Try to empathize with a boy and a woman who are forced to leave their homes at the time of the Second World War. How could this happen? Use the important documents to help you and find out how these events forever influenced the lives of thousands.
Czech citizens leaving the borderlands, which were seized by Nazi Germany after the Munich Agreement (Polička, October 1938). Source: ČTK
Czech Germans are awaiting the transport for the displacement from Czechoslovakia (Prague Holešovice, Strossmayerovo náměstí, May 1945). Source: ČTK.
Munich, 29 September 1938
Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy have agreed with regard to the agreement, which was essentially reached in the matter of the withdrawal of the Sudeten German territory, on these conditions and on the means of such withdrawal and on the measures to be taken, and declare that under this Agreement everyone individually answer for the steps to be taken to ensure its implementation.
§ 1
Clearances will begin on 1 October.
§ 2
The United Kingdom, France and Italy agree that the evacuation will be done by 10 October, without destroying any existing facilities, and that the Czechoslovak government is responsible for ensuring that the evacuation is done without damaging the stated facilities.
33/1945 Sb.
To the Government's proposal and in agreement with the Slovak National Council, I stipulate:
§ 1
(1) Czechoslovak nationals of German or Hungarian nationality who acquired German or Hungarian citizenship under the rules of foreign occupying power lost Czechoslovak citizenship on the date of acquisition of such nationality.
(2) Other Czechoslovak nationals of German or Hungarian nationality shall lose Czechoslovak citizenship on the date this Decree becomes effective.
(3) This Decree does not apply to Germans and Hungarians who, at the time of increased threat to the Republic (§ 18 of the Presidential Decree of 19 June 1945, No. 16 Coll., On the Punishment of Nazi Criminals, Traitors and Their Aid and Extraordinary People's courts) registered in the official report as Czechs or Slovaks.
(4) Czechs, Slovaks and members of other Slavic peoples who at this time registered as Germans or Hungarians, forced by coercion or circumstances worth special consideration, shall not be considered as Germans or Hungarians under this Decree if the Regional National Committee approves of the certificate of National Reliability issued by the relevant District National Committee (District Administrative Commission) after reviewing the stated facts.
§ 2
(1) Persons falling under the provisions of § 1 who prove that they have remained loyal to the Czechoslovak Republic, have never been guilty against the Czech and Slovak nations and have either taken part in the struggle for its liberation or suffered under Nazi or Fascist terror, shall keep the Czechoslovak citizenship.
Flight and expulsions of large groups of people seem to accompany the whole history of mankind. Since the beginning of the 20th century, the expulsion of larger population groups in Europe and its adjacent areas has been most often associated with their ethnicity. Both waves of forced displacement from the borderlands of the Czech lands, in 1938 and in 1945–47, have such a character.
After the secession of this territory from Czechoslovakia and its affiliation with Nazi Germany, most (about half a million) Czechs living here opted for Reich nationality, which allowed them (albeit without full civil rights, enjoyed on the grounds of racial principles only by Reich citizens of German nationality) to stay in the borderlands. About 250,000 Czechs decided to leave for the Czech inland, often departing hastily and under difficult circumstances, even though formally they could take with them all their movable property. As many as thousands of people did not have this choice because their German neighbors and various pro-Nazi, often armed groups were expelling them using violence.
In 1945, the situation for a little less than 3 million people of German nationality was different. As a result of the decrees of the President of the Republic, issued at the end of the war and in the first post-war months, Germans, except for the so-called anti-fascists, should not have had their Czechoslovak citizenship returned. Thus they lost all their rights, and if they were not forcibly expelled or killed (the estimated number is at least 20,000 dead) during the so-called wild displacement in the spring and summer of 1945, they were deported to Germany under international arrangements. Only less than 200,000 Germans could stay. At the same time, the recognized anti-fascists made up only a tiny percentage of them, most of them were those who had to stay because they were from the state's point of view indispensable workers in important economic sectors, or the people that the state simply did not manage to displace.
author: Matěj Spurný, historian
The project was funded by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic