CHAPTER 6
FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO
COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP
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The Third Czechoslovak Republic came into being on 9 May 1945, the day
after VE Day. It fell three years later when the cabinet crisis known to proCommunists
as ‘Victorious February’ and to anti-Communists as the
‘February Coup’ tipped the delicate political balance in the National Front
government decisively in favour of the Czechoslovak Communist Party
(Komunistická strana Československa or KSČ ). On 9 May 1948, three years to the
day after the official liberation of Prague by the Soviet army, the Czechoslovak
Republic adopted the constitution that set the seal on the country’s fate as a
totalitarian police state. Czechoslovakia, the last country in Europe to fall
behind the Iron Curtain, was to remain under the control of the KSČ, itself
kept under the watchful eye of the Kremlin, for the next forty-one years. But
unlike other Soviet satellites of Central and Eastern Europe, the Czechoslovak
People’s Democracy was neither forced to go Communist nor to ally itself
with the Soviet Union. It did both voluntarily, acting in what looked to the
political leadership of the day to be national self-interest.
The Third Republic may have been brief, but it was understood, even at
the time, to be politically significant. Beneš was not alone in believing postwar
Czechoslovakia to be at a crossroads, its faith in parliamentary democracy
and Western alliances too shaken to be recovered, its ethnic hatreds too
deep to be overcome. ‘Czech leaders’, as Jeremy King has put it, ‘convinced
that their “nation” had barely escaped annihilation’, naturally ‘ranked questions
of Communism or capitalism, East or West lower than the question of
how to protect Czechs against a renewed German onslaught in the future’.1
The decision to remove Czechoslovakia’s principal ethnic minorities from
the country and to purge the body politic of its right wing had been taken
by the Czechoslovak National Council in London and the exile Communist
leadership in Moscow long before it was formally announced at Košice in
April 1945. It only remained for the unelected government of the National
Front of Czechs and Slovaks to decide how far and how quickly – not
whether – to move in the only direction that was politically possible, given its
own political outlook and the current political climate: towards strong
Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 151
government, socialist economic planning and the closest possible alliance
with the Soviet Union.
In May 1945, although Soviet and Czechoslovak flags were being flown
side by side and portraits of Beneš and Stalin were on display everywhere,2 it
was not yet possible to guess how ruthlessly the Czechoslovak (KSČ ) and
Slovak (KSS ) Communist parties would come to emulate the worst features
of the Soviet system, nor how high the price of Soviet protection from the
bogey of a resurgent Nazi Germany would turn out to be. In those first
heady days following the liberation and reunification of a state that might
so easily have been left divided, it was easy to be swept along by President
Beneš’s rhetoric about Czechoslovakia being historically determined to mediate
between East and West and follow its own, evolutionary path to a utopia that
was at once socialist and Czech nationalist. Some even imagined that the
renewal of the state at the war’s end might mean a magical return to the
democratic, multinational state that had existed before the Munich Crisis. But
although Czechoslovakia had recovered most of its pre-Munich territory and
went back to its pre-Munich name, its ethnic composition, international
alliances and political structures, to say nothing of its public mood, were not
the same. The Third Republic, so often portrayed as a time of national liberation
and democratic revival whose promise was only spoiled by the Communist
putsch of February 1948, was in reality a brutal and brutalizing time, one
whose ruthlessness was driven as much by resurgent Czech nationalism as by
specifically Communist ambition.
By the time that Czechoslovakia was back on the map, most of its Jewish
citizens were dead.3 As survivors slowly made their way back across a
dislocated and chaotic Central Europe, the first horror to greet them was
discovering how few Jewish family members, friends and acquaintances
had survived. Eva Blochová, who had got through her teenage years at
Theresienstadt, Oederan and Auschwitz by telling herself that, once the war
was over, she would go back to Prague and her old lifestyle, quickly discovered
that ‘the prewar city, with its lively Jewish community, did not exist any longer.
In this respect, Hitler had succeeded: Prague was Judenrein [free of Jews].’4
Shocking in a different way was to find out how many neighbours, friends and
acquaintances to whom Jewish families had entrusted their belongings before
being called up for deportation now denied that they had anything to return
or complained at having to give them back.5
Nor was it easy for Jews who had
lived through the hell of the SS camps to listen to Czechs, who had been able
to stay in their own homes, complain of having had to live in fear of the
Gestapo, let alone of having been unable to send their children to university
or forced to endure the names of tram stops being called out in German.
Before the war, Blochová later mused, ‘I hardly knew who among my
girlfriends was Jewish. Now the chasm, due to our very different wartime
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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152 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
experiences, seemed unbridgeable.’6
Some Jewish survivors were as mistrustful
of the new nationalism as they had been of the old; others sought refuge in
the Communist Party, which claimed to despise anti-Semitism and oppose
Fascism, and immediately had existing anti-Jewish legislation reversed.
Gypsies, like Jews, had been treated by the Czech and Slovak, as well as the
German, authorities as a ‘problem’ to be ‘solved’ by means of forced labour,
imprisonment, deportation and, ultimately, extermination. It was the German
authorities who organized the systematic killing of Gypsies for which the
special Gypsy Camp at Auschwitz became infamous; but it was Czech and
Slovak officials who sent them there. Only a tiny fraction – estimated at
between 5 and 12 per cent – of Bohemian and Moravian Gypsies, whether
Czech- or Romany-speaking, survived the systematic attempt to destroy
them. By contrast, the vast majority of Slovak Roma and other Gypsies
survived the war, not because the Tiso regime was any more humane than
that which prevailed in the Protectorate, but rather because the Slovak
Ministry of the Interior came to the view that it was more efficient to keep
Jews and Gypsies at home for slave labour than to continue to pay the
German authorities to ‘resettle’ them in the east.7
Communists of all backgrounds, including two future KSČ general secretaries
and presidents of the republic, had suffered in their tens of thousands
as prisoners of Czech, Slovak or German authorities.8 Out of a prewar
Communist membership of about 100,000, more than half had spent the war
in concentration camps, where about a quarter perished.9 Just 28,485 prewar
members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ ) and about 12,000
from the Slovak Communist Party (KSS ) survived the war; only because
20,000 Social Democrats were added to the KSS by the forced merger of
September 1944 was there a postwar Slovak Communist party big enough to
be worth mentioning.10 With its postwar membership so badly depleted, the
Communist Party could not afford to be choosy about who joined its ranks,
and on 12 May 1945, the KSČ officially declared its intention to ‘open the
doors of the party wide’ and to welcome ‘workers in the factories, working
peasants and the intelligentsia’.11 Although supposed in theory to be made up
‘primarily’ of those who had ‘already proved themselves’ in the ‘heroic
struggle against bestial fascism’, in practice neither the Czech nor the Slovak
branches of the Communist Party could afford to throw away the energy of
the young, the ambition of careerists or the expertise of former members of
the Gestapo, Hlinka Guard and ÚŠB.12
In addition to countless numbers of ‘opportunists’ – including peasants
and workers eager for confiscated German and Magyar property in the
former Sudetenland and in southern Slovakia – the Communist Party was
able to recruit from the first generation of Czechoslovak citizens to be able
to vote from the age of eighteen, many of whom were already starry-eyed
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 153
young converts to Stalinism.13
These children of the war, who had no
conscious experience of any other political system than authoritarian totalitarianism,
were especially ripe for conversion and easily exploited by the more
seasoned prewar Communist leadership. Zdeněk Mlynář, a Bohemian Czech
who joined the Communist Party in the spring of 1946, when he was not
quite sixteen, remembered his decision to become a Communist as akin to a
conversion experience. With the ‘leap of faith’ to Communism, as he later
put it,
comes automatic knowledge. Your inner world is transformed; it takes on direction,
and though in fact you still know nothing, you now feel in a position to
pass judgement on everything. You know what is progressive and what is reactionary,
what is good and what is bad for the future of mankind. And you also
know what is and is not scientific without having to bother with any concrete
scientific research.14
Within a year of the liberation, Communist Party membership in
Czechoslovakia had risen to over a million, making it as large as all the other
political parties put together, and one-sixth the size of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union. By the end of 1948, membership figures had risen
to almost two and a half million out of a population of roughly eleven
million, meaning that every third adult was a card-carrying member of the
Communist Party. The Czechoslovak Communist Party, which had twice as
many members as the Hungarian and almost four times as many as the Polish
Communist parties, thus became, ‘in proportion to the total national population’,
the largest Communist Party ‘in the whole world and of all time’; it may,
indeed, have ‘reached a pinnacle’, not only ‘in the history of Communism’,
but in the history of political parties generally.15
Wartime policies had already done a great deal to pave the way for the rise
of Communism in the Bohemian Crown Lands. By abolishing the universities,
imprisoning intellectuals, deporting Czech Jews and cracking down on
patriotic societies, extreme right-wing Czech and Nazi German authorities
had effectively silenced the Czech middle class. The policy of favouring
manual labourers with extra rations, pay bonuses, works outings and other
team-building exercises had helped to foster worker solidarity and class confidence.
