Recent historical studies on the organizations of German expellees and their influence on West German political culture highlight the insincere attitude and deception by the whole West German political establishment toward the expellee politicians and activists and their cause.Footnote 1 One study in this field is Matthias Stickler's important book “Ostdeutsch heißt Gesamtdeutsch,” and a more recent one by Manfred Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen?, takes Stickler's thesis even further.Footnote 2 It creates the impression that the expellee organizations, highly dependent on the government for financial and political support, had no option in this matter and were even helpless in that they had to accept the noncommittal rhetoric and the West German government's unwillingness to obligate West Germany for their cause. In this article, I probe this portrayal of the expellee politicians and activists as objects rather than subjects of German politics by inquiring into the political and public relations activities of the German Sudeten Council (Sudetendeutscher Rat) in the field of foreign policy during and around the tenure of Hans-Christoph Seebohm as the leader (Sprecher) of the German Sudeten Expellee Homeland Society (Landsmannschaft) (1959–1967).Footnote 3 The Sudeten Council is a non-party association; one half of its members are elected by the federal assembly of the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft and the other half by the political parties of the Bundestag. As well as being a politician of the expellee organization, Hans-Christoph Seebohm pursued the longest political career in the German federal cabinet—seventeen years. He served as Minister of Transportation and Mail of the Federal Republic from 1949 to 1966 under Chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Ludwig Erhard. To date, no monographic work has been written about Seebohm.
Seebohm began his political career in West Germany in the nationalist German Party (Deutsche Partei), switching to the Christian Democrats in the early 1960s. During his long career, Seebohm was known for the scandals he evoked in his Sunday speeches (Sonntagsreden). On more than one occasion, his radical rhetoric regarding the expulsion, the expellees, border issues, and other highly sensitive German topics precipitated scandals and were sharply criticized by the Allied high commissioners in Germany at the time, by foreign governments, by international public opinion in the east and the west, and by the government as well as the opposition.Footnote 4
The Official West German Ostpolitik and Seebohm's Positions 1949–1967
Following World War II and the public exposure of Nazi crimes, especially those against the Jews and Slavic peoples, throughout the world, Germany's reputation suffered a devastating blow. The governments of the young Federal Republic made immense efforts to overcome foreign suspicion and hostility toward the young German state, to improve its image abroad, and to rehabilitate its international prestige. West Germany joined the Western bloc, committed itself to anticommunism, and cultivated good relations with its former arch-enemy, France; however, West Germany's Ostpolitik rejected the German eastern borders which were defined by the three victorious Allies in the Potsdam Treaty of summer 1945. Since its establishment in 1949, and sanctioned by that treaty, the Federal Republic has refused to accept the subsequent expulsion of millions of Germans from former eastern German territories and from non-German territories in central Europe in the aftermath of World War II. The Potsdam Treaty literally defined Germany's eastern borders as temporary, and declared that the permanent borders would be determined in a future peace conference between Germany and its neighbors. “In reality, however, all three signatories of the Potsdam Treaty expected the de facto border agreements to become permanent.”Footnote 5 As opposed to the wording of the treaty on the issue of German borders, the decision to uproot millions of Germans from their homes and to settle them anew in occupied Germany was already intended by all the relevant decision makers as a final decision in summer 1945.
Germany's revisionist position regarding the Potsdam Treaty derived from various considerations. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, in November 1964 after leaving the chancellorship, Adenauer denied that he had ever demanded a return to the 1937 borders—even though this had been the explicit position that he and his party, as well as the Social Democratic opposition, advocated.Footnote 6 I am interpreting his assertion as implying that the demand for the 1937 borders had been made mainly as a bargaining position, anticipating future peace negotiations. I presume that out of diplomatic practical negotiation tactics, Adenauer wished to preserve the German claim to the eastern territories as a bargaining chip for future peace negotiations. He was aiming, at least, for the unification of the two German states.Footnote 7 During his long tenure as chancellor, however, he maintained such positions only behind closed doors and never dared to talk about this issue in public in that way.Footnote 8
The government revisionist position regarding the Potsdam treaty also derived from internal political considerations of mobilizing political support among nationalist groups for the coalition's political goals, in election campaigns as well as in the parliament. To Adenauer, integrating Germany into west Europe was a most desirable political goal. To realize this goal he needed a solid majority in the Bundestag that would support his policy. As he disliked the relatively large Social Democratic Party and did not trust its leaders, he had to form a coalition of parties from a very wide political and ideological spectrum, including nationalist parties, such as Seebohm's German party, and, after 1953, the Bloc of Expellees and Disenfranchised (BHE), a party whose prominent leaders were former Nazis. Adenauer feared a potential danger of nationalist groups in postwar Germany, groups that might destabilize the society and the young German state. The expellee organizations and parties formed an integral part of these nationalist groups.
The German nationalists regarded the eastern territories as German lands and as the exclusive property of the German nation. They regarded the partition of Germany sanctioned in the Potsdam Treaty as a crime committed by the conquering Allies against their country and denounced any German compliance with the treaty as betrayal. Seebohm had been an outstanding politician of this nationalist scene. Since the foundation of the Federal Republic, he and his colleagues in the German Sudeten Homeland Society had repeatedly declared, in various public forums, that Germany should not even recognize its 1937 borders, the lines that the Federal Republic said it would demand in future peace agreements with its neighbors. In 1951 in a speech before the federal party's assembly of the German Party (DP) in Goslar, Seebohm reproached Germany's official demand for the borders of 1937 and rhetorically asked, “Have we forgotten that these borders in the east are the borders of Versailles? Have we ever recognized these borders at any time in our history? No, we have not—and as long as we have been conscious of our Germanness [deutschbewußt], we would never have done so.” Seebohm claimed that the Versailles treaty had created the problem of nationalities in 1919 and that the failure of the League of Nations in Geneva to guarantee the rights of minorities had created the conditions that led to World War II.Footnote 9
Like the other leaders of the German Sudeten Expellee Homeland Society, Seebohm repeatedly maintained that the Sudeten region was German territory and that the Germans had never ceded this part of their homeland. He attempted to justify his demand with the claim that this former German settled region had been an integral part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation until 1806 and then of its last remnant, the Habsburg Empire, until 1918. This, he maintained, entitled the area to be regarded as German land.Footnote 10 He regarded the Munich Agreement of 1938 as a justified revision of the Versailles and St. Germain treaties which, in his opinion, had denied the Sudeten Germans, as well as other minorities in eastern Europe, the right of self-determination and had discriminated against them. The Munich Agreement had received international recognition, he claimed, and emphasized that the support of the Sudeten Germans for the annexation of the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany had nothing to do with their support for Nazism or with their support of the later disintegration of Czechoslovakia in 1939.Footnote 11
Adenauer had chosen to bring these circles closer to him, not only by adopting a lenient nationalist rhetoric regarding Germany's future eastern borders and the expellees' dream of returning to their former homelands, but also by tying them to him and his political establishment with bonds of financial assistance and political commitment. The pattern that he established endured until the late 1960s. The generous state funding that flowed to the branched net of expellees' organizations and institutions, and their reluctance to cut off this financial flow made it hard for them to conduct an extreme form of politics that would contradict the principles of Adenauer's politics.Footnote 12 As we have already seen, however, the government support has never succeeded in deterring the expellee leaders from expressing flamboyant declarations, which sometimes sneaked past the public eye and passed with no resonance, but much more often, evoked international scandals and damaged the enormous efforts made by the federal government and West German diplomacy to rehabilitate Germany's image and reputation abroad.Footnote 13
In spite of this alliance with the nationalist circles and parties such as Seebohm's German Party or Theodor Oberländer's Bloc of Expellees and Disenfranchised (BHE), Adenauer pointedly refrained from addressing the issue of the Sudeten Germans in public. Furthermore, he never attended an assembly of the German Sudeten Homeland Society in contrast to other groups of German expellees, for example the Silesians, and, in this respect, Chancellor Erhard also followed his predecessor. In his first speech to the Bundestag in Bonn as chancellor in September 1949, Adenauer referred to the issue of the eastern territories. But he ignored a Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) member, Dr. Franz Richter, who shouted, “Please don't forget the Sudetenland, Mr. Chancellor.”Footnote 14 At one of the Federal Republic's first cabinet meetings in September 1949, Seebohm questioned the legality of the border with Czechoslovakia and maintained that Egerland, one of the Sudeten districts, should be annexed to Bavaria. This possibility, he claimed, had already been discussed in talks between Eduard Beneš, Czechoslovakia's president, and the U.S. government. Adenauer reprimanded him for always thinking only about the expellees rather than about the implications that demands of this sort would have outside Germany.Footnote 15 Adenauer himself set down guidelines for government officials regarding a noncommittal reference to the Sudeten issue.Footnote 16 He had also, repeatedly and in vain, demanded that Seebohm refrain from “political speeches.”Footnote 17 So I would argue that the rules of the political game were very clear to all the participants, but Seebohm tried every now and then to transgress them and to air his declarations that were far from the cabinet line. He was never ready to sacrifice his post in the cabinet for the sake of his ideological positions, however. His lengthy service in the West German cabinet granted him personally a lucrative status and his declarations a special resonance in the media, benefits he did not want to lose. Whenever the chancellors confronted him with the contradiction between his extremist declarations and the official line of the government, in which he functioned as a senior member, and the possibility of his dismissal, he always withdrew his outrageous statements by claiming that the press had misinterpreted his words and that, in fact, he was complying with the cabinet's official line.Footnote 18 His extremist positions, uttered frequently, gave eastern Europeans and the rest of the world the impression that the Federal Republic was trying to play both sides of the game. This impression was probably exacerbated when both Chancellors Adenauer and Erhard refrained from firing him, even when he no longer had a large body of voters behind him. Abroad, their position created the impression that they actually wanted a man like him in the cabinet, taking such provocative positions, as part of their anticommunist policy during the Cold War. They might have seen him as a means of exerting pressure in negotiations with the Soviet Union and the countries of eastern Europe—not to mention countering American pressure on Germany to compromise on its eastern borders.
The West German Ostpolitik during the tenures of Adenauer and Erhard posed a great challenge for the credibility of West German foreign policy, especially regarding public opinion both in the east and west. Outside Germany, there was very little sympathy for German wishes to regain German sovereignty and to expand eastward.Footnote 19 As the former German Sudeten territories had never been part of the German Reich within its 1937 borders, before 1964 the West German government had never unequivocally declared that the Munich Treaty of 1938 had no binding validity. The first time that the federal government had to refer to this issue officially occurred in May 1964 when Seebohm evoked an international scandal. In a public speech he addressed an assembly of Sudeten Germans in Nuremberg. Seebohm claimed that the Munich Treaty of 1938 was still valid and declared that the German border with Czechoslovakia would be determined only by an all-German (i.e., a united German) future government.Footnote 20 A couple of days later, he demanded that the “stolen” German Sudeten Homeland territory be returned to its people (Heimatvolk).Footnote 21 Seebohm's provocative declaration evoked angry responses in Germany and abroad, both in the west and east.Footnote 22 The Czech president, Antonín Novotný, demanded that the FRG irrevocably abdicate the Sudeten territories.Footnote 23 On the following day, the government spokesman, Karl-Günther von Hase, stated in Bonn that the Federal Republic had made no territorial demands on Czechoslovakia. He did not refer at all to the question of validity of the Munich Treaty of 1938, however, and only maintained that the federal government hoped that Czechoslovakia would fully respect the right to a homeland (Heimatrecht),Footnote 24 a classical demand of the expellee organizations. After a talk to clarify matters with Chancellor Erhard, Seebohm, as he usually did in such cases, claimed that his speech in Nuremberg had been misinterpreted.Footnote 25
The responses abroad, however, forced the chancellor to make an official declaration for the American media and thence to public opinion. In an interview with the American network NBC, he defined Seebohm's speech as “although juristically still plausible, politically, however, it is absolutely impossible.” Despite the anticipated protest of the German Sudeten Homeland Society, Erhard condemned Hitler's territorial demands on Czechoslovakia as blackmail.Footnote 26 Nevertheless, his successor, Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, as late as August 1967 still maintained in a letter to Seebohm that one should not extrapolate from the “ex nunc” nonvalidity into the “ex tunc” validity of the Munich Treaty.Footnote 27
Allies and Initiatives in the International Arena
The Anticommunist Exiles
The only chance to gain certain international support for the expellees was expected from hawkish circles in the west. Seebohm, as well as his former Sudeten Landsmannschaft leader, Rudolf Lodgman von Auen, attributed much importance to forming alliances with anticommunist exiles from all eastern European countries (including Czechoslovakia) in Germany and America who would be ready to cooperate with the expellees' organizations.Footnote 28 The Sudeten Homeland Society cooperated as well with the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) whose president was Jaroslaw Stetzko, the elected Ukrainian prime minister under Nazi occupation in 1941.Footnote 29 One of the vice presidents of this organization was the Czech general, Lev Prchala. In contrast to Stetzko, Prchala was an anti-Nazi who had already opposed the politics of the exiled Czech president, Eduard Beneš, during World War II. Prchala settled in Germany after the war and called for reconciliation between Germans and Czechs.Footnote 30 In August 1950 Lodgman and Prchala (on behalf of the exiled National Czech Committee) signed a treaty of friendship in Wiesbaden regarding the peaceful coexistence of Czechs and the German Sudeten in a future democratic federation in the Bohemian-Moravian-Silesian region. The treaty hoped to secure the return of the expelled German Sudeten to this region after the liberation of the Czech people.
