Devil’s Playground

The times were unripe for such dreaming. The fledgling parliamentary republic of Czechoslovakia was on the verge of becoming the unlucky testing ground for something new in the ways and means of power. A bizarre symbol of things to come was the kowtowing of one head of state to another. The old Chinese custom of touching the ground with one’s forehead as a sign of worship or absolute submission to power (k’o-t’ou, from k’o, knock, t’ou, head) — the Czechs call it crawling up someone’s arse — was repeated on the evening of 14 March 1939, when the top-hatted, stooping President of the Czechoslovak Republic, Emil Hacha, hurried by train from Prague to Berlin to keep an appointment with Hitler. It is unclear just how well Hacha along the way had digested the ominous news that that same evening, at 17.30 hours, the crack SS Bodyguard ‘Adolf Hitler’ had begun to occupy the Ostrava region, in the north of the country. It is known that Hácha’s appointment began badly. The moody film buff Führer — the man who seemed to regard total war as a big-budget film — made his counterpart wait two hours so that he could finish watching a movie. It was an escapist romance, recommended to him as usual by Goebbels, appropriately enough entitled A Hopeless Case (Ein Hoffnungsloser Fall).²¹

Business got under way at a quarter-past one in the morning, by which time the old and frail Hacha had been mesmerized into playing the role of the mouse before the lion. Hacha was the first to open his mouth. He repeated what he had said publicly before leaving Prague: that the Czechoslovak state indeed belonged both geographically and historically to the sphere of German power.²² Apparently so surprised by Hácha’s submissiveness, Hitler, sipping his favourite mineral water, quickly roared that within six hours the German armed forces would invade Czechoslovakia from three sides, crushing ruthlessly any resistance along the way. It was a lie. German airfields were at that moment enshrouded in fog. But the lie had instant effect. The faint-headed Hácha collapsed into the arms of the Führer’s personal physician, Dr Morell, who injected him at once with dextrose and vitamins. The kowtowed Hácha with eyes barely open was then told by Göring that the Luftwaffe would smash any Czech resistance by reducing Prague to a pile of rubble. The bluffing worked. Hácha telephoned Prague to order that there be no resistance to the invading troops. He then reassured Hitler and his entourage of clever thugs that Czechoslovakia would do anything to avoid bloodshed. Sitting beside Hitler just before dawn, Hácha concluded the meeting by signing a statement prepared by the Nazis. ‘The Czechoslovak President declared that ... he confidently placed the fate of the Czech people and country in the hands of the Führer of the German Reich,’ the statement ran. It was a masterpiece of political deception. ‘The Führer accepted this declaration and expressed his intention of taking the Czech people under the protection of the German Reich and of guaranteeing them an autonomous development of their ethnic life as suited their character.’²³

The words were to be written like foul-mouthed graffiti over the young Václav Havel’s life during the next six years. Hácha’s faint-headed behaviour before Hitler fitted perfectly the stereotype of Czechs as self-pitying, childlike subjects skilled at stepping away from responsibility — subjects who are then forced by others to pay heavily for their cowardice and to wallow in a ‘martyr complex’.²⁴It was later said in Hácha’s defence that he tried his best under difficult circumstances to protect his fellow citizens. And Hácha himself claimed that he had sacrificed the state to save the nation. But the bitter truth was that the Czechs were forced to pay heavily for their leader’s kowtowing. The Czechoslovak state was rapidly dismembered. Ruthenia was forcibly annexed by Hungary. Slovakia was reorganized into an independent state with limited sovereign powers. And Bohemia and Moravia, once the heartlands of the republic, were pushed and shoved through several stages of Nazification.²⁵

‘Es kommt der Tag[The day will come],’ Czech friends of the Nazis used to whisper, and here it was. Hours after Hácha’s fateful meeting with Hitler, in blizzard conditions, German troops poured into Prague, red-faced by sleet and frost, and perhaps even a touch of shame. Hitler followed, checking in to Prague Castle at Hradčany on the evening of 15 March. Initially, the Nazis treated their prey with caution. Militant pragmatism dictated that the Czechs were to be exploited for the Nazi war effort with a minimum outlay of German resources. Talk of Czech-German co-operation abounded. The important independent powers of the provinces of Bohemia and Moravia — customs and monetary affairs, military authority and defence, foreign affairs, and postal and telecommunications facilities — were all wiped out by decree. All governmental institutions were placed under the immediate authority of the ‘Reichsprotektor’, an office filled by the former German foreign minister, Baron von Neurath, who from here on countermanded ‘in the interest of the Reich’ any measures of the government of the Protectorate. The Czechoslovak army was disbanded. Parliament was dissolved. All political parties were suspended. Privileges were extended to the ethnic German-speaking minority, such as the right of Reich citizenship, immunity from Czech courts of justice, and promotion within the administration of such cities as Prague, Brno, Olomouc, and České Budějovice. Meanwhile, ‘sensible’ measures against Jews were taken, which meant that a climate of fear and suspicion was nurtured, for instance by sacking Jewish civil servants and banning the Jewish population from purchasing or disposing of their property.

