The introduction sets the scene well. Combining headlines from The New York Times with George Kennan's dispatches, Bryant takes the reader to Prague just as the Wehrmacht marches through the streets and Gestapo officers check their lists of enemies about to be arrested. Bryant's central objective is to examine what constituted “Czech” and “German” identities within the unhappy period from 1939 to 1947.

The first chapter analyzes the fluid national categories as they evolved from the beginning of the Nazi occupation to the end of the Sitzkrieg in 1940. It reveals the awkwardness of the German position. The Nazi ideology rejected the Czechs as a subhuman race unwelcome in the Lebensraum of the Third Reich. But not even the most fundamentalist Nazis could ignore the interests of the Third Reich that called for the Czech industry to support the war effort. The tension between the ideology that called for mass murder, expulsion, or Germanization, and the pragmatic concern for industrial output never declined.

Bryant traces the initial stages of the German assault on the Protectorate Jews and deals with such pseudo-scientific Nazi categories as Mischlinge. He makes good use of reports from the Prague section of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). They reveal a paradox. The Czechs responded to the occupation by closing ranks, whereas a fissure opened between the Sudeten Germans, who had previously been citizens of Czechoslovakia, and the Reich Germans, recent arrivals in the Protectorate. Most administrators had come from the Reich, and they had little use for the local Sudetens who felt snubbed and ignored. On occasion the Wehrmacht simply took from them what it needed, and Reich women found them “disorderly and lazy” (48–49). Much has been written about the Protectorate, but to my knowledge Bryant is the first to discern the rift among the Nazi occupiers.

The next two chapters focus on the irrationality of the Reich. Having swept across half of Europe, one would think that the Third Reich was fully engaged trying to figure out what to do with Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, occupied Europe, and other such matters. It is astonishing to read in Prague in Black how many Nazi administrators were dealing instead with the most ridiculous aspects of life in the Protectorate, for instance, libraries for Germans “scattered” among Czechs. There were other issues; e.g., Oberlandrat von Watter was gravely worried about the percentages of “German blood” among applicants for marriage licenses in the Protectorate. It is not hard to understand that von Watter found such make-believe activity preferable to serving in uniform, but it reveals the self-destructive component of the Third Reich that he was able to get away with it.

Although the Nazi administrators were seeking to provide Germany with material for the war, the issue of “race” was never far from the center of their attention. Some of the plans for the cleansing of Bohemia and Moravia of all Czechs were so brutal that the Nazi bosses of the Protectorate had to protest that deporting all Czechs “would leave the fields fallow and cities deserted” and that there were no Germans to replace them (117). Bryant points out that among the vigorous guardians of racial purity in the occupied lands was the SS butcher Odilo Globocnik, a distinctly non-Teutonic name (153).

The most notorious promoter of the racist doctrines of Nazism was Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects of the Holocaust. The author brings up some details of his tenure in Prague, but the section dealing with his assassination is too short to provide new information (167–72). Soon after the assault on Heydrich, German experts on race intensified further the debate whether the Czechs should be Germanized or killed. Teams stood by with mobile X-ray machines to provide “scientific” answers as Nazi administrators seriously discussed plans for a future expulsion of some 3.5 million Czechs to eastern destinations.

The final two chapters cover the period from Heydrich to 1947. They are excellent. The author is here on his own because most of the secondary sources end with the destruction of the Czech resistance after Heydrich's assassination. Bryant easily proves that he is capable of first-class and original research. The Nazis imposed tighter controls over every aspect of life in the Protectorate in an effort to increase industrial production. Any transgressions were severely punished, sometimes by death. By now even the most nationally indifferent Czechs experienced a patriotic awakening and hatred for everything German. As the Nazis vowed to fight to the end, the Czechs at home and abroad were plotting revenge. The expulsions of the Sudeten Germans from postwar Czechoslovakia are covered in the last chapter.

Bryant has consulted original sources in various foreign languages, and he paints an accurate picture of a difficult era in a country notorious for its complex history. The book does not overturn existing views but enriches and adds depth to what we knew. This is an excellent new work and it will have a lasting value.