Edvard Benes: The Liquidator
Edvard Beneš – The Liquidator. Fiend of the German Purge in Czechoslovakia is a book[1] by the Czech authoress Sidonia Dedina[2] describing the purges of ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union's puppet Communist State of Czechoslovakia immediately following World War II.
Content
It provides gruesome details on the expulsions, atrocities and murders of ethnic Germans for whom Bohemia and Moravia and Sudetenland had been their homelands for up to 1000 years. These took place under the authority of Edvard Beneš, mainly in April and May 1945, continuing for the ensuing year. The worst took place before the Potsdam Conference. They were cold-bloodedly planned and brutally executed by the new government in Prague. Edvard Beneš' hatred of Germans drove him and his adherents on. The eventual fall of communism in 1991 yielded no softening of the harsh anti-German expulsion laws created to legalize the 1945/46 genocides. This book is essential reading on this murderous period in Czechoslovakia.
Beneš decrees
The Beneš decrees (officially called "Decrees of the President of the Republic"), among other things, were a crime against humanity and expropriated the property of citizens of German and Hungarian ethnicity and facilitated Article 12 of the Potsdam Agreement by laying down a national legal framework for the loss of citizenship[citation needed] and the expropriation of about three million Germans and Hungarians. However, Beneš's plans for expelling the Hungarian minority from Slovakia caused tensions with Hungary, whose coalition government was likewise leaning towards the Soviet Union, and ultimately objections from Moscow ended the expulsion of the Hungarians shortly after it had begun. In contrast, the Soviets had no objections to the expulsions of the Sudeten Germans, and the Czechoslovak authorities continued to expel the Sudeten Germans pursuant to the Potsdam Agreement until only a negligible number of Germans remained in the Sudetenland.
Gallery
German civilians in Prague rounded up by Czech terrorists await their fate, 1945.
German civilians being expelled from Pilsen, May 1945.
German civilians murdered by Czechs await the mass grave.
German civilians being expelled from their homes in the Sudetenland by the Czechs.
German civilians executed at the side of a road by Czech terrorists
Germans forced to dig roadside graves for their executed kin (above) before being executed themselves by the Czechs.
Memorial in Germany to the murdered ethnic German population of the Sudetenland.
See also
Sources
- ↑ RFP Publications, Mountain View, California, U.S.A., 2000, ISBN: 0-96639689-4-7
- ↑ Sidonia Dedina was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and now makes her home in Munich, Germany. Encounters with expellees and with a UN human rights officer in the 1980s made her aware of cruelly misdirected revenge by her fellow Czechs against blameless native Germans. Stunned, disillusioned and angered, she began investigating post-World War II crimes in Czechoslovakia and the role the then-Prague government under Edvard Benes played in planning and executing those crimes.
