Political authority and popular opinion: Czechoslovakia's German population 1948–60

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Political authority and popular opinion:Czechoslovakia's German population1948–60Matěj SpurnýPublished online: 12 Nov 2012.

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Matej Spurny

Political authority and popularopinion: Czechoslovakia’s German

population 1948–60

Georg Kussner, a member of the Communist Party of Germany, emigrated to Czechoslovakia

in 1933. He married a Czech woman and remained in Czechoslovakia. After 1945 he was

discriminated against, as were many other German anti-fascists. His circumstances illustrate the

experiences of many Germans at that time.

Vıtanı is a small village, a few kilometres from Horsovsky Tyn. After searching for a short

time, I finally found the house number 16, where comrade Kussner lived with his family.

It is an old shabby hut, the roof is full of holes and pushed to one side, I couldn’t believe

that this is a human dwelling. I entered the room, where I was confronted with a scene of

human misery and hardship. The diseased comrade Kussner lay on an old iron bed. The

walls were wet; the floor rotten and there was very little furniture. Although comrade

Kussner was very pleased to see me, he couldn’t talk because of an apoplectic attack he

had suffered last night. He needed absolute quietness. Mrs Kussner, also a party member,

who has Czech nationality, is a young woman; however she looks very run-down and

overworked. She took me to two other rooms, which looked even worse. They sleep

without bed sheets and bed linen; they don’t have any. Their children do not have one

piece of decent clothing. In May 1955, a commission from the hygiene and health

department of the district national committee visited comrade Kussner’s house and agreed

that it was uninhabitable. The commission promised to assign a flat to comrade Kussner

but after more than one and a half years nothing has happened.1

In 1945, more than three million Germans lived in Czechoslovakia, mostly (but not only) in

the border regions of Bohemia and Moravia. After two years of expulsions and organized

displacement, some 170,000 of them remained.2 For those Germans who remained in the

Czech lands, the 1950s brought the end of ethnic cleansing and coercion and they regained

1Narodnı Archiv (National Archives, Prague,hereafter NA), Archive of CPCz Central Com-mittee (AUV KSC), f. 05/3, ideologicke oddelenı[ideological department], sv. 34, a.j. 267, l. 95,

Zprava ze sluzebnı cesty, Charlotta Cerna,8.10.1956.

2See the overview of the Germans in Czecho-slovakia, 15 February 1949, in NA, f. 850/3

(AMV-D), k. 1282, sl. Nemci.

Social History Vol. 37 No. 4 November 2012

Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online ª 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandfonline.comhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2012.732735

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November 2012 Czechoslovakia’s German population 1948–60 453

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their basic rights. However, many of these people were to experience pauperization and social

marginalization. Between 1945 and 1948, Germans were driven out of their homes, family

houses and attractive flats by Czech settlers. Therefore it was not a coincidence that Germans,

in many districts, according to official reports, lived in worse housing conditions than all other

population groups.3 This was in marked contrast to the conditions which most Germans had

enjoyed before 1945.

The poverty and desolation experienced by older Germans in the 1950s has received little

systematic attention. Although their children had more opportunities to integrate into post-

war socialist society, they remained concerned about their loss of identity and the

disappearance of the milieu from which they came. In the 1960s a large number of Germans

who remained in Czechoslovakia after the forced migrations of the immediate post-war years

were either assimilated or emigrated en masse to West Germany.4 The contrast in the 1950s

between anti-discrimination policy and the end of coercion, on the one hand, and social

marginalization, loss of community and conflicts with the local Czech majority, on the other,

provide the focus for this article.

THE POST-WAR DECADE IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA REVISITED

The dominant discourse of modern Czech history is based on the opposition between the

democratic tradition, which is said to have been deeply rooted in Czech society since the

inter-war period, and ‘totalitarian’ oppression coming mostly from the outside.5 Following this

logic, the short post-war period has been interpreted as a struggle between democracy (or

democratic political parties) and the emerging ‘totalitarianism’ which eventually won in

February 1948.6 February 1948, seen from this perspective, represented a breaking point in

3NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3, ideologicke oddelenı,sv. 34, a.j. 270, l. 2–4, Vladimır Cerny – zprava zesluzebnı cesty do Ces. Budejovic, 31.1.1957

[Vladimır Cerny – report on an official visit toCeske Budejovice, 31.1.1957].

4Between 1960 and 1964 approximately 7500

Germans emigrated to West Germany; a further48,000 emigrated between 1965 and 1969. In total,about one-third of the German minority living inCzechoslovakia in 1960 had emigrated to WestGermany by the end of the decade. Tomas Stanek,Nemecka mensina v �ceskych zemich 1948–1989 [TheGerman Minority in the Czech Lands 1948–1989](Prague, 1993), 147–8.

5This view of post-war Czechoslovakia, espe-cially the communist period, is deeply rooted in thefirst generation of post-1989 scholars – see KarelKaplan, Nejvetsı politicky proces: M.Horakova a spol.[The Largest Political Trial: M. Horakova et al.](Brno, 1995); idem, Tajny prostor Jachymov [SecretZone Jachymov] (Ceske Budejovice, 1993) – but isalso influential among younger scholars, particu-larly those affiliated to the state-run Institute forthe Study of Totalitarian Regimes. See Petr

Blazek, Karel Jech and Michal Kubalek, Akce‘K’: vyhnanı sedlaku a jejich rodin z usedlostı vpadesatych letech: studie, seznamy, dokumenty [Action‘K’: The Expulsion of Farmers and Their Families fromTheir Lands in the 1950s: Studies, Lists andDocuments] (Prague, 2010); Tomas Bursık, Prislijsme na svet proto, aby nas pronasledovali –trestanecke pracovnı tabory pri uranovych dolechv letech 1949–1961 [Penal Labour Camps in theUranium Mines, 1949–1961] (Prague, 2009); PavelVanek, Pohrani�cnı straz a pokusy o prechod statnıhranice v letech 1951–1955 [Border Guards andAttempts to Cross the Border 1951–1955] (Prague,2008).

6Eva Broklova, ‘Ceskoslovensko na ceste ktotalitarismu’ [‘Czechoslovakia on the road tototalitarianism’], Na pozvanı Masarykova ustavu, I

(2004), 137–44; Jirı Kocian, Ceskoslovenska strananarodne socialisticka v letech 1945–1948. Organizace-program-politika [Czechoslovak National SocialistParty 1945–1948] (Brno, 2002); idem, ‘Politickysystem v letech 1945–1948’ [‘The politicalsystem in 1945–1948’] in George Painter andPavel Marek (eds), Politicke strany. Vyvoj politick-

454 Social History vol. 37 : no. 4

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Czech history of the twentieth century. After 1989, this interpretation of the events of 1948

determined a number of political measures and laws, as well as the institutional background for

research on, and the treatment of, modern Czech history.7 These interpretations also added a

Stalinist dimension to the communist dictatorship because of the influence Stalin exercised

over Czech communists. This is viewed as the main reason why the communists of the late

1940s and early 1950s completely rejected the tradition of the pre-war Czechoslovak

Communist Party which enjoyed links with the democratic socialist tradition.8 The import of

Soviet practices then culminated in the political processes of the 1950s.9

However, the experience of ethnic minorities, particularly in their relationships with

political authority, and the majority of the population challenges or contradicts this discourse

and its emphasis on 1948 as a moment of discontinuity. While the beginnings of the

‘totalitarian regime’ have been described as a period with an extremely high degree of state-

induced violence and an unprecedented number of victims in the dominant historiographical

literature of the last two decades,10 it is important to realize that between 1945 and 1947, when

most German-speaking inhabitants of Czechoslovakia were being displaced, the extent of the

violence committed by the state and its security and other bodies was far greater. In the 1950s

the character of the violence changed, and new groups that had not been persecuted before

were hit hardest (priests, rich farmers, soldiers who had served in foreign forces, etc.). In the

aftermath of 1945 it was right-wing politicians and leaders of the Agrarian Party who were

targeted. In the 1950s politicians from socialist parties, including some communists, were sent

to prison or executed.

Nevertheless, the total extent of state-induced violence decreased gradually. This is evident

from the number of deaths, which dropped from tens of thousands in 1945–7 to hundreds or a

few thousand in the first half of the 1950s, and decreased even more significantly in the second

half of the 1950s. Of course, this does not make the repressive character of the communist

dictatorship or the suffering of the victims any more acceptable, but this context is important if

we want to understand why a large part of society perceived such demonstrations of political

power as legitimate.

A high degree of state-organized violence, as well as efforts to segregate different social

groups, were practices that Czech society had experienced during the war and the German

occupation. With astonishing ease, these principles found their way into the inventory of the

Czechs’ own political and social practices and were considered ‘normal’. After liberation this

ych stran a hnutı v �ceskych zemıch a v Ceskoslo-vensku 1861–2004 [Development of Political Partiesand Movements in the Czech Republic andCzechoslovakia, 1861–2004] (Brno, 2005), vol. II,1165–73. In February 1948 the CzechoslovakCommunist Party, which enjoyed popular sup-port, took advantage of a cabinet crisis duringwhich non-communist ministers threatened toresign, to stage demonstrations supported byarmed people’s militias. Against the expectationsof non-communist government members, Pre-sident Benes accepted the ministers’ resignationsand appointed a new government under Kle-ment Gottwald. On 9 May the parliament

approved a new constitution proclaiming Cze-choslovakia a People’s Democracy.

