Victims of Genocide

By April 4, 1945, the Red Army had conquered most of Slovakia and put it under the authority of Benes" 's government. In a reign of terror, 28,000 Slovaks were accused of high treason, and 11,800 sentenced to jail or execution to discredit and destroy the desire for Slovak independence. Tiso was hung in public. Worse was the fate of the non-Slavic minorities. Benes"'s April 5, 1945 Program declared that the CSR would be a purely Slavic state since the "guests" (living there since the 12th century!) had misbehaved. Their demands for equal rights, then autonomy, were considered to be in themselves proof of collusion with Hitler, for had the CSR not been a perfect democracy? On the basis of this distorted reasoning (which would make fair game of any ethnic minority demanding equal rights), mobs began killing and deporting the native German and Magyar population, with medieval brutality. All Germans had to wear white armbands, making them easy targets. In Prague, for instance, in May, several dozen old men were tied to lampposts on the Charles Bridge, doused with gasoline, and burned alive under the jeers of Czech nationalist mobs. According to an investigation by the German government in the 1950s, the accounting of the victims, and studies by historians such as Fritz-Peter Habel and Alfred de Zayas, about 250,000-350,000 Sudeten Germans were murdered. Even outstanding resisters were murdered, such as the Victorin family, the parents of artist Herta Ondrus"ova-Victorin, Prague Germans who had dared the Gestapo to save the lives of 40 Czech workers wrongly accused of sabotage. Their courageous deed was known, but it did not save them. Surviving non-orthodox Jews, who often had considered themselves of German or Magyar ethnicity before the war, were told to assimilate or leave the country. In 1946, another Benes" decree made the killings not even crimes needing amnesty, but lawful patriotic deeds. These decrees remain valid laws in the Czech Republic to the present day.

In Slovakia, this "final solution" to the "German problem" found little support. Slovaks generally drew the line at trying to assimilate their neighbors, as they had tried during the war, and murdering them. The Slovak communist party, whose prewar support among the Catholic Slovak peasantry had been very limited, had many German and Magyar members. Benes" had ordered the Czech resistance not to work with Sudeten German anti-Nazis, for he needed the picture of their collective support for Hitler to gain Allied support for his murderous plans. But his writ did not extend to wartime Slovakia. Over 250 Carpathian Germans fought with the partisans. Several dozen, including their leader Ferdinand Zimbaur, died in the KZ of Mauthausen. Remembering this, even Slovak communists asked Benes to differentiate between the innocent and the guilty, but to no avail. At least they were able to stop the deportation of Magyars in 1948, so that a substantial number remained in Slovakia.

That any German joined the partisans at all was a wonder, for resistance in Eastern Europe was, thanks to decisions taken by FDR, morally far more ambigous than is commonly realized in the United States. Besides the need for courage to face the police of a totalitarian state, which makes the number of resisters small, whether in the Soviet Union, Third Reich or Red China, Germans had to consider that the Allies, despite their claims to represent decency and humanity, had embraced the mass-murderer "Uncle Joe," and given him Eastern Europe. Now this would be bad for all people living in the East. But, in addition, the Western Allies tarred an entire ethnic group with collective guilt for an ideology most of them had not chosen. Any would-be German partisan had to mull over that he may, in the end, only be helping the murderers of his own women and children. As the events of 1945/46 showed, such fears were not at all far-fetched.

According to Paul Brosz, by April, there still were 21,000 Carpathian Germans in Slovakia. After fighting ceased, perhaps 40,000 returned to their homeland. They were innocent of any crimes, and saw no reason for anxiety. Stripped of all civil rights, they were interned and and many died, usually of willfull neglect from starvation and disease, in camps such as Novaky near Priewitz/Prividza, or massacres such as in Prerau/Moravia on June 18, 1945, when Czech soldiers under captain Karol Pazura pulled 269 mainly Zipser women, children and old men from a train, (young men were POWs or labor camp inmates), had them dig their graves, strip,and killed.The youngest victim was seven months old. Others were carried off as slave laborers to the Soviet Union and died there. In 1949 the Hilfskomitee fuer die ev.-luth. Karpatendeutschen calculated that about 13,000 Germans had been killed between Summer 1944 and Dezember 1946. Paul Brosz, in Das letzte Jahrhundert, p. 66, notes that 23,000 Carpathian Germans were killed during and after the war, 13,000 being civilians murdered between Summer 1944 and the closing of the camps in 1947, plus 9,000 soldiers at the front and about 1,000 civilians deported to Sibiria. This means of blood toll of 16%, or every sixth Carpathian German. By the end of 1946, the majority of interned Carpathian Germans were deported to Germany and Austria. Between 6,000 to 10,000 remained in Slovakia, usually women married to Slovak men, and the village of Hopgarten, (today Chmelnica),protected by its remotedness and a lot of luck.

