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THE MEGALOMANIA OF THE
NATIONAL IDEAL
EDVARD BENEŠ AND THE ORIGINS OF THE
POSTWAR EXPULSION OF THE SUDETEN GERMANS,
1918–1945
Timothy R. Wright
~
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History
University of Sydney
SID: 310243866
October 2013
ABSTRACT
The expulsion of the German populations of Central and Eastern Europe after the Second
World War was among the largest and most brutal forced migrations in human history. It is
also one of the least understood. By focusing on the exile of one group, the Sudeten Germans
of Czechoslovakia, this thesis seeks to discover why the postwar eviction took place. It traces
the origins of the purge from the foundation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and argues that the
Republic’s long-serving president, Edvard Beneš, played a crucial role in the development
and implementation of the plan. Through a detailed analysis of interwar minority rights,
population transfers and the notion of German collective guilt, this thesis takes the position
that the motivations behind postwar expulsions were shaped by the bitter experiences of the
interwar period and that they were not, therefore, carried out as an impulsive act of
retribution in the hour of victory.
i
CONTENTS
L I ST
OF
I L L U ST R AT I O N S
iii
L I ST
OF
M AP S
iv
AN D
T AB LE S
I N T RO D UC T I O N
I
T W I LI G H T
OF
1
I N T ER N AT I O N A LI SM
13
National self-determination and minority rights in the First Czechoslovak
Republic
II
F R O M M UN I C H
TO
P O T SD A M
44
The path to expulsion in East-Central Europe
III S A F EG U AR D I N G D E M O C R A CY
72
Collective guilt and the foundations of the postwar order
C O N CL U SI O N
93
B I B LI O G R A PH Y
96
ii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
1.1. President Beneš of Czechoslovakia
12
1.2. Konrad Henlein and Adolf Hitler, 1938
43
iii
LIST OF MAPS AND TABLES
Maps
1.1. Ethnographic map of Czechoslovakia showing minorities
29
1.2. Ethnographic map of Czechoslovakia showing density of the German minority
30
Tables
2.1. Expulsion proposals presented by President Beneš to the Allied Powers
70
2.2. Number of Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, 1945–1946
71
3.1. Czechoslovak Parliamentary Elections, 19 May 1935
91
3.2. Czechoslovak Parliamentary Elections, 26 May 1946
92
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INTRODUCTION
~
Expelled from their homes in the Sudetenland, East Prussia and the whole vast
region of Germany taken over by the Poles ... a horde of Germans is struggling
daily into Berlin – and being turned away because there is no food for them. The
majority are old men, women and children. Some of these persons, too weak to
wander further, have been seen under the bomb-wrecked roof of the Stettiner
railway station dead or dying ... the figure of those [throughout Germany] for
whom no food can be provided rises to 13,000,000 at least. This proportion of
Germany’s population must die before winter if nothing is done.
─ Victor Gollancz1
In the immediate years following the defeat of Germany, an ugly spectacle confronted
Europe that was equal to all but the most barbaric acts of the Nazi regime. Despite the fact
that the Second World War had been fought upon the principles of democracy and freedom,
in the first years of peace that followed victory an event of unprecedented scale and suffering
took place in the heart of the European continent. In an apparent act of retribution, twelve to
fourteen million Germans were evicted from their ancestral homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia
and Hungary and forced into the American, British and Soviet occupation zones of postwar
Germany. 2
1
Victor Gollancz, et al., ‘Save Europe Now: To the Editor, the Journal-Herald’, North Devon Journal, 13
September 1945, p. 4.
2
There is no exact figure for the total number of Germans expelled during the ‘wild expulsions’ (1944–45) and
the ‘organised expulsions’ (1946–47) due to a lack of population data during the Second World War. Alfred M.
de Zayas places the total number of expellees at fifteen million using figures obtained from the German Federal
Ministry of Expellees. More conservative estimates range between twelve and fourteen million. See Alfred M.
1
These expulsions, which had been approved in July 1945 by the Allied Powers at the
Potsdam Conference, must surely rank among the greatest atrocities committed by humanity
during the course of the twentieth-century. The overwhelming majority of expellees were
women and children; the smallest group affected were adult males – the demographic most
likely to have consorted with the Nazi regime.3 Contrary to the terms of the Potsdam
Protocol, which sanctioned the ‘orderly and humane’ transfer of German populations, the
expulsions were carried out with great brutality and vengeance. More than two million
Germans did not survive this exercise in ethnic cleansing and many hundreds of thousands
perished from starvation, malnutrition, disease and exposure as they made their westward
transit in cattle trucks and freight trains to war-torn Germany.4
THE EXPULSIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY EUROPE
All too often, the history of twentieth-century Europe has been reduced to a battle between
moral antitheses, and this tendency has for too long conditioned general perceptions of the
postwar expulsion of the Germans from Central and Eastern Europe. According to
conventional wisdom, the expulsion of German minorities was a just punishment for their
de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans – Background,
Execution, and Consequences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. xix, xxi, xxv; R. M. Douglas,
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2012), p. 1; Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 111; G. C. Paikert, The German Exodus: A selective study on
the post-World War II expulsion of German populations and its effects (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p.
2, footnote 2; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 25-26. For
estimates of the number of Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia, see Piotr Pykel, ‘The Expulsion of the
Germans from Czechoslovakia’, in Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, eds., The Expulsion of the ‘German’
Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War, EUI Working Paper, HEC No. 2004/1
(Florence: European Universities Institute, 2004), pp. 18-20; Zdeněk Radvanovský, ‘The Transfer of
Czechoslovakia’s Germans and its Impact in the Border Region after the Second World War’, in Mark Cornwall
and R. J. W. Evans, eds., Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe 1918 – 1948 (New York: Oxford
University Press for the British Academy, 2007), pp. 224-225.
3
Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 229-253.
4
There is also considerable ambiguity over the number of Germans who died during the expulsions. Estimates
typically range from 500,000 to 2,000,000. See Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. xxv; Douglas, Orderly and
Humane, p. 1.
2
collusion with Nazi Germany as irredentist ‘fifth columns’.5 A far more robust analysis casts
doubt upon such an assumption and indicates that the motivations behind the purge of
German minorities and the machinery by which this project was achieved form part of a
broader historical narrative whose penultimate chapter is the period between 1939 and 1945.
The postwar expulsion of the Germans was a poignant example of the brutality and misery
that characterised the first-half of the twentieth-century. This period has been labelled ‘the
era of violence’ by Ian Kershaw due to the exposure of civilian populations to the effects of
total war and the increased capacity of the state to implement its political and racial
ideologies.6 Although such violence was not endemic to Europe, some of its worst examples
occurred on the continent between 1914 and 1945. As Tony Judt remarked, the vantage point
of the end of the Second World War left ‘little of which to be proud and much about to feel
embarrassed and more than a little guilty’.7 The expulsion of the Germans was a
manifestation of this violent era that, in many regards, did not distinguish between the
dictatorships and democracies. Both were the practitioners of state violence, whether on the
subaltern periphery or within Europe itself.
A second broader trend to which the expulsions form part was the rise of nationalism and
the process of nation-state formation in East-Central Europe.8 After the collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, the intermingled ethnic boundaries of their former
territories did not provide demographic foundations that gave way to naturally forming
nation-states. In 1918–1919, the borders drawn and states created at the Paris Peace
5
De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 4.
Ian Kershaw, ‘War and Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe’, Contemporary European History,
Vol. 14, Issue 1 (February 2005), p. 108.
7
Judt, Postwar, p. 41.
8
Matthew Frank, ‘Reconstructing the Nation-State: Population Transfers in Central and Eastern Europe, 1944–
48’, in Jessica Reinisch and Elizabeth White, eds., The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion
and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944–49 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 27-47.
6
3
Conference were as much arbitrary as they were principled.9 The failure to implement
President Wilson’s call for self-determination for all nationalities not only sealed the fate of
the Versailles settlement, but further exacerbated ethnic tensions by making the nation the
key unit of political organisation. This was evident in the political structure of ‘nation-states’
such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, whose borders extended far beyond the core national
groups they represented and thus brought within their jurisdiction German, Hungarian and
Ukrainian minorities.10 As such, the chaotic emergence nation-states in East-Central Europe
followed the earlier example set in the Balkans. Indeed, the International Commission of
Inquiry into the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) spoke as much for the tragedy that was to unfold
in the Sudetenland, East Prussia and western Poland in 1945 when it attributed the subversion
of the principles of international law and humanity in the pursuit of state aggrandisement to
the ‘megalomania of the national ideal’.11
As definitive expressions of violence and nationalism, the postwar expulsions were a
symptomatic example of the dominant paradigms of twentieth-century Europe. In their
immediate context, they were the final and most extensive forced mass migration of people
arising from the Second World War. Its victims were millions of German peasants and
villagers that for the most part had little or nothing to do with Hitler.
9
A recent work that provides an account of the Czech delegation at the Paris Peace Conference is Margaret
Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 229-242.
10
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 9, 42.
11
International Commission of Inquiry into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, Report of the
International Commission: To Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, D.C.:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), pp. 61-62.
4
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES AND DISCOURSES
The postwar expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe has been largely
neglected by historians of twentieth-century Europe. Only in recent decades has this
unprecedented event featured in comprehensive studies and, even today, many elementary
questions still remain to be fully answered: how were the expulsions implemented, who was
responsible, how was the resettlement and integration of expellees into postwar Germany
achieved, and what place does this traumatic event occupy in historical memory.
Nonetheless, great scholarly advances have been made on the topic of the postwar expulsions
since the first serious English-language study by Alfred de Zayas was published in 1977.12
The impetus for the recent proliferation of scholarship on the expulsions can largely be
attributed to the efforts of historians to place them within the broader historical context of
ethnic cleansing and genocide – a particularly relevant field of study given the new wave of
ethnic violence that has accompanied the turn of the present century. The result of such
scholarly endeavours has been to reopen a brutal chapter in European history that has for too
long been dismissed under the assumption that the German people simply deserved to be
punished for Nazism. While much of this debate has taken place amongst European
academics, the last two decades have seen a considerable and growing body of Englishlanguage literature on the subject, to which this thesis is a contribution.
12
Recent works that provide a comprehensive analysis of most aspects of the expulsions are Douglas, Orderly
and Humane; Hugo Service, ‘Reinterpreting the Expulsion of Germans from Poland, 1945–49’, Journal of
Contemporary History, Vol. 47, No. 3 (July 2012), pp. 528-550; Reinisch and White, eds., The Disentanglement
of Populations; Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfers in Context
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Radvanovský, ‘The Transfer of Czechoslovakia’s Germans and its
Impact in the Border Region after the Second World War’, pp. 217-229; Prauser and Rees, eds., The Expulsion
of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War; Steven Bela Vardy
and T. Hunt Tooley, eds., Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Boulder: Columbia University Press,
2003).
5
In contrast to the approaches mentioned above, my thesis will be concerned with the
political origins of the postwar expulsions. To incorporate the stories of all expellee groups
into a single dissertation would be an impossible task, and partly for this reason, I have
decided to focus on the expulsions as they affected a single group – the Sudeten Germans of
Czechoslovakia. A further consideration behind this choice was the influential role played by
President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia in the development of expulsion as a remedy to
Europe’s minority problems. As a long-serving foreign minister (1918–35) and president
(1935–38 and 1945–48) of the Czechoslovak Republic and the leader of its London
government-in-exile (1940–45), Beneš was uniquely placed at the helm of political power
and at the centre of decision-making in both Prague and London.13 His political career, more
or less, forms the bookends of this dissertation – from Czechoslovakia’s first national
liberation in 1918 to its second in 1945. Between these years, the Czechs and the Sudeten
Germans were engaged in a political and moral struggle over the very question of
Czechoslovakia’s statehood and, more specifically, the legitimacy of Prague’s jurisdiction
over the German-speaking border areas that would become known in due course as the
‘Sudetenland’.
The battle between the Czechs and Germans had both local and international dimensions,
and by taking account of the broader movements and trends in twentieth-century Europe, a
more complex picture emerges of this struggle and its fateful conclusion. The toxic nexus of
nationalism and violence forms the overarching narrative. A closer perspective reveals the
inherent tensions between minority rights and state sovereignty, the threat to multiethnic
states posed by national chauvinism, and the radicalising effect of total war on ethnic
relations. This thesis will argue that, while at no stage inevitable, the expulsion of the
13
The most recent English-language biography of Beneš is Zbyněk Zeman and Antonín Klimek, The Life of
Edvard Beneŝ, 1884-1948: Czechoslovakia in Peace and War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
6
Sudeten Germans was a characteristic expression of the fractured European order that
emerged after 1918.
I unfold my argument across three chapters. In the first, I argue that the tense CzechGerman relationship during the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938) sowed the seeds
for the repudiation of minority rights, which, by removing the means for the protection of
German minorities, enabled their mass eviction from the Czech lands. During the interwar
period, Prague attempted to consolidate its hold over the German-speaking border areas, and
in many cases, this infringed upon the political and cultural rights of the Sudeten Germans
who were protected by the League of Nations.14 Czechoslovakia’s international obligation to
uphold minority rights was a contentious issue during the interwar years, particularly given
the possibility under the League’s minority system for external intervention in Czechoslovak
internal affairs and the threat to state sovereignty that such intervention entailed. The rise of
more extremist German parties in the 1930s, such as the Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP), and
the coming to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in neighbouring Germany
permanently discredited the minority rights regime due to the fact that it could be exploited
by irredentist minorities and expansionist states. Such fears eventuated in the Sudeten Crisis
of September 1938, which resulted in the amputation of the Sudetenland and the
dismemberment of the Czechoslovak state.
The influence of the interwar minority rights system on nationalism and violence in Europe
has been the subject of a growing body of historical scholarship. Carole Fink’s detailed study
of minority protection from 1878 to 1938 in Defending the Rights of Others (2004) is a fine
14
For works on interwar minority rights, see Jennifer Jackson Preece, National Minorities and the European
Nation-State System (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Ludvík Němec, ‘Solution of the Minorities Problem’, in
Victor S. Mamatey and Radomír Luža, A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 416-427.
7
example of this approach and an important contribution to the history of international law and
European ethnic-national relations.15 More recently, minority rights have increasingly
featured in the discussion of human rights discourse and its evolution during the twentiethcentury. The efforts of Mark Mazower and Dirk Moses in this field have yielded some
important results, and in particular, on the genesis of population transfers and ethnic
cleansing in Europe and beyond, which, as Moses states, ‘attests to divergent humanitarian
norms and to internal tensions within the emerging human rights regime’ of the postwar
world.16 These themes will be further elaborated in chapters two and three.
In the second chapter, I will outline the origins of the mechanism by which the expulsion of
the Germans from Czechoslovakia was implemented. Due to the opposition of President
Beneš to the territorial changes enacted under the Munich Agreement, the 1919 borders of
Czechoslovakia remained unchanged with the notable exception of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia,
which was transferred to the Soviet Union. To resolve the problem of Czechoslovakia’s
ethnic minorities, Beneš advocated the large-scale ‘population transfer’ of the overwhelming
majority of Sudeten Germans. Although the envisaged transfer was on an altogether
unprecedented scale, the wartime plans of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile and the
British Foreign Office looked to interwar examples of population transfers in Asia Minor, the
Balkans, South Tyrol, the Baltic and Bessarabia.17 The shortcomings of minority protection
in Europe had been evident since the 1920s, and population transfers were seen as a means to
15
Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority
Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
16
A. Dirk Moses, ‘Partitions, Population “Transfers” and the Question of Human Rights and Genocide in the
1930s and 1940s’, Seminar Paper, Human Rights and Imperialism in Historical Perspective, University of
Sydney, 10–11 August 2012, pp. 1-21; Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights’, The
Historical Journal, Vol. 47, Issue 2 (June 2004), pp. 379-398; Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations
in Interwar Europe’, Daedalus, Vol. 126, No. 2 (1997), pp. 47-63; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of
Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
17
Joseph B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 1939-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1946); Anthony Read, The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939–1941 (New York:
Norton, 1988).
8
ameliorate internal ethnic tensions by creating more homogenous nation-states. I argue that
Beneš became an advocate of population transfers from mid-September 1938 and, although
he did not advocate such plans publicly until 1941, from the outset of his exile, the
Czechoslovak leader massaged Allied opinion towards the view that the Sudeten Germans
would have to be removed as part of a lasting postwar settlement.
Discussions of Beneš’ wartime role in the development of Allied expulsion policy is fairly
limited. Although there is a general consensus across what literature exists in regard to his
role in the annulment of Munich and the agreement of the Big Three to the principle of
population transfers, there is nonetheless a substantial gap concerning the evolution of
transfer proposals and the influence of interwar examples on their development.18
Furthermore, many scholars quote Beneš’ public declaration of support for population
transfers in September 1941 as the first instance of his conversion to the concept.19 This is not
the case. As the historical record shows, Beneš first suggested a large-scale transfer of the
Sudeten Germans through an intermediary to the French Government at the height of the
Sudeten Crisis. This evidence indicates that the removal of Czechoslovakia’s German
minority pre-dated the Second World War, and thus, future wartime initiatives were
significantly shaped by the disastrous results of minority politics in the interwar era.
In the third and final chapter, I assess the notion of collective guilt as it applied to the
Sudeten Germans for their ostensible association with the Nazi regime. President Beneš was
among the foremost advocates of the ‘collective guilt’ doctrine, and used it to justify the
drastic measure of wholesale expulsion. For many, the support that the Sudeten Germans
18
For Beneš’s role in the annulment of Munich, see Vít Smetana, In the Shadow of Munich: British Policy
Towards Czechoslovakia from the Endorsement to the Renunciation of the Munich Agreement, 1938–1942
(Prague: Karolinum Press, 2008).
19
Beneš, ‘The New Order in Europe’, Nineteenth Century and After, Vol. 130 (July–December 1941), pp. 150155.
9
gave the SdP and their supposed mass collusion with Nazi authorities during the war marked
them as traitors to the Czechoslovak state. These claims require re-evaluation, for Beneš
determination that the Sudeten Germans had been disloyal citizens was based upon
questionable assumptions.
The notion of the collective guilt of the German people also needs to be examined
alongside the promotion of human rights by the Allies during the Second World War. Not
only were both concepts contradictory, but they were on occasion proclaimed by the same
person. Beneš’ advocacy of ‘individual democratic rights’ while he pursued a policy of
retribution against the Sudeten Germans is undoubtedly one of the greatest ironies of
history.20 Yet, if understood in the context of the interwar period, this paradox becomes less
nonsensical. Beneš conceived human rights as the protection of individual against arbitrary
state power.21 This model substantially differed from the interwar minority rights system that
granted special provisions to national minorities. As the history of Czechoslovakia
demonstrated, minority rights could be exploited to overthrow the state by appealing to an
international forum or a hostile predatory nation. In Beneš mind, the only way to solve the
problem of national minorities was their physical removal from the state.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
In terms of the primary sources used for this investigation, the vast majority have been
drawn from government archives, official publications, political memoirs and speeches.
Much of this material is in English, either by design or due to the efforts of translators.
Archival material has primarily been drawn from the Cabinet Office (CAB) and Foreign
20
21
Beneš, ‘The Organisation of Postwar Europe’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 2 (January 1942), pp. 226-242.
Mazower, Dark Continent, p. 202.
10
Office (FO) records of the United Kingdom, located at the British National Archives, Kew. I
have, however, sought to complement this material with Czech and German sources where
possible to include other perspectives. These documents have been obtained from the
Londynsky Archiv (London Archive) of the Archiv Kanceláře prezidenta republiky
(Presidential Office Archive of the Czech Republic) and the Politisches Archiv des
Auswärtigen Amts (Political Archive of the German Foreign Ministry). I have also consulted
the following publications on a regular basis for primary sources: Documents on German
Foreign Policy, 1918–1945 (DGFP) for translated German documents, Documents on British
Foreign Policy (DBFP), Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), and the League of
Nations Official Journal (LNOJ). Where possible, I have sought to distil complex data into
tables and have given direction where the reader may benefit by consulting them.
Historians are fortunate that President Beneŝ produced two political memoirs and many
articles during his time in office at home and abroad.22 These have been invaluable sources in
tracing the evolution of his thinking on the issues of minority rights, population transfers and
postwar reconstruction. I have also drawn on the writings of Beneš’ contemporaries on these
matters to provide different viewpoints of the events that unfolded between 1918 and 1945. 23
These sources confirm that it was only by Beneŝ’ considerable diplomatic skill and his
implacable hostility to the German people that the expulsions in Czechoslovakia took place
as they did.
Edvard Beneŝ, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneŝ: From Munich to New War and New Victory, trans. Godfrey
Lias (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954); Beneŝ, My War Memoirs, trans. Paul Selver (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1928).