7By law, the Institute for the Study ofTotalitarian Regimes must exclude the periodbetween 1945 and 1948 from its research, as onlythe ‘totalitarian’ periods of 1938–45 and 1948–89

fall within its terms of reference.8See Karel Kaplan and Jacques Rupnik, Histoire

du Parti communiste tchecoslovaque: des origines a laprise du pouvoir (Paris, 1981).

9Karel Kaplan, Komunisticky rezim a politickeprocesy v Ceskoslovensku [The Communist Regime andPolitical Trials in Czechoslovakia] (Brno, 2001).

10See footnotes 3 and 6.


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approach was not only used against Germans, who were collectively identified as those who

caused the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and the suffering of the war years. From the

viewpoint of its citizens, the society of the new national state needed to be rid of all actual and

potential threats. In addition to Germans (and Hungarians in Slovakia), people of mixed

origin, Roma people, German-speaking Jews and south Moravian Croats were seen as

potential threats. Soon, especially in the border regions where new communities were

forming, the logic of purification turned against other ‘unreliable elements’ and those whose

unwanted status may have had nothing to do with their ethnic origin.

It was in the mid-1940s that the political practices – usually associated with dictatorships – of

singling out and removing those who did not fit in the ‘good’ society were most evident.11 As

Tomas Stanek and Adrian von Arburg have demonstrated in their study of ‘violent’ expulsion,

these practices were systematically organized by political leaders, security agents and the elites

of authorized political parties.12 But they were supported by, and in many cases radicalized by,

activities at the local level. All of this has been well analysed by Czech and other historians

concerned with post-war ethnic cleansing, retribution and purification.13 However, the

problem with most of the existing studies on these topics is that they do not really

conceptualize the rise of the communist dictatorship in this context. Despite the very

productive approaches towards ethnic and other forms of cleansing in the three years after

1945, the analysis is not combined with a study of the period after 1948. This again emphasizes

discontinuities between both periods and so sacrifices indirectly the totalitarian interpretation

of Czech Stalinism.

The absence of strong interconnections of both topics in the historiography is surprising. In

fact, the unprecedented pressure for purification ‘from the bottom’ was a feature of both the

mid-1940s and the whole of the 1950s. Using the example of the minority issue, one can show

that even in the 1950s the government’s repressive measures were often a reaction to a broad

and persistent social demand. Indeed, to persuade citizens and the local authorities that some

groups (Germans, Roma) were no longer to be persecuted and discriminated against was a

difficult and time-consuming task that hardly added to the popularity of the political leaders,

even under the Stalin-inspired dictatorship of the first half of the 1950s. In some cases the

public demand for different forms of cleansing and forced regulation of life in minority

communities was so strong that the elites of the socialist dictatorship had to satisfy it, even at

11Gerd Koennen even considers the purificationmechanism to be an integral part of the Commu-nist utopia. See Gerd Koenen, Utopie der Sauberung(Berlin, 1998).

12Tomas Stanek and Adrian von Arburg,‘Organizovane divoke odsuny? Uloha ustrednıchstatnıch organu pri provadenı ‘‘evakuace’’ ne-meckeho obyvatelstva (kveten az zarı 1945)’[‘Organized wild expulsions? The role of centralgovernment in implementing the ‘‘evacuation’’ ofthe German population (May–September 1945)’],Soudobe dejiny, XII, 3–4 (2005), 465–533.

13A pioneer of a critical historiographicalapproach towards the forced migration of theGerman population from the Czech lands after1945 is Tomas Stanek. See his books Odsun Nemcu

z Ceskoslovenska [The Expulsion of Germans fromCzechoslovakia] (Prague, 1992), Verfolgung 1945[Persecution 1945] (Vienna, 2002) and Internierungund Zwangsarbeit: das Lagersystem in den bohmischenLandern 1945–1948 [Internment and Forced Labour:The Camp System in the Czech Lands] (Munich,2007). For post-war retribution policy and practicesee Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Re-tribution against Nazi Collaborators in PostwarCzechoslovakia (Cambridge, 2004). On the pur-ification of post-war society see David Gerlach,‘Beyond expulsion: the emergence of ‘‘unwantedelements’’ in the postwar Czech borderlands,1945–1950’, East European Politics and Societies,XXIV, 2 (2010), 269–93.


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the cost of renouncing the emancipation project that they liked to think they were

implementing.14

This indisputable continuity in the ideas about society and in the political practices cannot,

however, be reduced to a simplistic statement that the post-war expulsion of Germans brought

about the onset of the communist dictatorship.15 The immediate post-war logic of segregation

and the removal of foreign elements had its historic roots in the war years. The violent form

the expulsion of Germans took, the broad acceptance of expulsion as an equitable solution, and

the continuing repression of the remaining German population are just some of the

demonstrations of this way of thinking and acting. Already, in the years 1945–7, a wide range

of concurring decisions, processes and projects was in place, based on the same conviction that

what was unreliable or foreign needed to be removed as a preventative measure.

GERMANS AND POST-WAR ETHNIC CLEANSING

One can hardly understand the discourses about the Germans who remained in the Czech

lands, or the mentality and everyday problems of this group, without knowing the

circumstances whereby the new German minority was created. Nearly all of the 170,000

German-speaking inhabitants who could or had to stay in Czechoslovakia, despite the

collective transfer of nearly three million Sudeten Germans, experienced fear, loss of property

and personal discrimination in the three or four years after 1945.

The rules defining which persons of German nationality were allowed or forced to stay

were established after the rules which deprived the Germans, collectively, of their human and

civil rights. The presidential decrees of 19 and 21 May 1945 regulated the confiscation of

agricultural land and the larger properties of Germans and Hungarians on the basis of

nationality returns in all censuses since 1929. If a person was defined as German in one of these

censuses, or was a member of any German patriotic organization, he or she was deemed to be

German and consequently deprived of property. The withdrawal of Czechoslovakian

citizenship from Germans, the pre-condition for transferring them to Germany, was based on a

later decree of 2 August that did not contain, somewhat surprisingly, any definition of German

nationality or any reference to former decrees. The result was that the exact definition of

nationality was delegated to the Interior Ministry. The only unifying aspect of the ministry’s

instructions was the notion that nationality was an objective category which one just had to

diagnose in a correct way for every individual and then deduce the consequences ( the

confiscation of property, withdrawal of citizenship or transfer to Germany). These post-war

regulations effectively constructed national identity by objectivizing subjective decisions of the

past. In some cases, the authorities also adopted the Nazi construction of nationality although,

unlike the Polish case, this was not the main measure of nationality.16

14See, for example, the change in CommunistParty policy towards the Roma population in thesecond half of the 1950s in Celia Donert, ‘Citizensof Gypsy Origin: the Roma in the Reconstructionof Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989’, PhD dissertation,EUI, 2008.

15Some of the dissident authors of the 1970s and1980s such as Jan Mlynaryk and Petr Pithart took

this view; see Jan Kren, Cesi-Nemci-odsun [Czechs,Germans, Transfer] (Prague, 1990).

16The so-called ‘Volksliste’ was an instrument ofNazi policy for identifying nationality by acombination of cultural, language and racialcriteria. In those regions of post-war Polandwhich had belonged to the Polish Republic before1939 and were inhabited by Poles and Germans,


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The national identity of hundreds of thousands of Czechoslovak citizens was ambiguous and

uncertain, so constructing a clear division between people belonging to the national corpus

and those excluded was not possible. The Interior Ministry was forced to make very fine

distinctions and a complicated tangle of regulations came into being. The ministerial officers

also had to judge many cases individually. This, of course, created opportunities for

interference and corruption.

Once defined as German, a person lost everything. In the presidential decrees allowance was

made for exceptional circumstances, where citizenship and civil rights were retained. One had

to prove that the person concerned fought against Nazism or suffered under its terror and

stayed loyal to the Czechoslovak republic. However, these people17 (with infrequent

exceptions) were first incriminated, then made into pariahs, and had to wait for the final

assessment of their request. This was the initial situation of the vast majority of those Germans

who escaped the fate of the three million who were expelled.

The Germans who remained were a very heterogenous group. The only exception were the

German anti-fascists (Germans who had fought against fascism or suffered under the Nazi

terror). However, the 6500 officially recognized anti-fascists who stayed in the country

constituted a very small percentage of the Germans who remained in Czechoslovakia. There

were a number of reasons for this. For months after the war no central authority existed that

would defend anti-fascists from the violent pogroms and expulsions. The definition of an anti-

fascist was very narrow, so that Germans who were not politically organized in social

democratic or communist parties or associations found it difficult to demonstrate their loyalty

to the Czech nation. Even if Czechoslovakian citizenship were granted, it did not help much if

property had already been lost. For months many anti-fascists found themselves stateless. This

uncertainty persuaded many German anti-fascists to leave Czechoslovakia. Former German

social democrats and communists were sometimes even forced to leave by officials from Czech

and East German socialist parties, which legitimized their removal to East Germany as a

‘Kadertransfer’.

The much larger group of Germans who remained, many of them forceably, were the so-

called ‘indispensable experts’. Here, pragmatic and economic reasons were more important

than questions of guilt or innocence. In the military instructions of 2 August 1945 there were

measures to prevent German experts and workers in important industrial areas from leaving

Czechoslovakia. Some 55,000 German experts and their families remained, working mainly in

agriculture and the glass, mining and textile industries.

