VOJTA BENE§:

The Vanguard of the ''Drang nach Osten" THE VANGUARD OF THE "DRANG NACH OSTEN" The Vanguard of the "Drang nach Osten"

By Vojta Benes

Czechoslovak National Council of America Chicago, Illinois 1943 INTRODUCTION

AD this little book been written in the days of the H Munich Pact, which was to buy "peace in our time" for the democratic world, or even before March 15, 1939, when Czechoslovakia was invaded, it would not have found many readers nor received much credit. So effective had been Goebbels' propaganda and so powerful the "wishful The publication of this book was made thinking" of the people of many nations that Hitler himself possible through the generosity of had to blast their misconceptions with the bombs of thou• Mr. Frank Kubat, Hinsdale, 111. sands of his warplanes over , England, Belgium, and Rotterdam, and shatter their smug complacency with the murders of millions of Poles, Jews, Yugoslavs, and Russians, and the systematic extermination of the intellectual leaders of Europe. To-day there are probably only a few people who would have to be convinced by argument that the Czech lamb, standing down stream, could not even muddy the water for the German wolf. However, more attention than it received heretofore will have to be given to the problem of racial minorities not only in Czechoslovakia but in all countries where that problem exists. For the problem of the minorities will be one of the delicate questions of the future peace. It will have to be studied in all its aspects. History, geography, and ethnography, political and social problems, all the dif• ficulties it creates, will have to be considered, if the problem is to be solved not only to the satisfaction of the racial minor• ities but also for the good of the States in which they live. Czechoslovakia is a typical example of a country in• habited by peoples speaking different languages, whose Printed in USA. racial questions cannot be solved either by the violence of a mechanical cut, as was attempted at Munich, or on the basis R. Mejdrich & Co., 2616 S. Lawndale Ave., Chicago, 111. of any doctrinaire assumptions which, though wrong, may seem justified by their generalization. This problem must be resolved by the wisdom of statesmen supported by a thor• ough knowledge of its implications. CONTENTS It is to be remembered that the questions concerning the racial minorities of Central Europe create a moral and po• litical problem rather than one of territory. And it is once Introduction more necessary to combat the erroneous notion that the Munich controversy about Czechoslovakia was a result of BOOK ONE the Versailles treaty of peace, the alleged source of all evil. On my American lecture tour I was asked more than once the question: "For what reasons did the Chapter I. take away more than three million Germans from Czechoslovakia and the 'Drang nach Osten' 3 and give them to Czechoslovakia?" Chapter II. This little book will offer proof that the Nazis were not Germans in the Historical Czech State 1 0 interested in the fate of the three million German immigrants in the Czech countries, but only sought to obtain possession Chapter III. of the bastion of Bohemia, which for fifteen centuries had Czechoslovaks Under Hapsburg Austria '9 effectively barred the way to the German "Drang nach Osten" on its march toward the domination of Europe Chapter IV. and the world. The Czechoslovaks Under Hapsburg Austria-Hungary 35

Chapter V. Germans in the Czechoslovak Republic 56

Chapter VI. Munich—Before and After 92

Chapter VII. The Mission of Czechoslovakia in Europe 143

BOOK TWO

The Danger of the National Minorities of Central Europe CHAPTER I

Czechoslovakia and the "Drang nach Osten"

HE expression "Drang nach Osten"—the drive toward T the East—indicates the goal of the geopolitics of modern Germany: the subjugation of the Central European and Slav countries of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and , as a preliminary to a campaign for the domination of the world. The drive was already under way in the first half of the seventh century. The early history of Bohemia is obscure, but the known facts appear to justify the conclusion that the have inhabited the territory of the Czechoslovakia of to-day since immemorial times. They were originally divided into a number of tribes. In the West the , the most powerful of the tribes in Bohemia, gave their name to the country and the nation. They made extensive settlements also in the neighboring country of Bavaria. The Latin names of these two countries, Bohemia and Bavaria, originally Boio-haimia and Boio-aria, are really doublets, both being derived from the name of the Slavic Boii, formerly mistaken for a Celtic tribe of a like name. In the East the Slovak settlements ex• tended from the Carpathians to Pannonia; the central plain between the Czechs and the Slovaks was occupied by the Moravians. *) *) Another version speaks about the German tribe which abandoned their settlements in Central Europe during the mi• gration of nations and pressed on toward the West. They left some countries almost depopulated. The Baltic Slavs followed them into the regions of the lower Elbe. When the Marcomanni, inhabiting also the countries of the present Czechoslovakia, had been extermi• nated in wars with Rome, those countries were gradually settled by Slav tribes originally dwelling beyond the Carpathians.