One of the many terrible legacies of the Nazi policy of divide and rule
in the Protectorate was that traditional areas of class, ethnic and national
conflict had only been further exacerbated. Resentment by those who had
been losers in the war towards those who appeared to have profited from it
combined with new government directives, decrees and legislation to give
postwar class and economic jealousies an extra edge. Heda Margolius, a
Czech Jew who had managed to escape from Auschwitz but lost everything
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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154 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
in the war, parodied better-off peasants and small farmers in the countryside
(who were soon to be victimized as ‘kulaks’ and forced to collectivize) as
having ‘Oriental carpets’ on their floors and ‘original paintings’ on their walls,
and as eating sausages off ‘silver platters’ and drinking beer out of ‘cut
glass’.16 ‘Partisans,’ she remembered with bitterness,
who throughout the war had lived in the woods, widows of the executed who for
years had slept on the floor of some basement, and ailing survivors of the concentration
camps spent day after day waiting at the Housing Authority while butchers
and grocers and other wartime profiteers walked in by the back door and were
seen first.17
The wife of a Communist functionary, scrimping and saving to get by, similarly
resented her cleaning lady for demanding a ‘meat lunch, morning and
afternoon snacks, plus 40 Crowns an hour’, far more, she claimed, than her
husband was earning.18 At a time when so many had suffered, to varying
degrees and in different ways, sympathy for others appears to have been in
short supply.
Among the many dubious practices that the postwar Czech and Slovak
authorities learned from the Nazis was how to pre-empt political dissent with
the judicious use of rationing, populist slogans, wage and benefits policies,
and the redistribution of confiscated property. The National Front government
now put these skills to good use, launching a sweeping nationalization
programme, together with a dramatic land reform one, both of which were
explicitly socialist as well as pro-Slav nationalist. Between 14 May 1945, when
finance minister Vavro Šrobár announced the abolition of the anti-Semitic
property laws,19 and 27 October 1945, when twenty-three presidential
decrees were rushed through in a single day (in order to coincide with the first
postwar meeting of the Provisional National Assembly, itself timed to coincide
with the twenty-seventh anniversary of Czechoslovak independence,
soon to be renamed ‘Nationalization Day’),20 ninety-one laws came directly
from the office of the president, the remainder either from the cabinet
Presidium or individual ministries.21 In order to keep up with the sheer
volume of new legislation, the government printing office worked flat out
through the six-day working week.22 Together, the policies put forward by the
National Front of Czechs and Slovaks added up to a brutally nationalist and
radically socialist revolution, not a return to either democracy or the free
market as they had existed before Munich.
Liberation brought joy and relief; it also unleashed envy, resentment and
hate. At the Small Fortress in Theresienstadt, where the Nazi authorities had
killed more than 8,000 Czechs, revenge by former prisoners was immediate. A
doctor gave 45 German prisoners – mainly SS and Gestapo – lethal injections;
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 155
in all, about 550 out of the 3,725 German postwar prisoners kept in the Small
Fortress are estimated to have died, 70 directly at the hands of former
prisoners and the rest as a result of the conditions in which they were kept.23
Nikolaus Martin, a recent inmate of the Small Fortress, whose mother was
Czech and whose father was German, applauded the execution of his former
SS guards, but was shocked, upon his return to Prague, to come across a group
of German-speaking civilians, stripped to the waist and with swastikas painted
on their backs and foreheads, being forced to replace cobblestones in the
street. He was even more disturbed by the sight of three electrocuted bodies,
said by the surrounding mob to belong to Gestapo agents, hanging from a
lamppost in a nearby square.24 Rosemary Kavan, the English bride of a Czech
Communist, was similarly horrified to come across a group of German
women, tufts of their hair having already been torn out, being forced by the
surrounding crowd to lick a huge swastika painted on the pavement. Only
because her husband had taught her the Czech phrase ‘nejsem Němka, jsem
Angličanka’ (‘I’m not a German, I’m an Englishwoman’) did Kavan narrowly
escape the same fate.25
No sooner had the president of the Republic and ministers of the
National Front government arrived in liberated Prague than they began
inciting Czechs and Slovaks to take advantage of the historic opportunity to
rid themselves, forever, of their ethnic German and Hungarian rivals. It was
the ‘democratic’ Czechoslovak president and political leadership who led the
calls to ‘cleanse’ the state of millions of its German- and Hungarian-speaking
citizens, although Czech and Slovak Communist leaders Klement Gottwald
and Gustáv Husák were quick to see the potential benefits to the ‘class
struggle’ and only too eager to add ‘economic traitors’ and ‘bourgeois
elements’ to the already impressive list of proposed victims. Above all, it was
Beneš, who had been campaigning hard throughout the war for a ‘radical’
solution to the problem of Czechoslovakia’s minorities, who could see that
the Great Powers needed to be presented with an ethnic conflict appalling
enough to make ‘orderly’ mass expulsions seem the more ‘humane’ and ‘civilized’
option. (A similar technique, it will be remembered, had been tried by
the Czech leadership seven years earlier to rid the Second Czecho-Slovak
Republic of its Jewish, especially its German-Jewish, population; it had also
been used by the Slovak authorities to rid the region of its Czechs, Jews and
Gypsies.)26
On 16 May 1945, in his first public speech in Prague after his return from
exile, President Beneš explicitly appealed to the masses gathered in the Old
Town Square to seize the moment to ‘liquidate out [vylikvidovat]’ the Germans
and Magyars in ‘the interest of a united national state of Czechs and Slovaks’.
Minister of justice Prokop Drtina, another Czech National Socialist, similarly
called on Czechs to take matters into their own hands, emphasizing: ‘We must
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156 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
begin immediately, this very moment, to expel the Germans from our lands.
We must use all possible means – nothing can be allowed to cause us to stop
or even to hesitate.’ The Czech Communist contribution to the general
chorus of urgency lay in its demands – publicized in newspapers and on the
radio – that local authorities not only ‘immediately’ begin the ‘severe’ punishment
of Germans, but also that ordinary people spontaneously ‘uncover and
seize’ ethnic Czech collaborators, traitors and ‘lackeys’, and ‘chase them’ to
swift judgement and punishment before a ‘people’s revolutionary court’.27
Those who were lumped together – in political speeches, newspaper
articles, radio addresses, presidential decrees and official statute books –
as ‘Germans, Hungarians, Traitors and Collaborators’ were from the first
subject to random acts of violence and cruelty, and to being rounded up into
prisons and concentration camps, or simply dumped across the border with
Germany or Austria.28 The politically calculated orgy of violence, vigilanteism
and ethnic hatred that lasted through the spring and summer (May to August)
of 1945 is rather disingenuously known in Czech as the divoký odsun (‘Wild’ or
illicit ‘Transfer’), to distinguish it from the more ‘orderly’ and ‘legal’ official
odsun (transfer or expulsion) of a further 2.8 million ethnic Germans from
their homeland which followed over the course of 1946.
The cruelty shown to millions of ordinary German-speakers was justified
through their official description as ‘traitors’ and ‘Fascists’ (with the
misleading implication that the contemporary Czech and Slovak regimes had
somehow not been Fascist or collaborationist). The opportunity to turn the
tables on ‘the Germans’, regardless of whether or not German-speaking individuals
had actually been Nazi, Nazi sympathizers or even German nationalists,
proved impossible for many Czechs to resist, particularly when spurred
on by their own national politicians. In the German-Czech city of Brno,
where combined police and paramilitary forces had incarcerated some 1,600
suspected collaborators and war criminals – including about a hundred
Czechs – the local authorities begged Prague urgently to set up some sort of
war crimes tribunal, since, as they explained, they were being forced to use
machine guns to keep Czech lynch mobs at bay.29 At Olomouc, also in
Moravia, the local Communist-controlled National Committee put up red
posters (just like the ones previously used by the Protectorate authorities) to
urge citizens to turn in not only Nazis and war criminals, but also ‘profiteers’,
‘opportunists’, ‘open or hidden fascists’ and Czechs who had ‘in any way
transgressed against the Czech people and their national honour’.30
On
12 May 1945, a concerned Prime Minister Fierlinger asked his ministerial
colleagues to issue a radio appeal to ask Czechs to stop attacking innocent
Germans. Since the primary purpose of inciting pogroms was to drive
away as many Germans and Hungarians as possible, it is depressing, but
not surprising, to find that the rest of the cabinet dismissed his request as
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 157
‘unnecessary’.31
Fierlinger, like every other prominent Czech politician of
the day, in any case agreed with the principle of national cleansing; and
announced, at the celebration to commemorate the 325th anniversary of the
Battle of the White Mountain (Bílá hora), that ‘the wrong inflicted upon us
after White Mountain, which was again to have been repeated under the Nazi
regime, will be completely rectifed . . . Czechs and Slovaks will again be the
masters of their own land’.32
Although most of Subcarpathian Ruthenia’s 725,357 inhabitants did not
yet know it, they were about to be handed over to the Soviet Union, their
province turned into ‘Zakarpats’ka Ukrajina’, the Transcarpathian oblast’
(region) of Ukraine. In order to forestall objections that ‘the people’ of the
region ought, as had been promised at Košice, to be consulted, Subcarpathian
Ruthenia’s forcible inclusion in the Soviet Union was justified on the strength
of a rally held by delegates from the Communist-dominated National
Committees based in the recently restored regional capital of Užhorod
(Uzhhorod). The transfer of property was then formally agreed in a SovietCzechoslovak
treaty signed on 29 June 1945, which was pointedly passed into
Czechoslovak constitutional law on 22 November 1945, seven years to the
day after the central government in Prague had been forced to grant
Subcarpathian Ruthenia its extorted autonomy.33 From the point of view of
the Prague government, the change meant that a common border was created
with the USSR; the central Czechoslovak government was freed from having
to subsidize what had always been its poorest region; and the state was rid of
a potential cause of constitutional instability, together with a large number of
minorities: not only Rusyn/Ukrainians, but also a smattering of Magyars,
Romanians, Gypsies and Jews.
On 15 May 1945, two months before the central government, the Slovak
National Council brought out a retribution law in the shape of a decree
‘Providing for the Punishment of Fascist Criminals, Foreign Oppressors,
Traitors and Collaborationists, and for the Creation of a National Tribunal
and of People’s Courts’ in the territory of Slovakia.34 Some 26,296 prisoners,
mostly Carpathian Germans, were soon being held in sixty-three forcedlabour
camps across Slovakia35 (including the infamous Svätý Jur, Ústie
na Orave, Krupina, Nováky and Ilava ones, where the lack of medical care
made the mortality rates particularly high). In the Lands of the Bohemian
Crown, where there were as yet no specific directives from the centre, antiGerman
measures began to escalate out of control as denunciation followed
denunciation and local authorities, in the absence of any specific directives
from the centre, dreamed up whatever measures they thought best. In what
many people began to notice was turning into a tit-for-tat revenge, which
simply inverted victim and oppressor, ration allowances for ethnic Germans
were cut to the same inadequate level that had formerly been allotted to Jews.36
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158 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
In some places, Germans were required to wear a white armband so that they
could be easily identified.37 From June, German schools were forcibly closed.
Germans were allowed to shop only at certain hours, and were forbidden to
visit places of public amusement, to use public means of communication or
to change their place of residence.38 Hundreds of concentration camps and
other facilities were used to hold Germans and suspected collaborators; by
mid-June, roughly twenty thousand people were being detained at thirty-seven
different locations in Prague alone.39 At two of the most infamous postwar
Czech camps – the Hanke internment camp for Germans near Ostrava and
the Kolín camp for suspected collaborators in eastern Bohemia – the torture,
rape and murder of inmates apparently became institutionalized in much the
same way as in wartime camps run by the SS.40
Beneš could have tried to dampen the flames of ethnic hatred. Instead, he
stoked them by deliberately conflating Sudeten, Carpathian and Reich
Germans as if all were the same and all were equally responsible for Hitler’s
crimes. Speaking at Tábor in mid-June 1945, for example, he reminded his
audience how, during the May Crisis of 1938, he had asked ‘the Germans’ for
‘tolerance’ and ‘forgiveness’. Since ‘their’ answer had come in the form of
‘terror, treason, concentration camps for us Czechs’, he declared, it should
not ‘surprise anybody in the whole world when we say that we are determined
to get rid of these [sic] Germans forever’.41 On 21 June 1945, a presidential
decree promised to speed up the confiscation and redistribution of land
formerly belonging to ‘Germans, Hungarians, traitors and enemies of the
Czech and Slovak nation’.42 This only added the incentives of greed and envy
to an already lethal cocktail of ethnic hatred and collective guilt, a righteous
fury that was kept on the boil by frequent reports of alleged German sabotage
in the pages of Rudé právo, the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s daily
and the most widely read Czech newspaper of the day.43
The most notorious incident to result from the atmosphere that rumours
of continued German sabotage and Gestapo plots engendered occurred on
31 July 1945, at Krásné Březno just outside Ústí nad Labem (Aussig) in the
former Sudetenland, when somewhere between eighty and four hundred
Germans – men, women and children – were lynched, shot or drowned in the
River Labe (Elbe) in response to rumours that an explosion in a nearby military
depot, which had killed twenty-eight people and injured more, was the
work of German terrorists.44
This horrifying incident was then used by Beneš
and other leading Czech politicians as the clinching argument to justify the
transfer of the maximum possible number of Germans (and Hungarians)
from the Czechoslovak territories. On 20 July 1945, arrangements were made
for Czechs, Slovaks and ‘other Slavs’ to ‘resettle’ the lands and property that
had belonged to ethnic ‘Germans, Hungarians and other enemies of the
state’ in the rapidly emptying border regions.45 Jan Šejna, a Czech peasant
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 159
who got his start in life by taking over a farm confiscated from a Sudeten
German family awaiting deportation, was an enthusiastic recruit to the
Communist Party in 1946. He not only did his bit to ‘indoctrinate local
farmers’ and ‘discredit the bourgeois opposition’; when the time came, he
prepared lists of ‘bourgeois elements’ to be arrested ‘without a twinge of
conscience’ since he considered them to be ‘enemies of the revolution’.46 He
rose to become chief of staff to the Czechoslovak minister of defence
before eventually fleeing the country.
It was becoming clear that a top political priority was the creation of a
police network large, flexible and politically reliable enough to cope with the
enormous demands being placed upon it by everything from mass trials and
summary executions to forced expulsions and exchanges of whole groups of
people. In the summer of 1945, in the midst of the initial, ‘wild’ phase of the
‘transfer’, prewar policemen, partisans and armed trade unionists were
brought together under the umbrella of an organization calling itself the Sbor
národní bezpečnosti (SNB) or ‘National Security Corps’. The SNB, an enormous,
sprawling organization, was subdivided into various specialist police
agencies. These included a uniformed police corps known as the Veřejná
bezpečnost (VB) or Public Security, a criminal investigation branch and socalled
emergency units. Three additional police agencies that were soon to
become intimately associated with the Communist regime were the StB (Státní
bezpečnost or State Security, spelt Štátná bezpečnost in Slovak), which was originally
created by the National Front government as a specialist agency to seek
out collaborators, and two less prominent agencies that were set up by the
Communist minister of the interior: the intelligence and espionage service
known as ZS, and the border guards who were later to become so important
in patrolling the perimeter of the Iron Curtain.47
From 19 June 1945, those identified by the StB as ‘Nazi criminals; traitors;
and their helpers’ were dealt with by ‘extraordinary people’s courts’ which
were hurriedly set up all over the country to cope with the need for the state
to be seen to be punishing the enemy within.48 Although outwardly legal
forms of trial and punishment had returned, Benjamin Frommer has found
Czech retribution courts to have been so brutal as to have been almost
without parallel in bloodthirsty postwar Europe. Czech people’s courts not
only convicted an astonishing 97 per cent of those who were brought before
them, but – thanks to extraordinary provisions decreed by President Beneš
which insisted that death sentences be carried out within two or three hours
of a verdict and that there be no right of appeal – sent more defendants per
capita to their deaths than anywhere else in Europe apart from Stalinist
Bulgaria.49 In all, this initial, ‘wild’ stage of the transfer of ethnic Germans
resulted in the forced expulsion of about 660,000 German-speakers from
Czechoslovakia, the killing of anywhere between 19,000 and 30,000 more, and
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160 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
the premature death of untold others. Uncounted numbers of ethnic Czechs,
said by informers, people’s tribunals or simply the surrounding mob to have
collaborated with the ‘enemy’ or to have betrayed or shamed the ‘nation’, also
perished.50 By December 1945, complaints to the Ministry of the Interior that
Czech policemen were torturing suspects and witnesses to secure convictions
had become so commonplace that a young National Socialist politician
pleaded explicitly with the nation to ‘de-Nazify’ its ‘state administration’ and
‘security forces’ and do something about its ‘police jails where . . . utterly
innocent people have suffered’.51
While the Czech authorities were expelling and interning ethnic Germans
and denouncing as a traitor any Czech who showed the slightest sign of
having sympathized or fraternized with or profited from ethnic Germans,
Slovaks – who were not in the position of being able to blame Fascism on
a rival ethnic group – proved much more reluctant to convict war criminals
and collaborators, although equally quick to take advantage of the opportunity
to rid their own territory of ethnic Germans and Hungarians. When,
at the end of October 1945, the Allies handed over ex-president Jozef
Tiso and his government, whom they had captured in Austria, to the
Czechoslovak authorities, the Prague government apparently expected the
Slovak population to rejoice and be grateful. Instead, even the chairman of
the Democratic Party and head of the Slovak National Council, Jozef
Lettrich, showed suspicion at the sight of ‘Tiso and his government’ being
brought ‘back to Slovakia in chains’ by ‘the State Security organs which
were under the orders of a Communist Minister of the Interior’. This, he
later remembered, was ‘the first thing’ in postwar Czechoslovakia to cause
‘much bad feeling’ among the Slovak population.52 An underground leaflet
campaign was immediately launched in defence of the Tiso regime, together
with ‘Cross Campaign’, through which sympathy for Tiso was expressed by
wearing a crucifix pin on one’s lapel.53 The Slovak people’s courts, which by
31 December 1947 had tried 20,561 defendants, convicted only 8,059 (as
compared with about 168,000 tried, and 69,000 convicted, in the equivalent
Czech courts).54 Slovaks proved at the very least ambivalent about being
expected by the Czechs – widely considered in Slovakia not only to be a separate,
but also an aggressively domineering, rival nation – to regard Slovak
Fascists and anti-Semites, but who were also Slovak patriots and observant
Catholics, as simple criminals.
