"Sudeten" refers to a mountain range 200 miles long and 20 to 40 miles wide, covering the north of
Bohemia and Moravia as well as part of Sudeten Silesia. Germans inhabited this "Czech" territory
well before Slavic tribes arrived around 500 AD, although major German settlement in the Sudeten
began during the reign of King Premysl Otakar II in the 13th century when the area was largely
uninhabited and heavily forested. For centuries, Czechs were but a small minority here.
"Liberec will never again be Reichenberg. We will clear Liberec of the German enemies, and we will
do it so thoroughly that not the smallest place will remain where the German seed could grow once
more. We shall expel all the Germans, we shall confiscate their property, we shall de-nationalize not
only the town but the whole area. so that the victorious spirit of Slavdom shall permeate the country
from the frontier range to the interior . The government is determined to settle the question of the
Germans uncompromisingly and unflinchingly . We are aware that, in the West, various reactionary
protectors of the Germans are at work. But the government will not be misled or softened by any
pressure, any campaigns, any libellous attacks. It is for us a decisive and encouraging fact that the
Soviet Union stands by us in the question of transferring the Germans, and that Marshal Stalin
himself has the greatest possible understanding for our endeavors to get rid of the Germans. We will
not allow even some hundreds of thousands of Germans to remain in this country . We do not want
any Germans along our north-western frontier, we want Czechoslovakia to form one integrally Slav
territory with Poland and the Soviet Union." Kopecky, the Stalinist Minister of Propaganda in the
Czech cabinet, stated in a speech at Reichenberg (now "Liberec") on July 25, 1945
The still valid Benes decree #115 of May 8, 1946 declared all deeds against Germans, down to the
rape and murder of children, were "justified acts of retribution" that could not be prosecuted. This
led to unfathomable and sadistic abuses by anyone with a penchant for lust, murder, revenge or theft.
Some people were crammed in freight cars and shipped out, such as the cramped, thirsty transport of
Sudeten Germans from Troppau in Czech Silesia that arrived in Berlin in August, 1945. After 18
hellish days of travel, only 1,350 out of 4,250 woman, children and old people were still alive.
Many were forced to walk. Reduced to skin and bones, the
refugees were starving on the roadsides, with women, children
and babies dead in the ditches. Those Germans who made it alive
to a bombed -out, starving and already over-strained West
Germany were regarded at times as unwanted foreigners. They
had to struggle to fit in and were lucky to get even menial jobs.
Left: Refugees in Berlin 1945 (click)     Read Account  
The Germanic villagers living for centuries along the sections of ancient salt routes through the
present day Czech Republic were all rounded up and either murdered or exiled after World War
Two. Their homes and farms were stolen. The place names of German villages and cities in these
areas were all changed, and their histories subsequently stolen, erased or rewritten. An example is
the farming village of BoemishRoerhren, a resting and watering place for salt trade horses going
from Passau to Prachatitz to exchange salt for wheat and barley. The village was laid out facing
the morning sun against the mountain. The Germans were brutally expelled in 1944 at sunrise.
In 1945 Budweis, now "Ceské Budejovice", the entire
centuries-old German population living in the city was
forced to assemble. Some were murdered outright, and
the rest were forced into exile under horrible conditions,
leaving their homes, farms and businesses behind.
Today, Budweis is part of the present day Czech
Republic with its German heritage intentionally erased.
These citizens were never repaid for the brazen theft of their homes and properties. Zuckmantel (now
"Zlate Hory") was the home  of Schubert's father, Franz Theodor Schubert. He moved in 1783 from
German speaking Neudorf near Mährisch-Schönberg in the Sudetenland to Vienna. There were also
were genocidal expulsions here after war's end.          Old Place Names
The Sudetenland: Stolen Suffering
Some were fortunate enough to survive the hardships and slaughter and moved on with neighbors.
A town called Gablonz an der Neiße in northern Bohemia was the second largest town of the
Reichenberg Region and it had for centuries a large German majority, mainly glass blowers and glass
workers. After the Czech decree that all property belonging to the "German Race" be confiscated
without compensation, many Germans who were expelled from Gablonz (now "Jablonec") migrated
near to the old Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren where they founded the township of Neugablonz.
Even small hamlets were cleansed of their German histories. For well over 700 years, German
speaking people had inhabited Zuckmantel, the birthplace of Franz Schubert's mother Maria Vietz
(1756- 1812) until the very last remnants of them were cruelly driven out at the end of World War
Two between December and January of 1946. Their new Czech masters almost overnight, by gun
point, issued the following directive: that the banished inhabitants must leave their houses "completely
furnished; curtains, carpets, lamps, bed linen... with beds to be freshly made for 2 persons per home.
The luggage may not be packed in carpets and coats.......Certified luggage for a person : 30 kg and
10 kg hand baggage. All else is to be left in the home!"
On March 28, 1946, the provisional Czech formally mandated that all German civilians were to
bepresumed collectively guilty and stripped of their citizenship and their property. They included the
most barbarous persecution and oppression of minorities humanly imaginable: deportations,
expulsions, internments, kangaroo courts, confiscation of property and the use forced labor camps.