3 All these Central European Slavs united politically for the German Drang nach Osten or from the Magyars only the first time under King Samo (627-652) to resist the in• spurred the Czech nation to greater efforts. That was the roads of the Avars, an Asiatic Tatar tribe, who had reached situation under the great King Pfemysl Ottokar II (1253- Dacia about the year 555 and harassed their Slav and other 12 78) when the Hapsburgs made their first tragic inter• neighbors by predatory raids. As early as the first half of vention in Czech affairs, and when German immigration into the seventh century the Slavs inhabiting the territory of the Czech lands appeared for the first time as a grave danger. present Czechoslovakia had to resist also the incipient Drang In the fifteenth century the Czechs successfully defended nach Osten. The wars began in 628 under Dagobert, the their religious freedom against the spiritual centralism of Merovingian, and continued under Charlemagne and his Rome, and in the Hussite wars (1419-1434) routed the successors, who sought to justify their aggression by the false armed forces of Germany. The first and only Hussite King pretense of carrying Christianity to the heathen Slavs. The of Bohemia, George Podiebrad (1458-1471), one of the; petty rulers of the Slav tribes united for their common de• most enlightened rulers of Europe, made a heroic effort to fense under the kings of Greater Moravia. stop the German and Magyar aggression and turn the united forces of Central Europe against the Turkish menace. His In order to remove the German pretext of Christiani- plan for the organization of a League of Princes and a zation the kings of Greater Moravia invited Slav missionaries peaceful settlement of international disputes failed of ac• from Constantinople to preach Christianity to the natives in ceptance; it was proposed about a thousand years too soon. their Slav tongue. The Germans, unable to crush the united Slavs, found willing helpers in the Magyars, an Asiatic After 1526 the center of German aggression shifted to Mongolian tribe, which, following the Avars, had invaded Vienna when the Hapsburgs became the rulers of confeder• the Hungarian plain in 895. Eleven years later (906) the ated Central Europe. The Czechs whose religious liberty was Moravian kingdom succumbed to the joint assaults of the threatened supported the cause of German Protestantism. Germans and the Magyars. Bohemia and Moravia succeeded In the ensuing wars between the Protestant North and the in maintaining their independence against the later German German Catholic South the Czechs were almost exterminated attacks, but Slovakia remained under Magyar domination. by the German armies and left under the domination of the The German Drang nach Osten then went on unceas• German Hapsburgs, who sought to destroy the Czech spirit ingly, though occasionally changing its form or its starting of democracy and crush the Czech nation. Large numbers points. Under the pressure of German and Magyar aggres• of German immigrants, another form of the Drang nach sion the territory originally inhabited by the Slavs was Osten, invaded the Czech countries. gradually reduced in size, and the language frontier was In the meantime German Protestantism had recovered pushed back, chiefly by German immigration. The Mora• and in the eighteenth century, under the Prussian kings of vian kings had ruled over an area of 61,000 square miles; the Hohenzollern house, sought to effect a political union the Republic of Czechoslovakia had an area of 54,000 of all the Germans. The attempt at German unification square miles. was inspired largely by the ideals of the American and the For centuries the Czechs maintained their independence French Revolutions, which had awakened the national con• in defiance of the unceasing Drang nach Osten. They es• sciousness of the peoples of Western Europe. Those demo• tablished a powerful State which often played a decisive role cratic revolutions, however, awakened also the small Slav in the history of Central Europe. Every blow coming from races. Their spiritual awakening, followed by a political

