Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II
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[edit] Background
There had been a German minority in Bohemia and Moravia ("Czech lands") for centuries. They had started coming, on the invitation of Bohemian kings as early as the 11th century.
The regions later called Sudetenland were situated on the borders of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which also consisted of Moravia (and later Silesia) and was in turn part of the Holy Roman Empire. After the extinction of the Czech Přemyslid dynasty, the kingdom was ruled by the Luxemburgs, later the Jagiellonians and finally the Habsburgs. Starting from the 13th century onwards the border regions of Bohemia and Moravia, called Sudetenland in the 20th century, were settled by Germans, who were invited by the originally Slavic Bohemian nobility.
Until the so-called "renewed constitution" of 1627, the German language was established as a second official language in the Czech lands. The Czech language remained the first language in the kingdom. Both German and Latin were widely spoken among the ruling classes, although German became increasingly dominant, while Czech was spoken in much of the countryside.
During the Habsburg Monarchy, especially from the 17th century onwards the German-speaking population became the privileged ethnic and linguistic group, while Czechs felt increasingly sidelined.
The Habsburgs integrated the Kingdom of Bohemia and Moravia into their monarchy, of which it remained a part until the modern nationalism gained power in the 19th century: conflicts between Czech and German nationalists emerged, for instance in the Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas: while the German-speaking population wanted to participate in the building of a German nation state, the Czech-speaking population insisted on keeping Bohemia out of such plans.
The relationship between the German-speaking and Czech-speaking populatons radically changed after World War I when independent Czechoslovakia was established. The three million ethnic Germans, nearly a quarter of Czechoslovakia's population, felt deeply disappointed and many strove for separation of the German inhabited regions.
Before the 1938 German annexation of the Sudetenland, roughly 20% of the population in Czechoslovakia were ethnic Germans.[1] Ethnic German nationalists backed by Hitler demanded the union of German-speaking districts with Germany. Threatening war, Hitler seized through the Munich Agreement in September 1938 the cession of the Bohemian, Moravian and Czech-Silesian borderlands - Sudetenland. In November 1938, Czechoslovakia was forced by Germany and Italy to also cede southern Slovakia (one third of Slovak territory) to Hungary. The Czechs in the greatly weakened Czechoslovak Republic were forced to grant major concessions to the non-Czechs. Eventually Germany seized all of Czechoslovakia.
[edit] Plans to expel the Sudeten Germans
Almost as soon as German troops occupied the Sudetenland in October 1938, Edvard Beneš pursued a two-fold policy: the restoration of Czechoslovakia in its pre-Munich boundaries and the removal, through a combination of minor border rectifications and population transfer, of the state’s disloyal German minority. Though the details changed along with British public and official opinion and pressure from the Czechunderground, Beneš’s broad goals remained the same throughout the war.
The pre-war policy of minority protection was now seen as useless and contraproductive (and the minorities themself were seen as the source of unrest and instability), because it led to the destruction of democratic regime and whole Czechoslovak state. Therefore the Czechoslovakian leaders made decision to change the multiethnical character of the state to the state of 2 or 3 nations (Czechs, Slovaks and initially also the Ruthenians). This goal should be reached by the transfer of the major part of minorities members and the succesive assimilation of the rest. Because almost all people of German and Magyar ethnicity gained German or Hungarian citizenship during the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the transfer could be legalized as the banishment (in German "Ausweisung") of the foreigners."[2]
On June 22, 1942, after plans for the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans had become known, Wenzel Jaksch (a Sudeten German Social Democrat in exile) wrote a letter to Dr. Edward Benes, the Czech President in exile in London protesting the proposed plans.[3]
[edit] Evacuation
On Himmler's orders, the majority of the roughly 120,000 Carpathian Germans from Slovakia had been evacuataed to the Protectorate and the occupied Šumava region.
[edit] Conditions in postwar Czechoslovakia
Developing a clear picture of the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia is difficult because of the chaotic conditions that existed at the end of the war. There was no stable central government and record-keeping was non-existent. Many of the events that occurred during that period were spontaneous and local rather than being the result of coordinated policy directives from a central government. Among these spontaneous events was the removal and detention of the Sudeten Germans which was triggered by the strong anti-German sentiment at the grass-roots level and organized by local officials.
Records of food rationing coupons show approximately 3,325,000 inhabitants of occupied Sudetenland in May 1945. Of these, about 500,000 were Czechs or other non-Germans. Thus, there were approximately 2,725,000 Germans in occupied Sudetenland in May 1945.
[edit] Chronology of the expulsions
At the end of World War II, Czechoslovakian president Edvard Beneš advocated a policy of "no mercy" toward the Germans and indicated the "German problem" would have to be solved by transfers/expulsion.
