The Beneš Decrees

Introduction

When Czechia was trying to become a full member of the European Union in the early 200s (it joined on May 1, 2004), representatives of German expellee organization demanded that Czechia first repeal the decrees issued after World War Two that allowed for the expulsion of all ethnic Germans from their homes in what was then reconstituted as Czechoslovakia, and the confiscation of all of their property. The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, America’s oldest German-language (or rather bilingual) newspaper, published an article in that context in its issue No. 25 of June 21, 2003 (on page GT-2) titled “Czech Premier against lifting of Beneš Decrees.” The first sentence reads as follows:

“Czech prime minister Vladimir Spidla is flatly opposed to lifting the Beneš Decrees which made thousands of Sudeten Germans refugees.”

First, the genocidal crime of ethnic cleansing committed by the Czechs in 1945/1946 is trivialized by reducing the dimension of this crime by a factor of about 1000, or three orders of magnitudes. Not a few “thousands” but 3.5 million Sudeten Germans were expelled from Czechia after World War Two. This is a typical example for the consistent downplaying of crimes committed by victorious nations and their benefactors. Since the Kosovo war in 1999 of NATO against Serbia, the world knows now that the crime of “ethnic cleansing” even justifies going to war against the guilty country, as U.S. President Clinton and all of NATO have demonstrated.

Brief History of the Sudeten Germans

Let us review the history of the Sudeten Germans. They and their ancestors had lived peacefully in Bohemia and Moravia for roughly one thousand years. On January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson delivered an address to Congress and proclaimed his “Fourteen Points” for a suggested armistice and later peace agreement. “Point X” reads as follows:[1]

“The Peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to be safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”

On November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed by Germany under the condition that a peace according to the “Fourteen Points” of President Wilson will be negotiated. In the Versailles “Peace Treaty” signed on June 1919, however, the Sudeten Germans were placed under Czech rule against their will, and in violation of Point X of Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” as well as the armistice agreement. The Sudeten Germans were not “accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development” as promised. The Munich Conference of 1938 corrected that injustice.

Beneš Memoirs

In his memoirs, Dr. Eduard Beneš, former president of Czechoslovakia, dedicates a whole chapter to “The Transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia.”[2] On page 210, he writes:

“It was clear to me immediately after Munich that when the annulment of Munich and of its consequences came in question in the future the problem of State Minorities and especially the problem of the Germans would also have to be solved radically and finally.”

On page 218, we read:

“I have been considering all these matters very carefully, I have examined and compared the various plans for a solution of these problems and the least common multiple at which I have arrived is that in the social revolution which will certainly come it will be necessary to rid our country of all the German bourgeoisie, the pan­German intelligentsia and those workers who have gone over to Fascism. That would be a final solution and, as we are concerned, the only possible solution which we would be able to implement, namely the coupling of our social revolution with the national one.”

Very interesting. Thus, a plan for the radical “Final Solution” of the German question was already in Beneš’s mind as early as 1938. The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans has therefore nothing to do with whatever happened between 1938 and 1945. The plan existed already in 1938! There is evidence that this plan existed already at the Pan-Slavic Congress in Prague in 1848!

On page 75 one can read:

“Before I [Beneš] left the United States, I visited Washington, and on May 28, 1939, had a long conversation with President F.D. Roosevelt. […] We stayed with Roosevelt for about three and a half hours, during which time I had one of my most important conversations of post Munich times.”

Page 80:

“He [Roosevelt] added: `You may be sure that in this war we will not do less for you than in the last’.”

The war Roosevelt was talking about was on May 28, 1939, was still more than three months away. But he already fully supported Beneš and his plans for the time after the war he was sure would come.

On May 13, 1943, Beneš wrote a letter to his government, printed on page 193 of the Memoirs:

“On the first day I had a discussion lasting 5 hours with Roosevelt in which we covered most of our political problems. The talks took place in a very cordial, friendly and frank atmosphere. […] My short resume follows: […]

4. He agrees that after the war the number of Germans in Czechoslovakia must be reduced by the transfer of as many as possible.”

On page 195, we find the reprint of a letter by Beneš dated June 7, 1943:

“Today I had my final farewell conversation with Roosevelt. […] (b) He agrees to the transfer of the minority populations from Eastern Prussia, Transylvania and Czechoslovakia. I asked again expressly whether the United States would agree to the transfer of our Germans. He declared plainly that they would. I repeated that Great Britain and the Soviets had already given us their views to the same effect.”

On page 223, we read:

“The practical aspects of the whole question of our Germans were afterwards dealt with at the Potsdam Conference. […] in July, 1945, when the transfer of the Germans from our country was internationally approved. It was carried out by us to its conclusion in 1945 and 1946 under the leadership and full and permanent control of the United States of America.”

What had those poor German farmers and workers of the Sudetenland done to Roosevelt, the United States of America or the American People that Roosevelt wanted them expelled from their centuries-old homelands?

Summary

1. The victors of the First World War claimed to have fought this war in order to “Make the World Safe for Democracy,” yet they denied the Sudeten Germans – among many other minorities in Europe – the promised democratic right of self-determination (Wilson Point X) by putting them against their will under the rule of the Czechs.
2. The victors of the Second World War carried out the Final Solution of the German Question as planned by Beneš already prior to the war, by ethnically cleansing and expelling the Sudeten Germans from their homelands, in which they had lived already for centuries even before Columbus (re)discovered America.
3. When the issue came up during Czechia’s integration into the European Union, the mass media downplayed the human tragedy with false numbers by replacing “millions” with “thousands” – if they mentioned numbers in at all.
4. About 7-8 million Czechs took the property, the houses, the farms, the factories, the villages, the cities, the fields, the artworks, the furniture, the tools, the machinery, the books (which were probably burned), the churches, the museums, the libraries, etc., etc., of about 3.5 million Germans, although there had never been any armed conflict between Germans and Czechs in their more than thousand years of peaceful co-existence.
5. If making maximum war profit with minimum effort and with no fighting is a feature of a successful politician, then Beneš was probably the most successful politician in world history.

Conclusion

The Czech Republic should not have become a member of the European Union as long as the Beneš Decrees are on the books. However, except for a few spokespersons of tiny expellee organizations in Germany, representing an ever-shrinking and increasingly disinterested group of geriatric expellees, nobody cared.

Had Czechia been cajoled into revoking the decree, a large number of lawsuits of expelled Germans and their descendants against the current occupiers of their former property could have resulted. This would also have set a precedent for other European countries which enacted similar laws or decrees to expel their German minorities (Poland, Slovenia) or allow and encourage others to do so (UK, France). Never-ending civil litigations for real estate and other property worth potentially billions or trillions of dollars, located in what is now Poland, Russia (northern East Prussia), Slovenia and maybe other countries could have ensued. There was no way any politician in Europe would ever have agreed to that.

Some wounds are simply too deep to ever heal. They either vanish with the affected, deeply wounded population, or go unnoticed when the collective memory of a nation wanes. Today, the German nation’s collective memory is in full swing of getting wiped out, and the native German population is getting replaced with immigrants who have no stake in that conflict. With the wounds forgotten and the Germans gone, eternal peace will reign in Europe.

Or maybe some other nation will have different plans.

Endnotes