23
Hubert Ripka, Munich: Before and After: A fully documented Czechoslovak account of the crises of
September 1938 and March 1939 with a detailed analysis of the repercussions of the Munich Agreement on the
situation of Europe as a while and of Central Europe in particular, together with an essay on the reconstruction
of a free Europe’, trans. Ida Šindelková and Edgar P. Young (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939); Ripka, The
Future of the Czechoslovak Germans (London: Chiswick, 1944); Wenzel Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam,
trans. Kurt Glaser (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963).
22
11
Figure 1.1. President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia (Courtesy of the Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C.; LC-USW33-019089-C).
12
I
TWILIGHT OF INTERNATIONALISM
NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION AND MINORITY RIGHTS IN THE
THE FIRST CZECHOSLOVAK REPUBLIC
~
Most states have been fashioned by the sword or have grown out of colonization.
Czechoslovakia is the child of propaganda.
─ H. A. L. Fisher1
For nearly two decades the German as well as various other nationalities in
Czechoslovakia, have been maltreated in the most unworthy manner, tortured,
economically destroyed, and, above all, prevented from realising for themselves
also the right of the nations to self-determination.
─ Adolf Hitler2
On 28 October 1918 an independent state was declared in Bohemia by the Prague
National Committee, and after administrative authority was surrendered in the afternoon by
Vienna, enthusiastic crowds gathered in Wenceslas Square to remove the symbols of
Austrian rule that had represented nearly four centuries of Hapsburg domination in Bohemia.3
On the same day at Hotel Beau Rivage in Geneva, Edvard Beneš and representatives of the
1
H.A.L. Fisher, A History of Europe (London: Edward Arnold, 1945), p. 1155.
Adolf Hitler, ‘Letter from the Führer to the British Prime Minister’, 23 September 1938, Documents on
German Foreign Policy, 1918–1945 (hereafter DGFP), Series D, Vol. 2, Czechoslovakia and Germany, 1937–
1938 (Washington: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1949), p. 889.
3
Edvard Beneš, My War Memoirs, trans. Paul Selver (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1928), p. 452-453;
Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands became Czech (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press), p. 135.
2
13
Czech National Council met a delegation of politicians from Prague to determine the
organisation of the newly declared Czechoslovak state.
4
It is strangely fitting that these
negotiations concerning the creation of a new national democracy in the heart of Europe took
place in Geneva, the future home of the League of Nations. Although Czechoslovakia was
already a de facto state by the time the Paris Peace Conference convened, its independence
was only officially recognised on 10 September 1919 with the signing of the Treaty of SaintGermain-en-Laye and a separate treaty outlining provisions for the ethnic minorities that
were to fall within its recently drawn borders.5
This latter agreement constituted part of a general framework adopted under the auspices
of the League of Nations to guarantee the political rights and cultural autonomy of Europe’s
national minorities. Like its immediate neighbours, Poland and Yugoslavia, which emerged
in the wake of the First World War, the Czechoslovak Republic that had been forged out of
national revolution was, in fact, a multiethnic conglomeration of Czechs, Slovaks, Germans,
Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenes (Map 1.1).6 The greatest threat to the viability of these new
4
Beneš, My War Memoirs, pp. 440-441; Zbyněk Zeman and Antonín Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, 18841948: Czechoslovakia in War and Peace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 34.
5
Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Austria; Protocol, Declaration and Special
Declaration, St. Germain-en-Laye, 10 September 1919, Australian Treaty Series 1920, No. 3 (electronic),
created 22 December 2002/updated 24 April 2003, hosted by the Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade,
Australia <http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1920/3.html>, viewed 14 May 2013. States bound by
minority treaties or minority clauses within the peace treaties concluded at the Paris Peace Conference were
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. See Athanasia
Spiliopoulou Akermark, Justifications of Minority Protection in International Law (The Hague: Kluwer Law
International, 1997), pp. 104-105; Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews,
and International Minority Protection, 1878-1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 268;
Jennifer Jackson Preece, National Minorities and the European Nation-State System (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998), pp. 73-94. For a thorough explanation of the legal aspects of minority rights, see Julius Stone,
International Guarantees of Minority Rights: Procedure of the Council of the League of Nations in Theory and
Practice (London: Oxford University Press, 1932).
6
R. J. W. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Cornwall and Evans, eds., Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist
Europe, 1918–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press for the British Library, 2007), p. 2. For demographic
data and census results, see Archiv Kanceláře prezidenta republiky (hereafter AKPR), Londynsky Archiv
(hereafter LA), Carton 21, ‘Committee on Reconstruction: Economic and Statistical Seminar – Memorandum on
Czechoslovak Population and Agricultural Over-Population in Slovakia and Sub-Carpathian Russia’, 1943, pp.
1-15; Václav L. Beneš, ‘Czechoslovak Democracy and Its Problems, 1918–1920’, in Victor S. Mamatey and
Radomír Luža, eds., A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1973), pp. 40, 42-43.
14
states in the vast ethnic sea of Eastern Europe – where the intermingling of national identities
made the imitation of the nation-state model of Western Europe highly problematic – was the
temptation to national chauvinism. This resulted in the political exclusion of minority groups
and the infringement of their cultural autonomy as outlined by the League’s minority treaties.
Despite the principle of national self-determination espoused in President Wilson’s Fourteen
Points, many ethnic minorities were denied this right and would suffer under the nationalist
policies of the political regimes which replaced the multiethnic Hapsburg and Russian
empires.7 Principal among this group were the Auslandsdeutschen – the German communities
beyond the borders of the Reich after the peace settlement of 1919–1920.8
The injection of minority politics into international affairs during the interwar period – a
product of the importance of national identity to Wilsonian internationalism – created the
political and intellectual milieu in which statesman and bureaucrats would later consider mass
expulsion as a remedy for civil strife and state conflict. The tenuous position of ethnic
minorities had been appreciated in 1919, and in the years between the world wars
international solutions were sought through the forum of the League of Nations that would
address their grievances by strengthening the international protection of minority rights
through legal means. It was the combination of the demise of the League, the intransigence of
domestic politicians and the rise of fascism in the 1930s that brought about the renunciation
of such international mechanisms in favour of nationalist solutions, including population
transfers and mass expulsions that were practiced in the 1940s by both Nazi Germany and the
Allied Powers.
7
Woodrow Wilson, President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 8 January 1918, Project Avalon hosted by Lillian
Goldman Law Library, Yale, New Haven, USA, < http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp>,
viewed 17 July 2013.
8
John Hilden, ‘The Weimar Republic and the Problem of the Auslandsdeutsche’, Journal of Contemporary
History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (April 1977), pp. 273-289; Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of
Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 7; Fink, Defending the
Rights of Others, p. 296.
15
The traumatic years from 1918 to 1938 form the first chapter of events that led to the
postwar expulsions. This can be discerned in the changing attitudes towards minority rights
in Geneva and among the European political class over the period. In the era of liberal
optimism in the 1920s, the principle of international protection was readily adopted and
exercised by the League of Nations. However, in the 1930s, the perceived abuse of this
system by an expansionist Germany and its infringement by the signatory states themselves
led to the abandonment of minority rights in preference for the greater national
homogeneity.9
In Czechoslovakia, the consequences of this broader trend can be perceived in the
domestic struggle of Beneš and his national compatriots against an increasingly subversive
Sudeten German minority. The former had carried out a ‘Czechoslovak’ national revolution
in the closing months of 1918 under the principle of self-determination, whereas the Sudeten
Germans, without their consent, were forcibly included in this new democracy. 10 Under the
leadership of Konrad Heinlein’s Sudetendeutsche Partei (SdP) the Sudeten minority became
increasingly radicalised, and with the active support of Nazi Germany, triggered a political
crisis in 1938 that resulted in the partition and dissolution of the First Republic, and thus, the
fall of Europe’s last democracy east of the Rhine.11 It would also prove the genesis of a belief
that German minorities were a Nazified ‘fifth column’ that had sabotaged Czechoslovakia
from inside – an auspicious portent of their future mass expulsion from Central and Eastern
Europe.
9
Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950’ The Historical Journal, Vol. 47, Issue 2
(June 2004), 1933-1950’, p. 384.
10
For accounts of German resistance in Bohemia in 1918–1919, see Wenzel Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam,
trans. Kurt Glaser (London: Thames and Hudson, 1963), pp. 167-173; Wingfield , Flag Wars and Stone Saints,
pp. 139-140; Orzoff, Battle for the Castle, p. 140; Victor S. Mamatey, ‘The Establishment of the Republic’, in
Mamatey and Luža, eds., A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1973), pp. 24-25; A. J. P. Taylor, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire
and Austria-Hungary (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 269-270.
11
Cornwall, ‘“A Leap into Ice-Cold Water”: The Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in Czechoslovakia’, in
Cornwall and Evans, eds., Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, pp. 123-142.
16
CREATING
AN
INTERNATIONAL
FRAMEWORK
FOR
MINORITY
PROTECTION
The need to protect Europe’s ethnic minorities was not a new consideration when the issue
was brought before the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Indeed, since the consolidation of
the nation-state the need had existed to protect the civic and cultural rights of those outside
the majority from its ‘centralising, homogenising and organising tendencies’.12 Such forms of
protection have historically been enshrined in bilateral treaties between states or in
diplomatic agreements conferring extra-territorial rights. Prior to the nationalist fervour of the
nineteenth-century, minorities were typically defined by their religious beliefs and practice. 13
The religious upheavals and state conflict caused by the Reformation and CounterReformation led to a series of treaties that protected the religious liberties of minorities that
were brought under the jurisdiction of a ruler who was not affiliated with their religious
confession. Notable examples include the treaties of Vienna (1607) and Dresden (1745),
which affirmed the tolerance of Protestants in Central and Eastern Europe. Similarly, the
Treaty of Oliva (1660) that awarded Livonia and Pomerania to Sweden and the treaties of
Nijmegen (1678) and Ryswick (1697), which altered the Franco-Dutch border in Flanders,
contained clauses that protected the religious liberties of Catholics who inhabited these
regions.14 In the Balkans and Near East, the persecution of Christian minorities provoked
frequent intervention by members of the Concert of Europe in the internal affairs of the
Ottoman Empire. The crumbling of Ottoman authority in Greece and the outbreak of
rebellions elsewhere within the ‘sick man of Europe’ attracted foreign support throughout the
12
Patrick Thornberry, ‘Historical Background: International Law Moves from Protection of Particular Groups to
Norms of a Universal Character’, in Joshua Castellino, ed., Global Minority Rights (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011),
p. 26.
13
Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, p. xvi, 17.
14
Thornberry, ‘Historical Background’, p. 26.
17
nineteenth-century. Two such examples are the interventions of France in the DruzeMaronite conflict in Lebanon (1860), and Britain and Russia in the aftermath of the Bulgarian
Atrocities (1876).15 In these instances, the persecution of minorities was used to further the
diplomatic objectives of the Great Powers – a legacy to be disowned by the peacemakers in
1919.
It was, however, the rise of nationalist sentiment in the nineteenth-century that resulted in a
more conscious perception of civic and cultural rights beyond those of religious freedom.
This was apparent in the Treaty of Berlin (1878) that recognised the independence of
Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, all of which had been provinces of the Ottoman Empire. 16
The move towards reconstructing the Balkans around Slavic nation-states established two
important precedents that would also be apparent in 1919–1920. The first was a trend away
from multiethnic empires towards the nation-state model in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.
The second was the imposition of clauses that protected minority rights within the treaties
that established successor states to the retreating Ottoman Empire.17 Their adoption became a
condition for international recognition and a means by which the internal governance of these
states could be supervised by the Great Powers. The minority treaties signed after the First
World War were also shaped by the principle of international oversight, however, the
responsibility to guarantee minority rights would now be exercised by the League Council to
15
Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Interventionism (New York: Vintage Books,
2009), pp. 190-212, 256-312; David Harris, Britain and the Bulgarian Horrors of 1876 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1939).
16
For minority provisions, see Articles V, XX, XXVII, XXXV, XLIV and LXII of ‘Treaty between Great
Britain, Austro-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Turkey, for the Settlement of Affairs in the East.
Signed at Berlin, 13th July, 1878’, in Edward Hertslet, ed., The Map of Europe by Treaty: showing the various
political and territorial changes which have taken place since the general peace of 1814, Vol. 4, 1875–1891
(London: Butterworths, 1891), pp. 2769-2770, 2778, 2781, 2785, 2790, 2796-2797; Fink, Defending the Rights
of Others, pp. 28-29; Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012),
pp. 250-254.
17
Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, pp. 37-38.
18
‘ascertain that the provisions for the protection of minorities are always observed’.18 It can be
argued, as has been done by Carole Fink, that some of the key principles guiding the
protection of minority rights in the interwar era were derived from the Berlin Conference of
1878.19
There were, however, some important innovations made under the interwar regime that
differed from the precedents established in 1878 surrounding the legal procedure for the
enforcement of minority rights. Throughout the first decade of the League’s existence, the
mechanisms for the resolution of minority questions were improved and enhanced, and it is
worthwhile outlining this process in some detail. The provision for minority rights was first
established in the Polish Treaty, signed on 28 June 1919, which formed the basis for
successive minority treaties with Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Greece. 20 These treaties
were a ‘tripartite agreement’ between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers, the state
concerned, and the League of Nations. They did not constitute a universal framework for
minority rights for two principal reasons. Firstly, the minority treaties were only applied to a
handful of national governments that included: the defeated Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and
Turkey; the emergent states of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; and states already
bound by minority clauses, such as Romania and Greece. These treaties were strengthened at
the Paris Peace Conference in response to territorial adjustments.21 Secondly, the provisions
of the minority treaties were to be upheld in the national laws of these individual states. For
this reason, they did not establish in international law a basis for minority rights. The
18
Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, p. 5.
Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, pp. 152-153, 154.
20
Treaty with Poland: Treaty of Peace between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, Italy,
and Japan and Poland, signed at Versailles on June 28 th, 1919 (Washington: Government Printing Office,
1919); British National Archives (hereafter BNA), FO 608/27/4, Ref. 58-68, Czecho-Slovakia: Draft of a
Treaty, 6 September 1919, pp. 1-21. For treaties with Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Yugoslavia, see BNA, FO
608/54.
21
Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts (hereafter PAAA), R60540 (Minderheiten/Minorities), Ref. 44,
‘League and Minorities: Council Debate’, The Times, 28 February 1929; Stone, International Guarantees of
Minority Rights, p. 17; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, p. 154.
19
19
protection of minority rights within national law was outlined in the first article of the
Czechoslovak Treaty, which stated that the minority provisions ‘contained in Articles 2 to 8
shall be recognised as fundamental laws and that no law, regulation or official action shall
conflict or interfere with these stipulations, nor shall any law, regulation or official action
prevail over them’.22 The nature of the rights to which minorities were entitled was
elaborated in Article 8. It identified both individual and collective rights, asserting that:
Czecho-Slovak nationals who belong to racial, religious or linguistic
minorities shall enjoy the same treatment and security in law and in fact
as other Czecho-slovak nationals. In particular they shall have an equal
right to establish, manage and control at their own expense charitable,
religious and social institutions, schools and other educational
establishments, with the right to use their own language and to exercise
their religion freely therein.23
The limited application of minority rights weakened the League’s scheme from the outset,
and throughout the interwar years there were many efforts directed towards improving the
scheme and making it more universal.24 The association of the minority treaties with the
defeated nations and historic notions of Western tutelage caused much resentment in Poland
and Czechoslovakia. Both of these nations saw themselves as partners in the Allied cause,
and Czechoslovakia styled itself as a nation that was culturally part of Western Europe. As
Beneš declared to the Council of Ten at Versailles, ‘the [Czech] Nation felt itself to be a
22
BNA, FO 608/27/4, Czecho-Slovakia, p. 7.
BNA, FO 608/27/4, Czecho-Slovakia, p. 11.
24 Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe’, Daedalus, Vol. 126, No. 2 (Spring
1997), pp. 51-52; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, p. 154, 296, 298.
23
20
European Nation and a member of the Society of the Western States’. 25 Furthermore, the
exemption of the Great Powers and their colonial empires, particularly Italy given its
jurisdiction over non-Italian communities in South Tyrol and Fiume, led to the impression
that the treaties were unequal and unjust.26
THE POLITICS OF MINORITY RIGHTS
The recognition of national minorities created as many conundrums as they resolved, and
throughout the interwar period the disapproval of the Polish and Czechoslovak governments
to the discussion of their internal affairs at Geneva was palpable. They primarily objected to
the right of minority organisations to petition the League Council to notify its members of
possible infractions of the minority treaties.27 The provision for international oversight had
been established in Article 12 of the Polish Treaty and Article 14 of the Czechoslovak Treaty,
which stated that minorities ‘[constituted] objects of international concern’ and placed them
under the guarantee of the League of Nations.28 It is important to note that both articles gave
neither minorities nor minority organisations the right to bring cases of infraction before the
Council, but rather placed this responsibility on Members of the Council.29 Minority
organisations, however, were able to lodge petitions to the Minorities Section of the
Secretariat that, if deemed legitimate, would be sent to the government of the state concerned
25
Beneš, as quoted in ‘Secretary’s Notes of a Conversation Held in M. Pichon’s Room at the Quai d’Orsay,
Paris, Wednesday, 5 February 1919, at 3 p.m.’, Minutes, Foreign Relations of the United States: The Paris
Peace Conference, 1919 (hereafter FRUS), Vol. 3 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 877.
26
Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, pp. 213-215
27
Most of the petitions lodged to the League of Nations pertained to alleged infringements of minority rights in
Polish Silesia. Petitions were lodged by German groups in Czechoslovakia in 1921, 1922, 1924 and 1936. These
petitions have been assessed in Cornwall ‘“National Reparation”?: The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten
Germans 1918 – 1938’, The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 75, No. 2 (April 1997), pp. 271-277;
Cornwall, ‘The Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in Czechoslovakia’, p. 139.
28
Treaty with Poland, pp. 12-13; BNA, FO 608/27/4, Czecho-Slovakia, pp. 13-15.
29
Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, p. 38, 42, 43, footnote 1; Fink, Defending the Rights of
Others, p. 216; Jackson Preece, National Minorities and the European Nation-States System, pp. 78-83.
21
for a written response.30 A ‘Committee of Three’ would then convene to consider both
sources of information, and decide whether Members of the Council should be notified of a
possible infraction of the minority treaties. The Council could then resolve the issue through
its own mechanisms, or refer the matter to the Permanent Court of International Justice
(PCIJ) for a final settlement.31 There was, however, no legal obligation for members to act
upon the information presented to them by the minorities committee. This precedent was
formalised in the Tittoni Resolution of October 1920, which affirmed that petitions did not
constitute a legal document and, therefore, did not ‘create a new legal situation’.32
Nonetheless, the legal nature of minority petitions remained a contentious issue in Geneva
throughout the 1920s. The debate centred upon whether petitions were legally binding, and
by implication, whether minorities were a legal personality beyond national jurisdiction, or if
petitions were merely of an informational nature that could be freely heeded or disregarded
by Members of the Council.33 The representatives of states bound by the minority treaties
adopted the latter view, fearing encroachment on their sovereignty by minority groups and
the international scrutiny of the League in their internal affairs. This view was expressed in
the Polish memorandum of 16 January 1923, which asserted that the process of lodging
petitions was ‘devoid of legal foundation’ and ‘contrary to the stipulations of the [Polish]
Minorities Treaty’.34 The memorandum was a product of Warsaw’s indignation over petitions
submitted in 1920 by its Ukrainian minority during negotiations with Soviet Russia settling
30
Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, pp. 72-75, 160-162.
A dispute between Poland and German over minority schools in Upper Silesia was referred to the PCIJ in
1928. See, ‘Rights of Minorities in Upper Silesia (Minority Schools)’, 26 April 1928, Publications of the
Permanent Court of International Justice, Series A: Collection of Judgments, No. 15 (Leyden: A. W. Sijthoff,
1928); Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, pp. 8-10.
32
Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, pp. 44-45.
33
,Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, pp. 38, 40-42.
34
M. Askenazy, ‘Proposals Submitted by the Polish Government Regarding the Procedure in Connection with
Minority Petitions’, League of Nations Official Journal (hereafter LNOJ), Vol. 4, Issue 5 (May 1923), p. 481.
31
22
Poland’s eastern border.35 Hence, it is not surprising that Poland affirmed the protection of
the ‘freedom and equality’ of minorities only ‘within the limits of the states to which they
belong’.36 According to the government in Warsaw, minority problems were temporary in
nature and would be resolved by the reconciliation of minorities to the new political realities
of the 1920s, rather than through external intervention and granting minorities a ‘privileged
position’ both domestically and internationally.37 The memorandum, therefore, revealed
tensions between the political orthodoxy of state sovereignty and the more recent treatment of
minorities by the League as non-state entities. Beneš conferred with the opinions expressed
by the Polish memorandum in his address to the League Assembly in September 1925,
stating that any attempt to establish legal competence in minority questions beyond Members
of the Council was not in accord with the provisions of the minority treaties. 38 This reasoning
lay behind his resistance to discuss the internal affairs of Czechoslovakia with the German
foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, at Locarno in October of the same year.39
Beneš’ advocacy of a ‘minimalist’ approach to minority rights was influenced by the many
interwar disputes that occurred between states over the sovereignty of contested territories.
