Sudetenland - a trigger of WW II

[Jaga]

Good and sad video, how German nationalism used these German people and played them and how later they all had to leave:

sudetenland

[pieter]

Parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia in 1935



Parliamentary elections were held in Czechoslovakia on 19 May 1935. The result was a victory for the newly established Sudeten German Party, which won 44 seats in the Chamber and 23 in the Senate. Funded by the German Nazi Party, it won over two-thirds of the vote amongst Sudeten Germans. Voter turnout was 91.9% in the Chamber election and 81.2% for the Senate. The Sudetendeutsche Partei (Sudeten German Party) of the Sudeten German Nazi leader Konrad Henlein sent the second largest bloc of representatives to the Czechoslovak Parliament. Still about one-third of the Sudeten Germans were not Nazi's.


Sudeten German leader Konrad Henlein

German Social Democratic Workers' Party in the Czechoslovak Republic



The German Social Democratic Workers' Party in the Czechoslovak Republic (DSAP, Deutsche sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei in der Tschechoslowakischen Republik; Czech: Německá sociálně demokratická strana dělnická v Československé republice) was a German social democratic party in Czechoslovakia, founded when the Bohemian provincial organization of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria separated itself from the mother party. The founding convention was held in Teplice from 30 August – 3 September 1919; the first leader of the party was Josef Seliger.

In the First Czechoslovak Republic, DSAP was the most important German party, aiming to give the German population a place in the republic. At first the party's leadership was politically and socially radical; the Czechoslovak State was regarded as a "creation of Allied Imperialism" and the Czechoslovak Constitution as the "suicide of democracy". However, these politics changed shortly thereafter as the radical left-wing, led by Karl Kreibich, left the party for the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in October 1920. The number of members fell dramatically from 1921–1926, from 120,000 to 60,000. Unlike right-wing German parties, the DSAP accepted Jews as members, and nominated Jewish candidates for office.



Some leading members of the party started talks with President Masaryk, who tried to persuade the party to join the government. It finally agreed in 1929, when its leader Ludwig Czech became Minister of Public Affairs.

During the years of the great economic crisis, the party lost many of its Sudeten German supporters, and the Sudeten German Party (SdP) gained importance. After the Munich Agreement, when the troops of Nazi Germany began occupying the Sudeten areas (on 1 October 1938), only some of the anti-Nazi opposition members could retreat into the remaining Czechoslovakian territories. Immediately after the entry of the Nazi troops, the persecution of Social Democrats and other opponents of Nazism began. From October to December 1938, 20,000 members of the Social Democratic Party were arrested; 2,500 Sudeten Germans were sent to the Dachau concentration camp alone. Around 30,000 people managed to flee to the West. On 22 February 1939 the DSAP leadership decided to cease all activities in the Czechoslovak Republic and continue working abroad as "Treuegemeinschaft sudetendeutscher Sozialdemokraten". The group began publishing the monthly bulletin Sudeten-Freiheit from Oslo.

The party was a member of the Labour and Socialist International between 1923 and 1938.


Wenzel Jaksch, chairman of the German Social Democratic Workers' Party in the Czechoslovak Republic

The party chairman Wenzel Jaksch (25 September 1896 – 27 November 1966) opposed the growing influence of Nazis in Sudeten German Politics. After Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939 Wenzel escaped to Poland, and after the German invasion of Poland to Great Britain, where he represented the interests of the Sudeten Germans in the Czechoslovak government-in-exile. During the war Jaksch's relations with the Czechs became strained as he opposed to acknowledge the pre-Munich borders of Czechoslovakia of his homeland. After World War II the Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia. Influenced by Edvard Beneš, the British Government refused to allow Jaksch's return to Western Germany until 1949. In 1949 he became responsible for Refugee affairs in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany, in 1950-53 he became director of the Hessian State Office for Expellees, Refugees and Evacuees, and in 1951 he founded the Seliger-Gemeinde, an Association of Sudeten German Social Democrats. In April 1960 Jaksch regretted that West German politicians officially claimed only the 1937 borders of former Nazi Germany and declared that "No Sudeten German would go back to his homeland if he felt that he would to belong to a minority", demanding annexation and union (Anschluss) of "German speaking territories" with Germany as a "sensible solution". In 1957 he was elected a member of the Bundestag, in 1961 he became the Vice-President of the Sudeten German Federal Assembly and in 1964 he became the President of the German Federation of Expellees.

