When Beneš had pleaded Czechoslovakia’s case before the Allies at Paris in 1919, the idea that the country should embrace the Sudetenland but not the Sudetendeutsche had never been seriously considered. Like many of his generation, Tomáš Masaryk reposed great faith in the assimilative capacity of nation-states; he himself had undergone a teenage conversion from a partly Germanic upbringing to a keen Czech cultural nationalism. Economically, the Republic could not have hoped in any reasonable time-frame to make good the loss of the productive capacities of a fourth of its population. In any event, the entire question was rendered moot by the certainty that the Allies would never agree to it. By the late 1930s, though, such things were no longer unthinkable. The exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1922–23 had shown that large-scale movements of peoples were at least possible. Beneš had had the Lausanne example in mind when, in a secret initiative that would have had explosive ramifications had it ever been made public, he offered Hitler on September 15, 1938, some six thousand square kilometers of Czechoslovak territory if the Führer would admit between 1.5 and 2 million Sudetendeutsche in a compulsory population transfer as part of the bargain.27 More concerned with his meeting with Chamberlain at Berchtesgaden the same day, Hitler had not troubled to respond.
Yet Beneš was far from the only Czechoslovak to be thinking along those lines. His chief publicist, Hubert Ripka, was if anything even more determined that the Sudetendeutsche be removed, predicting that if left unmolested after the war they would shelter within Czechoslovakia just long enough to gain immunity from demands to pay reparations, and then immediately restart separatist agitation.28 A report from Prague that reached the president a month after Nazi Germany’s occupation of Bohemia and Moravia described the popular mood with respect to the Sudetendeutsche as “very radical…. A thorough reduction in their numbers seems to be a general demand at present.”29 This was, in all likelihood, an exaggeration. ÚVOD, the central council of the Czechoslovak resistance movement, consistently took a more extreme position on postwar matters than the majority of ordinary citizens, a reflection of the predominance of military officers among its membership.30 Because most of the information he received about domestic public opinion reached him through an ÚVOD filter, however, Beneš was led to believe that his compatriots demanded a harsher line than was probably the case. An example of this tendency came in 1940, when Beneš began to explore the possibility of deporting about a million “young, incorrigible Nazis” and concentrating the remainder of the Sudetendeutsch population in three homogeneous Swiss-style cantons. When he floated this idea to the resistance, an infuriated Lieutenant-Colonel Josef Balabán of ÚVOD responded sardonically in a coded radio message, “We look forward to bidding farewell to the dear Hitlerites. We will beat them so hard that the three damned cantons you thought up and for which people here would tear you to pieces will be somewhere near Berlin.”31
Yet it would be a mistake to see Beneš’s stance on the Sudeten German question as being influenced entirely, or even mainly, by pressure from home. Temperamentally he was highly resistant to being pushed by subordinates in directions he did not wish to go, and he did not hesitate to reprove ÚVOD for its naïveté in supposing that “we can simply destroy or wipe out three million Germans …”32 He was also conscious of the indispensability of Allied backing for whatever arrangements would ultimately be made, and in the early stages of the war he knew that a policy that recognized no distinction between “guilty” and “innocent” Germans was unacceptable to them. After the Dunkirk debacle, when the prospect of a conventional military victory over Germany had all but disappeared, one of the few possibilities that encouraged the British government to continue the fight was the hope that Hitler might be overthrown by an anti-Nazi revolution as the economic strain of the war began to tell on ordinary German civilians.33 Punitive war aims stood in the way of such a scenario, playing into Goebbels’s hands by suggesting that the British sought not an end to Nazism but the destruction of the German nation. It was for this reason that Churchill’s government had hesitated in 1940 to grant full recognition to Beneš’s government in exile, which did not contain a single representative of the Sudeten German democratic movement in London headed by Wenzel Jaksch. As a sop to the British, Beneš indicated his willingness eventually to offer the Sudetendeutsch Social Democrats six seats on the Czechoslovak State Council, a forty-member advisory body; the government in exile itself, though, remained a Czech and Slovak monopoly. For the same reason, he specifically, and mendaciously, denied in meetings with the Sudetendeutsch refugees that the rumors flying around London that he and his government were considering mass expulsions of the German population had any foundation.34
