Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Countess Sophie and their family

[Wenzel]

I know just one case from friends of us, Count Karolyi, through his mother a Windishgrätz they had an estate there and was confiscated by Benes, now they are trying to recover at least their belonging and perhaps the castle, but they have to invest an immense amount of money, which is impossible unless the finds an investor from USA or Germany.

[Janet Ashton]

Never in their lives Count and Countess von Nostitz Rieneck were "separatists",

It was Erwein Nostitz, Friedrich's father, who was believed by the provisional government in 1918 to be funding people in the borderlands who hoped to attach the German-speaking parts of Bohemia to the new Austrian state rather than to Czechoslavakia. Whether this was true or not, it surely affected the way that his son's association with the children of Franz Ferdinand was perceived, to their detriment. Erwein Nostitz was later president of the German nobility association, which slowly became more SdP-inclined, albeit after Clary had taken over. But membership of this was a political choice in itself: there was also a Czech association to which several families who did not necessarily have actual Czech ancestry belonged, as a conscious act of acceptance of the new Bohemia, and indeed to the historic idea of a Kingdom of Bohemia that was a Czech-German Kingdom, but by no means necessarily a Habsburg Kingdom. It was the idea of this Kingdom and its historic borders which the Peace Conference in 1918 intended to preserve in the Czech half of the new nation.

They were completely monarchists and loyal to their Emperor and King

Sure. But in Bohemia - as opposed to Austria - in the 1920s and 1930s, what did this really mean in practical terms? In West Bohemia of all places?

Anyway, I can't really see that there's much to be gained from kind of going around in circles here...:-)

All the best

Janet

[Wenzel]

At the time of their assassination, Sophie's family became the guardians, I believe, of the children. Alternately, I've heard that Sophie, Maximilian and Ernst were raised by Maria Teresa of Bragança, Infanta of Portugal , the 3rd wife of Archduke Karl Ludwig of Austria whose 2nd wife was FF mother. (Perhaps a joint custody kind of thing?) Karl I (their first cousin) , also looked after the welfare of the chldren during his brief reign.  FF had been wealthy, with large holdings both in Bohemia & Austria, as well s inheriting a good amount from a distant relative. Unfortunately, after WW1 Bohemia became part of the new nation of Czechoslovakia & the government nationalized most of the properties there on the grounds that they were Crown property (which seeing as how FF purchased them and he never wore the crown seems a stretch). I don't know if they kept the Austrian estates afterward though. However, because they were excluded from the succession and therefore not barred by the law of exile they were allowed to remain in Austria. Sophie married Count Nostitz when she was 19 and lived a pretty happy marital life. Fate tossed her some more tragedies though. She had 3 sons & a daughter.  One son was KIA in WWII, another died in a Soviet POW camp. The couple also had a stillborn son in 1908.  During the 1930s, Maximilian and Ernst led the Austrian monarchist party which had as its goal the restoration of their cousin Archduke Otto (very generous seeing as how if not for their mother's birth, they would've been the heirs to the throne--I guess that shows there wasn't bad blood there) to the throne.  They were also fierce opponents of Nazism and were arrested in March 1938 by the German authorities and interned in Dachau.
Most of the Hohenbergs and their descendants seem to have done well, leading productive and often distinguished lives. For example, Max's younger son, Georg, 3rd Duke von Hohenberg was named Austrian ambassador to the Holy See in 1988. (Quite a nice spot for a good Catholic!) and before Austrian ambassador to Argentina, where he has many cousind von Wuthenau and von Auersperg-Breunner

Remebering what has been quoted as FF's last words to his already-dead wife,"Sophie!  Don't die!  Live for our children!" it's just too sad. Despite FF's faults he was a devoted family man and they were a happy little group despite the slights Sophie had to contend with. It was due in part to this marital happiness that I believe she accompanied him on that fateful trip

Princess Sophie von Hohenberg was born on 24 july 1901 and was the eldest of four children of the morganatic marriage of Archiduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of the Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria, and Countess Sophie Chotek.
Upon the marriage, the Countess was made Her Serene Highness Sophie von Hohenberg, but in 1909 her title was raised to Her Highness Duchess Sophie von Hohenberg, and the children became Prince or Princess von Hohenberg.
After the assassination of her parents, Sophie and her two surviving brothers, Maximilian (1902-1962) and Ernst (1904-1954), were taken in by their father's close friend Graf Jaroslav Thurn.
They were exiled from Czechoslovakia and took refuge in Vienna and Schloss Artstetten.
On 1920, Sophie married Count Friedrich von Nostitz-Rieneck and had four children, three sons and a daughter.
In 1938, following the Anschluss, sophie and her brothers were arrested and deported to Dachau concentration camp where they spent the next seven years of their lives.
She died 27 october 1990.

