Extra Information & Clarifications Sources for all my videos are in the bibliography of my scripts all available to download for FREE on my Patreon. www.patreon.com/mlaser?filters[tag]=script 0:05 In the shown map I am not accounting for post war border changes like the land transfer between Czechoslovakia & Poland and or Hungary & Austria. Even though at some points I will be talking about 1918 or 1920, before all the border disputes in Central Europe had been settled, the maps will only reflect the final state of Central European borders. 0:26 The Czech part of the map shows the 1921 census & the Slovak 1910 census (I was unable to get hold of the Slovak 1921 regional data. There was a 30% decrees in the number of Germans in Slovakia between the 1910 & 1921 censuses. This can easily be explained by the fact that around 65% of Germans living in Slovakia were natively bilingual) while the 3.2 million number comes from the German population of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The number of Germans in the 1921 census was 3.123 million 1:15 This map is based on the 1930s Czechoslovak census & was made based on an amazing map made by the Czechoslovak ministry of defence in the 1930s 2:02 There was a bunch of contention within the socialist & communist parties of Czechoslovakia, including the ones mentioned, on the grounds of how much socialist/communist they should be. For example, Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers Party were mostly light socialist & some more radical people split from the party to form a Communist party. Such splitting of leftist parties & forming of new parties & dissolution of other parties was very common in interwar Czechoslovakia. However, all of these parties were more concerned with the "class struggle" rather than ethnic struggle 3:57 Ethnicity is a social construct, as such it can form in different ways (there isn't one inevitable outcome) & can be malleable. The Czech & Slovak ethnic identities of today were much more fluid in the 19th & 20th century & the idea that Czechs are separate from the Slovaks wasn't the only idea at the time. Some people which we would today define as Czechs & Slovaks, all the way in the medieval era, believed themselves to be of one ethnic group. Modern believers of this idea, as ethnic identities began to be far more important during the modern period, tried to form one official united ethnic identity which included both Czechs & Slovaks (they tried this through News Paper like Hlas). During this time other Czechs & Slovaks (although they wouldn't want to be called that) even flirted with Pan-Slavism i.e. all Slavs are the same & one ethnicity. Anyways, the Czechoslovak ethnic proponents partially succeeded as the idea of a Czechoslovak ethnicity, composed of two subgroups, was quite widespread in usage during the first Czechoslovak Republic. There were people, like the first president of Czechoslovakia, who identified as Czechoslovak. However, over time, especially after the Slovak Fascist State, the idea of Czechoslovak ethnicity fell out of use, & by the 1990s it was so well out of use that the splitting of the nation, based largely on an idea of separate ethnic identities, was possible. However, none of these later developments detract from the fact that a Czechoslovak ethnic identity did exist & was used by both Czechs & Slovaks during the First Republic. That is why it's used in this video 5:14 Here I used the phrase German-speaking as opposed to just German. This is because it was language not ethnicity that was used in the AH's censuses that were used to determine which areas had a German majority & which had a Czech 9:04 What is interesting here is that Kramar was considered as one of the more chauvinistic Czechoslovak politicians & was far more nationalistic than, for example, Masarik or Benes. However, even he, as you can see with his quote, was against violent attacks on Germans & their property & understood the importance of not antagonising the Germans 10:55 There were few instances of these terms being used before 1918 but they were never used by the Czechoslovak Germans themselves. It was only after the formation of Czechoslovakia that these terms started to be used as ethnic identifiers by the Germans of Czechia & Slovakia 13:31 The 20% mark wasn't defined in the constitution. It was left open in order to be defined later when or if the minority parties were willing to negotiate. This didn't happen as the minority parties viewed any negotiation as admitting defeat, & so the old 20% standard of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was adopted as the mark for Czechoslovakia as it was deemed to be the most "equal" solution 15:33 The one gripe that everyone keeps holding against Masaryk was that he called the Germans 'colonists' & 'settlers' in Czechoslovakia during his December 1918 speech to the nation called 'první poselství'. However, in that same speech Masaryk called for ethnic unity & for creating "free self-governing citizenship" composed of all "equal" ethnic groups, including Germans, Hungarians, & Rusyns. His statement of calling German 'colonists' & 'settlers' wasn't meant to incite ideas of deportation or ethnic cleansing, it was simply a statement of the historical reality. Nevertheless, the statement was very controversial at the time & Masaryk did later, during a newspaper interview, apologise to the Sudeten Germans for saying it. Masaryk never, at any point, called for ethnic cleansing & his entire agenda was always one of co-prosperity & interethnic unity in the country 19:39 Confusingly all the Nazi parties in the various countries retained the same name. So instead of calling the German, Czechoslovak, & Austrian Nazis the same name I will specify which country they're from 20:59 The Czechoslovak Nazi party was technically able to get a bit more % of the vote then just 3.5 as they ran on a joined election ticket with the German National Party. All together both parties manage to score a bit over 5% of the Czechoslovak vote 21:47 The Nazis knew the Czechoslovak government was going to ban & dissolve them & before the ruling could pass through the parliament they preemptively dissolved themselves. So "technically" they weren't dissolved by Czechoslovakia but they were banned & the funds of the paramilitary Volkssport were seized 22:48 Estimated because there are no unemployment figures that differentiate among ethnicity. Also, it must be stated that the reasons which made the Germans suffer more during the great depression also made their economic recovery after the great depression, more specifically after 1937, faster 28:31 I am skipping over a lot of Czechoslovak internal politics here because I found them to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Nothing, other than western intervention, would have prevented the conquest of Czechoslovakia by Germany 28:25 What would become the Munich agreement was already being negotiated before the September coup attempt but the uprising was the final nail in the coffin for the allied decision 29:25 However, any planned large-scale settlement of Germans in Czechia never happened due to the war 31:00 I will admit that stating that one terrible experience isn’t as bad as another terrible experience is missing the point a bit 31:18 Population changes shown on screen are estimates so you will see a bit different numbers from various sources. However, every single source will agree that the population of Czechia during the war grew while the populations of Poland & Ukraine drastically fell 33:45 The scale & planned execution of this idea changed on an almost monthly bases depending on various conversations, state of the war, & support or reluctance from the allies. At one point in 1941-2 Benes even tabled the idea of autonomous German parts within Czechoslovakia, with expulsion of only the members of the Nazi party (which at most would be 20% of the German Czechoslovak population). However, this got rejected by the Czechoslovak nationalistic elements. On the other hand a lot of the Sudeten Germans in exile also rejected various proposals from the Czechoslovak government in exile, basically, for the most part, no one was willing to compromise 33:45 There's far more nuanced diplomacy happening here. For example, the allies, including UK & USA, agreed earlier in 1942 to an organized expulsion of Germans but by 1944-5 UK & USA were reluctant to officially sanction it. Basically there was a lot of backroom diplomacy with secret deals being made & others being broken. But in broad strokes what I talk about in the video is accurate 36:22 The Russian, & in parts of Western Czechia, US troops sometimes tried to mediate the tensions between the German civilians & Czechoslovak militias but the troops were not everywhere, especially not in rural towns & villages, & even if they were, they would often let the locals do what they want & not interfere 38:28 Some of these camps, after 1948, were also used by the communist as gulags 38:45 The labor camp showen was a German labor camp in Petrzalka not Pezinok. A picture of the Pezinok labor camp doesn't exist 39:00 The picture is of a camp in Terezin which was built by the Nazis & later used by the Czechoslovaks. This is not a picture of the camp in Budejovice (no pictures of it exist), it is only here to serve as a visual representation There were many other instances of brutality & executions of the Germans than I have mentioned here (I cannot mention everything). Like, for example, the execution of around 100 Hauerland Germans in today's Slovakia, or the roughly 1000 Germans shot dead in Postoloprty, etc.n
Already the video in itself was fantastic - especially wrt to the pictures. And then these footnotes, wow! Your use of images is so far from what commercial documentaries manages to do that it isn't funny. I usually give up on those big budget productions because I can't deal with the flood of "illustrative" images that seems to have been put together by some "visual artist" without any historical knowledge whatsoever. In contrast here I had to pause the video so often to look at the various things you are showing (I love old pamphlets and posters) that I should really watch the video again :-)
My grandfather was a Sudeten German. When his family was exiled, he left a harmonica with a Czech neighbor, and decades later he returned to his hometown as an adult to find that she not only lived in the same house, but had kept the harmonica for all those years.
slavs are not even native to central europe. the slavs came with the great migration period from eastern european plains. before that balts and germanics lived throughout these areas and illyrians in the balkan with celts and greeks. how about the slavs simply return home to russia@@dylanvogler2165
Do what happened to the Greeks of Constantinople/Istanbul, culminating in the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955. Greeks made up 31% of the city's population in 1919, when Turks made 38%. It's a very interesting story.
There is something to be said about the Greco-Turkish ethnic wars, exchanges, and conflicts of the early 20th century as they were kind of a precursor to other ones in Europe like the expulsion of the Germans, but I don't want to go into another depressing topic any time soon. I need some positive ones after this video.
@@MLaserHistory take care mate! Your mental wellbeing is more important. I can relate somewhat - I followed Ukranian war pretty closely since I'm still a Russian citizen and I live not that far away from the action and I got a sort of a mild PTSD as a result. Now my fav topics of history, politics and war sometimes make me really anxious so I completely stopped watching some of my fav youtube channels. Just can't stomach it anymore.
@@stariyczedunI hope things get better and to can enjoy these subjects again soon. I will do prayers that the conflicts don’t spread and peace comes as quick as possible so no more death
In Bavaria we have entire towns founded by Sudeten Germans after the war, like Neu-Gablonz, Waldkraiburg or Traunreut. And lots of cities often have an area called "Neue Heimat" (new home). A large part of the Bavarian population descends from Sudeten Germans today, and Bavaria has a population larger than that of Austria or the Czech Republic.
When vacationing in Grossgmain, south west of Salzburg , a couple of years ago, I encountered a memorial. It's memorial text surprised me. It was a tale of German suffering of people driven away from Sudetenland. I am aware of the history, The Reichsgau Sudetenland -38, WW2 and the departure of the Germans post -45 and all that... so nothing new there. What was new was the the message of the memorial. I was surprised. First time ever that I saw a memorial for suffering Germans. I. e. ordinary people. I my mind everybody else in Europe suffered. From German doing. The German nazis only got what they deserved. Right?! Well, this memorial contrasted very much with my up grown overall picture. It was a lesson and an awakening for me. www.google.se/maps/@47.7253838,12.9101689,3a,75y,218.31h,96.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-S2shXcCnCXnRIvsWKMWBA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=sv&entry=ttu
@@Y2Drifter Interesting You are mentioning that. I was vacationing in Schwangau, Bavaria this year. Hiking and looking around. When reading about the history of the various places and palaces I visited and of Ludwig II and that time, I encountered a small piece of text. I believe it was on Wikipedia. It mentions briefly that during the 20-ies, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the German and the Austro-Hungarian empires, there were ideas and even suggestions to resurrect Bavaria as an independent Kingdom. Not surprisingly, people around the old Royal family and certain members of the Bavarian elite supported the idea. But there were apparently also some Bavarian nationalistic sentiments left among common people as well. Question: How is it today? How do ordinary Bavarians think of the matter today? Are there any sentiments for a Bavarian independent state? Is the idea discussed or are people happy with things as they are?
Something similar was going on in eastern Croatia (Slavonia) and northern Serbia (Vojvodina) at the time. My grandma's family got a house and land grant in Slavonia, but when they got there, they found the german family that owned the farm shot dead and deposeted on the dung heap. They didn't want to live in a place obtained in such a way and went back to their village in the mountains of south Croatia.
@@ImNotReal12345 Yup, those were horrible and chaotic times with a lot of brutalities happening. This is not the only personal account of horror that I heard from that time. Talkig to my grandparents, hearing what they saw, I'm fascinated that none of them developed any visible PTSD and they all managed to live pretty normal lives afterwards.
My families Vojvodinia German on my Mother's side and Hungarian on my father and yeah, insanely tragic things happened to so many of us. Most of the family was killed, but a handful were just left with their farms and lands taken away
@@Gusararrthe Italian deportation and killings are mostly a myth, perpetuated by post war Italian nationalists politicians and others. Unlike with Germans who did face deportation and were not allowed to stay, Italians were never deported, and tens of thousands stayed and continued to live in peace. Most Italians did leave, but that was because of fear and opposition to Yugoslav government, not forced and not by orders. As for the killed - the case of Foibe is perhaps one of the most blown out of proportion events of modern history. A historic joint research commision of both Italian and Slovenian historians was created to research it, and the findings were that between 2000 and 4000 people were killed in total, over the course of 4 years of war, of which a large degree was Italian occupation soldiers and yugoslav collaborators in wartime actions, while the civilians who were killed were also of both ethnicities and not targeted for ethnic background but for political reasons, of real or precieved collaboration or fascist sympathism, just as such massacres happened to a much larger scale against native Yugoslavs. While still sad moment of history, it is not comparable to fascist-nazist ethnic cleansing or post war retaliations and deportations of Germans, neither in scale nor in scope.
@@martinsriber7760 Oh God, you are right. Especially since I've seen this exact method of tongue-in-cheek censorship multiple times on different channels. It serves UA-cam right. 😄
As a descendent of Sudeten Germans, I greatly appreciate this video since the topic is basically unknown outside Germany and Czechia (and even there lots of folks don't know anything about it). My grandparents continue to have nightmares about the explusion and refused to watch any news about the War in Ukraine because "they had already seen enough dead bodies during their youth". What happened between our people was horrible and we can all be glad to finally live peacefully next to one another. May those times never repeat again.
No, everyone is very familiar with this in czechia. Even thou some people actually still think it was justified. They just dont get that a good answer to ethnic cleansing is not ethnic cleansing
Don't think they can't happen again. I remember back in the 1990s, when Germany reunited, the Czechs living in one former Sudeten German village went to the graveyards and destroyed all the skeletons of the Germans they had murdered in 1945, just to make sure there were absolutely no German remains in the area. And later the Czech President Milos Zeman defended the genocide, saying the Sudeten Germans had 'betrayed their birthplace' (oddly enough, he didn't care much when HE supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, nor said anything about the Czechs that fought for Russia in WWI against Austria-Hungary, technically their 'birthplace').The incident even made the German President cancel a visit to Czechia. You may think things are different today, but I assure you, all it takes is a small fire to make the powderkeg blow up again.
My grandpas family was expelled from the Sudetenland, but he always had a surprisingly positive experience with the Czechs that got the house, to an extend that other Germans from the region are confused. The family let my grand-grandpa take valuable family stuff from the house over the border and my grandparents now often visit. We children even got socks knitted by a Czech grandma, who sadly passed away around 3 years ago. If anything he only had a bad experience with the Soviets, who sadly shot the family dog (who was not attacking them and in their shed). Ironically he faced discrimination by other school kids in East Germany for being "foreign". I think we can just agree, that its bad to to ethnic cleansing. Its not a good look, if people use Nazi tactics to Germans that were expelled.