The entry of the Soviet Union and the United States into the war in 1941, however, changed the equation dramatically, as did the intensifying antagonisms the conflict itself was generating on all sides. By the end of the year the defeat of the Axis on the battlefield was once again a realistic prospect, while it had become clear that hopes of an anti-Nazi revolution breaking out in Germany were so much wishful thinking. The marked hardening at this time of Beneš’s rhetoric, both private and public, on the future of the Sudetendeutsche was not coincidental. In a radio message to ÚVOD leaders in September 1941, he assured them that he was sympathetic to the objective of expelling all Sudeten Germans at the end of the war, though for diplomatic reasons he might have to assent to a less radical program.35 His exchanges with Wenzel Jaksch also took on a new and much more uncompromising tone. A year previously, the two had agreed that Beneš’s suggestion that the Sudeten German problem be solved by a process of internal transfer to ethnically homogeneous cantons that would enjoy a significant measure of autonomy offered a realistic basis for talks over the shape of the postwar Czechoslovakia. The president’s insistence that this be accompanied by a partial expulsion of the Sudetendeutsche, though, had stalled the negotiations; and in the event Beneš proved unable to sell the canton idea even to his own government in exile. It is hard not to conclude that by the end of 1941 he had abandoned the idea of—or no longer saw the necessity for—an agreed solution with the Sudeten Social Democrats. Jaksch began to fear, with much justification, that “Beneš hoped to gain a commitment from the British Government to restore the previous frontiers of Czechoslovakia after which he would be in a position to claim that the Sudeten question was purely an internal Czechoslovak matter.”36
That Jaksch had read the tealeaves correctly was shown by the fact that Beneš now felt sufficiently confident to reveal in public the way in which his mind was working. Cautious as ever, he commenced with a series of trial balloons. In September 1941, for the first time, he publicly indicated his support for “the principle of the transfer of populations” in the context of a “New Order in Europe.”37 Two months later, in a pair of speeches at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities, he expressed the opinion that “Germans, good and bad, European-minded and Nazi-minded, must learn … that war does not pay.” There was, he maintained, “no way other than the way of suffering of educating a social and political community and there never was any other way.”38 Emboldened by the lack of Allied disagreement with these arguments, in an article in Hamilton Fish Armstrong’s Foreign Affairs in January 1942 Beneš proceeded from the general to the particular. “National minorities,” he declared, “are always—and in Central Europe especially—a real thorn in the side of individual nations. This is especially true if they are German minorities.” Before speaking of minority rights, it was necessary to “define the rights of majorities and the obligations of minorities.” Indeed, in light of wartime experience, whether it was necessary or desirable for national minorities as such to continue in existence was an open question.
Hitler himself has transferred German minorities from the Baltic and from Bessarabia. Germany, therefore, cannot a priori regard it as an injury to her if other states adopt the same methods with regard to German minorities…. It will be necessary
after this war to carry out a transfer of populations on a very much larger scale than after the last war. This must be done in as humane a manner as possible, internationally organized and internationally financed.39
Beneš conceded that the victors had a moral obligation to “design measures for the protection of loyal minorities, for guaranteeing them their political and cultural rights, on the basis of absolute mutuality.” But there could no longer be any doubt that the Czechoslovak government in exile was now openly committed to the removal of all or most of its Sudetendeutsch population after the war. In separate meetings with Jaksch and the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in the month his Foreign Affairs article appeared, Beneš confirmed that this was his intention. He was willing, he indicated, to adjust Czechoslovakia’s frontiers so as to give up some small tracts of exclusively Sudetendeutsch-inhabited territory to Germany, provided he received suitable compensation elsewhere. But no more than 600,000 to 700,000 Sudeten Germans, or a fifth of the prewar population, would be allowed to remain. Eden gave Beneš a noncommittal response, which angered him greatly. The Foreign Office’s lack of enthusiasm, he complained to Philip Nichols, was yet another British betrayal of Czechoslovakia, reminding the Ambassador that the “issue of our Germans is for me the issue of Munich in general.”40
Once again wider wartime developments worked in Beneš’s favor. On May 27, 1942, acting on the Czechoslovak president’s instructions, a pair of Czech agents with the Special Operations Executive ambushed and killed Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s genocidal deputy, as he drove through a suburb of Prague. The previous September, Heydrich had been appointed “Protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazis’ Orwellian title for the colonial governor of the Czech lands. So successful had he been in pacifying the area through a combination of carrot-and-stick measures—Czech munitions workers, for example, received higher rations than even their German counterparts, and the Czechoslovak economy as a whole “obediently produced roughly 10 percent of the Nazi Reich’s industrial output in exchange for handsome salaries”41—that an alarmed Beneš ordered his assassination for fear that the Allies might conclude that Czechoslovakia had reconciled itself to Nazi occupation.42 If his intention was to provoke a reaction from the Germans, the mission achieved its purpose. Responding with their customary lack of restraint, the Nazis razed the villages of Lidice and Ležáky to the ground as a reprisal, massacring the men and sending the women to concentration camps. More than a thousand Czechoslovak Gentiles died in the repression that followed; a thousand more Czech Jews were sent to Mauthausen camp, never to return. Worse still from Beneš’s point of view, the German dragnet hauled in practically the entire membership of ÚVOD, leaving Czechoslovakia without a functioning resistance organization and depriving the government in exile of any means of reliable communication with the homeland.
