They fought against Nazis, but after the War they were treated as enemies by the Czechoslovak Republic. Reason? Their mother tongue was neither Czech nor Slovak.
In 1934, barely one year after Hitler's accession to power, Gestapo arrested a young Czech German Franz Hufnagel of Cheb, who had attempted to smuggle anti-Nazi pamphlets into the territory of the Third Reich. In detention, he was subjected to torture so cruel that he died shortly after his release. Most probably, he was the first victim of the Nazi terror among Czechoslovak antifascists. In 1945, the entire Hufnagel family was deported to Bavaria with under 30 kilograms of personal belongings despite the fact that all of them belonged to the Nazi opposition (R. Ströbinger, Reflex 22/2002). Many a similar story has been completely forgotten since then. Minority anti-Nazi movements had never been among frequent research focuses of Czech historians, perhaps mainly because the stereotypical perception of Czech Germans as a thoroughly "brown", compact mass had made the political justification of the expulsion much easier.
In actual fact, there were thousands of anti-Nazi resistance heroes among Sudeten Germans and even other Czechoslovak minorities: Hungarians, Poles, Jews, etc. They suffered in concentration camps and hundreds of them executed for their humanistic, political and religious beliefs. They played a not insignificant role in the domestic resistance movement as well as wore the uniforms of Czechoslovak troops abroad. Even though the President Beneš's Decrees recognized German antifascists and excluded them from the measures taken against so-called enemy population, the reality was often very different. During the first wild deportations in the months immediately after the War, there was no distinction between pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi Germans and Hungarians. The victims were deprived of their homes and property, sometimes even murdered, by self-appointed avengers. That was why many antifascists voluntarily opted for eviction rather than for threatening persecution.
However, even the later, state organized deportations run by official commissions were far from just to the opponents and victims of Nazism. They were denied the right for Czechoslovak citizenship and for returning from exile. That automatically meant that they lost their homes and that their property was confiscated. Jews who claimed to be of German nationality before the War became a special group: if they managed to survive the Holocaust, their property first stolen by the Nazis was confiscated again as German property.
The Project aims at searching out approximately one hundred people with similar life stories both in the Czech Republic and abroad and at recording their memories of the anti-Nazi resistance as well as of the post-war persecution by the Czechoslovak authorities. In other words, it aims at pulling their stories out of oblivion.