Always the same .Decent persons are everywhere! It could happen that the servile ones, suddenly have fun to torture you while the persons with dignity not.
You were lucky on good people. There are good Czech people like in any nation, but of course there are also bad people. Czechs are the same as Germans in many ways.
@@tomassiegl4991 It also shows how arbitrary "race" can be. I talked multiple hours to my grandpa and he remembered more negative about east Germans done against him (although he isn't resentful against them either and enjoys the culture), while stressing that he only had positive experiences with Czech people.
@@kompognatus ; before that it was a Roman tactic. Before that, it was an Assyrian tactic. Ethnic cleansing, along with genocide, unfortunately is as old as humanity.
My grandfather lived in Teplice (Teplitz). They were ethnicaly czech but spoke german (czech as well they were bilingual). After 1938 anexation his grandma switched nationalities from czech to german whitch resulted in the death of his father and brother in Stalingrad. Suprisingly after the war (mainly due to speaking czech) they were able to stay here and I also live in Teplice to this day. It was strong when he said when hitler came I had to forgot czech and when communists came I had to forgot german.
Though I'm slovak, my grandpa was a Moravian. After the war his parents were given a house and land in the Sudetes. One night, they found an old man walking around their house. When my great-grandma asked who is he, and what he wants on their property, he calmed her down and said, that he just wanted to see his old home. They got to talk, grandma invited him inside. He was one of the germans, who were expeled. He even showed her, where he hid some of their valuables, which were still there. So grandma let him take it. Grandpa was always telling me this story, because his parents felt very sorry for the man and guilty for living in the house, which he built.
Great video! My grandfather was Sudeten German (*1924) and was pretty much bilingual. On the other hand, his mother (I was fortunate enough to meet her when I was still very young) still spoke rather broken Czech. Her husband was actually politically active and very much anti-Hitler. As a result, he ended up in a concentration camp, managed to survive for a couple of years but died shortly after his release. After the war, they wanted to deport the family from their house but my great grand mother successfully pleaded for an exception. However, all their friends and neighbors from the village either died during the WW2 or if they survived, they got deported. It must have been surreal to watch the new “owners” “occupy” their homes.
my gparents live there too and said the new owners were often miscreants and didnt do a good job keeping up the place but at least it kept more nature unspoiled with less folks around.
@@polsyg6581Do not forget that 50 years of communism followed. Nobody was allowed to keep any kind of farm, land or factory anyway. Most often even not a home or house, because all resources belonged now to the state. So whatever was there in property, everybody lost it anyway. My great-grandfather had a factory in Prague (kohinoor) but he was Jewish. In 1938 the factory was seized by the Germans, and he was sent to Dachau. Officialy he „sold“ the factory for some cents to them. After 1989 the Czech state never gave us anything back, because of the Beneš decree, stating all property seized from Germans in 1946 belongs now to the Czech state. Can you imagine the irony??
@@denkendannhandelnthats an interesting Story, how three differente systems took stuff from people and insured that the original ownerd never got anything back
@@denkendannhandeln Koh-i-noor is a very famous Czech company. Everyone in Czechia knows Koh-i-noor. I assume there is only one company with this name in Czechia. I personally know only one Koh-i-noor. If there is more than one, it might not be the same company in that case. The company is not in state hands anymore. If it is any consolation to you, the current owner of the company seems nice. :)
When I did my Erasmus program at Pilzen university we went around an abandoned German village. It was really interesting. The forest had reclaimed so much but it was still obvious we were walking through someone’s house.
Yup, the remnants of this event are still all around. (also how dare you watch my video months after it has been released, you should be one of the first viewers!)
Thanks for your efforts in revealing this complicated history! My mother's ancestors were also Germans in Czechoslovakia at Znaim/Znojmo and fled to central southern Germany in 1945. Just managed to visit the (beautiful) town last autumn and randomly booked my hotel not far away from a place where my grandmother worked at some 80 years before like my mother told me afterwards. Although I'm generally politically interested, I never wondered, what the political beliefs of my ancestors from that region might have been, but never heard negative expressions about what happened.
A very good video, though one point seems to be missing - the aftermath of the München Agreement when not only the Sudets were ceded to Germany but the Czech population of the region was expelled. Not so brutally and forcibly, not at such a short notice, but expelled they were, and those who stayed were subject to ethnic prosecution. Just one more piece to the mosaic. Also, after the Velvet Revolution, the topic was opened and quite widely discussed throughout the 1990s, it's not like it's been all hush-hush.
In the 2000s, the owner of the holiday apartment we stayed in for our winter holidays here in Austria was a Sudeten German. He refused to accept Czech guests. So these wounds lived on for a long time. Of course the same is true for the more numerous victims of Nazi crimes. Even though I was at least superficially familiar with the topic, I was still surprised by the brutality and gained a better understanding. Thank you! I hope there will be a video about the Slovak WW2 uprising in the future. It just came up on the WW2 in real time channel and I honestly had never heard of it before!
@@uxydra6403 Something that makes it hard to move on from is also that little was done to make-good on what happened. Germany did, Germany's even in court with Namibia over colonial violence from more than a century ago, Czechia hasn't done shit that I've been informed of as somebody who would be if it did anything such as land-back or reparations.
I am Czech of German, Polish, Silesian, Italian and Slovak origin. I am Czech/German speaking and can understand Slovak and quite well Polish, because I am originally from the Moravian-Silesian region, which shares the borders with Poland and Slovakia and many people are of both Polish and German origin. To explain a little bit more my roots, my ancestors came to Ostrava/Ostrau, which was growing very fast due to the industrialization of this region. I am thankful, that nowdays we can live peacefully next to each other and enjoy the life together. I have many German and Austrian friends. Liebe Grüße aus Tschechien nach Deutschland, Österreich und an alle, die kein Hass sondern eine Annäherung unserer Länder unterstützen.
I hope you can continue to live in harmony. But as this story, the break up of Yugoslavia, and the rebirth of fascist/"strong-men" world wide has shown - all that harmony can quickly be wiped away by power hungry politicians playing to the basest instinct of their audiences. It is important for all those that want harmony and peace to vehemently oppose those that would divide us. Otherwise, we will all go blind from all the eyes and teeth taken.
Die Kommunisten haben diesen Hass gegen die Deutschen 40 Jahre lang genährt, sie haben mich auch einer Gehirnwäsche unterzogen, aber ich habe nicht nachgegeben.
A part of my mother's family were Sudeten Germans, including my great-great-grandmother. She wasn't expelled after WW2 because she was married to a Czech but her sister and her family were since they were all German. A part of my family, people I don't know and who might not even know I exist, was torn away. History hits different when it directly affects those close to you. In the end I am left wondering how it could have been different and what potentional future was lost.
@@desichalkos5627 The act of forcibly removing someone from a location - expulsion - is a way a region can be ethnically cleansed. I used this word to put emphasis on the fact that they weren't murdered.
@@Bohous156Do you know Germans always had a very positive view of Ethnic cleansing. If you read German history or German writers from 18th, 19th and 20th century, all of them were advocating ethnic cleansing. First it were of the Natives in Americas, then Africans in Africa and finally specific type of Europeans in Europe. But you correctly pointed out that history hits differently when it directly affects those close to you. Since Germans themselves were never a victim of ethnic cleansing till WW2, they were always in favour of such kinds of things. On top of it empathy and kindness were probably never part of German culture, so doing acts of violence on others was easier for Germans.
@@asmirann3636 To be fair, most nations and cultures advocated for such policies, the russians (with ukraine, caucasus, baltics...), the french (algeria), italians (south tyrol)...
@@asmirann3636"empathy and kindness were probably never part of German culture" Seriously, have you not studied basic history? Are you not aware of how the Germans have always been more kind and empathetic than most other cultures (particularly Eastern and Southern Europeans)? For one, they reformed and enfranchised people a lot sooner than many other places. Even France and Britain didn't have universal male suffrage before Germany did. Germany and Austria also allowed women to vote before France and Italy did. Claiming that Germans were in favour of ethnic cleansing also ignores the fact that they're not a monolith who all share the same views. The years of the Weimar Republic are very good evidence of this.
Though we need to stay forever vigilant. We still have politicians "declaring war to the end upon liberalism", people shouting racist slogans on the streets and, of course, on the internet,... Even in our own societies that we consider more civilized and more advanced, the idea of ethnic division resurfaces depressingly often. I feel like we're still just one economic crisis away from a backslide into the 1930's.
@@georgejanzen774These conflicts arose out of the new borders. Everybody wanted an ethnostate. Just all have been decided by plebscites. That's how you avoid shitty conflicts like in southern Tirol, the Sudetenland or Carinthia.
Ahh very interesting, sadly, I don't think precedent is on her side on this one. I believe Slovakia and Czechia literally have a clause in repatriation laws that exclude descendants of expelled people under Benes decrees.
Рік тому+6
I'm thinking of Slovakian citizenship too, but my grandpa was a Jewish Hungarian speaker from [Czecho]Slovakia so I have more chance I think
Out of curiosity and by no means intended as an insult, what makes one interested in a Slovakian citizenship? I'm of Eastern European descent myself and love discovering the area. But isn't the larger demographic trend still emigration due to economic underdevelopment? Or are we getting close to a tipping point?
@@georgejanzen774 Both Czechia and Slovakia are full EU members, so having their citizenship gives you the right to live, work in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and other EU countries as well as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. If you have a US passport and then get an additional Slovak passport, this basically gives you the right to live, work and travel visa-free in two of the greatest commercial centers of the world.
yours must be one of the most efficient and precise channels about history on UA-cam. I really enjoy how seriously you take the manners you explore and I appreciate all the more the emphasis you put on parts of history often shadowed under their collossal neighbors, such as Czechia
Extremely commendable effort, I learned a ton of new information and even knowing the expulsion of Germans was horrible, this made it much more clearer just how horrible it actually was. Hope there would be more of that in our (Slovak) history schoolbooks. Would love to see another one on the Slovak National Uprising and maybe one about the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, after you recover from this one :)
Yes yes yes! Those two (SNP and Hungarians) were the two topics that came to mind watching this. Hungarians would be interesting also in a wider lens than just Czechoslovakia - Transsilvania and Zakarpattya (sorry, can't think of what to call that part that is now mostly Ukraine). I noted Czernowitz on one of the maps - I visited Chernihiv this summer, and wow, is that corner of the world also interesting. Just following the history of the professors of that university through the wikipedia articles about them gives a mind blowing picture of how different central/eastern Europe was before 1914.
@perseus274What Slovaks and how many of them did actually live in Subcarpathia to support any claim for it to be called 'far eastern Slovakia'?? If anything, the whole territory had been subdivided into several Hungarian counties, and even under Czechoslovakia, it simply never became the same administrative unit as Slovakia, so please stop spreading nonsense. The overwhelming majority population has been Ruthenian (formerly mostly loyal to the Hungarian cause and patriotic), Hungarian and Jewish, with a marginal handful of German, Slovak and Romanian villages.
@@AsptuberOh well, the typically Slovak unconscious doublethink: on the one hand saying 'expulsion of Germans was horrible & do a video on Hungarians as well', on the other hand using the false, insinuative term 'Slovak National Uprising' (which in fact lead to deaths of many Carpathian Germans, priests or simply people named 'Nemec') as if nothing happened.
Seeing this topic I can't stop myshelf from thinking of similarish situation that is happing as this video releases. The fleeing armenians from nagorno karabak.
Except the Armenians are mostly settlers that commited ethnic cleansing against the Azeri population in the 90s, that is the comparison. Azeris are finally putting things right, returning homes to hundreds of thousands of people.
@@buurmeisjeNo they are not Ngarno-karabakh has always been majority armenian you can look at past census. Yes there were Ethnic cleansing of the azeri population in the 90s which was bad and does not justify More ethnic cleansing rambert azeribajain also committed ethnic cleansing in the 90s .Nothing justifes ethnic cleansing. What is right is to allow both tye armenian and azeri population to return to ngarno karabakh and the principle of national self determination to sort this out
Thanks for uncovering what was never really taught, or discussed, in CS. In the early 1960s, I spent (relatively) a lot of time in the Cheb area, attending a 2 room school where my aunt and uncle were teachers. It was only much later that I realized why I didn't always get what the other kids were saying --- duhh. In the late 60s, we camped in the SW Sumava mountains, where we explored "abandoned" farm houses littered with German journals and magazines -- it was eerie. In 69 we were in a refugee camp in Germany; my mom was working outside. She came home one night, very disturbed, because some guy was yelling at her in Czech in an obscene and threatening manner. On the other hand we left the kitten that we adopted with a Czech speaking camp employee, a Sudeten German, who befriended my parents. BTW, Pekna cestina! Ja bych si na slovenstinu netrouf... :)
just so you know. It's taught today in schools. Though, teachers usually have no time to go any deeper into the topic since we learn about WWII in great detail. IMO way too much that it's unnecessary. Not because it's not important, but there happened a lot of stuff in Czechoslovakia in the past 100 years and we have only 1 year to teach the students about it and half of it goes to WWII usually. And wow, such an interesting story.
This is an absolutely fascinating video. Thank you. I am an American citizen, my mother's family leaving Czechoslovakia from Kacov in 1939 as there were members in the family with US citizenship so they left with the Nazi annexation. As such, I have received most of the history of these lands from a very one-sided account, and that includes the expulsion of the Czech Germans too. I had a Great Uncle, Alois Jedlička, who fought as a resistance fighter during the war who was a Czech scholar, professor of Czech language at Charles University and editor of the magazine Naše řeč. He was one of an authors of a book standardizing Czech grammar. I visited the Czech Republic (now, of course Czechia) in the mid 1990s. Many of the older family members were still resolutely unfriendly to Germans, others had moved on. Things were a even more divisive when discussions of Communism were brought up (more a rural verses urban split as much as I could tell).
Hi, my husband's grandmother and her family members are/were Carpathian Germans from Spiš, around Spišská Nová Ves. If you have the last/family name, it would be interesting if they match/are related or if they were neighbours/from the same area. Husband's grandma could stay (they were told to accept CS citizenship past WW2 and stop talking German and then could stay, or refuse and leave. Cca 90% of her family refused and had to leave for Germany, she and cca 10% of her family stayed and she became a musical primary school teacher during the communist era.
My grandmother was born in Jablonné v Podještědí/Deutsch Gabel, but was forced out of her home along with her 3 older brothers, younger sister and her mother when she was 5 years old. She and her siblings were all half-Czech/half-German with her mom being Czech and both her biological father and her step-father being Germans. Her family walked to Berlin where they would stay in a bombed out appartment with another family for 2 years until her mom could no longer provide for all 5 of her children and thus send my grandma and her brothers to live with different families all across Germany. The living conditions in Berlin were so dire that my grandma just barely survived an infection with tuberculosis in which a doctor succesfully removed one of her affected kidneys. Her German step-father meanwhile had been marched into a nearby forest along with many other German men from the region and was never seen again. Her brothers later visited their hometown again sometime in the 70s and actually discovered that their biological father was still alive and living in a nearby town.
