazi Germany. In this struggle for the appropriation of benefits belonging to deported Jews, entities of various types, from police headquarters to special offices administering Jewish affairs, all participated.165 Among them, in May 1942, it was the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague, the predecessor of the aforementioned Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question in Bohemia and Moravia, which demanded that the Reich authorities transfer the accident insurance benefits belonging to insured Jews to a bank account set up for this purpose. The Central Office for Jewish Emigration, which in the course of time developed into an institution responsible for the deportation of Jews, was to use the originally Jewish pensions transferred to it to cover the costs associated with the Nazi extermination policy. For the highest Nazi officials in the Protectorate, such as Horst Böhme, deputy commander of the Security Police and SS intelligence agency in Bohemia and Moravia, such a solution was ‘a matter of course’.166

Although the negative effects of social policy in the sense of denying social support to a certain group of people were primarily racial, in specific cases they were applied to the non-Jewish Czech population as a type of punishment. The forms of exclusion of Jews and non-Jews subject to punishment were similar only to a certain extent. As will be made clear especially in Chapter Six, in the case of non-Jews these punishments never had the objective of definitive exclusion from the národní pospolitost. The harshest approach was taken in the case of the survivors of persons sentenced to death by the martial courts, who were subsequently denied maintenance allowances by the authorities.167 From the point of view of the occupation regime, these rather exemplary punishments were only considered in exceptional cases and, unlike the measures taken against Jews, Roma and Poles, they were never collective and were often applied only for a limited period of time. It must be stressed, however, that this harshest form of punishment was not applied by the authorities in every case of political persecution. If they opted for a milder version of the procedure, it was not out of the goodwill of an occupation official. This is well illustrated by the situation of families of those taken into custody. From October 1939 at the latest, instructions from the Protectorate government were in force stating that ‘family members of arrested persons shall retain all the rights they have under the social insurance regulations’.168 The principle was to preserve the standard of living of the family of the arrested person. This did not simply mean maintaining participation in all applicable insurance schemes but choosing such a solution that the payment of contributions would not unduly burden the family, or so that the breadwinner released from custody could re-enter the system without difficulty. In the case of sickness insurance, an exception was in place to allow them to switch from compulsory insurance to voluntary insurance at any time. For long-term insurance such as disability, old-age or pension insurance, the procedure was different. The insurance premiums for an arrested person were paid by the provincial authorities in the Protectorate, both the part paid by the employee and the part contributed by the employer, since the employer usually deregistered the employee from the insurance scheme immediately after arrest. The discriminatory function of social policy in the case of members of the Czech národní pospolitost gave way considerably in favour of stabilisation mechanisms in the interest of the conduct of the war and the needs of the war industry.169

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