Saddeningly, the Western Allies agreed to the elimination at the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences in 1945. How could this have happened after the "Good War," supposedly fought for the rights of humans not to be killed or hurt because of their ethnicity? Hitler, looking at the large number of Jews in Communist movements, had concocted a Jewish collective guilt for Communist crimes, ludicrously including anti-Communists and the unpolitical majority. This is why he killed them after Fall 1941. But the Allied governments concocted an equally immoral guilt-by-ethnic-association for the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship, again not caring whether a particular individual had actually resisted the Nazis, or belonged to the majority of ordinary people who, in any dictatorship, are powerless and unpolitical, and merely try to survive. (For comment "Nazifying the Germans," by Prof. Ralph Raico, SUNY Buffalo, use browser, for his site wanders). The result of this policy was the genocide of the East Germans. About 15 million lost the homelands in which Germans had often lived for close to a thousand years, while about 2.5 to 3 million were butchered on the roads, killed in camps, or starved to death. Few had been involved in Nazi crimes (those guys already had fled). In the 1940s, people such as the Anglo-Jewish publisher, politician and humanitarian Victor Gollancz and the Alsatian humanitarian Albert Schweitzer reminded Allied audiences that they had sullied their victory by allowing this massacre of innocents. But then this tragedy was entombed in media silence, as if it had never happened. Few people in the United States are aware of it. A general overview is given by Alfred de Zayas, a senior lawyer for the UN Center on Human Rights in Geneva, and by Prof. Kalman Janics Czechoslovak Policy. A moving litterary treatment has been written, in English, by the young writer Astrid Julian, called Irene's Song. Her short story is about the Danube Suebians. But what Carpathian Germans, and so many others, went through, was similar.

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The Search for Justice

In Stuttgart, Rev. Desider Alexy and Rev. Jakob Bauer founded in 1946 relief societies for Lutherans and Catholics, united in 1950 as the Karpatendeutsche Landsmannschaft. Its first speaker (we do not have presidents), was Anton Birkner. At first, the need was to lobby for relief for Carpathian Germans expelled to Germany and Austria, a task that continued into the 1960s, when the last Carpathian Germans slave laborers were released from Sibiria. There also was a constant trickle of individuals who either fled, or were allowed to join their families in the West. To house its old people, the KDL initiated a building cooperative, Karpatenland, that built several old peoples' homes and a housing development near Stuttgart. Today, the main task is to keep the memories alive. The KDL publishes the monthly Karpatenpost and the annual Karpatenjahrbuch,with serious, professionally researched, articles on local history and folklore. They built a museum in Karlsruhe, so that their existence would not be forgotten. The museum, with 5 rooms, and research library with 4,000 books and an archives, is run by the Karpatendeutsches Kulturwerk, founded on the initiative of Julius Robert Luchs (1901 Kaesmark, 1988 Korbach/Germany). Those who were able to remain in Austria formed their own Landsmannschaft, and publish the Heimatblatt der Karpatendeutschen, now six times a year. A memorial stone in Hainburg/Austria, tells of our people's tragic fate.

There were Czech and Slovaks leaders in exile who recognized that a horrible crime had been committed. In 1953, the Slovak National Council in Exile (represented by Matus" C^ernak and Karol Sidor), concluded a treaty with the KDL promising that in a free Slovakia, German innocents would be as welcome as other exiles. The treaty was endorsed on July 22, 1953 by the influential Slovak League in America, with whom the KDL had close contacts, especially under its leader Filip Hrobak. Hrobak also came to the annual convention of the Carpathian Germans in Stuttgart in 1961 and reiterated that in a free Slovakia, Germans would gain restitution. In 1955, the Czech resistance hero, general Lev Prchala, now head of the National Executive Committee, one of several Czech exile groups, concluded a similar treaty with the Sudeten Germans.

