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Talking PointForced displacement of Czech population under Nazis in 1938 and 1943
The transfer of the German-speaking minority from Czechoslovakia after the
end of the Second World War remains the topic of discussions between Czech
politicians and their counterparts and pressure groups in Germany and
Austria. It is also a subject of extensive historical research. Much less
is known about the mass exodus of the Czech population from the border
regions of Bohemia and Moravia, surrendered to Nazi Germany following the
Munich Agreement in 1938.
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WitnessJosef Skrabek - tragi-comedy in the Sudetenland in October 1938
Sixty-five years ago, at the beginning of October 1938, the Nazis marched
into the Czech border regions, known as the Sudetenland. With the Munich
Agreement at the end of September the British and French governments had
notoriously given Hitler the green light to annex these mainly
German-speaking areas. Overnight this had a huge impact on millions of
Czechoslovak citizens. At the time Josef Skrabek was ten years old, and
lived in the village of Valec in the heart of the Sudetenland. His father
was Czech and his mother German, one of many mixed families in the region,
for whom the events of 1938 were a painful blow. Here Josef Skrabek
remembers a tragi-comic episode as the village was waiting for the German
army to arrive.
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Talking PointThe "Benes decrees" - a historian's point of view
During the past few years, the two words "Benes decrees" have
been ubiquitous in the Czech media. Most recently the term has been used
in connection with the case of Franz Ulrich Kinsky, a member of an
aristocratic family with long roots in Bohemia, who has filed a total of
157 lawsuits asking the Czech courts to confirm that he is the rightful
owner of large amounts of property which were confiscated from him as a
child after the war. The so-called "Benes decrees" that
politicians, journalists, lawyers and property claimants frequently refer
to, are in simple terms usually described as "post-war legislation
that sanctioned the expulsion of ethnic Germans and Hungarians from
Czechoslovakia and the confiscation of their property". But of
course, matters are much more complex. Historian Jan Kuklik, who is
assistant professor at the law faculty in Prague, specialises in the
history of law. I spoke to him about the origins of the so-called
"Benes decrees".
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Current AffairsJehovah's Witnesses win compensation for suffering in the 1950s
Two Jehovah's Witnesses have been granted compensation worth several
hundred Euros for appalling hardship they faced in Czechoslovakia's
Stalinist prisons in the early1950s. The hard line authorities had jailed
the men as part of a huge clampdown on religious organizations at the
height of the communist purges. What makes this case unusual is that the
men are neither Czech nor Slovak. Today they are both German citizens.
David Vaughan has the story.
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Press ReviewPress Review
Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla's conciliatory statements in Austria on the
post-war expulsion of the Sudeten Germans receive a mixed reception in
today's papers: the story is headline news in PRAVO, but relegated to the
inside pages of both LIDOVE NOVINY and MLADA FRONTA DNES.
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Current AffairsFirst Czech conciliatory gesture to Sudeten Germans in Austria
Over the weekend, the Czech Republic apologised for the first time to
ethnic Germans living in Austria for their expulsion at the hands of the
Czechoslovak authorities in the years following WWII. At a European Forum
in the Austrian town of Goettweig over the weekend, Czech Prime Minister
Vladimir Spidla said Czechs regretted that these events and actions ever
happened.
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