Sudeten-German Inferno By Ingomar Post The hushed-up tragedy of the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia Forward As we stand at the threshold of a new millennium, we look back on what is perhaps the most terrible century in the history of mankind. A chapter in its own right is the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from their homeland. Theirs was ancestral German land which had been inhabited by their German forebears for at least 2,000 years1 and of which their centuries of hard work and diligence had wrought a paradise. In time, Czechs trickled into the region, and soon the invaders tyrannized and oppressed the good-natured Sudeten Germans, with the intent to eradicate them, as the following accounts clearly show: "The district physician of Graslitz, a district with a population of 25,000, reports officially and on his professional responsibility: black barley-malt coffee without milk or cream is the food that babies are given, and older children get coffee, bread and potatoes. The children are undernourished and anemic. They have no clothes. Entire families live in cramped holes where the floor is the only place to sleep. "In winter there is no coal with which to heat. Mother, give me some water, I'm so hungry, beg the children - and the physician (who clearly feels that this will perhaps be disbelieved) says that he can take it on his oath that this is a direct quote, and that there was cause for it. In one family of six - parents, three children and a mother-in-law - the family members literally go naked. They have neither stockings nor shoes, nor shirts. They live on black coffee for breakfast, soup for lunch, and there is no supper. They are slowly but surely dying out. In the Adlergebirge mountains the people supplement their bread with tree bark, while the government orders tons of grain dumped into the Moldau river to keep the prices from dropping. A large part of the population has been eating cats and dogs."2 And what was the public response to this? "Embarrassed silence abroad, and at home, vile incitement against all those who allegedly sullied the Czech nation's reputation with their warnings. "Now it was clear that the Sudeten Germans were supposed to be wiped out, for economic impoverishment plus social ruination, plus political hopelessness, plus national chauvinism on the part of the Czechs, added up to the destruction of the essence of the Sudeten German ethnic group, despite all Sudeten German efforts to ward this off. The systematic displacement of the Germans from the employment scene resulted in a catastrophic drop in the birth rate." 3 This is how matters stood in the Sudetenland when it was forced to become part of Czechoslovakia in 1918. And if Hitler had not restored the Sudetenland to the German Reich, the genocide of the Sudeten Germans would already have been a fait accompli even then. Yet despite all this, the two ethnic groups, the Czechs and the Sudeten Germans, lived peaceably together during the Third Reich. This fact casts a highly significant light on the character of the Sudeten Germans: after all, they could have taken revenge now. But after the end of this deplorable war, in 1945, the tables once again turned to the disadvantage of the unfortunate German population, and the Czechs in their godlessness were seized by a blood frenzy that could not possibly have been any more gruesome. They must have been possessed by the devil: who else could have guided their hands as they celebrated slaughter feasts and intoxicated themselves with orgies of murder? Whose voice was it that ranted from the lips of their 'men of God': "You can kill the Germans, that's no sin!" Were those God's words? Surely not. I myself heard such a call to mass murder as it was being preached from the pulpits of the German churches by the Czech 'servants of God' in those days. The Czech President Eduard Benes, back from exile in London, incited the already-crazed population via the radio: "Take everything from the Germans, leave them only a handkerchief to weep into!" In Prague Germans were hung head-down from the lamp posts and set on fire as living torches in Benes's honor. Ever since, the number of victims has been cited as 250,000. "Files from the SBZ/German Democratic Republic which were not accessible until 1990 showed that this figure was actually much higher and must now be set at no less than 460,000."4 And now, half a century later, a "New Order" is to be established. Over the decades, the Sudeten Germans' suffering was mentioned less and less, until finally the topic was banished into the darkest corner of history's broom closet by the German government itself. This government now supports the Czech Republic's admission to NATO; it reassures the Czechs that the Sudeten German expellees make no claim for restitution, and the Czechs need not even renounce their Mr. Benes's disgraceful decrees. That is nothing less than legitimatized genocide, for in just one more generation there will be no more Sudeten Germans - the survivors have become assimilated by the rest of the German population. At the same time the Czechs grow ever more brazen and even demand "restitution" from the Germans! For what, is beyond me. As though it were not enough that they stole the land and the people's wealth - goods of inestimable value - they let this former gem of a region go to rack and ruin and even want to be paid for it! On this putrefaction, a "New Order" is now to be built; on a foundation of unatoned-for crimes, festering wounds, and the bitterness of the unfairly treated! And this is supposed to end well? I doubt it will. Herta Ruthard, eyewitness