THE CRIME OF POTSDAM
In his book _Europa in Trümmern_, Father Reichenberger recalls that Hitler had also considered a resettlement of the Czechs.
"But," Reichenberger wrote, "Hitler had stated that the
resettlement of seven million Czechs would take a century. The Humanists of Potsdam expelled twice that number in one year."
They had decreed that the resettlement should be carried out in an "orderly" and "humane" fashion. What a colossal mockery of those affected!
Details of the "humane" genocide did not remain unknown to the state chancelleries in London and Washington. In August 1945 Churchill said in the House of Commons, "a tragedy of immense proportions is playing out behind the Iron Curtain." And as per the Times of November 5, 1945, England's Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin commented in the House of Commons with regard to the effects of the Potsdam Pact of July 17, 1945: "Great God, it's the height of human madness. It was a dreadful spectacle."
There were American voices too in 1946. But none of the
governments involved thought for even a moment to put a stop to the "dreadful spectacle".
The expulsion revealed the fact that National Socialism was not the issue at all. The program of extermination was aimed at the Germans. It was not Nazis who were being resettled - it was everyone who happened to have been born of a German mother.
The decree of banishment inflicted by the democratic and Communist barbarians struck 2.3 million East Prussians, 0.6 million citizens of Danzig, 3.1 million Lower Silesians, 3.4 million Upper Silesians, 0.9 million from Brandenburg, 1 million
Pomeranians, 0.3 million West Prussians, 1 million from Posen and 1 million from the Warthegau - a total of 13.6 million German people. Added to this were 3 million Sudeten Germans, and 1.5
million from Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania. That makes more than 18 million Germans. More than 2.5 million of them lost their lives in the expulsion.
To truly get a sense of the extent of this Crime of Potsdam, it is necessary to see these figures in comparison to other countries.
Austria has a population of 7 million; Denmark, Sweden and Norway together total about 15 million. Switzerland has 4.5 million inhabitants. Twice as many people as live in all of Austria were driven destitute from their homes.
It was fortunate for Europe that the beggared 15 million that were thrust into the sea of debris that was then Germany did not
become a hearth of unrest, an explosive element such as the three million Palestinians became in more recent days. But the biological consequences of overpopulation do already cast dark shadows in the form of the rapid decline of the German birth rate.
In East and West alike, the subject of the expulsion is still a
taboo. The Sudetenland is a wasteland. Czechoslovakia does feel the loss of the economic strength of three million inhabitants whose competence and unparalleled industriousness had ever been exemplary.
Countless Sudeten German voices have given a powerful echo to this publication. They had one central theme: a peaceable
attitude, not a word of revenge. Certainly many of them are tired and resigned. But at the core of the Sudeten German people the will to preserve their ethnic substance beats strongly.
So does the demand for compensation.
This demand and the insistence on the right to one's homeland will no doubt pass on to the next generation. "The homecoming of the expelled," said Otto Habsburg, "is not only a postulate of
common sense. It is also the prerequisite for a Christian renewal of our part of the world, for that practical application of the divine laws of justice in public and private life without which
Communism can never be spiritually overcome."
As the late Dr. Lodgman, the Sudeten Germans' faithful Eckart, telegraphed Father Reichenberger, God's champion of justice:
"God lives yet, and His day will come."
OUR NAMELESS DEAD CALL OUT TO US
What now? The expulsion of the economically highly efficient Germans, coupled with 50 years of Socialism, has turned
Czechoslovakia into a poorhouse. The Czechs will never be able to replace the material goods, worth many thousands of millions of dollars, which they robbed from the Germans. The murderers can no longer be apprehended. What the Germans can demand,
however, is the right to their homeland. But even that demand earns them only hatred: "Not so much as a rock belongs to the Germans - German property must remain Czech!", the headlines scream. A recent line is that the Germans ought to be grateful that they were expelled, since this saved them from the yoke of Communism. The expellees grew richer in the free world - thus, they ought to be grateful for their expulsion! Not a word is wasted on the sadistic mass murder of 241,000 Sudeten Germans, much less on the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who,
unarmed, fell to the Czechs' hands and knives and submachine
guns. Most young Czechs today do not even know about the orgy of sadism. For decades they have been taught in their schools that the Germans only arrived with Hitler, and left again in 1945.
That the Germans had already settled the Sudetenland before America was even discovered is a fact that even some adults in Czechoslovakia do not know. The genocide has been hushed up perfectly.
Now that the struggle for a new order at the heart of Europe is beginning, the great and treacherous silence about the crimes of 1945 and 1919 must be broken at last. Europe is to become a Europe of regions. Why should there not be a German and a Czech region at the heart of Europe? Hundreds of thousands of dead, thrown like dogs into sorry excuses for graves, without a death certificate or even a cross, have a right to some last respects. The vast army of the nameless dead holding their
admonitory vigil in the stolen soil of their native land calls out to us....
