The organised transfer of population, in the immediate post-War period, may, indeed, be one of the foundations of better international relations in a later phase. Nor would this be a new departure. Between the Wars the transfer of population between Turkey and Greece was an undoubted success.
In any case, there will be a vast problem of repatriation and resettlement in Europe, when tens of millions of refugees, slave labourers, and prisoners of war return to freedom and their own homes. Compared with this, the transfer even of substantial national minorities, German and other, to the right side of the post-War frontiers, will be a small affair. However, just when so much is fluid, there will be a unique opportunity, which will not recur, to make a permanent settlement of this vexed question.76
This does not mean that a consensus in the democracies on the necessity of mass population transfers ever emerged. Even within the British Labour Party, a strong minority found the reasoning behind them impossible to understand. The journal Socialist Commentary called attention to the incongruity of trying to preserve in aspic the often artificially defined European frontiers of 1939, the product of centuries of dynastic squabbling and historical accident, for all time. More than that, “Once the frontiers have been settled, all discussion is then to be discouraged as to whether they were the right ones after all.” It would have been more fitting, it pointed out, for a party that professed to be both democratic and internationalist “to bring justice and freedom to the national minorities wherever they choose to live, and not to continue the odious Nazi method of shifting people about like cattle.”77 The member of Parliament and future minister George Strauss, although himself Jewish, asked the 1944 party conference to repudiate population transfers that would, in his view, “punish the innocent with the guilty, damage the whole economy of Europe, lead to the reappearance of Fascism and involve us in another world war.”78 For their part, members of the political Right, in keeping with their ideological tendency to regard with caution grandiose state-driven projects aimed at eliminating complicated problems at a stroke, responded coolly to the first public indications that expulsions were being seriously considered. The London-based Economist warned in the same month that Beneš’s Foreign Affairs article appeared that punishment of Germans after the war “must fall on those who are guilty in a moral and not in a racial sense. The Nazis have made racial scapegoats; the Allies must not fall into exactly the same error.”79 The following year, as signs of Czechoslovakia’s and Poland’s intentions became clearer, the journal spoke out in more forceful tones. If, notwithstanding the Allies’ stated principles, “dismemberment, mass transfers of population, massacre, the permanent oppression of minorities are to be part of the settlement this time, let it be plain from the start that neither Britain nor America will in ten years from the signing of the peace raise a finger to maintain it.”80
Probably the most perceptive critique offered of the expulsion project was published in 1943 by Allan Fisher, a New Zealand economist, and David Mitrany, a brilliant young Anglo-Romanian political scientist who had served as an adviser on international questions to both the Foreign Office and the Labour Party. To claim that this practice was now justified because of the Nazi government’s previous recourse to it, they argued, seemed a curious way of reeducating the German people “at a time when they are being urged to abjure Hitler and all his works.” In any event, it was futile to suppose that attempts to create nationally homogeneous states by expelling alien populations could be sustained over the long term except by hermetically sealing those countries from all outside movements in the future.
[I]t is clearly not enough merely to create such “pure” states. Like race, they must also be kept pure. Therefore, whatever the criterion of purity for the time being, if it is to achieve the ends for which it is advocated the policy of transfer must have as its corollary a continuous policy of segregation. Migration or any free movement of people would have to be prohibited lest it should lead to the gradual creation of new unwanted and irritating minorities. The habitual natural adjustments of population, to fit economic conditions, would thereby be checked; and the “New [postwar] World” would be inaugurated by the suppression of an old freedom.
