‘It Won’t Work without a Social Policy!’ Social Policy in Practice in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia
Abstract
Social policy in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, from mid-March 1939 to early May 1945, is a key topic in contemporary research on the history of this brief period. The article is concerned with the possible approaches to research with regard to the latest trends in research on National Socialism.
It begins with an outline of the historiography of social policy in the Protectorate, which is marked chiefly by a predominant uniformity of argumentation, a lack of systematic approach to interpretation, and Czech and Czechoslovak historians’ limiting themselves to the ethnically Czech population. Research conducted so far has completely failed to put social policy into the context of social history.
The author thus first provides an outline of the social framework, which represents the concept of a Volksgemeinschaft (national/ethnic/racial community), in which ideas about the purpose and function of social policy were formed and implemented. In the next part, she focuses on the defi nition of the term ‘social policy’ as understood by Nazi theorists after 1933.
In the last part of the article, she seeks to define the new social relations in the Czech- German environment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and suggests possibilities of its analysis in the area of the implementation of social policy. She believes that it will be fruitful to study the implementation of the relevant criteria in the Reich and the Protectorate at the level of discussions among experts, and to research social policy in practice.
The author sees the most important aspects of the implementation of social policy as residing in the various motivations of the régime when implementing social policy in relation to different parts of the population, ranging from social exclusion to forms of social protectionism.