[Marc]

After the assassination of her parents, Sophie and her two surviving brothers, Maximilian (1902-1962) and Ernst (1904-1954), were taken in by their father's close friend Graf Jaroslav Thurn.

In fact it was their uncle,Prince Jaroslav von Thun(not Thurn) und Hohenstein...His wife Marie was Sophie's sister.

[Janet Ashton]

After the assassination of her parents, Sophie and her two surviving brothers, Maximilian (1902-1962) and Ernst (1904-1954), were taken in by their father's close friend Graf Jaroslav Thurn.

In fact it was their uncle,Prince Jaroslav von Thun(not Thurn) und Hohenstein...His wife Marie was Sophie's sister.

Wenzel reposted some old comments from early in the forum's life. There was other wrong info in there, including the claim that Sophie Nostitz-Rieneck was deported to Dachau at the time of the Anschluss and remained there for 7 years. This is not even true of her brothers.

[Wenzel]

Janet you cannot say that they were not deported to Dachau, I will advice you to read more true history and not make up post based in nothing. Both brothers were deported with seven Habsburgs more, a month later of the Anschluss my aunt Hedwig Baronin von Böhm and her husband Max Ferdinand suffered the same fate, both princes Hohenberg survived, two Habsburgs including the one married to Prince Radziwill perished in Dachau, Sophia and her husband were sent to prison inside Austria by the Gestapo, and even her husband was sent to
Dachau in the late 1943. You can write to His Highness Georg Herzog von Hohenberg, to Arstetten, and he will be more than happy to clarify your horrendous ideas, which I consider an insult to Our Imperial House and to the Ducal House of Hohenberg. If for you is too complicate I will ask to anyone in this forum to send an email to Baron Franz Ferdinand von Wuthenau-Hohenthurm who lives in Buenos Aires, and was the president of Saint Andrews University here in Argentina. fwuthenau@gmail.com. You are showing such a hate to the Habsburg dynasty that demonstrates the lack of objectivity in your judgements, which most are "mistaken"

[Janet Ashton]

Janet you cannot say that they were not deported to Dachau, I will advice you to read more true history and not make up post based in nothing. Both brothers were deported with seven Habsburgs more, a month later of the Anschluss my aunt Hedwig Baronin von Böhm and her husband Max Ferdinand suffered the same fate, both princes Hohenberg survived, two Habsburgs including the one married to Prince Radziwill perished in Dachau, Sophia and her husband were sent to prison inside Austria by the Gestapo, and even her husband was sent to
Dachau in the late 1943.

Read again what I wrote.

I did not say that the brothers were not sent to Dachau; I said that even they were not sent for seven years. They were not; the brothers were imprisoned in different places and for different periods of time. I also said that their sister was not sent there. Or are you now going to tell us that she was too? If this was the case, how was her husband able to argue that Ernst Hohenberg should be released into his custody?

I base what I write on what I have heard and read, just as you do, and my sources are assorted historians of the family from Meysels to Bestenriener to the recent "Assassination of the Archduke", which I read in manuscript and then read again after Sophie de Potesta had read it and made her changes, and I know exactly what changed.

I do not make things up; nor do I "hate the Habsburg dynasty", but what I do hate is your insistence that  "God left Europe" the day the Habsburgs, with their perfections and imperfections, lost their throne. I post here under my own name, which is also on my published work. It is scarcely in my interest to "make things up", is it?

At no stage have I accused you of lying in what you say, or making things up, even when you copy and paste other peoples' ancient posts. You simply misread what I write because I don't think you have read the same things I have.

