The entire European edifice created by the post-First World War settlement had left Central Europe awash with Kurdistans. Nations had been born that no one would have given credence to or believed sustainable just five years earlier. Ten million German speakers were now scattered as minorities outside the borders of two much-reduced German states, in many cases in countries that no one had ever heard of. Their minority status was guaranteed on paper, but they soon learned that this meant little in practice. Their rights, property and increasingly their freedom to use their own language came under threat. Jewish-American groups fought hard to enshrine a statute for minorities as part of the process to protect their own communities and, officially at least, to protect all minorities. However, this had little chance of success in the newly created national states, each of which only had one official state language.
The intentions from the Allies had been clear from the outset. France’s Foreign Minister Aristide Briand had said, ‘The process that we have in mind is not aiming at the disappearance of the minorities but rather their assimilation.’(38) Neville Chamberlain had said, ‘The aim of the agreements reached on minorities is to protect and secure their legal status. However, with the passage of time, these minorities should prepare themselves to dissolve into their new national communities.’(39) These statements were music to the Czechs’ ears. Meanwhile, Beneš wrote in his memoirs, ‘The so-called Czechification of our German areas will follow automatically from the natural exchange between our peoples and the mixing of the Czech and German populations, exactly as it did in earlier centuries when the situation was reversed.’(40)
Despite cooperation on the part of the German Social Democrats with their Czech counterparts, who governed the country from 1929–38, the German-speaking minority continued to overwhelmingly resent being part of this new state. The first elected leader of the newly formed ‘Sudeten’ Germans (a term that came to represent all the disparate German communities in the country) stated in 1920 that: ‘The Germans would never accept the injustice that had been forced upon them,’ (i.e. being forced to be part of Czechoslovakia) and, despite many examples of cooperation, this sentiment remained the majority view.(41) When Konrad Henlein took over the nationalist movement (the Heimatsfront-Sudetendeutsche Partei, SdP),li and then allied it to the Nazis, his calls for the Sudeten Germans desire to ‘Come Home to the Reich’ were to have disastrous consequences for his community. ‘They got what they asked for!’ is a common phrase that is still used mockingly within the Czech Republic today.
It could have all been so different had one of the famous comments that Beneš made in January 1919 been followed with any vigour. He said, ‘Our government would be similar to that of Switzerland.’ An interesting example indeed, as Switzerland had also once been part of the Holy Roman Empire and was a country with four very different ethnic groups, each with their own language and traditions. Where the Swiss Germans made up two-thirds of the population, a canton-based prosperous federal democracy had developed, and the communities lived in peace with each other for hundreds of years. Had greater efforts been made earlier by the Czech majority to create a truly federal structure — with greater autonomy for the nation’s minorities, allowing full use of their languages, not discriminating against them in terms of public employment, and not imposing a Czech-dominated state, it would most likely have taken the wind out of the sails of the extremists in the German and Slovak camps.