But their exile groups faded in the 1970s. In the CSSR itself, the Germans were "cleansed" from history as well. Every German artifact was declared a Slavic creation, from Meister Paul, a famous Carpathian German medieval woodcarver, to the famous beer of Budweis and Pilsen in the Sudetenland. After the CSSR became free in 1989, the new president Vaclav Havel denounced the Vertreibung as immoral. Justice seemed to win, in the end. But then Havel changed his tune. Stung by the strong Czech nationalist reaction that endangered his reelection, in 1995, at an extraordinary speech before the Charles University in Prague, he attacked the wish of the exiles to return by blaming ordinary Sudeten Germans for Nazi crimes in Bohemia, using Benes'" wartime lies, and attacking people who disagreed with this collective guilt thesis as close to the Nazis.These lies were then the basis of the 1997 Czech-German "Reconciliation" Agreement, which denounces only the brutality of the deportation, but not the deportation itself, and precludes any return, even if the victims purchased back their own former homes. The Czech political class wants the results of the ethnic cleansing to be final. Sudeten Germans were scandalized by this heartless cynicism.

The number of slain Sudeten Germans had been calculated with great care by the Statistical Office of the German Federal Republic in the 1950s, and was probably too low since it overestimated the number of deportees sent to the future GDR. So far, no one had seen any factual reason to dismiss these findings, which tallied with what survivors knew about who had survived from their home communities. But now nationalist Czech historians proceeded through various accounting tricks to pretend that "only" Sudeten 40,000 Germans were slain, while hiking the number of "Czech" victims (notably by including Jews and Gypsies who had not felt to be Czech when alive), in an Orwellian juggling with corpses intended to make the number of German victims less than the number of Czech victims. For Carpathian Germans, the death toll was put at "several hundred"! At the urging of the German Kohl-government, eager to get on with improving foreign relations and capitalist trade, the Czech-German Historical Commission in 1996 validated these propaganda figures.

A poll printed in Die Welt showed that, unlike the current "reeducated" German political caste, which, educated mostly in the 1960s, has been greatly influenced by collective guilt notions, (for comment, see Raico, above), most Germans agreed with the scandalized Sudeten Germans that this was no basis for friendship within the European Union, which the Czech Republic hopes to join. So does Gernot Facius, Welt's humanist grand old man, in editorials such as on October 12, December 11, 1996, Jan. 21, Febr. 17, May 24, 1997, see Die Welt,the SPD politician Peter Glotz, and among Czechs, former dissidents such as the historian Bohumil Dolezal, the philosopher Petr Prihoda, and Chess champion Ludek Pachman. So does the Bavarian State Government. The ties between Bavaria and neighboring Sudetenland had been close, and after the war many deportees settled there. It agreed to the treaty only with the reservation that it must be not a closure, but a first step that will enable talks convincing the Czech public of the need to come clean before God and History. Another fighter for the truth is historian Frantisek Hybl, who after years of agitation to an often hostile crowd convinced the city of Prerau (Presov) in Moravia to erect a German/Czech memorial to the Carpathian Germans massacred there.

In the United States, historians such as Charles Ingrao and the Jewish-Hungarian Istvan Deak remind people that, as Deak stressed in 1996, "Nor is the murder and expulsion of the Bosnian muslims any more of a criminal act than was the murder and expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, both being based on the monstrous principle of collective guilt and preventive action." (Vertreibung).

After this betrayal by a German government they had trusted, the Sudeten Germans face now the arduous task of educating the public, which they had neglected to do since the justice of their position seemed so obvious. They also had believed the coldwar propaganda that democracies are naturally virtuous. The only obstacle seemed the Communist dictatorship. This will become even more arduous under the new socialist- ecologist government elected in Germany in September 1998. It was elected to deal more effectively with the very high unemployment rate. Yet, as most of its members belong to the '68ers, who believe that human rights are not universal, but can be withdrawn from politically incorrect ethnic groups, in this case Germans, the new government is likely to be very damaging to the flickering hope for recognition held by the victims of the Vertreibung, as the utterances made in late October 1998 by the new Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to the Polish government hint. See the event page for current political happenings. [To the top of the Webpage]

