DEUTSCHE-WELLE

Bavar­ian Prime Min­is­ter Guen­ther Beck­stein called Sun­day for a dia­logue with the Czech gov­ern­ment to resolve out­stand­ing issues related to the expul­sion of eth­nic Ger­mans from Czecho­slo­va­kia at the end of World War II.

For this to hap­pen, “Prague had to face up to the chap­ter of his­tory relat­ing to the expul­sions,” he said at a rally of the Sude­ten Ger­man Asso­ci­a­tion in the Bavar­ian city of Nuremberg.

“Con­ceal­ment will not resolve the prob­lem. A last­ing rec­on­cil­i­a­tion is pos­si­ble only on the basis of the his­tor­i­cal truth,” Beck­stein said at the gath­er­ing attended by around 8,000 mostly elderly expellees.

Beck­stein shared the view of Sude­ten lead­ers that Prague might be will­ing to dis­cuss the issue, but said the “dif­fi­cult con­di­tions of gov­ern­ment” at the moment made a break­through unlikely.

He said obsta­cles on the path to rec­on­cil­i­a­tion were the decrees pro­claimed by the late pres­i­dent Edvard Benes that led to the con­fis­ca­tion of Ger­man prop­erty and the depor­ta­tion of more than 2 mil­lion Sude­ten Ger­mans, who were accused of being Nazi collaborators.

Another imped­i­ment was the law that granted immu­nity from pros­e­cu­tion to those who com­mit­ted crimes dur­ing the expul­sion, Beck­stein said.

Many died in the bru­tal expul­sion and hun­dreds of thou­sands later set­tled in Ger­many and Aus­tria where they and their descen­dants still live, pre­serv­ing their dialect and folk customs.

Bavaria seek­ing closer ties to Czech Republic

Beck­stein, said one of Bavaria’s goals was to strengthen rela­tions with the Czech Repub­lic, with which it shares a com­mon bor­der. “This will not always be easy but it is a nec­es­sary task,” he said.

The Czech gov­ern­ment, mean­while, damp­ened the hopes of the Sude­ten Ger­mans for an early dia­logue, say­ing it saw no need for such discussions.

“There is no change in our posi­tion. If the Sude­ten Ger­mans see things dif­fer­ently it might be linked to a change in their rela­tion­ship to the Czech Repub­lic,” for­eign min­istry spokes­woman Zuzana Ople­talova was quoted as say­ing by the Czech news agency CTK.

Nazi dic­ta­tor Adolf Hitler forced Czecho­slo­va­kia to cede its west­ern Sude­ten­land region to Ger­many in 1938, say­ing Ger­man speak­ers were being per­se­cuted there.

Hitler seized the rest of the coun­try in early 1939, ahead of his inva­sion of Poland in Sep­tem­ber, which pre­cip­i­tated World War II.

After the war, the seized ter­ri­tory was restored to Czecho­slo­va­kia, but the post­war expul­sions under the Benes Decrees, which have never been repealed, remain a sore point for many Germans.