4 5 revival, was made possible also by the continuous struggle military, as well as psychological preparations, for a new being waged between Vienna and Berlin, between the Haps• Drang nach Osten, much more powerful than ever before. burgs and the Hohenzollerns, for the leadership of the Ger• Even prior to the first World War the Germans in the Czech man race. The struggle with made it impossible for countries openly admitted that a complete destruction of Hapsburg Austria to carry on its campaign of extermination Czech influence was one of the goals of unified Germany. against the Czechs and the Slovaks with full force. When All Europe looked with apprehension upon the German- the liberal Hapsburg, Joseph II (1780-1790), planned to Magyar-Austrian alliance. At first the Drang nach Osten increase his power of resistance to the attacks of the Prussian was directed south of the Danube toward the and Hohenzollerns by a pitiless Germanization of the Czecho• the Near East. slovaks, his attempt aroused the mighty opposition of the When the Balkan War of 1912 resulted in the creation reawakened people; after two centuries of oppression the of Greater Serbia, a barrier to any extension of German democratic spirit of the Czechoslovaks was alive again, and domination over the Balkans, Germany decided on war. the nation was ready to make new efforts. Serbia was not to be allowed to organize its defenses against In 1848 the struggle between the Hapsburgs and the the Drang nach Osten. On July 29, 1914, German guns Hohenzollerns assumed new and sharper forms when the shelled Belgrade. Pan-German congress at Frankfort-on-the-Main started a In the Czechoslovakian countries oppression, Germani• powerful movement for the unification of all the Germans. zation, and Magyarization increased in brutality and violence. A new campaign against the Czech nation was begun, and Only the final victory of the democratic Powers saved the the Drang nach Osten was re-enforced by a third effort: Czechoslovak nation from incipient destruction. Czecho• wars and immigration were now followed by a purposeful slovakia became an independent Republic and maintained a and merciless Germanization of the people through German healthy life in spite of the enmity of a large portion of its schools and later on also through the intimidation of Czech German population. It spared no efforts to increase its workingmen by German capitalists. moral, political, and military power, for T. G. Masaryk In 1867 the Hapsburgs, who, though of mixed blood, understood the German soul and the meaning of German considered themselves Germans rather than just rulers of unification better than any other European leader. their empire, lost everything: their contest with Prussia for Czechoslovakia had been considered not only by Chan• the leadership of the Germans, as well as full sovereignty cellor Otto Bismarck but by all German statesmen a country over their own empire. The Prussian victory in the contest of great importance, a dangerous barrier to German ex• for leadership had been effectively aided by German phil• pansion. After the first World War, however, the German osophy, its concept of the unlimited power of a deified leaders became aware also of the disintegration of the moral State, and Schopenhauer's idea of will to power. After 1867 forces of liberalistic democracy and made a very shrewd the Austro-Hungarian rulers of the Hapsburg house came estimate of the possible consequences of that moral dis• under the complete control of aggressive Pan-Germanism, integration. and German unification was practically completed. After the easy absorption of Austria the first decisive The consequences of this development were ominous. battle had to be waged for Czechoslovakia, not only for its The oppression and Germanization of the non-German races moral and military preparedness but chiefly for its strategic of Austria-Hungary was intensified, and both empires made importance and its powerful mountain defenses which barred

6 7 the way to the German Drang nach Osten. That, and that vaks had a much larger proportion of agriculturists than the alone, was the underlying cause of the Munich Pact. Even Germans, and the Slav population gains were much higher. though the two German ruling families had disappeared from Thus in the decade between 1920 and 1930 the number of the scene, the unified German nationalism and the feudal the Czechoslovaks increased by 924,557 or 10.55% of the nobility of the Magyars were still in existence. Thus the old original total. In the same period the population gain of the Drang nach Osten continued unabated; it drew new strength Subcarpathian Russians had reached 87,720 or 19.01%, from the unification of the German race, and while it had The Germans, on the contrary, showed an increase of only formerly threatened Europe alone it now became a menace 102,064 or barely 3.46% . The number of the Magyars de• to the world. clined; their birthrate was even lower than that of the Ger• The Munich Pact was the first victorious battle of the mans, and Magyarization had become impossible. It is to be second World War: it presented to the Germans as a gift noted that in Czechoslovakia conscientious social care for the bastion of Czechoslovakia, which they had been vainly mothers and infants, proper hygienic measures, and medical trying to conquer for more than a thousand years! assistance saved a high proportion of the new-born. In 1930 Czechoslovakia had 14,729,536 inhabitants. The disparity in the birthrates had aroused the appre• Of that number 9,756,604, or 66.91 , were Czechoslovaks hensions of the Germans and the Magyars long before the and 568,941 (3.79%) Subcarpathian Russians, a closely first World War, and their fears had led to the Germani• related race. The majority loyal to the State included more zation and Magyarization of the subject races. German than 70% of the total population. nationalists saw, and still see, the only solution of the crisis The Magyars in the Republic numbered 719,569 in a victorious war which would remove the Czechoslovakian (4.78%). Their number had decreased by 52,698 in the problem from their way forever. German nationalists in the first decade, as tens of thousands of Slovaks, Magyarized by Czech countries readily accepted the task assigned to them force during the first World War, had recovered their free• by the aggressive German nationalism since the days of the dom after 1918. There were 204,779 Jews in Czechoslo• Frankfort congress: to be the vanguard of the Drang nach vakia, and 101,198 Poles, Rumanians, and Yugoslavs. Osten. Their zeal increased in proportion to the number of The largest racial minority in Czechoslovakia was that those "Sudeten" Germans who had, about 1930, rejected of the Germans, numbering 3,318,445 or 22.32% of the the hateful German nationalism, accepted Czechoslovakian total. That number included 86,75 7 aliens. democracy and collaborated with the Czechs. This process An important factor in the progress of Czechoslovakia of democratization had to be stopped if a majority of the was the birthrate. The birthrate of the Magyars had always Czechoslovak Germans were not to be lost to Greater Ger• been low, and under the feudal governments of Hungary many and its mission. German propaganda finally succeeded was supplemented by an atrocious Magyarization which in 1938 in deceiving even the democratic nations about the robbed the smaller races of hundreds of thousands of souls real aims of the nationalist agitation. Munich "murdered" annually. The higher birthrate of the Czechs had likewise Czechoslovakia—to use the late Senator Borah's expression been one of the important causes of Germanization in the —and opened the gates to the German flood. And thus Czech countries. After the union of the Czechs with the with the help of the nationalist Germans of Bohemia the Slovaks the difference between the German and the Czecho• latest Drang nach Osten was begun. slovakian birthrate was alarming. The Czechs and the Slo- ^