From London and Moscow, Czech and Slovak political agents in exile followed an advancing Soviet army pursuing German forces westward, to reach the territory of the first former Czechoslovak Republic. Benes proclaimed the program of the newly appointed Czechoslovak government on April 5, 1945, in the northeastern city of Kosice ( Kassa, Kaschau), which included oppression and persecution of the non-Czech and non-Slovak populations of the partially restored Czechoslovak Republic. After the proclamation of the Kosice program, the German and Hungarian population living in the reborn Czechoslovak state were subjected to various forms of persecution, including: expulsions, deportations, internments, peoples court procedures, citizenship revocations, property confiscation, condemnation to forced labour camps, involuntary changes of nationality and appointment of government managers to German and Hungarian owned businesses and farms, referred to euphemistically as “reslovakization.”
[edit] Role of the Czechoslovak army
The Czechoslovak army played a major, if not central, role in the expulsions. General Zdeněk Novák, head of the Prague military command "Alex", issued an order to "deport all Germans from territory within the historical borders".
The "Ten Commandments for Czechoslovak Soldiers in the Border Regions" directed soldiers that "The Germans have remained our irreconcilable enemies. Do not cease to hatae the Germans...Behave towards Germans like a victor... Be harsh to the Germans...German women and the Hitler Youth also bear the blame for the crimes of the Germans. Deal with them too in an uncompromising way."
On June 15, a government decree directed the army to implement measures to apprehend Nazi criminals and carry out the transfer of the German populaton. On July 27, the Ministry of National Defence, issued a secret order directing that ht etransfer should be carried out on as large a scale as possible and as expeditiously as possible so as to present the Western powers with a "fait accompli". British and American representatives were already calling for discussions about the timing and means by which the transfer was to be conducted. The Anglo-American vision was for the resettlement to start in about five years. In the interim, they envisioned only partial, internal transfers of the German population who were to be subjected to forced labour.
[edit] Beneš decrees
Between 1945 and 1948, an series of discriminatory anti-German and anti-Hungarian presidential decrees, edicts, laws and statutes were proclaimed by the president of the republic, the Prague-based Czechoslovak Parliament, the Slovak National Council (parliament) in Bratislava (Pressburg) and by the Board of Slovak Commissioners (an appendage of the Czechoslovak government in Bratislava).
The Beneš decrees are most often associated with the population transfer in 1945-47 of about 2.6 million former Czechoslovak citizens of German ethnicity (see also Sudetenland) to Germany and Austria. However, they do not directly refer to the expulsions; its advocates argue that the German exodus from Eastern Europe was agreed upon by the Allied powers at the Potsdam conference.
Some of the decrees concerned the expropriation of wartime "traitors" and collaborators accused of treason but also all Germans and Hungarians. They also ordered the removal of citizenship for people of German and Hungarian ethnic origin who were treated collectively as collaborators (these provisions were cancelled for the Hungarians in 1948). This was then used to confiscate their property and expel around 90% of the ethnic German population of Czechoslovakia. These people were collectively accused of supporting the Nazis (through the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP), political party led by Konrad Henlein) and the Third Reich's annexation of Czech borderland in 1938. Almost every decree explicitly stated that the sanctions did not apply to anti-fascists although the term anti-fascist was not explicitely defined . Some 250,000 Germans, some anti-fascists, but also people crucial for the industry remained in Czechoslovakia.
On May 19, 1945, Decree No. 5 of the President of the Republic proclaimed Germans in Czechoslovakia to be a people on which the state could not rely. This decree established the basis for a series of measures that would relegate the Germans to the status of second-class citizens and restrict their freedom of action in everyday life.
[edit] Incidents
In the summer of 1945 there were a number of incidents and localised massacres of the German population. The following examples are described in a study done by the European University Institute in Florence:[1]
- In the Prerov incident, 71 men, 120 women and 74 children, who were Slovak Germans just passing through Prerov railway station, were taken out of the train, taken outside of the city to a hill named "Svedske sance", there they were forced to dig their own graves and all were shot.
- 20,000 Germans were forced to leave Brno to camps in Austria. Some sources report 800 deaths.[4]
- Estimates of killed in the Ústí massacre range from 30 - 50 to 600 - 700 civilians. Some women and children were thrown off the bridge into the Elbe River and shot. Principals of this massacre were arrested and imprissoned.[5]
Other recorded incidents include:
- 763 people were shot dead in Postoloprty and the immediate vicinity.[4]
- June 18-19, 1945, 265 Germans from Dobšiná are murdered while being transported back to Slovakia by soldiers of the 17th Bratislava foot regiment.
- At the railway station in Horní Moštěnice near Přerov 265 people were shot dead, including 120 women and 74 children.
[edit] Internment camps
A large number of Germans, most but by no means all of them active Nazis, were interned immediately after the liberation of Czechoslvakia. 1,215 internment camps, 846 work and disciplinary centres and 215 prisons were established on Czechoslovak territory. According to German figures, about 350,000 of the 2,750,000 Germans in Czechoslovakia passed through one or more of these institutions.
By the autumn of 1945, there were more than 150,000 people living in the internment camps including more than 16,000 children age 15 and younger.