At the eleventh hour, before Munich, Beneš did eventually make some concessions to greater autonomy (which the Slovaks at least had been promised at the outset of the First Republic) for all of Czechoslovakia’s minorities, but it was too late. The justified resentments of the Czech Republic’s German minority had been swept aside for too long with dangerous disdain. Not only because their powerful neighbour sought to redress them, but also because the nations that had imposed them were having second thoughts. Leading figures in Britain felt they had betrayed their own high principles of self-determination and now the chickens were coming home to roost. They included the British Ambassador to Berlin, Neville Henderson, and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. In pondering the virtues of action, Halifax told the French Prime Minister, Edouard Daladier, ‘… it would be impossible to give any effective protection to the Czechoslovak State. We might fight a war against German aggression, but at the peace conference, which would follow such a war (I do) not think the statesmen concerned would redraft the present boundaries of Czechoslovakia,’ meaning that the Sudeten German regions would not be included within the redrawn frontiers of some future Czech state. Neville Chamberlain went further in an argument that carried the day with the French. He said, ‘(If) the Czechs objected to surrendering territory after a plebiscite, for fear of the example to the Poles and Hungarians, then let it take place without a plebiscite. It could be represented as the choice of the Czechoslovak government themselves… that would dispose of any idea that we were ourselves carving up Czechoslovak territory.’ A.J.P. Taylor summed up the situation when he said, ‘The British and French Governments wanted Beneš to commit suicide to secure their peace of mind!’lii (42) Czechoslovakia having long since run out of friends was now also running out of time. One man who had a particular dislike of the Czechs and their treatment of his fellow Austro-Germans was Adolf Hitler, who would come to be hailed by roughly two-thirds of his dispossessed cousins as their saviour.liii
HITLER AND ‘HEIM INS REICH’ (HOME TO THE REICH)
Hitler’s first victims were the enemies within — the German people who had opposed him. These were the first to be put into the concentration camps, if they were not beaten to death. This occurred not only in Germany, but in Austria and Czechoslovakia as well. The Germans who fled the Third Reich to seek safety in Austria, and then Czechoslovakia, were particularly vulnerable. Prague became one of the first cities of refuge for German émigrés trying to escape the clutches of the Third Reich as its proximity to both Germany and Austria, along with its German-speaking community, made it a popular choice. The remnants of the SPD, (Germany’s Socialist Democrats), were among the first to decamp to Prague as the choice of destinations to escape to rapidly began to diminish.liv
Of the 3.5 million Germans living in Czechoslovakia — who made up a quarter of the total population — a third never supported Konrad Henlein’s Homeland Front and were unsympathetic to Hitler’s aims. They were delivered into the waiting hands of the Gestapo and the SD (Nazi Security Service), who had free rein to do their worst for three days following the internationally underwritten Munich Agreement, which had ceded the Sudetenland to Germany. They wasted no time in rounding up their opponents. Leading figures like Hans Gottfried, the trade unionist, were carted off and beaten to death in Dachau. In total, nearly 10,000 Sudeten Social Democrats were imprisoned. Many were taken to concentration camps where over 770 of them died.(1)
Nevertheless, following two decades of mistreatment, when the German Wehrmacht crossed the former border into Sudeten Bohemia on the 1st October 1938 they were met with jubilation from Henlein’s supporters. The first exodus followed hard on their heels with 170,000lv (mainly Czech civil servants and administrators) having to pack their bags and leave, as did many of the Sudeten German opponents of Hitler’s regime.
Those Sudeten Germans opposed to Hitler who chose exile in London during the war, had an increasingly difficult task trying to convince the British government, over and above the clamour of Beneš’ regime in exile, that their twenty-year experience of being an oppressed minority in Czechoslovakia meant they did not want the Munich Agreement annulled in its entirety. They argued that it had, from the outset, been a mistake to give 2 million Slovaks recognition as an independent national group while treating 3.5 million Germans as a minority, and to be treated as the Czechs pleased. In reality, the Slovaks had not fared much better, and the Hungarians were no better off than the Germans. The Czechs abused all their minorities to varying degrees, from neglect to outright persecution. As always, it was
the Jews of the region who were to suffer the worst of it. They were driven into the narrow strip of no-man’s-land between the two new frontiers and left there to wander about without shelter or provisions for weeks — until the Czech government finally relented and let them in. On the 15th March 1939, when Hitler occupied the rest of the Czech state, not only the Jews would have to fear for their future. This time the worst fears of the Czech nationalists were to become a reality, and for a while, it appeared that the light of Czech national liberation would be snuffed out forever. The Slovaks, on the other hand, got their ‘own’ state. The incarceration of Czech citizens mounted from this moment on: 1,200 Czechs were immediately rounded up and put into camps as human shields, in case of possible Czech partisan reprisals against the German minority in Prague and elsewhere. Theresienstadt, the former Austro-Hungarian fortress-come-prison, was converted into a concentration camp for the Protectorate’s Jews and became a major transportation hub for ‘Jewish resettlement to the east’ — in other words, the trains stopped at Auschwitz. However, Czech losses during the occupation were nowhere near the level of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in Poland, Russia, and other theatres of the war.