Following the declaration of war on Germany by Britain and France on 3 September 1939, but especially after the posting to Prague two years later of Reinhard Heydrich, former boss of the Reich Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt), the Nazis toughened their methods of governing. Stimulated by military victories against the Soviet Union, and confident in their own ability to deal with reported Czech resistance, and keen to win what Goebbels liked to call the ‘chess match for power,’ the Heydrich administration swiftly moved in for the kill. Martial law was declared. The Gestapo undertook large-scale arrests, turning first mainly to German political émigrés. Rounds of summary court judgements and executions followed. Material concessions to peasants and workers were combined with policies aimed at terrorizing and weeding out intellectuals. The Czechs were entitled to live a private existence so long as they didn’t think or act publicly. Colleges and universities were closed and their buildings assigned either to the German University in Prague or used for different functions, as happened to the building of Prague’s college of law, which was turned into a Schutzstaffel (SS) barracks. Student dormitories were ransacked. Thousands of students and staff were arrested. The ‘ring-leaders’ among them were summarily shot. Many others were carted off as hostages to the Oranienburg concentration camp, from which they were set free by handfuls and permitted to return home, frightened by their brush with death.

Nazi government in this form bore the stamp of Heydrich, under whose leadership the Protectorate was changed by fits and starts into a well-functioning system of total power, the likes of which Czechs had never before experienced. This was no dictatorship or despotism. It was an entirely new configuration of power, whose contours defied all traditional categories of political thought. It was soon to be called ‘totalitarian’. The word has subsequently lost much of its sting through familiarity and misuse, but for descriptive purposes it remains chillingly apt. Under conditions of totalitarianism, nobody — not even its commanders — was safe from persecution, or death. Totalitarian rule was specifically geared to organizing, breaking up and destroying everything that was living, dead, inert. Land, shared historical memories, men, women, and children: these were the objects of totalitarian rule, which more savagely rampaged through the world only after its adversaries were defeated and destroyed.

The totalitarian power that the Nazis brought to Prague was unhinged power. Balzac (in Cousine Bette) noted that ‘arbitrary rule is power gone mad’, but the madness of totalitarian power was beyond the bounds of his wildest imaginings. Transforming the world into a hell-hole, totalitarianism was uninhibited power enjoying a monopoly of the means of available violence. Totalitarian power was the unrestricted capacity to organize and push people and things down the path of complete annihilation. Totalitarian power produced total powerlessness. It even regarded suicide as an insult, and it did all it could to prevent it by emaciating and grinding down the bodies of its victims — in the last instance by means of torture, or by a bullet through the head of the one trying to reach the electrified fence. Totalitarian power naturally created an inferno of fear and uncertainty for everybody and everything. Nobody was safe from annihilation. Totalitarian power certainly relied upon formal organizations: specialized administrative staff; hierarchies of command; the scheduling of services; codes of conduct and discipline for personnel; systematic record-keeping. In this way, totalitarian power could function well by ensuring smooth administration, even if its staff were second-rate, or prone to rivalry, protection and corruption. Totalitarian rule also certainly put to good use individuals who were careerists, or who had a strong sense of duty and a knack for organizing things and getting jobs done. Yet totalitarian power was most definitely not a species of bureaucratic rule. For one thing, it cultivated and required its victims’ willingness to take the initiative in performing the dirty business — for instance by informing on others, or supervising prison work-squads. For another thing, totalitarianism recognized no hindering rules or restrictions; it was self-propelling power that thrived on crashing through the world, demolishing all barriers along the way. Totalitarian power tended to undermine bureaucratic rule. It ignored considerations of economic utility or Realpolitik. And it did away with talk of moral or ethical restrictions. It treated such talk as rubbish left over from a corrupted past.

The totalitarianism of the Reichsprotektorat dispensed with ideological convictions. Although it operated under the canopy of a totalizing ideology — the ideology stressed the animal-like struggle of the new Reich against its enemies, and the imperative of building a new Europe modelled on the emerging Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich — totalitarian power effectively broke free from all such ideological self-justifications. The old maxim that power is only effective when it is legitimate in the eyes of the ruled was disproven by totalitarian power, which was not at all a type of rule guided by principled aims and calculations of how to achieve certain ends. Or, rather, totalitarian power was guided by only one end: the annihilation of its designated enemies. Totalitarian power was impulsive, arbitrary, terroristic, murderous. Not even its unlimited power of culling and sewing a label on whole categories of the population — Jews, homosexuals, Romanies, Poles, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the unfit — was free of arbitrariness, uncertainty and disorder. Everything became provisional. The essence of totalitarian power was terror — soul- and body-destroying fear driven by the expectation that death and destruction at the hands of the secret police, army or ‘unidentified thugs’ were just around the corner.

Thanks to the Reichsprotektorat, everybody, including the administrators and accomplices of the regime, was potentially superfluous. ‘Force should be right,’ said the totalitarian voice, ‘or rather, right and wrong should lose their names, and so should justice.’²⁶ The living were flung into a merciless struggle of each against all. The boundaries between life and death dissolved. Past and present and future collapsed into each other. Each minute was potentially the last minute. A second could feel like a lifetime. Or like nothing at all. Everyone was ‘raw material’. Each individual was on terror’s hit list. Anyone — in the Auschwitz jargon — could be turned into a walking dead Muselmann (‘Muslim’) whose body and soul disintegrate before the eyes of others. Anyone could be disposed of without trace. Murder naturally succoured this form of power. It demonstrated its omnipotence. Gruel excess was constantly required. Talented and ingenious barbarism functioned as a form of self-assertion — as sadistic proof that there were no external barriers to power, that those who were acting on the world were capable of anything, that the unthinkable was real.²⁷It was therefore not surprising that bizarre forms of dastardly evil resulted. Totalitarianism was a killing field, which is why the mass grave and the concentration camp, in which subjects were stripped of the right to have rights and then exterminated, were its perfect manifestations — and not somehow embarrassing exceptions. Extermination of individuals and whole groups — one might even say all of humanity — was the logical and practical end point of totalitarian power.