@@desichalkos5627 are you a bot or something lol stop correcting people's stories, let them talk about their family history as they want to. Not everyone has to talk like you.
That is really interesting. I never thought I would find someone with roots from Deutsch Gabel here. My family is from the area and we were spared of Transfer. We come from a Dorf north of Deutsch Gabel. Do you have any information about the event of Transfer itself? I could help you find some info in Archive in Česká Lípa, where documents about Transfer from Bezirk Deutsch Gabel are
Excellent video, very informative and well researched. My family is from Bohemia and both ethnicities intermarried throughout my family tree. I understand both sides of this sensitive issue, this video should be used in schools!
Quick sidenote: in German, if there is an "h" after a vowel in a word, it is not pronounced. Instead it makes that vowel long. Wehr would be pronounced with a long "e" and with the "h" silent.
Thank you for the video. It's depressing for me as a Czech, but truthful history must be kept alive. What i generally found annoying tho is that Westerners usually think that the 'Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia' were only german speaking pple therefore Germans. They don't realise the difference between being a majority and being homogenous. These Germans lived with Czechs next to each other and when Henleiners with Nazis took over, those 'Sudeten areas' (btw the fact that Sudeten germans never existed as a term for the whole border line of the Czechoslovakia only to be coined by the nazi propaganda and this term is used to this day, i find very appaling) expulsed those pple, who didn't want to proclaim that they are only German or were just Czechs... My grandfather's family is from southern Bohemia and according to traditions over there, everyone were devout catholics and Czech girls were often married in to German families. This intermingling happened through centuries and thats why Czechs are the most german like Slavs and Austrians are the most Slavic like Germans... Anyway, thank you again for the history of our country, take a brake and focus on something more positive. :) _Veritas vincit!_
You're right. My father is from Bohemia, my mother from Moravian Selesia. I've got family records that go back to 1600 and the names of my ancestors sometimes were German, sometimes Czech or Polish. I did a DNA test not too long ago and it turned out that I was about half North Western European, half Eastern European. My nationality is German and I've got a Czech surname. I don't think there is something like a "pure" ethnicity.
Nationality is a contrived concept useful for politicians, ordinary people should be very suspicious when it is used to convince them. It is vital for us all to understand it's consequences - we in the UK have just been manipulated into leaving the EU by such means and are suffering the consequences. Thank you for making this informative record.
Nationalism as a whole is such a stupid concept. Especially in central Europe. I am Czech. I have Czech name. I live in Czech republic. But my family basically came from Germany on one side, and Austria on the othe, based on the records that we have found. I would not be even surprised if some of my ancestors have been forced to change their name to hide the fact that they were Germans.
@@TheMirodyn Nationality is rather a squishy term and it always depends on how it is defined. If it denotes the citizenship of a person in a specific country, it’s clear. But if the term is used synonymously to refer to ethnic origin or belonging to an ethnic group, it poses problems because notions of ethnic groups are no more than social constructs often associated with racial discrimination and nationalism which have led to terrible wars in the past. Really contraproductive here in Central Europe, I totally agree with you.
As an ethnic Czech from Prague I had no idea about most of this. We are taught about the two burned Czech villages over and over, but the scale of inhumanity done to Germans after the war has always been glossed over. Great video, I really appreciate you focusing on quotes rather than personal opinions and explanations.
You are not taught about that? How do you explain that 3 million Germans lived in Czechoslovakia before the war and now there are almost none? There were even more Germans than Slovaks in this interwar Czecho-German-Slovakia. P.S.: in the Slovak part of the ČSSR you did the same to the Hungarian population, although not so thoroughly.
@@ekesandras1481 You would be surprised. Many Czechs believe to this day that it was the right thing to do and that the expulsion of the German population from the country was justified.
@@ekesandras1481 we are taught about the Beneš decrees and the expellation of the Germans, not so much about the violence, I think it is because during the communist rule it wasn't really taught at all
Hi thank you for very interesting video. I'm german and part of my (grand)grandparents lived the czech republic before they came to the modern day germany. Since my grandparents from this side already died I only know a few things of what happened indirectly from my mother. One thing I'd like to say is that she told me that the neighbours back then harbored no ill will against my grand-grandparents and from what I've heard they could have stayed after the war. But with conditions like no german language allowed and no school for the children. But theese were not the condition from their neighbours! What I'd like to point out is the collective guilt which is always a topic. Since I myself, as a german perhaps not so objective person on the question, wonder how many people think everybody got what he deserved with such a notion. And since your video could be seen as critisizing the czech part of the actions of the czech people I'd like to extend my view to this topic as well. Politics are one thing and it is hard or more like impossible to judge every single person in a situation like back than and make decision on what to do on an individual level. Especially with the emotional state most people must have been in. But I think when we view back into history we can always aknowledge that besides the people who took action back than, there were probably many people who either just lived their lives without knowing of what happened, felt powerless to do anything against it or simply feared the outcome of what would happen if they tried to do anything. And I thing this fear was a very real and legitimate reason, even if many people - at least online - seem to scoff at such arguments.
There should be no such thing as « collective guilt ». It is an injustice to new generations. The Expression « Sins of the Father » should have no bearing on future generations. Also I, born in Gablonz a.d. Neisse (Jablonec n. n.), have as a mantra that I do not forget but I forgive and on recent trips back »home » I would never hold past events against present Czechs.
It's a long and tragic story. The microcosm was already broken, when the Czech suddeters were kicked out, in 38. And any chance of it mending pretty much died, when the Nazis launched their campaign of retaliation following Heydrich's assassination. The attitudes varied obviously, however the overarching one was that co-existence wasn't really an option anymore, by the end of the war.
Although I've seen a few of your vlogs, I've been putting off this video for a long time. Both my great grandmother and my wife's grandmother came from the Sudetenland. I don't want to say what was lost, but rather how excellent this vlog was! The history was reported very neutrally and in the end both were losers. Keep on your good work and greetings from Austria!
Very interesting and I as a German do appreciate the moslty fair storytelling. It’s always sad to hear about civilians beeing treated so poorly but at least there are people willing to speak about it and thereby show that the world is full of good will and forgiveness as well as memorance and good humanist people
@@trevorphilips2090This is a problem with Germans. They migrate in millions to foreign lands and then feel entitled. They are more German origin people living outside of Germany, then within it.
My grandfather and his mother were ready to be expelled from the country, but after a few days they were waiting at the train station. They and other Germans here from Těšín were told that they should return home. And this despite the fact that my great-grandfather was a member of the NSDAP and fought in the Kriegsmarine. Now I see that they had more luck than they could have imagined.
Did they? Do not forget, all those who remained in Czechoslovakia were forced with living under totalitarian communist rules for the next 50 years. And then 25 years of economic turmoil following fall of the Sovjet Union. Poverty, misery, hardship, being held captive and unable to travel. All those who fled in 1946 and reached Austria and Germany had for sure a much better live.
@@denkendannhandeln I'm not sure if I fully agree with you. You are right in principle though. Keep in mind that after the war, economic situation in Czechoslovakia was much better than in Germany or Austria. So at that time you wanted to be in Czechoslovakia rather than in Austria or Germany. With time and economic stagnation in communist Czechoslovakia, it progressively changed. I have experienced life in Czechia during 90s after the Velvet revolution and it was completely fine. Good quality of life even back then. Now it is much better of course. Things improved dramatically after the Velvet revolution with EU membership.
@@tomassiegl4991 I saw documentaries of the life in Czech Republic, especially Prague in the 80-ties. The same time I often visited the place as a teenager. It was horrible. Waiting in lines for every item and goods, and all the communist products were of an absolutely horrible quality (remember the toilet paper?) and if you needed something from an official you had to bribe him with western chocolate and coffee. The pluming system was not working, and in Prague was a horrible housing crisis. People lived in miserably run down buildings, heated with coal and living in thick smog. Prague was covered with a black layer of dust. In addition was the constant political pressure with unspeakable police brutality. And all were being held prisoner in their own land - that was not fun. And I am not sure if the 90-ties were such fun for many people eighter. Many were not equipped or educated to succeed in a stressful capitalist system, they lost their jobs, lost their stability and psychological understanding of the world, many factories were sold or closed and people fell into unemployment with just minimal help from the government. Not being used to capitalism they took too many loans they could not pay back, had no understanding of the financial system, subscribed to loans for houses with way too high mortgages, had no barrier to refrain from expensive consumption of western goods and lived way out of their budget. Still today almost 20% of people have so high debt, that they are permanently threatened with foreclosure. Alcoholism increased as well as suicides and a large exodus of the workforce occurred. But today it is a beautiful land. Still I think the Germans had a way better live in Westen Germany. I myself was so lucky that my parents escaped in 1968.
@@denkendannhandelnYou probably don't know much about life in CS during communism or what real poverty means.. the lack of freedom was much bigger hardship than "poverty". I would describe it as they weren't blessed with consumerism. Not saying that I would like to live in those miserable times.
@@leoprg5330 well, not everybody lived in the same circumstances. Apparatshniks surely had if much better. There were always people, who found their way around hardship. About consumerism there is one difference, you are free today to CHOOSE to participate in it or not. Living under communism you were FORCED to live in the circumstances the government imposed on you. Of course it was not starvation level poverty, but standards of living were for 50 years way below the level of the potential of the country. Let‘s not forget Czechs we’re one of the most industrialized and wealthy regions in 1920, exporting goods to the whole world during the first republic. So it was a hard step down. I just observe a certain romanticizing of the communist period by some groups of Eastern Europeans. Often people who lived at maximum their childhood then. Seeing it as the good old times and completely blocking our the reality of the times. It happens often to people around 50-60 who mix in their memories the good times, that everybody has as teenagers and youngsters (friendships, adventures, first love etc.) comparing it with the hardship of older age (aches creep in, health deteriates etc.) with the actual political system. Being 15 under communism for sure was more fun than being 55 under capitalism. But they make the mistake to project the normal flow of live and it’s psychological phases onto the state itself. I am not sure if I manage to explain the idea well. Often this changes around 65, when people start needing urgently a well functioning medial health system. Being confronted with cancer, needed operations, and so on, absolutely nobody wants to go back to communism where health care was just possible on very basic level and innovative western drugs were just not available.
The depopulated areas along the German border were settled during the rule of the Communist party by gypsies being relocated from Slovakia. Later on more came in to unite families. It's fascinating to see how an area which used to be highly industrialized and economically active during the German presence would descent into poverty. Even today the areas of former Sudetenland are mostly viewed as poor regions with low income, poor housing, crime, lack of opportunities and generally undesirable to live in.
@@cjthebeesknees During the Socialist period there was basically no such thing as variable land value. Rents were identical per m2 whether you lived in a large city like Prague or a small town. And much of the Sudetenland was repopulated with new workers for the industry and factory jobs there, so people did not have choice over where they were settled.
Great video as always. Its kinda sad as a Slovak to have to deal with the fact that our nations role in ww2 was basically a black void of evil. Even sadder is that we cant even truly blame the Germans since we basically got off scot free compared to the everyone else. We truly are the greatest makers of our own misery. I hope todays election isnt just another step deeper into that black void.
Hello from Finland. My dad and his gf visited Slovakia ~5 years ago. Dad told me it was bizzarre how many shopkeepers and other service providers not only refused to talk to him but looked away in almost disgust when he and his gf tried to communicate in somewhat broken English. They even tried telling they're from Finland but no difference. My dad is the most gray unpolitic man you'll meet and I don't believe he lied. It's weird how many Slovaks behaved towards them.
Very good presentation. In 2000 I had to translate for my wife's grandmother who in her dementia had reverted to the German she spoke until she was 17 in 1945. When the Red Army got close to Moravia, her German dad fled to Stuttgart, where his family was from, leaving his Czech wife and their kids to fend for themselves, which wasn't easy, especially since he had forbidden them from speaking Czech and their neighbors in Šumperk (formerly Schoenberg) considered them Germans. My wife, who was born in Šumperk in 1970 and lived there until she was 26, had never heard most of the stories I was translating for her and at first couldn't even believe them...until she asked an older aunt who confirmed all of it. A truly horrific history, which didn't stop when the war ended. And this is the reality of history--it's not just an account of things that once happened but instead the driving, shaping force behind what the present is, whether we know that history or not.
I am German, and this chapter of history was only peripherally touched with a few lines in our history lessons at school. Your documentation threw some light at the background why all this happened.I am very happy to live now and not in these dark times. I'm happy to have now many friends who are Czechs! Nationalism as an ideology on steroids is never good! We are all humans!
Nationalism isn't bad idea i think. Idea that nation should have their own political entity and govern by themselves is good. It made modern western democracy. Chauvinism on the other hand is evil. It is degeneration of the nationalism.
@@4tedi4 There is a very thin line between chauvinism and nationalism same like nationalism and fascism. The events of the Inter-war period made it to be so thin with no return.
@@alexandrosnaoum1318 On the other hand from antinationalism position is very thin line to international comunism. Without nationalism there will be no modern democracy state.
@@4tedi4Well, to be fair, it is possible to be a patriot, or at least a different kind of nationalist. For example, there is no such thing as an "American" ethnicity (unless if you count Amerindians, I guess), yet ideas of patriotism and nationalism still exist there. Additionally, not all Russian nationalists are ethnic Russians. And then there's India, which has over 2000 ethnic groups.
Not sure what deemed someone "German", my Aunt was born and raised in Brno (*1924) in a Germand AND Czech speaking household, their surname was "Horky" (not really German-sounding), still... They were expelled from their home and had to leave most of their stuff behind and participate on the "Todesmarsch" (death-walk) to Austria. They were neither Nazis nor "real" Germans IMO. It simply was a bad time for human rights. And revenge often hits the wrong people.
Goes many ways...my Great-Grandfather had to leave Austria in 1938 for the US, for the obvious reasons. My dad on the other hand, was born in CZ and fled the country with his mum in the 50s, from Communism etc.
@@somebodyanonymousx Tak ono se to liší škola od školy, já se na základce celkově o 2. světové moc nedozvěděl (resp. něco, co bych tou dobou sám nevěděl), protože jsme vyplýtvali spoustu času na antických civilizacích a středověku, takže na moderní dějiny už čas nezbyl.
I really like your channel. I'm czech myself and love to see brotheren shining light on dark history. You show some inside on history that is not commonly taught in schools. In Czech schools we are never told the horrific things we did back to germans, only that we expelled them.
Extraordinary tragic history within a beautiful country. It would be strengthened by adding that the western CZ boundary with German lands had existed for hundreds of years. Great work!
The way we treated the German-speaking population after the war is one of the dark moments in our history. The Czechs still tend to put themselves in the role of victims, but refuse to admit that we were bad guys at some points in our history. I am glad that more is being said about these events. But I find it sad that many people still tend to relativise Czech atrocities in the post-war period. I remember when Karel Schwarzenberg, one of the most prominent human rights activists, campaigned for the 2013 presidential election and spoke out against the post-war ethnic cleansing. It was a national uproar and his opponent, Miloš Zeman, actively used it in his campaign against him.