Most of the 100,000 mixed families were allowed to stay. ‘This task’, argued the Czech

National Socialist Party in summer 1945, ‘concerns childen, who have to be Czechized and

whom we don’t want to lose! There are not so many of us, that we can dismiss so many

the ‘Volkslisten’ served to segregate the Germanand Polish populations.

17Those Germans designated as ‘anti-fascists’constituted a small minority of the German-speaking population that remained in Czecho-slovakia after the forced migrations. See EmiliaHrabovec, ‘Politisches Dogma kontra wirtschaf-tliches Kalkul’ in Peter Heumos (ed.), Heimat

und Exil (Munich, 2001), 163–85; BenjaminFrommer, ‘Expulsion or integration: unmixinginter-ethnic marriage in postwar Czechoslova-kia’, East European Politics and Societies, XIV, 2

(2000), 381–410; Heike von Hoorn, Neue Heimatim Sozialismus. Die Umsiedlung und Integrationsudetendeutscher Antifa-Umsiedler in die SBZ/DDR(Essen, 2004).


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thousands of childen, who are half our blood.’18 In the summer and autumn of 1945, special

re-education camps were established, primarily for families where the father was German, and

although it took a number of years before mixed families secured their basic rights, suspicion

on the part of the post-war authorities remained.

The debate about the future of German-speaking Jews needs to be viewed against the

ideological background of the Czech national revolution after 1945. Of 120,000 Jews in the

Czech lands, 35,000 had claimed German nationality before the war. Most of them were killed

in Nazi concentration camps, but more than 7000 returned to Czechoslovakia after the war. In

the eyes of the authorities these Jewish survivors were Germans, confirmed by an Interior

Ministry directive of September 1945.19 The yellow star was replaced by a white armband,

which Germans were required to wear, and they had to prove their anti-fascist past. This was

not so easy, however, because many authorities (and also some of the presidential decrees)20

understood anti-fascism to be armed resistance against the occupiers or membership of anti-

fascist organizations and political parties. The newspapers were full of angry articles criticizing

Jews in Liberec and elsewhere for not speaking Czech. The question that dominated these

deliberations was not whether someone was a Jew but whether they were Czech or German.

In September 1946, following international pressure and interventions from Czech Jewish

congregations, the Interior Ministry changed its policy and advised that German Jews should

be treated in the same way as other German anti-fascists. However, by then, most of the

German Jews had already been expelled. In 1949, just 596 German-speaking Jews remained in

Czechoslovakia. This particular case shows that the Czech national revolution of the 1940s was

not directed against the Nazi danger and its protagonists. The aim of post-war anti-German

policy was the ethnic cleansing of the Czech borderlands, legitimized by the vision of a

homogenous Slavonic society as a barrier against German aggression.

Paradoxically, the largest group of Germans who remained, some 65,000 people, did not

belong to any of these exceptional categories. These Germans remained because the western

allies were not willing to accept any more transports after a certain date. Many of these

‘unapproved’ and, in the eyes of the administration, ‘unreliable’ Germans lived in the

borderlands. State policy towards this German minority was, at least until the summer of 1949,

informed by suspicion and the language of ethnic cleansing.

In 1947, and again in the first months after the communist takeover of power in February

1948, Germans became subject to another forced displacement from the borderlands to inland

areas. Communist authorities were the most radical supporters of this new policy, using it as a

legitimizing instrument, especially after the coup. Between 1947 and 1949, some 30,000–

40,000 German-speaking inhabitants of the border regions were robbed of their homes and

often deprived of the opportunity to practise their professions. At least officially, mixed families

and anti-fascists were not affected. At first, the authorities tried to ‘disperse’ those who had not

been transferred to Germany because the transports were suspended and whose ‘reliability’ had

18NA, f. 100/24 (Klement Gottwald), sv. 137,a.j. 1494, Zapis jednanı vlady [Minutes ofgovernment meeting], 10.7.1945.

19NA, f. 850 (AMV-Nosek), k. 254, Osobyokupanty povazovane za osoby zidovskeho puvo-du (pokyny pro zachovanı �cs. ob�canstvı nebopovolovanı vystehovanı) – dodatek k vynosu MV

z 10.9.1946, 13.9.1946 [Persons identified by theoccupiers as persons of Jewish origin – instructionsfor retaining Czechoslovak citizenship or permit-ting emigration].

20For example, decree number 19/1945 on theconfiscation of agricultural property.


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not been established, and some industrial specialists. These people were relocated to the central

regions of Bohemia and Moravia, where they mostly worked in agriculture.21

Political and economic elites at the time, and also later historians, have talked about the

economic reasons for this forced relocation of labour. In fact, more people were needed in the

border areas and the removal of thousands of skilled workers exacerbated the problems of

labour shortage. In western Bohemia, and elsewhere, citizens of Czech origin, mostly re-

emigrants, were forced to work in industries following the relocation of German workers. The

spiral of social engineering accelerated.

The real motivation for these transfers was the desire to create ethnically purified borderlands

without large islands of German-speaking people. In internal documents in early 1948 we find

references to the ‘acceleration of the assimilation process of Germans transferred to wholly

Czech neighbourhoods’. This sounds logical, but on the other hand it can be viewed as a signal

of a shift in the paradigm. After two or three years of constructing a clear division between so-

called Czechs and Germans, the excluded ones now had to be assimilated. The ‘internal

dispersion’ can, of course, be seen as a continuation of ethnic cleansing and coercion, but it can

also be interpreted as the cautious beginning of a new period of Czech policy towards the

German minority in the first years of the socialist dictatorship, in which assimilation and

integration slowly replaced the coercion and segregation of the immediate post-war years.

TOWARDS A SOCIALIST NATIONALITY POLICY: SHIFT IN THE

RELATIONSHIP WITH GERMAN CITIZENS

The governmental crisis at the end of February 1948 reduced the plurality of Czech politics

and opened the way for the Communist Party (KSC) dictatorship. This change in the political

climate brought about a temporary radicalization of the rhetoric and practice of the purging of

public life, which in some cases had nationalist overtones.22 The anti-German orientation of

the ‘Action committee of the National Front’ echoed the anti-German practices that were so

much in evidence in the years immediately after the war. Loyalty to the new ‘public

democracy’ was also connected with a very patriotic discourse, which at least indirectly

excluded the Germans from the community of ‘our people’.23

This radicalization of the national rhetoric was not to last long. By the end of 1948, the now

stabilized Communist Party dictatorship brought an end to direct ethnically legitimized

coercion and introduced a measure of liberalization. For example, mixed Czech–German

marriages, which were forbidden under the Nazi occupation and in the immediate post-war

period, were permitted in the vast majority of cases. By the winter of 1948–9, party ideologists

understood that, for the non-Slavonic minorities, integration and equalization had to be a pre-

condition for their assimilation – and not the other way round.

21Adrian von Arburg identifies 28,701 personsand a further 88 transports where the names oftransportees are missing. See Adrian von Arburg,‘Zwischen Vertreibung und Integration. Dietschechische Deutschenpolitik 1947–1953’, PhDdissertation, FSV UK, Prague 2004, 344.

22See, for example, the articles in Straz severu[Guard of the North], IV, 49 (27.2.1948), 1 or the

article ‘O�cista ve Varnsdorfu musı byt uplna’ (‘Thecleansing of Varnsdorf must be total’), Straz severu,IV, 54 (4.3.1948), 3.

23See, for example, the article ‘Vybudujemevlastenecke pohrani�cı’ [‘We will build a patrioticborderland’], Straz severu, IV, 122 (26.5.1948), 1.


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After 1945, the Czechoslovak Communist Party was thoroughly nationalist in its

orientation. Why, then, did the party decide to reduce the level of discrimination against

the German minority in Czechoslovakia? The answer has much to do with the party’s quest

for legitimacy. By legitimacy, I do not just mean justifying politics in the eyes of the broader

population; of more importance was the ability of the power-holders to believe in a mission,

which justified their right to ‘rule’.

The KSC strategy before spring 1948 was to secure majority support and there was little

interest in the political orientation of minorities. All this changed after the dictatorship was

established. Now, it was essential to ‘gain the Germans for our state’, 24 as well as members of

other ethnic, cultural and social minorities.25 The only exceptions were those that the party

deemed to be political or class enemies of the new order. The need to ‘gain the Germans for the

state’ had a purpose beyond a desire to motivate German manual workers to productive work in

Czech factories and mines. To gain German support for the state meant to justify the existence of

the socialist dictatorship; to show that the Communist Party could construct a community, open to

everyone who wanted to take part, including those who had been marginalized and discriminated

against; and to prove that this new society was better than anything that had gone before.

The political conditions of the dictatorship made it easier to address the violence and

discrimination experienced by the German minority. Until 1949, the forced displacement and

subsequent employment of Germans was an important aspect of economic and industrial

policy. For some industrial sectors, such as uranium production, forced German labour was

essential. After 1949, those industrial sectors dependent on the labour of enslaved people (the

uranium mines in Jachymov employed more than a thousand German workers, for instance),

started to use political and other prisoners, whose numbers increased after 1948.26 This

targeting of other groups reduced the levels of persecution, discrimination and injustice

experienced by the German minority.

