Hitler – Beneš – Tito

This monograph is based on a broad range of primary and secondary sources and explores the development of the political, legal, economic, social, cultural, and military ‘communities of conflict’ within Austria-Hungary (especially in the Bohemian and south Slav lands); the convulsions of the First World War and the Czech, Slovak, and south Slav break with the Habsburg Monarchy; the difficult formation of successor-states; the domestic and foreign policies of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; Hitler’s destruction of the order created by the Treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain, and Trianon; the Nazi policies of conquest and occupation in Bohemia, Moravia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Slovenia; the genocide committed against the Jews in the Protectorate, Slovakia, the Ustaša-state, and Serbia; the retaliation against and expulsion of the Sudeten and Carpathian Germans as well as the Germans in Slovenia, Croatia, and the Vojvodina; and finally the issue of history and memory east and west of the Iron Curtain as well as in the post-communist national states at the end of the twentieth century in eastern and southeastern Europe. The focus is, on the one hand, on the ethnic-national contention between Germans and Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as well as between Magyars and Slovaks, Serbs, and Croats; and, on the other hand, on the conflicts at the level of the state of the German Empire and Austria with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Although many emperors, kings, presidents, chancellors, minister-presidents, ministers, business tycoons, general directors, ambassadors, generals, Gauleiter, and high SS and police functionaries appear as historical actors in the 150 years of east-central and southeast European history since 1848, three of them remain especially present in historical memory at the beginning of the twenty-first century: the German “Führer” and Chancellor Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister and President Edvard Beneš (1884–1948), and the Yugoslav partisan-leader and President Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980).