In connection with the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945 and the massacres of the population of the liberated territories, let us remember the personality of the President of Czechoslovakia, Dr. Edvard Beneš, who actively participated in crimes against humanity. Let us not be surprised that the Communists supported the law: the President, Dr. Edvard Beneš, was responsible for the state - and its destruction.J.Š.
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The following interview with me was broadcast on Kossuth Rádió on 2 August 2020 on the Sunday programme Without Borders on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the publication of the Benes Decrees. The reporter was Mária Haják, radio correspondent in Bratislava.
Mr. Géza Dunajszky, why did you become interested in the personality of the politician Edvard Beneš, or as many say Eduard Beneš, and what kind of person was he? What motivated you to do so?
Géza D. - When in 2007 the Slovak Parliament confirmed the validity of the Beneš Decrees, I was shocked and it gave me the need to re-examine things. Since my early childhood, I have retained certain memories of situations that are incompatible with good morals and humanity in general. In addition, I have also witnessed crimes that clearly fall into the category of war crimes. At the same time, I was constantly confronted with the propaganda that Benes and his government, and subsequently the Czech and Slovak public, considered us Hungarians and Germans to be co-responsible for the dissolution of the First Czechoslovak Republic. This aroused my interest in seeking an explanation as to how someone could be - I cannot find a better word now - such a scoundrel as to deceive all the great powers, France, England and even the United States. The only one with whom he found great understanding from the beginning was the big Slavic brother, the Soviet Union, but I have the feeling from certain sources that even there they did not trust Benes very much.
It also turned out that the Soviets had reason not to trust him, because Benes was spying on them too. Now it is no secret that Benes was a double agent. He was passing information directly to Stalin in the Soviet Union about the upcoming decisions of the French and English governments, and in the same way he was supplying internal information about Stalin's plans to the French and English governments. Benes was thus a scoundrel of great calibre, who would also surely have won the Nobel Prize for Scoundrels for his diplomatic exploits. But was he really such a great diplomat that he deserved to have a statue of him in Prague's Hradčany? Because the fact is, his statue is there. But at what cost did he achieve it? The Czech people and nation should consider this more carefully, because it is a great shame for the Czech nation to have a statue of such a racist, war criminal as Edvard Beneš in Prague Castle.
After all, the Czechs say that Edvard Beneš fought all his life for Czech independence, for the creation of Czechoslovakia, and that is why the Czech people are grateful to him ..
Géza D. - It is also interesting that he is regarded as a democrat. In the eyes of the Czechs, Benes is a man who has always respected human rights. Yes, but that was very deceptive. Respect for the law only applied to the Czech people, but no longer to the Slovaks. His democracy was therefore highly selective, and such a democracy is worse than Nazism and Stalinism combined.
In the course of my research, I realized that Benes combined the tactics of Nazism and Stalinism in his domestic politics and was able to achieve success with this apparent democracy. We can say that he essentially deceived the superpowers. He presented himself as a man who outwardly always respected human rights, but did everything he could to conceal the internal directives he had created for the non-Czech peoples on the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic. The democratic nature of the measures and decrees he issued in order to govern is very doubtful, because the parliament in Czechoslovakia did not function after the war. He had to fulfil the objectives announced in the government programme (Kosice Government Programme, 5 April 1945), but most of these measures were aimed at expelling non-Czech citizens from the country. In Slovakia they were directed against Hungarians and Carpathian Germans, and in the Czech part against the Germans who lived there. (This makes it clear that Benes was a racist, war criminal.)
It is safe to say that, according to today's assessment, Benes was a ruthless man who was, after all, willing to use anything to achieve his goal. But we also know that he was an educated man who knew foreign languages and had insight. Where is the point at which this educated man deviates from the path, the path of an educated man, and turns with a certain determined hatred towards non-Slavic peoples?