September 1999 Ingomar Pust - Sudeten-German Inferno (Continued) Prologue Probably all civilized nations on earth agree on one point: man, the most intelligent being in Creation, bears sole responsibility for everything that happens on our planet - with the exception of such acts of nature, of course, as are beyond human influence. And so our incarnation - or anthropogenesis, if the reader prefers - brought with it an unconditional cosmic morality that progressed to cultural levels whose degree and promise varied with the races and tribes that sprang up in the course of mankind's development. While some pursued their genetic impetus to the pinnacle, others have remained in spiritual narrowness and intellectual inadequacy, at a stone-age level to this day. Others again, however - particularly tribes and peoples that developed in a tradition of warlike violence - have retained incomprehensible sadism, inhuman cruelty as indestructible and unfortunate characteristics. In the sixth century A.D. the Czechs advanced into Central Europe in the footsteps of the Awars, without at first forming a unified tribe or nation. Even today the physical appearance of many Czechs reveals their genetic mixing with the Awars. But the bestialities engaged in by their oppressors is another factor of which they were never able to rid themselves completely. Even once they had begun to develop their own ethnicity they continued to manifest these inherited vices. Particularly since the Hussite wars of the 15th century, and right to the present day, they have tended towards open or (more often) clandestine cloak-and-dagger activity. Yet they have their German neighbors alone to thank for anything and everything they can boast in the line of culture and civilization. Since achieving ethnic unity this nation has fluctuated between the extremes of obsequious servility and hate-filled presumptuousness. It may be that this nation, wedged as it was right into the living space of the Germans, found itself backed into a moral corner where its baser instincts gained the upper hand. Virtually paralyzed by the unequaled creative genius of their larger German neighbor, the ambitious Czechs developed those complexes which, when additionally fueled by envy and resentment, have resulted in their well-known explosive outbursts. And this soul-deep unease is the driving force behind their boundless chauvinism. Only in this way can their most regrettable characteristic - their occasional blood frenzy - be explained. Throughout the many centuries that the Germans coexisted with the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia there was not one single case of a German having killed a Czech out of hatred or revenge. In contrast, what the following chapters describe can hardly be surpassed in its bestiality, or in its death toll of 241,000 German lives! This would truly be a subject fit for television - yet all the world's media have studiously ignored it for more than 50 years now, for indeed these mind-boggling atrocities were followed up with what may justly be called the crime of the century: the comprehensive expulsion of the entire Sudeten German ethnic group from their homeland which they had settled and made arable seven and even more centuries earlier. And this global crime was part and parcel of the Allied crusade for "Christianity and humanitarianism"! Alexander Hoyer -Eyewitness Chapter One Conspiracy of Silence The Federal Convention of Sudeten Germans has offered a prize for the best movie script written to portray the horrors of the expulsion. But will it be possible? The historical records exist: a grisly documentation, the mere reading of which is enough to cause nausea. But nevertheless it will hardly be possible to turn it into a movie true to life. It might be possible to reconstruct death marches and mass executions, to show bodies with their noses, ears and private parts cut off, wounded being thrown out of windows, people being roasted head-down over open fires. It might be possible to portray the naked women, on their knees being whipped through the streets of Prague strewn with glass shards. It might be possible to film the thousands of women that were thrown into the rivers Moldau and Elbe together with their children and baby carriages and then raked with machine gun fire. It might be possible to use dummy dolls to represent the heads of the dead mothers and babies still sticking out of the filth of the camp latrines where they had been thrown, until they were finally covered over by the excrement of their fellow-sufferers. It might even be possible to show bloody bundles of tortured people on the ground being forced to swallow human excrement, and gags covered in such excrement being forced into their mouths. But who would be able to recreate the screams of the Germans whose torn bodies were rubbed with hydrochloric acid, who were beaten until their private parts were reduced to bloody lumps? Who is to recreate the screams of the women, whipped bloody, who were shoved naked, rear down, onto SS daggers? Hundreds of thousands went through this hell of torture before they were beaten to death or shot. Specifically: 241,000. The number of soldiers who died in the course of this outburst of sadism is probably no less. And that was only part of the gigantic massacre in the East and Southeast. In his comprehensive and dispassionate work Deutscher Exodus (Seewald Verlag), Gerhard Ziemer writes: "According to a very painstaking calculation of the Federal Statistical Office in Wiesbaden, the German civilian population lost 2,280,000 members to flight, expulsion and deportation. These people were shot or beaten