Expulsion and Forced Resettlement

Abstract

The Munich tragedy marked the low point in the life of Edvard Beneš. He resigned from the presidency on 5 October and retired to his country residence, where, physically and emotionally exhausted, he spent several days in bed, whilst outside a vast press campaign blamed him for the disaster that had befallen the nation. Deserted by everyone but his family and closest friends, he left Czechoslovakia for London before the month was over.

The terminology of the topic covered in this chapter is of major political and moral importance. Article XIII of the Potsdam Agreement uses the terms transfer for the expulsion of the great majority of the German-speaking population of Czechoslovakia, so do emigree Czech historians (note e.g. R. Luža, The Transfer of the Sudeten-Germans). German historians — with the exception of Marxist historians based in the earstwhile German Democratic Republic — rarely accept this term, even those who cannot be suspected of any anti-Czech bias put the word transfer in inverted commas. The Sudeten-German Association, or historians writing on the organization’s behalf, reject Odsun, the Czech term for the transfer, which translates into German as Abschub. They insist that only the term Vyhnání (German Vertreibung) is the correct description. Czech historians repudiate this claim as it implies that the course of events in 1945 was solely the product of the Czech peoples’ desire for punishment and revenge. Although they do not deny that excesses occurred in the immediate post-war period, they stress (correctly in the author’s opinion) that the international factor, i.e. the determination of the Great Powers to prevent a repetition of the Nazi catastrophe, has to be taken into consideration. The joint Czech-German Historians’ Commission agreed on the German terms ‘Vertreibung und Aussiedlung’. This causes difficulties with the translation into English. Expulsion in English could stand for Vertreibung or for Ausweisung, the latter term being not quite as severe as the former. The term Aussiedlung could be translated by resettlement, which in English has also the meaning of Umsiedlung. This term, the official designation used in East Germany after the war, is altogether unacceptable to German historians today. The author suggests that forced resettlement is the closest term; see also below pp. 148–50.