Géza D. - His hatred stemmed from the fact that during the existence of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the Hungarians achieved their goal by gaining relative independence within the monarchy. The Czechs did not succeed. For this reason, Benes turns with immeasurable hatred towards the Hungarians and Austrians, and at the same time hates the German nation. Therefore, he turns to France and England to achieve his political goals with their help. (As a professor of Slavic Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, he stressed in his writings and speeches that "the Austro-Hungarian monarchy is a melting pot for the other nations living there, so it has no place on the map of Europe.") He spoke excellent French and English, so diplomatically he sought allies to achieve his own power goals: the creation of an independent Czech-Slovak state. This is how he came into contact with the two powers behind the scenes. It is no secret that he was a member of the French Masonic Lodge. He was therefore strongly attached to this European power. But less so to the English and the Americans, whom he tried to avoid with a wide arc. In the course of my research, I have come across concrete evidence that he can thank French influence for having managed to bypass the Hungarians and Germans in the Paris peace negotiations on the question of deportations in order to create a new, safer Czechoslovak Republic. And the big Slavic brother was his natural ally, even if Stalin was initially quite cold to him, but he was happy to use Benes for the sake of his aims. Specifically, Benes's immeasurable greed and his frustration, which stemmed from the fact that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy (Emperor Franz Josef) had given the Czechs the "shaft" in the year of the settlement (1867).
It is also questionable to what extent the reticent, intelligent T. G. Masaryk tolerated him side by side, and we know that he cooperated with him quite a bit. We also know that for the Slovaks the number one hero is Milan Rastislav Štefánik, who actively contributed to the creation of the first Czechoslovakia and who clearly hated Benes, and Benes hated him. So these human relations were very bad at that time.
Géza D. - There are serious reasons for that. I also followed it and found out what was the cause. It is known that during and just after World War I, Czechs and Slovaks living in America organized a collection to arm the Czechoslovak legion soldiers in the Soviet Union, where the legionnaires were recruited from the Czech and Slovak prisoners there. Six million dollars were raised, which were delivered to Europe, to Geneva, and deposited in a bank in Masaryk's name. Benes was a political nobody at that time. He was only a lecturer in the department of Slavonic studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. But somehow he got his hands on the six million dollars. He convinced T. G. Masaryk that this money could even be doubled by playing in the casino in Monte Carlo, whereupon all six million dollars were collected and Benes lost the money. (This made T. G. Masaryk an accomplice and he had to tolerate him).
When Stefanik arrived in Geneva, saying that he was flying to the Soviet Union in his private plane and needed the money, it turned out that not a cent of the six million dollars was left. In addition to Benes, three other people were present at the Geneva meeting, M. R. Štefánik, T. G. Masaryk, and Major Ivan Štefl, an officer of the French Foreign Legion who had formed the Czechoslovak Nazdar Division out of Western Czech and Slovak prisoners of war from France. By the way, this Geneva story is documented in Czech, the authors are Václav Bureš and Zbyněk Ludvík and the title of the publication is "The Book of the Black Past". At the meeting in Geneva, the Czech major brought with him the French humour newspaper Petit Parisien, which was similar to our former picture weekly Ludas Matyi. In it was a cartoon depicting Benes, entitled "The King of Roulette", having fun and throwing away millions of dollars in a casino in Monte Carlo, with the text "What a gentleman, what finances Edvard Benes, lecturer of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the Sorbonne, has at his disposal". Major Ivan Štefl brought with him proof of where the money, collected in America, had gone. Beneš's only helper at the time - this is also a very interesting turn of phrase - was the Hungarian-born financial advisor Zoltán Goldberg. (Born in Szobraniec, he graduated from the gymnasium in Mukačevo/Munkács and before World War I was a student of E. Beneš at the University of Economics in Prague. Later, under the name Zdeněk Toman, he was head of military counterintelligence in the Benes government in 1945-48. A film was made about him, which premiered in 2018 under the title TOMAN (author's note). Zoltán Goldberg introduced Benes to influential people in France and they helped him, giving him a loan of six million dollars and even more to establish the Czechoslovak Legion in the Soviet Union.
After the meeting in Geneva, they parted with Beneš, saying that when Czechoslovakia was founded, he would certainly be brought before the people's court for his actions. To avoid disgrace at home, both Stefanik and Major Štefl had to disappear from the ranks of the living. This is clear and no longer a secret, at least not in the Czech Republic. I have a friend, a local historian from Vrakúni/Vereknya, who deals specifically with the circumstances of M.R. Štefánik's death, and it is clear that Benes had the plane of the returning Štefánik shot down.