to death or died of hunger and exhaustion in the labor camps of the deportation process in the East." Ziemer states: "The number of victims of the expulsion never impacted on public awareness in the East or West. Even in Germany only a small minority is aware of it. It has not become a topic for journalism and the mass media like the victims of Fascism and the persecution of the Jews have." The statistics and documentation of these monstrosities have remained unknown. Official German authorities do not mention or publicize them even when Eastern or Southeastern countries make demands for restitution. It would be easy to say that the events in the East and Southeast were a just and fair response to the previous National Socialist misdeeds. But were the people in Prague, Warsaw and Belgrade called to avenge the Jewish fate on innocent Germans? Was it right to speak of "liberation" and then to eradicate entire population groups? To expel 15 million people from their homes? People utterly ignorant of history try to excuse that eruption of hatred with the suppression of Czech sovereignty. But if that were a viable argument, then the Sudeten Germans could well also have massacred the Czechs in 1938; they had been deprived of their own sovereignty and their right to self-determination for not seven, but 20 years. Nevertheless they did the Czechs no harm whatsoever in 1938. If suppression of sovereignty were really to justify bestial genocide, then the South Tyroleans as well would have the moral "right" to slit their Italian masters' throats. For some 60 years now they too have been deprived of their sovereignty and their right to self-determination. Self-Determination Drowned in Blood The tragedy of the Sudeten Germans began 60 years ago, with the collapse of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Millions of people were imbued with the desire for self-determination, which the American President had led them to believe was their right. When the Monarchy collapsed and the constituent parts were struggling for a new formation, the German local government officials and mayors of the Sudetenland already took their oaths of office in allegiance to the Republic of Austria. In the last days of October 1918 the Sudeten German parliamentary representatives had already constituted the provinces of "Sudetenland" and "German Bohemia" and had annexed these directly to Austria. In the days that followed, however, Czech troops in Austrian uniforms occupied the defenseless and totally demilitarized Sudetenland, despite vigorous protests by the entire German population. Local resistance - which sprung up despite the express wishes of the command posts of the People's Army, stationed in Vienna, and the newly formed Sudeten German provincial government - achieved only small-scale successes and could not prevent the course of things to come. The occupation was accompanied by hostage-taking and brutally violent measures; local resistance was even quashed with artillery fire, arbitrary censorship was inflicted on the press, district councils were dissolved, and the entire Austrian state property was "expropriated". On March 4, 1919, the Austrian National Assembly solemnly convened its first session in Vienna. Czech troops forcibly prevented the participation of Sudeten German representatives. In large-scale demonstrations the public now demanded freedom and democracy, and that right to self-determination which the Allies had declared to be one of their own aims of war. The Sudeten Germans congregated at these proclamations unarmed, informed by their faith in their right. But then the incomprehensible happened. On Czech orders, Czechs in uniform shot at those gathered together. The crashing of hand grenades accompanied the salvos of gunfire and the screams of those mortally wounded - 54 dead and hundreds of injured remained lying in the streets. Among the places where this happened were Arnau, Aussig, Eger, Kaaden, Mies, Karlsbad, Sternberg and Freudenthal. The 54 dead included 20 women and girls, an 80-year-old man, one youth of 16, one of 13 and one only eleven years old! This bloody event that ought to have shaken the world to its foundations remained without echo. Later, to justify the use of armed force, it was claimed that the Czech executive powers had acted in sudden, nervous panic. They had not; they had acted on an order given by the Prague Ministry of the Interior, instructing them to prevent the proclamations with force of arms. That explains the fact that the shooting of participants in these demonstrations took place everywhere at almost exactly the same time. In this way, demonstrations that might have attracted world attention were to be thwarted once and for all. Any attempt at exercising the right to self-determination drew immediate gunfire. After March 4, another 53 Germans fell victim to Czech bullets. More than 2,000 gravely wounded were taken to hospitals. That was the beginning of the sham democracy along the Moldau River ("Vltava"). The cries for self-determination had been drowned in blood. The Dead of March 4, 1919 n the following we record the names of the Sudeten Germans murdered on March 4, 1919 - shot by Czech officers for their belief in their right to self-determination. Killed on March 4, 1919: Age, Where Anna Sachs brewery master's wife 41 Arnau: Aloisia Baudisch laborer 16 Arnau: Franz Jarsch butcher 60 Aussig: Josef Christl student 18 Eger: Grete Reinl student 18 Eger: Franz Schneider shoemaker 52 Kaaden: Josef Wolf day laborer 51 Kaaden: Erich Benesch master spinner 30 Kaaden: Andreas Benedikt baker 46 Kaaden: Franziska Passler tanner's wife 46 Kaaden: Anna Rott