National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia

by Benjamin Frommer

This comprehensive history of postwar Czech retribution examines the prosecution of more than one-hundred thousand suspected war criminals and collaborators by Czech courts and tribunals after the Second World War. Based on archival sources that remained inaccessible during the cold war, the book provides a new perspective on Czechoslovakia's transition from Nazi occupation to Stalinist rule. Frommer asserts that the Czechs made a genuine, if flawed, attempt to confront past war crimes, including their own.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

410 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2004

Reviews

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, let me state my firm belief that real war criminals from this era deserve the utmost condemnation and punishment proportionate to their crimes; and that Nazi collaborationists also deserve appropriate oppobrium, rather than the neglect or even hero status they've assumed in so much of post cold war Europe.

That said, the Czech example, as described in often sickening detail by Professor Frommer, shows a cure as putrid as the disease it purported to treat. The mass and brutal expulsion of Germans from the Sudetenland and other Czech areas - and the lesser expulsion of Hungarians from Slovakia - was a clear example of ethnic cleansing, the kind of human rights atrocity which Western states now profess to be a crime against humanity, justifying invasion and bombing of said perpetrators. At this date, however, all is rationalized from the local level to UN chambers under the rubric of "population transfer." The brutality of the war seems to have entered the souls of the victors at all levels, provoking amnesia as to what exactly they had been fighting for and against.

I gave the book four instead of five stars, because I disagree with Professor Frommer on one point: his repeated statements that the National Committees "undermined Czech freedom and democracy." These committees were grass-roots government bodies, similar to New England town councils, and as such they naturally reflected the values - or lack thereof - of the Czech people. Frommer is correct in viewing the courts and their professional jurists as an important prop to what rule of law remained in postwar Czechia (we see this playing out in the USA now.) The Communists did push for an aggressive retribution policy for partisan ends, though they were no more ruthless than their "liberal" predecessors.

Frommer's conclusion is correct: "Postwar Czech retribution represented a serious and thorough attempt to face the crimes of the past, including those committed by the Czechs themselves" (p. 347); but "it is the Czechs who alone must bear responsibility for both the successes and failures" (p. 346.) As Frommer clearly shows it was Edvard Benes who conceived this plan, and even urged violence to create a "pure" Czech and Slovak state. One must wonder at possible connections between the "transfer" of Germans as a national menace and the expulsion of Arabs from Jewish Palestine in 1948: Czechoslovakia was infant Israel's greatest arms supplier during its Independence War, and no doubt details of the treatment of "enemy nationals" who "had no place" was passed along with the gun crates.

Unfortunately, this episode dispels the myth of Czech "liberal tolerance", as opposed to "backward" East European ethnics like Serbs or Croats. Czech society bore the same poisonous ethno-nationalism that still festers beneath the democratic facades of modern Europe. It leaves an open question, that if the collaborators of this era deserved such rough justice, then perhaps the loss of Czech democracy in 1948, and 41 years of Communism, were likewise also just retribution for this postwar mania. Some Czech jurists were foresighted enough to heed the warnings.