The New Slovak Republic

Though not a complete vindication, the relationship with the newly free Slovakia became better than expected. In April 1990, at a workshop in Stuttgart, KDL speaker Isidor Lasslob introduced two envoys of the provincial Slovak government, Dr Pavel Hollak and Anton Snahican. Dr. Pollak spoke the words the exiles had longed for: "Our first task can only be to honestly ask the Carpathian Germans for forgiveness for their suffering from 1944 to 1946. We wish to clear that path, to be able again to walk on it freely, as brothers with Christian love and respect." The official commemoration of the 1944 Slovak Uprising in 1990 also included, for the first time, a recognition of its innocent victims, and an incipient debate in the press about the doubtful nature of the competing hagiographies around the uprising created by Benes"ists and Communists to legitimize their rule.

The official declaration of the Slovak parliament of 13.Feb.1991 was more ambigous--fair to the history of Carpathian Germans until 1918, but then scapegoating that small and powerless minority for all that went wrong in Slovakia from 1918 to 1945, especially the anti-Jewish policies of the Tiso regime.The KDL in Germany and Austria, while welcoming the declaration in general, rejected the latter part as blatantly untrue. But the Slovak government refused to amend it. Slovak President Michael Kovac" suggested a meeting of historians to clear things up, but it met only once in 1992, and again only in September 1998. After 1992, the commemorations of the uprising again turned hagiographical and omitted any mention of the civilians murdered by the partisans. Slovakia has its rabid nationalists, of course, while fifty years of hate propaganda have left their mark on public opinion and popular stereotypes, and fill newspapers and schoolbooks. Others, though personally more open to the truth, found out that German-bashing pays, especially when approaching American and West European politicians, media and academia, thus allowing the new state to bypass its moral obligations to one of its former minorities. Remaining Carpathian Germans have already received over 20% of their property confiscated in 1946, (mainly derelict fields in isolated villages, and even there without the buildings, but still...) while the Czechs have returned nothing to the few thousand Germans survivors in Bohemia and Moravia, using the Benes-decrees as legal basis to deny elementary justice. But political and economic reasons have prevented so far the abolition of the racist Benes" decrees in Slovakia, the restoration of all property to the survivors still living there, not to speak about a right of return for the deportees. Right now, legally, they are treated just like ordinary tourists and cannot even purchase back their old homes.

Still, despite the raw wound left by the Benes" decrees, it must be stressed that compared to the post- Communist Czech Republic and Poland, the second Slovak state has done much for its demonized minority. Slovak works begin to acknowledge the existence and contributions of their German countrymen. The Slovak government allowed the creation of the Karpatendeutscher Verein, gives some financial support to its monthly Karpatenblatt, gave it a seat on the Roundtable for Minorities at the Interior Ministry, and basically treats Germans just like the other minorities. A KDV member, Augustin Lang, even became Slovak consul-general in Munich for a while.

The KDV was founded in 1990 in Metzenseifen. The first leader was Matthias Schmoegner (1990-91), followed by Wilhelm Gedeon, (1991-94), Gertrud Greser, (1994-2000) and Bartholomaeus Eiben (2000-). Like the KDL, the KDV is organized in Ortsgemeinschaften (village communities), of which in 2000 there were 34 with a total of 4600 members. The OGs are grouped into five regions, (Pressburg area; Hauerland; Upper Zips; Lower Zips; Bodwa-Valley and Kaschau).

Working closely with the KDL in Stuttgart, notably the energetic and politically well-connected (as long as Klaus Kinkel was German foreign minister) Oskar Marczy, the KDV succeeded in creating the following measures to help the Carpathian German minority: The KDL/KDV presented in Dezember 1992 a plan for bilingual German minority schools to the Slovak Ministry of Culture. It was adopted and most of the measures implemented by 2000. Germany and Austria sent German teachers. The schools are supported since 1999 by the KDL OGs coming from each region. Considering th poverty of the Slovak Republic, each DM 1,000 donated counts a great deal.