The war bypassed Bohemia and Moravia, leaving them largely unscathed, and the most intact regions anywhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the Czechs were Slavs and as such were regarded as Untermenschen (sub-humans) by their Nazi occupiers. Even if their treatment did not resemble that of the Poles and Russians during the war, their fate remained uncertain, the sword of Damocles still hung precariously over their heads, and as the occupation continued, the constant sense of uncertainty, pent-up fear and anxiety would build.
Reinhard Heydrich, who had been referred to by some as ‘the Führer in waiting’, was the man put in charge of the Nazis’ newly constituted ‘Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’. Heydrich was a man of action and an adrenalin junkie. He was a fencing champion and a keen mountain climber. Before the war he had trained as a fighter pilot, and had been kicked out of the naval academy for having an affair with another officer’s wife. When the invasion of Russia began, he jumped into the first plane he could find and flew over the advancing German forces and beyond to view the retreating Russians, only to be shot down by Russian AA fire. He crash-landed his plane and managed to scramble back to the advancing German lines. Heydrich was also cold-bloodedly ruthless and pursued the racial imperialist goals of the Third Reich with missionary zeal. His was the guiding hand behind the ‘Final Solution’ and it was Heydrich who called the conference, at a villa on Lake Wansee in Berlin on 20th January 1942, which deliberated the details of the extermination of Europe’s Jews. As leader of the Nazi Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the fate of the Czech people rested in his hands.
Heydrich had envisioned his governance of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in two phases. Firstly, he decided to use the resources of the new Reichgau (Reich administrative region) and its Czech inhabitants as a factory for war production. Secondly, when the war was over, he planned the radical racial cleansing to ‘assimilate and Germanise the good racial elements, sterilise the well meaning lesser racial types and shoot the rest.’(3) Heydrich and the Gestapo quickly mopped up what little Czech resistance there was by swiftly rounding up and shooting any potential ring leaders. This policy was combined with a reluctance to crack down on the Czech population as a whole (in contrast to other parts of occupied Europe) in the hope that a largely peaceful environment would not interfere with the primary goal of squeezing as much war production out of the Czechs as possible. The resistance which did occur (and ultimately brought about Heydrich’s assassination), came from abroad. It was ordered by the exiled Beneš government in London, and supported by the British government. It was, for the most part, against the wishes of the opposition groups within the Protectorate, for fear of the terrible reprisals that this would generate. Hitler was furious at Heydrich’s cavalier attitude to his own safety, driving around Prague in an open-top turbo-charged Mercedes without a military escort, which was indeed to prove fatal. A daring British SOE operation parachuted a group of Czech resistance fighters into Bohemia on an assassination mission to kill Heydrich. They attacked him in his open-top car and although he was not killed outright, a grenade splinter and the horse hair from the seat of the car entered his spleen and slowly poisoned him to death. He died on 4th June 1942, and was given one of the most elaborate state funerals in the history of the Third Reich. His assassination led Hitler to demand the execution of 10,000 Czechs in retribution. The new governor of the protectorate, Hans Frank, managed to continue Heydrich’s policy of ‘restraint’ and mollified Hitler’s demands, although it still led to the liquidation of two entire villages. In Lidice, a village just north-west of Prague, all the men were shot, the women sent to concentration camps and the children given up for adoption. The lesser known, but even more horrendous, massacre was in Lezaky, where all the adults, including the women, were shot. These massacres cost over 1,500 innocent Czech lives.(4)
EDVARD BENEŠ: GENOCIDAL BUREAUCRAT
The Czech President, Edvard Beneš, had been the second most important architect of the state of Czechoslovakia after T.G. Masaryk. At the Paris Peace Conference following the First World War, Beneš had lied about the number of Germans that would be incorporated into the new state of Czechoslovakia. Once in power he had continued to ‘encourage’ as many Sudeten Germans as possible to emigrate and aimed to forcibly assimilate the rest. Following the humiliation of Munich, the betrayal of the Slovaks in seeking their own state, and the occupation of the rump of the Czech lands by Hitler in March 1939, he and his administration went into exile in London. His aim now became the establishment of a homogenous national state, free of its German and Hungarian minorities. He repeatedly refused to give Wenzel Jaksch, the leader of the exiled Social Democratic Sudeten Germans in London, any assurances with regard to their future within a post-war Czechoslovakia, preparing instead for a final reckoning.
