World War II set in motion repressive policies regarding the treatment of minorities. In addition to the nearly six million Jews who perished during the Holocaust, millions of other ethnic minorities were expelled, relocated or interned during and after the war. Robert Magosci states that from 1944 to 1948, 31 million people were uprooted and forced to move in East Central Europe; going back to 1939, fifteen million more migrants can be added to that figure.78 While distinctions between pre-war, wartime and postwar forced migrations existed, expulsions and resettlement in Eastern Europe followed the same patterns and aimed at the same ends. For example, the readjustment of the postwar Polish borders involved the consequent flight of roughly eight million people, both Germans and Poles, some out of fear of the Red Army and others from its later actions. The Polish government continued to implement repressive ethnic policies into 1947 when it carried out Akcja Wisla (Operation Vistula), which forcibly dispersed Lemkos and remaining Ukrainians throughout Poland. In addition, more than three million Poles from central Poland also relocated to the so-called “recovered territories” in the west.79 World War II unleashed these mass expulsion and resettlement projects and dramatically reshaped postwar states and societies in Eastern Europe.
The transformation of the Czech borderlands occurred as part of this regional
reconfiguration of states, economies and ethnic composition. Jan Gross argues that World War II created dramatic social and structural upheavals which helped Communist movements gain
78 Robert Magosci, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle, 1993), 164; Schechtman, Postwar Population Transfers, 363.
79 Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations, chapters 8 and 9; Curp, “The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing,” 575-603;
Snyder, “To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem.” See also the chapters on Poland in the following: Várdy and Tooley eds., Ethnic Cleansing in 20th Century Europe; Ther and Siljak eds., Redrawing Nations.
power and support in Eastern Europe.80 From the war experience itself to increased state control of the economy, the societies of Eastern Europe appeared radically different in 1948 than they had a decade earlier. These changes, he argues, were not yet completed by 1945. Thus, instead of seeing the immediate postwar years as a sharp break with the past, he suggests a new
periodization for the region’s history beginning with the outbreak of war and ending in 1948. He writes: “It was only then that the destruction cum transformation of institutions, political forms, and social strata constitutive of pre-war polities loses its impetus and a consolidation phase of a new kind of regime begins.”81 In Nazi Germany, one might argue this process had already begun in 1935 or 1938 as sanctions against the Jews and expropriation of their property became more systematically employed.
In the Czech case, these changes originated with the Munich Agreement of September 1938, which attached much of the Sudetenland directly to the Reich and initiated the disintegration of the country. When the Nazis rolled into what became the Reichsgau Sudetenland, many Czech inhabitants moved to the interior parts of the country. This migration has been labeled an expulsion in its own right by those Czechs who experienced it.82 It was certainly influenced by the takeover of the Sudetenland and the reorganization of the region’s population. However, many of the roughly 300,000 people who left did so by circumstance, rather than being forced to move by armed military units. Some had lost their jobs either as part of the change in state administration or because Germans demanded their positions. Others, such as Jews and Social Democrats, fled out of fear of persecution. Still others did not wish to live in a different country,
80 Jan Gross, “War as Revolution,” in The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War II and its Aftermath, eds.
Istvan Deak, Jan Gross, and Tony Judt (Princeton, 2000), 17-40; Bradley Abrams makes a similar argument. Bradley Abrams, “The Second World War and the East European Revolution,” East European Politics and Societies 16, no. 3 (2002): 623-664.
81 Gross, “War as Revolution,” 24-25.
especially under Nazi leadership.83 But for many Sudeten Germans, the annexation came as a victory. They took up positions vacated by the departing Czechs and joined the Nazi party in ever increasing numbers. As Jürgen Tampke observes:
the enthusiasm and jubilation that accompanied the Anschluss into the Reich was genuinely shared by the great majority of Sudeten Germans, which is not to say that most of them endorsed the xenophobic hardcore racialist—soon to be genocidal—and ultra-aggressive aspects of National Socialist ideology. Rather, the widely held belief that incorporation into the Nazis’ grossdeutsche Reich would fulfill aspirations for national self-determination and would lead to
substantial socio-economic improvement constitutes a more convincing reason for the general euphoria.84
Aside from gaining limited short-term economic benefits, however, Sudeten Germans relinquished their own future to the Reich. The Nazi regime installed a new system of local administration with combined powers of self-governance and state administrator. This system meshed with Nazi efforts to streamline the Reich’s administration.85 Likewise, the Sudetenland economy became subordinated to the Reich’s needs.
