"It is an eternal problem and will persist as long as Germany and the Czech Republic are neighbors," Vaclav Klaus, the Czech prime minister, said recently. "We will spend
the rest of our lives trying to solve it, and so will future generations."
The "problem" is the relationship between Germans and Czechs, which, to phrase it mildly, is cool to frosty at the moment. Hardly a week passes when German newspapers do not
report about tourists in Bohemia being harassed by Czech police and molested or insulted by Czech burghers on the streets. Last fall one German motorist was even shot and killed in a scuffle with Czech cops in
the town of Pribram because he had left his car in a no-parking zone.
Conversely, Czechs complain about the hordes of marauding Germans who stream across the borders from Saxony and Bavaria. "The whole city is full of their flashy cars," says a
man in Cheb, the border town that the Germans still insist on calling by its German name of Eger. "During the day they plunder our shops, arrogantly buying everything in sight because it's so cheap for
them. At night they rampage like barbarians in the bars or with the whores." Meanwhile, a "Club of Czech Border Regions," which claims 10,000 members, most of them either ultra-rightists or
ex-Communists, grinds out reams of propaganda against the "Germanization" of Bohemia.
But there's worse. Although Presidents Vaclav Havel and Roman Herzog, as Richard von Weizsäcker before him, speak loftily of the need for reconciliation, and although the two
governments last November signed a treaty to facilitate cross-border cooperation, transportation, communications, trade, travel, and environmental protection, they remain deadlocked on a far more fundamental
issue: the legacy of the Third Reich and World War II.
The Czech Republic is the only European country whose victims of Nazism the German government has refused to compensate, Czech Jews included. First, says Bonn, the Czech government must
honor the property and restitution claims of the three million Germans, mostly from the Bohemian Sudentenland, who were expropriated, expelled, and forcibly deported at the end of the war. But this Prague
refuses to do on grounds that the expropriations and expulsions were legal actions by the democratic government of President Eduard Benes, and sanctioned by the Western Allies.
From that impasse, look northeastward on the map to Poland's Silesia. Since the end of Communist rule in 1989, Germans still living there have had the status of an ethnic and linguistic
minority with rights to their own schools, newspapers, radio stations, religious services, cultural circles, and minority representation in the Sejm and Senat, the two houses of the Polish parliament, where they
have their own caucus. About 300,000 have claimed and taken advantage of these rights, though there may be from 300,000 to 500,000 more who thus far have not. The more who do, the more Silesia seems to become a
cauldron of irredentism, nationalism, and Polish-German ethnic hatred.
You can get a glimpse of it in the hamlet of Dobrzen Wielki, which translates as Guten Tag and was actually its name when it was part of the German Reich. On the wall of the village
church there is a memorial to commemorate "the fallen of both world wars--the victims of injustice and violence." It was erected by the local "German Friendship Circle," one of about 200 in
the area. The memorial is covered with graffiti slogans in Polish that read: "Poland for Poles" and "Germans to Germany--Fuck off from Poland." It is one of several dozen memorials and
monuments desecrated and fire-bombed during the past couple of years. Meanwhile, the Catholic bishop of Opole (Oppeln in German) has been inundated with threats and hate letters because he has sanctioned holding
services in German.
There is another side to the coin in Silesia, however. As soon as Poland became democratic and the Berlin Wall opened, German irredentists, radical rightists, and neo-Nazis began
exploiting the newly won freedoms and travel opportunities. "Silesia Committees," partly funded by West German Silesian expellee and refugee groups but also by extreme right parties, set up offices in
border towns in East Germany, calling for "Silesian home rule" within Saxony and close ties to ethnic Germans on the Polish side of the frontier. By mid- 1991 they were operating in Poland. The
"National Offensive," a neo- Nazi group banned in Germany, set up offices in the town of Dziewkowice, in a house provided by the ethnic-German mayor. The radical rightist National Democratic Party
(NDP) opened a branch in Torun. Leaflets calling for the establishment of a "German Emergency Government/East" have cropped up from time to time in Wroclaw (Breslau).