Invariably, these disputes were couched in terms of the nationality of the inhabitants in the
contested region, and those states that wished to alter the status quo could either demand
plebiscites in the spirit of national self-determination or attempt to gain extra-territorial
influence through the mechanisms of the League.40 This was a particularly dire threat to a
35
Askenazy, ‘Proposals Submitted by the Polish Government’, p. 481.
Askenazy, ‘Proposals Submitted by the Polish Government’, p. 480.
37
Askenazy, ‘Proposals Submitted by the Polish Government’, p. 481.
38
Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, p. 29n.
39
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr Eduard Beneš: From Munich to New War and New Victory, trans. Godfrey Lias
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954), p. 17.
40
The Weimar Republic sought to be the champion of minority rights at Geneva during its membership of the
League of Nations (1926–1933). See, PAAA, R6540, Ref. 186-188, Address of Reichsminister Gustav
Stresemann at the Fifty-Fourth meeting of the League Council, 6 March 1929; Fink, Stresemann’s Minority
Policies, 1924–29, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 1979), pp. 403-422; Fink, The
Weimar Republic as the Defender of Minorities, 1919–1933: A study of Germany’s minorities diplomacy and
36
23
multi-national state, such as Czechoslovakia, that could count on each of its neighbouring
countries having their own territorial designs on its sovereign territory. During the ‘active’
life of the League between 1920 and 1935, the list of such disputes that involved minority
questions was extensive. The clashes between Poland and Sweden over the Aaland Islands
(1921), Poland and Germany in Upper Silesia (1921), Poland and Lithuania over Memel
(1923) and Vilna (1927), Greece and Turkey over the expulsion of Greeks from
Constantinople (1924–1926), Greece and Albania over the transfer of Albanians to Turkey
(1924), and Britain and Turkey over Mosul (1920–1928) demonstrated how grievances over
the treatment of minorities could quickly impair relations between states, or more alarmingly,
how minorities could be used as pawns in the conduct of international relations.41 Thus, in the
resolution of such disputes the first priority of the League was to separate the potential for
state conflict – which was dealt with under Articles 11 to 15 of the Covenant – from minority
questions, which were dealt with under the provisions of the relevant minorities treaty.42
On other occasions, a lack of common agreement on minority issues came down to
fundamental disagreements over the purpose of the minority treaties. Whereas the minorities
themselves and their advocates at the League saw minority rights as a means to protect
cultural autonomy, the states bound to protect these rights initially saw them as a means to
facilitate cultural assimilation by providing equal opportunity regardless of language, race
and creed. These contrasting views were palpable in a dispute between German and Poland
over questions raised in petitions lodged by the Deutscher Volksbund concerning German
the League of Nations system for the international protection of minorities, Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1968,
accessed
from
ProQuest
Dissertations
and
Theses,
No.
6913104
(electronic),
<
http://search.proquest.com/docview/302375460?accountid=14757>, viewed 20 July 2013.
41
Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, pp. 133, 141-146.
42
Stone, International Guarantees of Minority Rights, p. 137.
24
minority schools in Polish Silesia.43 At the 53rd Session of the Council in December 1928
when this issue was discussed, a heated debate ensued between the German foreign minister,
Gustav Stresemann, and his Polish counterpart, August Zaleski, that revealed the
shortcomings of the minority treaties respective to the national interests of the states these
ministers represented.44 The German-Polish Convention of 1922, which augmented the
existing minority treaty with Poland, mandated that the declaration of language by children of
school-age would determine the number of minority schools.45 Zaleski claimed that due to
‘false declarations of language’ a significant proportion of students at minority schools were
unable to follow German instruction because they did not have a sufficient understanding of
the German language.46 Language was, of course, fundamental to the maintenance of German
culture among minority communities and, from the perspective of the Polish Government,
this impeded the process of cultural assimilation of the German minority. For Stresemann, the
threat of the mass removal of students from minority schools posed a vital threat to the
cultural autonomy of the German minority in Poland. He argued that the Polish position,
which forced parents to nominate their child’s language as either German or Polish, did not
grasp the complexity of Eastern Europe’s intermingled ethnic landscape in which many
communities were bilingual or spoke regional dialects.
The dissention between Stresemann and Zaleski demonstrated how minority politics
continued to poison international relations despite efforts to provide international oversight
and arbitration. As well intentioned as Stresemann’s minority policy seemed, the posture of
Weimar Germany as the champion of minorities was in part self-serving, since the
43
Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, p. 303; Fink, The Weimar Republic as the Defender of Minorities, pp.
109-118.
44
League of Nations, ‘Minutes of the Fifty-Third Session of the Council – Held at Lugano from Monday,
December 10th, to Saturday, December 15th, 1928’, in LNOJ, Vol. 10, Issue 1 (January 1929), pp. 57-73.
45
League of Nations, ‘Minutes of the Fifty-Third Session of the Council’, pp. 65-69.
46
League of Nations, ‘Minutes of the Fifty-Third Session of the Council’, p. 64.
25
mechanism of the League enabled the German government to claim that it continued to
represent the interests of German nationals who lived beyond the borders of the Reich.47
Indeed, the opprobrium Stresemann directed towards Poland over its ‘spirit of hatred’
towards its German minority was foreboding of the rhetoric to be employed in Nazi
propaganda during the crises of the 1930s with Poland and Czechoslovakia.48
The international guarantee of minority rights was, therefore, already starting to be
discredited in its inaugural decade due to manipulation of the system by national
governments in pursuit of irredentist goals. Under Stresemann, Germany provided financial
subsidies to the Auslandsdeutschen, the influential journal on minorities, Nation und Staat,
which came under the direct control of the German Foreign Ministry in 1927, and supported
the goals European Minorities Congress – an organisation that would later become infamous
for its connections with Nazi Germany.49 In the 1930s such behaviour would turn into
outright abuse with Nazi Germany’s withdrawal from the League in 1933 and its pursuit of
Heim ins Reich through military conquest – a policy to bring all German minorities living
abroad into the German nation.50 Similarly, the termination of the League’s oversight of
Poland’s minorities in 1935 was a further indication that the minority rights regime was
47
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 78; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, p. 295.
League of Nations, ‘Minutes of the Fifty-Third Session of the Council’, p. 70. For accounts of German
propaganda during Sudeten and Polish crises, see Sir Nevile Henderson, Failure of a Mission: Berlin, 1937–
1939 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940), p. 203, 238; Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–
1939 (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 665-688, 695-696; William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
A History of Nazi Germany (London: Pan, 1967), p. 460, 469.
49
For reports of financial links between the National Minorities Congress and the Nazi Party and German
Foreign Ministry, see BNA, KV 5/70, ‘Notes on material relating to the Annual Congress of European
Minorities, the personalities who control it and the German organization behind it’, Report, 16 September 1937,
pp. 1-5; KV5/70, ‘The Congress of European National Minorities: Its origins, composition, principles and aims’,
Report, 16 September 1937; KV 5/70, ‘Extract from U.35 Report’, 27 September 1937.
50
PAAA, R 60594, L497992, ‘Reich Will Defend Minorities: Dr. Frick formally announces doctrine of
racialism as a part of official policy’, New York Times, January 18, 1938; R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane:
The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 4647; Mazower, The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, p. 384; Rainer Schulze, ‘Forced Migration of German
Populations During and After the Second World War’, in Jessica Reinish and Elizabeth White, eds., The
Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and Displacement in Postwar Europe, 1944-49
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 55.
48
26
unravelling under the pressure of nationalist ideologies. In Prague, Beneš continued to
publicly affirm his support of the League and minority rights, however, the events of 1937–
1938 that brought about the end of his presidency would ultimately prove too much for any
residual commitments to such declarations after the Second World War.51
‘NEW SWITZERLAND’ OR NATION-STATE?
The minority treaties were instituted as a compromise measure in response to the political
reorganisation of Europe in 1919 around the largely unfulfilled promise of national selfdetermination. The Czechoslovak Republic epitomized the failure to enact Wilson’s ideal,
and in this regard the new state represented little improvement over the multiethnic empire of
Austria-Hungary that it replaced. The discrepancy between the ideal of national selfdetermination proclaimed at Paris and the political framework that emerged in East-Central
Europe leaving millions of people without a national homeland or living beyond its borders
lay at the heart of the domestic struggle between Prague the Sudeten Germans. Although
Germans constituted the second largest nationality after Czechs, numbering more than three
million, they were neither asked to express their wishes in a plebiscite nor granted political
representation at the National Assembly that negotiated the peace settlement with the Allies
and crafted the new state’s constitution.52 Throughout the life of the First Republic, the
Germans of Czechoslovakia were excluded from the upper echelons of government and
generally occupied a secondary position in national life. This harsh reality stood in stark
contrast to the pronouncements that Beneš made to Western politicians and bureaucrats in
51
Beneš, ‘Postwar Czechoslovakia’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 3 (April 1946), p. 401; Beneš,
‘Czechoslovakia Plans for Peace’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 1 (October 1944), pp. 26-27; Beneš, Memoirs
of Dr Eduard Beneš, p. 6; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, pp. 338, 343, 346-347.
52
Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 18; Orzoff, Defending the Castle, p. 139; V. Beneš, ‘Czechoslovak
Democracy and Its Problems, 1918–1920’, pp. 40, 42-43.
27
1919, proclaiming that the new republic would be a ‘little Switzerland’ of national cantons.53
The contradiction between the romantic and humane vision of Czechoslovakia espoused at
Paris and the actual Czechoslovak nation-state that emerged understandably earned Prague
the antipathy its Sudeten German subjects.
From the outset of his diplomatic service in 1915, Beneš had sought to obtain the
favourable opinion of the Allied Powers towards the creation of an independent Czech state.
In both Paris and Geneva he actively cultivated the image of a statesman of Western pedigree
that Britain and France could trust to represent their interests in East-Central Europe. For this
reason, Beneš tended to play a cautious role when it came to minority questions. To both
protect his position at home and further his cherished dream of a Czech state at the Paris
Peace Conference, Beneš had to be seen by his Czech compatriots as a nationalist yet, at the
same time, assuage British and French fears of Czech chauvinism. Beneš’ deft performance
in balancing these two considerations at Versailles secured his reputation as a skilled
diplomat and admired national leader.54 However, his reception was rather less generous
among those who thought Czech claims were excessive or deceptively construed. Lloyd
George, infamous for his capacity for invective, privately referred to Beneš as ‘the little
French jackal’ whose statements ‘reeked with professions of sympathy for the exalted ideals
proclaimed by the Allies in their crusade for international right’.55 A more reserved yet
equally revealing critique of Beneš was made by Archibald Coolidge, an American academic
who conducted a commission into the political conditions of former Austria-.Hungary.
53
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 51; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, p. 26; Orzoff,
Battle for the Castle, p. 93.
54
Wickham Steed, ‘Edward Beneš’, in Jan Opočenský, ed., Edward Beneš: Essays and Reflections presented on
the occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1945), pp. 54, 60-62; Robert J. Kerner,
‘At the Peace Conference’, in Opočenský, ed., Edward Beneš, pp. 72-79.
55
David Lloyd George, The Truth About the Peace Treaties, Vol. 2 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), p. 931;
Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003), p.
229.
28
Map 1.1. Ethnographic Map of Czechoslovakia Showing Minorities
29
BNA, FO 925/2118 (with permission)
Map 1.2. Ethnographic Map of Czechoslovakia Showing Density of the German Minority
30
BNA, FO 925/2118 (with permission)
In response to the Czech’s territorial demands, he remarked:
In Bohemia they demand ‘historic frontiers’ regardless of the protests of
large numbers of Germans who do not wish to be taken over in this way.
In Slovakia they insist on the rights of nationality and pay no heed to the
ancient and well marked ‘historic frontiers’ of Hungary.79
This double-standard on the question of nationality was a conspicuous thread that ran
through Czechoslovakia’s case for independence when it was presented to the Allied
Supreme Council on 5 February 1919.80 Beneš, in his new capacity as foreign minister, and
Karel Kramář, as prime minister, were charged with the crucial task of convincing Lloyd
George, Clemenceau and Wilson to grant the Czechs the Hapsburg territories of Bohemia,
Moravia, Austrian Silesia and Slovakia, or as Beneš had declared with great hubris in
October 1918, the ‘frontiers they should like to have’.81 The justification for the inclusion of
these territories into a Czechoslovak state was based on historical precedent, economic and
strategic necessities, and the principle of national self-determination.82 On the issue of the
Bohemian (Sudeten) Germans, Beneš on the one hand declared they would be accorded ‘full
minority rights’, yet on the other, argued that they should not be granted a plebiscite because
they would vote for exclusion from the Czechoslovak state. 83 His reluctance to extend
national rights to the German minority was a manifest contradiction of the principles upon
79
Archibald Coolidge, ‘Memorandum by Professor A. C. Coolidge: The New Frontiers in Former AustriaHungary’, March 10, 1919, FRUS, Vol. 12, p. 273.
80
‘Secretary’s Notes of a Conversation Held in M. Pichon’s Room at the Quai d’Orsay’, pp. 876-887; Joseph
Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974),
p. 78.
81
‘Secretary’s Notes of a Conversation Held in M. Pichon’s Room at the Quai d’Orsay’, p. 877; Zeman and
Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 34.
82
Cornwall, ‘Dr Edvard Beneš and Czechoslovakia’s German Minority, 1918–1943’, in John Morrison, ed., The
Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European
Studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 172; Mamatey, ‘The Establishment of the Republic’, p. 35.
83
Secretary’s Notes of a Conversation Held in M. Pichon’s Room at the Quai d’Orsay’, p. 881.
31
which the Czechs claimed their own right to independence. Moreover, Beneš’ expression of
deep-seated Germanophobia in his declaration that the Czechs would act as ‘the protectors of
democracy against Germanism’ and fulfil their ‘duty at all times to fight the Germans’ should
have raised serious doubts about granting Prague jurisdiction over three million Germans.84
While French support for the excessive territorial claims made by the Czech delegation
could be assumed given the strategic need to contain Germany, Anglo-American support was
by no means an historical certainty. The Czech delegation was fortunate in that the so-called
‘New Europe’ group came to occupy key positions in the British Foreign Office as the First
World War drew to a close.85 These influential advocates of an independent Czechoslovakia
included the historian Robert Seton-Watson and foreign correspondent for The Times,
Wickham Steed, who became key advisors on the Hapsburg Empire. 86 Both had extensive
contacts with anti-Hapsburg émigré communities and were close friends of both Masaryk and
Beneš. They propagated a romantic view of the Czechs as a people of democratic and liberal
traditions that were exceptional among the Slavs for their rationalism, efficiency and
tolerance.87
Such racial propaganda, however, did not entirely render voices of criticism to the
bureaucratic margins. Cecil Gosling, Britain’s Charge d’Affaires in Prague in 1919, wrote to
London of his ‘a deep pessimism about the internal and racial condition of the
[Czechoslovak] republic’ and serious doubts about ‘its capacity to survive’.88 Gosling even
84
‘Secretary’s Notes of a Conversation Held in M. Pichon’s Room at the Quai d’Orsay’, p. 878.
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 94.
86
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 87.
87
Orzoff, Battle for the Castle, pp. 8-9, 11. Such views were actively encouraged by the Czechoslovak
government-in-exile during the Second World War. See AKPR, LA, Carton 11, Ministerstvo zahranicnich veci
Informacni oddeleni, 1942, ‘Press References to some of the Allies etc. in British Papers over a Six-Month
Period’.
88
Gerald J. Protheroe, Searching for Security in a New Europe: The Diplomatic Career of Sir George Russell
Clerk (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 65.
85
32
recommended that British troops should be sent to the Sudeten territories to prevent tensions
escalating into civil unrest.89 In response to these dismal warnings Seton-Watson was
dispatched to Prague, arriving in May 1919, to investigate the condition of Czechoslovak
internal relations.90 He wrote back to the Foreign Office expressing confidence in Masaryk’s
capacity as president and dismissed the seriousness of Czech-German hostilities.91 SetonWatson’s report allayed the fears of the Foreign Office and allowed Britain, with clear
conscience, to give Prague continued diplomatic support well into the 1920s. This was
evident in Britain’s decision to prevent Sudeten German petitions on land reform coming
before the League Council on numerous occasions and the Foreign Office’s general view that
the long-term resolution of minority questions would be achieved through national
assimilation.92
The inconsistencies in Beneš’ case and the potential for Czechoslovakia’s multiethnic
character to cause internal instability were thus known, yet not adequately heeded at the time
by the Allied Powers. Beneš and Kramář were either given the benefit of the doubt or were
protected by the widespread anti-German sentiment that prevailed in the wake of the
Armistice. More importantly, they presented Britain and France with a fait accompli by
creating facts on the ground that gave legitimacy to their excessive territorial claims. The
Czechoslovaks had been the first of the new states to be recognised by the Allied Powers and,
upon assuming control in Prague in October 1918, the National Assembly claimed authority
over the German inhabitants of Bohemia, Moravia and Austrian Silesia. This declaration
went against the wishes of the German members of the Reichsrat (Austrian Parliament), who
89
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 87.
Protheroe, Searching for Security in a New Europe, p. 65; Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, pp.
87-88.
91
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 88.
92
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, pp. 90-91.
90
33
passed a resolution that all German settlements were part of Austria.93 The authority of the
Reichstrat over these areas, however, was extremely limited given the decision of the
National Assembly to send Czech militia units to occupy the Bohemian hinterland and
western Slovakia in order to consolidate its control over these areas. 94 In Bohemia, the Czech
occupation provoked widespread resistance in German areas that lasted until the
Czechoslovak delegation concluded negotiations with the Allies in September 1919.95 The
bloodiest confrontation occurred on 3/4 March 1919, resulting in the death of fifty-four
German civilians and eighty-four wounded.96 Otto Bauer, the Austrian foreign minister,
directly protested to the Allies against the inclusion of the German populated borderland and
asked for plebiscite, which was duly rejected.97 Similarly, the military occupation of Slovakia
led to clashes with Hungarian forces throughout November 1918, and an outright retreat of
Czech forces behind the Moravian-Slovak border was only prevented by French diplomatic
intervention.98 The non-Czech territories awarded to Prague were thus obtained by military
occupation and bloodshed that had the imprimatur of France, and to a lesser extent, Britain.
The way in which these lands were conquered would have dire ramifications for the viability
of Czechoslovakia once the key foundations of the state were undermined in the 1930s.
Beneš’ lack of empathy towards the Bohemian Germans was by no means isolated. Indeed,
Czech chauvinism was far from lacking among the Czech émigrés during the First World
War. Behind Masaryk’s liberal program of democracy, the rule of law and Rights of Man that
he professed in Britain and America was an avowed Czech nationalism: ‘our politics must be
93
Mamatey, ‘The Establishment of the Republic’, pp. 27-30; De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 20.
Beneš, My War Memoirs, pp. 473-482; Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 49.
95
Zeman and Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš, p. 44.
96
Orzoff, Batte for the Castle, p. 140; De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, pp. 25, 27.
97
Beneš, My War Memoirs, p. 481.
98
Beneš, My War Memoirs, p. 475.
94
34
above all Czech ... and thus also Slav’.99 In later personal correspondence with the National
Democrat Viktor Dyk, Masaryk wrote, ‘That we must lead the Germans is a matter of
course... Who, please, is for a non-national state?’100 Thus, having abandoned any pretentions
of supporting Hapsburg federalism, the Czech émigrés had become passionate advocates of a
Czech nation-state that would civilize any German, Magyar or Slav minorities that came
under its jurisdiction. This nationalist sentiment was reflected in the organisation of the
Czech independence movement and the early republic. Out of 256 seats on the self-appointed
National Assembly in November 1918, fifty-five were given to the Slovaks and none to the
German, Hungarian, Polish or Ruthenian minorities.101 The marginalisation of these ethnic
groups was also a product of the political ideology around which the state was formed. In his
interwar memoirs, Beneš expressed his deep Francophile sensibilities and stressed the
importance of the French Revolution on his political development. While the French
revolutionary tradition did pass down, in Beneš’ words, the ‘traditional humanitarian,
universal, and cosmopolitan tendency, which sought the genuine cult of humanity’, it also
bequeathed the concept of a powerful central government that was not conceptually in accord
with a Swiss model of national-linguistic autonomy.102 Indeed, the national cult built around
the Czech democratic tradition and the Masaryk presidency were prime examples of
conscious initiatives to construct Czechoslovakia around ‘an imagined political community’
that was fundamentally Czech.103 The First Republic was thus less cosmopolitan and less
democratic than its nationalist myth purported.
99
Orzoff, Defending the Castle, p. 52; Taylor, The Hapsburg Monarchy, p. 257.
