the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Chapter VII The Transfer and its Legal Aspects
whom, in the hour of their success, they
openly approved and blindly obeyed.”
The political principles agreed on
included rules of the occupation regime
and the role of the Control Council of
Control in Germany. The members of
the Council exercised supreme authority
in Germany each in his own zone of
occupation, and also jointly. All political
and military groups were to be abolished
in order to prevent a resurgence of
German militarism and Nazism. In
addition to individual responsibilities,
the established political aims included:
“To convince the German people that
they have suffered a total military defeat
and that they cannot escape
responsibility for what they have brought
upon themselves, since their own
ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi
resistance have destroyed German
economy and made chaos and suffering
inevitable.”
It was also decided to control German
education : “so as completely to eliminate
Nazi and militarist doctrines and to
make possible the successful
development of democratic ideas.”
The Allies were convinced that it was
necessary to eradicate not only Nazism,
but also the militaristic and other
theories that led to the development of
Nazism, in order to prevent a resurgence
of German aggressiveness which had
already exposed the world several times
to great danger.
As to reparations, aside from Poland
whose reparation demands were to be
satisfied from its own share by the Soviet
Union, the reparation demands of the
United States, Great Britain and other
countries were to be satisfied from the
Western zones of occupation and
through the confiscation of German
foreign property. States who had claims
to this share met in December, 1945, at a
Reparation Conference in Paris. The
confiscation of German property in
Czechoslovakia was in accord with the
conclusions of the Paris conference and
with preceding documents issued by the
Allies.
The rules for the forced transfer of the
German population of Czechoslovakia
272
were set at the Potsdam Conference,
taking all this into account. The
legitimacy of the transfer was never
questioned. The delaying of further
transfers was justified by the enormous
workload of the occupation authorities at
that time. The Control Council was to
evaluate further transfers to ensure: “that
those Germans were shared fairly among
the individual occupation zones.” From
the speeches of Churchill and Stalin, as
well as from other materials, it is clear
that the legitimacy of the transfer was
never doubted. While Stalin claimed at
first that the transfers were already
concluded, Churchill was saying that in
reality they had not yet started, and the
US Secretary of State Byrnes demanded
a halt to the forced transfers, requesting
closer co-operation during further
transfers in order to distribute the
burden equally among the occupying
powers, all the occupation zones. After
the Potsdam Conference, the transfer of
the German population of
Czechoslovakia proceeded in accordance
with the above-mentioned note of the
Three Powers.
It was up to the states from which the
forced transfers took place to set their
own criteria for the selection of groups of
their German population that would be
subject to transfer, and the groups that
would be allowed to remain.
Czechoslovakia selected as one of its
criteria the previous attitude of each
individual towards the democratic
Czechoslovak state, and expressed this
criterion in the Constitutional Decree
No. 33 Coll., of August 2, 1945,
concerning the withdrawal of
Czechoslovak state citizenship from
persons of German and Hungarian
nationality, based on the government
proposal and issued by the President of
the Republic with the agreement of the
Slovak National Council.
Constitutional Decree No. 33/1945
Coll., took into account all previous
unilateral and bilateral acts pertaining to
state citizenship, including the
Czechoslovak-German agreement on
state citizenship and options of
November 20, 1938, and considered