WikipediaCritique

Wikipedia Critique

Wikipedia Critique!

Expulsion of Germans from
Czechoslovakia:

Critique of the Wikipedia-article "Expulsion of Germans from
Czechoslovakia"

This note is not intended to re-write said Wikipedia article. Rather,
it is meant to show its many and serious shortcomings, and
contradictions. Most notable is the ignorance of 800 years of
history of Czech-German relations. This and other deficiencies
must be overcome in order to properly assess the existing
difficulties in those relations.

Like (almost) all contemporary treatments of this matter, the
article overemphasizes 12 years of National Socialism (1933-1945)
to Czech German relations at the expense of 800 years of history.
Those German-Czech relations, unsettled at times but most of the
time peaceful, began in the 12th century when Bohemian rulers
invited German farmers, artisans, clergymen and traders to settle
in the border regions of Bohemia and Moravia. They came from
several German and Austrian provinces, notably Franconia. They
cleared the dense forests and tilled the soil. In one particular case,
my former northern Bohemian home village Peterswald/Petrovice
in Erzgebirge was founded by settlers from Thüringen/Thuringia.
They arrived under the leadership of a man named Peter; hence
the hamlet was named name Peterswald. It was first mentioned in
church records in AD 1235. When World War II ended in 1945 the
village still was exclusively German as identified by language,
customs and traditions. Thus, historically, I lay claim to a
German-Bohemian ancestry that dates back to the thirteenth
century; genealogically, I have been tracing my German extraction
back to the sixteenth century.

As a minimum, any treatment of Czech-German relations must pay
attention to history as it happened between 1918 and 1938, that is
after the foundation of the multi-national state that was given the
name Czechoslovakia. At that time the 1919 Paris "peace makers"
forced 3 million Germans into the newly-formed state against their
will, thus violating the then much publicized "principle of self
determination", propagated in particular by one of the leaders of
the WWI victorious allies, then US president Woodrow Wilson.

Unfortunately, the years 1918-1938 of Czech-German history are
completely ignored in the article, short of the fact of Sudetenland's
cession to Germany by an agreement between Great Britain,
France, Italy and Germany. Lord Runciman, designated by Prime
Minister Chamberlain in 1938 to act as mediator between the
Czechoslovak government and Henlein's Sudeten German Party,
then the strongest party in Prague's parliament, has summarized
German-Czech problems at that time in a report to his Prime
Minister. He states that he had "been left with the impression that
Czechoslovak rule in the Sudeten area for the last twenty years ...
has been marked by tactlessness, lack of understanding, petty
intolerance and discrimination, to a point where the resentment of
the German population was inevitably moving in the direction of
revolt. The Sudeten Germans felt, too, that in the past they had
been given many promises by the Czechoslovak government, but
that little or no action had followed these promises. This experience
had induced an attitude of open mistrust of the leading Czech
statesmen ... with the result that, however conciliatory their
statements, they inspire no confidence in the minds of the Sudeten
population.
"Local irritations were added to these major grievances. Czech
officials and Czech police, speaking little or no German, were
appointed in large numbers to purely German districts; Czech
agricultural colonists were encouraged to settle on land transferred
under the Land Reform in the midst of German populations; for the
children of these Czech invaders Czech schools were built on a
large scale.
"There is a very general belief that Czech firms were favored as
against German firms in the allocation of State contracts and that
the State provided work and relief for Czechs more readily than
for Germans. ... Even as late as the time of my Mission I could find
no readiness on the part of the Czechoslovak government to
remedy them on anything like an adequate scale.
"All these, and other, grievances were intensified by the effects of
the economic crisis on the Sudeten industries, which form so
important a part of the life of the people. Not unnaturally, the
Government was blamed for the resulting impoverishment.
"For many reasons, therefore, including the above, the feeling
amongst the Sudeten Germans until about 3 or 4 years ago was one
of hopelessness. But the rise of Nazi Germany gave them new
hope. I regard their turning for help towards their kinsmen [across
the frontier] and their eventual desire to join the Reich as a natural
development in the circumstances."

Thus wrote in September 1938 not one of those Sudeten German
so-called "radicals", or "revanchists", or "revisionists", (or
whatever else the politically "correct" historians and politicians
deem to call the truth seekers among us), but by a British nobleman
who was delegated to Czechoslovakia as a special envoy by his
Prime Minister to assess the Sudeten crisis of 1938.

What Lord Runciman fails to mention is the heroic struggle of the
Sudeten German anti-fascists, in particular the social democrats, in
the interest of Czechoslovakia's independence. Their fight for
survival in 1937/38 has largely been ignored to this day, not only by
the nationalistic-oriented Sudeten Germans, but also by every
Czechoslovak and Czech governments since 1937.

Another important shortcoming of said article is an over-emphasis
of the role that Czechoslovakian resistance groups played in the
Sudeten-German genocide. Contrary to what Czech historians
want us believe, there was no significant anti-Nazi resistance in
Czechoslovakia. Proof of it is Reich-Protector Heydrich's ride to
work in an open convertible, top down and without guards, on the
morning of his assassination. Had danger to his life been realized,
the number one German official in rest-Czechoslovakia had
undoubtedly insisted on security measures. Unaware of it he
became easy prey to two assassins who were flown in from
England. Homeland Czecho-Slovak resistance did not only not
produce an assassin of their own, they were also incapable to
protect their flown-in comrades!

Even though paradise in war-torn Europe during WWII was
nowhere to be found, the Protectorate (aka rest-Czechoslovakia,
i.e., Bohemia and Moravia without Sudetenland) during WWII was
"the place to be", as American historian Chad Bryant notes in his
book "Prague in Black". Thus he himself disputes his simultaneous
(and anybody else's) "documentation" of extreme Nazi terror
against the Czech and Slovak peoples.