T. G. Masaryk, as quoted in Orzoff, Defending the Castle, p. 109.
101
Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars, p. 92;Orzoff, Defending the Castle, p. 62.
102
Beneš, My War Memoirs, p. 17.
103
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 2006), p. 6.
100
35
ENEMY WITHIN, ENEMY WITHOUT: CZECHOSLOVAKIA UNRAVELS, 1937–
1938
The recognition of minority rights in peace treaties of 1919-1920 greatly increased the
influence and agency of minorities in both international and domestic politics. For most of
the interwar period, however, the plight of the German minority in Czechoslovakia was not a
matter of great concern either at the League or in Prague. In large measure, this was due to
the fact that the Sudeten Germans were not subjected to the abuses and excesses committed
against minorities by state authorities elsewhere in Europe. Nonetheless, from the perspective
of the Sudeten Germans, systemic discrimination was perpetrated against their community by
Czech authorities, which constituted legitimate grievances and created grounds for feelings of
resentment towards the Czechoslovak state. The exclusion of German political parties from
government until 1926, Prague’s pursuit of ‘anti-German’ land reforms and the 1920
language law that made ‘Czechoslovak’ the national language constituted the principal
grievances before the onset of the Great Depression.104 The economic malaise of the 1930s
that resulted in mass unemployment and social dislocation was acutely felt in Sudeten
German areas and contributed to the rise of Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party (SdP)
that caused considerable political instability from 1935.
Henlein’s movement drew on the hostile passions aroused by past and present injustices
among the Sudeten German community and, prior to the involvement of the Third Reich, it
demanded significant internal political reform that would have fundamentally transformed
the national character of Czechoslovakia. The intransigence of Beneš, who had succeeded
104
Mamatey, ‘The Development of Czechoslovak Democracy, 1920–1938’, in Mamatey and Luža, eds., A
History of the Czechoslovak Republic, p. 133; Zdeněk Beneš, ‘Czechs and Germans in a Democratic
Czechoslovakia, 1918–1938’, in Zdeněk Beneš and Václav Kural, eds., Facing History: The Evolution of
Czech-German Relations in the Czech Provinces, 1848–1948 (Prague: Gallery for the Ministry of Culture of the
Czech Republic, 2002), p. 73, 84, 88.
36
Masaryk as president in 1935, and his fellow Czech nationalists led to the fateful involvement
of Nazi Germany in what had been a domestic political crisis. In this sense, the politics of
interwar Czechoslovakia conformed to the general European trend towards political and
national extremism that brought long simmering prejudices and hatred to the fore. It is
therefore worth examining the grievances of the Sudeten German minority in the early years
of the republic, as these set the tone of Czech-German relations prior to the irreparable
damage which occurred at Munich.
The large-scale expropriation and redistribution of rural land in the first decade of the
republic created a lasting distrust and hostility among the Sudeten German minority for the
Czechoslovak state. They perceived land reform as a means by which Prague could carry out
its policy of ‘Czechification’ by settling Czech ‘colonists’ in predominantly German areas.105
In contrast, the redistribution or nationalisation of some four million hectares of arable and
non-arable land was proclaimed by Czech politicians as a shining example of the republic’s
capacity to implement social justice on a grand scale. Indeed, Masaryk had triumphantly
referred to the land reforms as the ‘crowning act’ of the Czechoslovak national revolution.106
Mark Cornwall has assessed in great detail the controversy over land reform in
Czechoslovakia. He concludes that the veracity of the conflicting claims made by Czechs and
Germans depends as much on one’s perspective as their veracity when compared with official
statistics of land expropriation and redistribution.
The assertion that land expropriation had a disproportionate effect on German landholders
is supported to some extent by the statistics of the Czech Land Office. By 1931, when the
majority of expropriated land had been reallocated, Germans had received a mere 28 per cent
105
106
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, p. 260, 275-277.
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, p. 259.
37
of distributed land in Bohemia’s ‘mixed regions’ – a bureaucratic euphemism used to
describe areas with a significant or majority German population. 107 They did, however,
receive 58 per cent of smallholdings and former German aristocrats were in many cases
permitted to retain a large portion of their estates.108 What was particularly ominous to the
Sudeten Germans was the resettlement of Czech legionnaires in the Bohemian hinterland that
threatened to alter the fragile Czech-German demographic balance. This program was jointly
supported by the ministries of Agriculture and Defence and was aided by the creation of a
‘colonization fund’ during Beneš’ term as prime minister (1921–1922).109 In what was to
prove one of the more remarkable repetitions of history, the interwar model of land reform,
which had facilitated the extension of the Czech linguistic border, was revisited in 1945 as
part of Beneš’ postwar policy to consolidate Czech control of the Sudetenland. However,
under the ‘Beneš Decrees’ – a form of emergency powers exercised by President Beneš
between 1940 and 1945 – the process was undertaken in a far more brutal manner. Upon
liberation, all the property of German inhabitants was expropriated and then redistributed to
loyal Czech and Slovak citizens.110 Like the interwar example, a national fund was
established to provide assistance for resettlement.
The question of land reform was linked from the outset to Czechoslovakia’s development
as a nation-state. In the First Republic, grievances over dispossession and Czech
encroachment were seen through the prism of minority rights and petitions on the matter
were summarily lodged by German organisations to the League of Nations. Czech-German
107
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, p. 264. The 1930 Czech census
showed that in the German districts of Bohemia and Moravia-Silesia a total of 618,960 persons were engaged in
agriculture. See AKPR, LA, ‘Committee on Reconstruction: Economic and Statistical Seminar’, Table No. 9, p.
14.
108
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, p. 265.
109
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, pp. 271-272, 275.
110
Jan Kuklík Jr. and Václav Pavlíček, ‘The Transfer and its Legal Aspects’, in Zdeněk Beneš and Václav
Kural, eds., Facing History: The Evolution of Czech-German Relations in the Czech Provinces, 1848–1948
(Prague: Gallery for the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, 2002), p. 236, 242.
38
nationalists and the German Parliamentary Union had submitted petitions to the Minorities
Section in 1921, 1922 and 1924, however, were unable to provide evidence of systemic
discrimination against Germans.111 When Erik Colban, the director of the Minorities Section,
appointed a Committee of Three in 1922 to investigate claims made in a petition submitted
by Wilhelm von Medinger, both Colban and the British representative, Sir Cecil Hurst,
contacted Beneš directly.112 They accepted his explanation, without thorough investigation,
that the land reforms had been applied equally to all nationalities and that any apparent
discrimination was due to the fact that Germans had been the majority landholders under the
Hapsburgs.113 Furthermore, Beneš disclaimed any responsibility for colonisation programs,
and attributed them to the activities of legionnaire organisations. The dismissal of petitions
on land reform was emblematic of the failure of the internal processes of the League and the
unwillingness of its members to enforce minority rights. Abandoned by their guarantors, the
Sudeten Germans would turn to more radical means to address their grievances.
By the 1930s, this was manifest in Czechoslovakia’s polarized political environment. Up
until this point, Czechoslovakia had been notable for its democracy and political stability as
its neighbours drifted towards authoritarianism. Its governing coalition could rely upon a
broad base of support that included a number of moderate German parties, which served in
government from 1926 onwards.114 To some extent, this political settlement continued into
the mid-1930s due to the immense personal appeal of Masaryk. Yet the broad-base of support
for Masaryk only concealed underlying political fragmentation, which was revealed by
Beneš’ fraught succession to the presidency.115 In contrast to Masaryk’s overwhelming re-
111
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, pp. 273-274, 276-277.
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, pp. 274-275; Cornwall, ‘Dr
Edvard Beneš and Czechoslovakia’s German Minority’, p. 180.
113
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, p. 275.
114
Mamatey, ‘The Development of Czechoslovak Democracy’, p. 133; Evans, ‘Introduction’, p. 3;
115
Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars, p. 125.
112
39
election in 1934, Beneš succeeded him with difficulty in 1935, and only by securing the
support of German Agrarians, the National Union, and Fascists.116 The most fundamental
political change, however, came with the rise of Konrad Heinlein’s SdP. The party had been
formed in 1933 as the Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront (SHF) but was renamed prior to the 1935
parliamentary elections in order avoid being banned from campaigning.117 Its success in these
elections, in which the SdP obtained two-thirds of the German vote and emerged as the single
largest party, introduced a new and more hostile political agent into Czechoslovakia’s
democracy.118 Its links with the Nazi Party (NSDAP) were particularly threatening, given
Hitler’s goal of Anschluss, and led to the somewhat inaccurate accusation that the SdP was a
vehicle for German irredentism.
Like its German counterpart, the economic depression allowed the SdP to convert the
memory of past grievances into political capital.119 In addition to the party’s cry that the
Sudeten Germans had lost ‘600,000 hectares of their national soil’ through Prague’s land
reforms, Henlein could also point to disproportionate levels of suffering in German industrial
areas.120 These export-orientated industries were particularly vulnerable to global economic
conditions, and in the early 1930s the level of unemployment in the German borderlands was
double that of the Czech interior.121 Moreover, the situation was not helped by reports that the
high level of German unemployment was also due to the replacement of German workers
with Czech labour, and the awarding of government contracts to Czech firms in German
116
Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars, p. 125, Orzoff, Defending the Castle, p. 177.
Michael Walsh Campbell, ‘Keepers of Order? Strategic Legality in the 1935 Czechoslovak General
Elections’, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, Vol. 31, No. 3 (September 2003), p.
295.
118
Igor Lukes, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 146; Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 291; Orzoff, Battle for the
Castle, pp. 174-175.
119
Catherine Albrecht, ‘Economic Nationalism in the Sudetenland, 1918 – 1938’, in Cornwall and Evans, ed.,
Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist Europe, p. 92.
120
Cornwall, ‘The Czech Land Reform and the Sudeten Germans 1918 – 1938’, p. 264.
121
Campbell, ‘Strategic Legality in the 1935 Czechoslovak General Elections’, p. 296.
117
40
areas as a form of industrial welfare.122 Indeed, the National Defence Law of 1936 granted
the government extensive control over industry and permitted the dismissal of all persons
deemed ‘unreliable in the eyes of the state’.123
Henlein’s solution to the plight of the Sudeten Germans was not initially separation from
Czechoslovakia and union with the Third Reich. The party had begun as a ‘broad church’ that
incorporated a ‘range of political outlooks’ that had not yet become an agent of Nazism.124 In
the mid-1930s, Henlein’s approach was rather one of internal political reform that would
fundamentally alter the national character of the Czechoslovak state and, in many regards, it
took the ideas contained within the minority treaties to their next logical step. The party’s
main policies were best summarised by the eight-point Karlsbad Program, announced on 24
April 1938, that included provisions for German self-government in German districts and the
recognition of the German minority as a legal personality.125
The SdP, however, had long articulated the need for radical political reform since
becoming a parliamentary force. In April 1937, SdP representatives had introduced a series of
bills that would have made it a requirement for all Czechoslovak citizens to register as a
member of a national organisation, each of which would constitute a legal personality and
have a right of appeal to a Verfassungsgericht (Special Court of Appeal).126 Compensation
for the infraction of minority rights would also be guaranteed and penalties would apply in
cases where an individual was forced to use a language other than their own. Each of these
122
PAAA, R60594 (Minderheiten/Minorities), L497944, Die gefährdete Lage der deutschen Minderheiten und
Massnahmen der Reichsregierung zu ihrem Schutze. A. Allgemeine Bemerkungen; B. Die Lage in den sinzelnen
Ländern: Tschechoslowakei, Report, 1932, p. 9; Albrecht, ‘Economic Nationalism in the Sudetenland’, p. 107.
123
Ernst Eisenlohr, ‘The German Minsiter in Czechoslovakia (Eisenlohr) to the German Foreign Ministry’,
Memorandum, 11 October 1937’, DGFP, Vol. 2, p. 12.
124
Cornwall, ‘The Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in Czechoslovakia’, p. 141.
125
De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 29.
126
Conversation between Henlein and Prime Minister Hodža, September 16, 1937, quoted in Eisenlohr, ‘The
German Minister in Czechoslovakia (Eisenlohr) to the German Foreign Ministry’, Minutes, 8 October 1937,
DGFP, Vol. 2, pp. 5-6.
41
initiatives sought to rectify the injustices faced by the Sudeten German minority by reforming
the state rather than seeking its destruction. As Henlein stated to Prime Minister Milan Hodža
in a private meeting on 16 September 1937:
I could equally have denied the constitution, as the Sudeten German
Party had no hand in voting for it in 1920; I could have demanded the
right of self-determination. I did not do so, but accepted the State and the
constitution as established facts. The bills do not alter the constitution,
but represent a supplement thereto; they were already to some extent
promised in the constitution only they have hitherto not been enacted.127
The SdP program would have transformed Czechoslovakia into a federal multinational
state, much like the ‘new Switzerland’ that Beneš had advocated in 1919. However, the
attempt by the governing parties to marginalise the SdP only drove Henlein into closer
association with Hitler and, in a vicious circle, increased the suspicions of Prague. As Hodža
remarked to Henlein, the outcome of successful negotiations was dependent on the SdP
avoiding being seen as ‘a branch of Hitlerism’.128 The Nazi Anschluss with Austria in March
1938, however, ended any possibility of an internal settlement to the ongoing dispute
between the SdP and the Czechoslovak Government. Without the means of resolving the
crisis through the mechanisms of the League and also having lost their high standing in
Britain and France, the Czechs were at the mercy of the sword.
127
128
Conversation between Henlein and Prime Minister Hodža, p. 6.
Conversation between Henlein and Prime Minister Hodža, p. 9.
42
Figure 1.2. Adolf Hitler and Konrad Henlein, 1938 (Courtesy of the
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin; F 66/127).
43
II
FROM MUNICH TO POTSDAM
THE PATH TO EXPULSION IN EAST-CENTRAL EUROPE
~
The problem of national minorities will have to be considered far more
systematically and radically than it was after the last war. I accept the
principle of the transfer of populations.
─ Edvard Beneš1
There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble … A clean
sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the
disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences,
which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
─ Winston Churchill2
On 1 October 1938, the Wehrmacht began its bloodless occupation of the Sudetenland in
accord with the Munich Agreement.3 Four days later the President of Czechoslovakia, Edvard
Beneš, resigned his post and departed the country.4 The Czechoslovak Republic then
underwent further dismemberment at the hands of Poland and Hungary before the Slovaks
1
Edvard Beneš, ‘The New Order in Europe’, Nineteenth Century and After, Vol. 130 (July–December 1941), p.
154.
2
Winston Churchill, ‘Debate on Poland’, 15 December 1944, Parliament of the United Kingdom, The
Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): House of Commons (Official Report), Fifth Series, Vol. 400, 1943–1944
(London: H.M.S.O., 1944), col. 1484.
3
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (London: Penguin 2006), p. 678.
4
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš: From Munich to New War and New Victory, trans. Godfrey Lias
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954), p. 51.
44
declared independence from Prague on 14 March 1939.5 On the following day, the remaining
rump Czech state was annexed by the Third Reich as the Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia.6 The destruction of Czechoslovakia has remained in historical consciousness as an
unedifying symbol of the betrayal of Anglo-French appeasement and another fateful step on
the road to the Second World War. For Beneš, the collapse of the First Republic from
external aggression and internal subversion dealt a mortal blow to Czech independence – a
dream for which he had strived and served for a quarter-century.
Beneš’ arrival in London on 22 October 1938 marked the beginning of a political exile that
was to last until his triumphant return to Prague nearly seven years later on 16 May 1945.7
During this period, Beneš established a London-based government-in-exile and pursued a
relentless campaign to re-establish a Czechoslovak state in the heart of Europe.8 The mass
expulsion of the Sudeten German population was a crucial component of this policy; for in
Beneš view, the Czechs and Slovaks could only flourish as an independent people by ridding
themselves of the traitorous German minority.9 This Carthaginian policy would form the
basis of his crusade to once again obtain Czechoslovak independence within its ‘historic’ preMunich borders. Once again, as in 1918–1919, Beneš had to convince the Great Powers to
support his proposals to fundamentally reshape East-Central Europe. The main difference,
however, between the first and second struggles for Czech independence was that Beneš
5
William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 540.
Theodor Prochazka, ‘The Second Republic, 1938–1939’, in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomír Luža, eds., A
History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 270.
7
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 51; Zbyněk Zeman and Antonín Klimek, The Life of Edvard Beneš,
1884-1948: Czechoslovakia in War and Peace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 143, 260
8
The Czechoslovak National Committee formed on 17 November 1939. This body was replaced by the
Czechoslovak State Council 21 July 1940, with Beneš as president. The State Council was recognised as the
Provisional Government of Czechoslovakia by the United Kingdom on 23 July 1940. It was granted full legal
recognition on 18 July 1941. See Louise W. Holborn, ed., War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, Vol. 1,
September 1, 1939 – December 31, 1942 (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1943), pp. 404-405.
9
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 51.
6
45
envisaged an ethnographic as well as a political revolution for Czechoslovakia’s second
national awakening in the 1940s that would complete the process of nation-state formation.
Czechoslovakia’s second national revolution was thus built upon the principle of national
homogeneity. The failure to attain cooperation among its national minorities in the interwar
period meant that the exact restoration of the First Republic was neither advisable nor
desirable in the mind of Beneš and his political allies.10 Their conclusion spelt the end of
cosmopolitan democracy in East-Central Europe. Exactly how the antebellum situation would
be rectified, however, was not immediately apparent and was debated throughout the war
between the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, the British Foreign Office and Beneš’ fellow
exiles, the Sudeten German Social Democrats led by Wenzel Jaksch. As a victim of Nazi
aggression, it is tempting to conclude that it was only a matter of time before Beneš, as the
representative of the Czechoslovak state, convinced the Allied Powers to support his policy
to drastically reduce the size of the Sudeten German minority. The path to the postwar
expulsions, however, was far more arduous than a retrospective cursory glance would
suggest. Both the agreement to implement these expulsions and the nature of their execution
was greatly owing to the considerable wartime efforts of Beneš and the radicalising effect of
the Second World War.
The years between the Munich and Potsdam conferences marked the period in which
proposals for the expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe were formulated
and developed. Beneš played a crucial role in this process, both as the leader of a
government-in-exile that had extensive grievances against a German minority and as a
10
Beneš, ‘Czechoslovakia Plans for Peace’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 23, No. 1 (October 1944), p. 32.
46
leading proponent of population transfers to strengthen nation-states.11 There are two
important questions concerning Beneš during this period: firstly, the origins and development
of his plans to expel the Sudeten Germans; and secondly, the extent of his influence over
Allied policy in East-Central Europe, which became increasingly favourable during the
course of the war to the expulsion of troublesome minorities. Britain was the most important
player, given that it alone of the Big Three was a signatory to the Munich Agreement. Beneš’
diplomatic manoeuvres in London, therefore, form a crucial chapter in the genesis of the
expulsions. His final triumph came in August 1945 with the inclusion of Article 12 in the
Potsdam Protocol, which outlined the ‘orderly and humane’ transfer of the German
populations of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.12
POPULATION TRANSFERS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE, 1 919–1939
The conceptual framework behind the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia lies in
the two decades that preceded the Munich Conference. The eviction of German nationals
from lands beyond the German state as envisaged in the Potsdam Protocol drew on the
precedents established by interwar and wartime population transfers and exchanges that were
conducted in both the presence and absence of international oversight. These ‘experiments’
formed part of a concerted effort in the first-half of the twentieth century to align ethnic
boundaries with state borders – a process that concurred alongside the emergence of Central
and Eastern Europe from under the aegis of multiethnic empires and the region’s traumatic
11
Beneš, ‘Towards Peace in Central and Eastern Europe’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science, Vol. 232 (March 1944), p. 165; Beneš, ‘The Position of the Small Nation in Post-War Europe’,
American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 5 (March 1944), p. 390, 393.
12
BNA, CAB 66/67/45, War Cabinet, ‘Protocol of the Proceedings of the Berlin Conference’, Minutes, 4
August 1945, p. 10; ‘Article XII: Orderly Transfer of German Populations’, The Berlin (Potsdam) Conference,
July 17–August 2, 1945: (a) Protocol of the Proceedings, August 1, 1945, Project Avalon hosted by Lillian
Goldman Law Library, Yale University, USA, <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decade17.asp>, viewed
20 August 2013.
47
reorganisation around the nation-state model. The project of creating a Czechoslovak nationstate had only been partially fulfilled in 1918 through revolution and independence; the
political conditions of the 1940s, however, made possible a second ‘national’ revolution
whereby the multiethnic state could be rearranged to reflect its Slavic political character. The
population transfers of the 1920s and 1930s formed the basis upon which this national project
could be realised.