I am Czech by birth and I must say your video has given me some new outlook and perspective on this whole thing Its really bizarre how we managed to justify this so well in our society, I distinctly remember being taught in school how the Germans were expelled after WW2 and the way it was presented is that it was a done deal, a right thing to do, not much detail was put into it. Only years after I learned about the violence but I somehow still told myself that it was a few isolated events but this video really puts the scale of the whole thing in the perspective.
in 2012-2016 I worked with the descendant of a Czech family who fled to Romania after 1938 ... he did not speak much about the subject but that made me curios and among the anecdotes I gathered was that after 1938 the official food ration for a Czech was 800 calories per month ...
My grandfather and his family lived in a town near the Austrian border named Gottschallings, they had to leave it in half an hour without being able to bring any of their valuables, outright lucky compared to what happened to others. The town was later demolished with almost no traces left of it today.
Just a little note, Emil Hácha definitely wasn't a nazi collaborator, he actively fought for the Czechs and their rights during the protecrorate. He was then called a collaborator by the communists, which somewhy stucked with him :/
Hácha understood, that Czechs, after being dumped by Western allies, are unable to fight the Germans, who were far superior in numbers, technology and also had great geographical and demographic advantage. Quiet surrender and cooperation was probably the most sensible thing he could do. Even the video mentions that the treatment of the Czech by the Germans was quite mild for WWII standards.
Hácha was a tragical personality. He was already too old when they asked him to become president, already before the German occupation. He had a rich career in international law and would have served the country well in better times. He had no chances of resisting the Nazi occupation and was not left with many options under the Nazis.
My hole family is Silesian and my mother in law survived a Czech labor camp with her mother and sisters.Nobody was talking about those things in public in W.Germany,all my childhood I had to lissen to those horrorstorys at familymeetings.Till today I hate christmastime cos it was the time everybody was remembering of their lost familymembers and how they died.
This was a very well done video, shocked it hasn’t blown up yet the visuals are amazing and this is a very specific part of history to be covered with many people not knowing it which I didn’t! The maps were also fantastic, I was zoned in the whole time, great script great visuals
Czech here, It's very fascinating to hear all the personal accounts from people of Sudeten German descent. Personal stories are a great way to gain some perspective on these historical events. One interesting thing about the former German majority areas of Czechia is that to this day these are some of the poorest regions of the country. It's eerie how the old protectorate border lines up with unemployment, low income or crime statistics of the current day. Many german speaking villages were never resettled and remain abandoned or sparcely populated. Before the war northwest Bohemia was an industrial powerhouse and one of the richest regions of Czechoslovakia (and of Austria-Hungary before that)
4:00. Funny. I am of the same opinion as they were at the time. Czechoslovak is more of a national and ethnic group (the two are near interchangeable in Czech and Slovak languages) than two. I still see a dialectal continuum and still find both to be dialects of one another in a way .. or rather dialects if Czecho-Slovak.
Also, do you plan on doing a video on the Free City of Danzig? A classic experiment of an "internationally administered" territory that went horribly wrong.
I am surprised how little we the Czech people are learning in school about this upholding chapter of our history. I am at university and I have heard about some of the darkest parts of this video for the first time.
It is sad that you expect from "university" to teach you everything. There is no excuse for ignorance. Czech libraries , archives and used books stores are treasures for educating yourself better than any "university' has to offer.
@@DANA-yc9wq Okay, you usually would expect universities not to be biased in such a drastical way. But modern universities are not so modern, in fact. Communist re-education had been very strong. By the way: What is not reflected in the video is panslavistic national occultism that played an important role due to the sponsors of foundation process of Greater Czech Republik which turned out to be Czechoslovakia.
My grandparents were Sudeten German. They were expelled after the war to Bavaria. Later they moved to North Rhine Westphalia. I still have some great recipes from Bohemia - "Apfelstrudel" for example. My mother grew up in Bavaria and Westphalia and has no connection to the old homeland and has never seen it. The dialect is lost as well.
There is a collection of special dialect-words Franz&Fritz Bertelswieser in the book 'Verlorene Böhmerwaldheimat' that collected the history, memories, songs, stories and fairy tales of the villages of the Parish Deutsch-Reichenau, and followed all it's last inhabitants up to their death-places. That made me understand why my family spoke slightly different than the others in our village, though my greatgrandmother's ancestors not only came from Reiterschlag/Pasecna but all over the place. If she gave my mum her language, she must have had hers from her own father's mother, that came from Sarau/Kyselov.
Didnt expect that i would learn that Czechs wanting autonomy made the Nazis... Anyways as a Czech i see the deportation as the worst part of our history... Vengence is the exact thing that made czechs be as bad as the nazis at the time... the fact that the Soviets allowed and supported this crime against humanity is horrible...
My great great grandmother was a Sudeten German from the village of Heiligenkreuz, which according to Wikipedia is the modern municipality of Chodský Újezd. Unlike some German villages in the area, it still exists. She was lucky to come to the states just before the world wars, but it saddens me that many of her relatives and neighbors were expelled so violently from their homes, if they survived at all. I was gifted her prayerbook by my grandmother, which she bought in the states from a German language bookstore shortly after her arrival in Minnesota.
Thank you for this very interesting topic. Just to add, after the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, the Nazis also organised expulsions of Czechoslovaks living there. In a very similar way, they were given a little time to pick their belongings and leave for the remaining portion of Czechoslovakia. Their properties were subsequently confiscated. My grandfather witnessed arrivals of such refugees, who came with the little they could bring with them into the soon-to-be Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where the effects of starvation of the non-German population were still felt long after the war, up until 1953, when food rationing was abolished. As you mentioned, the injustices during the Protectorate (mass murders, slave labour, low food rationing, systematic repression) fuelled the vengeance of the Czechs and Slovaks in the post-war period, which they decided it to take on the whole German-speaking population in the Sudetenland. Bear in mind there were also interests of turncoats such as Karol Pazúr, who gave in Přerov the orders to shoot German civilians. Previously, he fought for the pro-Nazi Hlinka guards until his capture by the Soviets. The expulsion of the Germans is still a hot topic to this very day. Whenever demagogues like Zeman try to lure voters into getting their votes, they are happy to label their opponents as willing to allow the descendants of the Sudeten Germans into reclaiming their confiscated properties. This will almost certainly never happen because the Beneš decrees are enshrined into the Czech law.
While I'm a Czech myself, to be fair, the extent of these expulsions has been inflated. "Only" around 100K left, most of them Czechoslovak state employees and their families who settled there after 1918. Half a million of Czechs stayed in the annexed areas and would, ironically, later become *less* resentful of the Germans than the Czechs from the interior of Czechia, since unlike for the Czechs from the interior, Germans weren't an "unified anonymous mass" to them, they interacted with Germans for years and differentiated between the "good ones" and "bad ones". During the Ústí massacre, some "Revolutionary Guards"men were even distrustful of the minority Czech natives of Ústí because of their lack of enthusiasm for killing Germans, there was a similar distrust for Czech natives of the Sudetenland among the post-1945 settlers as well.
In Poland it was far more straightforward and not much ideology involved. Big chunk if not majority of Germans fled west fearing the Soviets. The rest were being expelled gradually up to 50s
Thx for fantastic video about this topic (which is really underrepresended in school, usually it is only mentionet as yeah the germans were moved out, moving on, *later history*) A ohledně tvojí češtiny, skvělá práce jen tak dál
Similar stories exist in Uganda, Malaysia, Spain, Zimbabwe, Fiji, eta. All these countries experienced major ethnic tensions that stemmed from ethno-nationalism, leading to mass expulsions and murders, and ultimately ruined the countries in the aftermath, as the people expelled or murdered were also the best-skilled people that these countries depended on.
I'm from Spain and I don't think Spain fits here. Like, "ultimately ruined the countries in the aftermath" has to be the Civil War but it doesn't fit at all. I'm saying this just in case you have some missunderstandings and want to clarify them with me. " leading to mass expulsions and murders, and ultimately ruined the countries in the aftermath, as the people expelled or murdered were also the best-skilled people that these countries depended on." You can say this about the Civil War yeah. I would say "the best-skilled people" is mostly correct for artists and people with studies (the professors in the dictatorship were hell on earth because there were no good ones left) but the rest of the population (except the nobles, the rich people and a lot of priests and such, that were with the fascists) was more or less split in half. "experienced major ethnic tensions that stemmed from ethno-nationalism, leading to..." I'm not with you in this one. I started this comment because I think it's easy to think like this reading about the Civil War, but it's not really correct. There were "ethnic tensions" but just in Basque Country and Catalunya and it didn't really impacted the rest of Spain that much nor the ideology of the "nationalists" (as I see they are called in English) were created for that reason. It was more to counter the communists and anarchists than to counter any ethnic tension, but in any case it's just the way the fascism works, it's the way they always use. It was just a matter of left(and what we would consider now center) and right. The Civil War starts because of the struggle between these two sides and nothing more, one inspired by the fascism and the left inspired by the USRR and the anarchism.
I am travelling to the Czech Republic several times per year by train from Germany and, boy, the Sudetenland areas are by far the saddest. Visibly depopulated and poor with most wealth nowadays being created and reinvested into Prague and Plzen.
Wait.. wasn't the "N" meant as Německo (aka these people will go to Germany), because I heard, that some had "R" as Rakousko and they went to Austria..
@@MLaserHistory I see. I heard this from one historian, who talked about some specific family and he mentioned that they were lucky to have "R" instead of "N".
Very similar to what happened in Slovenia. Especially Northern Styria was very ethnically mixed, with large Austrian/German populations, especially in the urban areas. After the war basically all fled or were forced to leave. Its something that is not really talked about enough, as it is ever more a political issue and not a human and moral issue.
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Extra Information & Clarifications
Sources for all my videos are in the bibliography of my scripts all available to download for FREE on my Patreon. www.patreon.com/mlaser?filters[tag]=script
0:05 In the shown map I am not accounting for post war border changes like the land transfer between Czechoslovakia & Poland and or Hungary & Austria. Even though at some points I will be talking about 1918 or 1920, before all the border disputes in Central Europe had been settled, the maps will only reflect the final state of Central European borders.
0:26 The Czech part of the map shows the 1921 census & the Slovak 1910 census (I was unable to get hold of the Slovak 1921 regional data. There was a 30% decrees in the number of Germans in Slovakia between the 1910 & 1921 censuses. This can easily be explained by the fact that around 65% of Germans living in Slovakia were natively bilingual) while the 3.2 million number comes from the German population of Czechoslovakia in 1938. The number of Germans in the 1921 census was 3.123 million
1:15 This map is based on the 1930s Czechoslovak census & was made based on an amazing map made by the Czechoslovak ministry of defence in the 1930s
2:02 There was a bunch of contention within the socialist & communist parties of Czechoslovakia, including the ones mentioned, on the grounds of how much socialist/communist they should be. For example, Czechoslovak Social Democratic Workers Party were mostly light socialist & some more radical people split from the party to form a Communist party. Such splitting of leftist parties & forming of new parties & dissolution of other parties was very common in interwar Czechoslovakia. However, all of these parties were more concerned with the "class struggle" rather than ethnic struggle
3:57 Ethnicity is a social construct, as such it can form in different ways (there isn't one inevitable outcome) & can be malleable. The Czech & Slovak ethnic identities of today were much more fluid in the 19th & 20th century & the idea that Czechs are separate from the Slovaks wasn't the only idea at the time. Some people which we would today define as Czechs & Slovaks, all the way in the medieval era, believed themselves to be of one ethnic group. Modern believers of this idea, as ethnic identities began to be far more important during the modern period, tried to form one official united ethnic identity which included both Czechs & Slovaks (they tried this through News Paper like Hlas). During this time other Czechs & Slovaks (although they wouldn't want to be called that) even flirted with Pan-Slavism i.e. all Slavs are the same & one ethnicity. Anyways, the Czechoslovak ethnic proponents partially succeeded as the idea of a Czechoslovak ethnicity, composed of two subgroups, was quite widespread in usage during the first Czechoslovak Republic. There were people, like the first president of Czechoslovakia, who identified as Czechoslovak. However, over time, especially after the Slovak Fascist State, the idea of Czechoslovak ethnicity fell out of use, & by the 1990s it was so well out of use that the splitting of the nation, based largely on an idea of separate ethnic identities, was possible. However, none of these later developments detract from the fact that a Czechoslovak ethnic identity did exist & was used by both Czechs & Slovaks during the First Republic. That is why it's used in this video
5:14 Here I used the phrase German-speaking as opposed to just German. This is because it was language not ethnicity that was used in the AH's censuses that were used to determine which areas had a German majority & which had a Czech
9:04 What is interesting here is that Kramar was considered as one of the more chauvinistic Czechoslovak politicians & was far more nationalistic than, for example, Masarik or Benes. However, even he, as you can see with his quote, was against violent attacks on Germans & their property & understood the importance of not antagonising the Germans
10:55 There were few instances of these terms being used before 1918 but they were never used by the Czechoslovak Germans themselves. It was only after the formation of Czechoslovakia that these terms started to be used as ethnic identifiers by the Germans of Czechia & Slovakia
13:31 The 20% mark wasn't defined in the constitution. It was left open in order to be defined later when or if the minority parties were willing to negotiate. This didn't happen as the minority parties viewed any negotiation as admitting defeat, & so the old 20% standard of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was adopted as the mark for Czechoslovakia as it was deemed to be the most "equal" solution
15:33 The one gripe that everyone keeps holding against Masaryk was that he called the Germans 'colonists' & 'settlers' in Czechoslovakia during his December 1918 speech to the nation called 'první poselství'. However, in that same speech Masaryk called for ethnic unity & for creating "free self-governing citizenship" composed of all "equal" ethnic groups, including Germans, Hungarians, & Rusyns. His statement of calling German 'colonists' & 'settlers' wasn't meant to incite ideas of deportation or ethnic cleansing, it was simply a statement of the historical reality. Nevertheless, the statement was very controversial at the time & Masaryk did later, during a newspaper interview, apologise to the Sudeten Germans for saying it. Masaryk never, at any point, called for ethnic cleansing & his entire agenda was always one of co-prosperity & interethnic unity in the country
19:39 Confusingly all the Nazi parties in the various countries retained the same name. So instead of calling the German, Czechoslovak, & Austrian Nazis the same name I will specify which country they're from
20:59 The Czechoslovak Nazi party was technically able to get a bit more % of the vote then just 3.5 as they ran on a joined election ticket with the German National Party. All together both parties manage to score a bit over 5% of the Czechoslovak vote
21:47 The Nazis knew the Czechoslovak government was going to ban & dissolve them & before the ruling could pass through the parliament they preemptively dissolved themselves. So "technically" they weren't dissolved by Czechoslovakia but they were banned & the funds of the paramilitary Volkssport were seized
22:48 Estimated because there are no unemployment figures that differentiate among ethnicity. Also, it must be stated that the reasons which made the Germans suffer more during the great depression also made their economic recovery after the great depression, more specifically after 1937, faster
28:31 I am skipping over a lot of Czechoslovak internal politics here because I found them to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Nothing, other than western intervention, would have prevented the conquest of Czechoslovakia by Germany
28:25 What would become the Munich agreement was already being negotiated before the September coup attempt but the uprising was the final nail in the coffin for the allied decision
29:25 However, any planned large-scale settlement of Germans in Czechia never happened due to the war
31:00 I will admit that stating that one terrible experience isn’t as bad as another terrible experience is missing the point a bit
31:18 Population changes shown on screen are estimates so you will see a bit different numbers from various sources. However, every single source will agree that the population of Czechia during the war grew while the populations of Poland & Ukraine drastically fell
33:45 The scale & planned execution of this idea changed on an almost monthly bases depending on various conversations, state of the war, & support or reluctance from the allies. At one point in 1941-2 Benes even tabled the idea of autonomous German parts within Czechoslovakia, with expulsion of only the members of the Nazi party (which at most would be 20% of the German Czechoslovak population). However, this got rejected by the Czechoslovak nationalistic elements. On the other hand a lot of the Sudeten Germans in exile also rejected various proposals from the Czechoslovak government in exile, basically, for the most part, no one was willing to compromise
33:45 There's far more nuanced diplomacy happening here. For example, the allies, including UK & USA, agreed earlier in 1942 to an organized expulsion of Germans but by 1944-5 UK & USA were reluctant to officially sanction it. Basically there was a lot of backroom diplomacy with secret deals being made & others being broken. But in broad strokes what I talk about in the video is accurate
36:22 The Russian, & in parts of Western Czechia, US troops sometimes tried to mediate the tensions between the German civilians & Czechoslovak militias but the troops were not everywhere, especially not in rural towns & villages, & even if they were, they would often let the locals do what they want & not interfere
38:28 Some of these camps, after 1948, were also used by the communist as gulags
38:45 The labor camp showen was a German labor camp in Petrzalka not Pezinok. A picture of the Pezinok labor camp doesn't exist
39:00 The picture is of a camp in Terezin which was built by the Nazis & later used by the Czechoslovaks. This is not a picture of the camp in Budejovice (no pictures of it exist), it is only here to serve as a visual representation
There were many other instances of brutality & executions of the Germans than I have mentioned here (I cannot mention everything). Like, for example, the execution of around 100 Hauerland Germans in today's Slovakia, or the roughly 1000 Germans shot dead in Postoloprty, etc.n
Today is also Munich agreement day, did you do that on purpose?
Hezký přízvuk :)
Already the video in itself was fantastic - especially wrt to the pictures. And then these footnotes, wow!
Your use of images is so far from what commercial documentaries manages to do that it isn't funny. I usually give up on those big budget productions because I can't deal with the flood of "illustrative" images that seems to have been put together by some "visual artist" without any historical knowledge whatsoever.
In contrast here I had to pause the video so often to look at the various things you are showing (I love old pamphlets and posters) that I should really watch the video again :-)
It's great!
Ya should make a video about history of Romania 🇷🇴
My grandfather was a Sudeten German. When his family was exiled, he left a harmonica with a Czech neighbor, and decades later he returned to his hometown as an adult to find that she not only lived in the same house, but had kept the harmonica for all those years.
What a cool story
based czech woman
how wholesome
@@dylanvogler2165good things russia did
slavs are not even native to central europe. the slavs came with the great migration period from eastern european plains. before that balts and germanics lived throughout these areas and illyrians in the balkan with celts and greeks. how about the slavs simply return home to russia@@dylanvogler2165
Do what happened to the Greeks of Constantinople/Istanbul, culminating in the Istanbul Pogrom of 1955. Greeks made up 31% of the city's population in 1919, when Turks made 38%. It's a very interesting story.
There is something to be said about the Greco-Turkish ethnic wars, exchanges, and conflicts of the early 20th century as they were kind of a precursor to other ones in Europe like the expulsion of the Germans, but I don't want to go into another depressing topic any time soon. I need some positive ones after this video.
@@MLaserHistory take care mate! Your mental wellbeing is more important. I can relate somewhat - I followed Ukranian war pretty closely since I'm still a Russian citizen and I live not that far away from the action and I got a sort of a mild PTSD as a result. Now my fav topics of history, politics and war sometimes make me really anxious so I completely stopped watching some of my fav youtube channels. Just can't stomach it anymore.
@@stariyczedunI hope things get better and to can enjoy these subjects again soon. I will do prayers that the conflicts don’t spread and peace comes as quick as possible so no more death
If these deportations were ok, why not deport all minorities from Europe starting today?
@@stariyczedun "mild PTSD" lmao, no you didnt. not every feeling of shame and anxiety has a cool modern name. you insult those with actual PTSD.
In Bavaria we have entire towns founded by Sudeten Germans after the war, like Neu-Gablonz, Waldkraiburg or Traunreut. And lots of cities often have an area called "Neue Heimat" (new home). A large part of the Bavarian population descends from Sudeten Germans today, and Bavaria has a population larger than that of Austria or the Czech Republic.
@ilovememes2628 the last part is just not true, since the Sudete Germans settled in all parts of Bavaria, also Franconia.
The same here in Thüringen too
When vacationing in Grossgmain, south west of Salzburg , a couple of years ago, I encountered a memorial. It's memorial text surprised me. It was a tale of German suffering of people driven away from Sudetenland.
I am aware of the history, The Reichsgau Sudetenland -38, WW2 and the departure of the Germans post -45 and all that... so nothing new there.
What was new was the the message of the memorial. I was surprised. First time ever that I saw a memorial for suffering Germans. I. e. ordinary people. I my mind everybody else in Europe suffered. From German doing. The German nazis only got what they deserved. Right?!
Well, this memorial contrasted very much with my up grown overall picture. It was a lesson and an awakening for me.
www.google.se/maps/@47.7253838,12.9101689,3a,75y,218.31h,96.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s-S2shXcCnCXnRIvsWKMWBA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?hl=sv&entry=ttu
Bavaria is still the largest of the Germanic states, and it should have remained a sovereign and independent state !
@@Y2Drifter Interesting You are mentioning that.
I was vacationing in Schwangau, Bavaria this year. Hiking and looking around.
When reading about the history of the various places and palaces I visited and of Ludwig II and that time, I encountered a small piece of text. I believe it was on Wikipedia.
It mentions briefly that during the 20-ies, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the German and the Austro-Hungarian empires, there were ideas and even suggestions to resurrect Bavaria as an independent Kingdom.
Not surprisingly, people around the old Royal family and certain members of the Bavarian elite supported the idea. But there were apparently also some Bavarian nationalistic sentiments left among common people as well.
Question:
How is it today? How do ordinary Bavarians think of the matter today? Are there any sentiments for a Bavarian independent state? Is the idea discussed or are people happy with things as they are?
Something similar was going on in eastern Croatia (Slavonia) and northern Serbia (Vojvodina) at the time. My grandma's family got a house and land grant in Slavonia, but when they got there, they found the german family that owned the farm shot dead and deposeted on the dung heap. They didn't want to live in a place obtained in such a way and went back to their village in the mountains of south Croatia.
Well Croatians or Yugoslavs also depored/killed large amount of Italians from Dalmatia and Istria too
Good on your grandmas family, horrible that stuff like that happened
@@ImNotReal12345 Yup, those were horrible and chaotic times with a lot of brutalities happening. This is not the only personal account of horror that I heard from that time. Talkig to my grandparents, hearing what they saw, I'm fascinated that none of them developed any visible PTSD and they all managed to live pretty normal lives afterwards.
My families Vojvodinia German on my Mother's side and Hungarian on my father and yeah, insanely tragic things happened to so many of us. Most of the family was killed, but a handful were just left with their farms and lands taken away
@@Gusararrthe Italian deportation and killings are mostly a myth, perpetuated by post war Italian nationalists politicians and others. Unlike with Germans who did face deportation and were not allowed to stay, Italians were never deported, and tens of thousands stayed and continued to live in peace. Most Italians did leave, but that was because of fear and opposition to Yugoslav government, not forced and not by orders. As for the killed - the case of Foibe is perhaps one of the most blown out of proportion events of modern history. A historic joint research commision of both Italian and Slovenian historians was created to research it, and the findings were that between 2000 and 4000 people were killed in total, over the course of 4 years of war, of which a large degree was Italian occupation soldiers and yugoslav collaborators in wartime actions, while the civilians who were killed were also of both ethnicities and not targeted for ethnic background but for political reasons, of real or precieved collaboration or fascist sympathism, just as such massacres happened to a much larger scale against native Yugoslavs.
While still sad moment of history, it is not comparable to fascist-nazist ethnic cleansing or post war retaliations and deportations of Germans, neither in scale nor in scope.
Using the UA-cam logo to censor the forbidden symbol was genius
In distant future people will have the two symbols confused.
@@martinsriber7760 Oh God, you are right. Especially since I've seen this exact method of tongue-in-cheek censorship multiple times on different channels. It serves UA-cam right. 😄
@@martinsriber7760Maybe for good reasons. 🙃
@@martinsriber7760 in the future both symbols will be banned.
Credit Alternate History Hub for it, if you haven't, pretty sure he was doing it years ago.
As a descendent of Sudeten Germans, I greatly appreciate this video since the topic is basically unknown outside Germany and Czechia (and even there lots of folks don't know anything about it). My grandparents continue to have nightmares about the explusion and refused to watch any news about the War in Ukraine because "they had already seen enough dead bodies during their youth".
What happened between our people was horrible and we can all be glad to finally live peacefully next to one another. May those times never repeat again.
No, everyone is very familiar with this in czechia. Even thou some people actually still think it was justified. They just dont get that a good answer to ethnic cleansing is not ethnic cleansing
It is taught in Hungary too. Also the fate of East Prussia.
@@uxydra6403 Why?
Don't think they can't happen again. I remember back in the 1990s, when Germany reunited, the Czechs living in one former Sudeten German village went to the graveyards and destroyed all the skeletons of the Germans they had murdered in 1945, just to make sure there were absolutely no German remains in the area. And later the Czech President Milos Zeman defended the genocide, saying the Sudeten Germans had 'betrayed their birthplace' (oddly enough, he didn't care much when HE supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, nor said anything about the Czechs that fought for Russia in WWI against Austria-Hungary, technically their 'birthplace').The incident even made the German President cancel a visit to Czechia.
You may think things are different today, but I assure you, all it takes is a small fire to make the powderkeg blow up again.
@@KnightofAges As a Slav I see no problem with this. Good for the Czech people.
My grandpas family was expelled from the Sudetenland, but he always had a surprisingly positive experience with the Czechs that got the house, to an extend that other Germans from the region are confused. The family let my grand-grandpa take valuable family stuff from the house over the border and my grandparents now often visit. We children even got socks knitted by a Czech grandma, who sadly passed away around 3 years ago. If anything he only had a bad experience with the Soviets, who sadly shot the family dog (who was not attacking them and in their shed).
Ironically he faced discrimination by other school kids in East Germany for being "foreign". I think we can just agree, that its bad to to ethnic cleansing. Its not a good look, if people use Nazi tactics to Germans that were expelled.
Always the same .Decent persons are everywhere! It could happen that the servile ones, suddenly have fun to torture you while the persons with dignity not.
You were lucky on good people. There are good Czech people like in any nation, but of course there are also bad people. Czechs are the same as Germans in many ways.
@@tomassiegl4991 It also shows how arbitrary "race" can be. I talked multiple hours to my grandpa and he remembered more negative about east Germans done against him (although he isn't resentful against them either and enjoys the culture), while stressing that he only had positive experiences with Czech people.
Ethnic cleansing isnt a Nazi tactic, its originally a British tactic
@@kompognatus ; before that it was a Roman tactic. Before that, it was an Assyrian tactic. Ethnic cleansing, along with genocide, unfortunately is as old as humanity.
My grandfather lived in Teplice (Teplitz). They were ethnicaly czech but spoke german (czech as well they were bilingual). After 1938 anexation his grandma switched nationalities from czech to german whitch resulted in the death of his father and brother in Stalingrad. Suprisingly after the war (mainly due to speaking czech) they were able to stay here and I also live in Teplice to this day. It was strong when he said when hitler came I had to forgot czech and when communists came I had to forgot german.
Bohužel je to tak. Nacisté a komunisté je jedno zlo.
@@Prometheus101Stejná pakáž. Nacisti = národní socialisti, Komunisti = internacionální socialisti
@@cdgncgn O liberálech jsem nic nepsal. Jinak dnešní "liberál" = neomarxista.
@@jirislavicek9954based take. Tahle pakáž dělá to samé jen jedno definují nepřátele dle rasy druzý dle sociálního postavení
@@Prometheus101Deportácie neurobili komunisti ale Beneš
Though I'm slovak, my grandpa was a Moravian. After the war his parents were given a house and land in the Sudetes. One night, they found an old man walking around their house. When my great-grandma asked who is he, and what he wants on their property, he calmed her down and said, that he just wanted to see his old home. They got to talk, grandma invited him inside. He was one of the germans, who were expeled. He even showed her, where he hid some of their valuables, which were still there. So grandma let him take it. Grandpa was always telling me this story, because his parents felt very sorry for the man and guilty for living in the house, which he built.
Great video! My grandfather was Sudeten German (*1924) and was pretty much bilingual. On the other hand, his mother (I was fortunate enough to meet her when I was still very young) still spoke rather broken Czech. Her husband was actually politically active and very much anti-Hitler. As a result, he ended up in a concentration camp, managed to survive for a couple of years but died shortly after his release. After the war, they wanted to deport the family from their house but my great grand mother successfully pleaded for an exception. However, all their friends and neighbors from the village either died during the WW2 or if they survived, they got deported. It must have been surreal to watch the new “owners” “occupy” their homes.
my gparents live there too and said the new owners were often miscreants and didnt do a good job keeping up the place but at least it kept more nature unspoiled with less folks around.
@@polsyg6581Do not forget that 50 years of communism followed. Nobody was allowed to keep any kind of farm, land or factory anyway. Most often even not a home or house, because all resources belonged now to the state. So whatever was there in property, everybody lost it anyway.
My great-grandfather had a factory in Prague (kohinoor) but he was Jewish. In 1938 the factory was seized by the Germans, and he was sent to Dachau. Officialy he „sold“ the factory for some cents to them. After 1989 the Czech state never gave us anything back, because of the Beneš decree, stating all property seized from Germans in 1946 belongs now to the Czech state.
Can you imagine the irony??
@@denkendannhandelnthats an interesting Story, how three differente systems took stuff from people and insured that the original ownerd never got anything back
@@denkendannhandeln Koh-i-noor is a very famous Czech company. Everyone in Czechia knows Koh-i-noor. I assume there is only one company with this name in Czechia. I personally know only one Koh-i-noor. If there is more than one, it might not be the same company in that case. The company is not in state hands anymore. If it is any consolation to you, the current owner of the company seems nice. :)
Many of this new onry was expelld from Poland
When I did my Erasmus program at Pilzen university we went around an abandoned German village. It was really interesting. The forest had reclaimed so much but it was still obvious we were walking through someone’s house.