Presciently, Fisher and Mitrany warned that Western advocates of expulsion should not delude themselves that the same tactic would not be used against them in their turn. In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East white minority communities were also to be found. “Their presence and interests have always been used to justify intervention on their behalf by the home states. Therefore the ‘solution’ adopted in Europe for ending the trouble with minorities would very soon come to be used for ‘transferring’ European minorities … back to their home countries.”81
For all the cogency of their arguments, though, the opponents of expulsions had little hope of being able to reverse a policy decision that had already been taken at the highest level. From this point onward, as he later acknowledged in his memoirs, Beneš himself saw no reason to conceal his intentions any further. In what would prove to be his final meetings with Wenzel Jaksch and the other Sudetendeutsch refugee leaders, at the end of 1942, he informed them frankly that he regarded the overwhelming majority of Sudeten Germans as at the least “passive war criminals” and that the only solution acceptable to him was “our complete separation.”82 When one of Jaksch’s colleagues, Eugen de Witte, protested that this stance meant that “If Hitler wins the war, we Sudeten Germans are lost and if the Czechs win it, we are lost too,” Beneš replied that their fate was indeed tragic but nonetheless unchangeable. But the president would also ominously note that in resisting his plans, Jaksch and other anti-Nazi Sudetendeutsche may not have “clearly realise[d] that by so doing they automatically took full responsibility for what the Germans were doing to us as a Nation in the war …”83 A month later, in January 1943, Beneš sent Jaksch a lengthy memorandum in which he accused the Sudetendeutsch Social Democrats of going behind his back to the British; displaying their disloyalty to Czechoslovakia by continuing to claim the right of self-determination; and refusing to accept that the will of the majority in the postwar Republic ought to prevail in determining all questions relating to Czechoslovakia’s future, including any putative transfer of Germans.84 For Jaksch, however, this last demand placed his people in a Catch-22. If they rejected it they marked themselves out, at least according to the government in exile’s terms, as traitors to the Czechoslovak state, and hence liable to transfer. Should they accept it, on the other hand, they acknowledged the right of the Czech majority to legislate their denationalization as “passive war criminals,” leading to precisely the same end result.
By the beginning of 1943, therefore, the possibility of finding a middle ground had disappeared. As he had already told Philip Nichols he would do if Jaksch rejected his scheme, Beneš broke off all further contact with the anti-Nazi Sudetendeutsche. Thereafter, the government in exile pursued an increasingly vitriolic and, in the end, obsessive public relations campaign against Jaksch and his colleagues, declaring them to be “pan-Germans” seeking precisely the same objective as Konrad Henlein and, indeed, Hitler himself—the breakup of Czechoslovakia. The justification offered for this startling contention was a crude syllogism: Jaksch favored an autonomous Sudetenland within the context of a postwar European federation; a European federation would inevitably be dominated by its largest member, Germany; hence Jaksch favored German domination of the Sudetenland. In a typically venomous specimen of what would become a tidal wave of ad hominem literature directed against the Sudetendeutsch leader, at the end of 1943 Hubert Ripka denounced Jaksch, formerly “a good friend of his,”85 as not only a fifth columnist but a social reactionary.
It has been the deplorable lot of this German Socialist to bring to a climax the work of destruction which was begun and continued by Henlein, the Nazi…. There is no difference between Henlein’s proceedings then and those of Jaksch now…. There is, of course, a difference between Henlein, the Nazi, and Jaksch, the Social
ist: the former desires German domination in a Nazi régime, the latter in a Socialist régime, but both are pursuing the same final purpose, Pan-German domination of other peoples. Henlein and his followers are adherents of Hitler’s European “New Order,” while Jaksch is an advocate of a European socialistic federation, but a federation organized in such a way that socialistic Germany would be the strongest element in it and for all practical purposes would have the decisive word and hold sway over all the others. It is not surprising that this socialistic Pan-German can scarcely conceal his distaste for the Soviet Union and his disapproval of the Czechoslovak-Soviet alliance.86
