lxi In reality, evidence of the Sudeten Germans’ legacy stretched back over 700 years in Bohemia and Moravia.
lxii Even though the first chair filled by a professor of Czech language studies was not inaugurated until 1793, nearly 450 years after the university had been established.
lxiii In the spirit of ‘reconciliation’, Germany and Austria did not make Czech or Slovak entry to the European Union conditional on their at the very least abolishing the Beneš decrees and accepting responsibility and changing the official history of the ‘expulsions’ in their school books before joining. The Austrians thought about it but if their big northern neighbour and the country that is still by far the largest net contributor to the EU could not be bothered to make a fuss, then what was the point in little Austria doing so?
lxiv Since 1996, the Code of Crimes against Peace and Security of Mankind has, under Articles 18 and 20, made ethnic cleansing both a crime against humanity and a war crime respectively.
lxv To justify wholesale ethnic cleansing, successive Czech leaders have continued to legitimise the Beneš decrees, right up to the present day. Those expelled under the most barbaric of circumstances included Sudeten Communists, Socialists, Antifascists and religious leaders, as well as those who had been interned in Nazi concentration camps. Massacres of civilians are portrayed as ‘justified retribution’, and the official state puts on a mask of hypocritical innocence. Its leaders fail to see the irony in sending Czech troops on a NATO mission in Kosovo to protect ethnic Albanians against ethnic cleansing within Serbia. And its foreign ministers take great exception to German newspapers making direct comparisons between Slobodan Milosovic and Edvard Beneš.(57) Nor do they see any irony in the fact that for over sixty years Germany has worked hard to come to terms with the terrible crimes committed under the Nazis, whereas the Czech Republic, twenty years after the end of communist rule has barely begun to register the crimes committed in the name of Czech ‘democracy’. Whilst the German state has made countless efforts to apologise, remember and commemorate the victims of Nazi Germany, has paid hundreds of billions in restitution, compensation, rebuilds synagogues, restores cemeteries and attempts to preserve every last relic of German Jewish history, the Czech government does the exact opposite. The German history of the Sudetenland has been systematically destroyed and continues to be denied. This flies in the face of the value systems and laws on which the European Union, of which the Czechs became members in 2004, was founded. The 2013 presidential election in the Czech Republic again raised the spectre of the old demons of the past, with no lack of class war and anti-German rhetoric used to garner as many votes as possible. The former Czech Foreign Minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, made the ‘mistake’ of stating that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans on the basis of their ‘collective guilt’ was beyond the law and would have landed the government in the Hague had it been undertaken at any other time. To make such comments remains heresy in the Czech Republic. Unfortunately all too many German politicians are either too fearful or too indifferent to the fate of their fellow Sudeten Germans, lest it upset the valuable trading relationship that has been established between the two countries. Sudeten Germans are all too often regarded as a noisy and unwelcome distraction, and there are certainly those even in Germany who would say ‘better they all die off sooner rather than later.’(58) The only positive thing one can add is that in the recent past, thankfully there have been a few representatives at the highest level who being acquainted with the facts, have stood up to acknowledge that the expulsions were wrong, namely the former Czech President Vaclav Havel for one. In these individuals one has to put one’s faith that reconciliation can grow on the stony ground it is on now. The former Czech Ambassador to Germany, František Černý, has often said that ‘Every Czech should allow himself to be told by a Sudeten German, how things actually were at the time, so that he hears the details, what it is like when you have to leave your house with a small bundle and walk into a terrible and uncertain future.’(59) The 1997 German-Czech declaration was a small step along the long road to reconciliation and a mutual acknowledgement of crimes committed on both sides. The Germans acknowledged their crimes during the occupation and the Czech government expressed its regret about excesses and human rights violations that took place with the expulsions and that no measures were taken to punish those responsible.
(In the epilogue section entitled ‘Empty Sudetenland’ I take the reader on a journey through the Sudetenland as it is today.)
4
Prussia: From The ‘Sandpit of Europe’ To European Power Broker
During the seventeenth century, Prussia became one of the most enlightened and liberal states in Europe. More importantly, it was the first state in Europe to abandon the madness of religious zealotry and break the cycle of state-inspired religious persecution. The state’s motto was Suum cuique (‘to each his own’). Everyone was allowed to practise their religion freely. Prussia established itself as a safe haven for those fleeing persecution. Following the Edict of Nantes in France, 1685, King Friedrich III immediately announced the Edict of Berlin, allowing tens of thousands of French Huguenots (Protestants) to enter the country; by 1700 every third Berliner was French, and Prussia soon became an unparalleled refuge for persecuted Europeans with many Mennonites, Presbyterians and Jews following in their footsteps.
CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF PRUSSIA
At the highpoint of the Prussian Enlightenment, during the 1780s, Prussia was regarded as the embodiment of the rational Rechtsstaat (a state based on the rule of law). Immanuel Kant, and later Hegel, believed it had achieved the pinnacle of enlightened absolutism. Unlike her neighbours, Prussia did not fear the spread of the French Revolution from below, she was confident in her own revolution from above. Beyond its own frontiers, Prussia had become famous for its spartan thrift (in complete juxtaposition to the opulence of the Austrian court), its incorruptible civil servants, excellent bureaucracy, fine administration, independent judiciary, advanced legal code, high literacy rate, welfare of its citizens, loyal aristocracy, and above all, a sense of duty and service that bound the estates together from the king to the peasant farmer. Prussia was one of the first to champion a modern educational system (primary school became compulsory for all children aged seven and above, from the time of Frederick the Great), and the Prussian state became a patron of the arts and the sciences, producing some of the greatest philosophical minds of the modern era. The army was also held in great esteem, having held off France, Russia, Austria and Sweden during the Seven Years War from 1756–63. The Prussian army was an institution that came to embody and dominate many aspects of Prussian life. Not only did it protect the state from powerful neighbours, but it also played a formative role in welding the Estates to their king and country. British school children are taught that Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile and then annihilated it at the Battle of Trafalgar. However, they are not taught that it was Prussian troops who harried Napoleon’s land armies across the continent, culminating in the largest land battle in history (up to that point) at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813. Nor are they taught that it was General Blücher’s Prussian troops that saved Wellington from defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. From 1815 onwards, Prussia was essential to the balance of power created by the Concert of Europe following Napoleon’s defeat. In 1854, as Britain and France fought a war against Russia, attempting to destroy her as a future threat to their imperial ambitions, Prussia remained neutral so as not to tip that delicate balance of power on the Continent.
In 1878, Prussian Germany was the honest broker, preventing an all-out Balkan conflict that would have embroiled the rest of Europe. Bismarck’s famous adage, ‘I am not sacrificing the bones of one good Pomeranian Grenadier for the sake of the Balkans,’ has been reused in various forms by a variety of statesmen during a number of international crises. However, despite Bismarck’s clever diplomacy, the creation of a powerful, unified new centre, where for centuries there had b
een a weak and fragmented patchwork, resulted in a fear of the latent power of Prussian Germany. The amorphous territories at the heart of Europe, which had for so long been both the battleground of the great powers and which had presented such tempting opportunities for expansion were gone, and so was the balance of power that a weak centre had helped to cement. Fear and confusion about which course a mighty new Prussian Germany might plot began to transform the views of her neighbours. A nation that had once been synonymous with tolerance was increasingly depicted as a metaphor for militarism and outdated authoritarianism. However, before we can delve further into the stereotype of Prussian German militarism and its ‘predestined’ crash course with history we need to examine Prussia’s beginnings — by journeying to the far reaches of the eastern Baltic to where Prussia began.
THE CRUSADER STATE
All modern states have a beginning: numerous histories of England have started with 1066 ‘and all that’, with the Norman Conquest, America in 1620 with the arrival of the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock, yet these are not finite indisputable beginnings. One must start somewhere however, and in the case of Prussia her story invariably begins with the German crusading orders who Christianised and converted various East European ‘heathen’ Balts and Slavic tribes during the Eastern Reyses — one of the most successful — it was even mentioned by Chaucer — but now largely forgotten crusades in European history. Their mission, like all crusading conquests, was one of conversion and settlement. Whilst the crusades to the Holy Land petered out in less than 250 years — leaving lasting enmity between Christians and Muslims in their wake — the papally sanctioned crusades to Eastern Europe permanently succeeded in their objectives of bringing new Christians into the fold and of establishing new fortified Christian settlements in the East. Where there had been marshes and swamp, forest and untended land, over a thousand towns, cities and villages emerged. Great cities like Danzig, Königsberg and Riga, to name but a few, were founded by these crusading orders.(1)
Prussia began as a crusader state founded by the illustrious and infamous order known as the Teutonic Knights. A.J.P. Taylor once stereotyped the Prussians as, ‘Loving nothing more than to emulate the French and massacre the Slavs.’ But the early Prussians were not a Germanic tribe; they were the object of the early crusades, not the actual crusaders. The Prussians were a heathen Baltic people, whom the Teutonic Knights came to conquer and convert. Only in the coming centuries, after the conquest of the eastern Baltic, did the German settlers come to call themselves Prussians.
The Teutonic Order’s colonisation was first and foremost a Christian crusade of conversion, not a quest for Germanic racial supremacy, Lebensraum (living space) and the extermination of the people of the territories they conquered. Albrecht von Buxhoeveden’s subsequent invasion of modern day Estonia with his Schwertbrüder (Knights of the Sword — which later merged with the Teutonic Knights) was undertaken with an army composed almost equally of Germans and converted Livonians. Tribes that were conquered and accepted Christianity were left in possession of their lands and were conscripted by the order as fighting troops. Latin and German were the languages of administration, as the Baltic languages, like the early Celtic languages, were unwritten. As Desmond Seward aptly described in his book The Monks of War:
Prussians were initially forbidden to live in German villages only because they were poor farmers who did not use the heavy German plough. Intermarriage was prohibited because too many natives remained pagan, not to avoid diluting German blood. In the Samland region Prussian chieftains were thoroughly assimilated becoming indistinguishable from German nobles, whose daughters they married, building manor houses and adopting coats of arms. By the end of the thirteenth century Prussian Balts and Pomeranian Slavs were being admitted to the Order… the brethren’s prejudices were religious and economic, not racial. They were Catholic Christians first, Germans second.(2)
Sheer bloody barbarism towards one’s enemies was practised by all warriors during this period, which was certainly not unique to the knights of the Order; it had been so during the crusades to the Levant by the Franks before them and on their raids the pagan Baltic tribes were not averse to torture, rape and pillage either. Crusaders who were taken prisoner were usually led to a sacred forest grove and roasted alive in their armour as a sacrifice to the pagan Gods — oak trees were a particular favourite sacrificial place. No quarter was given or expected between pagan and Christian, as was the case in the endless battles between Christians themselves, whether these were between Catholic members of the Order and the Polish crown, or between Catholics and Orthodox Christians. After the Battle of Tannenberg, between the Order and Poland, the Poles took 14,000 prisoners, including a large number of knights, proceeding to torture and behead the majority of them.