The majority of people categorized as German but remaining in Czechoslovakia had not

been granted Czechoslovak citizenship by 1949.27 Without citizenship, it was difficult to

marry, one could not claim back confiscated property, much of which was redistributed,28 or

defend oneself effectively against forced migration and forced labour. Another reason why the

authorities made regaining citizenship nearly impossible for thousands of former citizens was

the possibility that at some point in the future – when the factories and mines did not need

24From 1949, ‘to win the Germans’ for our stateand later ‘for accepting citizenship’ were thepriorities of the official policy towards the Ger-mans. See NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky, Archiveof the Ministry of the Interior), k. 1281, ZpravaKNV Karlovy Vary o poznatcıch pri provadenınarodnostnı politiky, 5.3.1953 [Report from theKarlovy Vary KNV on the implementation ofnationality policy].

25Even more radical than the case of theGermans was the turn to a more integrative andin some aspects emancipatory policy towards theCzechoslovak Roma. See Donert, op. cit.

26For more on the German workforce in theJachymov uranium mines at the end of the 1940ssee Tomas Dvorak, ‘Tezba uranu versus o�cista

pohrani�cı’ [‘Uranium mining versus the cleansingof the borderlands: German labour in theJachymov mines in the late 1940s and early1950s’], Soudobe dejiny, 3–4 (2005), 626–71.

27On 1 March 1950, 36,409 persons of Germannationality were naturalized in the Czech lands;97,064 Germans were considered ‘stateless’; therest were regarded as persons with a different oruncertain citizenship. See S�cıtanı lidu a soupisdomu a bytu v republice Ceskoslovenske ke dni 1.brezna 1950, dıl I. Nejdulezitejsı vysledky s�cıtanılidu a soupisu domu a bytu za kraje, okresy amesta, Cs. statistika, rada A, sv. 3, Prague, 1957)[Census of March 1950].

28See, for example, NA, f. 850 (AMV-Nosek),k. 217.


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them any more – stateless Germans might be transferred to Germany. The granting or

regranting of Czechoslovak citizenship was also unpopular among regular Czechs. Thousands

of people and associations protested when a German or a member of a mixed family secured

citizenship despite all the obstacles.29

In contrast to ordinary people, the state authorities (at the latest in autumn 1947) anticipated

that dividing the population into two different categories, of citizens and non-citizens without

rights, was not sustainable in the long term.30 However, they first wanted to destroy the larger

islands of German-speaking populations, relocate them to the Czech interior, secure their forced

assimilation and distribute their confiscated property to the non-German inhabitants of the

borderlands. This situation changed after property had been redistributed and the Communist

Party had established and stabilized its political authority. From a practical, economic and

ideological point of view, it was necessary to integrate Germans into the ‘construction of the

socialist homeland’. To achieve this, one could not treat the German minority as non-citizens

without rights.

In April 1949, the Interior Ministry and regional national committees were instructed by the

Communist Party Central Committee Presidium that all citizenship requests should be

handled ‘with despatch and benevolently’.31 ThePresidiumalso declared that any dependenceor

linkage between the nationality of the applicant and gaining citizenship was ‘politically

unacceptable’.32 This government order, which came into force on 29 November 1949, marked a

real change in the relationship between the Czechoslovak state and the German minority who

remained after the forced migration of 1945–7. To comply with the new citizenship rules required

loyalty to Czechoslovakia and its popular democratic order, and some technical requirements such

as permanent residence on Czechoslovak territory. Applicants did not have to wait three years, the

customary minimum waiting period, and the authorities were charged to despatch all possible

obstructions to the granting of citizenship, ‘in the interest of the state’.33 Basic civil rights were

granted to the vast majority of Germans who remained in Czechoslovakia.

However, something happened which the political elites did not anticipate. Tens of

thousands of Germans demonstrated that they were not interested in this seemingly generous

offer.34 How was this possible? Whereas in the second half of the 1940s the Czechoslovak state

had absolute power over people of German origin, the position of the socialist dictatorship was

29See the letters and petitions in NA, f. 850

(AMV-Nosek), k. 217 nebo NA, f. 315/1 (UPV),k. 938, sl. 1221/7.

30In November 1947 the legislative committeeof the Interior Ministry drafted a memorandum on‘the final solution of the German and Hungarianquestion’ in terms of a gradual naturalization of theremaining Germans. For more on this aspect seeAdrian von Arburg, Zwischen Vertreibung undIntegration [Between Expulsion and Integration] (Pra-gue, 2004), 214–16.

31In February 1949 officials were prosecuted forbeing too benevolent in the granting of Czecho-slovak citizenship to Germans. See NA, f.AMV-D, k. 1280, �cj. 39, Zat�cenı pro zneuzitımoci urednı, 9.2.1949 [Arrests for misuse ofofficial powers].

32NA, AUV KSC, f. 02/1 (predsednictvo), k.10, Dokumenty ze schuze predsednictva UV KSC[Documents from meeting of the Presidium of theCentral Committee], 11.4.1949.

33NA, f. 315/1, UPV, karton 725, sg. 762/1/4a,Vladnı narızenı ze dne 29.11.1949, 252 Sb. ovracenı �ceskoslovenskeho statnıho ob�canstvı oso-bam nemecke narodnosti [Government order onreturn of Czechoslovak state citizenship to personsof German nationality].

34The first signs of opposition to German requestsfor citizenship were registered in the summer andautumn of 1949, by specialists in western Bohemia.See the reports on the political agenda in Chebcounty and reports from particular industrialenterprises, September–October 1949, NA, AUVKSC f. 100/45 (Kopecky), sv. 11, a.j. 198.


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different. In the circumstances of the Cold War, and in the light of their comparative

impoverishment, many Germans wanted to follow their relatives to West Germany. A forced

transfer and loss of homeland was no longer a threat to stateless Germans. On the contrary, it

was now possible, at least theoretically, to get to Germany, which is why Czechoslovak

citizenship was declined by many. Moreover, there was no more repression and explicit

discrimination against stateless Germans after the spring of 1949. Citizenship could play a role

in the reversal of a decision to confiscate property and it was was easier to marry, but without

citizenship one was protected from military service. In short, regaining Czechoslovak

citizenship was not seen as a great victory or as the gateway to a new life.

A new age began. Now the Czechoslovak authorities took on the role of supplicants, who

tried to regain the loyalty of their German minority, gain control over them, prevent their

isolation and prove the legitimacy of the popular democratic system as being open to all people

irrespective of origin, race and nationality. This new situation does not conform to the popular

thesis about the absolute power of the Communist Party in the 1950s, which has been stressed

by followers of the totalitarian paradigm among Czech historians in recent years.35

Although 99 per cent of the 90,000 applicants for citizenship were naturalized in 1950, more

than 40,000 did not apply and remained as stateless non-citizens.36 Even though local party and

national committees attempted to ‘scramble for every soul’, the situation remained unchanged

until 1952.37 Campaigns to persuade Germans to apply for citizenship did not meet with much

success. In Litvınov (northern Bohemia), where 1700 Germans without citizenship remained

after 1950, a great get-together of all Germans in the county was organized to change this

situation. The result was that the authorities persuaded one person to apply.38 Some of the

reasons cited were passivity, the chauvinism of local functionaries and western propaganda. The

negative reactions of the German minority were also discussed; ‘give us our property back, then

we will apply for citizenship’ was commonly expressed.39 It is surprising that the coercion of the

immediate post-war years, which was probably decisive in forming the relationship between the

new Czechoslovak state and the German minority, was rarely mentioned.

The relatively small number of the 40,000 German non-citizens who applied for citizenship

after 1950 did so in order to marry, study or obtain their old age pensions.40 Attempts to

35Compare, for example, the articles aboutCzechoslovakia in the 1950s published in thejournal Pamet a dejiny [Memory and History] andthose released by the politically controlled Ustavpro studium totalitnıch rezimu [Institute for theStudy of Totalitarian Regimes].

36According to the ideological department ofthe Communist Party’s Central Committee, by1951 some 120,000 Germans had been naturalized.See NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologickeoddelenı), sv. 34, a.j. 260, l. 1–5, Pripomınky II.odboru MV ke smernicım ‘Pe�ce o ob�canynemecke narodnosti’, 28.12.1951 [Observationsof II Department of the Interior Ministry on theDirective ‘Care for Citizens of German Nation-ality’).

37NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1281,Zprava KNV Karlovy Vary o provadenı narod-

nostnı otazky, 5.3.1953 [Report from the KarlovyVary KNV on the implementation of nationalityquestions].

38NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1285, sl.Nemecka otazka (1950–1953) -zpravy a zaznamyporad, Zprava o prubehu porady referentu provnitrnı veci a bezpe�cnost a prednostu referatu IIIONV konane u KNV v Ustı nad Labem,18.10.1951 [Report on a meeting of advisers forinternal matters and security of municipal nationalcommittees at KNV Ustı nad Labem].

39 ibid.40NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1285, sl.

Nemecka otazka (1950–1953) -zpravy a zaznamyporad, Nynejsı situace Nemcu, december 1952

[The German question (1950–1953) – reports andminutes of meeting on current situation of theGermans, December 1952].


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persuade the others proved unsuccessful.41 The idea of naturalizing all Germans who had been

deprived of citizenship according to Presidential Decree number 33, of 2 August 1945, which

would have been unthinkable a few years earlier, was born at the end of 1952. This step, which

officially made all Germans in Czechoslovakia equal with all other citizens, was realized by law

number 34 of April 1953. Although, after this date, many Germans refused to replace their

stateless documentation with a Czechoslovak identity card, we can consider this naturalization

decree as ending an important chapter in the history of the German minority who remained in

Czechoslovakia after the war.

