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Abstract
In post‐war Czechoslovakia the so‐called ‘people's democracy’ moved to push the Church to the periphery of society. Ideological motives were mixed with anti‐Austrian and anti‐German feelings directed against the historical Germanocentrism of the Catholic Church. The process was facilitated by factionalism within the Czech Church hierarchy and its unwillingness to criticize openly the deportation of Germans and other anti‐German measures. The collective measures against clergy and laymen alike provided the communist party with opportunities to subvert, in order, German, Slovak and Hungarian sections of the Church and to smooth the way for the total suppression of the Church which was completed in Czechoslovakia by 1949–50.