History of Czech Statistics after 1918

Three months after the founding of an independent Czechoslovakia – on 28 January 1919 – The Revolutionary National Assembly passed Act No. 49 on Organising the Statistical Service. The principles of the Act were commensurate, at that time already, with those on which the present State statistical service in the Czech Republic is organised. The State Statistical Office was founded in 1919 as a new body authorized to engage in national statistical surveying, including a population census as one of the most important types of surveys. The Office developed, improved and expanded its activities during the period between both World Wars. This was facilitated also by its firm commitment to statistical theory. Almost a half of the Office’s capacity was devoted to scientific and theoretical activity in the 1920s and 1930s.
In the publication Czechoslovak Statistics in the First Decade of the Republic from 1928 the function of state statistics was characterized as follows:
“The purpose of the statistical service is to provide a picture of the state and development of conditions in the entire country, the final target of which is to achieve economic welfare, good morals, wellness and fitness of the entire population. These efforts, however, cannot be managed by chance or traditionalism and mere instinct – it has to be done consciously, according to a plan, precisely and continuously, i.e. in a scientific way. Nevertheless, it needs a prerequisite knowledge of all facts and conditions in the state. To continuously find out the facts, to pick up what is typical for them, what relations and mutual causal relationships are among them, what regularities are in their development, that is namely the task of the statistical service.”


COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY IS COMING

Already with the foundation of the State Statistical Office (SSO) it was clear that for big statistical surveys, e.g. population census, it would be needed to ensure necessary machinery. On 1 April 1920, the SSO hired on trial 13 punching machines and 4 sorting machines with counters from the company Powers Accounting Machine. The first work of the machines was to process materials on natural population change during the war years. Machinery of the SSO was then rapidly increasing. In 1929, it had 6 automatic punching machines, 1 manual perforator, 14 sorting machines and 4 accounting machines in the machine room, in which 68 people worked. In 1939, already 19 kinds of various statistics were processed with machines. In 1928, for example, 5,875,799 of cards were punched; in 1939 it was already 6,334,816 cards. In 1939, sorting machines processed in total 327,859,000 cards and accounting machines 19,896,000 cards.


IMPORTANT REPRESENTATIVES OF THE STATE STATISTICAL OFFICE IN 1919—1941

Dobroslav Krejčí (* 10. 1. 1869 † 24. 7. 1936)
He was a president of the SSO in 1919 - 1920. Professor Dr. Dobroslav Krejčí devoted to statistics all his life’s effort. In the beginning of 1898 he started to work in the newly formed Statistical Office of the Kingdom of Bohemia. From 1 November 1905 he managed the office on the position of a deputy chief until the office became part of the State Statistical Office in 1919. After the foundation of the SSO he became its first president. He is virtually an author of the first Czechoslovak law on statistics from 1919 and of other following documents. Publication activity of Dobroslav Krejčí includes over 100 important works dealing besides statistics also with national economy, constitutional and public law and other matters. He is also an author of the theoretical and methodological handbook called Basics of Statistics (1920 and 1923) and of the textbook Statistics (1928). He also dealt with a historical development of the Czech statistics.

František Weyr (* 25. 4. 1879 † 29. 6. 1951)
He was a president of the SSO in 1920 -1929. František Weyr belonged to excellent land officers, who devoted themselves fully to the service for the new state and participated in forming its administrative and scientific organizations. He finished his law studies at the Czech university in Prague; in 1903 – 1909 he worked as an officer at political administration of the proconsulate in Vienna, Central Statistical Commission and the Ministry of Education. He was a member of the Revolutionary National Assembly. He was one of the founders of the Faculty of Law of the Masaryk University in Brno; he was working there as a full professor and the first dean (1919 – 1920, later 1927 – 1928, and 1935 – 1936). In 1923 – 1924 he was a rector of the Masaryk University. What is of special importance for statistics are his organizational efforts, although he is also an author of several professional statistical studies (e.g. study on “Problem of Free Will and Statistics” from 1911, and work on exceptional people “Above-average Intelligence as a Collective Phenomenon” from 1927, which received favourable response also from the international public).