Citizenship and civil rights were a necessary first step in the process of integrating German-

speaking inhabitants into the new Czechoslovak socialist society. It was always unlikely that

citizenship alone could compensate for the systematic discrimation that the German minority

had experienced after 1945. Before the communist coup in 1948, the Interior Ministry

initiated a process of social equalization for Germans. In March and April 1948, the 20 per cent

wage deduction for German workers was abandoned and Germans were incorporated into the

insurance system. In the first months of 1950, just before the discriminatory norms were

abandoned,42 the authorities started to discuss the question of reparations for losses which had

resulted from the imposition of such norms as the 20 per cent wage deduction for German

workers and the restriction of property rights. Although the material effect of reparations for

the German minority was negligible over the next few years, official acknowledgement of the

principle of compensation was important. The question remained of how to compensate

Germans for the wages they had not received and for the property that had been confiscated.

The relationship between the ideological construction of the recent past and the politics of

compensation is evident in the debate about the return of German property in the early 1950s:

The transfer of Germans and the confiscation of their property were part of the struggle

against Fascism and Nazism. This was resolved by our state immediately after the war.

The historical task of resettling the borderlands was finished. The people living there wish

for calm and the co-operation of all the inhabitants, putting aside all differences between

the borderlands and the interior of the country. That is why we have to win over and

secure the co-operation of those of German nationality to the task of constructing

socialism. They have to feel that they are equal citizens, as the constitution prescribes.

. . . Giving family houses back to our German fellow citizens will cement the awareness of

belonging to a popular democratic state, which cares for them. These proceedings will

bring legal certainty to all citizens.43

This instruction from the Interior Ministry for regional functionaries on the return of family

houses to their former German owners is a very concentrated summary of the new ‘German’

41NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 34, a.j. 260.

42According to an investigation in 1950, TomasStanek has identified 29 laws, directives andinstructions in the areas of work and social carewhich discriminated against Germans, most ofthem applying to Germans without Czechoslovakcitizenship. Tomas Stanek, Nemecka mensina v

�ceskych zemıch 1948–1989 [The German Minority inthe Czech Lands 1948–1989] (Prague, 1993), 103.

43NA, f. 850 (AMV-Nosek), k. 254, sl. Odsun I,Zachazenı s osobami nemecke narodnosi –konfiskace a prıdel rodinnych domku, 5.6.1951

[Treatment of persons of German nationality –confiscation and allocation of family houses].


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discourse. According to it, the post-war confiscation was necessary, as indeed was the

subsequent return of family houses. A remarkable aspect of this narrative was the emphasis on

the return of private property, to ‘cement the consciousness’ of care on the part of the state.

The Interior Ministry also warned the relevant committees to proceed very carefully in each

case of property restitution so that decisions bring ‘peace and satisfaction and do not make a

fuss’.44 Because of the uncertainty as to whether the proceedings would help legitimize or,

conversely, undermine the authority of the dictatorship, restitution was organized by the local

and county committees, not by the government or party committees.

The scope of restitution was limited, covering family houses, up to the size of two small

flats, which had not been returned to private ownership. If a German owned a family house

which had been sold to another person, he or she still had a chance to receive compensation.

The criteria remained vague, however, and had to take into consideration ‘the pioneering

effort of the Czechoslovak people’.45 While regaining family houses for those Germans who

still lived ‘at home’ was difficult for local authorities to obstruct, compensation for the formerly

displaced families often depended on political criteria which were open to interpretation and

abuse.46

It is not easy to answer the question as to the goal or objective of the Czechoslovak socialist

dictatorship’s policies towards the German minority who remained in the country. In the first

five years after 1948 we may come up with a thesis that, from the point of view of the central

authorities, it was very important to turn Germans into loyal citizens. The majority of

Germans were not citizens and had few, if any, reasons for being loyal to the state. To achieve

this goal, it was necessary to remove those anti-German measures that were still in force and

open the way to citizenship for all Germans living in Czechoslovakia. We have seen, too, how

on a limited scale there were attempts to redress some of the losses of earlier years. However,

this could not be enough in long term. What was the next step after the equality and civil

rights campaign? According to the state and party policy, what was the space which Germans

should have for their activities? And were there limits to these activities?

As Yuri Slezkine has shown,47 Soviet and especially Stalinist nationality policy tended to

support nations and national minorities in their cultural, though not political, emancipation.

Although this policy was mainly linked to territorially defined nationalities, it was not without

influence on the policy towards the German and other ethnic minorities in Czechoslovakia

after 1948. However, given the party’s role in the ethnic cleansing of the German minority,

there was a tension between the pressures of ideological coherence and the need for some

degree of policy continuity on the part of the party.

While the goals of nationality policy were not altogether clear, we know more about what

was undesirable from the party’s perspective. For them, what was not acceptable was the inter-

war status quo: a German national minority in Czechoslovakia as an autonomous political

body. This position was established immediately after the Munich agreement in 1938 and

constantly reiterated. Because of this fear of the past, Czech authorities even tried to avoid the

term ‘minority’ when dealing with Germans, referring to them instead as the ‘remains of a

44ibid.45ibid., Smernice pro konfiskaci a prıdel rodin-

nych domku, 12.6.1951.46I will return to the particular practice of

deconfiscation.

47Yuri Slezkine, ‘The Soviet Union as a com-munal apartment’ in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalin-ism – New Directions (London and New York, 2000),313–47.


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nationality’.48 The ideological opposition to the autonomy of any social group was

compounded in the case of Germans by the experience of the 1930s and the war itself.

However, during the 1950s there was a remarkable discrepancy between the refusal to permit

the existence of autonomous organizations and the liberalization of some aspects of state policy

towards the Germans. The end of overt discrimination brought about hopes concerning the

educational system and the cultural emancipation of the German minority. But these hopes

were short lived.

Dear Comrade Prime Minister [. . .], we can no longer put up with the fact that German

children do not have the chance to be educated in their mother tongue, in lectures in the

German language or in German schools. We cannot put up with the fact that the German

worker does not have the chance to preserve his culture, as Italians, Bulgarians and even

Gipsies are allowed to do.49

These embittered words from a resolution of German workers in Chomutov, a northern

Bohemian town, alarmed and occupied the Government Presidium, Ministry of Education

and the Interior Ministry. Workers from Chomutov were not the only ones who –

encouraged by the integrative policy towards Germans – looked forward to the education of

their children in their mother tongue. The Germans complained that other minorities,

including Poles and Hungarians, had their own schools in Czechoslovakia. During the

campaign for the elections to the national committees in spring 1954, it was announced that in

some regions German schools would be opened and that German teachers had been chosen

from reliable cadres. Because of the reaction of the Czech majority, local national committee

functionaries and also loyal German party functionaries, the initiative was stopped before it

actually began. According to a statement from the authorities, it had always been intended as a

survey.50 From the point of view of the German parents, tattered hopes for a German

education for their children were frustrating. That this was an important issue was confirmed

by the only German-language magazine, the otherwise loyal Aufbau und Frieden, which praised

the German educational system in Romania and published articles requesting German schools

in Czechoslovakia.

A decisive protest by the Czech majority and their representatives against any form of

autonomous German education system was to be anticipated. The Czech German struggle for

schools was considered the central symbol of minority policy in the inter-war period. German

schools had been a bulwark for the German position in the borderlands since the nineteenth

century. Under the socialist dictatorship, German language classes in schools attended by a

large percentage of German children was the ultimate achievement. Children from German

(not mixed!) families were allowed to take these lessons only optionally, after regular school

48NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3, sv. 35, a.j. 273, l.108–120, Zprava o stavu prace mezi nemeckymobyvatelstvem CSR [Report on work among theGerman population of the CSR].

49NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1285, sl.Nemci-Ustecky kraj, Resolution (Puvodce: Aktiv

der deutschen Vertrauensleute der Arbeiterschaftim Bezirke Chomutov), 16.10.1952.

50NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 254, Informace o nespravnychzjevech pri praci mezi pracujıcımi nemeckenarodnosti [Information on incorrect approachesto work among workers of German nationality].


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classes. The Ministry of Education and particular schools controlled these optional lessons, but

separate German schools were never permitted.51

The party’s somewhat ambiguous policy towards the German minority in the 1950s can be

summarized in three words: normalization – care – control. ‘Normalization’ brought an end to

explicit repression and discrimination and provided some measure of compensation, which

was welcomed by German citizens. ‘Care’ and ‘control’ often caused misunderstanding or

disillusionment even among relatively loyal Germans. The concept of ‘care’, which I take to

be central, is often excluded from discussions of integration and assimilation. However, ‘care’

enabled some degree of cultural emancipation, but only if the forms of ‘cultural enjoyment and

self-realization’ could be controlled and ‘supported a companionable collaboration’ of Czechs

and Germans.52 The anxiety about German autonomy or isolation often resulted in refusing

any initiative that came from the German-speaking milieu. Representatives of German

culture, such as journalists or actors in German ensembles, often came into conflict with

functionaries charged with controlling the activities of German-speaking citizens.53 In brief,

Germans were tolerated as diligent workers whose needs could be represented by trade unions

and other organizations, but not by independent German intellectual and cultural elites.