plumber's wife 41 Kaaden: Marie Ziener seamstress 18 Kaaden: Arianne Sturm seamstress 24 Kaaden: Karl Tauber student 14 Kaaden: Ludmila Doleschal seamstress 26 Kaaden: Leopoldine Meder dressmaker 28 Kaaden: Karl Lochschmid student 11 Kaaden: Paula Schmiedl student 15 Kaaden: Wilhelm Figert room painter 22 Kaaden: Oskar Meier apprentice 16 Kaaden: Julie Schindler servant girl 17 Kaaden: Berta Meier seamstress 40 Kaaden: Aloisia Weber office assistant 20 Kaaden: Marie Stöckl laborer 23 Kaaden: Ferdinand Kumpe day laborer 15 Kaaden: Hugo Nittner electrician 18 Kaaden: Marie Loos housewife 54 Kaaden: Kath. Tschammerhöhl laborer 49 Kaaden: Theodor Romig student 17 Kaaden: Paul Pessl student 18 Kaaden: Johann Luft railwayman 28 Mies: Rosa Heller private 24 Mies: Alfred Hahn accountant 19 Karlsbad: Ferdinand Schuhmann laborer 56 Karlsbad: Josef Stöck laborer 44 Karlsbad: Michael Fischer laborer 37 Karlsbad: Wenzel Wagner bricklayer 30 Karlsbad: Wilhelm Reingold merchant 52 Karlsbad: Josefa Bolek laborer 37 Sternberg: Hermine Kirsch laborer 37 Sternberg: Amlia Neckel laborer 38 Sternberg: Otto Faulhammer locksmith 18 Sternberg: Matthias Kaindl apprentice 16 Sternberg: Alois Länger coachman 42 Sternberg: Rudolf Lehr roofer 16 Sternberg: Franz Prosser turner's assistant 28 Sternberg: Ferdinand Pudek laborer 56 Sternberg: Ed. Sedlatschek civil servant 46 Sternberg: Josef Simak laborer 48 Sternberg: Emil Schreiber typesetter 18 Sternberg: Richard Tschauner tailor 26 Sternberg: Josef Laser retired 80 Sternberg: Franz Meier baker 36 Sternberg: Bruno Schindler laborer 68 Sternberg: Among the dead of March 4 were 20 women and girls. There was one 80-year-old, but also 16 persons aged 19 or younger, two of them were only 14, one was 13 and one as young as 11! In the time from 1918 to 1924 another 63 Sudeten Germans lost their lives in this way. They came from Wiesa-Oberleutensdorf, Gastdorf near Leitmeritz, Brüx, Moravian Trübau, Kaplitz, Znaim, Pressburg, Freudenthal, Arnau, Oblas near Znaim, Pilsen, Pohrlitz in South Moravia, Leitmeritz, Iglau, Zuckmantel, Asch, Aussig and Graslitz. Ingomar Pust - Sudeten-German Inferno Chapter Two The Karlsbad Program Excerpts from Professor Dr. Berthold Rubin's book War Deutschland allein schuld: Der Weg zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Rubin was historiographer at the University of Cologne. Page 112: Meanwhile, the "Sudeten German Party" continues to grow. The Prague government's policy of suppression has as its result a consolidation of the Sudeten Germans, who are firmly resolved to fend off the threats to their ethnic group. At the community elections on April 22, 1938, the Party wins 91.44% of all German votes. Two days later, on April 24, the historic Party Convention takes place in Karlsbad, and Konrad Henlein announces his famous Eight Points. "If matters in the Czechoslovak state are to progress peacefully, then it is the conviction of the Sudeten Germans that the following state and judicial order is necessary: 1. Full equality of rights and status with the Czech people. 2. Acknowledgment of the Sudeten German ethnic group as legal entity to maintain this status of equality within the state. 3. Definition and acknowledgment of the German settlement area. 4. Development of a German self-administration in the German settlement area, relevant to all aspects of public life insofar as they pertain to interests and concerns of the German ethnic group. 5. Institution of legal measures for the protection of those citizens living outside the closed settlement area of their ethnic group. 6. Elimination of the injustices inflicted on the Sudeten Germans since 1918, and rectification of the harm and damage already sustained through these injustices. 7. Acknowledgment and implementation of this matter of principle: German civil servants for the German areas. 8. Full freedom to acknowledge and maintain our German ethnicity and our German world view." In his commentary on these Eight Points Henlein pointed out at the Conference that Czechoslovakia's obligations under international law followed from President Wilson's well-known 14 Points, from the memoranda of the Czech peace delegation to the Peace Conference, and from Dr. Benes's note of May 20, 1919, as well as from the Peace Conference's statements in this regard, and from the national treaty of St. Germain of September 10, 1919. It is remarkable that neither Henlein's Karlsbad address nor any of the Eight Points make any mention of the Sudetenland's wishing to break away from the Czechoslovak state formation. In other words, the Sudeten Germans, despite all oppression, were still resolved at this point to remain part of this state. Ought the Czech state not to have immediately seized this opportunity which the German minority of three-and-and-a-half million offered it at the last minute? The Czech leadership would have been well advised to do so, and accepting Henlein's Eight Points would not have hurt them any. Added to this is the fact that, only a few weeks later, English and French delegations in Prague urged emphatically that the Czech state should accommodate the wishes of the German ethnic group. In this context it bears mentioning that the British Ambassador in Berlin at that time, Sir Henderson, suggests in his book Failure of a Mission (well worth reading) that the Prague government's immediate acceptance of most of the Karlsbad Program would have been quite possible. As Erich Kordt1 remarked: "There can be no doubt that, by refusing the Karlsbad Program, the Czechoslovak government played right into Hitler's hands." Thanks to the course set by Prague, the return of the Sudeten