Funds from the German government to buy and renovate old buildings in each region to use as German cultural centers. These "Begegnungshaeuser"were opened 1993-1997 in Kesmark (Kes^marok), Einsiedel a.d. Goellnitz (Mnis^ek nad Hnilcom) in the Zips, Metzenseifen (Medzev), Deutsch-Proben (Nitrianske Pravno), Krickerhau (Handlova) in the Hauerland, in Pressburg (Bratislava) and Kaschau (Kos^ice) in the Bodwatal area. The libraries were donated by KDL members, as well as much money. For details, see the events page.

The German government awarded initial grants to develop Carpathian German small businesses. The money, when paid back, is then loaned out again by the Carpathian German Association, a non-profit created for that purpose and headed by former KDV speaker Wilhelm Gedeon. The total sum granted that way was from 1992 to 1999 53.3 million crowns (about $1.2 million). Since 1995, money from repayments is available, too. A total of 185 small businesses, from carpenters to dentists, received funds, saving or creating about 1400 jobs of which the majority benefit Carpathian Germans. (Wilhelm Gedeon, Report in Karpatenpost June 1999, p. 16-17).

The slovak broadcasting network has a half-hour of German radio and TV, and the state subsidizes the Carpathian German press, theater and a handsome museum in Pressburg.

Important is that the Slovak governments since 1990 do not restrict cooperation between the KDV and the KDL in Germany and Austria, for after a half-century of pariah-like existence, the few remnants in Slovakia cannot, yet, support all by themselves these many institutions.

Since the Landsmannschaften in Germany and Austria are unlikely to survive more than another decade--the integration of the third generation just has been too perfect--their gentle nudging of the Slovak Republic to do right at least to the survivors there will abate. Yet there is hope that this small ethnic group will survive in Slovakia, and someday receive the compassion and justice its suffering deserves.

Perhaps a genealogical and heritage circle could be founded in North America, similar to the German-Bohemian Heritage Society, to provide an anchor-society for Carpathian German history and culture after the Landsmannschaften, having fulfilled their destiny, have gone into the gentle night.

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Carpathian Germans in the United States

Many Carpathian Germans, as well as Slovaks and Ruthenes, returned home with their savings. Little is known today about these immigrants to historians.There are several reasons for this. Carpathian Germans were not numerous anywhere, even in cities where they congregated, e.g. Philadelphia, Charleroi, PA, Schenectady, NY, Greater New York, Chicago, Cleveland, or Danbury, CT. Also, unlike Transylvanian Saxons or Danube Suebians, they had not a strong sense of regional ethnicity. Most of them, if they thought at all about this, saw themselves as German-Hungarians. And so, because of their small numbers and lack of desire, Pressburger, Hauerlaender and many Zipsers simply joined existing German or Hungarian parishes and clubs, sometimes Slovak ones. Unlike so many other German immigrants, they did not create many regional societies. Therefore, though individual families may have information about these early immigrants, it is difficult to find material about them as a group. The Deutsch-Ungarischer Bote, also German-Hungarian Herald, published in Cincinatti, Ohio, for all German-Americans from the old Kingdom of Hungary, did not survive in libraries in the United States save for its last six months in 1918, (at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago, miscataloged there as German-American Herald). The other likely source, the Oesterreichisch-Ungarische Zeitung, published in Chicago and New York City from 1881 to after 1912, vanished, too. In Upper Hungary, the Hauerland had no German paper before the war, but news about individual emigrants certainly will be found in the newspapers of Pressburg, and the Kesmarker Karpathen-Post, published from 1879 to 1940. Zipser had a somewhat stronger sense of regional identity, and before World War I founded several K.U.V. (or Krankenunterstuetzungsverein, sickness support society). In the absence of material, the following chapter is intended as sketch, and will be developed as more information comes in.

In New York City, Zipser founded on 12 October 1889 the 1. ZIPSER KUV. The labor daily New Yorker Volks-Zeitung reported once or twice a year about their socials.These small clippings give us a glimpse on early Carpathian German-American life. In 1893, for instance, the Zipser KUV had its 4th annual picnic at Zahler's Clinton Park in Maspeth, L.I., on June 19, and on September 3 a fest at Wavrac's Garden in Tremont, Bronx. The members and guests danced, the men competed at bowling and rope-tugging (prizes $10, $5, $3, not bad when a worker earned $1.50 for 10 hours of hard labor), the ladies in egg-racing and bird-sticking (prizes $5,$3,$2). The articles stressed that, besides Zipser Germans, there were guests from other ethnic groups from Hungary, and "German, Magyar, Croat, and Slavic were spoken together." In any case, all had "recht flott gezecht" (did drink heartily). Whether in 1900 or 1913, the games were the same, and so was the observation that despite rising ethnic conflicts in Central and Eastern Europe, the Zipser Germans mixed easily with their fellow Zipser Slovaks and Magyars. How large was that KUV? Data is scarce, but in 1905 it was noted that it had 183 members and $6,000 in the bank.