The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans thus fit into a pre-existing pattern of state-enforced
population removals between 1919 and 1949 that sought to bring about the ‘ethnic unmixing’
of Europe.13 These so-called ‘population transfers’ were closely associated with the growth of
nationalist ideology and the process of state formation in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. As
outlined in the preceding chapter, these two factors greatly exacerbated tensions between the
regions’ intermingled ethnic groups and undermined the civic and cultural rights of those
minorities whose livelihood could not be guaranteed under national law. The realisation that
the rights of minorities could not be protected by an international body, such as the League of
Nations, or that such protection could undermine national sovereignty, resulted in a
preference for the creation of greater national homogeneity. Population transfers and
exchanges were increasingly promoted as the means by which this goal could be attained.
This alternative allowed the establishment of a more stable political and social framework
than that bequeathed by the Paris Peace Treaties and avoided extensive territorial revision or
armed conflict. These early experiments in nation-state engineering would form the
blueprints for the postwar expulsions that were to be executed on a much greater scale.
13
Rogers Brubaker, ‘The Aftermath of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples,’ in Karen Barkey and Mark von
Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian,
Ottoman, and Hapsburg Empires (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 155-180.
48
The term ‘population transfer’ is somewhat misleading since its practice in the twentieth
century has typically occurred under conditions of duress, compulsion and the threat of
systematic discrimination against any persons who did not avail themselves of departure. It is
therefore understandable that the term has become somewhat of an Orwellian euphemism for
the assault by state authorities on undesirable ethnic groups.14 Certainly, the majority of stateenforced migrations in the first half of the twentieth century are more accurately described by
‘expulsion’, ‘genocide’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’ than the more benign term ‘population transfer’.
This is primarily due to the arbitrary nature of state retribution carried out both during and in
the wake of the two world wars that corresponded with the collapse of the old order in
Europe.15 The first example of modern genocide in Armenia (1915–1916) introduced
humanity to state violence on a hitherto unknown level.16 The infamous ‘death marches’ of
women, children and the infirm into the Syrian Desert that resulted in as many as 1,300,000
deaths was but the first step of the wider ethnic cleansing in Anatolia of its non-Turkish
inhabitants; and this in turn foreshadowed the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the
Second World War.17
The advent of total war and the increasingly powerful machinery of state apparatus meant
that more systemic forms of national engineering could be achieved over shorter periods of
14
Orwell himself reflected upon the euphemistic nature of the term, writing ‘Millions of peasants are robbed of
their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called “transfer of
population” or “rectification of frontiers”’. See Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, in Robert Neale,
ed., Writers on Writing (Auckland: Oxford University Press 1992), p. 180.
15
Serif Mardin, ‘The Ottoman Empire’, in Barkey and Hagen, eds., After Empire, pp. 115-128; István Deák,
‘The Hapsburg Empire’, in Barkey and Hagen, eds., After Empire, pp. 129-141.
16
Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2002), p. 41; Mark Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe’,
Daedalus, Vol. 126, No. 2 (Spring 1997), p. 49.
17
Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 61; Mazower,
‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe’, p. 49.
49
time to greater effect.18 Such practices were utilized in the name of nationalism and were
practiced by both totalitarian states and liberal democracies. Indeed, the racial classification
system used by France in Alsace-Lorraine to purge both provinces of their German
population between 1918 and 1921 was an early example of de-nationalisation followed by
expulsion.19 This model would form the basis for the mass displacement of persons in Nazi
and Soviet-occupied Europe and the postwar expulsion of the Germans carried out by the
Allied Powers and their wartime partners in Prague and Warsaw.20 Population transfers were
thus part of a broader movement of state violence employed for nationalist objectives.
Amid these brutal and violent displacements, however, was a narrow window during the
mid 1920s when a concerted effort was made to enact controlled population resettlement
under international auspices. The realisation that ethnic minorities could not be protected
from hostile national governments despite the best efforts at international protection lent
favour to the notion of internationally regulated population transfers that would prevent
large-scale loss of life and bring about a more stable political and social framework by
reducing inter-state and intra-state tensions.21 The first of such transfers occurred between
Greece and Bulgaria under Article 45 of the Treaty of Neuilly, concluded on 27 November
1919.22 A mixed commission under the League of Nations was appointed to oversee ‘the
reciprocal and voluntary emigration of the racial, religious and linguistic’ minorities between
18
Donald Bloxham, ‘Internal Colonization, Inter-Imperial Conflict and the Armenian Genocide’, in A. Dirk
Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History
(New York: Berghahn, 2010), p. 326.
19
R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 69-70.
20
Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 40-64.
21
For the perceived benefits of population transfers, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Partitions, Population “Transfers” and
the Question of Human Rights and Genocide in the 1930s and 1940s’, Seminar Paper, Human Rights and
Imperialism in Historical Perspective, University of Sydney, 10–11 August 2012, pp. 3-7.
22
‘Treaty between the Allied and Associated Powers and Bulgaria, signed at Neuilly-sur-Seine, November 27,
1919’, The Treaties of Peace, 1919–1923, Vol. 2 (New York: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
1924), pp. 665-666; Dimitri Pentzopooulos, The Balkan Exchange of Minorities and its Impact on Greece
(London: C. Hurst, 2002), pp. 60-61.
50
both states.23 Between 1924 and 1926 a total of 101,800 Bulgarians and 52,891 Greeks
emigrated and property compensation was completed by 1931.24
This example was closely followed by the more historically significant population
exchange between Greece and Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923).25 Under this
agreement, the Orthodox and Muslim minorities of both states were transferred under
international guarantee.26 Yet at the time the treaty was signed, much of what it envisaged
had already been achieved in regards to the Greek population, which had either been
massacred in the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia or fled as refugees across the Aegean after the
sacking of Smyrna in September 1922. Of the 1,268,000 refugees that made their way to
Greece between 1922 and 1933, only 150,000 were transferred in an orderly manner.27 The
plight of the Orthodox Greeks was in stark contrast to the more orderly emigration of nearly
half a million Muslim Turks after 1923 under the supervision of the Mixed Commission.28
The resettlement of the Greek minority, however, was somewhat more successful.
Responsibility for the resettlement program was given to a commission appointed by the
League and it was funded by a generous Anglo-American loan. The immigrants proved to be
an important source of skilled labour and contributed to the much needed urban development
and agricultural growth in a nation that was still reeling from nearly a decade of constant
23
‘Memorandum on the Mission and Work of the Mixed Commission on Greco-Bulgarian Emigration’ (1929),
p. 2, as quoted in Theodora Dragostinova, ‘Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between
Bulgaria and Greece, 1919–1941,’ East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Spring 2009), p. 185.
24
Dragostinova, ‘Navigating Nationality in the Emigration of Minorities between Bulgaria and Greece,’ pp.
186-187, 204n.
25
See Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations (Articles 1-19) in ‘Treaty of
Peace with Turkey, signed at Lausanne, July 24, 1923’, The Treaties of Peace, Vol. 2, pp. 1036-1043.
26
Yossi Katz, ‘Transfer of Population as a Solution to International Disputes: Population exchanges between
Greece and Turkey as a model for plans to solve the Jewish-Arab dispute in Palestine during the 1930s’,
Political Geography, Vol. 11, Issue 1 (January 1992), p. 57.
27
Joseph B. Schechtman, European Population Transfers, 1939-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1946), pp. 16-17.
28
Katz, ‘Transfer of Population as a Solution to International Disputes’, p. 57.
51
warfare.29 Moreover, the influx of Greek refugees into areas recently vacated by their Muslim
and Bulgarian inhabitants achieved the desired Hellenisation of Macedonia and Thrace, and
thus, further consolidated the nation-state model in the Balkans.30
For these reasons, the Greco-Turkish population exchange was generally referred to in
glowing terms and seen as a model to be emulated elsewhere in the troubled European
continent. The observation of the English historian John Stephens that the exchange had
‘worked wonders’ and must be applied as an immediate solution to minorities ‘whose
sufferings under alien rule excite their brothers to a warlike fury’ was characteristic of
confidence held in the potential for population transfers to resolve the tension between
nationalism and minority rights.31 More importantly, the Greco-Turkish model continued to
be lauded by none other than Winston Churchill as a prime example of the ‘disentanglement
of populations’ in the closing years of the Second World War.32 However, the relative
successes of the Greco-Bulgarian and Greco-Turkish exchanges were to prove exceptions to
the rule and any benefits resulting from their implementation must be balanced against the
uprooting of historic communities, immense bloodshed and suffering, and considerable
financial expense.33 It is also important to realise that in comparison with the postwar
expulsion of Germans, these exchanges were on a much smaller scale and occurred over a
more extensive period of time.
There were two further instances of population transfer that had considerable influence on
the formulation of the postwar expulsion of the Germans, although these were not conducted
29
Katz, ‘Transfer of Population as a Solution to International Disputes’, pp. 57-58.
Mazower, ‘Minorities and the League of Nations in Interwar Europe’, pp. 47-48.
31
John S. Stephens, Danger Zones in Europe: A National Study of Minorities (London: Hogarth, 1929), p. 18.
154.
32
Churchill, ‘Debate on Poland’, col. 1484.
33
BNA, FO 286/1013, ‘Sir George Clerk to Sir Austen Chamberlain’, Despatch No. 303, 20 June 1927.
30
52
under the League of Nations. They include the eviction of German-speakers from South
Tyrol (1939) and the population transfer of Baltic and Bessarabia Germans that took place
under the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939–1941).34 A proposal was also mooted by Sir Nevile
Henderson, the British Ambassador to Germany, in the days leading up to the outbreak of the
Second World War for an exchange of populations between Germany and Poland.35 Unlike
the earlier population exchanges in the Balkans, these agreements were not reflective of
expedient measures reached in the aftermath of armed conflict; rather, they had been reached
by bilateral negotiations between ‘friendly’ nationalist states. Although the numbers involved
in these transfers were dwarfed by wartime cases of ethnic cleansing, population
displacement and the postwar expulsion of the German populations, they were nonetheless
important examples of state-organised ethnic reorganisation to consolidate a new racial order
in Europe.
The arrangement between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to transfer the German-speakers
of South Tyrol was reached in a preliminary agreement signed in Berlin on 23 July 1939, and
a final agreement was signed in Rome on 21 October 1939.36 This German minority had
displayed limited potential for assimilation since the inclusion of South Tyrol in the Italian
state in 1919, and their transfer into the German Reich offered the prospect of dissolving
potential disputes between the Axis Powers over the issue of ethnic minorities. A notable
feature that this agreement shared with past and future population transfers was the
introduction of ethnicity alongside citizenship as a legal category. Both ethnicity and forms
of citizenship determined the treatment of German-speakers under the South Tyrol transfer.
This was apparent in the distinction drawn between the Reichsdeutsche – former Austrian
34
Schechtman, European Population Transfers, pp. 48-213; Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 39-64
BNA, FO 371/23027, Ref. 48-49, Sir Neville Henderson, ‘Special Distribution and Cabinet’, Telegram No.
461, 25 August 1939, pp. 1-2.
36
Schechtman, European Population Transfers, p. 52, 54.
35
53
nationals that had not accepted Italian citizenship in 1919 – and Italian citizens of German
ethnicity.37 The former group was not given the option of remaining in Italy, and their
evacuation was put under the control of Heinrich Himmler and the SS.38 Conversely, the
latter were able to opt for resettlement under a plebiscite that lasted until 31 December 1939,
with a three year extension for the settlement of property.39 Any German-speakers that chose
to remain were faced with the prospect of national assimilation. In effect, this meant that
German-speakers in South Tyrol renounced their cultural rights in Italy, either by migrating
to the Reich or by becoming Italian. Despite the looming threat of total assimilation to induce
their departure, approximately 100,000 Germans chose to remain in South Tyrol. 40 As a 1942
British study into population transfers correctly observed, ‘voluntary’ transfers did not
produce a ‘clean frontier’ because there was no assurance of the complete removal of the
minority in question.41 If such a result was desired, the only option was to carry out a
compulsory transfer.
BEGINNINGS: THE NEČAS MISSION
Edvard Beneš was an early convert to the idea of population transfers and first considered
their application in Czechoslovakia in the autumn of 1938 during the height of the Munich
Crisis. This significantly predates his first major public declaration in September 1941 of
support for the principle of population transfers in his oft-cited article, ‘The New Order in
Europe’.42 Although the idea of undertaking population transfers in the Czech lands had first
37
Schechtman, European Population Transers, pp. 54-55.
Schechtman, European Population Transers, p. 53.
39
Schechtman, European Population Transfers, p. 55.
40
BNA, FO 371/30930, Foreign Research and Press Service (hereafter FRPS), Memoranda on Frontiers of
European Confederations and the Transfer of German Populations, Report, 20 February 1942, p. 14.
41
FRPS, Memoranda on Frontiers of European Confederations and the Transfer of German Populations, p. 22;
Beneš, ‘Towards Peace in Central and Eastern Europe’, p. 166.
42
Beneš, The New Order in Europe, p. 154.
38
54
been raised by the French sociologist Bernard Lavergne after the First World War, the
prospect of population transfers ‘was rejected [at the time] as being apparently in
contradiction to the idealistic tendencies governing the 1919 plans for a new Europe’.43 By
1938, however, the Versailles settlement had become thoroughly discredited and the liberal
principles espoused by the League of Nations ceased to carry much weight in the conduct of
international affairs. The possibility of reorganising Europe along ethnic-national lines, as
had been achieved in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey through population transfers, was
heralded as an alternative to territorial revision and the now moribund League’s defence of
minority rights. This was the political context in which European statesmen, including Beneš,
approached the Munich Conference.
It is often forgotten that a limited Czech-German population exchange was envisaged
under the Munich Agreement. Provisions for a voluntary migration of Czech and German
nationals were contained in Clause VII, which stated:
There will be a right of option into and out of the transferred
territories, the option to be exercised within six months from the date
of this agreement. A German-Czechoslovak commission shall
determine the details of the option, consider ways of facilitating the
transfer of population and settle questions of principle arising out of
the said transfer.44
Such a transfer would ostensibly prevent a new minority problem by removing the Czech
minority from the Sudetenland and transferring Germans who lived outside the Sudetenland
43
Beneš, ‘The Organization of Postwar Europe’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 2 (January 1942), p. 235.
Agreement concluded at Munich, September 29, 1938, between Germany, Great Britain, France and Italy,
Project Avalon, <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/munich1.asp>, viewed August 9, 2013.
44
55
into the ceded areas. An orderly process of population exchange did not, however, take place.
Despite proposals to establish an international body to be ‘charged with the question of the
possible exchange of populations on the basis of the right to opt within some specified timelimit’, neither the organisation nor envisaged conditions of migration eventuated. Instead, the
responsibility for population transfers was given to the German-Czechoslovak Commission,
which had been formed at the behest of Hitler’s Godesburg Ultimatum in place of Neville
Chamberlain’s preference for an international body.45 Free from international control, the
commission denied right of Sudeten Germans to opt out of the Reich. 46 This violation of the
‘right of option’ principle that had been a feature of the interwar transfers resulted in the
chaotic flight of 160,000 refugees of both Czech and German nationality from the Nazioccupation of the Sudetenland.47
A more systematic proposal for population transfer in the Sudetenland, however, was
secretly proposed by President Beneš during the height of the Munich Crisis. On 16
September 1938, Beneš entrusted Jaromír Nečas, Minister of Social Welfare, with the task of
communicating a secret offer of territorial concessions over the Sudetenland to the French
Government through Lèon Blum, the leader of the French Socialist Party. 48 Blum passed on
the terms of Beneš’ message to the French Prime Minister, Eduoard Daladier, before the
latter’s crucial meeting with Neville Chamberlain and Viscount Halifax at the Anglo-French
45
‘Joint Message to President Benes of Czechoslovakia from the Ministers of the United Kingdom and France
at Prague’, Despatch, No. 300, 19 September 1938, DBFP, Third Series, Vol. 2, p. 405; Keith Eubank, Munich
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), p. 165.
46
Vít Smenta, In the Shadow of Munich: British Policy towards Czechoslovakia from the Endorsement to the
Renunciation of the Munich Agreement (1938–1942) (Prague: Karolinum, 2008), pp. 58-59.
47
Václav Kural, et al., ‘The Breakup of Czechoslovakia and the Genesis of the Transfer’, in Zdeněk Beneš and
Kural, eds., Facing History: The Evolution of Czech-German Relations in the Czech Provinces, 1848–1948
(Prague: Gallery for the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, 2002), p. 116.
48
Jonathan Zorach, ‘The Nečas Mission During the Munich Crisis: Nečas’s Own Account From the Hoover
Institution Archives’, East Central Europe, Vol. 16, Issue 1 (1989), p. 53; Milan Hauner, ‘“We Must Push
Eastwards!” The Challenges and Dilemmas of President Beneš after Munich’, Journal of Contemporary
History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 2009), p. 626.
56
Conference in London on 18 September.49 In return for the cession of four to six thousand
square kilometres of territory beyond Czechoslovakia’s defensive fortifications (which was
inhabited by half a million German-speakers) Beneš proposed that Hitler accept the transfer
of an additional 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 Sudeten Germans into the Reich.50 The combined
effect of the territorial cessation and population transfer would have reduced the German
minority from approximately 3,200,000 to a mere 650,000 (Table 2.1).51 If this proposal had
been enacted, Czechoslovakia would not only have become a more ethnically homogenous
state, but would also have retained its extensive border defences that were surrendered under
the Munich Agreement. As subsequent events would prove, the loss of these fortifications
mortally impaired Czechoslovakia’s viability as an independent nation. In contrast to the
proposal extended by Beneš to the Allies in mid-September, the Munich Agreement which
was concluded a mere two weeks later, deprived Czechoslovakia of 27,000 square kilometres
of land by forcing the state to cede areas with a population that was fifty percent German or
greater (Map 1.2).52 In a less than an ideal state of affairs, a total of 2,806,000 Germans and
750,000 Czechs subsequently came under the jurisdiction of the German Reich as a result of
the agreement.53
The ‘Nečas Mission’ is a largely forgotten but vital episode in the death throes of the First
Czechoslovak Republic. Overshadowed by Munich and largely omitted from the historical
49
Zorach, ‘The Nečas Mission During the Munich Crisis’, pp. 54-55.
Beneš, ‘President Beneš instructs Minister Nečas to propose cessation of ethnic German territory’, 16
September 1938, reprinted in Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, trans. Kurt Glaser (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1963), p. 455. In Nečas private papers from 1943, the former minister claimed that 1,000,000 were to
be transferred. See Zorach, ‘The Nečas Mission During the Munich Crisis’, pp. 55n, 63; Douglas, Orderly and
Humane, p. 18.
51
The figure of 3,200,000 is based upon the 1930 Census. See BNA, FO 925/21188, ‘Ethnographic Map of
Czechoslovakia’; Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 304.
52
Joint Message to President Benes of Czechoslovakia from the Ministers of the United Kingdom and France at
Prague, p. 405; Mark Cornwall, ‘Dr. Edvard Beneš and Czechoslovakia’s German Minority, 1918–1943’, in
John Morrison, ed., The Czech and Slovak Experience: Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for
Soviet and Eastern European Studies, Harrogate, 1990 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), p. 187, 201.
53
Prochazka, ‘The Second Republic’, p. 257.
50
57
record due to the efforts of Beneš himself, its importance has been lost on subsequent
generations of historians.54 It was, in fact, the first serious proposal to expel the Sudeten
Germans from their ancestral home in Bohemia and Moravia and established the suite of
measures that would be considered throughout the war to reduce Czechoslovakia’s postwar
German population. These consisted of three key measures that would form the basis of
future wartime proposals: large-scale population transfers, selective expulsions and limited
territorial revision. Throughout the course of the war the emphasis given to certain aspects of
this formula was naturally dependent upon political conditions, however, all three measures
survived as part of an evolving plan for the organisation of postwar Czechoslovakia. It was
only in late 1944, as total victory over the Axis Powers became all but inevitable, that these
three criteria gave way to a single solution: the wholesale expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.
If mid-September 1938 is taken as the point at which proposals for the removal of the
German minority of Czechoslovakia began to be formulated, it therefore follows that the
origins of population transfer in the Czech lands preceded the Second World War. The
expulsion of the Sudeten German minority would therefore seem to be predicated on the
systemic tensions of the Czech-German relationship throughout the interwar period. The
relationship came to breaking-point in the 1930s due to both economic depression, which
induced a domestic political crisis along ethic cleavages, and the expansionist pan-German
foreign policy of Nazi Germany. Viewed from this perspective, rather than being the ultimate
cause, the war provided the political circumstances by which such an ethnographic
transformation could be realised, expanded and implemented.
54
Beneš had instructed that the note be destroyed and assumed that Nečas had complied with his wishes. He
was informed otherwise by Nečas in 1943. Beneš made no mention of the affair in his postwar memoirs. See
Jaromír Nečas, ‘Remarks about the Political Events Before and After Munich’ (1943), Štefan Osuský Papers,
Box 99/File 5, Hoover Institution Archives, excerpt in Zorach, ‘The Nečas Mission During the Munich Crisis’,
p. 65.
