CZECHS AND GERMANS
By DENNIS BARDENS
y WAS sitting in my room at the Esplanade Hotel, Prague, when I I came across the statement—made quite dogmatically and with-
out the least qualification—that the Czechoslovaks were treating their German population " worse than the Germans had treated them." As I read this German prisoners nearby were clearing
debris at the top of the Vaclayske Namesti ; groups of them, in broad daylight, under the supervision of a single guard. I had not yet seen their food flung on the ground for them to eat, as was done habitually in Pancrac Prison for the humiliation of Czechoslovak prisoners ; they need not expect to dig their own graves when they had finished work, or receive constant kicks and blows throughout the day. And yet there it was, this casual libel. Worse than the Germans. I have just spent three months in Czechoslovakia, during which I have travelled thousands of miles throughout the Republic, and have investigated the German problem from many angles. In my view, there is not the faintest analogy to be drawn between what his happened to a few Germans in Czechoslovakia, and what Germans have done to the Czechs.
The Czechs are quite frank about it all. In the few months immediately following the liberation there were, undoubtedly, indi- vidual reprisals, and expulsions of sections of the German population under conditions which were unfair and in some cases inhumane. It would still be untrue to suggest that this applied to all the ex- pulsions ; at this period it did not. Local government was taken over by the National Committees which had co-operated with the London Government as an underground movement, and with the liberation these committees were enlarged to include many victims from concentration camps. With memories of German enormities fresh in their minds, with the sight of the miseries caused by German occupation everywhere about them, it would indeed have been surprising if there had not been individual excesses ; but the Central Government was quick to deprecate and check incidents of this kind.
It seems insufficiently realised here that Czechoslovakia's. deter- mination to transfer her German population is not an act of revenge against the Germans for what they have done, but an inescapable political necessity imposed upon the Czechoslovaks by German behaviour. The Germans were well treated in the pre-war Republic, enjoying full civil rights, having their own schools and theatres, their own freedom of worship, rights of assembly, positions in Parlia- ment and the legislature. The Czechs are now certain that the Germans cannot again be trusted ; nor can the Czechs settle down to reconstruction with a potential fifth column in their midst. It is natural that one should feel concern for any anti-Fascist Germans who might suffer with the guilty if their position were not safe- guarded, but it should not be forgotten that they were very much a minority. At the election in '935 the Henlein. Party gained 67 of all the German votes, and increased constantly until in 1938 almost 92 per cent. of the German votes were polled for it. The Sudeten German population, as the opening evidence at the Nuremberg trial proves clearly enough, was a Trojan horse, and the Czechs would indeed be unable to learn from their experiences if they allowed history to repeat itself.
The Big Three recognised the justice of Czechoslovakia's decision
to transfer her German population, accepting it in principle, but asking in the Potsdam Declaration that expulsions should for the time being be suspended. Czechoslovakia, as Mr. McNeil, Under- Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, stated in the Commons on October zoth, has earnestly attempted to co-operate. And the President, the Prime Minister and all concerned with the transfers have emphasised that they will be carried out humanely, in an orderly manner, and after adequate arrangements have been made for their reception.