If, as the article states, the Czechoslovakian foreign minister
already in 1918-19 advocated ethnic cleansing, why should as
president of the country he have needed "pressure" from
resistance groups to mastermind the brutal German expulsions
after WWII? That's a contradiction that needs to be clarified.

When, as the article also states, Edvard Benes "set out in March
1939 to convince the Allies ...that expulsion was the best solution",
he could not have done it with enticement by resistance groups,
because they hardly could have existed before the German
occupation in March 1939. That's another contradiction that needs
to be corrected.

This false assessment concerning resistance groups is stated
repetitively in the article.

Whether 244,000 Germans remaining in Czechoslovakia are a
substantial exception from expulsion is a matter of interpretation.
As it turned out, in the long run their lot was most definitely a much
less happier one than that of the expellees. Today, of the original 3
1/2 million Sudeten Germans a mere 40,000 Czech citizens still
claim German ancestry.

Caution must be exercised in accepting the number of fatalities
coming from a so-called "joint commissions of historians". Czech
historians, like Czech politicians, deliberately downplay the extent
of the Sudeten German genocide. Their German counterparts, full
of shame and guilt-ridden by 65 years of re-education (aka
anti-German propaganda) readily agree with them in order to
remain politically correct, which still today appears to be a
prerequisite for holding on to their jobs.

More believable appear data of victims that result from
sociological-scientific investigations like Rudolph Rummel's that he
published in "Statistics of Democide - Genocide and Mass Murder
since 1900", Transaction Publishers, Rutgers University 1998.
Citing 7 sources for the 1945 Sudeten German populace, 10 sources
for Germans remaining in Czechoslovakia after the expulsions, 18
sources for the number expelled, and 7 sources of Sudeten
Germans living in Germany in 1950, Rummel concludes that most
likely 130,000 Sudeten- Germans perished in connection with the
expulsions, with a margin of error between 68,000 and 375,000.

The article implies that after ceding Sudetenland to Germany in
1938 the Sudeten Germans acquired German citizenship by choice,
when in fact they became German citizens collectively by decree.

"Developing a clear picture of the expulsion of Germans from
Czechoslovakia is difficult (not only) because of the chaotic
conditions that existed at the end of the war", but also because of
the fact that this particular crime against humanity has been
murked to date by all Czechoslovak and Czech governments since
1945. This large-scale cover up serves to retain the illusion of a
liberal, democratic minded Czech people that could do no harm to
the nation's minorities, nevertheless had been treated so badly by
the nasty Germans. This is in accord with post-WWII re-education
that necessitates Germans to be exclusively perpetrators, while
pretty much every non-German was a victim of German
aggression.

The fact of the matter is that anti-German discrimination policies
by the Czechoslovak government since its foundation in 1918 at the
end drove many Sudeten Germans under Henlein's leadership in
the arms of Hitler. Recall that the Sudeten Germans made up 25%
of Czechoslovakia's population that, however, contributed 50% to
the nation's unemployed in the thirties. From this misguided
Czechoslovakian government policies suffered mostly the anti-Nazi
Deutsche Socialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (Sudeten German
social democrats) which once with 35% of the vote was the largest
Sudeten German party. They fought the cessation of Sudetenland
by Germany more intensely than did the Czechs, because their
survival depended on it. Their attempts to work with the
Czechoslovak government against it were, however, arrogantly
sabotaged. Ignoring pre-Hitler Czech-German relations, as is
usually the case in an "official" (i.e. politically correct) treatment
of the subject, is a serious shortcoming of the article.

Trying to downplay the role the central government in the
Sudeten-German genocide is nonsensical, because the article
alludes to the participation of the Czechoslovak army in the
expulsions. Those government forces were aided with extreme
brutality by"armed volunteers", aka partisans. Some past
Nazi-collaborators undoubtedly were among them, as implied, but
their primary characteristics were those of thugs and hoodlums.
Their brutality was encouraged by hate-enticing speeches by
leading politicians, to which the article alludes. Examples are
Benes's speeches that he gave in Prague, Tabor and Bruenn. The
biggest government-enticement, however, was passing law Slg.
115/1946 that guaranteed those marauders and murderers freedom
from prosecution to this very day, no matter how severe a crime
they had committed.

Army and partisans raged all across the land between May 1945
and December 1946. The given list of incidents, therefore, appears
meager. Missing are definitely the documented massacres of
Vollmau and Landskron that have to be added to the list. Also the
massacre of Prague that Czech television documented recently
deserves attention. The fury and length of the atrocities committed
make Rummel's result of Sudeten German deaths much more
plausible than the figures given by the Czech-German commission
of historians.

President Vaclav Havel's apology to Sudeten Germans is a myth.
Havel suggested an apology, but retracted as soon as he realized
his constituency's adamant opposition to it. This status quo exists
even today: The government insists on the continued existence
within the Czech judiciary system of the so-called Benes decrees
that legalized the Sudeten German genocide; the majority of the
Czech and Slovak peoples consider the Sudeten Germans' demise
just and right. Conclusion: Given another opportunity under the
right circumstances, the Czechs would repeat the crime against
humanity that they committed in 1945-46.

Finally, the article leaves the impression that the burden-sharing
law (Lastenausgleichsgesetz) of 1952 restituted the Sudeten
Germans for their expropriation by the Czechoslovak government.
The law's pre-ample, in contrast, makes it clear that this is not the
case. It was merely meant as an act of minimal and immediate relief
for those unfortunates who had lost everything they owned to the
brutality of expulsion. Incidentally, none of the victims who had
been expelled to the Soviet occupation zone which later became the
so-called German Democratic Republic received any
burden-sharing relief. To those unfortunates belonged my Dad.

Rudolf Pueschel