The company and its soldiers, who were entrusted with this task, gradually suffered interesting accidents with the "help" of assassins. When the last two Czech soldiers of this company noticed that their military comrades were dying under unexplained circumstances (in the early 1920s), they fled west to France. Then, while abroad, they wrote a true story about a plane crash, that they thought the Italian flag on Stefanik's plane was Hungarian. Stefanik was still alive after his plane was shot down and crashed. And then what they did to keep him alive is no secret now!
In connection with what was going wrong in Czechoslovakia, the name of Benes was everywhere...
Géza D. - Yes, that's why I started looking into it, because he also committed seven such acts against us that could be classified as war crimes, for which he really should have ended up at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. I have recorded those sins because my family was also a victim of these brutalities, which also had fatal consequences. This included the expulsion from the country, which affected 31 780 people, and it was mainly the Hungarian intelligentsia who were sent to the border with 20, 30 and 50 kilograms of luggage, and they could only be glad that this criminal act was dealt with in this way. Interestingly, members of the German intelligentsia were allowed to take luggage weighing up to 200 kg with them during their deportation from the Czech Republic.
In the meantime, a record of a meeting of the Benes government on 4 December 1945 has been found. It was found by historian Katalin Vadkerty in the Beneš presidential archives and translated into Hungarian by László Koncsol in the 1980s. Poor Laci was also disgraced in connection with this because the original, typescript copy of the translation came from the archives of Jozef Danaž, from the Hungarian department of the Slovak Secret Service (SIS). The translation was found by the aforementioned friend of mine, a local historian from Vrakún, and he brought it to me because he knew that I was dealing with this subject.
Little is said about how Hungarians living in Czechoslovakia were removed from the Slovak-Hungarian border before the population exchange, so that Hungarians would not come into contact with Hungarians. Around 10 January 1946, the Benes government began to evacuate the population with the help of the army. They had a list that included mainly wealthier farmers, members of the Hungarian Party. At that time, the displaced people were allowed to take half a wagonload of movables with them. Here the government power was "generous" to them, families could take half a wagon of personal belongings and 84,809 people were taken from villages along the border line. There were those who were later taken back to Bohemia because Hungary was no longer able to accommodate so many people. For this reason, too, Hungary had to act quickly to deport the German minority there.
On December 5, 1945, in Prague, the Beneš government began negotiations with the Hungarian Foreign Minister János Gyöngyösi on an agreement regarding the exchange of the Hungarian-Slovak population and other conditions included in the peace treaty. The ten-point Czechoslovak demand, approved at a meeting of the Beneš government on 4 December 1945, stated that Czechoslovakia would undertake the removal of Hungarians living in the Slovak-Hungarian border zone. This was also communicated to the Hungarian Foreign Minister János Gyöngyösi. Only where the linguistic border coincided with the national border were Hungarians allowed to remain in villages with a Slavic majority.
These demands were influenced by the fact that there were approximately 720,000 Hungarians living in Czechoslovakia. Thus, a plan was devised that only 100,000 Hungarians could stay, the rest had to go either to Hungary or to Bohemia instead of the Germans. It was assumed that the 100,000 Hungarians would then easily merge with the majority nation. They were to be relocated to the factories in the north under the pretext that they were educated and skilled workers. This was just another way of covering up acts that also fall into the category of war crimes such as the forcible change of ethnic proportions.
First, the deportation of Czech Germans in the Sudetenland began so that there would be enough space for the Hungarians who were to be relocated there. Benes deported 43,546 people to Bohemia, including 5,422 children under the age of 14, who were forced to leave their native country with their parents and were transported in inhuman conditions, in open wagons, in minus 20 to 25 degree cold.