In March 1939, the Nazis finished dismantling Czechoslovakia. The Protectorate of
Bohemia and Moravia was created under the pretext of continuing Czech-German conflicts and after Slovakia seceded. Slovakia achieved its first taste of independence under Nazi tutelage. From a Czech nationalist perspective, Czechs became the subjects of their age-old enemy. Czech universities were closed and Czech professionals and intelligentsia were forced to work for the Nazi war economy. Plans were also made to “Germanize” the vast majority of Czechs, leaving the remainder to be deported or exterminated.86 While these efforts were considered to be national attacks in their own right, repression was directed against certain segments of the
83 Václav Kural and Zdeněk Radvanovský et. al., “Sudety” pod hákovým křížem (Ústí nad Labem, 2002), 50-65.
Included in this figure are several thousand Jews and German anti-fascists.
84 Tämpke, Czech German Relations, 58.
85 Kural and Radvanovský, “Sudety” pod hákovým křížem, 92-95.
86 Bryant, “Making the Czechs German,” 100-104; Aly, Final Solution, 118; Vojtech Mastny, The Czechs under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance, 1939-1942 (New York, Columbia, 1977), 127.
population, but not against the Czechs as a whole. Vojtech Mastny notes that because of the initial smooth transition of power people’s daily lives did not change much. He argues that Czech attitudes towards Germans “though certainly not friendly, at least encouraged
accommodation to the new conditions.”87 Other historians also corroborate the general picture of Czechs’ acceptance of the occupation, though they differ on the extent and type of resistance.88 One measure of resistance all historians cite, however, was the increasing hatred for Germans and everything German toward the end of the war, outlined above.
Different conclusions about the expulsions and settlement are reached when the focus moves beyond Communist tactics and Czech/German hatred. First and foremost, across Central and Eastern Europe during the late 1930s and 1940s, governments and nationalist leaders sought to reconfigure the ethnic, economic and social composition of entire regions. While the impetus for these changes varied, governments took action against ethnic minorities considered disloyal, subversive, or productively useless. In addition, they sought to resettle areas where minorities lived with others whom leaders considered more reliable. For the Nazis, this meant clearing the east of Jews and Bolsheviks and collecting ethnic Germans into an integrated homeland or greater Reich.89 These policies were often intertwined, but only clearly succeeded in the first of
these objectives. The fight against the Bolsheviks was lost on the battlefield and the efforts to implement a grossdeutsche solution to meet Nazi goals of Lebensraum collapsed along with the retreating soldiers. However, the vast majority of the region’s Volksdeutsche was forced to move to Germany after 1945. This migration came in different guises and at different times, but
cumulatively represented over fifteen million persons by 1948. While millions of German speakers from Eastern Europe moved to German territory by the end of the war, Nazi planners
87 Mastny, The Czechs under Nazi Rule, 57.
88 Tampke, Czech-German Relations, 58-72; Luža, The Transfer of the Sudeten Germans, 187-222. 89 Aly, Final Solution, 19; Browning, Nazi Policy, 11.
had envisioned their migration as a form of promotion, not one of punishment. The Soviet Union had also carried out campaigns to ethnically cleanse certain border areas beginning in the early 1930s.90 The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ensured that borders would be redrawn and
populations moved. Indeed, the Soviet Union deported over 300,000 Poles after it took control of eastern Poland.91 Prior to the war, the USSR sent Germans to Nazi territory, but after the 1941 invasion, it deported nearly 750,000 of them to parts of Central Asia. Hundreds of thousands of others followed, many of them after the war.92 The ethnic cleansing campaigns surrounding World War II were not isolated events; they overlapped and influenced one another in several ways.