But there's more. The last thing many of the ethnic Germans in Poland, especially in Silesia, wanted, was official status and protection as a minority. They wanted to be part of Germany
again-- "part of the Reich"--as they say. While Silesian expellee and refugee groups in Germany merely protested the Bonn government's formal recognition of the Oder-Neisse line as the final border
between Germany and Poland after German reunification in October 1990, the ethnic Germans in Silesia were shocked. For decades they had been led to believe by Bonn that if Germany were ever reunified, Silesia
would become a part of it, maybe even a 17th federal state.
"The politicians in the Reich betrayed us," an elderly ethnic German in Krakow told me a couple of years ago. "And what Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher (then
Bonn's foreign minister) did in November 1990 was treasonous."
The tensions between Bonn and Prague and Warsaw and Bonn, the militancy and animosities between Germans and Czechs and Poles and Germans go back to the Third Reich and one of the least
known and perhaps most taboo chapters of World War II: the flight and expulsion of millions of Germans from their ancestral homes in Central and Eastern Europe, and the realignment of Poland's frontiers, to the
benefit of the Soviet Union and at the expense of Germany.
The numbers--like those of the Holocaust--have always been in dispute. The various West German expellee and refugee organizations gathered under the umbrella of the Bund der
Vertriebenen (Federation of Expellees), a powerful postwar lobby that for a while also had its own political party (Bund der Heimatlosen und Entrechteten--BHE) which participated in Konrad Adenauer's earliest
coalition governments, sometimes spoke of "almost 20 million." The American historian and international law expert Alfred M. de Zayas uses the figure of 15 million. The Bonn government's official
number up to 1950 is 11,700,000 who fled and were displaced, of whom 2,100,000 died en route.
The areas and countries from which they came were East Prussia, today divided between Poland and Russia; Eastern Brandenburg, Eastern Pomerania, and Silesia, today part of Poland;
Czechoslovakia, primarily Bohemia and the Sudentenland, which Adolf Hitler had annexed through the 1938 Munich Pact; central Poland; Yugoslavia; Hungary; Romania and the Baltic states that were annexed by the
Soviet Union.
Although this has been common knowledge, the theme of heated emotional discourse, and the stuff of Cold War party politics and diplomacy in West Germany for years, it was a taboo
subject in East Germany and the Soviet Bloc, and largely unknown--for lack of press coverage and interest--in the United States and Western Europe. As a result, most Americans do not even know it happened.
The legality and moral justification of this "mass population transfer," as it is called in diplomatic parlance and the language of international law, are also in dispute.
While some experts argue that compulsory population transfers are illegal under international law, the majority see it as a legitimate method of solving conflicts between nationalities and ethnic groups. There
is consensus that such deportations must be "orderly and humane," though how to assure these standards in a war situation is anyone's guess. As to the morality, there are those who say "the
Germans deserved it" after what they had done to the Czechs, Poles, Russians, and Yugoslavs, and those who argue that "two wrongs do not make a right."
The idea of expelling Germans from territories on which they had lived for centuries had its origins with Czechoslovakia's Eduard Benes, shortly after he had resigned as president
because of the September 1938 Munich Pact and gone to London where, later, he established the Czech government in exile. If Czechoslovakia were to be restored to its original borders, he argued, the Sudetenland
Germans would have to be expelled or the nationalities and ethnic problems would arise again. In a broadcast from London after the start of World War II, he said: "We must get rid of all those Germans who
plunged a dagger in the back of the Czechoslovak state in 1938." By August 1942, expulsion of the Germans had become the official policy of the Churchill government. American and Soviet agreement followed
in 1943.
That was also the year in which the plan for expelling Germans from what is today's Poland started taking shape. At the Teheran Conference between Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston
Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, the Soviet ruler demanded that he keep the 70,000 square miles of pre-war eastern Poland that he had grabbed under terms of the secret 1939 pact with Hitler. The Americans and the
British were at that point neither willing nor able to fight him over the matter. The USSR was then carrying the burden of the war against Germany. The Polish exile government in London had little choice in the
matter, and the Communist Polish government in Lublin was only established in July 1944. But, everyone at Teheran agreed, the Poles would have to be compensated.
