During the Nazi Occupation of the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazis killed 78,150 of the Protectorate’s Jews and some estimates put the figure of Czechs killed as high as 48,000. The Nazi puppet state of Slovakia also collaborated in handing over its Jews, 68,000 of whom died in the Holocaust.(53) Czech historians have generally played down the number of Sudeten German deaths, with some arguing that only 6,000 Germans died as a result of their ethnic cleansing, a ludicrous figure in light of the tens of thousands of witness statements — including those of the Red Cross — which demonstrate otherwise. What happened to over 250,000 German citizens who resided in Bohemia and Moravia in early 1945, and were never seen again, cannot simply be explained away. Where are they? Some may have been deported by the Soviets as slave labour, and a few may have emigrated further afield, but the majority clearly died at the hands of the militias, or as a result of the appalling conditions of the makeshift camps and prisons in which they were held across the country. The idea that in the process of forcibly removing 3.5 million ethnic Germans from their ancient homelands that a mere 1 per cent of them died as a result of six months of mob rule, during the early phase of the wild expulsions, or during the hounding of often elderly, very young or sick people across the borders makes no sense. This would put the death toll of the Sudeten German expulsions on a par with that of healthy young German POWs who were well treated in Western Allied prisoner of war camps until the end of the war. What would it take for you to leave your home, all your worldly possessions, the house you had built or furnished, the business you or your parents or grandparents had founded? Would a knock at the door and a group of men in uniform telling you that you had to assemble in the main square in thirty minutes, taking no more than one suitcase, leave everything behind, handing over the keys suffice? Or would you not close the door and think that it was surreal? Would you go willingly and just walk out of the door? Most people whom I have asked that question find it almost unimaginable but state that they would put up a fight. Many did and the consequence of resistance was nearly always death. The truth is that only the sight of and use of extreme violence and the threat of death would force a person to leave everything they and their family had worked for over generations. Only the fear for your own life and that of your family would have you walk nervously out of your own front door towards the assembly points and hope that you would at least come out of this with your life.
Although the process of the expulsions did become more orderly from mid 1946 onwards, the expulsions took years, during which tens of thousands continued to languish in transit camps, before being transported, all too often in appalling, often fatal conditions across the border. Sudeten Germans were also kept and continued to die in Czech forced labour camps for many years after the expulsions had officially ended. In 1949 the Vojna prison labour camp near Pribram (Pribrans) was the largest ‘political prisoner’ camp in Czechoslovakia, which housed predominantly Sudeten Germans. A prison camp with watch towers, surrounded by minefields and where a sign in the Czech language above the entrance of the camp read, ‘Work makes you free’.(54)
As with all the expulsions, a true exact figure for the overall death toll will never be known, but it is unequivocal to state that in their orchestrated revenge and one that was sanctioned from the very top, many more Germans found their deaths at the hands of organised Czech mobs than any post-war Czech government has been willing to admit to. Czech revenge was on a par with that meted out by the Poles who suffered immeasurably more at the hands of the Nazi occupation in Poland.
A final point, with regard to the ceaseless regret expressed by many Czechs about their fate of being occupied not only by the Germans, but then the Russians, is that in no other state in Eastern Europe did any of its elected representatives or exiled governments do more to hand their country over on a plate to Soviet rule than the regime of Edvard Beneš. Transcripts survive of the state visit made by Beneš to Moscow in December 1943. He effectively made himself and his country a vassal of the Soviet Union. Again, and again, he stated that he would reach no conclusion with the Western Allies until he had first reached agreement with the Soviets. He described the Soviet system as a model for the future Czech nation.
On 5th April 1945 when Beneš and his government first set foot on Czechoslovak soil again, they formulated the Košice (Kaschau) Programme. Beneš poured praise on the Russians for their ‘selfless example of sacrifice and limitless heroism’. He also promised that the Czech army would take on the same organisational structures, the same weaponry and the same training as the Red Army. Again and again, he repeated that the regime would pursue the ‘Slavic Line’ and would go on to establish Soviet-style national committees, which came to be dominated by communists.(55) Beneš was effusive about his pan-Slav nationalism and the need to punish Slovaks for betraying the Slavic family. The programme made it clear that all Germans and Hungarians had their citizenship revoked forthwith and that their land, property, companies and bank accounts would be confiscated, taken over by the state, and that the private property of Czech and Slovak citizens would be next. Beneš was working towards a Soviet Socialist model for his state and played right into the hands of the communists. Of the Eastern Bloc states, only Czechoslovakia was not forced either into an alliance with the Soviet Union or to go communist. In fact in 1946, the Communist Party’s support in Czechoslovakia already made it the largest party with a support base as large as that of all the other parties put together. By 1948 the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia was proportionately, in terms of its membership and electoral support, the largest in the world. Every third adult in the country was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.(56) Ardent Czech nationalists fail to see the irony, when they blame the Germans for all their ills, that had they not expelled 3.5 million Sudeten Germans then it would have been all but impossible for the Communist Party to have a achieved an electoral majority in 1948.
