Statue of Edvard Beneš in Prague, identical to the one in Brno (source: Wikimedia Commons)
Let’s forget that Beneš had little to do with Brno and that he was a “loser president” (he ended his first term by surrending to fascists and his second term by surrending to commies). I just can not understand how can the author of Beneš decrees have a statue in front of the Faculty of law.
Beneš decrees was series of laws enacted by Beneš between 1940 and 1945. The most controversial laws were declared shortly after the end of war – and they were filled with principes of collective guilt, national chauvinism and central planned economy:
- In May 1945, Beneš confiscated the property of German and Hungarian citizens of Czechoslovakia (some 3,000,000+ people). You had to prove you were actively fighting against Nazis to save your property.
- He also nationalized major branches of industry, from coal mines to banks. Three years before communists took the power, Beneš de-facto destroyed the free market economy in the country. (This injustice has never been corrected by the governments elected after 1989, on the contrary to nationalization caused by communists after 1948.)
- In August 1945, a decree #17 deprived Czechoslovak Germans and Hungarians of Czechoslovak citizenship, which led to the deportation of one fifth of the Czechoslovak population, living in their houses for hundreds of years, to the neighbor countries.
- What makes me sick the most: Beneš stopped investigation of the ethnically-motivated violence that took place in many Czech towns during the summer of 1945. Hundreds of innocent women and children were killed in these months, partially by Czech collaborants who tried to prove how loyal they were to their nation.
I am not saying that Edvard Beneš was an embodiment of evil, nor that all Germans and Hungarians were innocent victims of his laws. However, Beneš lived in an era that had nothing to do with law as we understand it today and his “Expell Them All, Let God Sort Them Out!” decrees prove it quite well. There are many people who deserve a statue in front of the Faculty of law much more than Beneš does.
Too bad that the Czech republic is still not ready for a cold-blooded debate about all the things that happened between years 1938 and 1948.
Your comments at Facebook
Yesterday I asked this question: This weekend, a statue of Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš will be mounted in front of the Faculty of law. Do you think he deserves such an honour?
I liked your answers:
- Tomáš Kutypa:
don’t know what common have Beneš and communism…I think he should be there..
- Andre Bienvenu:
No. And why in front of the faculty of law? I’m not taking up for the Germans and Austrians, but didn’t he illegally take their land and expel them all? Not all the Germans were Nazis in Czechoslovakia and many of the families had lived here for several generations.
- Peter Fronček:
kind of ironic, that the faculty of law used to be gestapo headquarters…
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
It´s a disgrace for a 21st century EU-member state to honour the liquidator of the Sudeten Germans in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. What was the “reward” for that? Communism, decline of the once flourishing economy, genocide….
Look and see! Go to the borderland to assure yourself what was his “credit”……
I am a young Austrian with relatives of as well Sudeten German and Czech origin….
Edvard Benes was one of the worst ethnic cleanser of the 20th century. The very definition of crimes against humanity include the act of ethnic cleansing.
As such, Benes was a war criminal and a criminal against humanity, far worse than Milosevic was. Benes was also a great nationalist hypocrit. In 1945, he accused the Sudeten of having betrayed ‘their’ forceful country : Tchecoslovaquia, omitting to say that they had been annexed against their will to that new country in 1919, by the force of arms (tchech legion). But Benes himself had also betrayed ‘his’ country Austria Hungary during the first world war, and curiously he didn’t consider himself as been a traitor…