58
THE UNDOING OF MUNICH AND THE ADOPTION OF THE
PRINCIPLE OF EXPULSION
The repudiation of the Munich Agreement formed the centerpiece of Beneš’ activities as
the leader of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. Although this topic has received
adequate historical treatment, it is important to relay its implications on the development of
Beneš’ expulsion policy.55 Indeed, the expulsions were only necessary in postwar
Czechoslovakia due to the restoration of the state’s pre-Munich borders. On this issue, Beneš
was unyielding and saw the annulment of Munich as a fundamental moral question.56 His
diplomatic efforts were primarily directed towards Great Britain, since the United States and
Soviet Union were not signatories to the Munich Agreement. Thus, the political manoeuvres
that played out in London between Beneš and Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary,
and Wenzel Jaksch, the leader of the Sudeten German Social Democrats, are an important
chapter in the exile period.
From the outset of his exile, Beneš was emphatic in his belief that Czechoslovakia should
be restored within its historic pre-Munich borders. In a report dated 21 August 1939 to the
Czech underground resistance movement, the ÚVOD, he declared ‘the restoration of
Czechoslovakia is today already a certainty’.57 This declaration not only predated the
extension of any formal diplomatic recognition to Beneš and his future government-in-exile
but also the creation thereof. The formation of the Czech National Liberation Movement
would occur somewhat later in October 1939 after the outbreak of war and full diplomatic
55
On the role of Beneš in the annulment of the Munich Agreement, see Smenta, In the Shadow of Munich;
Hauner, ‘The Challenges and Dilemmas of President Beneš after Munich’, pp. 619-656; Zeman and Klimek,
The Life of Edvard Beneš, pp. 165-192.
56
Beneš, Czechoslovak Policy for Victory and Peace: The Fourth Message of the President of the Republic to
the State Council on February 3, 1944 (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1944), p. 16.
57
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 159.
59
recognition was only granted to the Beneš Government in London in July 1941. 58 Beneš’
claim, however presumptuous, was in fact more than wishful thinking on the part of an exiled
national leader in the possession of enormous self-belief. In the same report, Beneš went on
to outline the pragmatic approach he would take in exile to regain Czechoslovak
independence:
For the time being, of course, not even we ourselves can say under what
conditions and within what boundaries. The fight on these issues is
about to begin and it will depend exclusively on the way the war
develops, on the situation under which peace is achieved, what will
happen also on our territory, who will be in the war and who will keep
out of it. It is self-evident that we will have to start cautiously. Our
demands will for the time being be put forward with reserve and then
we will gradually try as resolutely as possible for the attainable
maximum.59
Beneš’ exposition of the challenges facing the exile movement revealed his understanding,
gained during the previous conflict with Germany, of the vicissitudes of political fortune and
his awareness that they could be turned to Czechoslovakia’s advantage during the course of
the war. Indeed, the possible means that Beneš laid out in late-1939 for attaining the
maximum postwar territorial settlement for his countrymen was particularly far-sighted and
the Czech leader did well to follow his own pragmatic advice.
58
59
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 175.
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 159.
60
From the outset of his dealings with the British Foreign Office and Jaksch’s Social
Democrats, Beneš engaged in a double game of Machiavellian proportions in order to bring
about the annulment of the Munich Agreement and a favourable settlement over the future of
the German-speaking border regions. In order to reclaim the Sudetenland, Beneš had to
assure Eden and the Foreign Office that its inclusion would not cause any future
Czechoslovak state to suffer the same fate as its interwar predecessor. 60 His solution from the
outset was to reduce the size of the German population, although he did not reveal any
specific proposals to Eden until the beginning of 1942.61 Concurrently, Beneš and Milan
Hodža were conducting negotiations with Jaksch’s Social Democrats over the entry of the
latter into the Czechoslovak State Council.62 Wartime cooperation between both of these antiNazi groups was highly sought after by the Foreign Office and was a condition for further
diplomatic recognition for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile.63
Negotiations began during the summer of 1939 on the express understanding that no
population transfer of the Sudeten German minority would occur after the war. The first
meeting between Beneš and Jaksch took place at the former’s Putney residence on 3 August
1939, and was followed by a second on 4 December after the outbreak of war.64 Beneš also
met with the Sudeten German Social Democrat representatives Franz Kögler, Robert Wiener
and Fritz Kessler on 3 September in order to discuss the possibility of wartime cooperation.65
In all three meetings, Beneš rejected any claim that he intended to expel the Sudeten German
minority after the war. According to Jaksch’s postwar recollections, the Czech leader
declared that ‘we shall in any case have many German citizens’ after the war and that any
60
BNA, CAB 67/7/18, Anthony Eden, ‘Recognition of a Czecho-Slovak Provision Government’,
Memorandum, 1 July 1940, pp. 1-2.
61
BNA, FO 954/4A/1013, Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 13)’, Minutes, 21 January 1942, p. 2.
62
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, pp. 358-366.
63
BNA, FO 954/4A/1017, Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 154)’, 7 July 1942, p. 2.
64
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, pp. 213-214; Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 356.
65
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 357.
61
talk of expulsions was ‘nonsense’.66 This account would seem to correspond with Beneš
claim in his memoirs that he sought to conceal any expulsion plans from Jaksch.67
The prospect of Czech-German cooperation, however, reached an impasse in 1941 before
finally dissolving in 1942.68 The main reason for this outcome was that London became more
forthcoming in its support for Beneš after the massacres and reprisals carried out by Nazi
authorities throughout the Protectorate in retribution for the assassination of Reichsprotektor
Reinhard Heydrich as part of the Czechoslovak-led Operation Anthropoid.69 Indeed, in a
memorandum presented to the War Cabinet in July of the same year Eden stated:
In the view of the hard trials through which the Czechoslovak people
have been passing since the death of Heydrich, I consider it desirable,
mainly for psychological reasons, to give Dr. Benes such satisfaction as
is possible.70
Soon after, Eden presented a draft formula approved by the War Cabinet to Beneš, Jan
Masaryk and Hubert Ripka that went a long way towards recognising the key demands of the
Czechoslovak delegation.71 It reaffirmed Churchill’s declaration of 30 September 1940 that
the Munich Agreement had been ‘destroyed by the Germans’ and further stated that the
British Government ‘regard themselves free from any engagements in this respect’ and ‘will
not be influenced by any change effected since 1938’.72 With this statement, Britain joined
66
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, pp. 357-358.
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 214.
68
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 355.
69
Evans, The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Lead Germany from Conquest to Disaster (London: Penguin,
2009), pp. 275-276.
70
BNA, CAB 66/26/10, Eden, ‘Anglo-Czechoslovak Relations’, Memorandum, 2 July 2 1942, p. 1.
71
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 154)’, p. 1.
72
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 154)’, p. 2.
67
62
the United States (May 1939) and the Soviet Union (June 1942) in declaring Munich null and
void.73 The prospect of expulsions, however, was not included in the formula, although the
matter had been discussed on 2 July by the War Cabinet. Eden informed his colleagues of
Beneš’ proposal for a sizeable population transfer, which had first been communicated to the
Foreign Office in January 1942, and concluded his deliberations with the following
statement:
A population transfer on this scale would be a formidable undertaking.
It will probably be impossible to avoid some measure of this kind in
post-war Europe, but, 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 not commit ourselves to the
principle of such transfers, and let both Dr. Benes and the Sudeten
German representatives know that this is our view. I should not be in
favour of discussing the application of the principle until a much later
stage.74
The fact that Eden was now open to the large-scale population transfer of the Sudeten
Germans represented a significant progression from six months earlier when he had been
reluctant to consider the idea at all.75 On 6 July, the War Cabinet adopted in principle the
73
Edward Taborsky, ‘Politics in Exile, 1939–1945’, in Mamatey and Luža, eds., A History of the Czechoslovak
Republic, 1918–1948, p. 333.
74
Eden, ‘Anglo-Czechoslovak Relations’, p.2.
75
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 13)’, p. 3.
63
population transfer of German minorities throughout Central and Eastern Europe after the
war.76
Between September 1938 and August 1942, the fortunes of Beneš and his Czech
compatriots underwent a propitious transformation. With the repudiation of Munich and the
adoption of the principle of expulsion, the Czechoslovak leader had achieved his immediate
goals for a new postwar settlement. In large measure, his success can be attributed to his
skilful, if double-handed, management of the Sudeten German Social Democrats and the
British Foreign Office. By concealing his true intentions until he could be sure of British
support, Beneš was able to dispense with Jaksch and after August 1942 no longer sought nor
required an understanding with the Social Democrats.
WARTIME
PLANS
FOR
EXPULSION:
CZECH
AND
BRITISH
PERSPECTIVES
As has already been outlined, plans for the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans had begun in
September 1938 on the initiative of President Beneš. Had the policy of Anglo-French
appeasement continued and war been averted, such plans would have come to naught and
been consigned to the dustbin of history. The outbreak of the Second World War, however,
provided a new scenario in which the possibility of expulsions could again be considered.
Between 1940 and 1945, many proposals were considered, although more humane options
that included contingencies for re-settlement and compensation were ultimately overtaken by
wartime events. The Czechoslovak government-in-exile put forward a number of proposals
during the war, and of these, those presented to Anthony Eden in January 1942 and the
76
BNA, CAB 65/27/2, Meeting of the War Cabinet, ‘Czechoslovakia – Relations with the Czechoslovak
Government (No. 3)’, Minutes, July 6, p. 120.
64
European Advisory Commission November 1944 most clearly demonstrate how Czech
demands increased during the course of the war.77 In addition, the Foreign Office had the
Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS) produce two reports in 1940 and 1942 on
population transfers in Axis-occupied Europe under the chair of Professor John Mabbott of
Balliol College, Oxford.78 The Memoranda on Frontiers of European Confederations and
Transfer of German Populations of 20 February 1942 is the most informative on the matter
of the extent and perceived consequences of the transfer of German minorities in postwar
Europe.79 From this study emerges a clear picture of the degree to which the Foreign Office
understood the implications of uprooting millions of Germans from their ancestral homes and
forcing them into a much reduced and war-torn postwar Germany.80
The first Czechoslovak wartime plan for the mass removal of Sudeten Germans that was
presented to the Foreign Office in January 1942 bore significant resemblance to the Nečas
offer of September 1938. Although this proposal was less ambitious in its goal of reducing
the overall size of the Sudeten German population, it built upon the earlier plan by
introducing a three-point program of territorial cession, population transfer and expulsion. In
a meeting with Eden on 21 January, Beneš outlined these key measures. The Czechoslovak
President was willing to cede territory to Germany that had limited strategic value in the
west, north and north-east (including the Egerland-Karlsbad Triangle), which contained
77
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 13)’, p. 2; BNA, 954/4A/1039, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 231)’, 27
November 1944, pp. 1-2; Václav Kural, et al., ‘The Breakup of Czechoslovakia and the Genesis of the
Transfer’, pp. 187-188; Zdeněk Radvanovský, ‘The Transfer of Czechoslovakia’s Germans and its Impact in the
Border Region after the Second World War’, in Mark Cornwall and R.J.W. Evans, eds., Czechoslovakia in a
Nationalist and Fascist Europe, 1918–1948 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 221.
78
Matthew Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfers in Context
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 47, 52,
79
BNA, FO 371/30930, FRPS, Memorandum on Frontiers of European Confederations and the Transfer of
German Populations, Report, 20 February 1942, pp. 1-30.
80
FRPS, Memorandum on Frontiers of European Confederations and the Transfer of German Populations, pp.
18, 20-30.
65
between 600,000 and 700,000 Germans.81 In return, Beneš asked for the right to evict two
Germans from the remaining Czech lands for every inhabitant of the transferred territory.
These Germans would be divided into two categories: those to be expelled as war criminals
and associates of the Nazi authorities, numbering an estimated 300,000 to 400,000, and
removal by population transfer of an additional one million Germans.82 The combined effect
of all three measures would reduce the size of the pre-war Sudeten minority from 3,200,000
to a little over one million (Table 2.1). The similarities between the plans of January 1942
and September 1938 are striking. Both involved the sacrifice of non-strategic Germanspeaking territory in order to obtain the right to forcibly remove a far greater number of
Germans from the integral Czech borderlands and interior.
The latter plan, however, would have ceded more territory to Germany, and for this reason,
Beneš asked that it remain secret as it might be ‘quoted against him later’.83 If the proposal
had become official, it would have both attracted considerable personal criticism of Beneš
from extreme elements within the ÚVOD in Prague, and permanently impaired relations with
Jaksch. The Social Democrats had made clear that they were unwilling to accept the principle
of expulsion from the outset of their negotiations with the Czech leaders. 84 Nonetheless,
Beneš had presented Jaksch with a number of expulsion proposals in September 1942 after
gaining the agreement of the War Cabinet to the principle of expulsion in July 1942.85 None,
however, revealed the true extent of the number of Germans to be expelled. Beneš’
81
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 13)’, p. 2.
Eden, ‘Anglo-Czechoslovak Relations’, p. 2.
83
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 13)’, p. 2.
84
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, pp. 357-358.
85
Christopher Kopper, ‘The London Czech Government and the Origins of the Expulsion of the Sudeten
Germans’, in Steven Bela Vardy and T. Hunt Tooley, eds., Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe
(Boulder: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 263-264.
82
66
suggestion that any expulsions would be limited to between 600,000 and one million persons
was duplicitous, given his earlier indications to the Foreign Office and the ÚVOD.86
The hardening of anti-German sentiment after the Nazi atrocities of June 1942 and the
formal annulment of the Munich Agreement in August created a political situation in which
more comprehensive population transfers could be considered. From this point onwards,
Beneš displayed greater reluctance to cede territory to Germany, and therefore came to rely
upon the method of expulsion to create the sweeping ethnographic changes desired by his
government. In this endeavour, he was greatly assisted by growing support from the United
States and the Soviet Union. During the course of 1943, Beneš made considerable progress in
obtaining commitments from Roosevelt and Stalin to support his postwar policy for
Czechoslovakia.87 In mid 1943, Beneš toured the United States and had meetings with the
leading figures of the Roosevelt Administration, including the president himself.88 In
discussions with Roosevelt in May and June, Beneš twice received assurances that the United
States would agree to the transfer of ‘as many [Germans] as possible’. 89 A similar
commitment was given by Stalin and Molotov during Beneš visit to the Soviet Union from
November to December 1943, during which he renewed the 1935 security treaty in a new
Czech-Soviet Pact. 90
Having obtained the support of the Big Three to the principle of expulsions by the closure
of 1943, Beneš was able to contemplate the ‘attainable maximum’ for which he had dreamed
86
In Beneš’ communications with the ÚVOD, he suggested that between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 Germans
would be expelled. See Kopper, ‘The London Czech Government and the Origins of the Expulsion of the
Sudeten Germans’, p. 257, 261.
87
On Stalin’s attitude to postwar arrangements, see Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. 3, The Grand
Alliance (Sydney: Halstead, 1950), p. 558.
88
Beneš, Czechoslovak Policy for Victory and Peace: The Fourth Message of the President of the Republic to
the State Council on February 3, 1944 (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1944), p. 17.
89
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 193, 196.
90
Beneš, Memoirs of Dr. Eduard Beneš, p. 267; Beneš, Czechoslovak Policy for Victory and Peace, pp. 20-22.
67
in 1939. This found its expression in a new expulsion proposal presented by the Czechs to the
European Advisory Commission in November 1944 (Table 2.1).91 On the question of
‘transfers’, Beneš now insisted that all but 800,000 Germans would be expelled from
Czechoslovakia.92 As he was only prepared to surrender territory inhabited by 350,000 to
400,000 Germans, this would mean the expulsion of nearly two million, which was
considerably more than had been proposed under the 1942 program. It is not surprising that
such a drastic increase caused much consternation in the Foreign Office. Before Beneš
departure to recently liberated Slovakia in February 1945, Eden cautioned reserve until the
matter of German minorities could be discussed by the principal Allied Powers at a peace
conference.93 On this meeting, Eden wrote to Sir Philip Nichols:
His Excellency [Beneš], while not disputing that this might be a wise
course, said nothing which could be interpreted as acceptance of this
advice, and I am left under the strong impression, that, unless we
reinforce this advice in some way, he may, on his return to his own
country, commit himself on this subject to his people.94
No doubt, Eden was aware of the consequences of an expulsion of the magnitude proposed
by the Czechoslovak President. Indeed, the challenges of economic dislocation,
transportation, resettlement, compensation, and reconstruction arising from the mass
expulsion of German minorities from Central and Eastern Europe had been outlined by
Professor Mabbott in the FRPS report of February 1942, which estimated that if expulsions
were to proceed after the war, the number of Germans to be uprooted would be in the vicinity
91
BNA, FO 371/46810, ‘Transfer of Populations to Germany’, Memorandum 16 March 1945, p. 1.
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 13)’, pp. 1-2.
93
BNA, FO 954/4A/1041, Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 38)’, 23 February 1945, p. 1.
94
Eden, ‘Mr. Eden to Mr. Nichols (No. 38)’, p. 2.
92
68
of three million to 6,800,000.95 This figure turned out to be surprisingly accurate, especially
given that the report did not anticipate the westward movement of the German-Polish border
to the Oder-Neisse Line, which increased the number of Germans to be expelled from Poland
alone from 3,300,000 to approximately 9,600,000.96 If Mabbott’s figures of February 1942
are adjusted for the redrawing of the Polish border, the total number of expellees reaches a
maximum figure of somewhere between 12 and 14 million – the actual number of Germans
that were expelled in the postwar period. The potential scale of these transfers was indeed
unprecedented, and with this in mind, Mabbott suggested that a timeframe of ten years would
be necessary to achieve them in an ‘orderly’ manner.97 This assumption was based upon the
time required for earlier population transfers in the Balkans, South Tyrol and Eastern Europe.
For example, the Greek-Bulgaria exchange involving some 170,000 persons took place over
six years, the larger Greco-Turkish exchange of 550,000 over two years and the South Tyrol
transfer of 180,000 over a year with a three year extension for property settlement.98 In the
event, the expulsion of nearly three million Germans from Czechoslovakia was completed in
little more than one year.99
When Allied leaders grasped the full implications of expelling millions of Germans in mid1945, it was too late to repudiate the blank cheque that had been given to the leaders of
Czechoslovakia and Poland to purge their homelands upon liberation. Indeed, Churchill only
began to express misgivings during the proceedings of the Potsdam Conference. 100 By this
95
FRPS, ‘Memoranda on Frontiers of European Confederations and the Transfer of German Populations’, p. 2.
FRPS, ‘Memoranda on Frontiers of European Confederations and the Transfer of German Populations’, p. 9;
Alfred de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans – Background,
Execution, and Consequences (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 54-55.
97
FRPS, ‘Memoranda on Frontiers of European Confederations and the Transfer of German Populations’, p. 26.
98
FRPS, ‘Memoranda on Frontiers of European Confederations and the Transfer of German Populations’, p. 26.
99
Zdeněk Beneš, et al., ‘The Implementation of the Transfer’, in Beneš and Kural, eds., Facing History, pp.
210-233.
100
BNA, FO 934/3, Churchill minute to Eden, No. 14/5, 23 July 1945.
96
69
time, nearly one million Germans had already been evicted from Czechoslovakia before any
formal agreement had been reached on the question of transfers (Table 2.2).
70
Table 2.1. Expulsion Proposals Presented by President Beneš to the Allied Powers
September 1938
%
January 1942
%
November 1944
500,000 – 550,000
16 – 17
600,000 – 700,000
1,500,000 – 2,000,000
47 – 63
900,000 – 1,000,000
Reduction by Expulsion*
–
–
300,000 – 400,000
9 – 13
500,000
15
Estimated wartime casualties
–
–
–
–
250,000
8
2,000,000 – 2,550,000
63 – 80
1,800,000 – 2,100,000
56 – 66
2,400,000
75
650,000 – 1,200,000
20 – 37
1,100,000 – 1,400,000
34 – 44
800,000
25
Reduction by Territorial Cession
Reduction by Population Transfer
TOTAL
Remaining German Population**
19 – 22
%
350,000 – 400,000 11 – 13
28 – 31 1,250,000 – 1,300,000 39 – 41
* In the 1942 proposal, Beneš intended ‘expulsion’ as a separate measure for war criminals.
71
** Assuming a pre-war population of 3,200,000 (1930 Census).
Table 2.2. Number of Germans Expelled from Czechoslovakia, 1945 – 1946
‘Wild’ Expulsions (pre-August 1945)
700,000 – 800,000
Potsdam Protocol (August 1945 – October 1946)
2,100,000 – 2,250,000
TOTAL
2,900,000 – 2,950,000
Remaining German Population (October 1946)
250,000 – 300,000*
* The majority of those Germans that were not expelled had emigrated by 1948.