Critics of the transfer show an almost inordinate preoccupation with German welfare and happiness as opposed to that of their victims—for example, by their insistence that mass transfers are inhuman. For six years the Germans have broken up millions of homes, and with no justification wliitever ; from Czechoslovakia alone they transferred at least I,ioo,000 people for slave labour—for that is the present number of repatriates who have been returned to Bohemia, Moravia and Czech Silesia. The next main criticism is that no exception is made of anti-Fascist Germans. This, in my experience, is untrue. There are certainly many thousands of Germans whose claim to be anti-Fascist is not accepted. That is another matter, and it needs saying that in all Czechoslovakia, except- ing prisoners, you will not find a German who admits to having supported Hitler. For instance, self-styled German committees, whose authority has now been repudiated, sprang up in various districts and distributed anti-Fascist certificates to Germans. Over a thousand of these alleged " certificates of anti-Fascist reliability" were issued in the Chomutov district alone ; and this seems a large number in an area where, only the other day, a common grave was opened behind the Catholic church at Brezno, revealing 253 victims of violence, bringing the total in this district alone to 373. The inhabitants never remember the half dead and starving victims on their way to extermination camps, in the trucks which halted at Brezno station, receiving any succour from all these " anti-Fascists." - Political considerations apart, there are personal, human reasons why the Germans cannot expect to live in Czechoslovakia. German barbarity has been too terrible and too widespread to be either forgotten or forgiven, and this is proof not of the Czech's vengeful- ness, but of his normality. If one has civic pride, one must be shocked at the thought of Pietr Zenkl, now reinstated as Lord Mayor of Prague, lying verminous and starving amongst the corpses in a concentration camp. If one appreciates education, one cannot easily be reconciled to the persecution of intellectuals and professors, or of the massacre of the students of Charles University, who in a touching ceremony were recently invested with posthumous degrees. The Czechs love family life, yet scarcely a family is untouched by per- sonal tragedy in some form or other ; death, torture and humiliation have left wounds that are reopened by every sight of a German.
I visited several prisons and prison camps for German prisoners, in every case without giving prior notice. During a tour of the Sudetenland, for instance, I inspected a prison camp at Usti for 3,000 former Gestapo members awaiting trial. The cells were white- washed, there were hot and cold water, communal wash-rooms, adequate lavatory accommodation and room for twelve prisoners with double-tier bunks, each with one blanket. The discipline was strict, but there were sufficient medical supplies, stoves and light, and showers. As I walked around I thought of Belsen, whose surviving victims were at that very moment describing the horrors they experi- enced there. I visited Terezin, too, that grim fortress which was made a clearing-house for the labour and extermination camps. Now it is whitewashed, and flower-beds and well-kept paths give it a deceptive cheerfulness ; yet when it was liberated a few months ago 17,000 living dead were crammed there in incredible squalor and misery. Typhus, which claimed victims amongst the doctors and nursing sisters who went there on rescue work, was raging. There are only a few reminders : the straw dummy, complete with limbs and head, which the S.S. used for " practice." The steel door of the execution yard, with its gibbet, its three machine-gun emplacements opposite a bullet-riddled wall, the cheap cardboard cartons containing the cremated ashes of prisoners who died there.
How many Germans will be affected by the transfers? There has been no real census since 1930, but the food tickets issued by the new Government are some sort of guide. According to these there were on July 16, 1945, approximately 10,842,000 inhabitants in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia (not including Slovakia, which has its own administration), of which 8,031,000 were Czechs and non- Germans and 2,811,000 Germans. Dr. Benes recently estimated the number of Germans who will be transferred as 2,500,000. But these figures are only approximate, because the national committees are called upon to examine countless applications from Germans claim- ing to be anti-Fascist, and these investigations are still proceeding. If this claim is rejected by a local committee, a German may take it to the district committee, from thence if necessary to the Provincial Committee, and if that fails to the Ministry of the Interior.
Most Germans in Czechoslovakia are quite reconciled to being transferred. One German who has undoubtedly been patriotic, and whose reliability is admitted by the authorities, told me that he could understand the hatred which most Czechs feel towards Germans only too well. If he moves in his own immediate circle, amongst those who know his record, well and good, but otherwise can he reasonably expect that others will accept him, knowing him to be German, but not knowing his background, on equal terms?
Nobody who knows the Czechs can think them a heartless people. They know that all transfers involve hardship, and admit that of all tasks facing them the transfer of the Germans is the least agree- able. But as to the need for it, they have no doubt whatever. Whatever the immediate upheaval may entail, it is better not only for the Czechs, but for the peace of central Europe that Czecho- slovakia should be rid, once and for all, of her minority problem.
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