Seeing the end of the
First Czechoslovak Republic as a
fait accompli,
Edvard Beneš resigned as president one week after the
Munich Agreement ceded the
Sudetenland to
Nazi Germany. He initially fled to London. On 15 February 1939, he arrived in
Chicago; he became visiting professor at the
University of Chicago, where he took refuge in the same community that had once buoyed his predecessor and friend,
Tomáš Masaryk. While there, he was urged to quickly return to
Europe to organize some kind of government-in-exile. He therefore returned to Europe in July to live in Paris along with several other key players in his former administration. After
World War II formally began, the group became known as the Czech National Liberation Committee and immediately began to seek international recognition as the exiled government of Czechoslovakia. Claiming that his 1938 resignation had been under duress, Beneš named himself president. Longtime
People's Party leader
Jan Šrámek became prime minister. By the end of 1939, though, France and
Britain had extended it the right to conclude international treaties – France on 13 November and Britain on 20 December 1939 – but did not yet see those treaties as having been concluded in the name of the Czechoslovak Republic. It was in fact France itself that proved the greatest obstacle to accepting the committee as a full
government-in-exile. The government of
Édouard Daladier was ambivalent towards the ambitions of the Committee and of Czechoslovakia in general. Though he had publicly seen the
appeasement of Hitler as the road to war, Daladier ultimately capitulated to the wishes of
Neville Chamberlain. After the war came, he and his government dithered over whether the Soviet or Nazi threat was the greater. Likewise, though he extended recognition to the committee as a non-governmental agency, his government was non-committal to Beneš himself, and saw many possibilities for a post-war Czechoslovakia. fighting alongside Poles and Australians at the
Siege of Tobruk One of its principal reservations about giving governmental status to Beneš, was the fact of the murky situation in the then-independent
Slovakia (which was a satellite state of Nazi Germany). The French government of the winter of 1939–1940 felt that Beneš was not necessarily speaking for all Czechoslovaks, The
United States and the
Soviet Union were effectively forced to do the same later in the year, as Slovakia declared war on the two countries. With an
Axis government both firmly and formally in place in
Bratislava, the only friendly government left to recognize by the later half of 1941 was that of Beneš. The remaining legal question was whether the Beneš government was actually a
continuation of the First Republic, or a successor without solid constitutional underpinnings. This doubt was erased by the spring of 1942. Following almost six months of planning behind enemy lines, Czechoslovak Allied operatives in
Bohemia fatally wounded
Reinhard Heydrich, the dictator at the head of the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The success of this mission,
Operation Anthropoid, caused Britain and
Free France (itself a government-in-exile) to formally repudiate the
Munich Agreement, thus conferring
de jure legitimacy on the Beneš government as the continuation of the First Republic. The government's continued health now depended on Allied military victory. ==Planning for the future==