Jaksch was the President of the German Foundation for European Peace Questions (Deutsche Stiftung für Europäische Friedensfragen) and a member of the Sudeten German Council.

Jaksch died in a road accident in Wiesbaden.

Demography of the Pre-war Czechoslovakia

In 1921, the population of multi-ethnic Czechoslovakia comprised 6.6 million Czechs, 3.2 million Germans, two million Slovaks, 0.7 million Hungarians, half a million Ruthenians (Rusyns), 300,000 Jews, and 100,000 Poles, as well as Gypsies, Croats and other ethnic groups.[1][2][3] German-speakers represented one-third of the population of the Bohemian lands, and about 23.4 percent of the population of the whole republic (13.6 million).[citation needed] The Sudetenland possessed huge chemical works and lignite mines, as well as textile, china, and glass factories. To the west, a triangle of historic ethnic German settlement surrounding the town Eger was the most active area for pan-German nationalism. The Upper Palatinate Forest, an area primarily populated by Germans, extended along the Bavarian frontier to the poor agricultural areas of southern Bohemia.

Moravia contained many patches of ethnic German settlement in the north and south. Most typical in these areas were German "language islands", towns inhabited by ethnic Germans, but surrounded by rural Czechs. Extreme German nationalism was never prevalent in these areas. German nationalism in the coal-mining region of southern Silesia, which was 40.5% German, was restrained by fear of competition from industry in the German Reich.

Rise of the Nazi party



The Sudeten German nationalists, particularly the Nazis, expanded their activities during the Depression years. On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. The Czechoslovak government prepared to suppress the Sudeten Nazi Party. In the Autumn of 1933, the Sudeten Nazis dissolved their organization, and the German Nationals were pressured to do likewise. The government expelled German Nationals and Sudeten Nazis from local government positions. The Sudeten German population was indignant, especially in nationalist strongholds like Egerland.

During the Great Depression the mostly mountainous regions populated by the German minority, together with other peripheral regions of Czechoslovakia, were hurt by the economic depression more than the interior of the country. The controversies between the Czechs and the German-speaking minority lingered on throughout the 1920s, and intensified in the 1930s. The high unemployment, as well as the imposition of Czech in schools and all public spaces, made people more open to populist and extremist movements such as fascism, communism, and German irredentism. In these years, the parties of German nationalists and later the Sudeten German National Socialist Party (SdP) with its radical demands gained immense popularity among Germans in Czechoslovakia.

On 1 October 1933, Konrad Henlein with his deputy Karl Hermann Frank, aided by other members of the Kameradschaftsbund, a youth organization of mystical orientation, created a new political organization. The Sudeten German Home Front (Sudetendeutsche Heimatfront) professed loyalty to the Czechoslovak state but championed decentralization. It absorbed most former German Nationals and Sudeten Nazis.

In 1935 the Sudeten German Home Front became the Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei) (SdP) and embarked on an active propaganda campaign. In the May election, the SdP won more than 60% of the Sudeten German vote. The German Agrarians, Christian Socialists, and Social Democrats each lost approximately one-half of their followers. The SdP became the centre of German nationalist forces. The party represented itself as striving for a just settlement of Sudeten German claims within the framework of Czechoslovak democracy. Henlein, however, maintained secret contact with Nazi Germany and received material aid from Berlin. The SdP endorsed the idea of a Führer and mimicked Nazi methods with banners, slogans, and uniformed troops. Concessions offered by the Czechoslovak government, including the installation of exclusively Sudeten German officials in Sudeten German areas and possible participation of the SdP in the cabinet, were rejected. By 1937 most SdP leaders supported Hitler's pan-German objectives.

On 13 March 1938, the Third Reich annexed Austria, a "union" known as the Anschluss. Immediately thereafter many Sudeten Germans supported Henlein. On 22 March, the German Agrarian Party, led by Gustav Hacker, fused with the SdP. German Christian Socialists in Czechoslovakia suspended their activities on 24 March; their deputies and senators entered the SdP parliamentary club. Only the Social Democrats continued to champion democratic freedom. The masses, however, supported the SdP.

After World War II the Sudetenland was restored to Czechoslovakia, which expelled most of . When Czechoslovakia was reconstituted after the Second World War, the Sudeten Germans were expelled and the Czechoslovakian authorities repopulated the area with Czechs. The region today is inhabited almost exclusively by Czech speakers.


