The differential impact of the Great Depression on Czech and German communities intensified the Sudetenland’s sense of alienation. As one of the most export-dependent parts of the country, the Sudetenland was hard hit by the contraction in international trade. But the Prague government added greatly to the region’s distress by its practice of preferring Czechs for public-sector jobs, dismissing thousands of Sudetendeutsch workers in the process. Germans, more than 23 percent of the population in the 1930 census, five years later made up only 2 percent of the civil servants in ministerial positions, 5 percent of the officer corps in the army, and 10 percent of the employees of the state railways.14 Not a single ethnic German was to be found in Beneš’s own Foreign Ministry.15 State contracts, even for projects in the German-speaking districts, were steered toward Czechoslovak firms. By 1936, more than 60 percent of all Czechoslovak unemployment was concentrated in the Sudetenland.16 No less injurious to German sensibilities was Prague’s dismissive response to their complaints of discrimination. It was unreasonable, Czech leaders argued, for the Sudetendeutsche to complain about their exclusion from public-sector employment while they remained equivocal in their loyalty to the very state that they expected to pay their wages. Germans, on the other hand, recalled that Czechoslovakia had come into existence as a result of Czech and Slovak soldiers deserting from the Austro-Hungarian army during the Great War and forming a Czechoslovak Legion to join the conflict on the Allied side against their former comrades in arms. For Beneš and his followers, with their record of disloyalty to the Hapsburg Empire at a moment when it was fighting for its life, to preach to anyone else about minority nationalities’ duty of fidelity to countries to which they had been unwillingly attached seemed to most Sudetendeutsche the epitome of hypocrisy.
In 1933 a new factor emerged to complicate Czechoslovakia’s internal politics: the accession to power of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany. In the same year, Konrad Henlein founded a new party in the Sudetenland, the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront. Militant, populist, and openly hostile to Prague, Henlein’s movement grew steadily more assertive and confrontational in response to the rise of its powerful patron in Berlin. To this day, historians remain divided over whether the Heimatfront—soon to rename itself the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) and to claim to speak on behalf of all Sudeten Germans—was from the outset a Nazi front organization or merely attached itself to Hitler’s bandwagon for pragmatic reasons.17 Most authorities share the view of Mark Cornwall that at least until 1937, the SdP “drew its strengths and weaknesses from being a broad church, encompassing diverse elements of the German community and a range of political outlooks.”18 However that may be, Henlein’s party quickly became the principal vehicle for the expression of Sudeten Germans’ discontent with the existing dispensation in Czechoslovakia. In the 1935 elections—the same ones that brought Beneš to power—it won two-thirds of the vote in German districts, aided by large subventions from Berlin, and became the single largest party in the Republic. Equally, there is no question that after the Anschluss between Germany and Austria in the spring of 1938, Henlein, and his still more unsavory deputy Karl Hermann Frank, were anything other than Nazi puppets, nor that most Sudeten Germans by then favored the inclusion of their region within the Reich. Such views, to be sure, were no means universal. Social Democracy was strong within the industrial Sudetenland, and many workers were only too conscious of what would befall their trade union rights if they fell into the hands of Adolf Hitler. Partly for that reason, one of the most prominent Sudeten German Social Democrats, Wenzel Jaksch, twice visited London in 1937 on behalf of the Prague government to counter Henlein’s claims that there was no place for Germans in a Czechoslovak-dominated state. In March of the following year, Jaksch assumed the leadership of the SdP’s principal left-wing opponent, the Sudetendeutsche Sozialdemokratische Partei. But it is a measure of how much ground it had already lost to Henlein that Jaksch’s party was forced to drop its previous demand for Germans to receive their own autonomous region within the Czechoslovak Republic for fear that, if granted, this would have the effect of delivering the Sudetenland over to the Reich.