One accompanying feature of the migrations and changes in ethnic composition at this time was the simultaneous transformation of the Eastern European economy. In particular, the state increased its power over the economy by seizing property and controlling labor.93 The shift in property ownership and economic control sometimes reinforced other goals. For instance, the expropriation of Jewish property helped the German economy and the Nazi war effort by placing a vast number of firms under direct state control, while simultaneously threatening Jews’
existence and encouraging emigration.94 Following the war, much of this property fell to the
state, which then decided how to handle it. The Nazi war economy also shifted Eastern European economies toward heavy industry, particularly armament and energy production. These changes
90 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, 2004); Pavel
Polian, Against Their Will: The History and Geography of Forced Migrations in the USSR (Budapest, 2004), 59- 114; Martin, “The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing”; Naimark, Fires of Hatred, 88. The 1930s campaigns against suspicious minorities had its roots in previous state policies. Peter Holquist, “To Count, to Extract and to
Exterminate: Population Statistics and Population Politics in Late Imperial and Soviet Russia,” in A State of Nations:
Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin eds. Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (Oxford,
2001), 111-144.
91 Ther, “A Century of Forced Migration,” 51. Ther argues that this was an attempt at removing a class rather than
an ethnic enemy.
92 Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 30-46. 93 Gross, “War as Revolution,” 21.
were not necessarily negative because they brought investment and construction in these sectors. Economic planning went hand in hand with these shifts, and made bureaucrats, rather than entrepreneurs, responsible for economic initiative. Workers experienced labor as a form of punishment, and productivity fell accordingly. As Gross poignantly states: “Work – one of the major means for socializing people by creating a basis for cooperation among them, providing links between the satisfaction of individual needs and the common effort, as well as a forum for status seeking and social mobility – suddenly lost its capacity to do so, and labor was used contrary to the interests of the group performing it.95 One might even go further and argue that labor became punitive, not only for “working Jews,” but also for the millions shipped to Germany, POWs, or others working for the Nazis.96 Such a transformation in the meaning of work did not bode well for postwar reconstruction efforts in the region.
The Sudeten German expulsions and borderland settlement were, in effect, a continuation of these wartime policies and population movements. The expulsions, even though they were predicated upon the notion of collective guilt, represented one method of retributive justice to deal with Germans who had helped to undermine the interwar Czechoslovak state and advance Nazi aims in the region.97 The military nature and control of the expulsions prolonged the
repression unleashed by the war. Violence served both as a tool of revenge and compulsion immediately after the war. In conjunction with expulsions, settlement created a vehicle for Czech agricultural workers to become landowners and for others to take over Sudeten German
businesses and homes. The widespread expropriation of Sudeten German property spurred other far-reaching economic measures, including land reform and the nationalization of industry.
95 Gross, “War as Revolution,” 19-22.
96 For more on Jewish labor see, Browning, Nazi Policy, 58-88.
97 For more on the relationship between the expulsions and retribution in Czechoslovakia, see Frommer, National Cleansing, 228-266.
Although the military aspects of war ended in 1945, the social experience of war continued under the guise of expulsion and settlement.
Situating the Sudeten German expulsions and settlement within the social, economic and political upheavals of World War II offers a new context for studying the transformation of the postwar borderlands. Few historians underscore the connections among the various expulsions, deportations and resettlements that occurred between 1938 and 1948.98 Rather than considering each country’s war experience as unique, this dissertation argues that migration and population politics were defining features of Eastern European polities and societies at that time. Within this context, the remaking of the Czech borderlands from 1945 to 1948 provides a valuable case study of population politics. Examining expulsion and settlement politics requires not only the consideration of leaders’ plans and the effects of their policies on the expellees, but an
understanding of how these plans developed and how they worked in practice. In this case, specific attention is given to the way that economic prerogatives and needs shaped the course of migration to and from the borderlands. Focusing on economic factors provides critical insights into the connections among expulsion policies, personal motivations and settlement practices.