[Wenzel]

They were sent Dachau, not to multiple camps, and both count and countess Nostitz too were sent to prison, is is crystal clear, just reading Ian Cranshaw "The Fall of the House of Habsburg", "Archduke Franz Ferdinand" by Jean Sevillia and many other sources, including those which you can find in the Austrian National Library and Archives. When they were liberated was in Dachau no in other place, by American forces from General Patton, to say that they were sent to other camps as well is not true at all. Count Nostitz wasn't a Nazi as you said before, that's not true at all, the same I can say about countess Sophie von Nostitz, née princess von Hohenberg. I insist you should read the archives in Arstetten or write directly as I suggested to baron von Wuthenau -Hohenthurn who is their nephew and knew them very well and even he has documents and letters from the Hohenberg's brothers. I am convinced that you are a pro Czech republican supporter of the free mason Benes and the other traitors to our dynasty, which was condemned to death by Hitler and left Europe in 1940 to the USA. Benes expelled after the war millions of Austro Bohemians, Magyars, Poles and others and had confiscated their properties, not only from the nobility as was the case of our friend Prince Franz Kinsky, who was a little boy exiled since 1940 in Argentina with his mother née Baroness Mathilde von dem Bussche and many others, but even Jewish property was confiscated too. Benes and his circle and his heir Vaclav Klaus were not only enemies of all what means Austrian, but even they were openly racist and they didn't have any problem to sign an agreement with Stalin in Moscow in 1943, accepting the ethnic cleansing of millions in the former Kingdom of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia.

[Janet Ashton]

They were sent Dachau, not to multiple camps, and both count and countess Nostitz too were sent to prison, is is crystal clear, just reading Ian Cranshaw "The Fall of the House of Habsburg", "Archduke Franz Ferdinand" by Jean Sevillia and many other sources, including those which you can find in the Austrian National Library and Archives. When they were liberated was in Dachau no in other place, by American forces from General Patton, to say that they were sent to other camps as well is not true at all. Count Nostitz wasn't a Nazi as you said before, that's not true at all, the same I can say about countess Sophie von Nostitz, née princess von Hohenberg. I insist you should read the archives in Arstetten or write directly as I suggested to baron von Wuthenau -Hohenthurn who is their nephew and knew them very well and even he has documents and letters from the Hohenberg's brothers. I am convinced that you are a pro Czech republican supporter of the free mason Benes and the other traitors to our dynasty, which was condemned to death by Hitler and left Europe in 1940 to the USA. Benes expelled after the war millions of Austro Bohemians, Magyars, Poles and others and had confiscated their properties, not only from the nobility as was the case of our friend Prince Franz Kinsky, who was a little boy exiled since 1940 in Argentina with his mother née Baroness Mathilde von dem Bussche and many others, but even Jewish property was confiscated too. Benes and his circle and his heir Vaclav Klaus were not only enemies of all what means Austrian, but even they were openly racist and they didn't have any problem to sign an agreement with Stalin in Moscow in 1943, accepting the ethnic cleansing of millions in the former Kingdom of Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia.

Dear Wenzel,
           I think we should draw a halt to this conversation, and I am not going to reply to what you write. People can read the sources we both mention, and others with a broader remit, and draw their own conclusions about this family and the decisions they faced. I would like to recommend also biographies of Charlotte Masaryk. She was American, but I fear there is no bio in English of recent years, though her letters to her daughter Alice in the war are very moving and were published long ago. If people want simplistic history, they will believe what they find it convenient to believe, and you are free to level whatever accusations you like about what you think I may believe. But Charlotte's story matters in light of her health and new stories on her whereabouts when Konopiste was taken by the government.

I am reminded now of an Italian soldier/poet on the Soca Front in 1916, who inveighed in fury against his Austrian enemies, who his own nation had attacked gratuitously and without reason, for a few miles of land, at the cost of innumerable young or civilian lives - but who then lay down under the sky looking up at the mountains and wrote, "I just want an innocent country."

I hope you and yours have found your innocent country.

[Janet Ashton]

Interesting to use the Benes decrees as retroactive justification for undermining from the start a country that was set up to oppose the very aggressive German nationalism that destroyed them all.......:-(

[Wenzel]

CLEANSING IN POST WORLD WAR II CZECHOSLOVAKIA: THE PRESIDENTIAL DECREES OF EDWARD BENES, 1945-1948

Introduction

The first Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) was recreated in 1945 at the end of World War II and existed until the end of 1992. In both cases, Czechoslovakia utterly failed to form a governmental structure that secured freedom, prosperity, peace, and equal rights for all citizens of the state.

In 1918, the newly founded Czechoslovak Republic was entirely carved out of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy by a unilateral decision of the victorious entente powers. The dictated peace treaties of Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Trianon were not an outcome of a true peace conference at which the defeated would also have been given the opportunity to enunciate the limits of acceptable conditions for peace. Such a peace conference was never assembled.

The Versailles peace treaty with Germany was condemned by non-interested parties. In fact, the US Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, had declared that “the Versailles treaty menaces the existence of civilization,” and two popes had stigmatized the instrument. Benedict XV condemned it for “the lack of an elevated sense of justice, the absence of dignity, morality or Christian nobility,” and Pius XI, in his 1922 encyclical “Ubi arcam Dei,” deplored an artificial peace set down on paper “which instead of arousing noble sentiments increases and legitimizes the spirit of vengeance and rancour.”

The peace treaty of Trianon (1920) with Hungary resulted in the dismemberment of the thousand- year- old Hungarian Kingdom, as a result of an unbelievably inimical attitude of the allied representatives toward the Magyars. The consequence to Hungary was a loss of 71.5% of its territory and 63.6% of its population. The extreme tragedy of Hungary can be illustrated by comparing the smaller losses in 1871 of France to Germany, in which France gave up 2.6% of its territory and 4.1% of its population to Germany. The Trianon treaty forced three and a half million Magyars to live, without their consent, in Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenians and Rumania, with the stroke of a pen. The right of self-determination of nations, solemnly promised in the 14 points of US President Woodrow Wilson, was apparently forgotten.

In 1918, the government of the newly founded Czechoslovak Republic agreed to guarantee the rights of national minorities under the protection and supervision of the Geneva-based Council of the League of Nations. This obligation, however, was never honoured during the twenty-year existence of the first Czechoslovak Republic. The Prague government revoked acquired rights of domicile, treating millions of people of German and Hungarian origin as aliens in the land of their forefathers.  They were victims of harassment and deprivation. The Czechoslovak government confiscated land from their rightful German and Hungarian owners, without compensation, for distribution among Czech and Slovak colonists. A new tax was enacted called the “capital levy” to collect up to 30% of the value of one’s possessions on movable and immovable property.
                                                      
Census results were falsified as a quick method to reduce the number of minorities of the state. The Czechs represented only 43% of the mosaic state and attracted political problems for themselves in their own republic through their intolerance. Even their ruling Slovak partners were dissatisfied with Czech domination in the partnership. The Sudeten Germans, with a population of 3.5 million and representing the largest minority group in Czechoslovakia, sought to establish contact with the autonomous Slovaks as well as with the Hungarian and Polish minorities by forming an autonomist bloc against the Czechs. Due to the Defense of the Republic Act of 1923, containing 306 offenses punishable by incarceration, the national minorities along the borders lived a threatening existence of constant insecurity.

The radicalization of the internal political situation in Czechoslovakia worried the founders of the country, the British and French governments, leading to the emergence of the recommendation to appoint a mediator to arrive at a negotiated settlement of the minority problem. This led to the convocation of the four-power Munich conference at the request of the Czechoslovak government, culminating in the Munich agreement of September 29, 1938,and the cession of the Sudeten German districts to Germany. These historical events forced President Edward Benes (1935-1938) from office. The Benes letter of resignation addressed to the Czechoslovak government was delivered by the Prime Minister, General Syrovy, in a radio address during the evening hours of October 5, 1938. Benes escaped to Britain via Rumania several days later with millions of dollars worth of US currency and gold in his possession.

[Wenzel]

The declaration attached to the Munich agreement was of vital importance to the Hungarian minority. The heads of the government represented at Munich, namely: Britain, France, Germany and Italy, declared that they would reconvene if the problems of the Polish and Hungarian minorities in Czechoslovakia were not settled within three months time. Poland, on its part, decided not to wait for any further negotiations and immediately occupied the Polish-inhabited areas of Czechoslovakia.

Several weeks later on November 2, 1938, in Vienna, at the request of the Czechoslovak government and as a consequence of an impasse in negotiations between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, a two-power arbitration by Germany and Italy returned from Czechoslovakia to Hungary the following segment of lost territory: 12,700 km2 of land and 1,030,000 inhabitants, including 830,000 Hungarians, 140,000 Slovaks, 40,000 Ruthenians and 20,000 Germans.

It is noteworthy that Article XIX of the covenant of the League of Nations anticipated the peaceful reconsideration of the peace treaties pursued by the Assembly of the League which had become inapplicable and whose pursuit could endanger world peace.