Sudeten Germans make their way to the railway station in Liberec, in former Czechoslovakia, to be transferred to Germany in this July, 1946 photo. After the end of the war, millions of German nationals and ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from both territory Germany had annexed, and formerly German lands that were transferred to Poland and the Soviet Union. The estimated numbers of Germans involved ranges from 12 to 14 million, with a further estimate of between 500,000 and 2 million dying during the expulsion.

[pieter]

The camera follows dozens of German soldiers and civilians – men, women and children – wearing white armbands being herded along a road on the outskirts of Prague by armed Czech militias. The scene changes and we see a line of German men standing on the edge of a ditch. Then someone off screen begins shooting them at random, one after another. Then, another part of the footage shows a military truck running over the bodies, some of which are presumably still alive.



Massacre in Czechoslovakia

Newly Discovered Film Shows Post-War Executions

It has long been known that German civilians fell victim to Czech excesses immediately following the Nazi surrender at the end of World War II. But a newly discovered video shows one such massacre in brutal detail. And it has come as a shock to the Czech Republic.

Von Jan Puhl
02.06.2010, 16:28 Uhr



For decades, the images lay forgotten in an aluminum canister -- almost seven minutes of original black and white film, shot with an 8 mm camera on May 10, 1945, in the Prague district of Borislavka during the confusing days of the German surrender.

The man who shot the film was Jirí Chmelnicek, a civil engineer and amateur filmmaker who lived in the Borislavka district and wanted to document the city's liberation from the brutal Nazi occupation. Chmelnicek filmed tanks rolling through the streets, soldiers and refugees. Then, at some point, his camera also caught groups of Germans, who had been driven out of their houses and into Kladenska Street by Red Army soldiers and Czech militiamen.

Chmelnicek's film shows how the Germans were rounded up in a nearby movie theater, also called the Borislavka. The camera then pans to the side of the street, where 40 men and at least one woman stand with their backs to the lens. A meadow can be seen in the background. Shots ring out and, one after another, each person in the line slumps and falls forward over a low embankment. The injured lying on the ground beg for mercy. Then a Red Army truck rolls up, its tires crushing dead and wounded alike. Later other Germans can be seen, forced to dig a mass grave in the meadow.

A Shock to Czechs


Czech police uncovered human remains in August 2010 in what appeared to be a mass grave in a field near the village of Dobronín, in the Jihlava district (okres) within Vysočina Region of the Czech Republic.

The shaky images show an event that has been described again and again by eyewitnesses and historians: the systematic killing of German civilians. Yet the film comes as a shock to Czechs. "Until now, there was no footage whatsoever of such executions," says Czech documentary filmmaker David Vondracek, who showed the historical images on television. "When I watched this for the first time, it was like seeing a live broadcast from the past."

The only such images known before were taken by a US Air Force camera team. That footage showed injured Germans lying on the ground in Plzen, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in early May 1945. The images included some dead bodies, but they didn't show a liquidation, from beginning to end, like this one.

Vondracek's documentary about Czech atrocities, called "Killings, Czech Style," aired during primetime on Czech state television just two days before May 8, the anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender. The broadcast marks yet another milestone on the Czech road toward confronting a not-always-comfortable World War II past -- a path the country has been working its way down for years.

Even organizations representing "Sudeten Germans" -- ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovak territory after the war -- took notice. Horst Seehofer, governor of Bavaria, plans to pay an official visit to Prague soon, making him the first holder of his office to do so since World War II. "A great deal has come into the open where the Sudeten Germans are concerned," Seehofer commented recently.

Victim to Acts of Revenge



After the Second World War Czech people took revenge on their German-speaking neighbors

Following Nazi Germany's defeat, the Czechs and the Red Army expelled around 3 million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia. In the process, up to 30,000 civilians fell victim to acts of revenge. Only a small minority of them had been Nazi perpetrators. Germans and Czechs had lived side by side for decades before Hitler's 1938 annexation of Bohemia and Moravia, the two regions that make up the majority of the Czech Republic today.

No one knows who singled out the Germans in Borislavka, nor what crimes they were accused of committing. They were most likely killed by Red Army soldiers, perhaps also by "Revolutionary Guards" -- members of Czech militias. Those firing the shots may also have included former Czech collaborators, who had previously worked with the Germans and who wanted to clear their names with a show of anti-German brutality.

Helena Dvoracková, amateur filmmaker Jirí Chmelnicek's daughter, was one of the first to see the images of these executions. She doesn't remember how old she was when her father set up his projection screen and ran the film. "I don't remember either whether he said anything about it -- and really, there wasn't much to be said," she says.