The history of reslovakisation is also interesting. (According to the government's theory, it was just a readmission of the Hungarianized Slovaks into the bosom of the Slovak nation, which the Slovaks strongly insisted on). It is also noteworthy that more Hungarian families from the Upper Lands and also Carpathian Germans applied for reslovakization than the naturalization committees approved. On the basis of the data we now have, there were 381,995 applicants and 282,594 people were approved for change of nationality. Even so, this is a huge number.
In the spring of 1945, Benes allowed the deportation of 6,973 people to the Soviet Union. (This is only the number of people deported from the civilian population. Another 478,000 prisoners of war made their way to the Soviet Union from two Czechoslovak concentration camps. One camp was located in Moravia in the castle park of Rajec-Jestřebí, where about 300,000 Hungarian soldiers were concentrated and handed over by the Czechoslovak authorities to the Soviets. The second POW camp was located in Bratislava, in a large courtyard, in the stables and outbuildings of today's Kutuzov barracks (formerly the Hussar wing), from where about 178,000 soldiers and lieutenants were sent to the Soviet GUVIP camps.
The victims of the massacre, 5304 people, were buried in 211 graves. This includes victims of the massacres of the Hlinka Guard and German fascists. I wrote a whole series about it called "It Happened Seventy-Five Years Ago" which was published on MA7. For this purpose, I have studied hundreds of documents over the last seven months. Although there is already an incredible amount of literature on the subject, we still know very little about these horrors. This can be seen in the fact that when I wrote, for example, about the executions of partisans and citizens of Jewish and Roma origin detained after the Slovak National Uprising in Kremnica and Nemecká by members of the Hlinka Guard and Nazi anti-partisan units, the interest from readers was enormous. Thousands (38,000) of people read the article in one day.
Hungarians read it, Hungarians are interested in it. Would it be important to translate these articles into Slovak and publish them in Slovak and in Czech
Géza D. - It is interesting that these stories are also available in Czech and Slovak. I found these documents in Slovak and Czech. On the other hand, it is true that there are very few publications that are written about these events in a readable, understandable way even for an ordinary person.
I think that is why the ordinary person, the average citizen, does not know about these events
Géza D. - It is possible to publish an article on a bilingual website where it can be read in Slovak and Hungarian. In addition, I have already initiated my latest book, "Escape from the Death Camp", which specifically tells the story of the 90 survivors executed in Petržalka, based on the stories of three of them who managed to escape from the death camp, and I will have it translated into Slovak. I've already found a sponsor for it. I am also trying to get a publisher so that the book can be published in Slovak.
I have omitted the information about the forced eviction of the population as one case among many war crimes. The number of displaced Hungarians here was 68 407. If I add up the figures, of the 720 000 Hungarians in the Upper Countries, Benes made almost half of them "disappear" from Slovakia. No wonder, then, that only 451,000 people claimed to be Hungarian in the 1950 census.
(It should also be said that in 1950 several Hungarian families gave up the forced identity change and returned to the nationality of their ancestors, including our family. After the death of Edvard Beneš, almost everyone in our family again supported their Hungarianness. The harsh words of criticism that my maternal grandfather used to say to his children during the pilgrimage in Mokranec played a significant role in this return.)
There is one more interesting statistic I came across. A special method was used to calculate how much the number of Hungarians in the Upper Country had decreased from 1920 to 2011. The method is based on the results of the 1910 census, from which it is possible to calculate the percentage of each nationality living in a given locality. For example, in 1910 there were 78,000 people living in Bratislava and its catchment area. Rounded off, 31% were Germans, 30% Hungarians, 17% Slovaks and 5% Czechs, the remaining 17% were Jews, Bulgarians, Roma, Ukrainians, etc. If this percentage is projected into the ethnic distribution of the 420,000 inhabitants of Bratislava in the 2011 data, there should be 130,200 Germans, 126,000 Hungarians, 71,400 Slovaks, and 21,000 Czechs living in Bratislava and the catchment area (1% represents 4,200 people).
All of this would have been true if two world wars, the Benes Decrees, forced evictions and bloodless assimilation had not occurred in the meantime, but also bloody genocide (Romani, Jewish, German, Hungarian)! With such a calculation, we know how many Hungarians disappeared from each settlement. This work was done by my colleague Zoltán Papp, a teacher who studied geography and history in Nitra and taught in Buzita and Moldova nad Bodvou. He has published a book called 'Genocide without Blood in the Upper Country', in which he shows, using the examples of individual villages, how many Hungarians disappeared from each settlement in Slovakia between 1910 and 2011.