On March 15, 1939, another aftermath of Munich occurred as Hitler ordered the German occupation of two provinces on the rump of Czechoslovakia, Moravia and Bohemia, which remained under German rule as a “Protectorate of Germany” until the end of World War II. With the aid and support of Hitler, the Province of Slovakia (1939-1945) declared its independence as a sovereign state on March 14, 1939. The first Slovak Republic then became a faithful satellite state of Germany. A barely six-month old independent Slovakia became a German satellite state on September 4, 1939, three days after the beginning of the German attack of Poland, and remained a German ally during World War II.

It must be noted, for the sake of objectivity concerning the rush to German alliance during World War II that far-lying Bulgaria adhered to the German war effort on March 1, 1941; Rumania did the same on June 21, 1941 on the eve of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Hungary, on the other hand, an immediate neighbour of Germany, became an unwilling German ally on June 27,1941, four days after the alleged Russian bombardment of the northern Hungarian city of Kassa. Due to its geographic proximity to Germany, Hungary became the last country evacuated by the retreating German occupational forces, leading her enemies to erroneously accuse Hungary of being the last German ally of the war. As a consequence, the Hungarian nation was severely punished at the 1947 Paris peace conference, while Slovakia, a Nazi puppet state and the first ally of Germany during the war, was rewarded.

Exiled in Britain, ex-president Benes established a Czechoslovak National Committee immediately after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 which was recognized by the British and French governments. When France fell under German occupation in 1940, the British recognized Benes’ group as a provisional Czechoslovak government in exile, with Benes as president. This government in exile was on the payroll of the British government for the remainder of the war years.

The outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the Soviet Union ended Benes’ isolation from the Moscow-based Czech refugees. Soviet Russia concluded a treaty of mutual aid against Germany with the Czechoslovak government in exile and gave diplomatic recognition to the London-based Benes political agents. The Soviet Union recognized the pre-Munich Czechoslovak boundaries at that time while the British government denied the idea of the legal existence and continuity of the pre-1938 Czechoslovak Republic. The Munich agreement was declared null and void by the British on August 5, 1942 and by the French on September 29, 1942. Both had been signatories to the 1938 agreement. As the fortunes of war started to favor the Soviet Union, Benes began to scheme his political future on Russian assistance. He concluded two treaties with Moscow for mutual assistance and postwar cooperation: one in 1943 and the other in 1944. The Soviet Union along with some other governments also exchanged ambassadors with Benes’ London-based exile government.

The diabolic Benes plan for the expulsion of the German and Hungarian population from their homes on former Czechoslovak territory came closer to being a reality when the Sudeten German population and the Hungarian minority located there came within his grasp due to Russian advancement into Central Europe. When the German forces retreated from the Russian front, the Czech and Slovak political exiles in London went to Moscow. There they learned that when the Soviet army liberated the first Czechoslovakia from the German occupational army, the Czech and Slovak communist exiles based in Moscow were to be accepted as key members and portfolio holders in a resurrected Czechoslovak government.

[Wenzel]

Presidential Decrees and Statutes of the Partially Restored Czechoslovak Republic, 1945-1992

From London and Moscow, Czech and Slovak political agents in exile followed an advancing Soviet army pursuing German forces westward, to reach the territory of the first former Czechoslovak Republic. Benes proclaimed the program of the newly appointed Czechoslovak government on April 5, 1945, in the northeastern city of Kosice ( Kassa, Kaschau), which included inhuman elements of oppression and barbarous persecution of the non-Czech, non-Slovak and non-allied population of the partially restored Czechoslovak Republic. As an aside, the Soviet Union occupied the eastern province of Ruthenia from Czechoslovakia in 1945. After the proclamation of the Kosice program, the German and Hungarian population living in the reborn Czechoslovak state were subjected to various forms of persecution, including:  expulsions, deportations, internments, peoples court procedures, citizenship revocations, property confiscation, condemnation to forced labour camps, involuntary changes of nationality and appointment of government managers to German and Hungarian owned businesses and farms, referred to euphemistically as “reslovakization.”  Through these decrees of the self-appointed president of the republic, Edward Benes, who had resigned as president of the first Czechoslovak Republic on October 5, 1938 and was reelected on May 11, 1946, some three and a half million Sudeten Germans were brutally expelled from their homes. Benes also reserved the same fate for the Hungarians, who had been thrown under Czech and Slovak rule for the second time in the 20th century.

