The Prime Minister of Bavaria, Horst Seehofer, has asked the Czech
government to start a dialogue with the Sudeten Germans, a community whose
members were expelled from Czechoslovakia after the end of WWII. Speaking
at a Sudeten German conference in Augsburg, Germany, on Sunday, Mr Seehofer
said the motto of the Czech presidency of the EU “Europe without
barriers” meant no one should be excluded from a dialogue, particularly
those who became “victims of the 20th century history”. Spokesperson of
the Sudeten German association and MEP Bernd Posselt said that Czech
politicians should finally scrap the Beneš decrees. These were issued by
President Edvard Beneš after the war and became the legal basis for the
expulsion of some three million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia.