The Liquidator - Edvard Benes - Fiend of the German Purge in Czechoslovakia - Softcover

Sidonia Dedina (Author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966396847 ISBN 13: 9780966396843

Publisher: RFP Publications, 2000

Synopsis

Historical novel describing events culminating in the ethnic cleansing of Germans in Czechoslovakiain 1945.

About this title

About the Author

Sidonia Dedina was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia and now makes her home in Munich, Germany. Encounters with expellees and with a U*N human rights officer in the '80s made her aware of cruelly misdirected revenge by her fellow Czechs against blameless native Germans. Stunned, disillusioned and angered, she began investigating post-World War II crimes in Czechoslovakia and the role the then-Prague government under Edvard Benes played in planning and executing those crimes.

Review

The literary works inspired by World War II are not well balanced. In the Anglophone world there are literally thousands upon thousands books dealing with the Holocaust. In contrast only a handful of works have been written or translated into English on the almost equally brutal treatment of ethnic German civilians by the governments of the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia. The English translation of Czech journalist Sidonia Dedina's Edvard Benes-Der Liquidator by Rudolf Pueschel is thus a welcome addition to this small collection. It is an historical novel dealing with the ethnic cleansing of Germans from Czechoslovakia from April to July 1945. The native German population in Czechoslovakia when Berlin surrendered on 8 May 1945 exceeded three million people. During the spring and summer of 1945 the newly established government in Czechoslovakia under Edvard Benes instituted a brutal campaign of wild expulsions against the country's ethnic German population. The Czechs rounded up ethnic Germans into internment camps and confiscated their property before expelling them from the country with only 30 kilograms of possessions. These initial wild expulsions permanently uprooted more than 700,000 Germans from Czechoslovakia. They also involved considerable violence. On 18-19 June 1945 an anti-German pogrom in Prerov/Prerau killed 71 men, 120 women and 74 children. The Czech authorities enforced a series of measures meant to humiliate and demean its German population as stigmatized. They required Germans not already interned in concentration or labor camps to wear white armbands with the letter N for Nemec, the Czech word for German. The Czech authorities also banned Germans from using park benches, sidewalks, public transportation, trains and telephones and attending restaurants, cinemas and theaters. The wild expulsions from Czechoslovakia involved a complete denial of civil and human rights to the victimized Germans. These expulsions as well as the ones in Poland and Hungary received the official approval of the US, the USSR and UK at the Potsdam conference starting on 17 July 1945. The pertinent line from Article XIII of the treaty arising from this conference reads: The transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary will have to be undertaken. This treaty, however, also required that the transfer of ethnic Germans be conducted in a humane and orderly fashion. The conditions for German expellees thus improved somewhat during the second stage of the expulsions, but still remained extremely inhumane. The wild expulsions of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia organized by the Benes government in the spring and summer of 1945 form the subject matter of Dedina's The Liquidator. Although the author describes the book as a historical novel it is in fact based upon a great deal of investigative research and adheres closely to the actual events of the time. She provides detailed descriptions of a number of horrifying atrocities committed by Czechs against Germans after the end of World War II. These crimes include the death march of some 30,000 ethnic Germans from Brno/Bruenn into Austria at the end of May 1945. Another particularly stunning example of Czech brutality against German civilians occurred in Aussig/Usti nad labem on 31 July 1945. Here Czechs massacred dozens of German men, women and children. Although well documented elsewhere, Dedina's depiction of these events is particularly vivid and powerful. Dedina's novel focuses on two opposite poles. The first locus of the book is on Benes and his henchmen. She seeks to illuminate the motives and mechanisms behind the governments policy of ethnically cleansing Czechoslovakia of its centuries old German population. The second locus of her book is on the victimized Germans themselves. --J. Otto Pohl in his blog Otto's Random Thoughts

Sidonia Dedina's Edvard Benes: The Liquidator is a powerful historical novel centered on the plight of the Sudeten Germans between April and July 1945. This time period, after the defeat of Nazi Germany but before the Czechoslovak state officially adopted the Benes Decrees in full, is a key period in Czechoslovak and central European history. When they were fully implemented, the Benes Decrees would decree the forcible denaturalization of ethnic Germans and Hungareians, the confiscation of their property, and their deportation to their titular homelands. Czechoslovakia's Hungarians, overwhelmingly concentrated in Slovakia, survived as a community; Czechoslovakia's Germans, overwhelmingly concentrated in the Czech lands, did not. As she follows the sufferings of individual Sudeten Germans (even the low estimates suggest twenty thousand Sudeten Germans were killed out of three million people), Dedina also takes on a second narrative strand following Edvard Benes, who she argues was quite willing to deliver Czechoslovakia to the Soviet sphere of influence if it meant that the Czech lands would become ethnically homogeneous. Finally, Dedina follows a group of modern-day human rights workers as they try to navigate the aftermath of Czechoislovak communism and the reemergence of Sudeten Germans in history. This book is valuable inasmuch as it is one of the first fictional narratives I've read in any detail about the Sudeten German expulsions. Dedina's novel graphically mines the territory of Alfred-Maurice de Zayas in his A Terrible Revenge, one of the first books in the popular press of the Anglophone world to have explored the expulsion of ethnic Germans from central and eastern Europe in any detail. The Liquidator's arguments about Benes also have a certain plausibility to it. Leaving aside dubious allegations that Benes was a Soviet spy of some kind, he does seem to have been playing a dangerous game, trying to draw equally on Soviet and Western support while securing Czechoslovakia's independence, trying to placate the strong pro-Soviet communist current in Czechoslovakia while associating himself with the west. Benes' project did fail, but his Soviet alliance did facilitate their emptying-out of the country's German population at an appalling cost, in the forms of vast amounts of property lost and lives taken and ruined. The Liquidator also has very serious problems. The editing is very flawed, the lack of proper paragraphing leading to the cramming of entire conversations alongside a translation that somehow doesn't seem idiomatic. Perhaps more importantly, the content of The Liquidator is biased strongly towards the Sudeten German perspective, in so doing reproducing the sharp divisions between Czech and Sudeten German perspectives described. --Randy F. Mcdonald in rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/tag/ethnic%20cloeansing

About this edition

• Publisher: RFP Publications
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0966396847
• ISBN 13: 9780966396843
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 247
• Editor: Rudolf Pueschel
• Illustrator: Gerfried Schellenberg