Within the party a permanent struggle took place for the correct German policy. It was a

struggle between distrust and anti-German chauvinism, on the one hand, and the uncontrolled

activity or autonomy of the German minority on the other. The latter, it was argued, would

endanger the legitimacy of the Communist Party as a guarantee of the post-war order. The

discourse and policy of ‘care’ presumed that the party would retain control; a way out of the

schizophrenic situation between the Scylla of ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and the Charybdis of

repeating the ‘failure of the inter-war minority policy’.54 ‘Care’ and ‘control’ were two

interconnected responses to the insecurity of the 1950s. Integration and emancipation were

welcomed but only under the control of the party and in harmony with the construction of a

socialist society.

LOCAL INTERACTIONS AND EVERYDAY LIFE OF GERMANS IN THE EARLY

SOCIALIST DICTATORSHIP

It is a winter afternoon on the 17th of February 1952. In Branany, a village between Most

and Bılina in northern Bohemia, some 100 Germans come together after the local

national committee called a meeting for German-speaking citizens. Nearly all the adult

51NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 254, Pripomınky ke zprave o stavuprace mezi ob�cany nemecke narodnosti [Observa-tions on the report about work among citizens ofGerman nationality].

52NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 252, Navrh zasad Politickeho byraUV KSC pro praci mezi nemeckym obyvatelst-vem v CSR, 19.11.1956 [Proposal for principlesgoverning work among the German populationfor adoption by the Politburo of the KSC CentralCommittee].

53For example, the problems of the theatreensemble F. Schiller at the end of the 1950s; seeNA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke oddelenı),sv. 35, a.j. 258, l. 37–41, 81–83.

54The difficulty of combining socialist inter-nationalism with a clear refusal to recognizeminority rights was characteristic of many officialdocuments, articles and books in the 1950s. See,for example, Milos Hajek and Olga Stankova,Narodnostnı otazka v lidove demokratickem Ceskoslo-vensku [The Nationality Question in the People’sDemocratic Czechoslovakia] (Prague, 1956).


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Germans from the village came, mostly miners. The president of the county national

committee gives a speech, then another comrade speaks about proletarian internation-

alism for about one hour. Ten German citizens take part in the discussion. German songs

and recitations follow. From the bookstall, some 90 books have been sold; that is a

success. The bestseller is Far from Moscow by V. N. Azhaev – a novel about constructing a

pipeline at the time of the great patriotic war. However, in the local pub, which is

situated in the same house next to the room, where the German get-together takes place,

a very different atmosphere prevails. As every day, local Czechs are gathering in the pub

and they are not at all pleased with the meeting of the Germans ‘in their pub’. Their

remarks concerning the get-together and its organizers were characterized diplomatically

by an informant as ‘they spoke critically’. One of the Czechs, a Party member, said that

‘he will return his Party-membership card, because he didn’t imagine that this would be

the Party policy’. The organizers of the meeting are trying to calm the local communist

down by asserting that as a Party member he should understand its nationality policy.

They do not succeed and verbal attacks against the Germans continue until the next

day.55

This short report from the northern Bohemian borderlands illustrates much of the uncertainty

that surrounded how to interpret Communist Party instructions, communications, ordinances

and laws concerning the German minority. Primarily, it was the contrast between the

predominant atmosphere and opinions of the Czech majority in the borderlands and the

aspirations of the party and state authorities, who wanted to integrate the Germans into the

construction of socialism. In this part of the article, I would like to discuss these interactions at

the local level by considering the negotiations between the central authorities and local

functionaries and the conditions under which the German minority lived in Czechoslovakia in

the 1950s.

One of the clearest policy case studies of the interactions between the authorities at the

central and local levels and the Germans themselves is the return of family houses to their

former German owners. The negotiating strategies adopted, and ‘deconfiscation’ as the action

was called in official documents, also tell us a lot about the problem of the legitimization of the

political system. From the beginning, it was clear that a majority did not welcome any

restitution of former German property.

Lesov, a small village near Karlovy Vary in western Bohemia, had been known as a bulwark

of Sudeten German anti-fascists in the 1930s, where a social democratic mayor remained in

office until September 1938. Out of 69 families who were allowed to stay after the transfer in

1946, 61 belonged to the officially recognized anti-fascists. From the point of view of the

communist authorities, Lesov was exactly the sort of place where the restitution of family

houses was just and necessary. However, Lesov also demonstrates how difficult it was for the

party and central authorities to realize their intentions.

Liese Cinovska, a worker in a porcelain factory, and her brother Richard, a miner (both

anti-fascists) had bad luck. A Czech Communist Party and local national committee member,

55NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1285, sl.Nemci – Ustecky kraj (1950–1953), Zapis zeschuze koordina�cnı komise pro narodnostnı otaz-

ku u ONV v Bıline, 27.2.1952 [Minutes of ameeting of the co-ordinating commission for thenationality question, ONV Bılin].


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Petr Sozansky, liked their house and obtained it in the early 1950s. During deconfiscation,

Liese and Richard Cinovsky not only did not receive their house back, but the new owner,

Mr Sozansky, abandoned their rental contract on 15 June 1952. Also, because Liese Cinovska

was still waiting for her Czechoslovak citizenship, she and her brother were not able to react

quickly enough. Another small house in the village, whose owner Leopold Grund was more

than seventy years old, was undermined and destroyed – ironically by the local mine plant.

Neither the national land fund (which had confiscated the house originally), nor the local mine

responded to Grund’s request for compensation. Marie Stankova, a German widow of a Czech

post office worker and anti-fascist, did not get her house back and was terrorized by the new

Czech owner.

Adolf Sandig, a German member of the local national committee in Lesov, published a list

of these and other cases of ‘anti-German sabotage’ in the journal Aufbau und Frieden. As a result

he was removed from the committee on the grounds that he ‘had not understood the role of

the representative of Germans in the committee in the right way’.56 Sandig was reinstated

following the intervention of the county national committee in Karlovy Vary which alerted

the local committee of the need to collaborate with citizens of German nationality.57

Were these obstacles to restitution exceptional or the norm? A sample of all the cases of

deconfiscation or restitution from two counties, Most and Litvınov, will help us to answer this

question. A large number of German owners of family houses were not able to request their

property at all because they had been transferred to the interior of the country. Among those

who demanded their family houses, the local national committees, in accordance with the co-

ordinating commission of the county national committee, satisfied nearly 90 per cent of the

applicants. Between 1951 and 1953, the loyalty of former German owners to the Czech nation

and state was less important than it had been in the past, although the accusation of being a

‘member of a Nazi organization’ provided reason enough for the refusal of a restitution

request.58 A more decisive factor was if any Czech person or enterprise was interested in the

house and – if the answer was yes – how well he or she was integrated into the ‘construction of

socialism’.59

Some of the restitution cases occupied former owners, municipalities, and local, county,

regional and national committees until the end of the 1950s. Some of the higher functionaries,

mostly at the regional level, criticized the compromises that were forced upon them. They

acknowledged that even German anti-fascists, who without doubt had the right to regain their

property, very often ‘are not able to get it in practice’. According to these authorities, the

situation just reinforced the feeling of many Germans that ‘there was not the same law for

Germans as for Czechs’.60

In terms of the relationship between the Czech majority and the German minority, disputes

over property were not the only problem. There were many reasons why the Czechs were

reluctant to come to a rapprochement with the Germans who remained in Czechoslovakia.

56NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1286, sl. S-S, 8.7.1952.

57ibid.58SOkA Most (State county archive, Most), f.

354 (ONV Litvınov, county national committee,Litvinov)), i.�c. 1 (Zasedanı rady, council meet-ing)), kat.�c. 147 (zasedanı 5.9.1952).

59SOkA Most, f. 354 (ONV Litvınov), i.�c. 1

(Zasedanı rady), kat.�c. 147 (zasedanı 5.9.1952).60NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-

lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 271, l. 17–18, Prıpis KV KSCPlzen UV KSC ve veci dekonfiskace, 16.1.1960

[Communication of the Regional Committee ofthe KSC in Plzen regarding restitution].


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Once, I had an experience, which changed my whole life. It was in 1954, I think. We

were listening to a sports event – I don’t know if it was football or ice hockey.

Czechoslovakia was playing West Germany and won overwhelmingly. We sat together

in front of the radio, our whole bunch – people, who ate and drank together, who played

chess and handball in a sport’s club in Liberec. The jubilation after the victory of course

was huge. I don’t know why I did it, but suddenly I said: ‘We really wiped the floor with

them!’ Maybe, I just wanted to show that I belong to this country, not only because I live

here, but also with my feelings and thoughts that I am a member of the bunch. I have

never forgotten those open-mouthed and stiff faces. The one, who said it, probably said it

for all: ‘We wiped the floor with them? Why we? You are through and through, a

Sudeten German!’ Now, it was me who had a stiff face. I am sure this sentence was not

malicious and didn’t intend to discriminate against me, but just wanted to say, that I am

not a Czech. However, it changed my whole life. From this moment, I felt that whatever

I do, they never will accept me – and also I didn’t feel as if I was one of them any more.

