Old wounds

last updated 8 January 2015

Prague

The German province of Bavaria this week protested the unveiling in Prague of a statue of Czechoslovakia’s first postwar president, Edvard Benes. One of Benes’ first official acts was to expel ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, a Czech province heavily populated by Germans who supported the Nazis. Hitler annexed the province in 1938 and Czechoslovakia got it back after World War II. Descendants of the Sudeten Germans, most of whom now live in Bavaria, have been demanding reparations for what they say was an act of ethnic cleansing. This week, some Sudeten activists likened Benes to Stalin—a comparison Czech parliament speaker Lubomir Zaoralek called “ridiculous.”