Benes Decrees

Introduction:

The year 1945 was a year of great, fundamental upheaval in the life of Czech and Slovak society. After liberation from Nazi occupation, the National Front government led by President Edvard Beneš took power in the country and began to rebuild the state that had been liquidated by the Nazis in 1938 and 1939. Throughout the war, Czech politicians in exile - in London and Moscow - repeatedly stressed that this was not, of course, a mere restoration. President Benes himself, in a meeting with representatives of our Communists in Moscow on 13 December 1943, found it necessary to say at the outset, that "the unity of political parties should continue to apply, many years after the war, so that we can build a new modern republic, which will be a continuation of the First Republic, but it will be greatly transformed, especially in social terms." The unity of political parties did not last long. However, it more or less existed in the "decree" period, i.e. from May 1945 until the creation of the Provisional National Assembly on 28 October 1945, and was then extremely important for the activities of the Czechoslovak government. Those few months were quite enough to restore the Czechoslovak Republic as a completely new state, different from the pre-war Czechoslovakia. These were mostly changes that had been long in the making, as plans for the future organisation of the Czechoslovak Republic were being worked on in exile throughout the second half of the war. Already on 14 December 1943, the day after he spoke to the Communists in Moscow about the unity of political parties, President Benes V. M. Molotov the principles of this modernisation, the basis of which would be to ensure the security of the Czechoslovak state. Therefore, the restored Czechoslovak Republic will cooperate closely with the Soviet Union. All domestic traitors will naturally be punished, and above all it cannot be allowed that Germany's borders are 60 km from Prague. The Germans are guilty of Munich, they started the war in Czechoslovakia, they occupied it and they must be punished for it. Even though he, President Benes, is willing to compromise, considers it necessary to rid the future Czechoslovak state of at least 2 million and at most 2.8 million Germans, (which was the number of the entire German "minority"). It also demands that the property of the displaced Germans be transferred to the Czechoslovak government. The confiscation of German property and the transfer of Germans then heralded the beginning of another, "Czech" nationalisation (i.e. the confiscation of large estates owned by Czech citizens). This will launch a great social upheaval throughout Czechoslovakia. And two days later, Dr. Beneš that the removal of the Germans would open the way for radical interventions and social transformations in the Czech areas: "It will be a national revolution, combined with a social revolution. " This Benes plan for a National Socialist revolution, based on the collective persecution of Germans, was not entirely consistent with the existing "international" understanding of Czech-German relations as conceived by Czech communists. However, when the Communists found out that Generalissimo Stalin was in favour and that President Benes' project would undoubtedly gain a lot of support "at home", they did not hesitate to become his supporters, and they were so zealous in the revolutionary events after the liberation of Czechoslovakia that many Czech citizens took credit for it. The legislative basis of the post-war revolutionary events were the decrees of the President of the Republic. And this slim book would like to show in a clear way how facts and documents that should be common knowledge (and are not) create a picture of this extremely important period of our recent history. There are 143 presidential decrees in total. But only about two dozen of them contain norms of a political, power or legal nature. And only these political decrees I call by common usage the Benes Decrees (in total I refer to these 143 documents as the Decrees of the President of the Republic).

Before the actual discussion, it is worth recalling that there is actually very little left of the period under discussion in terms of "material". How to get hold of the remnants of the now defunct "results of the Second World War"? Where was the entire restored Czechoslovak Republic left? What is left of the National Front other than the embarrassing authoritarian tradition of dangerous national unity? What is left of the national committees and works councils? In what hands are businesses today