On 2 August 1945, in concert with similar legislation across Central
Europe (but following a precedent set by the Prague government in August
1939, when it had wanted to deprive Jews and German refugees of their
Czecho-Slovak citizenship), several million ethnic Germans and Hungarians
had their Czechoslovak citizenship revoked through a special constitutional
law decreed by President Beneš.55 This marked the beginning of the official
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 161
expulsions, known collectively in Czech as the ‘Removal’ or ‘Transfer’ (odsun),
which the Prague government justified as being in accordance with the principle
of mass transfers of population agreed at the Potsdam Conference on
3 August 1945 (somewhat disingenuously, since it had done everything
possible to influence the Potsdam decision).56
According to the letter of the law, ‘reliable comrades and anti-Fascists’ – in
practice a euphemism for Communists – were supposed to be spared, in line
with the government’s insistence that the German and Hungarian populations
were not being expelled as detested ethnic groups, but rather as Fascists,
traitors and war criminals. Since it was Slovaks, not Hungarians, who had
established the anti-Czech, anti-Communist and anti-Semitic Tiso regime in
Slovakia, this logic was specious, to say the least. As it happens, unpublished
correspondence between President Beneš and Minister of the Interior Nosek
held in a Prague archive reveals that even the tiny minority of ethnic
Germans who met the stringent ‘anti-Fascist’ criteria were also deported to
Germany, the only difference in their treatment being that the 88,614 ‘antiFascist
Germans’ that the Ministry of the Interior recorded as having been
expelled by 29 October 1946 were allowed to keep their property and were
transported separately from the rest.57
According to detailed guidelines put forward by the Ministry of the Interior,
which was responsible for the ‘selection’ and ‘assembly’ of German-speakers
into concentration camps, their forcible expulsion – by train, motor vehicle or
on foot – was considered so ‘politically important’ as to take precedence over
any economic considerations.58 Registers of those to be transported were
prepared by district National Committees, which were also responsible for
appointing the armed SNB (State Security) or army guards to head transports
and ‘confiscate’ valuables, together with any ‘anti-state’ or ‘anti-Czech’ materials,
during luggage and body searches.59 Germans awaiting deportation were
permitted to take up to 30 kg (about 66lbs) of personal luggage, including
food, and up to 1,000 Deutschmarks [sic] per family, but no cameras, valuable
watches or Czechoslovak currency. They were required to bring their own
blanket, cutlery and bowl with them to the concentration camps, to leave their
vacated homes tidy and securely locked, and to pack all forbidden articles in
parcels, each to be accompanied by a detailed list of contents.60
Reporting for the Daily Mail in August 1945, Rhona Churchill described
the first wave of expulsions from Brno. When the SNB arrived:
They marched through the streets calling on all German citizens to be standing
outside their front doors at nine o’clock with one piece of hand luggage each ready
to leave the town forever. Women had ten minutes in which to wake and dress their
children, bundle a few possessions into their suitcases, and come out onto the pavement.
. . . Then they were marched at gun-point towards the Austrian border.61
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162 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
A characteristically complacent report, filed by the Czech police a year later,
shows that the procedure remained unchanged and unquestioned. ‘On
12 July 1946,’ this particular report reads:
214 persons of German nationality were taken from Pardubice to the concentration
camp at Ústí n[ad]. Orl[icí]. Organizational arrangements went smoothly,
down to the last detail. More than 20 gold and silver objects (rings, earrings,
watches, etc), some articles of clothing, 57 bank and savings books and cash to the
value of 44,515.80 crowns were seized and retained after the documentation
check.62
On 15 March 1946, the seventh anniversary of the establishment of the
Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Karl Hermann Frank, one of the few
Sudeten Germans to have held a post of any importance in the Protectorate,
went on trial in Prague.63 Since Frank, a vicious anti-Czech, shared direct
responsibility for some of the worst atrocities to have taken place in the
Protectorate – including the repression of Czech students in the autumn
of 1939 and the terror (including the destruction of Lidice) that followed
the assassination of Reichsprotektor Heydrich – his widely publicized trial was
immensely popular from the first. It ended on 22 May 1946 with the spectacle
of his public hanging, in front of thousands of spectators, in the courtyard
of Pankrác prison. The trial – which was broadcast on state radio and
improperly preceded by the publication of incriminating testimony taken
from his interrogations – was treated in both parliament and the Czech press
as the trial, not merely of a single war criminal, but rather of what Benjamin
Frommer has termed the ‘collective criminality of the German minority in
Czechoslovakia’ in order to prove ‘the collective guilt of an entire nation’.64
The notion that Bohemian, Moravian and Silesian German-speakers, the
Czech-speakers’ traditional rivals in the Bohemian Crown Lands, were collectively
guilty and inherently criminal helps to explain the inhumanity with
which German-speakers (many of whom, ironically enough, could just as
easily have opted to register as Czechs) were treated. Some Germans were
deported immediately, others were rounded up, their citizenship removed,
property confiscated and homes sealed, only to be left indefinitely in labour
or concentration camps: those classified as ‘political prisoners’ could end up
being kept for years or even decades. Vojna prison camp near Příbram, originally
built in 1947 to hold German prisoners, was by 1949 the largest forcedlabour
camp for political prisoners in all Czechoslovakia. Surrounded by
watchtowers, barbed wire and minefields, its resemblance to an SS concentration
camp was made explicit by the temporary placement, at its main gate,
of a placard that read ‘Work Makes You Free’, this time in Czech rather
than German.65
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 163
On 15 November 1946, Czechoslovak Minister of the Interior Nosek
presented President Beneš with a special illuminated parchment to mark and
celebrate their joint achievement: the ‘victorious completion’ of the Czechs’
‘ancient struggle for national and political rights’ and the ‘culmination’ of the
‘liberation’ of the Czechs and Slovaks which had ‘begun’ on 28 October 1918
but been ‘consolidated’ by the ‘May 1945 revolution’ in the shape of the
complete elimination of Germans from the Bohemian Crown Lands. The
certificate showed the Ministry of the Interior’s sensitivity to Beneš’s particular
weaknesses by taking the trouble to proclaim the ‘transfer’ of the Germans to
have been undertaken ‘legally’ and with the explicit ‘approval of the three Great
Powers’. It also made clear the scale of the SNB/StB’s technical achievement,
boasting with characteristically bureaucratic indifference to human misery
that 2,170,598 Germans had – between 24 January and 29 October 1946 – been
removed permanently by means of 1,646 trains, 67,748 railway carriages,
4 hospital trains, 960 automobiles and 12 boats. A further 249,911 Germans,
the document proclaimed, still remained on Czechoslovak soil; but only
temporarily, since they had yet to be ‘transferred’ for either ‘economic’ or
‘humanitarian’ reasons.66 (This turns out in practice to have meant that, as had
been the case with the 9,000 or so Czechs who were not immediately expelled
from autonomous/independent Slovakia in 1938–39, they had specialist skills
that the state still required; or else, as had been the case with Jews and Gypsies
temporarily left in the Slovak camps under Tiso, that their slave labour, such as
at the uranium mines at Jáchymov, was still required.)
