Beneš, Edvard, born 28-05-1884 into a peasant family in the small town of Kožlany, Bohemia,
the youngest son and tenth child overall of Matěj Beneš (1843–1910) and Anna Petronila (born Beneš; (1840–1909) His brother was a Czechoslovak politician Vojta Beneš,
grandfather of Emilie Benes Brzezinski.
Emilie Benes Brzezinski, born Emilie Anna Benes (Geneva, 1932) is an American sculptor. Emilie Benes studied at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Shortly after college, she married Zbigniew Brzeziński, a political scientist and later national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter. She had three children. She had her first solo shows in Washington and New York in the 1970s. She has also exhibited at the Florence Biennale (2003) and a sculpture biennale in Vancouver, among others.



Voita died age 73 on 20-11-1973 in South Bend, USA. Edvard spent much of his youth in Vinohrady district of Prague, where he attended a grammar school. During this time he played football for Slavia Prague. After studies at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Charles University in Prague, he left for Paris and continued his studies at the Sorbonne and at the Independent School of Political and Social Studies. He completed his first degree in Dijon, where he received his Doctorate of Laws in 1908. He was involved in Scouting. During World War I, Beneš was one of the leading organizers of an independent Czechoslovakia abroad. He organized a Czech pro-independence anti-Austrian secret resistance movement called “Maffia”.
In September, 1915, he went into exile where in Paris he made intricate diplomatic efforts to gain recognition from France and the United Kingdom for the Czechoslovak independence movement, as he was from 1916–1918 a Secretary of the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris and Minister of the Interior and of Foreign Affairs within the Provisional Czechoslovak government. In May 1918 Beneš, Masaryk, and Stefanik were reported to be organizing a Czecho-Slovak army to fight for the Western Allies in France, recruited from among Czechs and Slovaks able to get to the front and also from the large emigrant populations in the United States, said to number more than one and a half million. From 1918–1935, Beneš was first and the longest serving Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, and from 1920–1925 and 1929–1935 a member of the Parliament.
He represented Czechoslovakia in talks of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1921 he was a professor and also from 1921–1922 Prime Minister. Between 1923–1927 he was a member of the League of Nations Council. He was a renowned and influential figure at international conferences, such as Genoa 1922, Locarno 1925, The Hague 1930, and Lausanne in 1932. Beneš was a member of the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party
and a strong Czechoslovakist – he did not consider Slovaks and Czechs to be separate ethnicities. In 1935, Beneš succeeded Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk
as President. Masayk died old age 87 on 14-09-1937, in Lány. Beneš opposed Nazi Germany’s claim to the German-speaking so-called Sudetenland in 1938. In October, the Sudeten Crisis brought Europe on the brink of war, which was averted only as France and Great Britain signed the Munich Agreement, which allowed for the immediate annexation and military occupation of the Sudetenland by Germany.




After this event, which proceeded without Czechoslovakian participation, Beneš was forced to resign on 05-10-1938 under German pressure and Emil Hacha
was chosen as President. In March 1939, Hácha’s government was bullied into authorizing the German occupation of the remaining territory of Czechia. On 22-10-1938 Beneš with his wife Hana Benešova’ (born 1909–1948),
went into exile in Putney, London
. In November 1940 in the wake of London Blitz, Beneš, his wife, their nieces, and his household staff moved to The Abbey at Aston Abbotts near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. The staff of his private office, including his Secretary Edvard Táborský and his chief of staff Jaromír Smutný, moved to The Old Manor House in the neighbouring village of Wingrave, while his military intelligence staff headed by František Moravec
was stationed in the nearby village of Addington. Moravec died age 71 on 26-07-1966 in Washington D.C. In 1940 he organized the Czechoslovak Government-in-Exile in London with Jan Šrámek as Prime Minister and himself as President. Edvard Beneš (right) gives medals to soldiers, including the later Operation Anthropoid assassins Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, 1940.










Death and burial ground of Beneš, Edvard.
Beneš had been in poor health since suffering two strokes in 1947, and he was rendered a broken man after seeing a situation come about that he had made his life’s work to avoid.





He died of natural causes at his villa in Sezimovo Ústí, Czechoslovakia
on 03-09-1948, age 64. He is interred along with his wife, she died 02-12-1974, in the garden of his villa and his bust is part of the gravestone.



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