From the Communist coup d’état in February 1948 to the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Czechoslovakia was ruled by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Czech: Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ). The country belonged to the Eastern Bloc and was a member of the Warsaw Pact and of Comecon.

The master race (German: Herrenrasse, also referred to as Herrenvolk ( listen (help·info)) “master people”) is a concept in Nazi ideology in which the putative Nordic or Aryan races, predominant among Germans and other northern European peoples, are deemed the pinnacle of human racial hierarchy.

World War II is appropriately called “Hitler’s war.” Germany was so extraordinarily successful in the first two years that Hitler came close to realizing his aim of establishing hegemony in Europe.

Anschluss, German: “Union”, political union of Austria with Germany, achieved through annexation by Adolf Hitler in 1938. …

Following the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in March 1938, the conquest and breakup of Czechoslovakia became Hitler’s next ambition, which he obtained with the Munich Agreement in September 1938….German occupation of Czechoslovakia.

Interwar. Czechoslovakia gained independence in the aftermath of World War I, as Austria-Hungary fell apart, just as Poland regained independence as the Second Polish Republic after 123 years of partitions. Both emerging countries shared a long border, and soon became enveloped in a border conflict.

When the country regained its independence after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, the new name of Czechoslovakia was coined to reflect the union of the Czech and Slovak nations within one country.

The two sides were debating the name until Czechoslovakia, after 74 years as a nation, broke apart in 1993—into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. That year, the Terminological Committee of the Czech Office for Surveying, Mapping, and Cadaster named it Czechia, an English version of the Czech word Česko.

After World War I and the establishment of an independent Czechoslovak state, the whole of Bohemia became a part of Czechoslovakia, defying claims of the German speaking inhabitants that regions with German speaking majority should be included in the Republic of German-Austria.

The Sudeten and other Germans in Czechoslovakia numbered about 3,000,000 in the interwar period.

The Bohemians (Latin: Behemanni) or Bohemian Slavs (Bohemos Slavos, Boemanos Sclavos), were an early Slavic tribe in Bohemia (modern Czech Republic). Their land became recognized as the Duchy of Bohemia around 870.

The Sudetenland was a province in northern Czechoslovakia, bordering Germany. Germany wanted to expand its territory to include the Sudetenland and gain control of key military defences in the area. Once it had control of these defences, invading the rest of Czechoslovakia would be considerably easier.

When Adolf Hitler came to power, he wanted to unite all Germans into one nation. In September 1938 he turned his attention to the three million Germans living in part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. This was not actually the case, but Hitler used it as an excuse to place German troops along the Czech border.