The Western powers, albeit with varying degrees of enthusiasm, had
proved willing to go along with the principle of collective guilt in the case of
‘the Germans’ (even if this meant Germans who had never set foot in the
Reich) since ‘the Germans’ were also hated at home. They were not willing to
consent so easily to the wholesale transfer of Hungarian-speakers, who were
not associated in the public mind with any particular atrocities and seemed to
have been rather less ‘collaborationist’ than the majority of Czechs and
Slovaks. The National Front’s determination to rid Slovakia of its ethnic
Hungarians (Magyars) had therefore to be handled differently. Instead of a
straight expulsion – and in line with the same logic that had prevailed in
Slovakia under the Tiso regime – 73,000 Slovaks were moved from Hungary
to Slovakia in exchange for 74,000 Magyars, who were moved from Slovakia
to Hungary. A further 44,000 ethnic Hungarians were forcibly resettled in the
border regions of Bohemia and Moravia that had been vacated by expelled
Germans; additional arrangements were made to ‘repatriate’ ethnic Slovaks
living in Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria.67 The rest were to be dealt with
by a special ‘Re-Slovakization Commission’ (Reslovakizačná komisia) established
in Bratislava. A series of strong measures, it informed the central
government in Prague – including the removal of Hungarian-speakers from
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164 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
a whole range of jobs and the confiscation of their property – would need to
be taken in order adequately to ‘re-Slovakize’ southern Slovakia, which, as a
consequence of the Vienna Arbitration Award, had been in Hungary for the
past six years. The Commission stressed the vital importance of what it called
the ‘absolute purification’ of municipal and district National Committees, tax
offices, financial offices, post offices, courts and the police, together with
banks and insurance companies.68 In addition to those Hungarian-speakers
who lost their jobs, property or liberty in the supposed interests of ‘state
security’, Slovak historian Elena Mannová reports that a further 326,697
Hungarian-speakers were ‘re-Slovakized’ (in other words, prevented from
being allowed to work or vote until they agreed to declare themselves ‘Slovak’
rather than ‘Hungarian’).69 Eugen Steiner, a Jewish member of the Slovak
Communist Party, was struck by how insistent the Slovak minister of foreign
affairs, Vladimír Clementis – although supposed in theory to be free, as
a Communist internationalist, of national chauvinism – was ‘on the
Hungarian issue’ and how ‘vehemently’ he fought ‘for the annexation of
three Hungarian villages on the right bank of the Danube’,70 which led to
the ‘re-Slovakization’ even of ‘purely Hungarian’ towns and villages. These
were then given provocatively Slovak nationalist names, so that Párkány, for
example, became ‘Štúrovo’ and Gyalla was renamed ‘Hurbanovo’.71 Steiner
also noticed how Gustáv Husák, the leader of the Slovak Communist Party
(KSS), deliberately avoided following the Czechoslovak Communist Party’s
example of appointing Jews to high posts on the grounds that to do so would
make the Slovak branch of the party ‘appear to be Jew-ridden’ and therefore
‘an easy target for hostile allegations, such as those which had been made
earlier by Hlinka Party propaganda’.72
Fifty years before the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was coined, semi-democratic
Czechoslovakia – through a combination of border changes, legal discrimination,
imprisonment, forced transfers, exterminations and expulsions – had
rid itself of so many ethnic minorities that its claim to be a ‘national’ state of
the Czechs and the Slovaks became plausible for the first time since its
creation in 1918–20. In the border regions, from which some 2.5 million
Sudeten Germans had been forced out, without compensation, approximately
1,460,000 persons deemed to be ethnically suitable Slavs were moved
in to claim their property, houses, farms and fields.73 German schools, shops,
hotels, sawmills, glass factories, businesses and farms could be made over to
look Czech relatively easily; not so the region’s characteristically German
cottages, churches and graveyards – battered and faded perhaps, but still with
their German plaques, inscriptions and headstones, which gave the area an
eerily abandoned and empty feeling.74
In 1921, the proportion of ‘Czechoslovaks’ (a category that, as discussed
in Chapter 3, had then included not only Czechs and Slovaks but also a fair
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 165
number of Jews and Rusyns/Ukrainians) had officially been put at around
64 per cent; by 1950, the figure for Czechs and Slovaks alone had risen to an
astounding 94 per cent.75 For the first time in their history, Bohemia, Moravia
and Austrian Silesia – the historic Lands of the Bohemian Crown – because
they were left with only a tiny minority of ethnic Germans and Poles, could
claim with accuracy to be overwhelmingly ‘Czech’ lands. Only in Slovakia,
where most Gypsies (Roma and others) had survived the war and there were
still compact communities of Rusyn/Ukrainian-speakers in the Prešov region
and semi-Slovakized Magyars along the border with Hungary, were there any
significant minority populations left. Even so, all ethnic minorities – Poles,
Hungarians, Romanians and a remnant of Germans – were thereafter kept
under routine surveillance by the StB, whose regional officers were expected
to report to Prague, every month, on their activities, political outlook and the
state of their morale.
Changing the ethnic composition of the state was not only about satisfying
Czech and Slovak nationalist sentiment, although this is the aspect of the
postwar reorganization that has traditionally tended to be ignored or downplayed.
It was also supposed to prevent the kind of destabilization that had
led to Munich and associated disasters and to ensure the continued political
dominance of the Left. Just as postwar Czechoslovakia’s close alliance with
the Soviet Union was deemed necessary to prevent a recurrence of German
aggression, so the removal of its ethnic Germans, Hungarians and Rusyns/
Ukrainians was supposed to make it impossible for the state’s minorities ever
again to be used as fifth columnists by hostile foreign powers. But there was
an elephant in the room. The problem that – together with the Sudeten
German problem – had led most directly to the collapse of the first
Czechoslovak state, the ethnic problem that no one wanted to mention, was
the Slovak problem.
The Czechoslovak Communist Party had originally calculated that the
postwar swing to the political Left would be sharpest in Slovakia, where there
had been a genuinely widespread and popular uprising against the Tiso
regime in 1944, and where most peasants – now that the Agrarian and Slovak
People’s parties had been outlawed, and there was confiscated land to
redistribute – might be expected to vote Communist. It was with this assumption
in mind that the Communist Party appeared initially to show such
concern for Slovak – as well as Czech – national feeling, insisting upon the
inclusion of the Slovak National Council in the National Front government
and the maintenance of a separate Slovak Communist Party (one largely
boosted by the forced merger in 1944 with the Slovak Social Democratic
Party), and resulting in the stress it put on the so-called ‘Magna Carta of the
Slovak Nation’, with its commitment to re-establish Czech–Slovak relations
on the basis of sincere ‘brotherhood’ and genuine ‘equality’.
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166 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
It soon became apparent that the Slovak peasant and Catholic vote was
not, as anticipated, being transferred to the Slovak Communist Party, but
rather to the conglomeration of centre-right parties known as the
Democratic Party. The other parties in the National Front sought to weaken
the Democratic Party’s support by exploiting its internal tensions and inconsistencies,
while simultaneously taking advantage of the anti-German and
anti-Hungarian decrees to expel as many Catholic clergy and religious as
possible. As Karel Kaplan has found, the Slovak Communist leadership even
tried to set up a rival, nominally Christian Democratic (Catholic) Party; but
after it presented the Catholic clergy with a political programme which was a
mere copy of the Communists’ own, the Catholic side withdrew.76 For its
own part, the Czech Social Democratic Party attempted to revive its old
Slovak branch by setting up a third Slovak political party, the Party of Labour.
In the weeks leading up to the general elections set for May 1946, a block
of conservatives within the Democratic Party formed a breakaway party,
originally called the Christian Republican Party, but then renamed – because
of objections by the National Front government to its confessional and
conservative overtones – the Freedom Party.77 This left Slovakia with four
political parties.
In April 1946, just before the state-wide elections, the leadership of the
Democratic Party struck a deal with the right wing of the Freedom Party,
taking them into its own membership in exchange for a promise of a fixed
ratio of Catholics to non-Catholics to hold office in institutions controlled by
the Democratic Party, guaranteed state funding for Church schools, and other
issues close to the heart of the old Slovak People’s Party. The Democratic
Party apparently also promised either to prevent Jozef Tiso from being put
on trial, or else to ensure that, like some of the Czech Protectorate authorities,
he would be given a relatively light sentence.78 Having failed either to
split or to discredit the Democratic Party in Slovakia, the KSS and KSČ were
unexpectedly left to face state-wide elections without an alternative strategy
for Slovakia.79
Czechoslovakia’s first postwar general elections were held on 26 May 1946.
