Klaus: Czech post-war acts against Germans nothing like Nazi crimes

Nov 17, 2010, 13:40 GMT

Prague - Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Wednesday that post-war violence by Czechs against ethnic Germans in what was then Czechoslovakia was not as harsh as Nazi atrocities before and during World War II and is not at all comparable.

Klaus said he was frustrated with the excessive attention the media and politicians have paid to Czech post-war crimes, the brutality of which was sparked by Nazi violence.

'We certainly cannot be proud of what some of our fellow citizens did after the war that just ended,' he said at a gathering marking a bloody Nazi crackdown on Czech universities 71 years ago. 'But we must also not lose a sense of proportion.'

Former Czechoslovakia was home to a large ethnic German minority. Soon after the war ended, some Czechs lynched and massacred their German neighbours out of revenge for the war-time atrocities by the Adolf Hitler's regime.

In the best-known case, more than 750 German civilians were murdered in the north-western town of Postoloprty.

More than 3 million Czechoslovak Germans were later expelled to Germany in an act of collective punishment.

Recently, police found remains of six people, likely German civilians murdered after the war, buried at a field near the village of Dobronin.

Klaus has promoted a nationalist stance on the matter. In 2005, he slammed then Czech premier Jiri Paroubek for apologizing to German expellees who held anti-Nazi views and were loyal to Czechoslovakia.

An avowed eurosceptic, Klaus also conditioned his signature under the European Union's Lisbon Treaty, which overhauled the bloc's institutions, with an exemption that he said would protect Czechs from potential property claims by the expellees and their heirs.

The anniversary of the November 17, 1939, Gestapo raids on Prague university professors and students has long been commemorated as International Student Day.

A crackdown on a student march 60 years later kicked off events of the so-called Velvet Revolution, which led to the fall of Communism in former Czechoslovakia in 1989.

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