A step forward

Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek is catching a lot of flak from President Vaclav Klaus, among others, for his plans to provide symbolic compensation to ethnic German anti-fascist fighters who were wrongfully expelled from Czechoslovakia at the end of the Second World War.

Paroubek, a Social Democrat, is the first Czech prime minister to speak publicly about the need for some type of reconciliation with the nearly 2.5 million expelled Germans, known as Sudetens because most came from the border Sudetenland region annexed by Hitler in 1938. The annexation was supported by most ethnic Germans, and that support was among the chief reasons they were expelled, stripped of property and citizenship. A few thousand Germans who could prove they fought the Nazis were not sent into exile, but most of these relocated to Germany voluntarily after the war.

While the main Sudeten German organization, Landsmannschaft, is right in certain respects that the proposed compensation illegitimately divides Sudeten Germans into good and bad categories, it seems more important that Paroubek is perhaps putting his own neck on the line a bit to make any sort of attempted reconciliation.