Source: Piotr Pykel, ‘The Expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia’, in Steffen Prauser and Arfon Rees, eds., The
Expulsion of the ‘German’ Communities from Eastern Europe at the End of the Second World War, EUI Working Paper
HEC No. 2004/1 (Florence: European Universities Institute, 2004), pp. 18-20.
III
SAFEGUARDING DEMOCRACY
COLLECTIVE GUILT AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE POSTWAR ORDER
~
After the First World War about seventy or eighty percent of our German nationals
failed to grasp the democratic revolution that we Czechs had gone through. They
accepted the pan-German counter-revolution and Nazism instead. It will be necessary
to cleanse the Republic of guilty citizens even if there are hundreds of thousands of
them.1
─Edvard Beneš
No one who has seen and heard what the Germans did in this country can doubt that it
is impossible now to keep Germans here as citizens. This terror wasn’t the act of a few
SS men. It was really the expression of the spirit of a whole people. The Germans have
to go.2
─A. J. P. Taylor
In what was to become a conspicuous scene across war-torn Europe, an impecunious
seventy-year old woman found herself far from home at an unknown train station.3 Given
only ten minutes to flee from Silesia, her only possession was a Bible. 4 Such was the fate of
1
Edvard Beneš, Edvard Beneš in His Own Words: Threescore Years of a Statesman, Builder and Philosopher
(New York: Czech-American National Alliance Eastern Division, 1944), p. 60.
2
A. J. P. Taylor, as quoted from audio extract in David Vaughan, A. J. P. Taylor: Faith in a Socialist
Czechoslovakia, Radio Prague, first broadcast 11 September 2008, <http://www.radio.cz/en/section/archives/a-jp-taylor-faith-in-socialist-czechoslovakia>, updated 8 October 2011, viewed 10 August 2013.
3
The plight of this anonymous German woman was recounted to the House of Commons by Robert Boothby,
the Conservative Member for Aberdeen and Kincardine East; Robert Boothby, ‘Expulsion of Germans’, 16
August 1945, Parliament of the United Kingdom, The Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): House of Commons
Official Report, Fifth Series, Vol. 413, 1945–1946 (London: H.M.S.O., 1946), col. 992.
4
AKPR, LA, Carton 22, Vystrizky z anglichych novin (1945), ‘“Out in Ten Minutes” Order to Germans: “Eye
for an Eye” in Sudetenland’, Daily Mail, 6 August 1945.
72
millions of German refugees forced to leave the lands they had inhabited for nearly several
centuries in the aftermath of the Second World War. The vast majority, often peasants and
townspeople, had little or nothing to do with the Nazi regime; however, they were
nonetheless connected by language and ethnicity with the Germanic race. In the context of
1945, this association alone was enough to justify their expulsion as punishment for their
complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime.
One of the most startling aspects of the German expulsions must surely be how the liberal
democracies of Britain and the United States and liberal-minded statesman, such as President
Beneš, chose to deny the most basic of human rights to millions of Germans on the premise
of collective guilt. For much of the postwar period, their role in the expulsion of twelve to
fourteen million Germans was a chapter of the war preferred to be forgotten.5 The similarities
between the Allied-condoned expulsions and the atrocities committed by the Nazis were far
too uncomfortable to contemplate for most contemporary participants and observers, and in
any case, the expulsions were clearly at odds with the over-arching narrative of the war that
celebrated the triumph of democracy and liberalism over totalitarianism and fascism. Yet, at
the time, the forced removal of German minorities was perceived as a necessary measure for
peace and the consolidation of democracy by expelling anti-democratic ‘Nazified’ elements
from the reconstituted states of Central and Eastern Europe.6
It is crucial to understand the central paradox of the postwar expulsions – of the
suppression of democratic principles by the Western democracies in order to facilitate
forcible state-led ethnic cleansing analogous to the deeds of Nazism. Scholars have too often
5
R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 3.
6
De Zayas, ‘Anglo-American Responsibility for the Expulsion of Germans, 1944–1948’, in Steven Bela Vardy
and T. Hunt Tooley, Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Boulder: Columbia University Press,
2003), p. 240.
73
either dismissed this act as a lapse of conscience on the part of Britain and the United States
in the hour of victory, or more simply, adopted the assumption that the German people
deserved to be punished for Nazism, and in 1945, the removal of German minorities from
lands beyond the German state seemed a reasonable, if barbarous, course of action. Both of
these interpretations are fundamentally lacking in historical rigour and do not contemplate the
possibility that the expulsions, if considered within the prism of 1943–1945, were viewed as
a crucial component in the reconstruction of Europe around functional, social-democratic
national states.
Indeed, in the mind of President Beneš, the removal of the Sudeten Germans would
provide the demographic foundations that would allow the repudiation of national rights and
the adoption of the individual rights of the citizen.7 It was his firm belief that with the
removal of German minorities from Poland and Czechoslovakia, these countries would be
allowed to prosper as democratic nation-states and thus avoid the fate of their multiethnic
predecessors of the interwar period. In other words, Western statesmen and their Czech and
Polish counterparts decided that it was necessary to commit the excess of expulsion in order
to guarantee regional stability in East-Central Europe. This blatant contradiction between the
advocacy of democracy and citizenship on the one hand and the execution of mass expulsions
on the other has perhaps been summed up best by the legal historian A. W. Brian Simpson:
‘enthusiasm for human rights and hypocrisy not uncommonly go hand in hand’.8
7
Beneš, ‘The Organisation of Postwar Europe’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 20, No. 2 (January 1942), p. 239; Mark
Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 202.
8
A. W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European
Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 161.
74
GERMANOPHOBIA AND THE ‘FIFTH COLUMN’ MYTH
Of all the German minorities of interwar Europe, the Sudeten Germans were the most
likely to justify the concept of collective guilt. According to well-established Czech
nationalist pedagogy, they had, in Beneš’ words, ‘plunged a dagger in the back of the
Czechoslovak State in 1938’ and then subsequently assisted the Nazi authorities in
suppressing the Czech people during the years of the Protectorate.9 This behaviour was
commensurate with the actions of a ‘fifth column’ – a term coined during the Spanish Civil
War that referred to civilian elements within Madrid that supported General Franco and the
Nationalist cause.10 After 1939, the term was increasingly used to cast German minorities as
‘traitors’ and ‘saboteurs’ as part of a concerted effort by those who desired their forcible
removal as part of the peace settlement.11 It is necessary, however, to re-evaluate from a
position of critical distance the entire notion of the collective guilt of the Sudeten Germans.
This assumption gained widespread acceptance in large measure due to the radicalising
effects of the war – not a promising milieu for the propagation of truth – and has since
continued to shape the historical record.
The successful campaign carried out against the Sudeten Germans by the Czechoslovak
government-in-exile resulted in a dramatic reversal of attitudes, and particularly that of
Britain, towards their role in the events between 1935 and 1938. At the height of the Munich
Crisis, Neville Chamberlain’s envoy to Czechoslovakia, Lord Runciman, had been express in
his sympathy for the Sudeten cause and had likened Prague’s jurisdiction over the
9
Beneš, Radio Broadcast, 1944, in Louise W. Holborn, ed, War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, Vol. 2,
From Casablanca to Tokyo Bay, January 1, 1943–September 1, 1945 (Boston: World Peace Foundation, 1948),
p. 1036.
10
Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 4.
11
De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 4.
75
Sudetenland to the rule of an ‘alien race’.12 A similar sentiment was shared by Sir Joseph
Addison, the British Minister in Prague, who once referred to the Sudeten Germans as ‘this
Cinderella in the Czechoslovak household’.13 By 1943, however, favourable views of the
Sudeten Germans were all but extinguished by the rising tide of anti-German sentiment, no
doubt abetted by the vitriol expressed towards them by the Czechoslovak government-inexile. One of the political realities ostensibly established by Munich was that the Sudeten
German minority had been disloyal subjects to the Czechoslovak state. Indeed, Beneš spoke
of the necessity ‘to punish all those who, directly or indirectly, have participated in acts of
treason and bestialities perpetrated by the Henleinites, the Nazis, and the Gestapo’.14 Such
was the level of antipathy that Beneš felt towards the Sudeten Germans that, upon his
resignation from the presidency in 1948, the British Ambassador to Czechoslovakia made the
observation, in what was otherwise a generally praiseworthy political obituary, that ‘Munich
had left him [Beneš], more even than most Czechs, with a fear and loathing of Germany
amounting to obsession’.15 This attitude was certainly well-documented, and is pervasive
throughout Beneš’ writings during his years in exile.
Although it is understandable that Beneš was more hostile than most to the Sudeten
Germans, his Germanophobia was neither unique nor newly learnt. As an avowed Czech
nationalist, Beneš had displayed a lack of sympathy with the plight of the German citizens of
12
Walter Runciman, ‘Letter from Lord Runciman to President Benes’, 21 September 1938, in E. L. Woodward
and Rohan Butler, eds, Documents on British Foreign Policy (hereafter DBFP), Third Series, Vol. 2, (London:
H.M.S. O., 1949), p. 676.
13
Mark Cornwall, ‘“A Leap into Ice-Cold Water”: The Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in
Czechoslovakia, 1933–1938’, in Cornwall and R. J. W. Evans, eds, Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist
Europe 1918–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 137.
14
Beneš, ‘Basic principles of the attitude of the President of the Republic, Dr. Eduard Beneš, to the Resolution
of June 7th, 1942, from the Executive Committee of the Sudeten German Social Democratic Party handed to
Wenzel Jaksch by the President of the Republic on December 1 st, 1942’, Memorandum, reprinted in Beneš ,
Memoirs of Dr Eduard Beneš: From Munich to New War and New Victory, trans. Godfrey Lias (London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1954), p. 312. Beneš also referred to the behaviour of the SdP as terrorism. See Beneš,
Czechoslovak Policy for Victory and Peace: The Fourth Message of the President of the Republic to the State
Council on February 3, 1944 (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1944), pp. 37-38.
15
BNA, KV 2/2942, Pierson Dickson, ‘Resignation of Dr. Benes as President of Czechoslovakia and His Part in
Evolution of the Republic’, Report, No. 148, 27 July 1948, p. 2.
76
Czechoslovakia – a tendency that was deeply grounded in Czech historical consciousness. In
announcing his postwar program in 1941, he invoked the historic struggle between the
Czechs and Germans and saw Nazism as the most recent manifestation of a far older panGermanism.16 His interpretation was no doubt aided by the fact that Hitler, in his early years,
was a disciple of the Austrian pan-German Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who Benes referred
to as ‘a drunken and incompetent anti-Semite who hated the Czechs’.17 Such sentiments had
long been expressed by Czech politicians. The nineteenth-century statesman and historian
František Palacký had likened the Czech-German relationship to an uninterrupted historic
conflict been the two peoples over the lands of Bohemia and Moravia.18 In this battle of
antitheses, the heroic resistance of the peace-loving Czechs was pitted against aggressive
German encroachment and colonisation.19 This was nationalist history par excellence and,
like other conscious efforts throughout Europe to construct national identity, the historical
narrative espoused by the Czechoslovak Republic that was founded in 1918 and restored in
1945 celebrated its Slavic identity and Hussite past to the exclusion of its German and
Magyar minorities.20
The rhetoric of a racial struggle was continuously evoked by Beneš throughout the war,
and intensified as the full scale of Nazi atrocities became known. Even anti-Nazis, such as
Wenzel Jaksch, were not spared. In a private conversation with Anthony Eden in January
16
Beneš, ‘The New Order in Europe’, Nineteenth Century and After, Vol. 130 (July–December 1941), p. 150.
Beneš, ‘The New Order in Europe’, p. 150. For pan-Germanism in Austria, see Carl E. Schorske, ‘Politics in a
New Key: An Austrian Triptych’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 39, No. 4 (December 1967), pp. 343386.
18
František Palacký, Dějiny národu českého w Čechách a w Morawě, Vols. 1–5 (Prague: F. Tempský, 1848–
1876); Palacký, ‘History of the Czech Nation in Bohemia and Moravia’, in Balázs Trencsényi and Michal
Kopeček, eds., Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe, 1770–1945, Vol. 2, National
Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements (New York: Central European University Press, 2007),
pp. 50–56.
19
AKPR, LA, Carton 11, Zpravy Zamini ruzne 2/4, E5921/43, J. Opocensky, ‘Czech History and PanGermanism’, 1943, pp. 1-10. Beneš also subscribed to this nationalist narrative. See Beneš, Bohemia’s Case for
Independence (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1917), pp. 5-8.
20
Andrea Orzoff, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2009), pp. 11, 26-27.
17
77
1942, Beneš sought to undermine the leader of the Sudeten German Social Democrats, stating
that it would be impossible to offer Jaksch a place on the State Council due to Heydrich’s
oppression of the Czechs and that Jaksch was inclined to make threats against the Czechs and
‘always carried a little pistol in his pocket’ during negotiations.21 Hubert Ripka, a Minister of
State in the Czechoslovak cabinet, was more scathing: ‘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’.22
Such animosity and mistrust was given further justification by the Nazi reprisals of June
1942. Upon his return to liberated Czechoslovakia in 1945, one of Beneš’ first ceremonial
acts as president was to commemorate the three year anniversary of the destruction of Lidice,
a small village in central Bohemia that had been razed by the Germans. 23 In his address,
Beneš was adamant in his belief that the German people bore collective responsibility for its
destruction. He declared:
Lidice is the hallmark of Nazi culture and of the German system. I say the
‘German’ system and I add ‘Nazi’, because I cannot dissociate the German
nation as a whole from the barbarous massacre of Lidice. I hold the entire
German nation responsible for Nazism ...24
Beneš’ belief in the inherit connection between the crimes of Nazism and the German
people was a continual theme throughout his wartime pronouncements. It was intricately tied
21
BNA, FO 954/4A/1013, Anthony Eden, ‘Mr Eden to Mr Nichols (No. 13)’, 11 January 1942, p. 1.
Hubert Ripka, The Future of the Czechoslovak Germans (London: Chiswick, 1944), p. 13.
23
Gotthold Rhode, ‘The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1939–1945’, in Victor S. Mamatey and Radomír
Luža, eds., A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973),
pp. 314-315; De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 34; Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 22-23.
24
AKPR, LA, Carton 22, Vystrizky z anglichych novin, 1945, Beneš, ‘The Lesson of Lidice: A Speech of
President Beneš’, The Central European Observer, 29 June 1945, p. 191.
22
78
to the notion that German minorities constituted a ‘fifth column’ that were an ongoing threat
to the new states in which they resided, particularly Czechoslovakia and Poland. In the same
month that Beneš made his Lidice address, Dr Vladimír Clementis, the Deputy Minister for
Foreign Affairs and member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), echoed Beneš’
sentiments when he called for the removal of both the German and Hungarian ‘fifth columns’
that had been used as the ‘willing tools of the policy of aggression directed against the
Republic from the outside’.25 Clementis’ speech also drew upon the notion of collective guilt
by placing the blame for the events of 1938 solely upon the German population, stating ‘it is
a question of removing not thousands but millions of enemies and saboteurs from our soil’.26
The idea of German minorities functioning as Nazi ‘fifth columns’ was not a belief
universally shared amongst the Czechs’ wartime allies. In the same year that Beneš’ had
called for large-scale population transfers to be enacted after the war, The Economist set out
an alternative postwar order in which the ‘allocation of guilt must be measured by accepted
canons of law’ and that ‘punishment must fall on those who are guilty in a moral and not in a
racial sense’.27 At first inspection, Beneš’ invocation of racial themes to justify expulsion
would seem out of step with such liberal sentiments. In many regards, this was certainly the
case; however, his belief in the collective guilt of the Germans was also based upon their
demonstrable disloyalty to the Czechoslovak state from the rise of the SdP in 1933 until
liberation in 1945. The criteria he used to reach this conclusion simply marked the
overwhelming majority of Sudeten Germans for expulsion.
25
AKPR, LA, Carton 22, Vystrizky z anglichych novin, 1945, Vladimír Clementis, ‘Fifth Column Must Go’,
The Central European Observer, 29 June 1945, p. 192.
26
Clementis, ‘Fifth Column Must Go’, p. 192.
27
‘Justice and Revenge’, The Economist, Vol. 142, No. 5134, 17 January 1942, p. 4; Beneš, ‘The New Order in
Europe’, p. 154.
79
In terms of the guilt of the Sudeten Germans, he drew little distinction between those
Germans that had ‘acquiesced’ as observers and those who had actively participated as
‘collaborators’ and ‘executors’ in the crimes of the Nazi regime. 28 In the President’s
estimation, approximately ninety percent of Czechoslovakia’s Germans fell into these two
categories.29 The basis for such a high figure has a complex origin. In order to claim that
such an overwhelming proportion of the Sudeten Germans had been disloyal to the
Czechoslovak Republic, Beneš determined their national allegiance upon the question of their
support for Henlein’s SdP, a party that had close political and financial links with the
NSDAP in Germany. In the 1935 parliamentary elections, the SdP had polled two-thirds of
the German vote, and in the May 1938 municipal elections in the Sudetenland the party’s
support increased to between 82 and 85 percent, and in some districts this figure reached as
high as 90 percent of the vote.30 The size of the party’s membership was equally impressive.
After only two years since its formation in 1933 the SdP had 400,000 members, and its
membership continued to climb to 770,000 in March 1938 and then dramatically increased to
1,300,000, or 40.6 percent of the Sudeten German population, in July 1938 after the
Anschluss.31
The immense electoral and popular support enjoyed by the SdP would seem to justify
Beneš’ assertion that the overwhelming majority of the Sudeten Germans harboured
irredentist objectives and had openly flirted with Nazism. This would certainly be the case if
voting intentions were taken as the only criteria. A more accurate barometer of where
national loyalties truly lay was the Sudeten response to mobilisation orders issued during the
28
Beneš, ‘The Lesson of Lidice’, p. 191.
AKPR, LA, Carton 22, Vystrizky z anglichych novin, 1945, John Fisher, ‘“Wholehearted Unity” in
Czechoslovakia: Dr Benes Talks of His Plans’, Daily Telegraph, 3 August 1945.
30
Igor Lukes, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 146; Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 291.
31
Cornwall, ‘The Manoeuvres of the Henlein Movement in Czechoslovakia’, p. 137; Michael Mueller, Canaris:
The Life and Death of Hitler’s Spymaster, trans. Geoffrey Brooks (Annapolis: Naval Institute, 2007), p. 127.
29
80
May Crisis of 1938. In response to reports of German military movements on the
Czechoslovak border, a partial mobilization was ordered by the Minister of National Defence
on 21 May.32 According to Wenzel Jaksch, as reservists occupied the border forts of the
Sudetenland a ‘political paradox’ took place: Sudeten German men of military age obeyed
mobilisation orders and members of the SdP did not attempt insurrection or mutiny at the
prospect of fighting their German brothers.33 Cowed by the display of Prague’s resistance to
invasion, party members quietly removed the swastika from public buildings overnight.34
Hubert Ripka recounts a similar course of events that took place on 11 September 1938. 35 A
series of revolts were instigated in the Sudetenland on the eve of the Munich Crisis by some
more extreme elements within the SdP. They failed, however, to gain any active support from
the majority of Sudeten Germans.36 Indeed, according to Ripka, ‘in several places Henlein’s
extremist agitators were driven away by actual members of the Sudeten-German Party’.37
This remarkable behaviour, which indicated the limit of the Sudeten Germans’ support for
the SdP, led Ripka to remark in the lull between Munich and the outbreak of the Second
World War that:
32
Lukes, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler, p. 140; Ernst Eisenlohr, ‘The German Minister in
Czechoslovakia (Eisenlohr) to the German Foreign Ministry’, Telegram, No. 153, 21 May 1938, DGFP, Series
D, Vol. 2, pp. 304-305.
33
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 291.
34
Lukes, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler, p. 145.
35
The extreme wing of the SdP intentionally instigated unrest in German areas that resulted in bloodshed so that
negotiations with the Czechs would be unable to continue. See Runciman, ‘Letter from Lord Runciman to
President Benes’, 21 September 1938, DBFP, Third Series, Vol. 2, p. 676; ‘Mr. Newton (Prague) to Viscount
Halifax’, Telegram, No. 555, 13 September 1938, DBFP, p. 304; ‘The German Chargé d’Affaires in
Czechoslovakia (Hencke) to the German Foreign Ministry’, Telegram, No. 348, DGFP, p. 745; ‘Report from
the War Ministry’, Minute, 13 September 1938, DGFP, pp. 749-750.
36
Hubert Ripka, Munich: Before and After: A fully documented Czechoslovak account of the crises of
September 1938 and March 1939 with a detailed analysis of the repercussions of the Munich Agreement on the
situation of Europe as a whole and of Central Europe in particular, together with an essay on the
reconstruction of a free Europe’, trans. Ida Šindelková and Edgar P. Young (London: Victor Gollancz, 1939),
pp. 18-19.
37
Ripka, Munich, p. 19.
