- As Czechoslovakia was liberated from the Nazis at the
end of World War II, the population of the country took its revenge - not
on the Nazis themselves, but on three million of their fellow citizens.
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- For centuries, three million ethnic Germans had lived
in the Czech lands which became part of Czechoslovakia after World War
I.
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- Clustered around the borders with Germany and Austria
in the Sudetenland, they got along reasonably well with their Czech neighbours.
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- But as the Nazis were driven out of Czechoslovakia, it
was open season on Germans - any Germans.
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- Among those caught up in the violence that followed was
a 15-year-old ethnic German Czech girl, Ingeborg Neumeyer.
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- In the middle of the night, she and her family were evicted
from their apartment in the city of Brno and sent on a death march.
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- "We had no water, no food, and we were constantly
forced on with whips and rifle butts. We were told to walk faster, faster.
If somebody collapsed, they were shot or beaten with rifle butts. In the
ditches by the roadside we could see many dead bodies.
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- "We marched on, kilometre after kilometre. I had
another problem - I was wearing three dresses because my mother had told
me to wear them so I would have something spare to wear later, and we were
not allowed to leave the road, we had to march on, even if you needed the
toilet you had to do it as you walked.
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- "I couldn't march any more and I went to the side
of the road and tried to take off two of my dresses, but one of the Czech
partisans saw me and beat me. I had blood coming out of my mouth and ears
and nose. He took the dresses and threw them away, and threw away my shoes
too."
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- Across Czechoslovakia, thousands of ethnic Germans were
murdered, raped and tortured, in the so-called "wild expulsions".
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- According to Czech military historian Frantisek Hanzlik,
the wild expulsions were in fact carried out on the basis of a government
programme, and there was an official cover-up afterwards.
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- As order returned to Czechoslovakia, the new president,
Eduard Benes, put into operation a plan, hatched with the Allies during
the war, to expel all 3 million Germans from the country without compensation.
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- Agreed at Potsdam, this act of ethnic cleansing was openly
sanctioned by Churchill, Stalin and Truman.
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- Stuck in the middle
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- But did the Sudeten Germans bring it on themselves?
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- During the Czechoslovak communist era, they were rarely
mentioned, or else depicted as Hitler's collaborators.
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- They had not made themselves popular with the Czechs:
in 1935, over a million of them voted for a nationalist German party which
demanded unification of the Sudetenland with Germany.
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- Zdena Nemcova was one of those who witnessed growing
German militancy in the 1930s.
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- She has no sympathy for the plight of the Germans after
the war.
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- "We hated them. People who had survived the concentration
camps were returning and they were describing what happened to them there.
The fact is that people hated the Germans, genuinely hated them so much
that there was a spontaneous reaction, and the feeling was that if they
liked the Third Reich so much, they could go there."
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- It is arguable that the Sudeten Germans had some reason
not to want to belong to a Czechoslovakia that, before the war, did not
always treat them as equal citizens.
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- Be that as it may, the Sudeten Germans found themselves
squeezed between the Nazis who were false friends, the Czechoslovaks who
wreaked disproportionate vengeance, and the victorious Allies who simply
washed their hands.
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- It may be too late to right the historic wrongs, but
it is never too late to remember one of Europe's less honourable episodes.
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- © BBC MMIV
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3466233.stm
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