Ironically, after the Communist coup of 1948 Ripka—who rarely permitted himself to think or say things that Edvard Beneš had not thought or said first—upon fleeing Czechoslovakia once more and setting up yet another government in exile would himself advocate “the rebirth of a free Czechoslovakia ‘within the framework of the future European federation.’”87 In 1944, though, he indicated that such ideas were grounds for an eventual treason prosecution, declaring in the State Council that “from the Czechoslovak point of view, the activity of Jaksch is anti-State, and that it must be judged as such with all the consequences which it involves.”88
As the war began to draw to a close, then, Jaksch was left with fewer and fewer cards to play, beyond appeals to international public opinion that were unlikely to succeed. His protest to Beneš over the stance the government in exile was taking “against old allies who stood at the Czech Nation’s side when it was abandoned by all its friends” at the time of Munich was ignored.89 A pamphlet published in English in July 1943, pointing out that anti-Nazis in the Sudetenland would hardly be motivated to rise against Hitler when nightly BBC broadcasts to Czechoslovakia reminded them that “victory over Nazism will be followed by new disasters of evacuation and transfer,”90 merely drew attention to the fact that if overt resistance to the German occupation in the Czech lands was minimal, in the Sudetenland it simply did not exist. Recognizing this, at the beginning of 1945 Jaksch approached one of his contacts at the Foreign Office, Frank Roberts, for permission to broadcast to his homeland on the BBC one last time. Though there was not more than a “tiny chance,” he acknowledged, that his attempt to warn the people of the Sudetenland of the fate that awaited them would succeed, it might still be possible to prevent the worst after the war “if the anti-Nazi element in the Sudeten districts … could, in a decisive hour, act simultaneously with the masses in the Czech interior.” In August 1944, after all, Slovak insurgents had rebelled against the Nazis, following five years of enthusiastic collaboration with Berlin in the course of which Slovak forces had participated in the invasions of both Poland and the USSR, to say nothing of assisting in the deportation of most of the country’s Jewish population to Hitler’s extermination camps. Though the rising had been a failure, it was sufficient to insulate Slovakia against the threat of a systematic campaign of postwar retribution. By early 1945, the only faint hope for the Sudetendeutsche seemed to be a similar demonstration, however belated, of their willingness to identify themselves with the Allied cause. In the text of his address to the Germanophone population of his homeland, Jaksch did not mince words about the peril in which they stood if they failed to do so.
Only a general refusal of obedience, from Asch [Aš] to Jägerndorf [Krnov], can avert from you the impending doom. The fate of our people and our homeland hangs on a last thin thread. In your name have Henlein, K. H. Frank, Krebs, May and their accomplices heaped crime upon crime…. You have only the choice between standing before the tribunal of the peoples for the atrocities of a K. H. Frank in Prague and of an Ernst Kundt in Poland, and breaking away from them at the last hour. We entreat all decent Sudeten Germans, and above all the men in the Volkssturm battalions, that they should not for anything allow themselves to be used as tools to suppress a Czech popular rising. Should you be ordered to shoot at Czech fighters for liberty, reverse your rifles…. You, the Germans in the Protectorate, have to make many amends. Any further support of the Nazi régime spells certain disaster.91
The Foreign Office’s fear about such a broadcast was the opposite to Jaksch’s: not that his appeal might fail, but that it might succeed. The Czechoslovak government in exile’s settled policy, a British official reminded his colleagues, was to eject most of the Sudetendeutsche from the country. If in response to exhortations from Britain they were to rise against the Nazis, London would thereby be accepting “responsibilities for these Sudetens who responded to this appeal. This responsibility we should not be able to accept …”92 Jaksch’s request for broadcast facilities was consequently denied. By the time the war ended, he was unable to point to a single concrete example of Sudeten German assistance—or even attempted assistance—to the Allied campaign.
