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National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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Beginning in January of 1946, trains filled with Sudeten Germans—forty wagons, thirty passengers per wagon—left Czechoslovakia daily for the American Zone of occupied Germany. By the end of 1946, the Czechoslovak government completed the “organized transfer” of almost 2 million Germans, and it did so in a manner that in many respects fulfilled the mandate of the Potsdam agreement that the resettlement be “orderly and humane.” But a focus on these regularized trainloads of human cargo obscures the extent of the humanitarian disaster facing Germans during the summer months of 1945, immediately after the Nazi capitulation. By the end of 1945, Czech soldiers, security forces, and local militias had already expelled over 700,000 Sudeten Germans to occupied Germany and Austria. As many as 30,000 Germans died on forced marches, in disease-filled concentration camps, in summary executions, and massacres.
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References
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51. Ibid.
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76. In a perceptive article on genocide in history, Jared Diamond shows an interesting pattern in genocidal activity since the fifteenth century. Before 1900, most genocides took place as a result of colonial encounters, with Europeans (or descendents of Europeans) destroying aboriginal peoples. From 1900–1950, the locus of genocide moved to Europe, and the pace accelerated. Since 1950, there have been no fewer than seventeen genocides, predominantly in Third World countries in Africa and Asia. Diamond blames the twentieth-century increase in genocides on denser populations, improved communications, and improved technologies. See Diamond, , The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (New York, 1992), 284–97.Google Scholar
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79. The founding father and first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Masaryk, raised and rejected the idea of a transfer of minorities in a 1918 book on the postwar shape of Europe. His reason seems quaint in retrospect: it would be impossible to convince them to move! Masaryk, Tomáš Garrigue, Nová Evropa (New Europe) (Brno, 1994 [1918]), 107–9.Google Scholar
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82. Making a slightly different argument, Jan Gross cites “wartime experience of spiritual crisis, crisis of values, and normative disorganization” as a precondition for the Communist seizure of power in East Central Europe. Gross, , “War as Revolution,” in The Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949, ed., Norman, Naimark and Leonid, Gibianskii (Boulder, 1997), 24.Google Scholar
83. “Směrnice pro Národní výbory o nejnutnějších opatřenich v zemědělství” (Directives for National Committees Concerning the Most Pressing Measures in Agriculture), Ministry of Agriculture, 10 May 1945, p. 2. SÚA, Ministerstvo zemědělsrví (Ministry of Agriculture) (MZ-S), carton 372, #195.
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