The family of Rudolf Schnittner, the author of the above letter to a Czech friend,61 was not

transferred to Germany after the war. His father was a foundry specialist, who was needed in

the industry in Rumburk, northern Bohemia. Rudolf Schnittner was nine years old after the

war and tried to integrate into Czech society in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He attended a

high school in Liberec, and had lots of Czech friends. However, according to his story,

experiences like the one quoted above convinced him that he would always remain a foreigner

in Czechoslovakia. To become an equal member of society, he had to go to Germany. He

succeeded in the end, when he emigrated in 1965.

Experiences like that of Rudolf Schnittner, apolitical and difficult to measure, often

influenced decisions and human relationships more than the framework of formal rights and

obligations. It was of immense importance what relationship a person had with his or her

neighbours, co-workers or schoolmates. We cannot really generalize about the extent to

which German nationality (or Sudeten German identity) influenced these relationships. It was

different in every case. However, I would argue that in these personal relationships between

Czechs and Germans, frictions and tensions very often lasted for longer, well beyond the turn

to integration in official Communist Party policy.

In archival sources, we can often read about cases of people shouting at a German who

occupied a place on a bus or train – as a German one should first let the Czechs sit down.62

Typical are complaints about salespeople, who not only refused to communicate in German

with German women (who didn’t speak Czech), but who forbade them from speaking

German to each other in ‘their’ shops.63 Examples of everyday belittling differed from place to

place. Mrs Hurnıkova, the wife of an anti-fascist from Chomutov in northern Bohemia,

sometimes came home crying in the early 1950s; after queuing for hours to buy meat, Czech

61Rudolf Schnittner, Jsem zkratka Sudetak:dvanact dopisu Jendovi [I’m just a Sudet’ak: TwelveLetters to Jenda) (Prague, 2006), 59.

62NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1284,Zprava o vysledku setrenı stıznosti Josefa Witkeho,18.6.1951 [Report on the investigation of acomplaint lodged by Josef Witek].

63NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 276, l. 2–7, Zprava o schuzıchob�canu nemecke narodnosti v olomouckem kraji,May 1952 [Report on meetings of citizens ofGerman nationality in Olomouc region, May1952].


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women grabbed her and sent her to the end of the queue, shouting ‘Germans to the back’.64

Other reports and records from the 1950s confirm that experiences like this were not unique.65

Some Czech citizens tried to cause even greater difficulties for Germans by informing the

authorities or the police about their lasting Nazi convictions or that they were preparing

actions against the Czechoslovak state. A certain strata of Czech society believed well into the

1950s that there remained a continued threat of German expansionism to which the country

should remain alert.

Despite hundreds of similar cases, relationships between Czechs and Germans developed

‘normally’, without any reported conflicts, in many parts of the country. People often had to

work together to solve problems. In this context, let me provide an interesting insight into two

southern Bohemian areas, Horska Kvilda and Lenora. In official reports in the 1950s both

places were characterized as exhibiting poor relations between the nationalities, but everyday

life could be quite normal and peaceful.

In 1957, in Horska Kvilda, ten local German woodmen refused to collect their identity

cards – and so, at least formally, their Czechoslovak citizenship.66 One might assume that this

created or reflected poor relations between the Czechs and the Germans in this mountain

village. However, the opposite was the case. The main problem for Horska Kvilda, situated a

few kilometres from the barbed wire of the western frontier, were the deserted cottages, which

were gradually falling down. When settlers came, the national committee tried to provide

accommodation for them. However, after a month, most of the settlers left because the living

conditions were so poor. In 1951, the electric generator broke and there was no money for a

new one. Czechs and Germans complained that it was ‘dark in the village’. There was also no

pub in Kvilda, with Czech inhabitants suggesting that a German named Zettl, who ran a local

shop, would be the best innkeeper. According to a report in Aufbau und Frieden, ‘the only

comfort for the inhabitants is the nearest station of the frontier police, which sometimes invites

them – Czechs and Germans – to their entertainment’. The schooling practices in Horska

Kvilda with regard to German instruction went beyond the normal rules of voluntary lessons

for German children. According to the reports, the work of the local teacher

positively influenced children and their parents. At the school, German children are first

taught in their mother tongue and learn Czech as a foreign language. These children

come to school from the mountain hamlets and don’t know one single Czech word. In

the third class, they already speak and read Czech fluently.67

64Interview with Hedvika Hurnıkova in MatejSpurny (ed.), Sudetske osudy [Sudeten Destinies](Domazlice, 2006), 28–37.

65NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 271, l. 84–87, Zprava ze schuze sprıslusnıky nemecke narodnosti, Kino Tachov,17.6.1951 [Report on a meeting with representa-tives of the German nationality in CinemanTachov].

66NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 270, l. 5–20, Situa�cnı zprava o

stavu a praci mezi nemeckym obyvatelstvem vCeskobudejovickem kraji, 4.4.1957 [Situationreport on work among the German populationin Ceske Budejovice region].

67NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 33, a.j. 252, l. 265–267, Hlasenı o besede snemeckymi ob�cany v Horske Kvilde (Sumava),13.12.1958 [Report on a discussion with Germancitizens in Horska Kvilda, Sumava].


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Czechs not only mixed with Germans, but also expressed respect towards their German co-

workers.

Common work, in particular in the local glass factory, was an important integrative aspect of

the second ‘problematic’ community, in Lenora. As late as 1957, local Germans were refusing

to take up their Czechoslovak citizenship68 and their traditional choir (very popular among

southern Bohemian Germans) was still, in the late 1950s, criticized for singing old German

‘Heimatlieder’ in the local German dialect.69 On the other side, the president of the national

committee in Lenora, former baker Cınek, was accused of being a Czech chauvinist, who,

according to the reports, ‘refuses working with Germans’. 70

Ethnographical researches from the 1980s, however, describe Lenora in the 1950s as an

interesting example of multicultural coexistence. In terms of national, cultural and language

problems at the time, ethnographers also show that, in the case of Lenora, it was not only the

dichotomy of Czechs and Germans that characterized the borderlands. In the early 1950s, only

about 50 per cent of Czech-speaking inhabitants lived in Lenora. The rest of the population

comprised Germans, Hungarians who had moved from southern Slovakia, re-migrants from

France (whose children spoke only French) and Slovak glassworkers, who came from

Romania. The latter, with the German specialists, worked in the glass factory.

The Germans, as the only autochthons, were the most closed group, but gradually the

barriers started to break down. An important role was played by the Slovak re-migrants from

Romania. As the first non-Germans, they started to attend the funerals of their German co-

workers. The Germans returned this form of social support after some time. It was the

authentic and intensive Catholicism of both groups which brought them close to each other,

especially for family occasions. Although each group went through different socialization

processes and had a different relationship with the place where they now lived, some habits,

practices and rituals united them. Moreover, the Slovaks from Romania had not experienced

the time after ‘Munich’ and the Nazi terror in the Sudetenland – and they did not have an

explicit experience which would provoke anti-German hatred. Besides the school, where all

ethnic communities met, the glass factory played an important role. Because the Slovaks had

used a different technique in Romania, they had to learn from German specialists here. The

latter enjoyed the respect of the Romanian Slovaks. As this example shows, profession and

social status could bring people of different ethnicities together.

I would now like to focus on the everyday life and strategies of the Germans themselves.

These strategies ranged from efforts to integrate through to the pursuit of autonomy and

autonomous living in Czechoslovakia. How, then, did ordinary Germans live in the 1950s?

What did they aspire to and hope to achieve?

68NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 270, l. 5–20, Situa�cnı zprava ostavu a praci mezi nemeckym obyvatelstvem vCeskobudejovickem kraji, 4.4.1957.

69NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 270, l. 21– Matej, Zprava z krajeCeske Budejovice [Report from Ceske Budejo-vice region], 2.3.1959.

70NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 270, l. 5–20, Situa�cnı zprava ostavu a praci mezi nemeckym obyvatelstvem vCeskobudejovickem kraji, 4.4.1957. See also NA,AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke oddelenı), sv. 35,a.j. 270, l. 27–32, Situa�cnı zprava o stavu a pracimezi nemeckym obyvatelstvem v Ceskobudejo-vickem kraji, 4.10.1960.


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It is a German village. Approximately 200 inhabitants live here, among them just three

Czech families. Besides the teacher, there are only Germans on the local national

committee. Its president is a 65-year-old social democrat, who was mayor here in the

inter-war period and again since 1945, continuously. He doesn’t speak a word of Czech.

He is very conservative, who for example criticized women for working, while saying

that it is sad, when a man is not able to sustain his family. The committee secretary is a

similar type, with the difference, that he speaks a little bit of Czech. There is a school in

the village, with only 6 children, who all come from German families. When at school,

the children don’t speak Czech at all. . . . The secretary refused to introduce the assembly

with even a few Czech sentences.71

During the national committee meeting in Cerny Potok (in western Bohemia), from which

the protocol quoted above comes, the party delegation had to persuade local Germans to

participate in discussions. They refused at first, one of them even arguing that ‘once, in 1938,

he discussed and was imprisoned because of that’, by which he meant to compare, albeit

indirectly, the Nazi regime with the contemporary rule of the Communist Party. In the end,

the debate turned to everyday problems, when local inhabitants complained, that ‘Germans in

Cerny Potok have to eat small potatoes, whereas Czechs get the big ones’.72

Cerny Potok, with such a large German majority at the end of the 1950s, was an exception

in north-western Bohemia. In 1962 it was coupled administratively with the nearest town,

which made it possible to disband the German national committee.73 However, this did not

mean that relatively isolated communities of Germans did not exist elsewhere. Also, reports

from other parts of the country confirm that many Germans did not come into contact with

the wider Czech public until as late as the mid-1950s.