Germans to the German Reich became inevitable. Initially, Hitler exercised restraint in the Sudeten Question. On March 29, in other words before the Karlsbad Party Convention, Henlein met with Karl Hermann Frank, Dr. Kuenzel and Dr. Kreissl for discussions in the Foreign Office in Berlin. The minutes of this discussion (Pol. I 789g (IV) Secret) contain the following passage: "It is up to the Sudeten German Party to make those demands of the Czechoslovak government whose fulfillment it considers necessary to achieve the freedoms it wishes. The Reich Minister (Ribbentrop) stated that it could not be up to the Reich government to give Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans - expressly recognized, and reconfirmed as such by the Führer - detailed suggestions as to which demands might be made of the Czechoslovak government. It is necessary to draw up a best-case program whose ultimate goal is to achieve full freedom for the Sudeten Germans... The government of the Reich must decline to appear to the government at Prague, or to London or Paris, as pacemaker or representative of the Sudeten German demands. It goes without saying that in the course of the coming discussions with the Czechoslovak government the Sudeten Germans are fully in Konrad Henlein's hands, that peace and discipline must be maintained, and that rash acts are to be avoided... "The task of the German envoy in Prague would be to act not so much in an official capacity as in private discussions with the Czechoslovak statesmen, to support the demands of the Sudeten German Party as reasonable, without exerting any direct influence on the extent of these demands. The discussion then turned to the expediency of an alliance between the Sudeten German Party and the other minorities in Czechoslovakia, especially the Slovaks. The Reich Minister decided that the Party must be free to maintain a loose association with other minority groups whose parallel action might be advantageous." This protocol is interesting and historically very significant because it shows that in spring of 1938, shortly after the annexation of Austria, Hitler had no intention of uniting the Sudetenland with the Reich, but rather of leaving it in the Czechoslovak state union - albeit with the grant of far-reaching autonomy in the spirit of the Karlsbad Program. This again goes to show how very different these events would have turned out if the Czechoslovak government had been more reasonable and shown more of a statesmanlike sense of responsibility, and had accepted the Karlsbad Program, which left the Czechoslovak state wholly inviolate. Munich Agreement - Protectorate The 1938 annexation of the Sudeten German regions to the German Reich proper, which took place with the participation of France and England, was thus no more than the putting-right of injustices dating from 1918. Regions that had been German for almost a millennium were included in a larger German sphere. This boundary region - the later Protectorate boundary - corresponded precisely with the linguistic boundary between German and Czech, and the votes of 98.9% of the Sudeten Germans confirmed this at the plebiscite of December 4, 1938. Not a hair of a single Czech's head was harmed in the process. In contrast to the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans in 1945, there were also no forcible evictions. Every Czech was free to claim his right to live wherever he pleased. In his book War Deutschland allein schuld? (Munich: DSZ-Verlag, 1987), Prof. Dr. Berthold Rubin wrote about the Munich Agreement and its consequences: "After the Agreement has been signed by the four statesmen, England and France, in a rider clause, assume responsibility towards Czechoslovakia to guarantee her new borders, while Germany and Italy, in another rider, give the same guarantees, to take effect as soon as the matters of the Polish, Hungarian, Slovak, Carpatho-Ukrainian and Ruthenian minorities in the remainder state are settled." The Czechoslovak government by no means carried out its own obligations, and half a year later Slovakia suffered gross interference from the central government at Prague, and the forcible dismissal of four Ministers on March 9, 1939 - the climax of the Czech-Slovak crisis. On page 153 of the aforementioned book we learn of Hitler's September 26, 1938 speech in the Berlin Sportpalast, and his admonition to the central government at Prague to find a prompt and peaceful solution to Czechoslovakia's entire minority issue: "... and further, I have assured him [Chamberlain] that in the very instant when Czechoslovakia solves its problems - that is, when Czechoslovakia has dealt with its minorities, and peacefully so, not by oppression - in that instant I will lose all interest in the Czech state and we will guarantee its borders. We don't want any Czechs, but we do want a full, satisfactory and final settlement of the minority question, no uneasy compromises, and absolutely no constant trouble spot at the heart of Europe!" But the Czech government let this precious time go by unused, and could not be bothered to solve this grave minority problem, least of all as quickly as possible. After Slovak President Josef Tiso called on Hitler on March 13, 1939 to request his aid and support in achieving independence for Slovakia, the Slovak Parliament, convened by Tiso and Dr. Durssansky, unanimously voted for independence from Prague on March 14, 1939. With that, the Czech republic fell apart and all the guarantees given by England and France lapsed, as did those promised by Germany and Italy for after the resolution of the minority problems. Just as is the case with regard to