Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND ETHNIC CLEANSING
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undertakings agreed to in an official prescribed context and binds the signatories into
accepting clearly delineated liabilities or responsibilities.
Czechoslovakia and Ethnic Cleansing. At the end of World War II, the restored
Czechoslovak government of Eduard Benes (1884–1948) instituted a policy of removing
all Germans (with very few exceptions) from its Sudeten districts. As the Nazi armies
retreated, the Czech militia and groups of communist cadres moved into German ethnic
areas and attacked civilians in their homes and on the streets. Anti-German pogroms
were perpetrated in which ethnic Germans were beaten, tortured, and/or shot. It quickly
became clear that all of the 3 million Germans in Czechoslovakia would be forced to
leave and transferred to German sovereign territory. During 1946 the Czech government
established transit camps, often on the sites of former Nazi concentration camps, with the
intention of facilitating the transfer of the Germans more systematically. According to
Sudeten German sources, some 272,000 Germans, representing about 8 percent of the
total German population in Czechoslovakia, died from harsh treatment, hunger, despair,
and exposure during the course of the transfers, though this figure has been challenged by
Czech and German historians (who claim the figure to have been much smaller). It has
been estimated that during the second half of 1947 almost the entire Sudeten German
population had been transferred to Germany, and the areas in which the Germans had
lived—often for several hundred years—were reoccupied by Czechs. In what was a clear
case of ethnic cleansing, Bohemia and Moravia were thoroughly Slavicized; the German
ethnic presence, in the space of no more than two and a half years, was eliminated from
Czech life forever. In a smaller-scale operation (though still involving hundreds of thousands
of people), and at the same time, similar treatment was accorded Czechoslovakia’s
Hungarian population.