Yup, the remnants of this event are still all around. (also how dare you watch my video months after it has been released, you should be one of the first viewers!)
Thanks for your efforts in revealing this complicated history! My mother's ancestors were also Germans in Czechoslovakia at Znaim/Znojmo and fled to central southern Germany in 1945. Just managed to visit the (beautiful) town last autumn and randomly booked my hotel not far away from a place where my grandmother worked at some 80 years before like my mother told me afterwards. Although I'm generally politically interested, I never wondered, what the political beliefs of my ancestors from that region might have been, but never heard negative expressions about what happened.
Thank you.
All the former German towns in Czechoslovakia are beautiful.
A very good video, though one point seems to be missing - the aftermath of the München Agreement when not only the Sudets were ceded to Germany but the Czech population of the region was expelled. Not so brutally and forcibly, not at such a short notice, but expelled they were, and those who stayed were subject to ethnic prosecution. Just one more piece to the mosaic.
Also, after the Velvet Revolution, the topic was opened and quite widely discussed throughout the 1990s, it's not like it's been all hush-hush.
Just like they expelled us, we did unto them
Eye for an eye
@@somebodyanonymousx Sort of, I guess... I just wish we hadn't stooped to their level doing so.
@@somebodyanonymousxYou do realise that the smallest minority is the individual, right?
Eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
This was the most detailed, documented and frankly honest presentation of the Sudaten German and Czech history together I have heard. Thank you.
Yes, surprisingly honest.
An absolute delight to watch, all the work you put in is clear as day (and the czech outro was the cherry on top)! Bravo!
In the 2000s, the owner of the holiday apartment we stayed in for our winter holidays here in Austria was a Sudeten German. He refused to accept Czech guests. So these wounds lived on for a long time. Of course the same is true for the more numerous victims of Nazi crimes.
Even though I was at least superficially familiar with the topic, I was still surprised by the brutality and gained a better understanding. Thank you!
I hope there will be a video about the Slovak WW2 uprising in the future. It just came up on the WW2 in real time channel and I honestly had never heard of it before!
Of course the Czechs weren’t ruling themselves after WWII, it was just a puppet government installed by the Soviet Union
Most people moved on from the complicated history the germans and slavs have but for some its too much to move on from
@@uxydra6403 Something that makes it hard to move on from is also that little was done to make-good on what happened. Germany did, Germany's even in court with Namibia over colonial violence from more than a century ago, Czechia hasn't done shit that I've been informed of as somebody who would be if it did anything such as land-back or reparations.
@@uxydra6403also among Slovenian/Croatian Italians.
@@Argacyanreally ? My grandfather was enslaved (forced labor camp) and never received any compensation or even an apology.
I am Czech of German, Polish, Silesian, Italian and Slovak origin. I am Czech/German speaking and can understand Slovak and quite well Polish, because I am originally from the Moravian-Silesian region, which shares the borders with Poland and Slovakia and many people are of both Polish and German origin. To explain a little bit more my roots, my ancestors came to Ostrava/Ostrau, which was growing very fast due to the industrialization of this region. I am thankful, that nowdays we can live peacefully next to each other and enjoy the life together. I have many German and Austrian friends. Liebe Grüße aus Tschechien nach Deutschland, Österreich und an alle, die kein Hass sondern eine Annäherung unserer Länder unterstützen.
I hope you can continue to live in harmony. But as this story, the break up of Yugoslavia, and the rebirth of fascist/"strong-men" world wide has shown - all that harmony can quickly be wiped away by power hungry politicians playing to the basest instinct of their audiences.
It is important for all those that want harmony and peace to vehemently oppose those that would divide us. Otherwise, we will all go blind from all the eyes and teeth taken.
Bravo! Hope our folks are gonna be wise enough for the upcoming decades to continue or even intensify sharing their lives and stories...
Die Kommunisten haben diesen Hass gegen die Deutschen 40 Jahre lang genährt, sie haben mich auch einer Gehirnwäsche unterzogen, aber ich habe nicht nachgegeben.
A part of my mother's family were Sudeten Germans, including my great-great-grandmother. She wasn't expelled after WW2 because she was married to a Czech but her sister and her family were since they were all German. A part of my family, people I don't know and who might not even know I exist, was torn away. History hits different when it directly affects those close to you. In the end I am left wondering how it could have been different and what potentional future was lost.
@@desichalkos5627 The act of forcibly removing someone from a location - expulsion - is a way a region can be ethnically cleansed. I used this word to put emphasis on the fact that they weren't murdered.
@@Bohous156Do you know Germans always had a very positive view of Ethnic cleansing.
If you read German history or German writers from 18th, 19th and 20th century, all of them were advocating ethnic cleansing. First it were of the Natives in Americas, then Africans in Africa and finally specific type of Europeans in Europe.
But you correctly pointed out that history hits differently when it directly affects those close to you. Since Germans themselves were never a victim of ethnic cleansing till WW2, they were always in favour of such kinds of things. On top of it empathy and kindness were probably never part of German culture, so doing acts of violence on others was easier for Germans.
@@asmirann3636 To be fair, most nations and cultures advocated for such policies, the russians (with ukraine, caucasus, baltics...), the french (algeria), italians (south tyrol)...
@@asmirann3636"empathy and kindness were probably never part of German culture" Seriously, have you not studied basic history? Are you not aware of how the Germans have always been more kind and empathetic than most other cultures (particularly Eastern and Southern Europeans)? For one, they reformed and enfranchised people a lot sooner than many other places. Even France and Britain didn't have universal male suffrage before Germany did. Germany and Austria also allowed women to vote before France and Italy did.
Claiming that Germans were in favour of ethnic cleansing also ignores the fact that they're not a monolith who all share the same views. The years of the Weimar Republic are very good evidence of this.
Truly a wonderful video about not so wonderful times of our Country, one of, if not the best, summarization of these events. Good job!
Such an ugly age for the European continent, I consider myself extremely lucky to have born after ww2
Though we need to stay forever vigilant. We still have politicians "declaring war to the end upon liberalism", people shouting racist slogans on the streets and, of course, on the internet,... Even in our own societies that we consider more civilized and more advanced, the idea of ethnic division resurfaces depressingly often. I feel like we're still just one economic crisis away from a backslide into the 1930's.
Yep
@@georgejanzen774These conflicts arose out of the new borders. Everybody wanted an ethnostate. Just all have been decided by plebscites. That's how you avoid shitty conflicts like in southern Tirol, the Sudetenland or Carinthia.
@@georgejanzen774 The pendulum is simply swinging back. Well, I don't mind that it is.
@@TheSonOfDumbYou don't mind that racism and fascism is on the rise? 🙄 Good to know.
My video editor is descended from Pressburg Germans. She's currently trying to get a Slovakian passport.
Ahh very interesting, sadly, I don't think precedent is on her side on this one. I believe Slovakia and Czechia literally have a clause in repatriation laws that exclude descendants of expelled people under Benes decrees.
I'm thinking of Slovakian citizenship too, but my grandpa was a Jewish Hungarian speaker from [Czecho]Slovakia so I have more chance I think
Out of curiosity and by no means intended as an insult, what makes one interested in a Slovakian citizenship? I'm of Eastern European descent myself and love discovering the area. But isn't the larger demographic trend still emigration due to economic underdevelopment? Or are we getting close to a tipping point?
*Bratislava
@@georgejanzen774 Both Czechia and Slovakia are full EU members, so having their citizenship gives you the right to live, work in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands and other EU countries as well as Switzerland, Norway and Iceland. If you have a US passport and then get an additional Slovak passport, this basically gives you the right to live, work and travel visa-free in two of the greatest commercial centers of the world.
yours must be one of the most efficient and precise channels about history on UA-cam. I really enjoy how seriously you take the manners you explore and I appreciate all the more the emphasis you put on parts of history often shadowed under their collossal neighbors, such as Czechia
Extremely commendable effort, I learned a ton of new information and even knowing the expulsion of Germans was horrible, this made it much more clearer just how horrible it actually was. Hope there would be more of that in our (Slovak) history schoolbooks. Would love to see another one on the Slovak National Uprising and maybe one about the Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, after you recover from this one :)
Yes yes yes!
Those two (SNP and Hungarians) were the two topics that came to mind watching this. Hungarians would be interesting also in a wider lens than just Czechoslovakia - Transsilvania and Zakarpattya (sorry, can't think of what to call that part that is now mostly Ukraine).
I noted Czernowitz on one of the maps - I visited Chernihiv this summer, and wow, is that corner of the world also interesting. Just following the history of the professors of that university through the wikipedia articles about them gives a mind blowing picture of how different central/eastern Europe was before 1914.
@perseus274 Nice one sided propaganda; I assume you're Slovak.
@perseus274Duh, another chauvinist moron. 🤦♂️
@perseus274What Slovaks and how many of them did actually live in Subcarpathia to support any claim for it to be called 'far eastern Slovakia'?? If anything, the whole territory had been subdivided into several Hungarian counties, and even under Czechoslovakia, it simply never became the same administrative unit as Slovakia, so please stop spreading nonsense.
The overwhelming majority population has been Ruthenian (formerly mostly loyal to the Hungarian cause and patriotic), Hungarian and Jewish, with a marginal handful of German, Slovak and Romanian villages.
@@AsptuberOh well, the typically Slovak unconscious doublethink: on the one hand saying 'expulsion of Germans was horrible & do a video on Hungarians as well', on the other hand using the false, insinuative term 'Slovak National Uprising' (which in fact lead to deaths of many Carpathian Germans, priests or simply people named 'Nemec') as if nothing happened.
What a video, man. Congratulations on being a wonderful historian, Slovak, and human being.
Seeing this topic I can't stop myshelf from thinking of similarish situation that is happing as this video releases. The fleeing armenians from nagorno karabak.
Honestly, yeah ... :(
Except the Armenians are mostly settlers that commited ethnic cleansing against the Azeri population in the 90s, that is the comparison. Azeris are finally putting things right, returning homes to hundreds of thousands of people.
@@buurmeisje Eye for an eye...
@@buurmeisjeYeah, the cycle of revenge that has been proven to stabilize nations. Right?
@@buurmeisjeNo they are not Ngarno-karabakh has always been majority armenian you can look at past census. Yes there were Ethnic cleansing of the azeri population in the 90s which was bad and does not justify More ethnic cleansing rambert azeribajain also committed ethnic cleansing in the 90s .Nothing justifes ethnic cleansing. What is right is to allow both tye armenian and azeri population to return to ngarno karabakh and the principle of national self determination to sort this out
Thanks for uncovering what was never really taught, or discussed, in CS. In the early 1960s, I spent (relatively) a lot of time in the Cheb area, attending a 2 room school where my aunt and uncle were teachers. It was only much later that I realized why I didn't always get what the other kids were saying --- duhh. In the late 60s, we camped in the SW Sumava mountains, where we explored "abandoned" farm houses littered with German journals and magazines -- it was eerie.
In 69 we were in a refugee camp in Germany; my mom was working outside. She came home one night, very disturbed, because some guy was yelling at her in Czech in an obscene and threatening manner. On the other hand we left the kitten that we adopted with a Czech speaking camp employee, a Sudeten German, who befriended my parents.
BTW, Pekna cestina! Ja bych si na slovenstinu netrouf... :)
just so you know. It's taught today in schools. Though, teachers usually have no time to go any deeper into the topic since we learn about WWII in great detail. IMO way too much that it's unnecessary. Not because it's not important, but there happened a lot of stuff in Czechoslovakia in the past 100 years and we have only 1 year to teach the students about it and half of it goes to WWII usually.
And wow, such an interesting story.
No discuss? It´s been strongly publicly discussed since the fall of communism in 89...
I'm very happy that you covered this topic of the Germans (and other minorities) in Czechoslovakia!
Guys, wake up a new video by M. Laser History just dropped
Cool countryball
Guys wake up, its time for our weekly jelq session
Why am I always kinda busy when my favorite HistoryTubers drop an amazing colab?
In order that you take a break, everyone needs breaks.
@@MLaserHistorycorrect
chelanguages viewer?
@@Shrey_Shrek Yes. 😁
super@@Artur_M.
Really great work on this video. Congratulations and thank you.
This is an absolutely fascinating video. Thank you. I am an American citizen, my mother's family leaving Czechoslovakia from Kacov in 1939 as there were members in the family with US citizenship so they left with the Nazi annexation. As such, I have received most of the history of these lands from a very one-sided account, and that includes the expulsion of the Czech Germans too. I had a Great Uncle, Alois Jedlička, who fought as a resistance fighter during the war who was a Czech scholar, professor of Czech language at Charles University and editor of the magazine Naše řeč. He was one of an authors of a book standardizing Czech grammar.
I visited the Czech Republic (now, of course Czechia) in the mid 1990s. Many of the older family members were still resolutely unfriendly to Germans, others had moved on. Things were a even more divisive when discussions of Communism were brought up (more a rural verses urban split as much as I could tell).
Thank you for putting this out! My great grandfather was a Carpathian German from near Spis, always wanted to learn more!
Hi, my husband's grandmother and her family members are/were Carpathian Germans from Spiš, around Spišská Nová Ves. If you have the last/family name, it would be interesting if they match/are related or if they were neighbours/from the same area. Husband's grandma could stay (they were told to accept CS citizenship past WW2 and stop talking German and then could stay, or refuse and leave. Cca 90% of her family refused and had to leave for Germany, she and cca 10% of her family stayed and she became a musical primary school teacher during the communist era.
Hello where from is your great grandfather? I am from Spis and I try to learn more about Germans in Slovakia
My grandmother was born in Jablonné v Podještědí/Deutsch Gabel, but was forced out of her home along with her 3 older brothers, younger sister and her mother when she was 5 years old. She and her siblings were all half-Czech/half-German with her mom being Czech and both her biological father and her step-father being Germans. Her family walked to Berlin where they would stay in a bombed out appartment with another family for 2 years until her mom could no longer provide for all 5 of her children and thus send my grandma and her brothers to live with different families all across Germany. The living conditions in Berlin were so dire that my grandma just barely survived an infection with tuberculosis in which a doctor succesfully removed one of her affected kidneys.
Her German step-father meanwhile had been marched into a nearby forest along with many other German men from the region and was never seen again. Her brothers later visited their hometown again sometime in the 70s and actually discovered that their biological father was still alive and living in a nearby town.
@@desichalkos5627 are you a bot or something lol stop correcting people's stories, let them talk about their family history as they want to. Not everyone has to talk like you.
@@LucyMusic1999thank you
@@desichalkos5627 well, technically the N@zis were the first who wanted to ethnically cleanse Czechoslovakia by forced assimilation.
@@tremondialthat does not justify the chechoslavakian acts at all.