APPENDIX:
Comments on Contemporary History
The occupation of the Protectorate by Hitler was only one of many political upheavals on the territory of former Czechoslovakia
(others were the independence of Slovakia, and thus the
dissolution of the Czech multi-ethnic state), but none of these developments succeeded in obtaining the still-withheld minority rights of the five ethnic groups that had been forced into this state without any plebiscite after the First World War. Even
Hitler's severe warning in his "Sports Palace speech" of
September 26, 1938, urging that the minorities living in that state must at long last be granted their right to self-determination, fell on deaf ears in the government at Prague.
In Professor Dr. Berthold Rubin's book _War Deutschland allein schuld?_ (Munich: DSZ-Verlag, 1987) we learn on page 153: "...
and further, I have assured him [Chamberlain] that in the very instant when Czechoslovakia solves its problems - that is, when Czechoslovakia has dealt with its minorities, and peacefully so, not by oppression - in that instant I will lose all interest in the Czech state and we will guarantee its borders. We don't want any Czechs, but we do want a full, satisfactory and final settlement of the minority question, no uneasy compromises, and absolutely no constant trouble spot at the heart of Europe!" (The last sentence is always studiously omitted by other publications!)
Ultimately, the victorious powers of World War I - the midwives to the Paris treaties - were the initiating force behind this hearth of unrest in Europe (compare today's Yugoslavia!), together with the chauvinistic Czech nationalists who had had 20 years to solve the minority question in Czechoslovakia in a fashion satisfactory to all. But, idle and spineless, they wasted the time so precious to all concerned, and were not interested in a serious solution. With his well-known Eight Points, Konrad Henlein, the leader of Sudeten Germans, also attempted in vain to make the Czech government see reason at the Karlsbad Party Convention on April 24, 1938.
It should be our aim to make the facts of this ethnic martyrdom - hushed up for so long, but now beginning to break through into
the light - known to the general public that is starved for truth.
Cover-ups serve no-one! And truth is indivisible.
It is especially important that new editions and reprints of
publications be revised to reflect historical documents that have only recently become known after having been locked away in archives for, in many cases, very long periods of time. This is the only way to do justice to history - and such revisions would be entirely unnecessary if uncomfortable facts had not been
suppressed for decades in the first place.
APPENDIX:
Convention on International Law, Bonn, 1961 Excerpts from "Das Recht auf die Heimat
im historisch-politischen Prozeß", F. H. E. W. du Buy.
Euskirchen: Verlag für zeitgenössische Dokumentation GmbH, 1974.
The debates about the questions regarding the right to one's homeland were continued at the convention of experts on
international law on October 28 and 29, 1961 in Bonn. The results of this convention were formulated as seven basic principles, as follows:
"I. In the recent past, and in various regions of the world, peoples and ethnic groups were expelled from their ancestral homes.
These acts of violence are in clear violation of fundamental principles of modern national and international law.
"II. The expulsion of peoples or of ethnic and religious groups represents a flagrant violation of the right to self-determination.
The right to self-determination has been recognized by the United Nations as a leading principle of order; by virtue of this fact, as well as through practical application by nations over the past decades, it has become a general and binding fundamental of international law. It is the right of peoples and population groups to freely determine their political, economic, social and cultural status. In this context, peoples are not to be regarded as
fluctuating masses that may be pushed from one region to
another for political, economic, police or other considerations, but as resident communities that are closely tied to their settlement area. Thus, the right to self-determination includes the prohibition of expulsions. Not even a conquered people may be denied the right to self-determination.
"III. The international conventions of war include the prohibition of deportation of the population of an occupied region by the occupying power. Complete agreement on this was already expressed at the 1907 Peace Conference in The Hague. Thus, Article 49 of the Geneva Convention of August 12, 1949 about the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War did not create a new law, but rather codified existing law.
"Attention is also drawn to Article 49, Section 6, according to
which an occupying power may also not deport or resettle parts of its own civilian population into a region occupied by it.
"IV. Under modern international law, no state may deport its own citizens from its national territory, nor deny them entry into said national territory. This prohibition applies also in cases of changes
in territorial sovereignty. In such a case, the resident population may not be denied citizenship in the acquiring state, insofar as it had previously also held native status. This protects the
population from expulsion across the newly-fixed border.
"V. The question whether expelling nations and host nations may conduct population transfers in an internationally lawful manner through national treaties cannot be answered with mere reference to the Potsdam Pact. This Pact of August 2, 1945 - whose Article XIII ordered a humane carrying-out of the expulsion of the
Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary that had in fact already begun at full scale several months earlier, under the sovereign responsibility of the expelling states - had been
concluded by the occupying powers, namely Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. The condition imposed
therein on Germany, to accept the expelled Germans, thus does not represent an internationally lawful acknowledgment of the expulsion on the part of Germany, since Germany was not a party to this Pact.
"VI. Deportations within the boundaries of a national territory also violate the fundamentals of a modern system of government.
"International law demands that nations respect a minimum
standard of human rights, and this standard is characterized by a progressive acceptance of universal human rights.
"In 1956-57 in the Soviet Union, for example, mass deportations of a state's own citizens were ruled to be an inadmissible violation of constitutional rights and to be in conflict with the principles of
Marxist-Leninist nationality politics, and were reversed for a part of the persons affected.