Physically, these people exist, but they are no longer, as far as their identity is concerned, Hungarians, Germans or Ruthenians. Because also the Ruthenians have almost completely disappeared, not only the members of the Jewish communities. Our compatriots of Jewish nationality have also almost disappeared from Slovakia, although until 1910 they had communities with a large membership in this area.
Of the 155,000 Carpathian Germans (in 1910, that was the number of Germans who claimed this nationality), 62,000 were Germans in 1946, when the Germans were counted again, but by 1950 their number had dropped to only one-tenth, to 6,290. And their current number, according to the 2011 census, is just 4,000. Hungarians are better off by comparison, but as far as the final tally is concerned, 1,650,000 Hungarians disappeared from towns and villages in Slovakia between 1910 and 2010. I repeat, one million six hundred and fifty thousand Hungarians disappeared from the Upper Country in one hundred years! In the light of this fact, this decline is a tragedy.
So we are talking about Hungarians whose descendants could no longer be born because they themselves were Slovakized, killed, expelled!
Géza D. - Exactly! This subtlety, cunning, sophistication of Benes's intention was shown in this very case. The repression eventually resulted, paradoxically, in his becoming the enemy of his entire nation. (Today, this method is also used by the militants of the Islamic State.) That is why after World War II there was such a large number of non-Germans changing their identity, and the same is happening today! The same idea, the same method, the same selective democracy is still used in Slovakia today, which was invented earlier by Benes. That is the danger for us Hungarians. It is no longer merely the physical liquidation of persons of Hungarian nationality, but also a spiritual liquidation. It is the wrong way to become a good, i.e. loyal, Slovak Hungarian today. Instead of the expression 'Hungarian living in Slovakia', it is now said in a sophisticated, liberal formulation that he is a good Slovak citizen. This is the danger of the concept of Béla Bugár and the Most-Híd party, that they, too, have adopted this liberal drivel. That is why our numbers are dwindling rapidly to such an extent, because there is self-destruction among Hungarians in the Upper Countries.
And what happened after the war with President Benes? How did he die? The way he lived?
Géza D. - Clement Gottwald was the one who removed him from power, but it took strong help from the Soviets to do that. Benes was under pressure for being a double agent and was given an ultimatum. (He was threatened with disclosure of his troubled past and embezzlement of American donations). This eventually forced him to resign as head of government late in the evening of February 24, 1948, and hand over power to Gottwald. As proof of his marketability, he was presented with an invoice with his signature confirming that he had received tens of thousands of dollars from Stalin or the Soviet secret service at Christmas 1944 to cover his necessary expenses. By this blackmail they succeeded in removing him from power. There are several legends about what happened at Prague Castle that day. But one thing is certain. Benes was physically broken during the negotiations, he became ill and had a stroke. (He had had a minor stroke earlier, in 1947.) Zoltán Goldberg (alias Zděnek Toman), who, on behalf of the French, supervised the Czech government's budgetary indicators and public finances and arranged new loans for Beneš, in return for which the French companies Zoltán Goldberger alias and the people behind the scenes received property confiscated from the Germans and Hungarians. It was he who helped Bedřich Smetana escape from Brno prison via Hungary to Israel on October 10, 1947, to prevent the revenge of his brother Ernest Bacušan.)
President Beneš was taken unconscious from Prague Castle to Šumava, more precisely to the government department in Sezimovo Ústí, and his condition was supervised by his own family doctor and Beneš's wife. I read another memoir. It is a memoir by Beneš's wife's sister, in which she states that she visited her sister several times in the sanatorium at this time. Benes had a stroke on the night of 24 February 1948 and was then treated in a coma in Sezimovo Ústí. Benes eventually died on 3 September 1948. Between these two dates, his wife's sister visited the family several times. She writes that during her visits Benes regained consciousness several times, his mind became clear and he began to communicate with them. Full of joy, they called the doctor in the hope that he would help Benes' improving condition, but the opposite happened. Benes fell back into a coma. From this Benes' wife's sister concluded, and writes so, that apparently the doctor and Gottwald did everything in their power to prevent Benes from recovering and his memory from ever returning! So the patient suffered to the last moment. So, just as he lived, Edvard Benes was finished!