If Ottokar II, Charles IV, Rudolf II, Mozart or Kafka were to return to Bohemia today, none of them would recognise it. The Jews and the Germans who did so much to shape the cultural and architectural landscape of Bohemia are gone, and the new nation is not richer for it. The ancient kingdom of Bohemia is no more; it died at Theresienstadt, Lidice and Aussig and cannot be resurrected. The only German names that continue to exist in the former German East are Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.lxv
xxxix The literal English translations of these names are: Farmer, Miller, Potter, God, Godwood and Black Mountain.
xl The most enduring legacy of John’s reign was that Bohemia acquired acceptance of feudal overlordship over the wealthy province of Silesia from the Polish Piast Silesian nobility from 1318. The Polish King, Casimir the Great, formally recognised the loss of Silesia to Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire in 1335. As a result, this became one of the most stable borders in European history, remaining unchanged till the Napoleonic era. The carve-up of Silesia did not begin until after the First World War, and the region has remained divided to various degrees between Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic ever since.
xli Georg von Podiebrad, the last Czech king to rule Bohemia, did so from 1458–71. There would not be another Czech ruler in Bohemia until 1918.(22)
xlii During Rudolf II’s reign the Chief Rabbi was Rabbi Loew of Worms who created the character known as ‘the Golem’. The stories he wrote became part of the fabric of the mystical old city of Prague.(24)
xliii As indeed they would some sixty-three years later in England, during the Glorious Revolution, when Parliament preferred a Dutch Protestant as king over an English Catholic.
xliv Radical pan-Slavic elements at the congress gave the world a foretaste of the disastrous consequences this new form of ethnic nationalism would bring, calling for all Finns, Germans, Italians and Turks to be expelled in a line drawn from the Oder river on the Baltic, to Trieste on the Adriatic. Yet they had to wait almost a hundred years for an ethnic Georgian — Stalin — to make this ‘dream’ a reality. The
battle lines were being drawn for a bloody European future. The congress broke up in violent disarray.(5)
xlv The Hungarians lost no time in Magyarising their non-Hungarian dominions in Croatia, Slawonia, Dalmatia and Bosnia — stoking the fires of new nationalisms along the way.
xlvi With the Pittsburgh Convention, Masaryk promised the Slovaks considerable autonomy within the new state, including their own courts, parliament and use of their own language,(17) a commitment he reneged upon, to the lasting bitterness of the Slovaks, who saw their erstwhile Hungarian masters replaced by the Czechs. Their bitterness was enough to have them cede from Czechoslovakia in 1939 and become one of Hitler’s central European satellites. Czechs and Slovaks were forced to ‘remarry’ in 1945 but the separation of the two states in 1993 is seen by both sides as being permanent.
xlvii For a full list of the enormously varied industries in the German Sudeten regions, and their percentage value to the overall industry in Czechoslovakia, see appendix. Beneš was probably well aware that Czechoslovakia would have few friends left after the peace conference, having robbed Austria, Hungary and Poland of territory, and would soon alienate the Slovaks. Britain and France were far away; what gains he was accumulating for himself and his new country now, he would do at the expense of leaving the fledgling state of Czechoslovakia friendless and alone during her greatest hour of need.
xlviii The Czechs’ fine words were not mirrored by their actions. When Hungary descended into communist anarchy, the Czechs took full advantage; marching in and claiming more territory from the Hungarians, including their last coalmine. On the whole, it was the French who did more than anyone else to help shape realities on the ground. Their troops went in everywhere in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkans to gain the most favourable territorial terms for her new Central European satellites and least favourably to her Austro-Hungarian and German enemies, and to hell with the ethnic consequences.(27) No nation bears a greater responsibility for the messy and explosive ethnic carving-up of Central Europe following the First World War than France, a legacy that remained well into the latter part of the twentieth century, with the bloody collapse of the artificial creation of Yugoslavia, and the more civilised, if still at times acrimonious, split between Czechs and Slovaks.
xlix Of the land not nationalised in the land grab, 95 per cent was sold to Czechs.
l Czech nationalism had a long history of anti-Semitism, which had always tended to lump Jews (who primarily spoke German or Yiddish) together with Germans. Czech authorities extradited fleeing German and Austrian Jews back to the Third Reich abandoning them to their fate. One Czech academic I spoke to blamed the post-1945 expulsion of numerous Jews from Czechoslovakia to Germany as ‘only affecting those Jews who were Nazi sympathisers.’ He clearly believed there were Jewish Nazi sympathisers in Bohemia and Moravia following the Holocaust. During the First Republic Czech authorities also vilified Catholics as reactionary, alien, un-Czech, seeking Habsburg restoration, and as well as removing crucifixes from schools, nationalists removed and attacked Catholic statues. This created ever-greater tension with Slovaks who remained staunchly Catholic; the post-Munich autonomous and later independent Nazi German satellite Slovak state having been described as clerico-fascist. Both Czech and Slovak authorities however were united in their persecution of their Gypsy minorities setting up and sending them to forced labour camps, prior to their being sent to the German-run Gypsy camp at Auschwitz.(34a)
li Shortly after its formation the SdP amazingly won the largest number of votes in the May 1935 election gaining 15.2 per cent of the vote, ahead of the Czech Agrarian and Social Democratic Parties with 14.3 per cent and 12.6 per cent respectively, showing the strength of disaffection among the Sudeten community with the policies emanating from Prague.