Slovak President Tiso, it is also alleged that it was Hitler who "ordered" the March 14, 1939 visit from the then Czech President Emil Hacha. Secretary of State Otto Meissner, who was present at that discussion, stated: "The initiative for Hacha's and his Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky's trip to Berlin came strictly from the Czech side." What is particularly significant about Meissner's report is that Hacha's and Chvalkovsky's trip to Berlin followed an explicit decision by the Cabinet when he elected, on the evening of March 13, 1939, to request a personal discussion of the political situation via the German chargé d'affaires (p. 203). The Sudeten German Social-Democratic Representative Wenzel Jaksch commented similarly in his book Europas Weg nach Potsdam: "... in view of the ever-worsening situation on March 14, 1939, Hacha felt that it was necessary to request that discussion with Hitler." England acknowledged Slovakia's separation from the Czech whole as a voluntary act of the Slovak people's representatives. This disproves the false claims of the foreign press, that Tiso had allegedly been "ordered" to Berlin on March 12, 1939 and that Slovakia had then declared independence "under duress" from Hitler. That same world that vented such outrage at the inclusion of seven million Czechs in the German Reich of more than 80 million had previously, and for a span of 20 years, not only tolerated the enslavement of eight million non-Czechs by seven million Czechs in the ethnic dungeon of "Czechoslovakia", but also bore the blame for the creation of this state in the first place. No Czechs were expelled in 1938 Excerpt from: Dr. Heinrich Wendig, Richtigstellungen zur Zeitgeschichte, issue 5, pub. Institut für deutsche Zeitgeschichte, Tübingen: Grabert, 1993. No Czechs were expelled in 1938 The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from their homeland after 1945 is rationalized by, among other things, the mendacious claim that following the Munich Agreement of September 28, 1938, Czechs were "expelled" from the Sudetenland, which was then annexed by the German Reich. But there was never any such expulsion, and particularly not in the time from 1938 to 1945. The fact is that in late 1918, aside from the German minority, some 160,000 Czechs lived in those regions of Czechoslovakia that would later be affected by the Munich Agreement; in May 1939, however, official statistics place their number at approximately 320,000, i.e. fully twice as many. They had come to these regions and also to purely German towns and villages as officials or teachers, for example. Their purpose was to "Czechify" these regions - to counteract their German character and to make them Czech. After the Sudetenland's annexation many of these immigrants moved back into their Czech homeland, the future Protectorate. But not one of them was expelled. A number of dissidents - German functionaries and members of the German Social-Democratic Party - also left the once-again-German regions because they did not wish to live under National Socialist rule. Many of them then emigrated via Czechoslovakia to the West. They too were not expelled, but left voluntarily. In a March 17, 1992 letter to the editor of the Prague daily paper Lidove Noviny, Stanislav Aust, a witness to those times, responded to an editorial in this paper in which "expulsions in 1938" had been mentioned: "As eyewitness, I must reject the lies that were contained in the article titled 'Munich and the Legal Order'. Our family was very active against Henlein, and we were not forcibly expelled; we fled out of fear of potential persecution. In Czechoslovakia proper we were registered as refugees, not as expellees. Those that did not choose to leave did not have to. Many in Trautenau weathered the occupation. Our family's house remained our possession, and the German tenant continued to pay his rent regularly. It was June 1945 before the house was taken from us, by a member of the Revolutionary Guard, and my parents had to go to great trouble to get the house back. The claim that the property of Germans who had remained loyal to the Republic was not confiscated (in 1945) is more than ridiculous." (From the German translation in Deutscher Ost-Dienst, no. 12 of March 27, 1992.) Notes 1 Diplomat in the Foreign Office since 1928; 1936, First Diplomatic Secretary to Ribbentrop in London; 1938-1941, Chief of the Ministerial Office in the Berlin Foreign Office. At the Nuremberg Tribunal he admitted having stood in active opposition to the National Socialist regime since as early as 1936. Ingomar Pust - Sudeten-German Inferno Chapter Three Establishment of the Protectorate In the early morning hours of March 15, 1939, the German troops moved into Czechoslovakia. There were no incidents of violence whatsoever, neither with the Czech army nor with the civilian population. The Czechs received the German soldiers in silence, but without resistance, while the German inhabitants in Prague, Brünn and other cities with a sizable German minority greeted their fellow-countrymen with cheers of joy. The next day, on March 16, 1939, the "Decree Regarding the Bohemian-Moravian Region's Status Under National Law" was proclaimed. The degree of freedom and independent existence which the German Reich allowed the Czechs in the Protectorate becomes evident from "Neues Staatsrecht II", issue 13/2, by Dr. W. Stuskart and Rolf Schiedermair, respectively the Secretary of State and the Assistant Department Head in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, on p. 90 of the 19th edition published by Verlag Kohlhammer in Leipzig in 1944: Administration of the Protectorate It is part of the National Socialist view of people, ethnicity and race, to respect the ethnicity of foreign peoples. From this view, which is fundamentally different from that of the ruling power in former Czechoslovakia, it follows that the Reich guarantees the Czech people the autonomous development of their national life in accordance with their own unique nature. 