The Soviet Union, which had announced that it would be moving troops
across the country on 22 May, responded to protests that this might prejudice
the election results and – with nothing much to lose, since all important
aspects of its relationship with the Czechoslovak People’s Democratic
Republic had been decided with Beneš during the war – tactfully agreed to
wait. This seemed to give weight to Stalin’s assurances that the Soviet Union
had no intention of interfering in Czechoslovakia’s internal affairs and to
President Beneš’s assertions that his country’s ‘new and transformed democracy’
would be able to live ‘side by side’ with ‘the Soviet Socialist system’
until Czechoslovakia could be turned gradually into a socialist utopia by an
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 167
‘evolutionary path, empirically and by scientific economic planning, without
catastrophes and without violence, by agreement and co-operation’.80
The 1946 elections were genuinely free, but they can scarcely be called
‘democratic’, given that the two most popular prewar parties, the Czech
branch of the Agrarian Party and the Slovak branch of the People’s Party,
were not allowed to stand and that millions of the state’s former citizens –
Germans, Hungarians and all others classified by the StB as ‘traitors’ and
‘collaborators’ – were barred from voting. On the strength of a platform that
included demands for a new constitution, the launch of a two-year economic
plan, a further stage of land reform and new agricultural and commercial
taxes,81 the Communists, with almost 38 per cent, won by far the largest share
of the state-wide vote. The second most popular party, the National
Socialists, took 18.29 per cent, the Czechoslovak People’s Party 15.64 per
cent, the Democrats 14.07 per cent and the Social Democrats 12.05 per cent
(the votes for the Slovak Labour Party and Freedom Party were negligible).82
Klement Gottwald, as chairman of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the
single largest party, replaced the Social Democrat Fierlinger as prime
minister, receiving ovations so enthusiastic that Harry Pollitt, head of the
British Communist Party, claimed never to have heard the like ‘except the
ovations given to Comrade Stalin in the Soviet Union’.83
The government interpreted the swing to the Communist Party as indicating
broad support for its nationalization programme as set out at Košice,
together with its ‘solution’ to the minorities ‘problem’ of expelling unwanted
ethnic groups and redistributing their wealth among Czechs and Slovaks. The
Communists could see that the strategy of being even more Czech nationalist
than the traditionally Czech nationalist parties was working like a dream in
Prague, and generally throughout Bohemia. Overall, the state-wide election
results were so astonishingly good that the Communist Party decided to make
51 per cent of the vote its goal for the next elections, which were scheduled
for May 1948.84 This campaign was launched by Gottwald with the slogan
‘For a majority of the nation’ and repeated assurances that the Czechoslovak
Communist Party would not import the Soviet system, but follow its ‘own
road to socialism’, one that would work with the other political parties to
bring about a genuinely new republic, one that would be ‘truly democratic,
truly national, truly ours’.
But although the KSČ had proved overwhelmingly popular in Bohemia,
suggesting that its policies had succeeded in wooing voters who might, in
the old days, have supported the Agrarians, in Moravia the vote was more
or less evenly split between the Communists and the Catholics, while in
Slovakia it was the Democratic Party – not the Slovak Communist Party
(KSS ) – that emerged as the clear winner, taking 62 per cent of the vote to
the Communists’ 30 per cent, resulting in 63 seats in the Slovak National
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168 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Council for the Democratic Party, 31 for the Communist Party, and just 6 for
the Labour and Freedom parties combined. This meant that Jozef Lettrich,
chairman of the Democratic Party, became the chairman of the Slovak
National Council, while the Communist Gustáv Husák became chairman of
its executive body, the Board of Commissioners.85 This regional disparity
meant, as Steiner afterwards recalled:
When the Slovak Communists wished to curb the power and influence of their
stronger partner in the Slovak national organs, they had in practice to look to the
central government in Prague for support and understanding. This was the case
not only in important matters of economic and social policy, but even in matters
which would ultimately represent an obstacle to the autonomy of Slovakia, even
though it was for such autonomy that the Communists had earlier fought. In the
end, the decision of the central government and Czechoslovak National Front in
Prague to limit the powers of the Slovak National Council and the Board of
Commissioners was accepted by the Slovak Communists.86
On 8 July 1946, the National Front government, now led by Prime Minister
Gottwald, launched its first two-year economic plan. The Communist Party
then turned its attention to solving the Slovak problem. The first step intended
to bring Slovakia into line with the broadly socialist and anticlerical consensus
in the National Front government was for the Communist Party to launch a
smear campaign against the Democratic Party. As Jozef Lettrich remembered,
Democrats were suddenly accused everywhere of ‘anti-Soviet attitudes, of
anti-Communist agitation, of having misused the influence of the Roman
Catholic hierarchy for their own ends, and of having rehabilitated the former
members of the Slovak People’s Party’.87 The climate of suspicion created by
the Communist-led campaign made it easy to justify sharply curtailing
Slovakia’s administrative and governmental powers, which was done in the
so-called Third Prague Agreement, which insisted that Slovak political and
administrative institutions be subordinated to the relevant central governmental
ministries and that legislation passed by Slovak representatives be
approved by the central government in Prague.88 Finally, at a joint meeting of
the Presidiums of the KSČ and KSS, it was decided that there should be a
severe verdict in the forthcoming trial of Jozef Tiso, together with another
two members of the former Slovak National Unity, since – as Viliam Široký,
a rising star in the Slovak Communist Party, put it – the trial would serve to
‘liquidate the whole reactionary Slovak past’.89
The growing confrontation between the KSS and the Democratic Party in
Slovakia, overlapping awkwardly with increasing tension between Slovak
autonomists and Prague centralists, turned the Tiso trial into the catalyst for
a dramatic resurgence of mutual Czech–Slovak mistrust. Even Lettrich, the
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 169
chairman of the Democratic Party, although the Tiso regime had sent him to
a concentration camp, appealed to Minister of Justice Drtina not to allow the
former president to be condemned to death, while the Vatican requested that
Tiso, as a Catholic priest, be kept in a monastery rather than a prison and that,
in the interests of the peace, his trial not be held in public. In January 1946,
a group of Slovak bishops sent a letter to President Beneš claiming that Tiso
had sought ‘the lesser evil’ and begging that his case not be handled ‘with
ruthless harshness’.90 On the occasion of a Czech–Slovak football match
held in Bratislava less than a week after the May elections, the crowd sang the
independent Slovak republic’s national anthem, called for Tiso’s release and
shouted anti-state and anti-Czech slogans until they were restrained by units
of the SNB.91
The Communists retaliated by organizing demonstrations against Tiso,
inundating the president, Czechoslovak government and Slovak National
Council with thousands of telegrams and resolutions, and sending deputations
of partisans, former political prisoners, participants in the 1944 Uprising
and workers to the chairman of the Slovak National Council, Lettrich, ‘in
order to exert the maximum pressure upon him against procuring clemency
for Tiso’.92 Right up to February 1948, as Steiner later recalled in wonderment,
the leadership of the Slovak Communist Party ‘did not directly oppose the
limitation of Slovak autonomous rights even those guaranteed in the Košice
Programme, and the increased influence of the central bodies in Prague’
because it seemed more important to them to ensure the confiscation of
German, Hungarian and collaborators’ property and ‘stricter punishment of
leaders of the former Slovak State’.93
The Tiso trial lasted from 2 December 1946 until 19 March 1947 (which
happened to coincide with his name day), when there were demonstrations
all over Slovakia, dominated by women demanding his release and singing a
mixture of Catholic hymns and patriotic Slovak songs.94 After deliberating
for a month, on 15 April 1947 the National Court sentenced Tiso to death,
whereupon both it and President Beneš were besieged with telegrams and
petitions either to insist that the verdict be carried out or else to appeal to the
president to exercise his right to grant clemency. Despite the firm expectation
throughout Slovakia that his sentence would be commuted to a long term in
prison, Tiso was hanged almost immediately, on 18 April. As if to underline
what looked suspiciously like a double standard in the treatment of Czech
and Slovak war criminals, the trial of Rudolf Beran, the former leader of
Czech National Unity and the Protectorate government, which took place in
Prague at the same time as the Tiso trial in Bratislava, ended in a twenty-year
jail sentence rather than an execution. Tellingly, among the crimes of which
Tiso was convicted was that of dividing the republic. As Brad Abrams has
pointed out, even under the heading of Tiso’s ‘crimes against humanity’,
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170 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
maltreatment of ethnic Czechs was given precedence over the deportation of
Slovak Jews.95 This political trial was as much about the Slovaks’ ‘betrayal’ of
the Czechs as about the crimes committed by a thoroughly repellent Slovak
dictatorship against its own citizens.