That is really interesting. I never thought I would find someone with roots from Deutsch Gabel here. My family is from the area and we were spared of Transfer. We come from a Dorf north of Deutsch Gabel. Do you have any information about the event of Transfer itself? I could help you find some info in Archive in Česká Lípa, where documents about Transfer from Bezirk Deutsch Gabel are
Excellent video, very informative and well researched. My family is from Bohemia and both ethnicities intermarried throughout my family tree. I understand both sides of this sensitive issue, this video should be used in schools!
Quick sidenote: in German, if there is an "h" after a vowel in a word, it is not pronounced. Instead it makes that vowel long. Wehr would be pronounced with a long "e" and with the "h" silent.
Thank you for the video. It's depressing for me as a Czech, but truthful history must be kept alive.
What i generally found annoying tho is that Westerners usually think that the 'Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia' were only german speaking pple therefore Germans. They don't realise the difference between being a majority and being homogenous. These Germans lived with Czechs next to each other and when Henleiners with Nazis took over, those 'Sudeten areas' (btw the fact that Sudeten germans never existed as a term for the whole border line of the Czechoslovakia only to be coined by the nazi propaganda and this term is used to this day, i find very appaling) expulsed those pple, who didn't want to proclaim that they are only German or were just Czechs...
My grandfather's family is from southern Bohemia and according to traditions over there, everyone were devout catholics and Czech girls were often married in to German families. This intermingling happened through centuries and thats why Czechs are the most german like Slavs and Austrians are the most Slavic like Germans...
Anyway, thank you again for the history of our country, take a brake and focus on something more positive. :) _Veritas vincit!_
You're right. My father is from Bohemia, my mother from Moravian Selesia. I've got family records that go back to 1600 and the names of my ancestors sometimes were German, sometimes Czech or Polish. I did a DNA test not too long ago and it turned out that I was about half North Western European, half Eastern European. My nationality is German and I've got a Czech surname. I don't think there is something like a "pure" ethnicity.
You're right; lancing a boil can be painful but it does end up healing the sore.
Nationality is a contrived concept useful for politicians, ordinary people should be very suspicious when it is used to convince them. It is vital for us all to understand it's consequences - we in the UK have just been manipulated into leaving the EU by such means and are suffering the consequences. Thank you for making this informative record.
Nationalism as a whole is such a stupid concept. Especially in central Europe. I am Czech. I have Czech name. I live in Czech republic. But my family basically came from Germany on one side, and Austria on the othe, based on the records that we have found. I would not be even surprised if some of my ancestors have been forced to change their name to hide the fact that they were Germans.
@@TheMirodyn Nationality is rather a squishy term and it always depends on how it is defined. If it denotes the citizenship of a person in a specific country, it’s clear. But if the term is used synonymously to refer to ethnic origin or belonging to an ethnic group, it poses problems because notions of ethnic groups are no more than social constructs often associated with racial discrimination and nationalism which have led to terrible wars in the past. Really contraproductive here in Central Europe, I totally agree with you.
I just discovered your channel. Brilliantly presented. Thank you.
Thank you, glad to have you here.
Úžasné video, vďaka ti za to že šíriš informácie o takýchto ťažkých, no napriek tomu málo známych témach, len tak ďalej!
I like how uzasne means awesome
In my language it means horrible💀
Some terrific/terrible vibes here
@@iskanderaga-ali3353 Or awesome/awful vibes
As an ethnic Czech from Prague I had no idea about most of this. We are taught about the two burned Czech villages over and over, but the scale of inhumanity done to Germans after the war has always been glossed over. Great video, I really appreciate you focusing on quotes rather than personal opinions and explanations.
You are not taught about that? How do you explain that 3 million Germans lived in Czechoslovakia before the war and now there are almost none? There were even more Germans than Slovaks in this interwar Czecho-German-Slovakia.
P.S.: in the Slovak part of the ČSSR you did the same to the Hungarian population, although not so thoroughly.
I‘m from Germany and this isn’t something we learn much about either. And I even lived basically next to the Czech border.
@@ancientbohemianCan you point out something the video got wrong? With sources to back that up? Otherwise your critique rings hollow.
@@ekesandras1481 You would be surprised. Many Czechs believe to this day that it was the right thing to do and that the expulsion of the German population from the country was justified.
@@ekesandras1481 we are taught about the Beneš decrees and the expellation of the Germans, not so much about the violence, I think it is because during the communist rule it wasn't really taught at all
Thanks a lot for the video, bylo to hodně zajímavý.
Děkuji!
Thank you for these videos! They provide valuable information most people don't know a lot about
Hi thank you for very interesting video. I'm german and part of my (grand)grandparents lived the czech republic before they came to the modern day germany.
Since my grandparents from this side already died I only know a few things of what happened indirectly from my mother.
One thing I'd like to say is that she told me that the neighbours back then harbored no ill will against my grand-grandparents and from what I've heard they could have stayed after the war. But with conditions like no german language allowed and no school for the children. But theese were not the condition from their neighbours!
What I'd like to point out is the collective guilt which is always a topic. Since I myself, as a german perhaps not so objective person on the question, wonder how many people think everybody got what he deserved with such a notion. And since your video could be seen as critisizing the czech part of the actions of the czech people I'd like to extend my view to this topic as well.
Politics are one thing and it is hard or more like impossible to judge every single person in a situation like back than and make decision on what to do on an individual level. Especially with the emotional state most people must have been in.
But I think when we view back into history we can always aknowledge that besides the people who took action back than, there were probably many people who either just lived their lives without knowing of what happened, felt powerless to do anything against it or simply feared the outcome of what would happen if they tried to do anything. And I thing this fear was a very real and legitimate reason, even if many people - at least online - seem to scoff at such arguments.
There should be no such thing as « collective guilt ». It is an injustice to new generations. The Expression « Sins of the Father » should have no bearing on future generations. Also I, born in Gablonz a.d. Neisse (Jablonec n. n.), have as a mantra that I do not forget but I forgive and on recent trips back »home » I would never hold past events against present Czechs.
It's a long and tragic story. The microcosm was already broken, when the Czech suddeters were kicked out, in 38. And any chance of it mending pretty much died, when the Nazis launched their campaign of retaliation following Heydrich's assassination.
The attitudes varied obviously, however the overarching one was that co-existence wasn't really an option anymore, by the end of the war.
Yessss a new M.Laser video!!!! Early christmas!!!
There'll be one more before Christmas ... hopefully.
@MLaserHistory the longer the wait the greater the hype 😂
Although I've seen a few of your vlogs, I've been putting off this video for a long time. Both my great grandmother and my wife's grandmother came from the Sudetenland. I don't want to say what was lost, but rather how excellent this vlog was! The history was reported very neutrally and in the end both were losers. Keep on your good work and greetings from Austria!
Very interesting and I as a German do appreciate the moslty fair storytelling. It’s always sad to hear about civilians beeing treated so poorly but at least there are people willing to speak about it and thereby show that the world is full of good will and forgiveness as well as memorance and good humanist people
Germans are usually oblivious about (and often ignore) the size of their minority in Eastern Europe, Hungary also has a huge German minority.
Transylvanian Germans, also at least 2,5 - 3 million ppl. After WW II.part of them tried to repatriate back in western Germany
@@trevorphilips2090This is a problem with Germans. They migrate in millions to foreign lands and then feel entitled.
They are more German origin people living outside of Germany, then within it.
What an incredible video, great job. I'll watch 10000 more videos by you now.
My grandfather and his mother were ready to be expelled from the country, but after a few days they were waiting at the train station. They and other Germans here from Těšín were told that they should return home. And this despite the fact that my great-grandfather was a member of the NSDAP and fought in the Kriegsmarine. Now I see that they had more luck than they could have imagined.
Did they? Do not forget, all those who remained in Czechoslovakia were forced with living under totalitarian communist rules for the next 50 years. And then 25 years of economic turmoil following fall of the Sovjet Union. Poverty, misery, hardship, being held captive and unable to travel. All those who fled in 1946 and reached Austria and Germany had for sure a much better live.
@@denkendannhandeln I'm not sure if I fully agree with you. You are right in principle though. Keep in mind that after the war, economic situation in Czechoslovakia was much better than in Germany or Austria. So at that time you wanted to be in Czechoslovakia rather than in Austria or Germany. With time and economic stagnation in communist Czechoslovakia, it progressively changed. I have experienced life in Czechia during 90s after the Velvet revolution and it was completely fine. Good quality of life even back then. Now it is much better of course. Things improved dramatically after the Velvet revolution with EU membership.
@@tomassiegl4991 I saw documentaries of the life in Czech Republic, especially Prague in the 80-ties. The same time I often visited the place as a teenager. It was horrible. Waiting in lines for every item and goods, and all the communist products were of an absolutely horrible quality (remember the toilet paper?) and if you needed something from an official you had to bribe him with western chocolate and coffee. The pluming system was not working, and in Prague was a horrible housing crisis. People lived in miserably run down buildings, heated with coal and living in thick smog. Prague was covered with a black layer of dust. In addition was the constant political pressure with unspeakable police brutality. And all were being held prisoner in their own land - that was not fun.
And I am not sure if the 90-ties were such fun for many people eighter. Many were not equipped or educated to succeed in a stressful capitalist system, they lost their jobs, lost their stability and psychological understanding of the world, many factories were sold or closed and people fell into unemployment with just minimal help from the government. Not being used to capitalism they took too many loans they could not pay back, had no understanding of the financial system, subscribed to loans for houses with way too high mortgages, had no barrier to refrain from expensive consumption of western goods and lived way out of their budget. Still today almost 20% of people have so high debt, that they are permanently threatened with foreclosure. Alcoholism increased as well as suicides and a large exodus of the workforce occurred.
But today it is a beautiful land. Still I think the Germans had a way better live in Westen Germany. I myself was so lucky that my parents escaped in 1968.
@@denkendannhandelnYou probably don't know much about life in CS during communism or what real poverty means.. the lack of freedom was much bigger hardship than "poverty". I would describe it as they weren't blessed with consumerism. Not saying that I would like to live in those miserable times.
@@leoprg5330 well, not everybody lived in the same circumstances. Apparatshniks surely had if much better. There were always people, who found their way around hardship.
About consumerism there is one difference, you are free today to CHOOSE to participate in it or not. Living under communism you were FORCED to live in the circumstances the government imposed on you. Of course it was not starvation level poverty, but standards of living were for 50 years way below the level of the potential of the country. Let‘s not forget Czechs we’re one of the most industrialized and wealthy regions in 1920, exporting goods to the whole world during the first republic. So it was a hard step down.
I just observe a certain romanticizing of the communist period by some groups of Eastern Europeans. Often people who lived at maximum their childhood then. Seeing it as the good old times and completely blocking our the reality of the times. It happens often to people around 50-60 who mix in their memories the good times, that everybody has as teenagers and youngsters (friendships, adventures, first love etc.) comparing it with the hardship of older age (aches creep in, health deteriates etc.) with the actual political system. Being 15 under communism for sure was more fun than being 55 under capitalism. But they make the mistake to project the normal flow of live and it’s psychological phases onto the state itself. I am not sure if I manage to explain the idea well.
Often this changes around 65, when people start needing urgently a well functioning medial health system. Being confronted with cancer, needed operations, and so on, absolutely nobody wants to go back to communism where health care was just possible on very basic level and innovative western drugs were just not available.
Docela skvěle video, děkuji. A ano opravdu ten konec mohl být klidně ve slovenštině.
Excellent and intellectual version of events. I learned a lot. Many thanks from Ireland.
The depopulated areas along the German border were settled during the rule of the Communist party by gypsies being relocated from Slovakia. Later on more came in to unite families. It's fascinating to see how an area which used to be highly industrialized and economically active during the German presence would descent into poverty. Even today the areas of former Sudetenland are mostly viewed as poor regions with low income, poor housing, crime, lack of opportunities and generally undesirable to live in.
They were repopulated with Czechs returning or displaced from various other regions like Russia, Poland etc.
Land and Rent/Mortgages are probably substantially cheaper in those areas I’m willing to bet.
I would rather have Germans there instead the mess that Is there now
About 300 villages fell into disrepair after the Germans were expelled.
@@cjthebeesknees During the Socialist period there was basically no such thing as variable land value. Rents were identical per m2 whether you lived in a large city like Prague or a small town. And much of the Sudetenland was repopulated with new workers for the industry and factory jobs there, so people did not have choice over where they were settled.
extremly good, informative and well balanced video.
Great video as always. Its kinda sad as a Slovak to have to deal with the fact that our nations role in ww2 was basically a black void of evil. Even sadder is that we cant even truly blame the Germans since we basically got off scot free compared to the everyone else. We truly are the greatest makers of our own misery.
I hope todays election isnt just another step deeper into that black void.
"We truly are the greatest makers of our own misery." The definition of Slovakia.
@@MLaserHistory You should check out Croatia 😬 Pozdrav iz Hrvatske i hvala na ovom kanalu
Hello from Finland. My dad and his gf visited Slovakia ~5 years ago. Dad told me it was bizzarre how many shopkeepers and other service providers not only refused to talk to him but looked away in almost disgust when he and his gf tried to communicate in somewhat broken English. They even tried telling they're from Finland but no difference. My dad is the most gray unpolitic man you'll meet and I don't believe he lied. It's weird how many Slovaks behaved towards them.
sending hopes of wisdom in upcoming elections from czechia ❤
I was happy to see that the ĽSNS deservedly lost the election shamefully.
Very good presentation. In 2000 I had to translate for my wife's grandmother who in her dementia had reverted to the German she spoke until she was 17 in 1945. When the Red Army got close to Moravia, her German dad fled to Stuttgart, where his family was from, leaving his Czech wife and their kids to fend for themselves, which wasn't easy, especially since he had forbidden them from speaking Czech and their neighbors in Šumperk (formerly Schoenberg) considered them Germans. My wife, who was born in Šumperk in 1970 and lived there until she was 26, had never heard most of the stories I was translating for her and at first couldn't even believe them...until she asked an older aunt who confirmed all of it. A truly horrific history, which didn't stop when the war ended. And this is the reality of history--it's not just an account of things that once happened but instead the driving, shaping force behind what the present is, whether we know that history or not.
I am German, and this chapter of history was only peripherally touched with a few lines in our history lessons at school. Your documentation threw some light at the background why all this happened.I am very happy to live now and not in these dark times. I'm happy to have now many friends who are Czechs! Nationalism as an ideology on steroids is never good! We are all humans!
Nationalism isn't bad idea i think. Idea that nation should have their own political entity and govern by themselves is good. It made modern western democracy. Chauvinism on the other hand is evil. It is degeneration of the nationalism.
@@4tedi4 There is a very thin line between chauvinism and nationalism same like nationalism and fascism. The events of the Inter-war period made it to be so thin with no return.
@@alexandrosnaoum1318 On the other hand from antinationalism position is very thin line to international comunism. Without nationalism there will be no modern democracy state.
@@4tedi4man has not thought clearly of what he wrote 😂
@@4tedi4Well, to be fair, it is possible to be a patriot, or at least a different kind of nationalist. For example, there is no such thing as an "American" ethnicity (unless if you count Amerindians, I guess), yet ideas of patriotism and nationalism still exist there. Additionally, not all Russian nationalists are ethnic Russians. And then there's India, which has over 2000 ethnic groups.