1. The Protectorate is autonomous and administers itself. Within the framework of the sovereign jurisdiction to which the Protectorate is entitled, it exercises its autonomy in accordance with the political, military and economic interests of the Reich (Article 3): i. Besides the head of state, the Protectorate has its own government, and other branches and divisions to exercise its sovereign rights. It is also up to the members of the Protectorate to determine their form of government. The Czech people may create for themselves the form of government which best suits their national character. ii. The Protectorate has its own flag. iii. The autonomous administration is carried out via the Protectorate's own authorities, with their own officials. These officials are not Reich officials: they are not sworn in with an oath of allegiance to the Führer. iv. The Protectorate has its own legal system. v. The Protectorate may muster its own units (7,000 men) to maintain internal security and order." In essence, what the Czechs in the Protectorate were legally guaranteed was exactly those rights which the leader of the Sudeten Germans, Konrad Henlein, had requested in his well-known Eight Points on April 24, 1938 in the 44-member Parliament at Prague, but had never been granted. Lidice All the world likes to publicize and draw attention to this major German crime of the destruction of the Czech village of Lidice near Kladno. Erich Kern, author of the book Deutschland am Abgrund, comments as follows (p. 160): "On September 22, 1941, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, had come to Prague. In an astonishingly short time he had won the Czech workers' and peasants' trust, and strove systematically for a complete reconciliation between the German and the Czech peoples." In his account of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, British historian Alan Burgess - who is otherwise exceedingly pro-Czech - describes the situation as follows: "The Western powers could no longer expect that resistance would continue. With each passing day Czechoslovakia slipped further into the Nazi camp... The Czech secret service saw only one means left to it to interrupt the course of events and to show the world that Czechoslovakia was again on the side of the Allies. While the sham regime bowed and scraped before the Nazis and accepted their caresses, as it were, partisan paratroopers were to drop unnoticed from the sky and to abruptly chop off the caressing hand. Such an incredible provocation would show the Germans that they were dealing with a defensible people who were far from defeated." Heydrich had to die. Jan Kubis and Joseph Gabcik were citizens-in-exile of Czechoslovakia and had fled to England. They had been trained as paratroopers, for which reason they were chosen to carry out the assassination of Heydrich in the pre-noon hours of May 27, 1942 in Prague. A general state of emergency was declared that same day, and a curfew was imposed for the hours from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am. Nine days after the attack, Heydrich succumbed to the injuries he had suffered from the hand grenade shrapnel. The officially recorded cause of death: anthrax???! Lidice was chosen to be made an example of, even though neither Kubis nor Gabcik had gone into hiding there. Some of their accomplices came from Lidice, but had had nothing to do with the assassination. In the early morning of June 10, 1942, 30 Czech gendarmes of the Prague police, acting on German orders, executed 174 men aged 16 years and up. The women and children were sent to the concentration camps of Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. In this context it is alleged time and again that Lidice was destroyed by the Waffen-SS. That is false. In fact, not so much as a single unit of the Waffen-SS was used against Lidice! (Kern, Deutschland am Abgrund, p. 165.) Wenzel Jaksch's Appeal to Benes 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 the following letter to Dr. Edward Benes, the Czech President in exile in London: "Dear Mr. President! For reasons I hardly need spell out, I have waited until this day to convey our resolutions of June 7, 1942. Let me assure you that the recent terrible events in our homeland have greatly dismayed us as well. Nothing has changed in our feelings of friendship towards the Czech people, and we mourn their casualties as though they were our own. For this reason I ask you, Mr. President, to please take note of our protest, a transcript of which is enclosed. It was announced in a radio broadcast and is surely also made in the name of our best comrades, who have been the target of harsh persecution since October 1, 1938. However, grave circumstances compel me to try with this letter to achieve a political clarification which can be postponed no longer. Our political resolution records the utterly negative results of all discussions held to date. It expresses our representatives' profound embitterment at the kind of treatment our movement has experienced since Munich. The degree of dismay which the current propaganda for a mass transfer of the Sudeten Germans has called forth in our ranks is difficult to describe, Mr. President. Naturally such measures would be directed at the