Ultimately, though, Czechoslovakia’s fate would be decided by outsiders. From the moment of his assumption of leadership over the infant National Socialist party in 1920, Adolf Hitler had never ceased to highlight the incompatibility of the territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles with the aims for which the Allies had professed to fight the Great War. The existence of Czechoslovakia in its current form, he insisted, was unanswerable proof of the victors’ hypocrisy. While preaching the virtues of democracy and of the rights of small nations to determine their own future, the Allies had sanctioned the creation of a state that held millions of unwilling subjects under its control by sheer force. To be sure, the leaders at the Paris Peace Conference had not needed a Hitler to remind them of the imperfect fit between Czechoslovakia’s frontiers and Wilsonian principles, but “because the existence of a Slav state bang in the middle of ethnic German territory was central to the Franco-British vision of how postwar Central Europe should be reorganized, everyone was at first willing to overlook the contradictions.”19
By 1938 these were harder to ignore. Nazi Germany’s absorption of Austria in March—another exercise of “self-determination”—placed Czechoslovakia in grave peril. No longer did it share a single short border with Germany to its northwest and west, but now was virtually encircled by a greater German Reich extending along approximately half the length of its northern and southern frontiers also. Estranged from its other immediate neighbors, Poland and Hungary, by ethnic antagonisms similar to those involving the Sudetendeutsche—neither Warsaw nor Budapest had forgiven or forgotten the cultural and economic discrimination to which the Magyar-speaking population in southern Slovakia and the Polish minority in the Teschen [Těšín] district were subject—Czechoslovakia found itself lacking friends at a moment when it needed them most. Even its allies considered it had a weak case. Though France and Czechoslovakia had had a treaty of mutual assistance since 1924, Édouard Daladier, the prime minister, did not believe that most French citizens would understand why, as the law professor and commentator Joseph Barthélemy put it, there must be a general European war “to maintain three million Germans under Czech sovereignty.” The Soviet Union, which had concluded a mutual defense treaty with Prague in 1935 safe in the knowledge that the two countries did not share a common border, sat on its hands throughout the Munich crisis; no evidence has ever emerged to substantiate the Czechoslovak Communist Party leader’s self-serving and incredible claim ten years later that Stalin undertook to go to war with Germany to defend Czechoslovakia even if France did not do so.20 As for Great Britain, “appeasers” and “anti-appeasers” alike agreed that the Sudeten Germans’ claim to determine their own allegiance was justified, differing only as to how it should be given effect. Even Winston Churchill told Hubert Ripka, one of Beneš’s closest associates, in the summer of 1938 that if he had been prime minister he would have acted as Neville Chamberlain had done, and after Munich carefully avoided suggesting that the Sudetendeutsche should not have had the right to choose to which country to belong, but instead maintained that any lines of demarcation ought to have been drawn by the League of Nations rather than Adolf Hitler.21
For that reason, although international public opinion lavished praise upon Edvard Beneš as he prepared to go into exile—the former French prime minister Léon Blum, the novelist H. G. Wells, and even the League of Nations all nominated him for the 1939 Nobel Peace Prize—few doubted that his decision was the correct one. Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, declared in the House of Lords that even if negotiations at Munich had broken down and a war had resulted, “no body of statesmen drawing the boundaries of a new Czechoslovakia would have redrawn them as they were left by the Treaty of Versailles.”22 Gallup polls revealed popular majorities in Britain and France, and a still larger one in the United States, in favor of the Munich Pact
. Little notice was taken of the true victims of the agreement, Czechoslovak Jews and anti-Nazi Sudetendeutsche. Both now faced persecution, not only from the Nazis but from their own countrymen who, as Beneš passed from the scene, set up the short-lived Second Republic under the presidency of the ineffectual Emil Hácha. Though it lasted only for six months, Mary Heimann warns against ignoring the Second Republic’s history, which was “a crucially important period in turning Czechoslovakia from an imperfectly democratic to a frankly authoritarian state, one whose central and autonomous governments ruled by decree, promoted racism, neutralized political opponents, rigged elections, set up forced labor camps, and persecuted Jews and Gypsies, all before any of this could plausibly be blamed on Nazi Germany.”23 While unable to take a line opposed to that of Berlin in foreign or economic policy, Hácha’s regime was far from a Nazi puppet. Rather, it was in part an expression of forces latent in Czechoslovak society that until then had lacked the opportunity to reach their mature form. It was Hácha’s troops and police, not Hitler’s, that rounded up approximately twenty thousand Sudetendeutsch anti-Nazis, most of them Social Democrats, and deported them to Germany where they disappeared into concentration camps. (Wenzel Jaksch, leader of the Sudetendeutsch Social Democrats, would have joined them had he not fled to London in the spring of 1939.) It was the Slovak government in Bratislava, whose demand for autonomy was backed by Germany as a reward for the Slovaks’ anti-Czech stance during the Munich crisis, that first ethnically cleansed the territory under its control, expropriating Jews and Czechs and dumping them into Moravia. And it was the Prague parliament, just before Hitler put an end to the Czechoslovak state on March 15, 1939 by declaring a “protectorate” over Bohemia and Moravia and militarily occupying both provinces, that passed a law providing for the dispatch of all unemployed males over eighteen years of age to forced labor camps. This affinity for extreme solutions to social and economic problems, clearly visible in Czechoslovakia before the war, would manifest itself afterward in new and still more disturbing forms.
The eclipse of the Second Republic in the spring of 1939, and the simultaneous establishment of a nominally independent Republic of Slovakia that, in contrast to its counterpart in Prague, was indeed a German lapdog, gave the exiled Edvard Beneš his opportunity for a comeback. Possessing behind a façade of modesty an absolute and lifelong belief in his own indispensability to Czechoslovak politics, he had departed his homeland for the United States with three firm convictions. The first was that there would soon be a world war, “perhaps next year or perhaps in two or three years’ time,” that would both put an end to Nazi Germany and justify his own policy at Munich.24 The second was that as a result, the Soviet Union would become the leading factor in European affairs; in consequence, it was important that Czechoslovakia and the USSR not only maintain the closest possible relationship but that the two countries share a common border.25 The third was that the political and economic changes the war would inevitably bring in its train would provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to complete the Czechoslovak national project, and that the solution of the minority problem though mass expulsions constituted the only possible means to that end.26 Beneš would set his political course by these three beliefs, but especially the last, for the remainder of his life.