Besides western Bohemia, with several municipalities with German majorities (which

included large numbers of German miners), quite extreme conditions were reported from

northern Moravia. When the authorities finally managed to persuade a significant number of

the local German population to come to meetings, ten years after the war and the expulsions,

they first had to discuss the ‘injustice’ of 1945–7. Local Germans openly confessed that they did

not trust state policy. A report about a meeting in Jesenık illustrates the predominant

atmosphere:

When the representative of the county national committee opened the assembly and

welcomed the Germans as ‘equal citizens of [the] Czechoslovak republic’, a large majority

of the visitors burst into a loud laugh. It was tactically completely wrong and it influenced

the rest of the meeting.74

71NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 273, l. 42–48, Delega�cnı list �c.219, Severo�cesky a Zapado�cesky kraj, Schuze aporady, 4–7.10.1961.

72ibid.

73This wasn’t the only case. In Kovarska, avillage a few kilometres away with a population of2000, 1600 were Germans.

74NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 276, l. 2–7, Zprava o schuzıchob�canu nemecke narodnosti v olomouckem kraji,May 1952.


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Outspoken criticism expressed during these meetings often scared local and regional

functionaries. Remarkably, this did not result in any criminal prosecutions. There were,

however, exceptions. For some of its critics, the authorities tried to find evidence of their

involvement with Nazi organizations or to accuse them of spreading discontent and

manipulating whole communities to active opposition against the socialist state.75

In northern Bohemia, where leftist workers comprised the majority of the German

population, meetings were also dramatic. Some of the participants shouted at the comrades

from county and regional committees.76 However, the situation differed from the conditions

described above in the west and north-east of the country. Whereas there, in the remote

mountainous districts, Germans often tried to isolate themselves from the Czech majority, in

the industrial centres of northern Bohemia politically and socially active German anti-fascists

were dominant. These people, often pre-war members of the Communist Party, were

convinced that their way of life and the sufferings of the past entitled them to be critical. The

authorities really could do very little against these long-standing German party members, who

were aware of their position and the influence they could exert.

Probably the most pronounced of these communist critiques of the party dictatorship and its

policy towards Germans came from Edmund Hunigen from Hermanice, near Liberec. As a

founding member of the Communist Party in 1921, he escaped to Prague from Henlein’s

forces in 1938. Two days later, he was arrested by a Czech policeman and handed over to the

Gestapo. He spent more than five years in Oranienburg and Flossenburg. His wife and

daughter spent the war in England and his son fought with Tito’s partisans. In 1945 the family

gathered in Prague and, for Edmund, another difficult struggle began – this time for the

dignity of German anti-fascists in Czechoslovakia. It looked like he was finally defeated when

the German anti-fascist committee in Liberec was dissolved in 195377 and Hunigen had to

work in a stone pit.

Despite being praised by the loyal German functionary Josef Lenk, who said at the end of

the 1950s that ‘comrade Hunigen had already overcome many wrong opinions’,78 he had not

given up. A few months later, at a meeting of German citizens, Hunigen captured something

of the relationship between the authorities and German workers and anti-fascists at that time:

There is no need to write about proletarian internationalism on Sundays, internationalism

has to be experienced in the everyday life of our workers. Many stories show that this is

not the case. The blackguards in the Party and trade unions know it, but they keep silent

about it. . . .We experienced another dirty business in the construction of the markets in

Liberec, where originally Germans were to be employed. At the last moment, they were

suspended and replaced by Czechs. . . .The case of Ing Klinger shows how people are

driven into the hands of our enemies. Klinger lived here in Liberec; he had a house here

75NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1285, AktivNemcu v Olomouckem kraji 30.9–3.10.1952.

76NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1284,Zprava o navsteve aktivu Nemcu na Ustecku vednech 11–13.12.1952 [Report on a meeting ofGermans in Usti].

77NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1282,Nemecka otazka na Liberecku – dopis A.Pohla a

E. Hunigena z 12.11.1951, 15.1.1952 [The Ger-man question in Liberec – letter from A. Pohl andE. Hunigen].

78NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 274, l. 48–49, Krajsky aktivfunkcionaru nemecke narodnosti, Liberec,6.6.1959 [Regional meeting of functionaries withGerman nationality, Liberec].


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and made improvements worth 20 million crowns to the Czechoslovak state. Neither his

wife nor children spoke German, he alone had German nationality. He had a house in

which one of these supercommunists was interested and supercommunists from the town

hall handed Klinger’s house over to him. Is it fair when things like that happen, when a

blackguard, hiding out in the Party, deprived Klinger of his house? Klinger went to the

West and today he appears in an exhibition as a spy and deviationist. That is the end of a

communist manhunt. . . .I went to a concentration camp because of people, who are still

alive today [and] have great influence.79

Desperate Czech comrades proposed a ‘conversation’ with Hunigen to tell him that ‘he

shouldn’t express himself in public any more because of his old age’ and that in any event he

should consult with the party authorities before speaking out on any matter.

Hunigen was not the only one. In every region of the borderlands, active – and from the

point of view of Czech party functionaries, similarly troublesome – German anti-fascists

promoted internationalism and called for integration in theory to become integration in

practice. Wilhelm Pusch, also a pre-war party member, called the Germans in one letter to a

journalist from Aufbau und Frieden ‘slaves without civil rights’ and demanded amnesty for

imprisoned Germans.80 In 1957, at a German meeting with functionaries from the regional

party committee, Pusch criticized the never-ending restitutions, the senseless interrogation of

Germans by the criminal police, and the decriminalization of former German Wehrmacht

soldiers and the crimes of revolutionary guards in 1945. He asked where the Communist Party

was at that time. According to him, the party missed a great opportunity to win the support of

Germans after 1948 and it was now too late.81 Of German party members and anti-fascists

Adolf Huhnel, Rudolf Klicher and Otto Togl from northern Moravia, reports said that they

were ‘aggressive, nationalistic, chauvinistic and demagogical’. According to the authorities,

Otto Togl was ‘the same as comrade Hunigen in Liberec’.82 Klicher, also a founding member

of the Communist Party in the Czech lands, declared during a trade union meeting in the mid-

1950s that the promise of equality with Czechs was not kept and he appealed to the ‘gentry’ to

‘let us get out of here, I would rather be unemployed in the West, where I would live more

freely and better, because here I am a slave and nothing’.83

Both strategies described above – the efforts at autonomy in small village communities and the

active and irreconcilable critique expressed by the old anti-fascists – survived until the beginning

of the 1960s. By that time an active German minority, struggling for its collective identity, was

79NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), k. 34, a.j. 267, l. 51–52, Informa�cnı zaznam onespravnem vystoupenı s. Edmunda Hunigena�clena KSC od roku 1921 na aktivu dopisovatelu a�ctenaru �cas. Aufbau und Frieden v Liberci,23.9.1961 [Information on incorrect remarks madeby comrade Edmund Hunigen, KSC membersince 1921, at a meeting of letter-writers andreaders of the magazine Aufbau und Frieden inLiberec].

80NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1284,Zprava o navsteve aktivu Nemcu na Ustecku vednech 11–13.12.1952.

81NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 273, l. 4–12, Zaznam o aktivu�clenu strany nemecke narodnosti na KV KSC vUstı nad Labem, 15.11.1957.

82NA, AUV KSC, f. 05/3 (ideologicke odde-lenı), sv. 35, a.j. 276, l. 2–7, Zprava o schuzıchob�canu nemecke narodnosti v olomouckem kraji,May 1952.

83NA, f. 850/3 (AMV-dodatky), k. 1285,Krajska Odborova rada Olomouc – provadenızakona 34/53, no date.


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disappearing. Old anti-fascists were dying out and the majority of the surviving communities

dissolved during the 1960s following assimilation and mass emigration to West Germany.

Everyday interactions between the Germans and the Czechs or other inhabitants of the

Czech borderlands in the 1950s were shaped by the tension between changing state policy

towards the German minority and the continuity of popular resentment and hatred towards

them. The Communist Party’s monopoly of power after 1948 represents a rupture concerning

state policy towards ethnic minorities. However, the character of this change is the opposite to

how the first years of communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia are often characterized. With

regard to policy towards the German minority, 1948 represents the end of open repression. In

the 1950s, state policy towards the German-speaking population was not coercive or openly

discriminatory. At the same time, there were continuities, with popular thought and local

practice remaining largely unaffected. As a result of these continuities, Germans were not

respected as a people with equal rights and status in local communities. It was a combination of

material interests (fulfilled at the expense of displaced and remaining Germans), fear and

distrust, which in the 1950s made life uneasy for most Germans. There were, of course,

different stories. In places where more than two dominant ethnic groups were present,

Germans were more likely to find allies. In distant mountainous regions, where people had to

co-operate and help each other to live and work in the mines or factories, Germans were often

respected as skilled and experienced people. However, the fact that the majority of Germans

who remained after the end of the organized forced migration left in the 1960s probably does

not only reflect the better standard of living of their relatives in the West. It seems, too, that it

was the lack of respect they were shown and their inability to recover a sense of belonging to

the country and its society which contributed to the (this time self-imposed) decision to leave

Czechoslovakia.

Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Science and Charles University, Prague


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