In his book, "Our Threatened Values," (London 1946) Victor Gollancz described the conditions Sudeten German civilians were faced with in a Czech concentration camp: "They live crammed together in shacks without consideration for gender and age ... They ranged in age from 4 to 80. Everyone looked emaciated ... the most shocking sights were the babies ... nearby stood another mother with a shrivelled bundle of skin and bones in her arms ... Two old women lay as if dead on two cots. Only upon closer inspection, did one discover that they were still lightly breathing. They were, like those babies, nearly dead from hunger ..."
According to Alfred de Zayas:
- One of the worst camps in post-war Czechoslovakia was the old Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Conditions under the new Czech administration are described by H. G. Adler, a former Jewish inmate as follows: ... in the majority they were children and juveniles, who had only been locked up because they were Germans. Only because they were Germans...? This sentence sounds frighteningly familiar; only the word 'Jews' had been changed to 'Germans'. [...] The people were abominably fed and maltreated, and they were no better off than one was used to from German concentration camps.
- The civilian internees who survived to be expelled recorded the horrors of month and years of slow starvation and maltreatment in many thousands of affidavits. Allied authorities in the American and British zones were able to investigate several cases, including the notorious concentration camp at Budweis in Southern Bohemia. The deputy commander of this camp in the years 1945-6, Vaclav Hrnecek, later fled Czechoslovakia and came to Bavaria where he was recognized by former German inmates of the camp. Hrnecek was brought to trial before an American Court of the Allied High Commission for Germany presided by Judge Leo M. Goodman. The Court based an eight-year sentence against Hrnecek upon findings that the Budweis camp was run in a criminal and cruel way, that although there were no gas chambers and no systematic, organized extermination, the camp was a centre of sadism, where human life and human dignity had no meaning.[6]
Conditions in in the internment camp near Kolin, in which internees were raped and beaten and two of them were killed were investigated by the Czechoslovak parliament.
According to a rough estimate by Tomás Staněk, approximately 10,000 people died in Bohemian and Moravian camps and prisons from 1945 to 1948. The causes of death included epidemics, undernourishment, overall exhaustion and old age, but also ill-treatment and executions.
[edit] Expulsions
Germans living in the border regions of Czechoslovakia were expelled from the country in late 1945. Several thousand died violently (some sources refers to 16.000 reported direct violent death including 6000 suicides[7] during the expulsion and many more died from hunger and illness as a consequence. In 1946, an estimated 1.3 million ethnic Germans were deported to the American zone of what would become West Germany. An estimated 800,000 were deported to the Soviet zone (in what would become East Germany). [1]
[edit] Law No. 115
On 8 May 1946 the Czech provisional National Assembly passed Law No. 115. It is one of the most controversial laws enacted in conjunction with the Beneš decrees as it specifies that "Any act committed between September 30, 1938 and October 28, 1945, the object of which was to aid the struggle for liberty of the Czechs and Slovaks or which represented just reprisals for actions of the occupation forces and their accomplices, is not illegal, even when such acts may otherwise be punishable by law."
This law, which is still in force, has ensured that no atrocities against Germans during the time-period in question have been prosecuted in Czechoslovakia. .[2]
However, the Czech government did express its regret in 1997.
III. "The Czech side regrets that, by the forcible expulsion and forced resettlement of Sudeten Germans from the former Czechoslovakia after the war as well as by the expropriation and deprivation of citizenship, much suffering and injustice was inflicted upon innocent people, also in view of the fact that guilt was attributed collectively. It particularly regrets the excesses which were contrary to elementary humanitarian principles as well as legal norms existing at that time, and it furthermore regrets that Law No. 115 of 8 May 1946 made it possible to regard these excesses as not being illegal and that in consequence these acts were not punished."
[edit] Results
German sources estimate that between 3 million and 3.4 million German civilians were to be found in Czechoslovak territory at the end of the war.[citation needed]
[edit] Casualties
Estimates of casualties range between 15,000 and 270,000 people, depending on source.
They died in internment camps and on the roads.[3] Approximately 10,000 died in "internment camps" in the years 1945-1948[8]
[edit] See also
- History of Czechoslovakia
- Beneš decrees
- Expulsion of Germans after World War II
- German exodus from Eastern Europe
- Demographic estimates of the German exodus from Eastern Europe
- Sudetenland
- Ústí massacre
[edit] References
- ^ a b The Expulsion of 'German' Communities from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, European University Institute, Florense. HEC No. 2004/1. pg. 18.
- ^ Trávníček, Miroslav: Osidlování s hlediska mezinárodního a vnitrostátního právního řádu. Časopis pro právní a státní vědu. XXVII/1946
- ^ http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/sginferno/sgi04.html#jaksch
- ^ a b Z. Beneš, et. al, p. 221
- ^ Z. Beneš, et. al
- ^ Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1977 ISBN 0710084684 pp. 124ff.
- ^ Z. Beneš, et. al
- ^ Z. Beneš, et. al, p. 223
[edit] Other resources
- Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans Survivors speak out. Self-published by the Study Group for the Preservation of Sudeten German Interests, 1951
Translation © 2002 by The Scriptorium.