It was typical of his unwavering self-confidence—or, in the eyes of his critics, arrogance—that he should soon persuade himself that he had not, after all, ceased to be Czechoslovakia’s president. As long as the Second Republic remained in existence, there was no possibility of arguing that his resignation in October 1938 had been made under duress and was thus invalid. The Western countries had already recognized Hácha’s government and established diplomatic relations with it. Even though juridically the Hácha regime continued to exist after the German occupation of March 1939, however, the de facto extinction of the Second Republic was seen by a majority of Czechoslovaks as a vindication of Beneš’s stance at Munich. As it appeared to prove, there had after all been no possibility of inducing the democracies to honor their commitments to Czechoslovakia’s territorial integrity; Beneš’s decision not to lead his people into a suicidal war but rather to live to fight another day had been the correct one. The ex-president could also count on the assistance of many supporters who remained in influential positions in the Czech bureaucracy, and with whom he remained in frequent contact through back channels. Even the unheroic Hácha, who for all his instinctive authoritarianism was neither a pro-Nazi nor an antipatriot, kept in touch with his predecessor with the help of intermediaries.
When the Second World War commenced, then, Beneš was well placed to resume his self-appointed role as the embodiment of the Czechoslovak national will. His plan of campaign was broadly the same as it had been during the Great War. With a network of émigré organizations, an army in exile, and an underground resistance movement in Czechoslovakia itself at his command, he would seek to exchange material assistance to the Allies for recognition as the country’s true leader. Taking advantage of his unrivaled network of personal contacts with Western politicians and opinion-formers, he would contrive, as he had done in 1918 and 1919, to make the eventual peace settlement as favorable as possible to Czechoslovakia’s interests. After his restoration to power in Prague, he would secure the country from future external threats by forging an alliance with a powerful neighbor with similar strategic aims—no longer equivocal and unreliable France, but a Soviet Union that, he was confident, was rapidly outgrowing its truculent Communist phase and was as anxious as he to see Czechoslovakia emerge as the principal conduit of a postwar “convergence” between East and West.
Beneš would live just long enough to see this vision, which in naïveté rivaled that of the conservative German politicians who elevated Adolf Hitler to power in 1933 in the belief that they could control him, collapse in ruins for the second time in his ill-starred public career. At the outset, though, the auguries were promising. Through the good offices of his friend Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of the influential American journal Foreign Affairs, he obtained a private meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt at Hyde Park in May 1939 and obtained from the president’s own lips a declaration that so far as the U.S. administration was concerned, “Munich does not exist.” A Czechoslovak National Council was formed in Paris in October, consciously evoking the similarly named body established by Masaryk in the same city in 1916. Initially ignored by the Allies, for whom Czechoslovakia’s entire recent history was an embarrassment of which they did not wish to be reminded, the council became more important after the fall of France as one of the few lines of communication Britain still possessed to anti-Nazi movements in occupied Europe. Winston Churchill’s administration acknowledged the council as the provisional Czechoslovak government in exile in July 1940; and although the path to complete recognition was far from straightforward, by mid-1941 Britain, the USSR, and the still neutral United States had entered into full diplomatic relations with the Czechoslovak regime in London and accorded Beneš the status appropriate to a friendly head of state. The final mark of his complete restoration in the eyes of the world as Czechoslovakia’s sole legitimate leader came a year later when, in response to countless hours of patient lobbying, the presentation of Czechoslovakia’s case in every conceivable venue, and unabashed recourse to emotional blackmail, the Big Three in separate declarations stated that they no longer considered themselves bound by the Munich Treaty. It was a moment of personal triumph for Beneš, who made haste to proclaim that Czechoslovakia’s unity and territorial integrity had at last been restored. But so too had the Sudeten German problem.
The question of what to do with the Sudetendeutsche had not gone overlooked by the British who, as the occasionally somewhat exasperated hosts of the Czechoslovak government in exile, were most immediately concerned with trying to conform Beneš’s initiatives to Allied war aims. Philip Nichols, a Foreign Office diplomat appointed in 1942 as British ambassador to—and to a still greater extent, minder of—the L
ondon Czechoslovaks, repeatedly made clear to Beneš that the denunciation of the Munich Pact did not necessarily commit the Allies to restore the Czechoslovak borders of September 1938, or indeed any particular borders at all. Throughout the war, the official British stance was that all territorial questions must await the eventual peace conference, when such matters would be examined from a comprehensive perspective and the outline of the new world order would finally be determined. No piecemeal commitments could be entered into in the meantime, especially one that would open the door to a host of similar claims from Poles, Yugoslavs, Danes, and others. Needless to say, this “wait and see” policy was wholly unsatisfactory to Beneš, who had not labored so long and endured so much only to see Czechoslovakia emerge from the war with a less favorable territorial status than it had enjoyed before falling victim to Hitler’s aggressions. Even if the 1938 borders were re-created, moreover, the problem of national minorities within Czechoslovakia would still have to be dealt with.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 3