population of entire regions, and thus would also affect circles that held out heroically in the conflict with Nazi Fascism both before and after the decision at Munich. Our people are well acquainted with struggle and hardship and they have not failed to notice the difference between the English proposal of punishment of the guilty, and the intent of Czech policy to achieve gains in national power far beyond any settlement of affairs with the Nazi criminals. Given the deep roots which our working population has in their homeland, it is clear that the evacuation of entire regions could be arranged only with brute force and against the unanimous resistance of all political forces that will be present after the collapse of Nazi rule. Dear Mr. President! It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you of the full extent of our concerns. The sooner this is made clear, the better: the program of population transfer will be a dangerous cue for the outbreak of a civil war along the Bohemian and Moravian linguistic border. There are other ways to atone for the Nazi crimes. There will be a reckoning-up in the Sudeten region as well - our dead, and the many thousands of our best men who survived the horrors of the concentration camps, vouch for that. Settling the account with the Nazis will offer no grounds for the inevitably indiscriminate expulsion of the population of entire border regions. A population transfer would be an indiscriminate revenge, and I wish to put this to you quite openly, Mr. President: that would mean the destruction of any and all foundations for democratic cooperation for a generation to come. In light of these dangers it is not an easy decision for us to abandon the moral legacy of a long period of national cooperation. Many things may be forgotten today, but the annals of history show that a million Germans stood by the Czech people in the fateful years of 1937-38. The fact that the Catholics and the Landbund Party capitulated after the collapse of Austria warrants a more lenient judgement if one considers how demoralizing the attitude of large Czech parties was to the German population. The heroism of our working people has made up for many of the weaknesses manifested in other sectors of the activist camp. Our population can face the Czech people with the clearest conscience in the world. Their casualties, and the activities they continue to pursue despite constant persecution, are points in their favor which cannot be ignored in drawing up the final account of the battle against Hitlerism. Permit me, Mr. President, to summarize these thoughts into a single argument: We believe we may take some of the credit for the Czech democracy having fallen heroically. In his most recent book, Dr. Hodza has admitted that as early as autumn 1937 he had offered Henlein the right to hold community council elections and thus relinquished the entire self-administration of our border regions to him. If our party had not decided to participate in local elections anyhow - virtually alone, and despite the danger of internal betrayal - the international propaganda war and the fate of Czechoslovakia would already have been lost in spring 1938. It would then have required no Runciman mission and no decision at Munich, and even the last heroic gesture of the September mobilization would have been denied the country. Any objective analysis of these tragic events will confirm that our organization still held the Sudeten region politically when the state bureaucracy had already more or less given it up. These are the reasons, Mr. President, why my comrades are deeply embittered by the lack of response which the good will openly shown by their legitimate representatives has received abroad. In the consciousness of duty one hundred percent fulfilled, they do not care to be discriminated against in comparison to Slovak representatives in government or in the council of state - representatives whose authority is no greater than our own. In this context, dear Mr. President, I refer to the exchange of telegrams in London on September 27 and 28, 1941, to illustrate how a token of honest good will remained unanswered and how a fund of personal trust in the hearts of worthy people was destroyed. Perhaps I may add, and not without justification, that I despair at how Czech policy is tending towards a dictatorship directed against old allies who had stood by the Czech people when they had been abandoned by all their other friends. I may summarize this inducement to our latest resolution with the following observation: The wholly negative position taken by the instruments of the temporary Czechoslovakian state in matters of mutual agreement, even in terms of political and economic interim solutions, deprives our attempts at rapprochement of all foundations. The program of population transfer lies outside the principle of continuity in national law, in whose name the Czechoslovakian government has thus far claimed the loyalty of the democratic Sudeten Germans abroad. Our resolution is an appeal to all responsible elements of Czechoslovakian government not to consider exclusively a violent solution with which they will drive those democratic Sudeten Germans who still feel ties to their homeland into a conflict that may have disastrous repercussions for both sides. Dear Mr. President, I am well aware of the implications of this observation. Permit me to express my highest regard. I am, Mr. President, your humble servant Wenzel Jaksch." A transcript of the original letter is reproduced on pages 255-257 of Verheimlichte Dokumente by Erich Kern. |
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