The Interwar Years More is known about that period, thanks to obituaries in the monthly Karpatenpost, and an excellent article by Kurt Sauter in the Karpatenjahrbuch 1986. After the war ended, and mail services resumed, Carpathian German-Americans were able to learn about the incredible hunger and dislocation in their home. Relief was not easy to organize. For, as many other German-Americans, they had been attacked and vilified as "hyphenate Huns." Many were undoubtedly intimidated from expressing publicly concern with fellow human beings who happened to be German. That hate-filled atmosphere is well described in David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society, (1980), and Joan Jensen, The Price of Vigilance, (1968). Many individuals discreetly helped their families directly. But this was not always the most efficient. Local relief associations were founded, such as the Zipser Hilfsverein of Philadelphia, and the Zipser House Association of Newark. An estimated 15,000 Zipser lived in the United States at the time. Gustav Adolf Weiss, from New York, (1867-1933), born in Kesmark, decided to organize the Zipser Bund of America. In September 1919, a benefit fest was held in Fram Park in Newark, NJ, followed by a much larger one in 1920 in New York City. Over $1100 were sent to the Zips. Among the organizers were Adolph Kaltstein and Miss Elsa Weiss, of New York. The organization became permanent, a monthly, the Zipser Bote, published from 1920-1928. Till 1930 over 1 million Czech Crowns sent over. Besides saving countless lives from starvation in the aftermath of the war--fighting in the Zips lasted till Summer 1919--the money funded German schools in the Zips. Gustav Adolf Weiss visited in 1922/23. In 1929 he led 120 members to the old homeland, who were honored by their grateful countrymen. In 1933, Weiss was succeeded as president by Alexander Rothberg. The Great Depression severely cut donations, since so many Zipser--usually artisans and skilled workers--had to fear for their own livelyhood. Yet contacts and donations continued till the outbreak of the war.

After the Vertreibung. After the war, and Benes"'s final solution to the German minority, there was no Zipser homeland anylonger. The Zipser Bund collected relief for their deported countrymen, helped those who immigrated to the United States, and then faded away. Its last president, William Dirr, from Zipser Bela, brought its flag to Germany, where it hangs now in the Heimatmuseum in Karlsruhe as a witness to the philanthrophy of Zipser abroad. But organized Carpathian German activities continued, notably under the energetic leadership of the late Reverend Geza Antony.The current president of the Carpathian German Association in the United States is John Gally. We meet annually, either in Danbury, CT or Philadelphia. The meetings are mainly social in nature, but the Association also tries to prevent our little group from being entirely forgotten. There is a memorial stone at the Danbury Lutheran cemetery, and soon there will be a book in English.

An overview over postwar Carpathian German immigration, written by Julius Loisch, has been published in the Karpatenjahrbuch 2000, pp. 161-188. It describes among else the history of Julius Loisch himself, from Muehlenbach/Zips, a former engineer for the US army in Alamogordo, and then for a company making parts for NASA. His sunwind-measurer on Apollo XII worked much longer than expected. Other families noted in that article are the family of Gustav Scharritter from Altwalddorf, Johann Zubak from Hunsdorf, Julius Klein from Muehlenbach, Gesa Knott from Rissdorf, Julius Demko from Kaesmark, Johann Gally from Forberg, Julius Menhardt, Hans Weiss, from Malthern, a hobby painter of great skill and retired manufacturer of parts for NASA in Manchester, CT, (Dynamic Metal Products, Co.), and Otto Maurer, who founded a great cabinetmaking company in Toronto.

If you are a descendant of Germans from the Northern Carpathians, or have an interest in Carpathian German history, culture, or genealogy, come and join us.

posted by lastpioneer at 4:28 PM