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The Czechoslovak Policy of War Crimes Punishment After the Second World War in International Context Pavla

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The Czechoslovak Policy of War Crimes Punishment After the Second World War in International Context Pavla MASARYKOVA UNIVERZITA FAKULTA SOCIÁLNÍCH STUDIÍ Katedra mezinárodních vztahů a evropských studií Obor Mezinárodní vztahy Building a New World: The Czechoslovak Policy of War Crimes Punishment after the Second World War in International Context Bakalářská práce Pavla Šimková Vedoucí práce: JUDr. Mgr. Ivo Pospíšil, Ph.D. UČO: 215513 Obor: MV Imatrikulační ročník: 2006 Brno, 2010 Prohlašuji, že jsem bakalářskou práci vypracovala samostatně a při jejím zpracování jsem používala pouze uvedené prameny a sekundární literaturu. ..................................................... 2 Acknowledgement I wish to thank my supervisor Ivo Pospíšil for his valuable advice and enthusiastic support, and also Ľubomír Majerčík for his readiness to help and my friend Martina Klicnarová for proof-reading my thesis and for her constructive criticism. 3 We are a generation which was doomed to live through the two most atrocious wars in history; but we are also a generation which, more than any other, has had the opportunity to take part in building of a new and better humanity... And we, who have in this grand struggle taken the right way politically and morally, can enjoy the sense of satisfaction that – in spite of all the shortcomings of our time – our lives have been successful. Edvard Beneš, February 1945 4 Contents 1. Introduction................................................................................................................6 2. Czechoslovak Contribution to the Preparation of War Crimes Punishment............11 2.1 Development of the Allied War Crimes Policy, the UNWCC, and Czechoslovak Involvement........................................................................................................13 2.2 Czechoslovak War Crimes Policy......................................................................19 3. The Ideological Basis of Czechoslovak Retribution in International Context.........27 3.1 Showing that the Nazis Were Bandits: Common Features of the Czechoslovak and Soviet War Crimes Policy...........................................................................28 3.2 Building a New World: Common Features of the Czechoslovak and American War Crimes Policy.............................................................................................33 4. Conclusion................................................................................................................43 Bibliography.............................................................................................................44 5 1. Introduction True to our feelings, there is only one punishment right for all those Germans, whether they perpetrated the crimes themselves or hailed them – death. We know for sure that our nation is part of the civilised world. And its answer to the question: What punishment – is definite – death. [...] They will be punished. For blood – blood.1 These sentences were read out on BBC‟s Czechoslovak Service on 1st January 1942, on the occasion of the conference held in London by the nine governments of the occupied European countries, which two weeks later resulted in the signing of a declaration in which the governments manifested their determination to punish the crimes now committed by the Germans against their civilian populations in occupied Europe.2 The declaration was seen as an extremely welcome act in the above-mentioned broadcast, and the editor remarked that the anxieties as to whether the post-war retribution will be carried out properly and dutifully, have now been dispelled by the declaration.3 Such statements, perhaps not quite so harsh, but no less determined, were no rarity among the Czechoslovak wartime declarations concerning future retribution against the Nazi occupiers and those who aided them. In his radio addresses which were broadcast into the occupied Czechoslovakia, President Dr. Edvard Beneš repeatedly stated that “the retaliation, which surely will come, will be terrible”4. Such statements, along with the actual retribution proceedings, which undoubtedly were in many respects rather ill-conceived and were carried out with greater than necessary severity, and in view of the post-war political development of Czechoslovakia which tended more and more to the political left, in international politics oriented the state increasingly towards the Soviet Union, and finally plunged the country only three years after the end of the war into forty years of Communist rule, can easily cause commentators and historians to dismiss the Czechoslovak retributive action as „inherently flawed‟5 and motivated more by a desire for vengeance than for justice. On the surface, Czechoslovak 1 BBC Military Broadcast: Czechoslovak Broadcast, 1st January 1942, edited by Jiří Mucha. Národní archiv Praha, fond Ministerstvo vnitra Londýn, karton 211. 2 The declaration was officially signed on the 13th January 1942 in the St. James‟s Palace in London and came thenceforth to be known as the St. James Declaration. 3 BBC Military Broadcast: Czechoslovak Broadcast, 1st January 1942. NA Praha, f. MV-L, k. 211. 4 Beneš , Dr. Edvard. Šest let exilu a druhé světové války. Řeči, projevy a dokumenty z r. 1938 – 1945. Praha: Orbis, 1946, p. 133. 5 Frommer, Benjamin. National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia. Cambridge (i.a.): Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 9. 6 retribution could therefore seem to many as a rather straightforward case of early Soviet influence in a country that already was directing its foreign policy toward an ever greater cooperation with the Russians and which was to become a Soviet satellite only a few years later. This image would indeed fit very well into the familiar black-and-white picture of the two basic – and opposite – approaches to the post-war punishment of the war criminals, in which a clear line is drawn between the Western Allies and the Soviets: in this picture, the attitude of the Western Allies is represented by the famous words from the opening speech of Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. Chief Prosecutor on the Nuremberg Tribunal: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason”6. Although the words themselves include all „four great nations‟, they were nevertheless uttered by the American Chief Prosecutor, and Nuremberg was (to a major extent rightly) regarded as a largely American undertaking with the Soviet presence on it perceived as its biggest embarrassment and flaw. Under these circumstances, Jackson‟s speech and this very part of it in particular came to be regarded as the ultimate expression of the intentions and motivations with which the Western Allies came to the Trial. The Soviets, on the other hand, although they also participated in the Trial, were seen as motivated almost exclusively by seeking vengeance for the destruction and suffering inflicted upon their country and people during the German invasion. Put it simply, while the Western Allies stayed the hand of vengeance, the Soviets did not; their hand had to be stayed by the others, and if they had had their way, they would have had the Nazi leaders shot out of hand. Such at least is the most common image of the great powers‟ differing approaches to post-war justice. It presents us with an unambiguous story of justice versus vengeance in which Czechoslovakia, although its retributive action was conceived in London, took sides ideologically with its big brother-to-be. However, plumbing the evolution of the idea of a post-war international trial of Nazi war criminals and in particular the history of the Czechoslovak involvement in the process of conceiving the punishment of war criminals and the ideological motivation which fuelled this effort reveals a far more complicated story, marked by complexity, contradictions and stubborn resistance to be painted either in black or in white. 6 Justice Jackson‟s Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal. Jackson Center Research Archive. http://www.roberthjackson.org/the-man/speeches-articles/speeches/speeches-by-robert-h- jackson/opening-statement-before-the-international-military-tribunal/. Accessed on 28th April, 2010. 7 The basic approach of this thesis will be to set the development of the idea of Czechoslovak retribution into the wider context of the international developments of the issue of war crimes punishment, that eventually led up to the Nuremberg Trial. I believe that this contextualization will show how closely interwoven the general – international and particular – national Czechoslovak levels of dealing with this problem in fact were, a connection that has frequently been underestimated in the various accounts of Czechoslovak retribution. Indeed, a closer look reveals some striking similarity of motivations for the domestic and inter-Allied punishment of the Nazi war criminals. The hypothesis of this thesis is basically two-fold: firstly, this thesis will argue that without the wartime effort of the occupied countries, the idea of punishment of the Nazi war criminals by judicial means may not have been put through at all, and that in this process, the Czechoslovak government-in-exile played a crucial role, promoting principles almost identical with those which were later adopted in the Nuremberg Charter; and secondly, this thesis will attempt to prove that despite some elements of the underlying motivation of the Czechoslovak
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