Over three and a half million Sudeten Germans were brutally expelled from their homes. Even very
old people much too frail to travel were evicted and forced into an early death. Benes and company,
in their merciless persecution of the innocent, did the same to ethnic Hungarians.  
Many expelled German civilians were interned in concentration camps
where they were murdered by poisoning, intentional starvation and
unchecked disease. 2,061 such camps existed in Czechoslovakia. In the
Mährisch-Ostrau camp around 350 people were tortured to death by
early July 1945. It was fully legal, even commendable, to kill Germans.
Likewise, local Carpathian Germans either fled or were killed in death camps such as Svaljava. 700
people from Theresiental were taken for slave labor in Siberia, the last ones not being freed until
1969. At the end of 1946, after "evacuation", about 24,000 ethnic Germans still remained in
Slovakia. Although most overt violence against German civilians in Slovakia ended in the late 1940s,
the years of discrimination resulted in a quick and disparate assimilation.
Benes constructed his decrees as early as 1940 during his exile,  
suggesting the expulsion of over two million ethnic Germans from
Czechoslovakia and the confiscation of their property, a greedy,
brutal solution fully supported by both the Allies and the Soviets.
The murder and expulsion of the large German population began in
earnest when the Benes "reslovakization" programs started in 1945.
Women, children and old people paid the dearest price.
German civilians thrown into Czech concentration camps ranged in age from 4 to 80 and were
crammed together in shacks and slowly starved to death. It is that approximately 10,000 people died
in Bohemian and Moravian camps and prisons from 1945 to 1948 from murder, epidemics,
starvation and general abuse. One such notorious concentration camps at the once German town of
Budweis was commanded in the years 1945-6 by Václav Hrneček who later fled Czechoslovakia and
went to Bavaria where he was recognized by former German inmates of the camp and brought to
trial before an American Court of the Allied High Commission for Germany. He received an eight
year sentence for his criminal and cruel camp, a virtual center of sadism. Similar conditions were
found in the internment camp near Kolín, where internees were raped, beaten and killed. According
to a some estimates, approximately 10,000 people died in Bohemian and Moravian camps and
prisons from 1945 to 1948.
The artificially built Second Czechoslovak "Republic" was abetted by foreign assistance, support and
endorsements which it received despite the xenophobic Benes Decrees which substituted the once
harmonious coexistence of the Czech, German, Slovak and Hungarian people with brutality, denial of
basic human rights, theft and murder. Benes was determined that his Czechoslovakia should not only
keep its pre-war borders, but rid itself of its German minority, and after coming to power following
the war. Rid itself it did, with immense greed, lust and murder leading the way.
All of the pent up rage at the war was directed at these civilian non-combatants in a gruesome,
genocidal mix of punishments. Already, in May of 1945, Czech paramilitaries, army units and gangs
of local vigilantes violently drove hundreds of thousands of Germans from their homes and across
the borders of devastated and occupied Germany and Austria, torturing and murdering many in what
Czechs refer to as the "wild transfer". The Czechoslovak army played a central role in the horrors.
General Zdeněk Novák issued an order to "deport all Germans from territory within the historical
borders" citing the "Ten Commandments for Czechoslovak Soldiers in the Border Regions" which
directed soldiers that "The Germans have remained our irreconcilable enemies. Do not cease to hate
the Germans... Behave towards Germans like a victor... Be harsh to the Germans... German women
and the Hitler Youth also bear the blame for the crimes of the Germans. Deal with them too in an
uncompromising way."
The only exceptions from expulsion were 244,000 ethnic German "anti-fascists" and other ethnic
Germans absolutely crucial for industries stolen from Germans. They were allowed to remain in
Czechoslovakia and were worked as slaves for their Czech masters, but only as long as needed. In
1946, an estimated 1.3 million ethnic Germans were deported to the American zone of future West
Germany and estimated 800,000 were deported to the Soviet zone, later East Germany.
Of the several thousands who died in the process of ethnic cleansing, some sources state that 16.000
alone were documented as dying from direct violent deaths, including 6000 "suicides" during the
expulsion, and thousands more died from hunger and illness as a consequence.
This famous photograph, which many of us have seen, shows
train cars crammed full of Sudeten Germans expelled from their
homes, and was originally described by the government as:
"Freight trains full of refugees, 1946. Crowded freight train
bound for the Ruhr region. Background, double-decker train to
Lübeck". The bombed-out Hamburg RR Station looms behind.
This photo was later cropped, retouched and widely distributed
in 1981 with the caption: (Nazi) "transports into ghettos and
extermination camps". (click to enlarge)
The ethnic and cultural face of the whole land was changed, even in the smallest of villages and the
most remote hilltop hamlets. For example, the German population was expelled and replaced by
Poles on the rugged northern Silesian side of the Riesenberg mountain range and by Czechs on the
southern Bohemian side. The brutal ethnic cleansing program innocuously termed a "population
exchange" led to a decline of the cultural landscape, and in many large parts of the mountains, the
meadows went to seed, settlements vanished and hundreds of traditional mountain houses, chapels
and monuments decayed or were destroyed because they were German in origin.