This, however, could only be achieved by taking territories in the west and north that had once been Polish and Slavic in the Dark and Middle Ages but that for at least 200 years, and
in some cases much longer, had been Austro-German. In his World War II memoirs, Churchill recalled: "I thought Poland might move westward, like soldiers taking two steps 'left close,' and if it stepped on
some German toes, that could not be helped. But there must be a strong Poland." In effect, it meant putting Poland on wheels. The plan started taking shape in 1944, was discussed again at the Yalta
conference in February 1945, and was finalized at the Potsdam Conference between Harry Truman, Stalin, Churchill, and Clement Attlee, who replaced Churchill after winning the British general election.
But it also entailed mass movements of peoples in order to avoid, as Churchill put it, "the mixtures of populations and nationalities" that up to then in Europe had
"caused endless troubles." Some six million Poles were to be moved from the 70,000 square miles ceded to the Soviet Union and resettled in the 48,000 square miles that Poland would get from the German
Reich. The more than nine million Germans in East Prussia, Eastern Brandenburg, Eastern Pomerania, and Silesia would be moved to the four occupation zones of defeated rump-Germany.
What was to become the largest, most dramatic movement of peoples in modern times, if not all known history, had already begun before the final plans were drafted. A massive October 16,
1944 Soviet offensive, which was accompanied by atrocities, such as a massacre in the East Prussian town of Nemmersdorf, triggered mass flight and evacuation. Although a German counter-offensive had pushed the
Soviets back out of East Prussia by November 5, the exodus continued into the spring of 1945.
Of the nearly 2.4 million East Prussians, more than 1.9 million fed westward under the most harrowing conditions. They were soon joined by ethnic Germans from central Poland. According
to Bonn government estimates, 277,000 East Prussians died or were killed, mainly when refugee ships were torpedoed in the Baltic Sea. Some 173,000 people remained, most of them in what is now the Polish part of
East Prussia, where since 1989 they again identify themselves openly as Germans. Meanwhile, as the Soviet army advanced, flight and evacuation started from Eastern Pomerania, Eastern Brandenburg, Silesia, and
Danzig (now Gdansk).
Actual expulsion and deportation of Germans from central Poland and the new territories started in April 1945, and from Czechoslovakia in May. All told, some 7.5 million from today's
Poland and the Russian part of East Prussia were affected by flight and expulsion, of whom an estimated 1.4 million died or were killed en route. Three million were expelled from Czechoslovakia; about 267,000
died or were killed; 260,000 remained in the country. There were also exoduses and expulsions from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the Baltic States, affecting almost 1.6 million people, of whom 530,000 died
en route.
The mass movement continued through 1949, and in a sense resumed again in the 1970s when the Bonn government began inviting immigration of ethnic Germans from Poland and the Soviet
Union, and literally bought them from Romania by paying the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu a "head price" of $20,000 to $30,000 in the form of foreign aid.
Some of the refugees stayed in the Soviet Occupation zone that became the German Democratic Republic, but most moved on to the American, British, and French zones that became the
Federal Republic of Germany. They numbered almost 10 million, and their ultimate integration, not easily achieved, is an amazing story by itself.
Initially, because the cities were in ruins, the refugees were sent to rural areas where some were billetted with farmers and others were placed in former army barracks, hastily built
huts, and even former Nazi concentration camps. They were so numerous that the population of rural Bavaria and Schleswig-Holstein rose by 30 percent and 60 percent, respectively. By 1950, West Germany's overall
population increased 20 percent over what it had been before the war, despite the wartime casualties.
The expellees and refugees were not exactly welcomed. In fact, they were regarded as alien intruders aggravating the housing and food shortages. Housing was so scarce that anyone with a
room to spare was ordered to lend it to a refugee family, which naturally caused friction and resentment. Their dialects were so different from those in West German that they were regarded as foreigners. In
Bavaria the Silesians were often insultingly dubbed Polacken.