During the early stages of the war, the Allies were not prepared to entirely scrap the Munich Agreement, so Beneš bided his time. But his intentions became clear as early as 18th November 1940, when in a communication with the Czech underground, he stated that ‘the Germans need to disappear’ from large tracts of Bohemia. He stated unequivocally that a future Czech state would accept no minority rights whatsoever.(5) Beneš continued to play around with the idea of sacrificing a tiny piece of territory to Germany into which he hoped to push as many Sudeten Germans as he could. Initially he did not believe the Allies would consent, or that he would be able to achieve the ethnic cleansing of over 4 million people from his country, but as Nazi atrocities rose across the Continent, sympathy for his radical plans increased. He played a clever game, playing Britain and the Soviet Union off against one another by forging an alliance with the Soviet Union, after what he and many Czechs felt was the betrayal of the Western Allies at Munich. He steered an ever-closer path to Stalin and the Soviet Union (the consequences of which he was either oblivious to or not concerned about) in his quest to establish an ethnically pure Czech state. From the outset, it had never been his intention to seek compromise with the state’s minorities, he simply wanted them purged and was willing to sign a pact with the devil to do so, making it clear to Churchill that he could just as well negotiate terms with Stalin as to the future of Czechoslovakia’s German minority and her future borders.(6) Beneš’ desire for striking a more radical deal with Stalin was delayed by the fact that Stalin became Hitler’s ally from September 1939–June 1941. Beneš, ever patient, had to wait for the impossible alliance between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia to fail for his luck to change.
Following Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941, and the massacres in Lidice and Lezaky in June 1942, Beneš talked ever more openly and repeatedly of large scale population ‘transfers’. With the German army being sucked ever deeper into the vastness of the Russian hinterland, and with America having joined the war, he
hoped the tide would ultimately turn against Nazi Germany. He did not have long to wait. On 6th July 1942 the British War Cabinet finally agreed to his long cherished desire to annul the Munich Agreement and, more importantly, to the innocuously termed ‘transfer’ of the German and Hungarian minorities. Beneš had tried to sweeten the bitter pill by saying that this was actually a protective measure, to save the German and Hungarian populations from spontaneous revenge and blood baths. He was not so discreet in his radio address to the Czech people in 1942, in which he called for nothing less than genocide against the German Bohemians, when he said, ‘The end of the war in our country will be written in blood. The Germans will be mercilessly repaid many times over, for that which they began in our country since 1938. The whole nation will participate in this fight. There will not be a single Czech who will not have his part to play in this endeavour, and there will not be a single patriot who will not practise righteous revenge, for that which our nation has had to suffer…’(7) Following Churchill’s visit to the United States in April 1943, Roosevelt also agreed to the population ‘transfers’. Molotov, Stalin’s Foreign Minister, who had plenty of experience in carrying out massive population ‘transfers’ in the Soviet Union, whether it was Volga Germans, Tartars, Chechens or Osetians, gave his consent in December 1943 during a state visit by Beneš to Moscow. In response to Beneš’ comment that it would mean the movement of over 3 million people, he stated, ‘That’s nothing, that’s easy.’ Later, Stalin made a personal pledge to Beneš, saying, ‘This time we shall destroy the Germans, so they can never again attack the Slavs.’(8) The Tehran Conference confirmed not only the transfer of these populations, but also the fact that Stalin was allowed to keep all the territorial gains he had made under the Molotov-Ribbentrop (Hitler-Stalin) pact of 1939. The territories Russia wanted to keep, the borders that had to be redrawn and the ensuing ‘population transfers’ that resulted from these decisions resulted in the largest and bloodiest forced migrations in the history of human kind, and the deaths of many millions of innocent civilians. On 3rd February 1944, Beneš again declared that ‘The overthrow must be violent, there must be a violent reckoning with the Germans… it must be a bloody and merciless fight.’ And in July, his future Justice Minister, Prokop Drtina, encouraged lynch mob justice stating that, ‘He who has deserved death should be liquidated, where possible without legal process, with executions.’(9)
Death of a Nation Page 16