During another stay in Moscow in March 1945, Beneš and Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk spoke with Molotov and received “confirmation of a positive attitude of the Soviet government” for their plans to evict the German population. The president thought that he could outmaneuver his Czech political opponents by leading the country’s campaign of retribution and renewal, but he was about to find out otherwise.35 Before the Czech delegation, including Beneš and Gottwald, left for their temporary headquarters in liberated Košice, Stalin hosted a banquet and in a toast to them played his most important card. He offered a solid commitment “to resist the German danger” in the future and gave his assurance that “the Soviet Union will never interfere in the internal affairs” of its allies. That statement was taken to heart by the Czechs and especially by Beneš, who perhaps somewhat naïvely then put aside earlier worries about Stalin’s revolutionary aims in Europe.36
When Beneš returned to Prague in May 1945, it was with a Moscow-approved coalition government led by Prime Minister Zdenĕk Fierlinger, a Social Democrat with strong sympathies for Communism. The Kremlin saw Fierlinger as a perfect choice to head the “National Front”; he was politically aligned with Moscow in every important respect, yet his Social Democratic credentials would serve to hide from worried voters the extent of the Communist penetration into their homeland. The Czech-Moscow deliberations also produced a cabinet that included seven Communists, some holding such key posts as the ministries of the interior and of information. According to one insider at the time, the “real head of the government was Klement Gottwald,” the deputy prime minister and head of the Communist Party.37
To some extent, events in the streets overtook the political process: on May 5, 1945, factions hoping to grab power before the Soviets arrived mounted an uprising in Prague. This attempt, similar to the action taken by the Poles in Warsaw in August 1944, lasted until the Red Army entered five days later.38 Enthusiastic crowds welcomed the liberators—until Soviet troops began to indulge themselves. No one was safe, least of all German women in the internment camps. Among the tales of horror was one about an unfortunate who was “raped until she died and was left where she lay.”39
At the same time, some of Prague’s citizens, themselves reveling in this hatred, led German women through the streets, beat them, forced them to perform punishing exercises, and savagely shaved their heads. They whipped the women until their clothes were in shreds or they were stark naked and shoeless. Adding to the abject humiliation, red ink or oil was then poured over their heads, all to the savage merriment of the mob.40
Part of what was called “wild retribution” was deliberately fostered by Czech leaders who, like Beneš, thought that revolution and vigilante justice would consume their German enemies. In a speech on May 12, he declared that they could not risk another war in ten or twenty years, and he held the Germans collectively guilty for the crimes of Nazism: “We have said to ourselves that we must liquidate the German problem out of the Republic.” By his decree on May 19, the government took over the property of those individuals and organizations deemed “unreliable.”41
All political parties demanded the expulsions, though at first the Communists tried to protect German resisters to Nazism. That effort did not last long. They then took steps, with mixed success, to channel the raging masses by issuing various calls, such as to establish work camps, where Germans would be forced to make good the damages they had caused.42
Sexual violence became the order of the day in the Prague football stadium, where some 10,000 Germans were held for days. One man and his family entered there on May 16 and left on June 3; he saw that the women (and likely also his wife) paid the heaviest price. They were dragged away each night or just raped among the prisoners, either by Czech guards or by Red Army soldiers.43
As these crimes were being perpetrated, the Communist minister of education on May 29 boasted of being able to “purify” Prague and the surrounding areas of Germans. He said the people had a great helper in the Red Army, and the alternatives were clear: “We must decide either for the East or the West.”44
Czechoslovakia’s liberation was followed by so many arrests of Nazis, collaborators, POWs, and then ethnic Germans, that, like Poland, it also resorted to using former Nazi concentration camps, Theresienstadt, for example. As of May 1945, the western part of the country (Bohemia and Moravia) had some 500 “camps”—carrying various labels—and Slovakia had many as well. At that time in greater Prague, up to 25,000 people were interned in forty or so different places, from schools and prisons to the football stadium. By mid-June they were centralized, with three of the Czech camps holding more than 20,000 each, and one at Tábor that contained 40,000 people.45
The first concentration camps hosted the horror and mistreatment unto death. People were executed through beating, hanging, and lethal injection. By the beginning of September, there were at least 10,000 children in the camps under the age of fourteen. Research has been unable to determine the total number of deaths in these camps, but by all accounts it was considerable.46
In the meantime, when Stalin met with Czech prime minister Fierlinger on June 28 to solidify Soviet-Czech friendship, they ironed out further population questions. They signed a deal about Carpatho-Ukraine, a small territory that Czechoslovakia had obtained as part of the peace settlement in 1919. It was now ceded to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine. Population exchanges would be allowed, and the inhabitants would be free to become either Soviet or Czech citizens. It was in this context that Stalin told his Czech guests that they should deport their Germans. “We won’t disturb you,” he said, “throw them out.”47 The Czech army proceeded to leave truckloads of desperate and starving women, older people, and children, in the Soviet zone of Germany without notice, to fend for themselves. Soviet occupation authorities complained to Moscow but to no avail.48
Stalin and his Czech and Polish comrades wanted to move out as many Germans as possible before the upcoming Potsdam Conference. So force the issue they did, for in the first or “wild” period of the expulsions, a total estimated at 400,000 were driven from Poland and 450,000 from Czechoslovakia.49 The radicals who participated in these expulsions were often enticed by promises that they would get the lands and properties of the dispossessed.50
CZECH COMMUNISTS SOLIDIFY THEIR HOLD ON POWER
At the first elections on May 26, 1946, the Communists emerged as the big winners, with 40.2 percent of the vote in Czech lands and just over 31 percent nationwide. Non-Communists were shocked at the results but admitted that the elections were relatively free and not stolen, as they were elsewhere in Eastern Europe. A strong pro-Soviet mood prevailed in the country, which felt betrayed by the West over the 1938 deal that gave them away to Hitler at the notorious Munich Conference. Now the Communists were by far the best-organized and largest party, with a membership growing from 28,485, at war’s end, to more than one million by the time of the first elections.51 The idealists among the joiners thought things could be different and better here than in Russia. More advanced Czechoslovakia, “with an intelligent, well-educated population,” they thought, could avoid all the mistakes made in the Soviet Union, and “we would leap over a whole epoch.” Moreover, material considerations led some to seek the party card as a necessary credential in the competition to become managers or custodians of nationalized properties of evicted Germans or Czechs who had fled.52