Under the guise of legal legitimacy, non-elected and self-appointed government officials carried out arbitrary, high-handed actions resulting in the merciless prosecution of innocent human beings. Between 1945 and 1948, an endless list of discriminatory anti-German and anti-Hungarian presidential decrees, edicts, laws and statutes were proclaimed by the president of the republic, the Prague-based Czechoslovak Parliament, the Slovak National Council (parliament) in Bratislava (Pressburg) and by the Board of Slovak Commissioners (an appendage of the Czechoslovak government in Bratislava).

While in London, in exile, Edward Benes gave himself temporary power to exercise legislative authority as early as February 1945, prior to his appearance on former Czechoslovak territory with Soviet Russian complicity.

To this day, in 2001, with two exceptions, there are 89 such decrees, edicts, laws and statutes, along with innumerable pages of instruction for their enforcement, kept valid by their continued existence in the statutes of the Czech Republic (1993) and the Slovak Republic (1993). These two successor states of the restored Czechoslovakia remain unwilling to revoke edicts and laws to restore human rights and property rights to their proscribed population. A complete exposure of the text of these regulations and statutes would total hundreds of pages; however, they are cited below in Addendum I – Anti-Hungarian Discriminatory Edicts, Decrees and Statutes, 1944-1948.

the position, and continue to demand, that the admission of the Czech Republic and Slovak Republic to the European Union be contingent on the revocation by these two successor states of Czechoslovakia of the anti-German and anti-Hungarian decrees of 1945-1948 and on the extension of restitution to the victims.

[Wenzel]

In 1918, more than one million Hungarians were subjected to Czech and Slovak domination. However, the 1950 census registered only 355,000 Hungarians, while the subsequent census of 1960 for the corresponding population, registered only 553,000. The Magyar minorities of the surrounding states were unable toThe expulsion of former Czechoslovak citizens of German nationality from Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, including the Sudeten and Carpatho-Germans, and the atrocities committed during their expulsion has been addressed and is well documented in numerous publications. The expelled Sudeten Germans have strong organizations in Germany and Austria fully a half century after the loss of their homeland. Several German governments and non-governmental organizations have expressed  receive assistance from the mother country since Hungary was under total Soviet Army occupation from the end of World War II until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

The Slovaks, willing partners in the 1938 collapse of the Czechoslovak Republic and solely responsible for the disappearance of the second Czechoslovak Republic in 1992, joined the Czechs in the persecution of the Hungarian minority in 1945. Army units of the first Slovak Republic (1939-1945) which fought the Soviet Union in alliance with Germany, suddenly at the end of World War II, became soldiers of the new Czechoslovak army, wearing the Czechoslovak tricolor on their Slovak army uniforms. The Ministry of National Defense of the first Slovak Republic, a German satellite state, published in 1942 an illustrated compendium of Slovak army battles against the Soviet Union entitled: OD TATIER PO KAUKAZ (From the Tatra Mountains to the Caucasus). In 1945, these same Slovak army units became Czechoslovak soldiers used for billeting Magyar communities and coercing the defenseless population into Hungary. Slovakia miraculously emerged as an accidental beneficiary of World War II, despite the fact that the President of Slovakia, Mgr. Joseph Tiso, was tried as a war criminal in Bratislava by the Prague government and executed by hanging in 1947. The role of Slovakia during World War II should be the object of an international inquiry.

The Population Exchange between Czechoslovakia and Hungary

The 1945 Potsdam conference approved the Czechoslovak government request for the deportation of the Sudeten German population to Germany but did not approve their plan for the deportation of Hungarians to Hungary. While the Czech and Slovak ethnic cleansing of Hungarians was rebuffed at Potsdam, the Prague government initiated negotiations with Soviet-occupied Hungary, with Soviet-Russian assistance, for an exchange of population. During 1947 and 1948, according to official lists, 106,616 Hungarians were forcibly taken to Hungary in boxcars; these Hungarians were generally well-to-do businessmen, tradesmen, farmers and intellectuals.  At the same time, 60,257, mostly poverty-stricken Slovaks volunteered to move to Czechoslovakia. In 1945, roughly 15,000 Hungarians escaped to Hungary to avoid Czech and Slovak persecution and an additional 39,000 were ordered to leave Czechoslovakia.

