Klaus: Expulsion of Sudeten Germans after WWII was logical conclusion of tragic period

Lezaky, East Bohemia, June 24 (CTK) - The post-war transfer of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia was a logical move at the close of a tragic period of Czech history, President Vaclav Klaus said at yesterday's meeting marking the 70th anniversary of the obliteration of the Lezaky village by the Nazis.

The annual commemorative event was attended by several thousands of people.

"For many years we have been asked to forget about the horrors of the war in the name of a general alliance, to feel as guilty as those who are to blame for the Lezaky and Lidice [tragedies] and for many other horrors," Klaus said at the meeting held at the memorial to the massacred inhabitants of Lezaky.

Klaus said the Nazi terror and the fanatic hostility of Germans destroyed the confidence that had been previously built between the Czechs and Germans laboriously and for a long time.

"If Sudeten German Landsmannschaft Franz Pany repeated a month ago that Vaclav Klaus keeps a hostile approach towards Germany, I'd like to tell him now that this is not true," Klaus said.

"I only cannot, do not want to and must not forget what happened in our country and elsewhere in Europe during World War Two," Klaus added.

He again appreciated German President Joachim Gauck for expressing sorrow in early June over the obliteration of the Lidice and Lezaky villages by the Nazis.

"I highly esteem this apologising and accommodating gesture that the German side had made never before. By his gesture, President Gauck indicated that the path towards future does not rest in setting demands but in drawing a lesson from history and showing respect for neighbours. Only such path can lead our nations to a happier future," Klaus said.

Klaus said the razing of Lezaky to the ground was no coincidence. "It was a premediated act by the occupiers that indicated the possible fate of Czechs, who, according to the German Nazis, should have had no place in the future in our thousand-year homeland. In fact millions of our citizens were not far from sharing the fate of the Lezaky inhabitants," Klaus said.

He said it is more and more difficult to keep the legacy and the memento of the tragic events in people's awareness.

"[People's] comprehension of what actually happened, who were the culprits and who the victims, what causes were behind the events and what happened first and what afterwards has been declining," Klaus said with apprehension.

The Nazis razed Lezaky to the ground on June 24, 1942 within their reprisals for the May 27 lethal attack on Deputy Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich by Czechoslovak paratroopers in Prague. The Gestapo uncovered an illegal transmitter near Lezaky that the domestic resistance movement used to communicate with foreign anti-Nazi fighters.

The Nazis executed 34 adult inhabitants of Lezaky later on the same day and another seven in the following days. Eleven children from Lezaky died in a gas chamber in the Chelmno extermination camp on July 25.

The Lezaky tragedy was preceded by the obliteration of the Lidice village, central Bohemia, on June 10. In Lidice, all 173 men were executed, women and children were sent to concentration camps, while some of the children were selected for re-education in Germany. After the war, only 143 women and 17 children returned to the country.