As described earlier, German settlers had started moving east from the twelfth century. Prompted by population growth in Western Europe to move to the more sparsely populated open spaces east of the Elbe, where they hoped to till the land and remain free of indentured labour and the demands of the feudal system. The settlement of the lands from the Elbe to the Memel rivers and beyond involved a pioneering trek and motivations that were similar to the opening up of the Wild Western Frontier of America, which followed some 500 years later. Without the protection of the knights of the Order — who were the cavalry of this eastern expansion and whose forts would come to dominate the landscape — none of the settlements would have endured.
The origins of the Order were in the Middle East with the earliest records showing it as having founded the Hospital of St Mary of the Germans in Jerusalem in 1127. After the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, its remnants went on to build a field hospital at Acre, which became the Order’s base of operations. Acre was also to be the last major stronghold of the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land. And in 1198, a new military order of the Teutonic Knights of St Mary’s Hospital of Jerusalem was formed, with the aim of supporting the crusades to the Holy Land, funded by the merchant leagues in Lübeck and Bremen. Lübeck became the Venice of the northern crusades. Its wealthy merchants laid the foundations for the establishment of the Hanseatic League of trading ports including Bremen, Hamburg, Rostock, Stettin, Danzig and Elbing (not Königsberg, which was to remain in the personal hands of the Order), Memel, Riga and Reval (Tallinn). The League’s fortunes took off at this juncture, with a new role of supplying and equipping the Baltic crusades or ‘Reyses’, which attracted nobles from all over Europe to collect the spoils that accompanied a papally endorsed crusade. Famous personages who used this to make their names and fortunes included the son of John of Gaunt, later King Henry IV of England, and King Ottokar II of Bohemia.
In 1201, Albrecht von Buxhoeveden sailed from Lübeck with a great fleet of colonists to found Riga, in the land of the Baltic Livs (modern Latvia) from which the crusaders and colonists began to carve out the new state of Livonia, roughly equivalent to the modern day Baltic States.lxvi Buxhoeveden’s Schwertbrüder Order of the Brotherhood/Knights of the Sword was at this stage a separate entity, but had close links to the Teutonic Knights and was later absorbed by them. The Knights of the Teutonic Order campaigned further south along the Baltic Coast fighting other Baltic tribes, including the Prussians. Albrecht’s campaigns took on a variety of Baltic pagan tribes, and later the princes of the lands of Rus,lxvii yet Livonia was to be the more precarious of the two colonial crusading projects. In a never-ending ebb and flow of titanic battles, it managed to hold its own for 361 years, until 1562, when finally it was overwhelmed by the forces of the Russian Tsar, Ivan the Terrible, who enslaved the region’s Baltic inhabitants and massacred most of the Germans. It took the combined force of Swedes, Danes and Poles to help fight off the Russians, leaving the Order in possession of the south-western part of Livonia — a region known as the Courland, held as an independent fiefdom until the eighteenth century when it became part of Russia. The largely German nobility of this region clung on to their prerogatives, culture and language until
the end of the Second World War. Examples of their way of life can be sampled by visits to the wonderfully restored Schloss Ruhental (Rundale Palace) and Herrenhaus Kuksǎs (Kukšu muiža) Grand manor house in the Courland region of Latvia. That and by viewing the countless German epitaphs that litter the cathedrals and churches across much of the Baltic states.
THE ADVANCE OF THE TEUTONIC KNIGHTS ALONG THE BALTIC COAST
Once the Order started to establish itself, the trickle of German settlers who had moved east behind the protection of the Knights suddenly became a flood. In 1225, the Polish Duke Konrad of Masovia designated the frontier territory around the settlement of Kulm (known in German as the Kulmerland) near the Baltic coast to the Order and invited them to take part in another Christianising mission against the heathen Prusiskai (Prussians).lxviii As in Bohemia, Slavic dukes encouraged this early ‘colonisation’ to cultivate their sparsely populated territories; to irrigate marshes, clear forests and gain arable land, and also to pay taxes into the royal coffers. The settlers came, not as part of a planned German colonisation, but as valued, skilled, economic migrants. Other western Europeans, such as the Flemish and Friesians soon followed in the Order’s wake.
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