In fact, as one Silesian pastor in Frankfurt once told me: "We were considered and felt like second-class citizens and outsiders until well into the 1960s, which was when Bonn
began recruiting 'guest workers' from Italy, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. Only then did we start to be treated and regarded as 'real' Germans and the poor foreigners began to bear the brunt of ostracism,
discrimination, and racism. Now they are the ones who are being asked, like we once were: 'What are you doing here? Why don't you go back to where you came from?'"
Resentment of the expellees and refugees was exacerbated by the 1952 enactment of the Lastenausgleichsgesetz, the "equalization of burdens law." It taxed those who had been
lucky enough to preserve all or most of their property during the war and benefited--through grants and low- interest loans--the refugees, expellees, and all others (including victims of wartime bombing and of
Nazism) who had lost all or almost everything. The tax amounted to 50 percent of the value of all assets at 1949 prices, to be paid in annual installments over a period of 30 years. By 1982, some DM 120 billion
($77 billion) had been redistributed.
Still, having lost most of their worldly possessions, the expellees and refugees formed a nucleus of malcontents among whom radical- rightists, and former Nazis and neo-Nazis found
fertile soil for political parties and pressure groups pursuing a revisionist and irredentist policy. Their basic message, right up to the 1990s, was that the Bonn government must never give up its claims to
former ethnic-German territories in Central and Eastern Europe and must never accept the Oder-Neisse line as Poland's western frontier. The BHE party was founded by a former SS man. High-ranking ex-Nazis were
politically active in it for years. When it finally dissolved, the National Democratic Party (NPD) and later the Republicans (Reps) and the German People's Union (DVU--Deutsche Volksunion) recruited members from
its ranks. The same was true for various other refugee and expellee organizations, of which the Sudeten German group was and remains the most militant.
The expellee and refugee cause was aided by the Cold War, the division of Europe and of Germany itself. It made it all the easier to project irredentism as an anti-Communist crusade,
fighting for freedom and human rights. What also helped them was that the GDR recognized the Polish and Czechoslovak borders.
Nothing was more inimical and treacherous to the expellees than the Ostpolitik launched by Willy Brandt, initially as foreign minister in the 1966-1969 Social Democrat-Christian
Democrat "grand coalition" government and then as chancellor of the Social Democrat-Free Democrat left-liberal government starting in October 1969.
Brandt's de facto though not de jure recognition of the Oder-Neisse line and of Czechoslovakia's borders caused a number of expellee SPD and FDP Bundestag deputies to defect to the CDU.
This so narrowed the SPD-FDP majority that the CDU leader Rainer Barzel tried to unseat Brandt as chancellor with a constructive confidence vote in 1972. He failed by only two votes.
The Oder-Neisse issue remained alive until November 1990 when Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher finally signed the treaty recognizing it as the eastern border of reunified Germany.
It was the price they had to pay for reunification, for neither Moscow nor the Western Allies would have agreed to it without a prior pledge by Bonn to recognize the Polish frontier. As it was, Kohl stalled on
the pledge as long as possible, fearing that opposition from the expellee lobby might cost him the December 1990 general election.
Finally, in February 1992, there was the friendship treaty with Czechoslovakia, signed by Kohl and Vaclav Havel, who already in 1989 had apologized for the expulsion of the Sudeten
Germans and who to this day describes it as "immoral." In that treaty, however, Germany refused to declare the 1938 Munich Pact null and void, on the grounds that this would make illegal everything
that had occurred in the Sudetenland between 1938 and 1945, including the registration of births, marriages, and property transaction. Instead, the treaty refers to the "continuation of the Czechoslovak
state since 1918."
Fifty years later the issues are not all settled and tensions as well as disgruntlement prevail in Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
Havel is under frequent attack by Czech nationalists for having apologized. They want him to retract. The government of Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus doggedly refuses to consider property
claims by Sudeten German expellees on grounds that the expropriations were legal under the postwar Benes government. The Kohl government, as a result, will not budge on compensation for Czech victims of Nazism.
