Central Europe, understood here as the German-Danubian area between the Baltic Sea and the Hungarian Great Plain, and mostly located in the Socialist camp during the second half of the 20th Century, was neither a distant far East, nor an environmental desert during this whole period of time. Contrasting with the idea of the Socialism as a lagging-behind area in the field of Nature protection, National Parks have been created there during the very same period as in Western Europe, or even before Western Europe in some cases. This chapter intends first to demonstrate the significant legacy of nature protection in Central Europe, and then would like to investigate the specificities of National Parks during the Socialist era, wondering whether a specific political regime produced specific forms of protected areas. It will be demonstrated that there is neither a real “socialist” model of a national park, nor a “post-socialist” one, but rather a sum of very different national policies that converge today towards an integrated policy that has been built within the European Union. New national parks have quickly been created since 1990 in a “catching up” strategy, but with a much broader range of functions than before: not only ecological ones, but also economic and social ones in the idea of gaining a better social acceptance and applying the principles of a sustainable development of Central European rural areas.