There is a theory that Benes was deliberately left to die, that is, he was murdered. This hypothesis is confirmed by Vladimír Čermák's article "Why and how was Edvard Beneš assassinated?". We quote: 'E.B. was murdered. On how, why and by whom his life was ended, the following opinion can be expressed, based on several testimonies - it is therefore not a mere guess."
It is worth tracking down this book by Vladimír Čermák on the internet and reading it.
I spoke to a Czech historian who found that even Hungary did not escape Benes' attention between the two world wars...
Géza D. - Benes was always and everywhere. Our friend, who is now the second man at Charles University in Prague, his chancellor Andrej Tóth, searched in the archives of the presidential office in Prague, specifically among the documents left by President Beneš, and then in the archives of Governor Miklós Horthy in Budapest. He was surprised to find that copies of the minutes of Horthy's cabinet meetings could also be found in the Beneš archives. He traced who wrote these minutes and it turned out that they were written and certified by Horthy's chief of staff. He has not yet revealed his name. He was the person who inserted another proof paper into the typewriter (under the copy paper) and then, after completing the entry, placed it in an envelope, handed it to the engineer of the express train to Prague in the evening, and the entry appeared on Benes's desk the next morning. They were copies of almost every minute of Horthy's cabinet meeting in Budapest. In the same way, Beneš's agents watched every move of János Esterházy, the politician from the Upper Countries, and of Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian governor. Our friend AndrejTóth also found in the presidential archives in Prague reports sent by Benes's intelligence officers from various places about Esterházy.
Andrej Tóth and two of his colleagues began to search the archives on the authority of the former Czech Foreign Minister, Karel Schwarzenberg, who was related to the Esterházy family in Nagylak. Schwarzenberg wanted to know whether or not Esterházy had conducted espionage activities on behalf of Hothy. In the end, it turned out that the spy was not János Esterházy but Miklós Horthy, a fairly high-ranking intelligence officer.
Because of the inconsistency of Hungarian intelligence, Edvard Benes thus knew everything that had happened or was planned at the highest state level in Hungary.
(Rádió Kossuth, Budapest Without Borders, 2.8.2020, HN - edited version of the interview)
Afterword:
This case also proves that Edvard Benes was a very cunning and unscrupulous political chess player. It is almost unbelievable what he accomplished to achieve his goals, how many injustices and deadly crimes (political murder, mass murder, deportations, confiscation of property, forced labour, reslovakisation, savage deportations and population exchanges, etc.)! Czechoslovakia has become a country filled with sin and blood that will not be removed from it for centuries unless the successor states make consoling gestures to the victims. No wonder Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist twice in the last hundred years. But it would be a mistake for the leaders of the successor states to think that they are not to blame and that nothing can be done about this moral filth. I think it should be a priority for them to wash the stain of sin and blood from their country's image as they continue to eat the toxic fruit of a dishonestly acquired country. And the fruits of dispossessed land, burdened with curses over poisoned "apples", spilled blood and suffering, may sooner or later be fatal to all their descendants.
It is also the fault of the governments of the successor states that seventy-five years, including 31 relatively free years - autumn, winter, spring and summer - were not enough for them to confront the consequences of Benes's sins, to make an intelligible plea for forgiveness for the innocent victims. To the members of the German and Hungarian peoples who were unjustly accused and expelled from their homeland, they should apologise sincerely and help us to find the mass graves that have been ploughed together, dig up the corpses that have turned to dust together and bury our dead in the manner of civilised people with Christian religious rites and ecumenical worship.
There is a famous medieval noble saying uttered by a German general during the Nuremberg Trials:
"War does not end and no peace begins until a single fallen or executed soldier remains unburied, in a mass grave!"
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Law is a real social concept based on a large-scale criminal basis
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