Anti-German feeling is high in the Sudentenland and Bohemia. "We were invaded twice in a lifetime by Germans," say many Czechs. "Once in 1938-39 and again in 1968 when the GDR People's Army joined
the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact forces to crush the 'Prague Spring' and Alexander Dubcek's 'communism with a human face.'"
In Silesia, expellee groups, irredentists, and neo-Nazis are spreading propaganda and ethnic Germans there as well as in other parts of Poland feel neglected and unwanted by Germany.
Poles, on the other hand, are incensed by the stridency and ethnic muscle-flexing of the German minority. "Sometimes I have the feeling," Poland's President Lech Walesa said not long ago, "that
relations between Poles and Germans were better when Germany was still divided and the Communist GDR was our neighbor."
One can only hope that the tensions will subside some day when Poland and the Czech Republic become members of the European Union and perhaps even of NATO.
Then being Polish, Czech, or German will no longer be so important and the people in the border areas, as the moderate thoughtful leaders are already doing, will concentrate their
efforts on improving and building up the cross-border Euroregions of Saxony, Bavaria, Silesia, and the Czech Republic, as well as of Mecklenburg- Pomerania, Brandenburg, and western Poland. There is certainly
enough to do--in the fields of environment, infrastructure, and energy--with plenty of jobs for everybody.
The Germans and the Slavs: A Battle of the Centuries
Back in 1960, when relations between the Soviet Union and Communist China started becoming critical, Nikita Khrushchev is reported to have said testily to Zhou Enlai at a summit
meeting: "We refuse to recognize territorial claims based on the bones of old ancestors."
Over the centuries there have been plenty of such claims in Central and Eastern Europe, between Germans and Slavs, as well as between Germans and other peoples in the region, such as
the Romanians and Hungarians.
The troubles were and are due partly to the fact that Germany as a nation state did not come into being until 1871, that the Habsburg Austrians, also German, expanded their territory to
include much of Central-Eastern Europe, and that the borders of principalities, duchies, and kingdoms changed like the pieces in a kaleidoscope.
There are people in some parts of this region, now in their late 70s and 80s, who have been citizens of three or four countries without ever having left the village or town in which
they were born.
But let's start with the Slavs and Germans. As the various German tribes moved westward into the fallen Roman empire--the Franks, Saxons, Angles, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards,
Allemani, to mention a few who became today's Germans, Dutch, Belgians, French, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, and British--Slavic tribes, sometimes fleeing the advancing Huns and Avars, settled in today's
eastern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and the other Slavic countries of Eastern Europe.
Well before the time of Charlemagne, Western Slavs--Pomeranians and Poles--had settled in all of today's eastern Germany up to the Elbe River. The first Slav state anywhere was
established in today's Czech Republic in the 7th century A.D. by a chieftain named Samo. Later, mini-duchies at the time of Charlemagne included much of present-day Austria, parts of Bohemia, and even Bavaria.
Further north, Slavic tribes, some of whose chieftains already called themselves princes, controlled eastern Saxony, all of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg- Pomerania, as well as today's western Poland, including
Silesia.
Poland was established as a duchy under Mieszko I, who had converted to Catholicism, in 966. Its territory reached from the Pripet Marches in the east to the Elbe and today's Dresden in
the west; from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathians in the south. It included all of Pomerania, Silesia, and parts of today's Saxony. Bohemia became a recognized duchy under "Good King
Wenceslaus" of Christmas Carol fame in 920. His capital was Prague and the Hradcany, where Vaclav Havel has his seat of office, was his castle.
Germanic incursion into these Slavic areas came in stages. The early Bohemian dukes spent much of their time battling against the eastward- looking and expanding Franks and Saxons,
sometimes coming to terms with them, but lost out completely in the 13th century when Ottokar II challenged the election of Rudolf of Habsburg as Holy Roman Emperor, a Swiss minor noble who had gained some
possessions in Austria, and then was trounced and killed in the Battle of Marchfeld, near Vienna, by Rudolf in 1278. Ultimately, Bohemia-Moravia lost its independence and became part of the Habsburg Empire, not
reemerging as an independent state until the founding of Czechoslovakia in 1918.
