In 1945, two and a half million ethnic Germans were driven from their homes in Czechoslovakia. Thousands died. Now, as the Czech Republic heads for EU membership, Charles Wheeler reports on how the Czechs made the Sudeten German minority pay for Nazi occupation, and why it became a hot political issue.
This is a story about Germans as victims of World War II. It has been suppressed for half a century, ever since Czechoslovakia expelled its three million strong German minority - the Sudeten Germans - at the end of the war.
It is also a story of two communities with a common past, each clinging to diametrically opposed versions of the same event.
To the Germans, their expulsion was a war crime, an early case of violent, ethnic cleansing. To the Czechs, after six years of Nazi occupation, the expulsions were simply retribution. What cannot be disputed is the brutality of the expulsions, especially during the chaotic transition from war to approximate peace. Newsreel film shows Germans being beaten up in the streets of Prague, forced to wear the swastika, painted on their overcoats.
The expulsions were decreed by Eduard Benes, Czechoslovakia's president-in-exile, during his wartime years in Britain. One particularly controversial decree granted immunity from prosecution to Czechs who committed crimes against the Germans.
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