Hey Guys,
Let's say the Germans treat the Czech people as badly as they treat the Jews - sending them off to death camps and only allowing them less than 200 calories a day. This means that, post-war, the Czech population has been reduced by some 2-3 million people, leaving around 5 million Czech's in the post-war country, rather than OTL's 8 million.
How would this affect post-war Czech culture? I assume the Germans would still be expelled from Czechoslovakia, but what would be done about the severe population drop? Could the Danubian Confederation become a reality, or would Czechoslovakia retain independence?
A. J. P. Taylor once wrote (*The Origins of the Second World War*), "In 1938 Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better--to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?"
That the Czechs were not treated worse is also curious if you remember that Hitler grew up in Austria at a time when anti-Czech feeling there was intense. (Indeed, the "Czech menace" was second only to that of the Jews in the eyes of the Vienna anti-Semitic gutter press which the young Hitler avidly read.) In *Mein Kampf* he says hardly anything about the Poles but has plenty to say about the Czechs:
"The Royal House Czechized wherever possible, and it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and inexorable retribution which caused Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the most mortal enemy of Austrian-Germanism, to fall by the bullets which he himself had helped to mold. For had he not been the patron of Austria's Slavization from above!...
"Especially since Archduke Francis Ferdinand became heir apparent and began to enjoy a certain influence, there began to be some plan and order in the policy of Czechization from above. With all possible means, this future ruler of the dual monarchy tried to encourage a policy of deGermanization, to advance it himself or at least to sanction it. Purely German towns, indirectly through government officialdom, were slowly but steadily pushed into the mixed-language danger zones. Even in Lower Austria this process began to make increasingly rapid progress, and many Czechs considered Vienna their largest city.
"The central idea of this new Habsburg, whose family had ceased to speak anything but Czech (the Archduke's wife, a former Czech countess, had been morganatically married to the Prince-she came from circles whose anti-German attitude was traditional), was gradually to establish a Slavic state in Central Europe which for defense against Orthodox Russia should be placed on a strictly Catholic basis...
"The use of Czech pastorates and their spiritual shepherds was but one of the many means of attaining this goal, a general Slavization of Austria...Czech pastors were appointed to German communities; slowly but surely they began to set the interests of the Czech people above the interests of the churches, becoming germ-cells of the de-Germanization process...
"Without doubt the national force of resistance of the Catholic clergy of German nationality, in all questions connected with Germanism, was less than that of their non-German, particularly Czech, brethren...
"At that time Vienna was so strongly permeated especially with Czech elements that only the greatest tolerance with regard to all racial questions could keep them in a party which was not anti-German to begin with..."
Why, in view of all this, were the Czechs not treated worse? I think a poster at soc.history.what-if got it right when he wrote: "The protectorate was industrialized area, not damaged by war, out of range of bombers and without much of resistance. Large scale atrocities would only decrease its economical output. The final solution was therefore postponed until the war ends."
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/6dug6z5YB10/YlNH5DGAYVcJ