'Under the Meadow'

Her father kept the film hidden at home for decades. Communist police even came calling -- someone had figured out that the footage existed. The police asked about the film and threatened Chmelnicek. But the filmmaker didn't turn over his reel. He wanted the world eventually to learn what had been done to defenseless people that day in May in Borislavka.

Ten years ago, long after her father's death, Helena Dvoracková offered the historical footage to a well-known Czech television historian, but the historian kept the film under wraps. "People will stone me to death if I show this," he supposedly said, and placed the reel in the state television station's archives. Documentary maker Vondracek found it there, after a cameraman who knew the amateur filmmaker's family told him about it.

Today Borislavka is one of Prague's nicer districts, and tall grass has grown over the meadow where the executions took place. Vondracek now wants to start a search for the Germans' mass grave. "It must be somewhere under the meadow," he says.

Likely not all that far away from a memorial plaque for two Czechs who fell in the battle against the Nazis on May 6, 1945.

Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein

[kaima]

21.01.1945 the German anti-partisan unit of edelweiss of Ostrý Grúň and Kľak burned down and killed 149 Local residents.

[karl]

Jaga

An excelent presentation of our long past history, but one of meanness of people toward other people for the reasons of that time that was theirs alone.

I do remember from our school book history of those events that were brought once again in to view. Our past history is not a good history to be proud of but demonstrates what we as people should never forget, but to insure not ever to repeat.

Karl

[kaima]

A tragic and terrible war story. Worse than usual, it is not recommended for sensitive people.

KILLING IN THE LUPKOW TUNNEL AND WOMEN BUILDERS:

In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Polish engineers blew up their half of the Lupkow tunnel. The tunnel and the railway line were repaired and put into operation by the Germans in 1943, when they transported military equipment to the Eastern Front.

A year later in 1944, the retreating Nazi troops blew the tunnel from the Polish side. And from the Slovak side they performed a terrible act, chasing into it all their captives, Russians and partisans from the local area, along with sick cattle. Then they pushed the locomotive into the tunnel, damaged the wagons and burned down the second entrance. Everyone trapped in the tunnel died a terrible death.

After the battle front passed the area, the Red Army rapidly built a serpentine track to bypass the tunnel, 3.5 km long, which was followed a large arc around the original track and replaced the tunnel. Due to demanding conditions (steep grades and tight curves), however, there were 2 derailments of trains with large material losses, so it was given the nickname "devilish railway".

The repair of the tunnel was undertaken by a unit of Soviet railway troops. In order for the operation to not conflict with international agreements, the unit impersonated civilian construction brigade Putrem.

V. Juráň recalls young women from the Russian technical unit - mostly Russian, who made up 70 percent of the unit: "They wore chemical protective clothing, gas masks on their faces, using narrow-gauge trolleys and shovels to dig out the tunnel of terribly stinking human and cattle gore. The contents were poured into a pit and covered with lime solution. The forensic specialists took over, sorted, cleaned, and put the remains of the soldiers in their crates, which were then transported to the cemetery in Svidnik. ”

The repaired tunnel was inaugurated for the anniversary of VOSR 7.11.1946.

(in the article) To the sounds of the Czech-Slovak and Soviet anthem memorial plaques were unveiled on the portal of the tunnel in the Slovak and Russian languages, which states: "What Germanic malice destroyed, the brother's arm of the Soviet army built." Then the first ceremonial train (in the photo) went to the Polish border, and the guests then traveled to Medzilaborce for a rally.

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[karl]

Kai

The events as you have presented from our history was not taught in our school{s}. My self am not usually disturbed by events protraying death on what ever scale, but I must say this event was beyond the usual scope of war time events such as presented.

Even though the rail tunnel was needed by the Soviets for their military transport and with rapid disposal of the dead as required in the event of clearing. It was still good of them for burial of the dead and dead animals. For in that stead, the Soviets had the option in saving of time, to simply dump the dead animals over the side from the rail line for some one else to clean up, but they did not.

I think that as age follows the path of my shadow, my self have been steadily becoming more prolife. We are given the blessing of one life to live in as well as other creatures that share the same earth we live on.

But of course we must eat to live, for one thing to live, another must then die.

Karl

[Jaga]

This Lupkow tunnel story is awful and I did not hear about it earlier. Soviet brigade was mainly women since men were at the war.... Soviet women basically kept Russia going as a main labor.