Posted on 09/04/2002 8:31:55 AM PDT by DTA
Report: Massacre evidence hidden
Documents describe postwar slaughter of ethnic Germans
By James Pitkin STAFF WRITER
Declassified documents from 1947 show that Czechoslovak officials ordered a cover-up of massacres of ethnic Germans after World War II.
Between May 1945 and December 1946, some 2.5 million Sudeten Germans were expelled from postwar Czechoslovakia as part of a series of decrees issued by President Edvard Benes.
Some Czechs and Slovaks used the deportations to vent their anger after seven years of Nazi occupation. Czech and German historians agree that up to 30,000 ethnic Germans were killed by civilians, Czechoslovak forces and Soviet Red Army soldiers during the expulsions.
The documents, uncovered by military historian Frantisek Hanzlik in 1997 but only now receiving public attention, reveal a campaign within the Czechoslovak government to cover up atrocities.
"This shows that those who should have been preventing unlawful actions were in fact taking part in them," Hanzlik told the daily Mlada fronta Dnes.
Reports of mass killings and other abuses against Sudeten Germans began appearing in the international press soon after the war and continued after the expulsions ended.
A parliamentary committee established in 1947 to investigate crimes committed during the expulsions recommended that officials stifle such reports and hide evidence of the killings, to protect the country's reputation.
Made up of officials from the interior and defense ministries, army officials, members of Parliament and civilian experts, the committee had access to information on attacks against ethnic Germans carried out in Czechoslovakia.
In the committee's final report, Defense Minister (later President of the Republic) Ludvik Svoboda and Interior Minister Vaclav Nosek -- both Communist Party members -- recommended squelching domestic and international press reports about the atrocities "in order to maintain the good reputation of Czechoslovakia and its people abroad."
The report also advised the government to "take precautions to hide and remove evidence of the mentioned acts."
The documents contain a long list of what are termed "mass interventions" against Sudeten Germans. They include the massacre of a trainload of deportees en route to Slovakia and the shooting of 1,500 people by an army unit. There are reports of mass graves and shootings of women and children in several border towns.
"Certainly there are more such cases," the report states. "Members of all layers of the nation took part, both soldiers and civilians."
Hanzlik has no doubt that officials acted on the committee's advice.
"These things appearing in public could be very uncomfortable for the government," he said. "I would compare it to the situation of America in Vietnam or the Soviets in Afghanistan, where neither was interested in sensitive information getting out."
The documents note a handful of cases in which perpetrators were punished but state that in the vast majority of cases, the killers could not be found because witnesses and soldiers refused to cooperate with investigators.
The committee concluded that many crimes against ethnic Germans were understandable given the context of the times.
"These are acts which, if committed under normal circumstances, would deserve the most severe public punishment," the report says. "But it is not possible to judge revolution under normal criteria."
The Benes Decrees have caused a diplomatic storm in recent years, with politicians in neighboring Germany and Austria demanding that the Czech Republic revoke the decrees before it joins the European Union.
Hanzlik said he hopes the documents don't deepen the current diplomatic row over the expulsions.
"I think it's always bad when tragic events are misused for political gain," he said. "This, in a certain way, prevents us from being able to see what happened with clear eyes."
-- Eva Dreserova contributed to this report.
James Pitkin's e-mail address is jpitkin@praguepost.com (July 24, 2002
Can someone provide Stars and Stripes story "“U.S. donates $1 million” from July or August this year about U.S. donating $1M of taxpayers money for a monument to Srebrenica hoax ?
It is vitaly important to understand the true nature of past historic events in order to be able with current and future shocks. Hence, what we should be surprised about is that Germans get unbeleivably lucky (mostly due to D-Day success) and some of them get out alive.
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