If the assassination failed abysmally in its objective of sparking greater militancy on the part of the Czech people—for the remainder of the war, the Germans found that fewer than two thousand officials were all that were required to keep tabs on a Czechoslovak administration employing more than 350,000 people—it nonetheless succeeded admirably in polarizing opinion at home and abroad. The Sudetendeutsche were infuriated by Heydrich’s killing to so great a degree that “the German authorities had to intervene to prevent lynchings of Czechs in ethnically mixed areas. Party organizations in the Sudetenland and in Vienna demanded mass expulsion of Czechs from their respective territories.”43 Some commentators have implied that Beneš foresaw just such a reaction, counting on it to ensure that the legacy of bitterness would be so great as to preclude any possibility of Czechoslovaks and Sudeten Germans ever living together again once the war was over.44 Certainly some of the more injudicious statements by the president and his ministers might be thought to lend support to such a theory. A silver lining to the destruction of Lidice, Beneš later remarked, was that “under no circumstances can doubts be cast any more upon Czechoslovakia’s national integrity.” His political secretary and party colleague Prokop Drtina, the minister of justice in the postwar government, expressed himself still more unfortunately when he proclaimed that “The response to the assassination and Lidice in Allied opinion was so enormous that it equalled for us a victorious battle.” Without the sacrifice of those who had carried out the operation, “we would never have achieved the purification of the Czech lands from the German settlements.”45 To conclude, however, that the assassination was carried out for the purpose of setting the ethnic communities in Czechoslovakia at each other’s throats is altogether too cynical an interpretation. A much more likely explanation is that Beneš, dismayed and embarrassed in his interactions with the British by the lack of overt resistance in his homeland, felt the need to demonstrate that he and his government were still relevant, and accepted the inevitable Nazi backlash that would result as a price that must be paid in wartime.
Whatever his motives, the martyrdom of Lidice strengthened Beneš’s hand immensely when dealing with the Allies. Although countless Polish, Soviet, and Yugoslav villages and towns had already suffered a similar fate, none received any publicity in the West. Lidice, however, quickly became a household name, thanks in part to the highly developed public relations network of the Czechoslovak Ministry of Information in London and also to the fortuitous decision of the leading U.S. propaganda agency, the Office of War Information, to make the massacre “the one cap-stone incident of the Axis terror and barbarism, which will fire the United Nations to smash the Nazi beasts.”46 (Ležáky, being smaller than Lidice and, still more importantly, with a name that was far more difficult for Westerners to pronounce, was almost immediately forgotten.) Under intense pressure from the Czechoslovaks and others to respond with reprisal air raids against Germany, an idea the British government opposed for fear that a cessation of Nazi atrocities against civilians might result in demands that the RAF respond by discontinuing its strategic bombing campaign, Eden looked again at the possibility of giving ground over the expulsion of the Sudetendeutsche.47 In a meeting with Stalin in Moscow in December 1941, he had learned that the Soviet leader considered the removal of the population of German lands that would be given to Poland after the war to be an important element of the eventual settlement.48 A February 1942 study by the Foreign Office’s research wing had pronounced large-scale forced population transfers a feasible method of dealing with the European minorities problem.49 Five weeks after Lidice, then, Eden brought forward a paper in the War Cabinet in which he stated his belief that “it would probably be impossible to avoid some measures of this kind in post-war Europe” and warned that “if they are not carried out in an orderly and peaceful manner it is only too likely that the Czech and Polish populations will forcibly expel the German minorities from their midst. The question is whether we should now commit ourselves to the principle of such transfers, and let both Dr Beneš and the Sudeten German representatives know that this is our view.” At the beginning of July 1942 Eden obtained his colleagues’ approval of “the general principle of the transfer to Germany of German minorities in Central and South-Eastern Europe after the war in cases where this seems necessary and desirable, and authority to let this decision be known in appropriate cases.”50
Where the Czechoslovaks had led, the Polish government-in-exile was eventually to follow. In the early stages of the war, it is true, the London-based administration of Władysław Sikorski had been much more concerned with ensuring that Poland’s prewar borders be restored, and in particular that the Soviet Union should evacuate the Polish territories it had invaded and absorbed in September 1939. Though some Poles cast covetous eyes on East Prussia, the idea of territorial acquisitions in the west was of much less importance to them. They reacted cautiously to Czechoslovak suggestions in the winter of 1939–40 of an expulsion of German minorities as a preparatory step toward a postwar confederation between the two countries.51 As it became increasingly clear that at least some of the eastern lands they had lost to the Soviet Uni
on would never be returned to them, however, Poles of all political stripes began to look much more seriously at the prospects of expanding at Germany’s expense in the west—an idea that had already been promoted between the wars by Roman Dmowski’s ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic National Democratic movement. In a December 1942 session, the Polish Parliament in London adopted a resolution advocating that the Polish-German frontier be “straightened and shortened” in the interests of Poland’s future security. What this meant in practice was clarified by Sikorski four days later, when he informed Roosevelt that Poland wished to annex East Prussia and German Silesia as far as the line of the Oder and the eastern Neisse rivers.52 The removal of Germans, however, was not the most important demographic question pressing on Sikorski’s mind. At the beginning of the year, he had told Anthony Eden that it would be “quite impossible … for Poland to continue to maintain 3.5 million Jews after the war. Room must be found for them elsewhere.”53 The Nazis would solve that problem for the Allies, although Sikorski, who died in an air crash in July 1943, would not live to see it.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 4