The next stage in the attempt to bring Slovakia into line came directly from
the Communist Party, working in tandem with the security services, and especially
the increasingly influential and well-organized StB. In May 1947, the
Communist Party instructed the minister of the interior to draw up a list of
all former members of the Slovak People’s Party who were in influential positions,
and to push for their retirement. This was followed, in June, with the
presentation of a report to the National Front government, written by highranking
officers in the StB, the aim of which was to persuade the central
government that the security situation in Slovakia was becoming critical and
the need to purge former members of the Slovak People’s Party urgent. At a
rally held at Devín on 6 July 1947, Prime Minister Gottwald accused the
Democrats of being reactionaries and of aiding and abetting anti-state
elements; the same accusations were immediately repeated by Antonín
Zápotocký on his own tour of Slovakia.96
On 14 September 1947, the Slovak minister of the interior announced that
an ‘anti-state conspiracy’, directed from abroad by Sidor and Ďurčanský, had
been ‘discovered’: it was claimed that some fifty officials of the Democratic
Party – including its general secretary, Fedor Hodža, the commissioner for
finance, Matej Josko, and Ján Ursíny, the deputy prime minister of the National
Front government – were in secret contact with Slovak émigré communities
and plotting to renew an independent Slovak state and assassinate President
Beneš.97 After about seven hundred people had been arrested in connection
with the ‘conspiracy’, the widespread atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion
provided an excuse for the Slovak Congress of Trade Unions and Employees
Councils, convened in Bratislava on 30 October at the request of the
Communists, to call on the Board of Commissioners to resign and be replaced
with men who ‘enjoy the confidence of the Slovak people’ and who would
ensure that Slovakia would be ruled ‘in the spirit of the Slovak National
Uprising’ and ‘the reconstruction programme of the Gottwald government’.98
Although a majority on the Board of Commissioners, who were from the
Slovak Democratic Party, knew better than to do it, six members, led by their
Slovak Communist chairman Gustáv Husák, did indeed resign. After protests
from the Communist Party and the intervention of the Communist prime
minister, Gottwald, on 20 November 1947 Slovakia’s Board of Commissioners
was reconfigured in such a way as to ensure that – despite the Democratic
Party’s clear majority in the 1946 elections – no single party had a majority.99
Although Deputy Prime Minister Ursíny resigned in protest, the results of this
Communist coup in Slovakia went unchallenged.
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 171
As members of the non-Communist parties became increasingly critical –
in cabinet, the National Assembly and the non-Communist press – of the
irregularity of the methods used by the Communists, and especially of their
steady infiltration into all branches of state security, more and more revelations
about brutal police interrogations, improper procedures, mass intimidation
campaigns and other ‘Gestapo methods’ were brought to light. These
were immediately countered by almost hysterical-sounding resolutions,
speeches, telegrams and articles from the Communists about reactionary
plotters in the ‘anti-state’ democratic parties. In his New Year’s speech on
1 January 1948, Prime Minister Gottwald assured the Czech and Slovak
nations that ‘the National Front, resolutely following the government
program and the will of the people’, would rid itself ‘of the reactionary
elements which are working against the program of the government, against
the people, and in the interests of subversion’.100
From September 1947, when the purge began in Slovakia, there was a
rapidly escalating sense of a Communist offensive in the Czech lands as well,
as the Communist-controlled Ministry of the Interior appeared to uncover
‘plots’ and ‘conspiracies’ with increasing frequency and to resort to ‘mobilizing
the masses’ through organized strikes, petitions, demonstrations and
telegram campaigns every time one of its demands or proposals was blocked
by members of the other parties in the National Front. And there were other
worrying signs. Parcel bombs were sent to Petr Zenkl, Jan Masaryk and
Prokop Drtina. The Czechoslovak government, having voted to accept
Marshall Aid, immediately withdrew its request after it was made clear that
the Soviet Union considered taking American money to be an unfriendly act.
As the atmosphere of mutual hostility and suspicion afterwards known as the
Cold War began to make itself felt in earnest, Communist parties all over
Central and Eastern Europe were growing less tolerant of national deviations,
less willing to countenance the idea that there might be a variety of
different ‘roads’ to socialism.
From the moment they had returned to Czechoslovak soil in the spring of
1945, ministers in the National Front government had worked together –
Communist and non-Communist alike – to incite mob vengeance, establish
people’s courts, abolish the right of appeal and carry out summary executions,
often based on retrospectively defined crimes and usually with a clear
presumption of guilt. They had solicited denunciations, criminalized interethnic
mixing, and countenanced legal discrimination against German- and
Hungarian-speakers: at first, they had even turned a blind eye to mob lynchings
and police torture. Millions of their fellow citizens, including children, had been
deliberately degraded, imprisoned and forcibly expelled. Only now, too late, did
the non-Communist ministers appear to begin to understand that, unless they
put a stop to the Communists’ willingness to move seamlessly from national
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172 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
cleansing and postwar retribution to purging the politically impure and rooting
out the ‘class enemy’, the next victims would be themselves.
On 13 February 1948, cabinet members from the National Socialist,
Democratic and Czechoslovak People’s parties finally sought to put a stop to
further Communist infiltration of the SNB by asking Václav Nosek, the
Communist minister of the interior, to explain the suspension of eight
non-Communist police commissioners and their proposed replacement with
eight Communist Party members. Instead of replying, Nosek pleaded illness
and excused himself from the relevant cabinet meeting. On 17 February, the
dissenting ministers announced that they would refuse to take part in further
cabinet meetings until the non-Communist police were returned to their
posts. The Communist Party immediately proclaimed a state of emergency
for all its members, and began organizing a People’s Militia.101 The next day,
National Socialists Petr Zenkl and Hubert Ripka met with Beneš, whom they –
like many others – appear to have assumed would not give in to Communist
pressure but would staunchly defend the ‘democratic’ state that he had helped
to establish.102
On 20 February 1948, twelve ministers from the non-Communist
(National Socialist, Slovak Democratic and Catholic Populist) parties forced
a showdown by sensationally announcing their resignations from the cabinet.
The apparent intention was to cause the government to fall, so forcing fresh
elections which would reveal to all the world that the Communists had lost
popular support since 1946 and so enable their influence to be curtailed.
According to the constitution, half of the cabinet’s twenty-six ministers
would have to resign in order to bring down the cabinet. Since the Social
Democrats and unaffiliated ministers – foreign minister Jan Masaryk and
minister of defence Ludvík Svoboda – did not resign, the anti-Communist
lobby found itself one minister short, with the Communist bloc in a majority
of one. All attention now turned to Beneš, who as president could choose
either to refuse or to accept the twelve resignations. As at the time of the
Munich Crisis ten years earlier, Beneš, who bore a good deal of personal
responsibility for this new crisis, stalled for time, unsure how to react.
While Beneš hesitated, Gustáv Husák, the Slovak Communist chair of the
Board of Commissioners in Bratislava, acted. On 21 February, he dismissed
the non-Communist ministers in the Slovak government on the grounds that,
since their colleagues in Prague had resigned, they no longer had a mandate to
govern. Husák then reconfigured membership so that ten out of fourteen
seats were held either by the Communist Party, with just a token two seats left
for the Democratic Party and one apiece for the Freedom Party and the Social
Democrats.103 This caused the collapse of the Democratic Party in Slovakia
and gave the two socialist parties an overall majority in the Czechoslovak state.
Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak Communist Party rallied its supporters with
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 173
appeals on state radio for mass demonstrations to condemn the actions of the
twelve ministers, described as reactionaries who wanted to block ‘progress’
and the fulfilment of the socialist promises set out in the National Front
government’s political programme. In addition, Gottwald appealed for ‘Action
Committees’ to form themselves and remove ‘reactionary and subversive
elements’ from public life. In all, the Action Committees are said to have
dismissed about twenty-eight thousand state and public employees and
expelled some seven thousand university students statewide.104
On 21 February, there was an overwhelming response to the Communist
Party’s appeals: gatherings and demonstrations took place throughout the
country, crowned by a huge rally in Prague’s Old Town Square, where Prime
Minister Gottwald warned a receptive crowd that an ‘anti-populist, antidemocratic,
anti-socialist bloc’ was threatening to push Czechoslovakia towards
‘a new Munich’. At the Castle, meanwhile, Beneš was inundated with telegrams
and petitions from delegations of factory workers insisting that he accept the
ministerial resignations. The Communist Party continued to make use of the
state airwaves to call for workers in every village, city and workplace throughout
the country to form themselves into Action Committees to keep up the
pressure.105 On 22 February, out of eight thousand trade-union delegates
assembled in Prague at the request of old-time Czechoslovak Communist
Antonín Zápotocký, only ten were said to have withheld their support from the
Communists.106 Meanwhile, a self-styled People’s Militia, consisting of around
fifteen thousand men, some of whom were even armed, also took to the streets
in protest. With the population seemingly split roughly 50:50 for and against
the Communist Party, Beneš – even if he had wanted to – could not have risked
calling on either the police – some forty thousand-strong, but thoroughly
infiltrated by Communists and responsible to a Communist minister of the
interior – or the army, made up of about 140,000 troops, and responsible to the
same minister of defence, Ludvík Svoboda, who had failed to support the
non-Communist ministers in cabinet.