Jan Auerhan (* 2. 9. 1880 † 9. 6. 1942)
He was a president of the SSO in 1929 -1939. After graduation from law studies in 1906, still in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, he started to work in the Statistical Office of the Kingdom of Bohemia. From the foundation of the State Statistical Office in 1919 he was its employee and his career underwent a rapid development. In 1921 he became a ministerial counsellor, in 1926 head of a department and vice president of the SSO, of which he was president from 1929 to 1939. He lectured at the Charles University. His work enhanced the national statistics to the international level. According to him statistics should not be a speech of mere dry facts, because for the experts it vividly bears witness to the condition of the society with a minimal distortion. And that is why Jan Auerhan dealt with an issue, which was really topical at that time: questions of emigration and Czechoslovak minorities abroad. Here are names of some of his works: Czechoslovak Minorities Abroad; Destiny of Czech Emigrants in Prussia, Poland and Russia; Czech Settlements in Volyn, Crimea, and Caucasus; Language Minorities in Europe. He also dealt with statistics on forestry. He issued many other works that are until now a valuable source of information and not only historians can learn a lesson from them. During the Nazi occupation he – as a real patriot – was in touch with the domestic resistance movement and even despite a proper conspiracy he was arrested (when the martial law was declared after the attack on Reinhard Heydrich) and executed at the shooting range in Prague-Kobylisy.

Antonín Boháč (* 5. 3. 1882 † 27. 12. 1950)
Vice president of the office in 1934 – 1941. Antonín Boháč belonged to founders of our demography and statistics; he enhanced Czech demography to international level. After the World War I he was a member of Czechoslovak delegation at the peace conference in Paris, for which he elaborated many background materials on economic, population and legal conditions of the population especially in marginal and ethnic-mixed areas. In 1921, he procured as for organization the first Population and Housing Census in the Czechoslovak Republic and participated a lot in processing of the results (he prepared the plan of processing by a punch card technology). A similar role he had also in the second census in 1930. In 1925, he re-organized demographic statistics. He was an associate professor of demography and lectured “Basics of Population Science” at the Faculty of Science from the 1929/1930 school year. He was a co-founder of the Czechoslovak Statistical Association and a vice president of the Association for International Studies. In 1934, he became a vice president of the SSO. After Dr. Auerhan was deprived of his post of the SSO president in the end of March 1939, he headed the office from his post of the vice president until 1941, when the Nazi deprived him of his function and later forced him to stay in his native village Lišice near to the town of Kutná Hora. He is an author of the Map of Nationalities of the Czechoslovak Republic and of the following publications: The Capital City of Prague (1923), Czech Population Problem (1914); Our Population Problem and Statistics (1929).

During the World War II statistical activity in Bohemia and Moravia was limited; it conformed to war conditions and the status of our territory. The president of the State Statistical Office, Dr. Jan Auerhan, was already in the end of March 1939 forced to definitely retire, especially due to his works on minority policy. Dr. Jan Auerhan was on 6 June 1942 arrested by Gestapo and on 9 June 1942 shot. Also many other employees of the office were persecuted. Some were executed, others died in Nazi prisons and concentration camps.

Immediately after the end of World War II the State Statistical Office with a national authority was set up, aimed at re-achieving the high pre-war level of Czechoslovak statistics. The war had a significant impact on the national structure of Czech lands, especially as a result of the compulsory transfer of German inhabitants.

After 1948, in the context of the country’s fundamental social changes, the Czechoslovak statistics focused, especially in the economic sphere, on tasks of national economic surveying and on plan fulfilment supervision.

After the communist regime collapsed in 1989, preconditions for forming of an objective, impartial and non-party state statistical service recovered. As on 1 January 1993, the foundation date of the Czech Republic, the Czech Statistical Office (CZSO) assumed all responsibilities of a national body of statistics. Its tasks and status, as well as the principles and assignments of the State statistical service in the Czech Republic, were laid down in the Act No. 89/1995 Sb. (the Collection of Laws) on Statistical Service a most recent amendment of which was made in June 2006.