German settlers came into Bohemia and the Sudetenland in the 12th century. Following Ottokar II's defeat and the discovery of rich silver reserves in the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge),
many of them came as miners, craftsmen, and traders. They settled in the embryonic cities, much encouraged by the Bohemian princes. To colonize the border regions of Bohemia, German farmers were also invited. By
the 15th century, Germans and Austro-Germans (to use modern-day distinctions of nationality and citizenship) accounted for about one- fourth of Bohemia's population. Towns and cities such as Liberec
(Reichenberg), Usti nad Labem (Aussig), Brno (Brünn), Ceske Budejovice (Budweis), and Cheb (Eger), were predominantly German- speaking, and German became the main language for 300 years after the defeat of the
Protestant Bohemian nobles by the Catholic Habsburg imperial forces at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 during the Thirty Years' War. It was in the period of 19th-century nationalism that the Slavic
Czechs began demanding language rights and the independence that came with the end of World War I.
Germanic expansion into Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Saxony, Silesia, and today's Poland started in the 12th century and really gained pace in the 13th through the Teutonic
Knights, who were looking for action and real estate after returning from the Crusades. As Germans moved eastward, so did the Poles--much to the loss of the Russians. At the height of its power in the late 16th
to early 17th century, the Kingdom of Poland was the biggest in all Europe and its eastern border was only 150 miles from Moscow. But by then most of Silesia was under Habsburg control, Eastern Brandenburg and
Pomerania under the Electors of Brandenburg, and East Prussia under the rule of the Teutonic Knights.
Poland's demise began in the 18th century when it was gobbled up by Prussia, Austria, and Russia until there was de facto no Poland left at all. The Prussians and later Germans annexed
everything in the west, the Russians the east including Warsaw, and the Austrians the south, including Krakow.
When Poland reemerged as a nation state in 1918, it first went to war against Bolshevik Russia to capture the eastern territories that were then later taken by Stalin, and, following
uprisings, submitted to a League of Nations division of Silesia between Poland and Germany. Poland got about 1,300 square miles and a million inhabitants, of which about 56 percent had voted for union with
Poland, 44 percent with Germany. It involved partition of a region which had been economically and culturally united for several centuries. Today, both ethnic Germans still living there and Poles who were not
transplanted from the east after World War II think and speak of themselves as Silesians.
Germans elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe have different histories. Those in Romanian Transylvania (Siebenburgen) are curiously of Swabian and Saxonian origin and descendants of
colonists, merchants, and craftsmen who can trace their history in the area-- far from Germany or Habsburg Austria proper--to the late 15th and 16th centuries.
The ethnic Germans of the former Soviet Union are descendants of colonists invited there in the 18th century by Czarina Catherine the Great, herself a German princess who didn't speak a
word of Russian when she arrived to marry Peter III, whom she arranged to have murdered so that she could sit on the throne. Most of them settled on the lower reaches of the Volga. They supported the Bolshevik
Revolution in 1917 and became the first ethnic group in the Soviet Union to be given autonomy--the Volga German Autonomous Republic. The republic was abolished by decree of Joseph Stalin in 1941, after the Nazi
invasion of the USSR. The two to three million Germans were deported, like cattle to Siberia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan, because Stalin feared they might collaborate with the Wehrmacht. The action was similar
to what happened to Japanese-Americans on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor.
The Volga Germans were not included in Nikita Khrushchev's decree on the rehabilitation of deported peoples, like the Crimean Tartars and Chechens, in 1957. Except for hundreds of
thousands who came to Germany as so-called Spätaussiedler (late resettlers) in the 1970s through the early 1990s, they are still in the regions of original deportation, though Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and
Kirgistan are meanwhile independent countries. The total is estimated at almost two million. Plans to create a new German republic or region in European Russia, with massive financial support from Bonn in order
to halt further Russian-German immigration, have not really gotten off the ground, despite continuing negotiation between Helmut Kohl and Boris Yeltsin.
