The Life of Edvard Benes, 1884-1948

Edvard Benes was a key figure in the history of Czechoslovakia in the first three decades of her existence. He helped Thomas Masaryk to found the state in the First World War; and in the 1920s he worked on foreign policy and was briefly prime minister before being elected president in 1935. His Presidency saw the loss of the Sudetenland at Munich in 1938, followed by German occupation in 1939, which forced Benes to form a London-based government-in-exile for the duration of the war. He lived to see a brief period of restored independence (1945-48), and died in 1948, the year when Czechoslovakia became another satellite state in Stalin's Soviet Union.