[Wenzel]

Deportation of Hungarians to the Czech province of Bohemia, 1946-1947    

Czech retaliation to the unfavourable decision of the Potsdam conference in July 1945 regarding the expulsion of the Magyar population from Czechoslovakia resulted in the issuance of another vicious presidential decree. On October 1, 1945, decree No. 88 called for the forced transfer of Hungarian families from southern Slovakia to the Sudetenland in Bohemia – left vacant subsequent to the expulsion to Germany of three and a half million Sudeten Germans. This modern day enslavement was officially referred to as “recruitment for public works.” Men between the age of 16-55 and women from 18-45 were designated for forced, read slave, labour.

Between November 19, 1946 and February 25, 1947, in order to ensure an adequate work force in Bohemia, 44,129 Hungarians were deported for slave labour to Bohemia from Slovakia and had their properties confiscated by the state.  According to German sources, the number of deportees was 68,407 while a Slovak source put the number at 73,000. A Slovak National Council decree estimated that 570,000 hectares of fertile land was confiscated by the previously referred to confiscation committees. When this action is supplemented by the 7,587,488 acres of land confiscated without compensation from Hungarian landowners by actions of the Czechoslovak National Assembly in 1919, the depth and extent of damage inflicted by the Czechoslovak Republic on their citizens of Hungarian origin can be better understood.  After 1945, further injustices were suffered by the Hungarian minority through additional confiscation of private homes, businesses, factories, mines, stock holdings, etc.

In the event that some of the unfortunate deportees escaped from Bohemia they would find that they were unable to return to their former homes since they were immediately occupied by the Slovak colonists brought there by the colonization committees.

 “Reslovakization”

Benes provided the finishing touch to the total destruction of the unfortunate Hungarian minority by his decree-writing activity. The expulsion and dispersal did not end the peril of Magyar extinction by way of the Czechoslovak brand of democracy. In the Czechoslovakia of 1946, yet another practice was implemented with the objective of eliminating the Magyar nationality. It was referred to a “reslovakization,” that is, the forced acceptance of Slovak nationality.

On June 17, 1946, the Slovakian Commissioner of the Interior, under the name Reslovakization, issued decree No.20,000/1946. So-called reslovakization commissions were created throughout Hungarian-populated southern Slovakia with the purpose of implementing forced acceptance of Slovak nationality. By December 1947, 326,679 Hungarians were labeled and recognized as Slovak nationals by the Central Committee for Reslovakization, often with the use of the gendarmerie and contrary to the inner convictions of these sacrificed individuals. Threatened and intimidated, these Hungarians submitted their applications to the committee under duress in the hope of retaining their possessions and/or employment. These actions did certainly not represent a voluntary desire to officially become citizens of a foreign nation, but rather were acts of self-preservation by defenseless individuals with a desire to avoid their expulsion to Hungary on 24 hours’ notice.

Revoked Decrees

Benes’ pathological hatred and ruthless persecution of his political opponents was ended by a coup d’etat of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in February 1948. Benes died four months later in June 1948 under house arrest at his estate in Bohemia. He had misled the French between 1918 and 1938 by not upholding the obligations that the first Czechoslovak Republic had assumed under the peace treaties after World War I. No longer able to delude the Russians, they mercilessly had Benes removed from office. The Czechoslovak parliament by a unanimous vote in June 1945 transferred Ruthenia to the Soviet Union, without the consent of the Ruthenian population. Ruthenia was formerly a part of the thousand-year-old Hungarian Kingdom and, as the eastern-most province of the first Czechoslovak Republic, this action by the Czechs brought the Russians west of the Carpathian Mountains into Central Europe for the first time in history.  

The Communist Party in Soviet-occupied Hungary intermittently took over the reigns of government through intimidation and political purges of opponents and so the Czech-Slovak-Hungarian antagonism became an embarrassment for Moscow over the years.
The dilemma for Moscow was that the newly founded regimes in the “peoples democracies” had to build socialism in common partnership, as the often-repeated refrain went in the Soviet-dominated capitals of East-Central Europe.

With the disappearance of Benes from the political scene, the Czechoslovak government issued decree No. 76/1948 on April 13, 1948, allowing those Germans and Hungarians still living in Czechoslovakia, to reinstate the Czechoslovak citizenship that had been revoked by decree No. 33/1945. The Slovakian Commissioner of the Interior also revoked the latter decree by issuing decree No. 287/1948. A year later, Hungarians were allowed to send their children to Hungarian schools, which had been reopened for the first time since 1945. In 1963, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but not the Communist Party of Slovakia, condemned the aforementioned methods of population transfer but not the population transfer itself.