lii The Munich solution had in fact been around for a considerable time and was previously suggested by the Czechs, even if it was on less generous terms. The idea that a few thousand square kilometres of the totally German mountainous border regions of the Czech republic could be given over to Germany with the aim of then rounding up all remaining German populations throughout the country and herding them across the border to join them, was not new at all. Julius Grégr’s 1888 plan was one of numerous such examples. And in September 1938, Beneš, rather than seeing the entire border region lost, sent his Minister for Social Affairs to London with another document to float. Whatever commitment Britain and France made to the remainder of Czechoslovakia after Munich, their most fateful mistake was not to make it crystal clear to Hitler that they would take him at his word, that he: ‘… had no more territorial ambitions in Europe’, and to draw a line in the sand making it clear, beyond question, that if he attempted to make further gains in Czechoslovakia, or Poland, that this would mean war. This catastrophic failure resulted in Hitler believing that neither Britain nor France had either any stomach for war, nor any interest in reining in Germany’s destruction of the Versailles treaty in Eastern Europe.
liii President Hindenburg disparagingly called Hitler ‘Austria’s revenge for Königgrätz’ and ‘that damn Bohemian corporal’. He obviously still regarded Bohemia as being an integral part of Austria, irrespective of the creation of Czechoslovakia. Königgrätz was the final battle in a crushing victory that Prussia scored over Austria during the Austro-Prussia war in 1866; also known by some commentators at the time as ‘The German Civil War’. Goebbels, who was the master of propaganda within the Third Reich, loved movies and had a particular weakness for attractive actresses with whom he had a string of affairs. Somewhat ironically in view of the Nazis virulent anti-Slavic prejudices one of Goebbels’ most enduring affairs was with Lida Baarov, a beautiful Czech actress.
liv Many nations were reluctant to accept the ever-increasing number of refugees flooding out of Nazi Germany. No matter how unattractive life had become for the German minority in Czechoslovakia, the alternatives looked no better. Russia went communist in 1918. Hungary went communist and then fascist in the space of two years, with Admiral Horthy taking control in 1920, Italy went fascist under Mussolini in 1922. Marshal Piłsudski took power in Poland after a military coup in 1926, then Salazar took control of Portugal in 1932, and Austria went clerico-fascist in 1934, Franco took control of all of Spain in 1936. Add to this the Baltic and Balkan dictatorships and you soon come to realise that democracy was a rare commodity in Europe during the inter-war period.(2)
lv One of the clauses of the Munich Agreement included the removal of Czech civil servants and administrators from the Sudeten regions that had been ceded to the Third Reich.
lvi Czech claims for reparations were utterly outlandish. The country had suffered less physical damage than any other continental European country, bar Switzerland. The Sudeten German expellees on the other hand valued their losses at USD $20 billion in 1947, which was more than the entire amount in grants given by the US in Marshall Aid to Europe after the war, and would be worth in excess of $40 billion at today’s exchange rates.(14)
lvii Beneš’ decrees not only remain on the Czech and Slovak statute books, they were reconfirmed in 1993 by both parliaments, and the Slovak parliament reconfirmed the decrees again as late as 20 September 2007, to the particular chagrin of the minority Hungarian Slovak Deputies and the Hungarian Government in Budapest. The decrees are based on the continuing claim of the ‘collective guilt’ of the ethnic German and Hungarian minorities and their complicity in the crimes of the Third Reich. The International Courts on Human Rights have thus far refused to rule on these heinous decrees arguing human rights laws only came into being after 1946.
lviii The only black comic irony is that many of the Alaska Express riders who dispossessed the Germans and Hungarians of their land, property and businesses, lost it again in the Moscow-inspired communist coup of October 1948, when all property was nationalised.
lix A Czech documentary film made for television covered this double massacre that took place at Lesche.
lx Ma
ss graves are continually being uncovered in the Czech Republic filled with the victims of the genocide against the Sudeten German communities committed after the end of the Second World War. Mass graves have been discovered at over 145 different sites in the Czech Republic and are presumed to exist in many more. In September 2010, the remains of some 5,500 German victims of the slaughter, after extensive consultations between the Czech authorities and the German War Graves Commission, were given a final resting place in a specially dedicated cemetery in the border town of Eger (Cheb). The cemetery is expected to take all future such finds which continue to be unearthed. A month after the ceremony had taken place the Czech mayor of Cheb demanded compensation for his ‘generosity’ in the form of 650 hectares of the Egerer Stadtwald (a forest/park) which had been part of the town before the war but somehow had not been incorporated into the post-war territory of Czechoslovakia. Remarkably the German court in Regensburg acceded to this request. This did not generate a single headline in the mainstream German media. It is hard to imagine that any other European nation would give up its territory so willingly.(43)
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