Esslingen 2005
“I was very critical of the resettlement or displacement. To do this, you have to understand the background. The so-called Sudetenland had supported Hitler. And in the 1937 elections, supposedly about 90% of the electorate voted for the Nazis. And the Sudeten Germans also took part. And then of course Czechoslovakia was also destroyed. And I can understand the reaction of the Czechs even though I don’t support them. If you speak to people from the Sudeten German compatriot, they of course say: that was a great injustice and forget what went before.
So: the Germans have been driven out by the Czechs. But my wife and her family had to flee the Sudetenland in the middle of the night in September 1938 because they had been threatened. Many of the Sudeten Germans forget that Jews and Czechs were expelled by the Germans in 1938. On the other hand, I thought in 1946 that people should be tried who committed crimes. That didn’t happen. Instead, an entire ethnic group has been expelled, regardless of whether they were Nazis or Social Democrats.
We have a good friend, my wife has known him since she was a child, a German speaker who deserted the Wehrmacht in Italy in 1943 - that was a very dangerous thing - and joined the British because he was against Hitler. When he got to the British, he reported to the Czechs. He wanted to fight Hitler in the Czech Legion. The Czechs did not accept him because they considered him German, although he considered himself a German-speaking Prague citizen who spoke Czech well. And he was also expelled in 1946. He is now very active in an association for German-Czech understanding.”