"The legal position following from the stated principles of national and international law for peoples, population groups and their members has come to be known as "the right to one's homeland".
Thus, this right is founded on positive regulations of
contemporary national and international law as well as on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its violation is a crime under international law.
"Every prohibition - and thus also the prohibition of forced resettlement and mass deportations - safeguards a condition perceived by man's sense of justice to be valuable and worth preserving. In the event of attempted unlawful interference with this condition, those who benefit from the preservation of said condition have the fundamental right to demand the cessation of such interference, or - if interference has been carried through - to seek redress. In the case at hand, such a right to redress takes the form of a right to permission to remigrate, and to assistance in doing so, or alternatively as a right to claim compensation. This coincides with the decisions of the standing International Court, as these have found expression especially in the Chozow case."
At this convention it was determined that there are several principles of international law whose purpose it is to afford
persons protection from forced resettlement and expulsion from their homeland. The term "right to one's homeland" has come to stand for the legally protected right to remain in one's domicile unmolested. This right to one's homeland can thus be regarded as the collective term for several principles recognized by
international law, and accordingly, the violation of this right represents a crime under international law.
The right to one's homeland is intended to afford a person the right to remain in his domicile without undue harassment. If this right is infringed upon, he has a rightful claim to restitution, which may be understood as a right to restitutio in integrum, ie. in this case the right to return to one's homeland. If a return to one's old homeland is not possible, the injured party has the right to claim compensation.
Principle 5 makes reference to the Potsdam Pact of August 2, 1945. The substance of this Principle is legally perfect, but it would go beyond the scope of this study to examine the Pact in greater detail.
SECOND CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL LAW, BONN, 1964 At the second convention of experts on international law, which was held on April 24 and 25, 1964, again in Bonn, the jurists debated further issues regarding the right to one's homeland. As usual, the convention was closed by recording the conclusions reached in these debates. The voluminous and very carefully worded conclusions represent another decisive stage in the
academic resolution of the problems associated with the right to one's homeland. Due to their great significance, these conclusions are reproduced here in extenso:
I. 1.The condition constituting the foundation of the concept "right to one's homeland", a condition perceived by man's sense of
justice to be valuable and worth preserving, consists of everyone being able to reside unmolested at his domicile and within his
social unit, with the certainty of being able to remain in such condition for as long as his will is freely directed thus.
In this context, terminology is defined as follows:
a) "domicile": the place where a person regularly resides because the focus of his life and social structure is itself located there;
b) "social unit": the people whose domicile is located within a specific spatial area ("homeland") and who are linked to each other there through tradition and a multitude of social relations;
[...]
Monsignore Dr. E. J. Reichenberger, Father of the Expelled.
APPENDIX:
God Lives: His Day Will Come!
Ten Thousand Expellees Cheer Father Reichenberger
Reprint from the "Süd-Ost Tagespost", Graz, June 10, 1952.
On Sunday the Graz Fairgrounds surrounding Industrial Hall were an unfamiliar sea of color. An observer felt transported into a great folk festival that might just as easily have taken place
somewhere in the Sudetenland, in Transylvania, in Backa or in the Banat. Some ten thousand expellees, many wearing their neat and colorful ethnic costumes, had answered the call of the
Steiermark "Auxiliary for the Sudeten Germans" to join together in a great summer festival to document their loyalty to their homeland, and to greet and thank the indefatigable champion of their rights, Dr. h.c. Father Reichenberger.
Monsignore Dr. E. J. Reichenberger, Father of the Expelled
The faces lined by a harsh fate and a life of hard work lit up as Father Emanuel Reichenberger appeared in their midst,
accompanied by Provincial Governor Krainer and Dr. Gorbach, President of the National Council, and a storm of applause greeted the Provincial Governor when he stepped up on the platform,
decorated splendidly with the Steiermark flags and the coats-of-arms of the ethnic German Welfare and Cultural Associations, to address the expellees.
"Dear festival guests - or, I am sure I may say, dear fellow-countrymen! The war forged us all into a community united by suffering. You have been particularly hard-hit because you lost your homeland, but I believe I can say that you have found another home with us - a modest and poor one, perhaps, but a home nevertheless. Tens of thousands of Germans settled in the Steiermark, and my only wish is that you may feel at home here with us. I also appeal to all inhabitants of the Steiermark to do their part to ensure that everyone who comes to us in need will be made to feel at home, and that everyone do their best to help us all become an indivisible community in this land. Let us all take home with us, from this gathering dedicated to Father
Reichenberger, the foremost champion of freedom and justice, the resolve to follow his example, so that after seven long years our land too shall finally become free, and true freedom and true justice shall return to us!"
The Students Still Have Ideals!
After a brief address, in which he stressed how the relations
between the expellees and the local population were growing ever closer, Dr. Prexl, the provincial representative of the Auxiliary for the Sudeten Germans, presented elaborate certificates to Father Reichenberger and to Otto Hoffmann-Wellenhoff, the head of the cultural department of the Alpenland station, for their great
services to the expelled. Walter Schleser, the Chair of the
Expelled Students in Germany, conveyed to Father Reichenberger
Expelled Students in Germany, conveyed to Father Reichenberger