The coup de grâce came on 24 February, when over two million citizens,
roughly one-sixth of the entire country’s population, took part in a general
strike organized by the Communist Party and the trade unions to demonstrate
support for the Communist prime minister. In the face of such a massive and
well-organized show of popular feeling in favour of the Communist Party,
President Beneš bowed to the pressure. On 25 February 1948, in the speech
that was to become the prime symbol of the ‘bloodless coup’ afterwards
referred to by the Communist regime as ‘Victorious February’ (Vítězný únor),
Prime Minister Gottwald announced that he had ‘just returned from the
Castle’, where the president had accepted the twelve ministers’ resignations
and approved the Communist-majority government. This was the moment
frozen in a photograph that was afterwards painted, reproduced on posters,
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174 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
shown in museum displays and schoolbooks, and even featured on a postage
stamp, which was taken to represent the very moment of the Communist
victory over ‘reactionary’ and ‘bourgeois’ elements. Never mind that
Czechoslovakia had already been a People’s Democracy for three years; that
one of Gottwald’s closest comrades would soon have to be airbrushed out of
the photograph; that Gottwald was obviously and audibly drunk; or that the
photograph had actually been taken during a speech that had been given a few
days earlier, and at a different location.107 Political truth was already more
important than the literal truth.
On 26 February 1948, the day after the Communists’ victory in cabinet, the
lead story in all the newspapers was the composition of the new Gottwald
government. The very next story to appear on the front page of Rudé právo, the
Czech Communist Party daily, was the beginning of proceedings against Zenkl,
under the ominous headline ‘The People Cleanse the Republic of Saboteurs,
Traitors and Unreliable Elements’.108 Jozef Lettrich resigned as chairman of
the Slovak National Council and went into exile; his place was taken by the
Slovak Communist Karol Šmidke. Eleven out of the fifteen people on the
Board of Commissioners were now members of the Communist Party.109
President Beneš swore in the new ministers in Gottwald’s National Front
government on 27 February 1948, bolstering Communist claims that their rise
to power had been perfectly legal. Of the twenty-three ministers in the
National Front government, eleven were now Communist Party members
and an additional four were Social Democrats who could be relied upon to
support the Communist line. Two further ministers – Jan Masaryk and Ludvík
Svoboda – although without party affiliation, had done nothing to prevent the
anti-Communist ministers from being ousted. Just six ministers – too few to
block any new government measures – were from the other political parties in
the National Front: the Czechoslovak People’s Party and National Socialist
Party for the Czechs and the Democratic Party and Freedom Party for the
Slovaks. Although the outward form of the political system had not changed,
a single Communist Party made up of two branches – the Czechoslovak
Communist Party or KSČ, and the Slovak Communist Party or KSS – could
now be sure that, providing it maintained internal discipline, whatever legislation
it liked would be passed by the cabinet and rubber-stamped by the
National Assembly. This was the logic of the prewar ‘National Unity’ and the
postwar ‘National Front’ taken to its ultimate conclusion.
Czechoslovaks abroad, unsure what was going on at home, had to decide
which way to jump. One of the many Czechoslovak diplomats to choose to
stay abroad was General Jan Ingr, who eventually joined Moravec’s exile
counter-intelligence group in the United States. At the Czechoslovak Embassy
in London, Rosemary Kavan, the English wife of the Communist press secretary
Pavel Kavan, remembered how eight non-Communist diplomats asked
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FROM NATIONAL CLEANSING TO COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP 175
for asylum while ‘the rest of us threw a party and sang old revolutionary
favourites and new militant songs with inspiring words like “Now we’ve got
what we wanted!” and “Hey rup! Roll up your sleeves and get down to
work!” ’110 At home, where political opinion was similarly split down the
middle, it was already felt to be dangerous to criticize the Communist Party or
to speculate aloud about the legitimacy of ‘Victorious February’. Some people
left the country altogether, going on ‘holidays’ from which they were never to
return or braved illegal border crossings to seek political asylum in Austria or
Germany. Others, unable or unwilling to leave their homeland, began to
complain that they had been liberated from one form of tyranny only to be
cast into another, a refrain that began to be taken up by Western anti-Soviet
propaganda abroad.
On 10 March 1948, just two weeks after the cabinet coup, foreign minister
Jan Masaryk, son of the President-Liberator, was found dead on the pavement
below his residence in the Czernin Palace, the Foreign Ministry
building. Rumours, which have persisted ever since, began to circulate that he
had been pushed, either by Soviet or Czechoslovak agents; but – just like
Beneš – Masaryk had shown no public sign of opposing the Communists and
Pavel Kavan, the last person to have seen him alive, like others who knew
about his history of depression, believed in the official verdict of suicide.111
The case was to be reopened in 1968, 1993 and 2002.112
Like every other public occasion of the day, Jan Masaryk’s funeral was
seized upon as an opportunity to parade national unity, political consensus
and cross-party solidarity within the Communist-dominated National Front
government. A lavish state funeral was held, with tens of thousands of
mourners following the slow progress of the coffin from the Czernin Palace
to the Pantheon of the National Museum, and special memorial issues of
popular magazines were brought out to commemorate the event.113 Another
crowd waited just outside the manicured grounds of the presidential summer
residence in the village of Lány, where Masaryk was buried alongside his
father, in a simple family plot. Principal mourners included not only the
surviving members of the Masaryk and Beneš families, together with Prime
Minister Gottwald and his wife, Marta, but also mayors dressed in their municipal
robes, uniformed Legionnaires from the First World War, soldiers, police
officers and a whole variety of Communist dignitaries. The new foreign
minister, Slovak Communist Vladimír Clementis, was much photographed
speaking at the Masaryk family grave; but for all the sentimental associations
which were made with the pre-Munich First Republic, his appointment meant
that yet another important cabinet post had gone to the Communist Party.
The end of the Third Czechoslovak Republic is usually presented as a
second Czechoslovak tragedy to follow the first great tragedy of Munich.
According to one version, the democratic, tolerant and humane traditions of
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=4585750.
Created from gla on 2020-09-26 14:35:39.
Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.
176 CZECHOSLOVAKIA
the First Czechoslovak Republic – almost mystically embodied in the persons
of Edvard Beneš, T.G. Masaryk’s spiritual son, and Jan Masaryk, his actual
one – were restored to the Czechoslovak ‘nation’ only to be destroyed by the
wiles and ruthlessness of the Communists. A second classic view suggests that
Czechoslovak Communism, which would naturally have taken a moderate,
evolutionary and distinctively Czech or Czechoslovak path, was instead forced
to conform to an inappropriate, crude and ruthlessly Soviet pattern. The ubiquity
of these two views, which seem to underpin virtually all writings on the
topic, helps to explain why so much effort has been expended – sometimes in
the teeth of the evidence – to portray Beneš as committed to democracy
during the February Crisis and to find evidence to suggest that Communist
agents – ideally Soviet ones – were responsible for Jan Masaryk’s death.114 The
obvious alternative, to blame the rise of Czechoslovak Communism on the
nationalist chauvinism and political opportunism of some misguided Czech
political leaders, is clearly less palatable. The Third Czechoslovak Republic,
together with the illusion that the state could remain both socialist and democratic,
a compromise between the parliamentary democracies of the West and
the people’s democracies of the East, was over after February 1948. So was
the chance of keeping even a limited and partial democracy. These opportunities
were not lost primarily because of outside interference, but rather
because a majority of politically active Czechs and Slovaks wanted something
more urgently than they wanted democracy: an ethnically homogeneous
nation–state under the protection of the Soviet Union.
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Heimann, Mary. Czechoslovakia, Yale University Press, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/gla/detail.action?docID=4585750.
Created from gla on 2020-09-26 14:35:39.
Copyright©2009.YaleUniversityPress.Allrightsreserved.