Edvard Beneš returned to Czechoslovakia on April 3, 1945, accompanied by members of his government, and set up a temporary administration in the recently liberated Slovak city of Košice. Despite the terrific strain of the previous six years that had taken a severe toll on his health, he could look back with satisfaction on what he had achieved since the beginning of his exile. With the exception of the small eastern territory of Carpatho-Ruthenia, which he had had to promise to the USSR as the tribute for Stalin’s patronage, Czechoslovakia was to be restored in its 1938 frontiers. Though he remained for the moment the head of an unelected government, he faced no immediate challenge to his domestic leadership. Most importantly, the minorities problem that had bedeviled Czechoslovakia since the moment of its creation was on the point of being resolved once and for all. Certainly some difficulties remained. Although the Allies had agreed to the expulsion of the Sudetendeutsche, they had as yet made no commitments as to when, how, or to where the population would be removed. They had turned a deaf ear to his frequent requests that the 700,000-strong Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia be treated likewise. Nonetheless, the prospect of a Czechoslovakia the overwhelming majority of whose people would be Czechs and Slovaks was clearly in sight. And most of this had been Beneš’s doing. To be sure, he had not done it alone. The Allies had not adopted a policy of population transfers to gratify an exiled central European politician in respect of whom they harbored a bad conscience, but because it suited their interests. Nor did he force the idea onto an unwilling Czechoslovak population. A great many contingencies, furthermore, had to occur to make such an outcome possible. Had the war been shorter, or longer; had it been Patton’s Third U.S. Army that liberated most of Czechoslovakia rather than the Red Army; had there been a significant Sudeten German anti-Nazi resistance movement, the expulsions might never have taken place, notwithstanding all Beneš’s efforts. But it had been he, as Chad Bryant correctly says, who “forced the issue at every moment, and in the end he did everything in his power to see that the Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia. Without him, the expulsions would not have happened as they did, if at all.”93
Wenzel Jaksch’s exile, in contrast, would never end. As one of its earliest acts, Beneš’s new government introduced the so-called “Great Decree,” providing for the punishment of “Nazi criminals, traitors, and their accomplices.” Its fourth clause made punishable, by a prison sentence of up to twenty years, any act by a Czechoslovak citizen living abroad that “subverted the movement to liberate the Czechoslovak Republic in its pre-Munich constitutional form and unity, or who otherwise consciously harmed the interests of the Czechoslovak Republic …” This section, Benjamin Frommer notes, “above all … threatened Wenzel Jaksch,” and was intended to deny the Sudetendeutsche “a strong advocate who could have credibly advanced the position that not all his people were Nazis and that retribution must be individual, not collective.”94 Jaksch knew well what awaited him should he return home, having already publicly been declared guilty by Hubert Ripka, who now became a minister in the Czechoslovak government and as one of his first official acts dispatched a formal note to the U.S. chargé d’affaires warning that the new regime “cannot regard as a loyal c
itizen any of those who, though residing in freedom abroad, did not act in a manner becoming a Czechoslovak citizen. I am thinking mainly of the group of so-called Sudetic Germans headed by W. Jaksch.”95 His own future uncertain, Jaksch remained in London, campaigning and writing energetically but with increasing desperation against a tragedy he was powerless to avert.
Yet just as the expulsion scheme was not the work of one man acting alone, neither was the failure to prevent it. Undoubtedly some of Jaksch’s decisions during the war can be second-guessed. His advice to Sudeten German refugees to join the British forces rather than the “Free Czechoslovak” army so long as the future of the Sudetenland remained unsettled made him no friends among the government in exile and was a definite tactical error, although one that probably made little difference in the long run. He was mistaken, as Beneš triumphantly reminded him, to think that the British would come to his assistance. Lastly, he failed to foresee how long and bitter the war would be, and how small a part traditional concepts of national self-determination would play in the postwar world order.
It would be a mistake, though, to view what had occurred as a duel between Beneš and Jaksch, in which the former outplayed the latter. In the final analysis, the Allies listened to Beneš and ignored Jaksch because one had influence over the people for whom he spoke and the other did not. Until the end of the war, the Sudetendeutsche, whether enthusiastic Hitlerites or passive anti-Nazis, continued to serve the Greater Germany of which they considered themselves a part. In this they did not differ from any of the other ethnic German—or Volks-deutsch—communities in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states, and elsewhere who, regardless of their individual political leanings, either aligned themselves with the Reich or did nothing to oppose it.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 6