Edvard Beneš
Edvard Beneš was Masaryk's foreign minister for seventeen years and his successor as president, was handed the Munich Agreement by Britain and France in September 1938 and accepted it rather than fight alone, led the government in exile through the war, came home in 1945 to expel three million Germans and make a treaty with Stalin, and in February 1948 accepted the communist government that ended the republic he had built twice; he died seven months later. He was born in 1884 in a Bohemian village, the tenth child of a farmer, studied in Prague, Paris and Dijon, and was the sociology lecturer who in 1915 followed Masaryk into exile and ran the Czechoslovak National Council's office in Paris, where the Allies came to recognise it as a government. He was foreign minister from the day the state existed in October 1918 until 1935, the architect of the Little Entente with Romania and Yugoslavia, the French alliance of 1924 and the Soviet one of 1935, and the most familiar face at Geneva, where he was president of the League assembly. He became president in December 1935 when Masaryk retired. Hitler made the Sudeten Germans his claim in 1938, Chamberlain flew three times, and on 30 September the four powers at Munich gave Germany the borderlands and the fortifications with them. Beneš, who had mobilised and been told by Paris and London that they would not march, yielded, resigned in October, and left for London. There, after the occupation of March 1939 he rebuilt a government the British recognised in 1941. He ordered the assassination of Heydrich in 1942, which cost Lidice. He signed the treaty with Stalin in December 1943 in Moscow against Churchill's advice, believing Czechoslovakia could be a bridge. He came home through Košice in April 1945 with communists in the key ministries, and issued the decrees that expelled the Germans and Hungarians and nationalised industry. In February 1948, ill from two strokes, faced with a communist-controlled police and militia in the streets and the resignation of the non-communist ministers, he accepted Gottwald's cabinet rather than risk civil war, refused in May to sign the new constitution, resigned in June and died in September at his villa at Sezimovo Ústí.
- Lived: 1884 CE – 1948 CE
- Nationality: Czech
- Roles: president, statesman
