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EXPLORE THE HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM IN Czechia
2004 – 2024
The European Union
In the years after joining the European Union, the organization of the neo-Nazi scene improved, which also had an impact on the organization of anti-Semitic events (some of which escalated into violence). Islamist anti-Semitic manifestations also intensified, although they were few in comparison with Western Europe. Even after the decline of the neo-Nazi movement in the middle of the second decade, there is a nationalist anti-Semitic spectrum in the Czech Republic that adapts anti-Semitism to contemporary problems (the so-called refugee crisis, the Covid crisis, the Ukrainian crisis). In the third decade, there is online radicalization by large numbers of young people from neo-Nazi and Islamist milieus.
1991 – 2004
The Time of Democratization
The fall of communism brought, on the one hand, a great degree of freedom, and on the other hand, a negative rise in anti-Semitic tendencies in a part of the population. Although the official policy of the country was friendly towards Jews and friendly relations with Israel were restored and maintained, a part of the population perceived this negatively. Anti-Semitic periodicals tied to interconnected circles of contributors began to appear, and at the same time anti-Semitic tendencies appeared in a part of the skinhead subculture, which leaned towards neo-Nazism. The result was also attacks on Jewish objects and people. Anti-Semitism tied to the Jewish-Arab conflict also affected the territory of the Czech Republic.
1945 – 1991
The Time of Authoritarianism
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1939 – 1945
Times of War and Genocide
The Nazi occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 brought the Jewish population under the full weight of German racial legislation. The newly created Protectorate became a laboratory for applying the Nuremberg Laws beyond Germany’s borders: Jews were stripped of citizenship rights, registered and marked, excluded from economic life, banned from public spaces, and subjected to escalating restrictions on movement, residence and livelihood. Aryanisation dispossessed tens of thousands, while “emigration” offices coerced families into surrendering assets before forcing them out. These measures, implemented jointly by German authorities and compliant Protectorate institutions, created a social environment in which antisemitism was normalised and Jewish presence treated as a problem to be managed, controlled and ultimately removed.
From late 1941, antisemitic policy transformed into organised annihilation. The first deportations to ghettos in Łódź and Minsk marked the shift to systematic removal. Theresienstadt—established as both ghetto and transit camp—became the central mechanism of Nazi persecution in the Czech lands, combining starvation, disease, and brutal overcrowding with constant onward transports to extermination sites. Tens of thousands died within Theresienstadt’s walls; tens of thousands more were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, including entire transports to the so-called Family Camp, liquidated in two mass killings in 1944. Even as genocide progressed, Theresienstadt was cynically used for propaganda, presenting a staged façade of “humane” treatment to international observers. In the war’s final months, evacuation transports, new deportations of Jews from mixed marriages, and a typhus epidemic deepened the suffering. When the Red Army liberated Theresienstadt on 8 May 1945, the Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia had been almost entirely destroyed—victims of a system that combined legal discrimination, economic plunder, forced segregation, and industrialised murder into a single, relentless programme of antisemitic persecution.
Explore the Full History
Dive deeper into key moments that shaped antisemitism in Poland — from the Holocaust to the digital age.