81
This is surely proof … that the majority of the Sudeten Germans were not in
sympathy with revolutionary National Socialism … If it had been true that
the majority of the Sudeten Germans really regarded Hitler, represented
among them in the person of Henlein, as their leader, one might have
expected them to grasp eagerly at this opportunity to revolt and free
themselves from the Czech yoke.38
The accounts of both Jaksch and Ripka cast doubt upon the conventional wisdom that the
majority of Sudeten Germans harboured irredentist goals, and thus, raise important questions
about the justification for their expulsion. Their unwillingness to revolt against Prague at the
opportune moment and unite with the German Reich would seem to support Jaksch’s claim
that the Sudeten Germans were not voting for separation from Czechoslovakia, but rather
thought that they could attain the long desired goal of political and cultural autonomy by
supporting Henlein and the SdP.39 This conclusion is supported by a close reading of the
SdP’s platform that, until the party came firmly under the control of Hitler after the
Anschluss, only demanded territorial autonomy for the Sudetenland within a federal
Czechoslovak state.40
Despite the inherent flaws in determining the collective guilt of the Sudeten Germans upon
the electoral support enjoyed by the SdP, Ripka came to distance himself from his pre-war
statements and subscribed to Beneš’ opinion that the overwhelming majority of
Czechoslovakia’s Germans were culpable of treason and of ‘wholeheartedly furthering the
38
Ripka, Munich, pp. 19-20.
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, p. 291.
40
Henlein’s desire for autonomy was articulated in the Karlsbad Program and the ‘Nationality Statute’. See
Jaksch, Europe’s Road to Potsdam, pp. 292-295. De Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam, p. 29.
39
82
aggressive schemes of Hitler’s Third Reich’.41 In a 1944 polemic on the future of the Sudeten
Germans, Ripka wrote:
It should be borne in mind that the Germans in the Czech territories, ever since last
century, have been zealous adherents and advocates of the doctrine of the German
Herrenvolk ... the genuine anti-Nazis and anti-Fascists among the Sudetic Germans
constituted only a small minority, less than one-third until 1938, and from Munich
onwards even this small amount has been still further reduced.42
The notion that the Sudeten Germans were a ‘Nazified’ fifth column, despite contrary
evidence, had become a generally accepted fact by the time that President Beneš began to
articulate his expulsion plans to the Big Three in 1942–1943. By determining German guilt
upon the electoral support of the SdP, Beneš and his political colleagues ensured that the
overwhelming majority would be expelled. Indeed, there is a striking parallel between the
250,000 to 300,000 Germans that remained in Czechoslovakia after the expulsions – slightly
less than 10 percent of the pre-war population – and the number of Germans that supported
the anti-Nazi Social Democrats in the 1938 municipal elections.
A NEW CONCEPTION OF RIGHTS?
In October 1945 at the London Conference of Foreign Ministers, John Foster Dulles
outlined the key tenants that would govern the postwar order: territorial settlements that
conformed to the will of the inhabitants concerned, an international bill of rights that would
protect human dignity and fundamental freedoms for all, and the return to principles of
41
42
Ripka, The Future of the Czechoslovak Germans, p. 10.
Ripka, The Future of the Czechoslovak Germans, pp. 10-11.
83
morality in international affairs.43 This ambitious program had been promulgated at the San
Francisco Conference, at which Dulles had been a senior advisor, by the founding members
of the United Nations and was an attempt to articulate the ideals for which the Western Allies
had fought the Second World War. Two months before Dulles speech, however, the Allied
Powers had agreed at Potsdam to the ‘orderly and humane’ transfer of German minorities
from Central and Eastern Europe, including the removal of 2,500,000 from Czechoslovakia.44
Those Germans to be expelled would not be entitled to the rights and privileges of this new
world order; they would be unable to make their views known through democratic means
and, unlike previous population transfers, would be denied the option of departing or
remaining in their homeland.
The spectre of millions of Germans fleeing their homes under the threat of retribution is
difficult, nigh impossible, to reconcile with the high ideals that were proclaimed first in the
Atlantic Charter of 1941, and then in 1945 at Potsdam and San Francisco. Nonetheless, some
historians have sought to discover the cold rationalism under which two such contradictory
phenomena could take place. Mark Mazower, for example, has argued that ‘behind the
smokescreen of the rights of the individual ... the corpse of the League’s minorities policy
could be safely buried’.45 This argument presents two great ironies. Firstly, the repudiation of
minority rights required the mass expulsion of national minorities in order to dissolve ethnic
tensions in Europe and thus establish a political and demographic environment that would
enable the protection of individual rights within homogenous nation-states. Secondly, the
43
BNA, CAB 121/85, John Foster Dulles, Speech at the London Conference of Foreign Ministers, 6 October
1945, as quoted in ‘General Distribution from Washington Office’, 13 October 1945, pp. 2-4.
44
‘Article XII: Orderly Transfer of German Populations’, The Berlin (Potsdam) Conference, July 17–August 2,
1945: (a) Protocol of the Proceedings, August 1, 1945, Project Avalon hosted by Lillian Goldman Law Library,
Yale University, USA, <http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decade17.asp>, viewed 20 August 2013; BNA,
FO 371/56070, Sir Philip Nichols, ‘Transfer of Germans from Karlovy Vary, November 30, 1946, p. 1; Robert
Smith, ‘Sudeten Germans out of Czechoslovakia: Story of Mass Transfer of a People’, Scotsman, 5 November
1945.
45
Mark Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933-1950’ The Historical Journal, Vol. 47, Issue 2
(June 2004), 1933-1950’, p. 389.
84
adoption of a universal, and what was to prove unenforceable, human rights regime allowed
the Big Three a degree of deniability on the issue of the expulsions. As a result, they were
able to shift the moral responsibility for the eviction of millions of German upon their
wartime allies in Prague and Warsaw. This abnegation of responsibility was evident in the
many protestations of London and Washington between 1945 and 1946 at the barbaric nature
of the expulsions, which the Allies had authorized, and their alarm at the burden placed on
occupation authorities in Germany by the chaotic arrival of expellees in the American, British
and Soviet zones.46
It should be remembered, however, that from the outset the precepts of the Allies’ new
world order were not intended to be enjoyed by all nations and peoples. The Atlantic Charter,
which has been lauded as the founding document of the postwar order, was deeply
ambiguous and bore many of the hallmarks of war propaganda.47 Although the charter had
forbade ‘territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples
concerned’ and respected ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under
which they will live’, these rights and privileges would not be exercised by the inhabitants of
enemy nations or by those of European colonies.48 Indeed, Churchill had been forthright on
the extent to which its guiding principles would apply, telling the House of Commons:
... the Atlantic Charter in no way binds us about the future of Germany, nor
is it a bargain or contract with our enemies. It was no offer to the Germans
to surrender ... the principle of unconditional surrender, which has also been
46
BNA, FO 1032/835, ‘Transfer of German Minorities in Germany from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and
Poland’; Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 158-193.
47
Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 55.
48
Atlantic Charter, 14 August 1941, Project Avalon, < http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp >, viewed
21 August 2013.
85
promulgated, will be adhered to as far as Nazi Germany and Japan are
concerned, and that principle itself wipes away the danger of anything like
Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points being brought up by the Germans after their
defeat ...49
The political contradictions and apparent hypocrisy of politicians and bureaucrats in the
1940s on the issue of human rights is only explicable if the period is viewed as a transitional
decade, during which those who professed the ideals and values of a postwar order looked to
the future and those charged with the conduct of war looked to the past. In some notable
cases, these roles overlapped. How else could President Beneš have proclaimed in the same
speech in liberated Prague the promise of ‘a new humanity – a humanity better, more
complete, more beautiful’ while also absolving the Czechs of any guilt over the expulsion of
the Sudeten Germans: ‘in no way have we sinned against our human dignity, or against our
great national tradition’.50 It was one of the bitter ironies of the twentieth century that such
political ideals and odious practices could go hand in hand.
A NEW CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY: INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS VS .
NATIONAL RIGHTS
The collective punishment of the Sudeten Germans can be traced back to the interwar
minority rights regime. In order to protect the rights of national groups without a state, the
minority treaties had created specific collective political and cultural rights. 51 As a result,
49
Churchill, ‘The Atlantic Charter and Unconditional Surrender’, 24 May 1944, Parliament of the United
Kingdom, The Parliamentary Debates (Hansard): House of Commons Official Report, Fifth Series, Vol. 400,
1943-1944 (London: H.M.S.O., 1944), col. 783.
50
Beneš, Speech delivered by President E. Beneš on the Old Town Square, Prague, on his Return to
Czechoslovakia, May 16, 1945 (Prague: Orbis, 1945), p. 5, 14.
51
Mazower, ‘The Strange Triumph of Human Rights, 1933–1950’, p. 382.
86
they bequeathed a group identity to disenfranchised minorities – a phenomenon that would
have significant ramifications across the next three decades. For the Czechoslovak
government-in-exile, the interwar experience of a democratic polity fractured along ethnic
cleavages and divided by competing demands of Germans, Slovaks and Hungarians for
greater political and cultural autonomy had a significant influence upon the creation of the
postwar political system.52 Already inclined to treat its citizens according to their national
identity, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile proceeded with the expulsion of Germans
and Hungarians on the basis of collective guilt to establish a state that would ostensibly be
structured around the ‘principle of individual freedom’.53
The intended effect of the expulsions on Czechoslovakia’s domestic politics has been a
much overlooked aspect of the state’s postwar reconstruction. It was a widely held belief that
the removal of the ‘anti-democratic’ Sudeten German minority would rectify a fundamental
structural weakness that had brought down the First Republic in 1938. Unlike the failed
democracies of Weimar Germany, Austria, Poland and Hungary that were destroyed by the
radicalisation of the middle-classes, political authoritarianism or military coups,
Czechoslovakia’s democracy was undone by internal ethnic tensions. Its experience was
therefore unique in the wider context of the failure of European democracy. When historians,
such as E. H. Carr, talked about the crisis of liberal democracy in the 1930s, or political
theorists spoke of the ‘necessity for re-stating the democratic idea’, as did R. W. G. MacKay,
this was typically understood to signify the creation of social democracy and the
52
R. J. W. Evans, ‘Introduction’, in Mark Cornwall and Evans, eds, Czechoslovakia in a Nationalist and Fascist
Europe, p. 2.
53
Beneš, ‘Lecture at Rhodes House before the Masaryk Society, Oxford, England, May 24, 1941’, in Holborn,
War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, Vol. 1, September 1, 1939 – December 31, 1942 (Boston: World
Peace Foundation, 1943), p. 410.
87
neutralisation of class conflict.54 In Czechoslovakia, however, the reinvention of democracy
also entailed sweeping ethnographic adjustments.
President Beneš was adamant that the democratic future of Czechoslovakia would not
reflect the experience of its interwar past. In an address to the Masaryk Society in 1941, he
declared that:
The New European democracy must remain victorious not only on the
military front but on the inner political front as well, and this principle must
be carried to its consequence without compromise.55
Beneš’ advocacy of democratic principles was intertwined with his equally held belief that
‘nationhood is an absolute value’.56 To entrench a stable and democratic Czechoslovak state
in the heart of Europe, he sought to establish a national consensus among three democratic
parties.57 This would represent a marked improvement upon the myriad of political parties of
sectional interests that had beset the First Republic. In the 1935 parliamentary elections, no
fewer than fourteen separate parties had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies and none
approached a popular or parliamentary majority in its own right (Table 3.1). The combined
support of parties associated with ethnic minorities rose to a staggering 32.9 percent of the
total vote, and of this, nearly 70 percent was garnered by the German parties.58 More
alarmingly to the mainstream parties that sought to protect the political status quo, the SdP
54
E. H. Carr, Conditions of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 105; R. W. G. MacKay, Peace Aims and
the New Order (London: Michael Joseph, 1941), p. 7.
55
Beneš, ‘Lecture at Rhodes House’, p. 410.
56
Beneš, ‘The Position of the Small Nation in Post-War Europe, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 5
(March 1944), p. 390.
57
Beneš, ‘Postwar Czechoslovakia’, p. 404.
58
These included the SdP, German Social Democrats, German Christian Social People’s Party, and German
Farmers League.
88
won two-thirds of the German vote and 15.2 percent of the total vote, making it the single
largest party.
With the removal of Czechoslovakia’s troublesome minorities, a new democratic order did
indeed take shape. In the 1946 parliamentary elections, the number of political parties was
reduced to seven, of which only five could be considered as having a broad level of support,
and the only parties that represented ‘minority’ concerns were Slovak (Table 3.2).59 The
Communist Party emerged as the clear victor, albeit without an absolute majority of votes.
The result was a clear vindication of Beneš’ position that the liquidation of Czechoslovakia’s
minorities would produce a new and more cohesive national-democratic framework.60 It was
the ultimate realisation of what he had envisaged in his triumphant speech upon returning to
Prague in May 1945:
It will be essential…to evacuate the Germans in Czech lands and the
Hungarians in Slovakia in uncompromising fashion as may be best
accomplished in the interests of a uniform national state of Czechs and
Slovaks. Our watchword must be: a definitive clearance of Germans and
German influence from our country in the cultural, economic and political
spheres.61
The contradiction of achieving individual democratic rights and stable national statehood
via such a profound violation of human dignity was not missed upon some contemporary
observers. As Sir Philip Nichols remarked, the implementation of such an idea in the form of
59
Luža, ‘Czechoslovakia between Democracy and Communism’, in Mamatey and Luža, eds., A History of the
Czechoslovak Republic, p. 404.
60
Beneš, ‘Postwar Czechoslovakia’, p. 400.
61
Beneš, Speech delivered by President E. Beneš on the Old Town Square, Prague, p. 19.
89
mass expulsions cannot be ‘regarded as other than a bitter and ironic comment on the
conditions existing in the twentieth-century’.62 Unlike the Nazis, who were true to their word,
the Allies engaged in a form of ‘doublespeak’ by promising human rights while at the same
time sanctioning ethnic cleansing at Potsdam. In the case of President Beneš, never did he
waver in his belief that this was the right course of action to bring peace and justice to
Europe.
.
62
Nichols, ‘Transfer of Germans from Karlovy Vary, p. 2.
90
Table 3.1. Czechoslovak Parliamentary Elections, 19 May 1935
Ethnic Minority Parties
Sudeten German
Autonomous Bloc
German Social Democratic
German-Magyar Christian Socialists
German Christian Social
German Farmers' League
Other
TOTAL
Votes
Senate
% of Votes
% of Votes
Seats
Seats
1,176,593
1,034,774
849,509
755,880
615,877
456,353
448,047
167,433
5,504,466
14.3
12.6
10.3
9.2
7.5
5.6
5.4
2.0
66.9
45
38
30
28
22
17
17
6
203
1,042,924
910,252
740,696
672,126
557,684
410,095
393,732
145,125
4,872,634
14.3
12.5
10.2
9.3
7.7
5.6
5.4
2.0
67.0
23
20
16
14
11
9
8
Nil
101
1,249,530
564,273
299,942
291,831
162,781
142,399
2,710,756
16,190
8,231,412
15.2
6.9
3.6
3.5
2.0
1.7
32.9
0.2
44
22
11
9
6
5
97
Nil
300
1,092,255
495,166
271,097
259,832
155,234
129,862
2,403,446
973
7,277,053
15.0
6.8
3.7
3.6
2.1
1.8
33.0
0.0
23
11
6
6
3
Nil
49
91
Party
Czechoslovak Parties
Agrarian
Social Democratic
Communist
National Socialist
Populist
National Union
Small Traders and Artisans
Fascist
Chamber of Deputies
Votes
150
Source: Joseph Rothschild, East Central Europe between the Two World Wars (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), p. 12.
Table 3.2. Czechoslovak Parliamentary Elections, 26 May 1946
Constituent National Assembly (Unicameral)
Party
Votes
% of Votes
Communist
2,695,915
37.8
National Socialist
1,298,917
18.2
Populist
1,110,920
15.6
Slovak Democrat
998,275
14.0
Social Democrat
905,654
12.7
Slovak Freedom
67,575
0.9
Slovak Labour
49,983
0.7
Other
11,455
TOTAL
7,138,694
Seats
114
55
47
43
36
3
2
300
Source: Chris Cook and John Paxton, European Political Facts of the Twentieth
Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 207.
92
CONCLUSION
~
I have already stated more than once in the past that evil is of an infectious nature
and that the evil of the transfer was only a sad consequence of the evil which
preceded it. There can be no dispute about who was the first to let the genie of
national hatred out of the bottle. And if we, that is, the Czechs, are to recognize our
share of responsibility for the end of the Czech-German coexistence in the Czech
lands, we have to say, for the sake of truth, that we let ourselves become infected by
the insidious virus of the ethnic concept of guilt and punishment...
─ Václev Havel1
Upon his triumphant return to Prague on 16 May 1945, President Edvard Beneš declared that
‘the Czechs and Slovaks again rise to new and great upswing, to new work and new life’.2 His
proclamation of national liberation foreshadowed the impending tragedy that was to unfold for
the non-Slavic inhabitants of Czechoslovakia. In the following months, Beneš would lay the
groundwork for the ‘transfer’ of more than 2,500,000 Sudeten Germans – an event known as
odsun in Czech and die Vetreibung in German.3 As we have seen, their expulsion brought about
the fulfilment of Beneš dream of a national state of Czechs and Slovaks within the historic lands
of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia and Slovakia. These former territories of the Hapsburg Empire
had historically been a melting pot of European nationalities; however, like much of Central and
1
Václev Havel, Czechs and Germans on the Way to a Good Neighbourship, Speech delivered at Charles
University, Prague, 17 February 1995, created March 2003/updated January 2012, Official Website of Václev
Havel, <http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=projevy&val=201_aj_projevy.html&typ=HTML>, viewed
4 September 2013.
2
Edvard Beneš, Speech delivered by President E. Beneš on the Old Town Square, Prague, on his Return to
Czechoslovakia, May 16, 1945 (Prague: Orbis, 1945), p. 5.
3
Zdeněk Beneš, ‘Foreword’, in in Zdeněk Beneš and Václav Kural, eds, Facing History: The Evolution of CzechGerman Relations in the Czech Provinces, 1848–1948 (Prague: Gallery for the Ministry of Culture of the Czech
Republic, 2002), p. 8.
93
Eastern Europe, they were transformed in the course of the first-half of the twentieth-century by
the guiding principle of nationalism. Where once Slavs, Germans and Magyars had coexisted
under the aegis of multiethnic empires, state violence and nascent nationalism battered these
intermingled communities into distinct national units. This state-led process forever
extinguished many ethnic groups, including the Sudeten Germans – a people that counted
among its number Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Kurt Gödel and Ferdinand Porsche.4
By integrating the German expulsions into the broader historical themes of the twentieth
century, this thesis has sought to shed a greater light upon the motivations and processes that lay
behind them. It has also sought to demonstrate how the postwar expulsions formed part of and,
in many regards, completed the process by which the continent of Europe was transformed into
homogenous nation-states. The emergence and consolidation of Czechoslovakia between 1918
and 1945 and the ethnographic transformation left in the wake of this process was an
emblematic feature of the restructuring of Europe around the principle of nationalism.
The origins of the expulsions in Czechoslovakia are equally tied to the travails of the interwar
years. The failure to realise national self-determination in 1919–1920 and the half-hearted
adoption of minority rights had a profound impact on the Czech-German relationship. The rise
of irredentist passions and Konrad Henlein’s SdP shattered the fragile political consensus that
had held together the First Republic. After Munich, the possibility of national coexistence was
rejected as impossible. From this point, Beneš and, in due course, the Allied Powers, sought to
remove the Sudeten Germans from the Czech lands. They looked to experiments of population
transfers in the 1920s and 1930s to form a blueprint for what became one of the largest forced
migrations of people in history. With the removal of German elements from Czechoslovakia, it
4
Rob Cameron, Born in Bohemia…but forgotten by Czechs, created 10 September 2010, Radio Prague,
<http://www.radio.cz/en/section/curraffrs/born-in-bohemiabut-forgotten-by-czechs>, viewed 19 September 2013.
94
was hoped that the resuscitation of minority rights would prove unnecessary. For Beneš, the
momentary excess of expulsion could be justified by the collective guilt of the Germans and by
the results yielded: a new order in Europe that was constructed around unitary nation-states that
could protect the rights of individual citizens.
It is easy to pass moral judgement on the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans of
Czechoslovakia. It is harder, however, to explain how and why this historical event, still within
living memory, took place. From the perspective of their perpetrator, President Beneš, the
expulsions were a necessary measure to not only undo a great wrong committed against his
country, but to also place the postwar Czechoslovak state on a more secure foundation. It is,
therefore, hardly surprising that Beneš was certain beyond all doubt of their justice.5
5
Beneš, Czechoslovak Policy for Victory and Peace: The Fourth Message of the President of the Republic to the
State Council on February 3, 1944 (London: Lincolns-Prager, 1944), p. 38.
95
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