Díky!
Diky!
Not sure what deemed someone "German", my Aunt was born and raised in Brno (*1924) in a Germand AND Czech speaking household, their surname was "Horky" (not really German-sounding), still...
They were expelled from their home and had to leave most of their stuff behind and participate on the "Todesmarsch" (death-walk) to Austria. They were neither Nazis nor "real" Germans IMO. It simply was a bad time for human rights. And revenge often hits the wrong people.
Goes many ways...my Great-Grandfather had to leave Austria in 1938 for the US, for the obvious reasons. My dad on the other hand, was born in CZ and fled the country with his mum in the 50s, from Communism etc.
because violence begets violence and revenge
Man wonderful video this part of history I really did not know and I love learning about it. You earned yourself a new patron!
Moc pěkné video o naší historii kterou se fakt málo kdo dozví ze školy. Rozhodne se těším na další videa o Československu
My jsme se o tom učili ve škole. Divné že to nebylo ve tvé škole
@@somebodyanonymousx Tak ono se to liší škola od školy, já se na základce celkově o 2. světové moc nedozvěděl (resp. něco, co bych tou dobou sám nevěděl), protože jsme vyplýtvali spoustu času na antických civilizacích a středověku, takže na moderní dějiny už čas nezbyl.
@@sigurdcz6241Myslel jsem střední. Vůbec si nepamatuji, co jsme se učili na základce, ale na střední jsme se učili o osudu Němců
Very interesting video, as a Czech, I learned a lot! Thank you
I really like your channel. I'm czech myself and love to see brotheren shining light on dark history.
You show some inside on history that is not commonly taught in schools. In Czech schools we are never told the horrific things we did back to germans, only that we expelled them.
Sounds like you're people are brainwashed on the whole then.
What school did you go to? When I was in high school, I did learn about the crimes done against Germans during the expulsions.
Thanks!
Thank you!
Extraordinary tragic history within a beautiful country. It would be strengthened by adding that the western CZ boundary with German lands had existed for hundreds of years. Great work!
Thanks
Thank you! :)
The way we treated the German-speaking population after the war is one of the dark moments in our history. The Czechs still tend to put themselves in the role of victims, but refuse to admit that we were bad guys at some points in our history. I am glad that more is being said about these events. But I find it sad that many people still tend to relativise Czech atrocities in the post-war period. I remember when Karel Schwarzenberg, one of the most prominent human rights activists, campaigned for the 2013 presidential election and spoke out against the post-war ethnic cleansing. It was a national uproar and his opponent, Miloš Zeman, actively used it in his campaign against him.
I am Czech by birth and I must say your video has given me some new outlook and perspective on this whole thing
Its really bizarre how we managed to justify this so well in our society, I distinctly remember being taught in school how the Germans were expelled after WW2 and the way it was presented is that it was a done deal, a right thing to do, not much detail was put into it.
Only years after I learned about the violence but I somehow still told myself that it was a few isolated events but this video really puts the scale of the whole thing in the perspective.
in 2012-2016 I worked with the descendant of a Czech family who fled to Romania after 1938 ... he did not speak much about the subject but that made me curios and among the anecdotes I gathered was that after 1938 the official food ration for a Czech was 800 calories per month ...
My grandfather and his family lived in a town near the Austrian border named Gottschallings, they had to leave it in half an hour without being able to bring any of their valuables, outright lucky compared to what happened to others. The town was later demolished with almost no traces left of it today.
Just a little note, Emil Hácha definitely wasn't a nazi collaborator, he actively fought for the Czechs and their rights during the protecrorate. He was then called a collaborator by the communists, which somewhy stucked with him :/
Happened to a lot of collaborators that felt staying in some kinda power was better then forfeiting the country to a more true puppet.
Hácha understood, that Czechs, after being dumped by Western allies, are unable to fight the Germans, who were far superior in numbers, technology and also had great geographical and demographic advantage. Quiet surrender and cooperation was probably the most sensible thing he could do. Even the video mentions that the treatment of the Czech by the Germans was quite mild for WWII standards.
Hácha was a tragical personality. He was already too old when they asked him to become president, already before the German occupation. He had a rich career in international law and would have served the country well in better times. He had no chances of resisting the Nazi occupation and was not left with many options under the Nazis.
@@jirislavicek9954 it actually was, until the czechs decided to murder heydrich. Then the germans decided no more mildness for the czechs.
@@TheBlackfall234 Which was a good thing. It taught the Germans learn a lesson that they cannot treat everybody as scum even on occupied territories.
Thank you for this video. It was very informative.
My hole family is Silesian and my mother in law survived a Czech labor camp with her mother and sisters.Nobody was talking about those things in public in W.Germany,all my childhood I had to lissen to those horrorstorys at familymeetings.Till today I hate christmastime cos it was the time everybody was remembering of their lost familymembers and how they died.
Beautiful documentary, it truly expands upon and explains an oft not talked about part of the aftermath of world war 2.
Thanks for this very nuanced video
What a fantastic content creator. That was very well approached. Kudos
I like the concept of project homecoming, keep it up guys
This was a very well done video, shocked it hasn’t blown up yet the visuals are amazing and this is a very specific part of history to be covered with many people not knowing it which I didn’t! The maps were also fantastic, I was zoned in the whole time, great script great visuals
Czech here, It's very fascinating to hear all the personal accounts from people of Sudeten German descent. Personal stories are a great way to gain some perspective on these historical events.
One interesting thing about the former German majority areas of Czechia is that to this day these are some of the poorest regions of the country. It's eerie how the old protectorate border lines up with unemployment, low income or crime statistics of the current day. Many german speaking villages were never resettled and remain abandoned or sparcely populated. Before the war northwest Bohemia was an industrial powerhouse and one of the richest regions of Czechoslovakia (and of Austria-Hungary before that)
Thank you for highlighting this mostly overlooked part of WW2 history.
4:00. Funny. I am of the same opinion as they were at the time. Czechoslovak is more of a national and ethnic group (the two are near interchangeable in Czech and Slovak languages) than two.
I still see a dialectal continuum and still find both to be dialects of one another in a way .. or rather dialects if Czecho-Slovak.
Also, do you plan on doing a video on the Free City of Danzig? A classic experiment of an "internationally administered" territory that went horribly wrong.
D
"Danzig Frei Stadt" has been called an example of sweeping a big problem under the carpet hoping no one notices.
@@ktipuss an attempted temporary compromise (like a UN peacekeeping operation) that should never have tried to be permanent.
What went wrong in Dantzig were the local people, and no amount of external policy, good or not, was ever changing that.
I am surprised how little we the Czech people are learning in school about this upholding chapter of our history. I am at university and I have heard about some of the darkest parts of this video for the first time.
Ollective guilt is against Ezropean values. In spite of that Benes decrees are part of present Czech legislation.
It is sad that you expect from "university" to teach you everything. There is no excuse for ignorance. Czech libraries , archives and used books stores are treasures for educating yourself better than any "university' has to offer.
@@DANA-yc9wq Okay, you usually would expect universities not to be biased in such a drastical way. But modern universities are not so modern, in fact. Communist re-education had been very strong. By the way: What is not reflected in the video is panslavistic national occultism that played an important role due to the sponsors of foundation process of Greater Czech Republik which turned out to be Czechoslovakia.
We had classes on expulsions in high school. Not to such depth as this video, but we had them. You should have learned long before college
@@lovaserzsebet670Czech values take precendent over some 'European' values
Thank you very much for this video it was very well done!
Thank you for your hard work :)
Extremely well done video. Had no idea of these events.
@keikihaniyasushin8574 you can't research an event you didnt know happened. Retard
My grandparents were Sudeten German. They were expelled after the war to Bavaria. Later they moved to North Rhine Westphalia. I still have some great recipes from Bohemia - "Apfelstrudel" for example. My mother grew up in Bavaria and Westphalia and has no connection to the old homeland and has never seen it. The dialect is lost as well.
There is a collection of special dialect-words Franz&Fritz Bertelswieser in the book 'Verlorene Böhmerwaldheimat' that collected the history, memories, songs, stories and fairy tales of the villages of the Parish Deutsch-Reichenau, and followed all it's last inhabitants up to their death-places. That made me understand why my family spoke slightly different than the others in our village, though my greatgrandmother's ancestors not only came from Reiterschlag/Pasecna but all over the place. If she gave my mum her language, she must have had hers from her own father's mother, that came from Sarau/Kyselov.
An excellent combination of hard facts and illuminating graphics.
Didnt expect that i would learn that Czechs wanting autonomy made the Nazis...
Anyways as a Czech i see the deportation as the worst part of our history... Vengence is the exact thing that made czechs be as bad as the nazis at the time... the fact that the Soviets allowed and supported this crime against humanity is horrible...
Czech wanting autonomy didn't make the Nazis. Germans opposed to Czechs wanting autonomy made the Nazis.
@@odyczCollectivism is the root problem
@ Shifting the blame onto the big bad boogie “Commie” man aye.. not surprised at all, pathetic.
@@cjthebeesknees What?
@ The Soviets didn’t allow or support anything of the such, don’t blame them for the chaos that was already present before they arrived.
Thank you for this informative video. It was extremely thorough and well balanced.
My great great grandmother was a Sudeten German from the village of Heiligenkreuz, which according to Wikipedia is the modern municipality of Chodský Újezd. Unlike some German villages in the area, it still exists. She was lucky to come to the states just before the world wars, but it saddens me that many of her relatives and neighbors were expelled so violently from their homes, if they survived at all. I was gifted her prayerbook by my grandmother, which she bought in the states from a German language bookstore shortly after her arrival in Minnesota.
Úžasný video! Hned ho rozešlu, kde můžu :)
Dekuji!
Thank you for this very interesting topic. Just to add, after the occupation of the Sudetenland in 1938, the Nazis also organised expulsions of Czechoslovaks living there. In a very similar way, they were given a little time to pick their belongings and leave for the remaining portion of Czechoslovakia. Their properties were subsequently confiscated. My grandfather witnessed arrivals of such refugees, who came with the little they could bring with them into the soon-to-be Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where the effects of starvation of the non-German population were still felt long after the war, up until 1953, when food rationing was abolished. As you mentioned, the injustices during the Protectorate (mass murders, slave labour, low food rationing, systematic repression) fuelled the vengeance of the Czechs and Slovaks in the post-war period, which they decided it to take on the whole German-speaking population in the Sudetenland. Bear in mind there were also interests of turncoats such as Karol Pazúr, who gave in Přerov the orders to shoot German civilians. Previously, he fought for the pro-Nazi Hlinka guards until his capture by the Soviets.
The expulsion of the Germans is still a hot topic to this very day. Whenever demagogues like Zeman try to lure voters into getting their votes, they are happy to label their opponents as willing to allow the descendants of the Sudeten Germans into reclaiming their confiscated properties. This will almost certainly never happen because the Beneš decrees are enshrined into the Czech law.
While I'm a Czech myself, to be fair, the extent of these expulsions has been inflated. "Only" around 100K left, most of them Czechoslovak state employees and their families who settled there after 1918. Half a million of Czechs stayed in the annexed areas and would, ironically, later become *less* resentful of the Germans than the Czechs from the interior of Czechia, since unlike for the Czechs from the interior, Germans weren't an "unified anonymous mass" to them, they interacted with Germans for years and differentiated between the "good ones" and "bad ones". During the Ústí massacre, some "Revolutionary Guards"men were even distrustful of the minority Czech natives of Ústí because of their lack of enthusiasm for killing Germans, there was a similar distrust for Czech natives of the Sudetenland among the post-1945 settlers as well.
Good and balanced overview. Thank you.
I wish I could view similar video about Poland. This was a very good job.
In Poland it was far more straightforward and not much ideology involved. Big chunk if not majority of Germans fled west fearing the Soviets. The rest were being expelled gradually up to 50s
Thx for fantastic video about this topic (which is really underrepresended in school, usually it is only mentionet as yeah the germans were moved out, moving on, *later history*)
A ohledně tvojí češtiny, skvělá práce jen tak dál
Similar stories exist in Uganda, Malaysia, Spain, Zimbabwe, Fiji, eta. All these countries experienced major ethnic tensions that stemmed from ethno-nationalism, leading to mass expulsions and murders, and ultimately ruined the countries in the aftermath, as the people expelled or murdered were also the best-skilled people that these countries depended on.
Stuff like this is still happening today - see recent news about Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Don't forget Boer Exodus from South African Republic
Czechoslovakia simply didn't want to get invaded by Germany again. This is the same sentiment across Eastern Europe.
I'm from Spain and I don't think Spain fits here. Like, "ultimately ruined the countries in the aftermath" has to be the Civil War but it doesn't fit at all. I'm saying this just in case you have some missunderstandings and want to clarify them with me.
" leading to mass expulsions and murders, and ultimately ruined the countries in the aftermath, as the people expelled or murdered were also the best-skilled people that these countries depended on." You can say this about the Civil War yeah. I would say "the best-skilled people" is mostly correct for artists and people with studies (the professors in the dictatorship were hell on earth because there were no good ones left) but the rest of the population (except the nobles, the rich people and a lot of priests and such, that were with the fascists) was more or less split in half.
"experienced major ethnic tensions that stemmed from ethno-nationalism, leading to..." I'm not with you in this one. I started this comment because I think it's easy to think like this reading about the Civil War, but it's not really correct. There were "ethnic tensions" but just in Basque Country and Catalunya and it didn't really impacted the rest of Spain that much nor the ideology of the "nationalists" (as I see they are called in English) were created for that reason. It was more to counter the communists and anarchists than to counter any ethnic tension, but in any case it's just the way the fascism works, it's the way they always use.
It was just a matter of left(and what we would consider now center) and right. The Civil War starts because of the struggle between these two sides and nothing more, one inspired by the fascism and the left inspired by the USRR and the anarchism.
@@Lanval_de_Lai and what about the expulsion of the Moriscos and the Sepharic Jews?
I am travelling to the Czech Republic several times per year by train from Germany and, boy, the Sudetenland areas are by far the saddest. Visibly depopulated and poor with most wealth nowadays being created and reinvested into Prague and Plzen.
Wait.. wasn't the "N" meant as Německo (aka these people will go to Germany), because I heard, that some had "R" as Rakousko and they went to Austria..
Every source I read on this subject talked about N for Nemec and didn't talk about destination.
@@MLaserHistory I see. I heard this from one historian, who talked about some specific family and he mentioned that they were lucky to have "R" instead of "N".
dobře zpracované video!
Excellent video! I'd love to see a prequel of the Bohemian Crown lands under the Hapsburgs.
Very similar to what happened in Slovenia. Especially Northern Styria was very ethnically mixed, with large Austrian/German populations, especially in the urban areas. After the war basically all fled or were forced to leave. Its something that is not really talked about enough, as it is ever more a political issue and not a human and moral issue.