The fifteenth volume of the Great History of the Lands of the Czech Crown is dedicated to a short but key period from 1338 to 1945. The independent Czechoslovak state, after only twenty years of existence, was first territorially diminished, stripped of the basic political and economic prerequisites for independent existence, and survived in the form of the Second Republic for only half a year at the mercy of Nazi Germany. After the declaration of an independent Slovak state in the spring of 1939, Bohemia and Moravia found themselves under German protectorate, and despite some attributes of sovereignty, they faced the threat of becoming an integral part of the Third Reich in a relatively short time. The Czech nation, in existential danger, took a wide range of positions from active collaboration with the Nazis to armed resistance.
