Sudeten German resistance against National Socialism

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There was also a Sudeten German resistance to the National Socialist rule .

history

Leopold Grünwald , author of several works on the Sudetenland , Czechoslovakia and the resistance against National Socialism , reports that after the incorporation of the Sudetenland into the German Reich, tens of thousands of German anti-fascists fled into the interior of Bohemia and Moravia in order to continue the resistance from there. However, most of them were sent back by the Czech authorities and thus subjected to persecution by the National Socialists. Around 7,000 Sudeten German anti-fascists managed to escape into emigration. The host countries of the refugees were mainly Great Britain and Sweden . Many of them became stateless .

In October 1938, of the Sudeten German anti-fascists who remained in the country, around 10,000 were sent to prisons and concentration camps; by the end of the year there were around 20,000. The majority of them consisted of members of the DSAP , the KPTsch and the free trade unions. The wing of the SdP , which did not profess National Socialism , was also eliminated and its supporters persecuted.

Resistance groups

According to Grünwald, there were around 185 resistance groups. In the Sudeten German metropolitan areas they had a dense network of local groups. The “Meerwald” group with 15 to 20 local cells was active in the Karlsbad district ; In the Tetschen-Bodenbach and Teplitz-Schönau districts , widely ramified resistance groups worked under different camouflages. The largest and most successful resistance group was the "Waltro" group . Their area of ​​operation was Northern Bohemia . It took care of many refugee Soviet prisoners of war and committed numerous acts of sabotage on armaments factories and on railway lines. But Sudeten German anti-fascists were also active in the armed struggle, sometimes together with Soviet citizens. In northern Bohemia (Jizera Mountains) the resistance was so great that the Wehrmacht dispatched a special unit to fight partisans in 1944 in order to keep the situation under control . From early 1944 to May 1945 the struggle reached its climax.

Well-known figures of the resistance include Herbert Löwit , Fritz-Bedřich Dědek and Otto Seidl (* 1913), Maria Günzl , Herta Lindner , Lorenz Knorr , and Rudolf Parschik. There was also considerable resistance among the German minority in Slovakia .

Work-up

In the historical picture up to now , the Sudeten Germans were often only perceived as " Hitler's fifth column ". In a statement on August 24, 2005, the Czech government expressed its appreciation to the Sudeten German resistance fighters and those persecuted by the Nazi regime. The government of the Czech Republic also expressed its regret that they did not get the recognition they deserved after the war. Instead, they were punished in contravention of the then valid legal regulation in connection with the measures implemented against the so-called hostile population in post-war Czechoslovakia. The government of the Czech Republic apologized to the active Nazi opponents who had been damaged by the post-war measures.

Since 2006, the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences has been running a research program in collaboration with the Museum of the City of Ústí nad Labem and the National Archives in Prague on behalf of the Czech government, the results of which “are still persistent in the Czech Republic , Note] and in the world widespread notion of the Sudeten Germans who have succumbed to the total 'home-into-the-Reich' propaganda “will be refuted. The self-declared task of the project is to record the history of the Nazi opponents from among the ranks of the former citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic, the legacy of their lives and their contribution to the struggle for European democracy and to make it accessible to a wider public.

literature

  • Barbora Čermáková and David Weber. They stayed loyal to Czechoslovakia: biographical interviews with German anti-fascists. Praha 2008, ISBN 978-80-7285-102-7 .
  • Leopold Grünwald: Sudeten German resistance against National Socialism. For peace, freedom, justice. Benediktbeuern 1986, ISBN 3-926303-00-X .
  • Lorenz Knorr Anti-Fascist Resistance in West Bohemia. Fascism in Germany - Munich Agreement - Benes Decrees. Self-published, Frankfurt am Main 2006.
  • Lorenz Knorr. Anti-fascist resistance against Hitler and Henlein among the Sudetes and in the Wehrmacht. Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-89438-390-9 .
  • Zdeňka Kokošková. Fates of Forgotten Heroes: Stories of German Anti-Fascists from the ČSR. Prague 2008, ISBN 978-80-86712-68-0 .
  • Tomas Okurka (Ed.) Zapomenutí Hrdinové. Forgotten heroes. German Nazi opponents in the Bohemian countries. German / Czech. Ústi nad Labem 2008, 2008, ISBN 978-80-8647-518-9 .
  • Otfrid Pustejovsky . Christian resistance to Nazi rule in the Bohemian countries: an inventory of the conditions in the Sudetenland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-8258-1703-9 .
  • Alena Wagnerová and Stefan Dölling. Heroes of Hope: the other Germans from the Sudetes, 1935-1989. Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-351-02657-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Compare the information in the catalog of the German National Library
  2. ↑ http://www.sozialismus.net/agm/home/aktartikel/benes.html
  3. ^ Sudeten German resistance against the Nazi regime - a Czech research project