Radka Šustrová argues that Czechoslovakia’s modern welfare state and an exclusionary Czech national identity were forged as two sides of the same coin in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,1939–1945. Šustrová thus offers important new insights into the administration of the Nazi Protectorate, the balance between collaboration and resistance in the Protectorate, the history of Czech nationalism, and the development of modern European social welfare regimes.

Czech scholars have long emphasized Czech resistance to Nazi rule as the defining experience of the Protectorate. Yet such narratives fail to address why Nazi rule was less violent and local resistance less disruptive than in neighboring Poland or in many other parts of East-Central Europe. Šustrová’s answer is both more damning and more nuanced than many of the dominant narratives in Czech historiography even as it adds important insights to debates in European history more broadly.

Nazi occupation officials in the Protectorate relied on local officials and bureaucratic structures to carry out policy and maintain order, a pattern that Šustrová argues made Nazi rule in Bohemia and Moravia more like that in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe (i.e., Poland). This system worked in part because it helped local authorities protect their own citizens and served as a powerful incentive for them to cooperate with the occupiers. But, she argues, protection came with a price tag. Although Czech political authorities largely succeeded in creating some stability for their citizens, in the process they played a crucial role in establishing Nazi power in Bohemia and consequently in Europe more broadly.

Šustrová asserts that social welfare lay at the center of Nazi policy both in the Reich proper and in many of its occupation zones. In Bohemia, as in many occupied territories, the Nazi administration sought political stability and a productive workforce. Expanded healthcare and other social welfare measures won acquiescence to Nazi rule not only from ethnic Germans who received the same rights and benefits as Reich citizens, but from Czechs who also experienced a substantial expansion of social welfare benefits.

Focusing the spotlight on social welfare’s importance for Nazi policy allows Šustrová to expand ever-green debates about why “ordinary” people went along with Nazism. Historians have investigated popular support within the Reich, but Šustrová demonstrates that such support played a crucial role in occupied territories as well. Czech expansion of social welfare began even before the occupation. Czech industries, like German ones, had been hard hit by the Great Depression. In 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia’s western borderlands (aka the Sudetenland), the truncated Czech state was left juggling the on-going economic crisis, loss of territory, and a large influx of refugees. It responded by launching an aggressive effort to rebuild society and made social welfare the centerpiece of this strategy with measures to rationalize labor, support families, facilitate leisure, and expand public health services. As Šustrová shows, those efforts continued and expanded after Nazi Germany occupied the rest of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, offering members of the Czech national community or národní pospolitost incentives to cooperate with the Nazis as well as with their own authorities. Nazism thus offered some continuity in the expansion of social welfare, and social welfare expansion won the acquiescence of many Czech citizens and authorities to the new political order.

Nazi welfare policy was designed to serve national communities rather than society as a whole. Germans received benefits as members of the German Volksgemeinschaft and Czechs enjoyed a different set of benefits as members of the Czech národní pospolitost. Nationalization not only reshaped state welfare programs but led to a consolidation of independent charities under the umbrella of the National Social and Health Care Center. Social support under Naziism was remarkably egalitarian for members of the nation. But although Germans and Czechs reaped benefits from these social reforms, Jews, Roma and other groups systematically excluded from German and Czech national communities under Nazi rule were also excluded from social welfare protections. Indeed, for Jewish Bohemians, legal exclusion from pensions and other social benefits were a kind of state-imposed social death that often preceded actual death. Further, the state used exclusion from social welfare as political punishment for non-Jewish Czechs who did not cooperate with the regime.

If national belonging was the prerequisite for access to social insurance, labor was the ticket itself. Šustrová argues that Nazi leaders were fixated on labor as key to consolidating power and to supporting the war effort. The Nazi regime treated Czechs as a crucial labor force whose significance only grew during the war since Czech men were excluded from military service. And Czechs, who had been hit hard by unemployment during the Depression, welcomed efforts to boost employment and to provide good wages, improved work conditions, occupational safety, health care, and old age and disability insurance as rewards for work. Further, Protectorate propaganda promised previously marginalized social classes jobs and social advancement by virtue of national belonging.

Nazi social welfare incentives contributed to short-term political stability and economic productivity in the Protectorate, but Šustrová shows they also had unintended consequences in the long term. National social welfare not only allowed Nazi Germany to create national hierarchies but also fostered a version of Czech nationalism that was far more exclusionary than that of the late Habsburg or interwar periods. Czechs learned to clearly differentiate themselves from Germans, Jews, and Slovaks with the understanding that national communities had separate rights and interests. National and policy divisions thus paved the way for a nationally exclusive vision of Czechoslovakia after 1945 and help explain why fierce anti-German violence and mass population expulsions marked the end of World War II in Bohemia even though occupation-era resistance had been far less pronounced than in many other occupation zones of East-Central Europe.

Šustrová’s work makes clear that the social safety nets that Czechs and other Europeans came to regard as normal in the second half of the twentieth century cannot be explained either as an exclusively post-war creation or as an unalloyed triumph of European labor or anti-fascist movements. Nazi Germany’s efforts to expand worker protections borrowed from interwar Czechoslovak examples even as Protectorate era expansion of Czech social welfare policy built on contemporary German examples and had legacy that stretched into the post-war era. Further, labor and health protections were driven by dual state goals to maintain a strong labor force and to improve the health of the nation. The World War II not only brought the abuse of science but also produced important new developments in medical science, pharmaceuticals, and health-care facilities. Nor was that coincidence: the policy of care and the policy of destruction were interwoven.

Šustrová’s book adds fascinating new insights to our understanding of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and of the ways modern authoritarian regimes use social welfare to reward and exclude. It is a reminder of the interconnection of neighboring states, peoples, and legal systems even in moments of occupation, war, and exclusionary nationalism. It will be of interest to scholars of modern Bohemia and Czechoslovakia; of Nazi Germany, fascism, and World War II; and of modern social welfare.