8 9 their necks to the German princes." And in 906 the Mo• ravian kingdom, the second free State of the Central CHAPTER II European Slavs, embracing the territory of the present Czechoslovakia, was destroyed by the joint assault of the Germans in the Historical Germans and the Magyars. In the Czech countries Christianity was thereafter Czechoslovak Lands preached by missionaries coming from Germany who were at the same time political emissaries of the German rulers. Even the first bishops of Prague were of German origin, and HE early German wars against the Slavs were carried on in the twelfth century some monastic orders, chiefly the T under the pretense of Christianizing the heathen. The Premonstratensians and the Cistercians, helped to keep open Western Slavs were offered Christianity on the point of a for the Germans the road to the Czech lands. sword; to become Christians was, for them, to become Ger• The German drive toward the East, the first beginnings mans. In the early years of the ninth century German of the Drang nach Osten, increased in intensity not only by bishops tried to impose their spiritual domination on the warlike but also by peaceful methods of procedure. The Czechs so as to increase both their own influence and the marriage of a Bohemian ruler to a German princess would political ascendancy of the German race. In order to counter• act their machinations and destroy the German pretext for be followed by the arrival of German officials and business• war, Rostislav (846-870), the ruler of the Moravian king• men. German merchants would come in large numbers and dom, applied to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III for settle along the highways in the vicinity of important castles. religious teachers who could preach the Gospel to the Slavs In 1061, in the reign of King Vratislav II, the German mer• of his realm in the Slavic tongue. The patriarch of Con• chants in Prague received for the first time certain privileges stantinople sent him the brothers Cyril and Methodius. They of autonomy. The Old Town of Prague, founded in 1234, were members of a family of high rank in the half-Slavic, was developed by German merchants. In 1 243 they estab• half-Greek town of Thessalonica. With the aid of their lished a settlement in Brno; in 1250, at Jihlava (Iglau). disciples these Slav apostles completed a translation of the The German immigrants refusing to be assimilated were Scriptures and did noble work in winning the heathen Slavs not popular, even though they were not yet numerous to Christianity. The success of their missionary zeal soon enough to be regarded as a menace. The Chronicle of aroused the wrath of the German bishops of Salzburg and Dalimil records this remarkable declaration by the Czech Mainz, who maintained that the Christianizing of the Slavs Prince Oldrich (reign, 1012-1037): "In marriage I prefer was entrusted solely to them. They accused Methodius of a Czech peasant girl to a German empress. Every one's heresy and apostasy. The Pope acknowledged the ortho• heart goes out to his race. A German wife would not like doxy of Methodius by making him an archbishop, but the my people; she would have a German household and teach German bishops disregarded the Pope's plea for moderation my children German, and that would mean a division and and persisted in their persecution of Slav priests until they ruin of the nation." Oldrich married the daughter of a drove them out of the country. "Whether they like it or farmer. In 1067 the intention of King Vratislav to appoint not," Katto of Mainz wrote to the Pope, "they must bow as Bishop of Prague his court chaplain Lanz, a German, aroused such a storm of protest that the king had to desist. 10 11