This treaty had very little political significance, however, and the Czechs who signed it lacked political influence.Footnote 31 The treaty did not recognize the Czechoslovakian state and, as such, was quite unacceptable for other and more influential Czech exile groups; nevertheless, more extremist and völkisch Sudeten organizations, such as the Sudetendeutsche Legionäre, utterly rejected Lodgman's politics as such groups regarded the treaty as creating a dependence of the return of German Sudeten expellees on the goodwill of the Czech people, a dependence that they, as German nationalists, totally rejected.Footnote 32
There were tensions between certain exile groups, such as the Czechs and Poles, as there were between these exile groups and the German expellees regarding the question of Germany's future borders with its eastern neighbor countries.Footnote 33 Seebohm's allegedly legal arguments that the Munich Agreement of 1938 was still valid and that “the determination of Germany's eastern border with Czechoslovakia can be accomplished only under the auspices of a pan-German regime,” found no more acceptance among most Czech exiles than it had in the west.Footnote 34
In his book, Matthias Stickler emphasized Seebohm's public plea for the Czech people, made at the annual convention of the Sudeten Homeland Society of 1963 in Stuttgart, and his call for forgiveness for the injustice inflicted on them by the Germans, and for reconciliation between the two peoples. Stickler defined Seebohm's gesture this way: “One has to evaluate Seebohm's declaration as an important step forward for genuine reconciliation politics.”Footnote 35 An analysis of Seebohm's talk, however, points out that Seebohm had, in fact, ignored the issue of Czech sovereignty and seemed to deny the very legitimacy of the Czechs having their own nation-state. Although he referred to “free Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, in which Germans and Czechs could erect their democratic polity [Staatsordnung] according to the principles of the right of self-determination,” he did not explicitly refer to the existence of Czech statehood in this region in the future after the fall of communism.Footnote 36 It is quite doubtful whether the Czech people who identified with the national idea of a Czech nation-state could support his suggestion or regard it as a frank gesture of reconciliation.
Despite Seebohm's declarations regarding reconciliation between peoples in a united Europe after the fall of communism, and despite his ardent anticommunist convictions, his revisionism and that of his Landsmannschaft evoked little public support for his cause in the world. Even hawkish circles in the west were, in the main, rather reluctant to support German revisionism.Footnote 37 So there were always wishes and attempts within the German Sudeten committee to involve their organization with more influential factors, such as states on an international level, rather than with less influential anticommunist individuals and organizations. Those allies were supposed not only to sympathize with the plight of German expellees in general, and the German Sudeten cause in particular, but were also expected to promote efforts toward a satisfactory solution to the problem.
The Arab World
At least Seebohm was confident in his knowledge of one surprising initiative created by a member of the German Sudeten Homeland Society during the late 1950s. The aim of the initiative was to break out of the political stagnation regarding the expulsion, the helplessness of the Federal Republic, and its inability to alter the results of World War II and the Potsdam agreements. This daring initiative failed. Its very planning which had intended to evoke a change in international politics, aided by a peripheral and rather weak bloc of Arab states at the time, indicates the isolation and the despair in the circles of the political activists of the expellee organizations regarding the realization of their aspirations.
Between 1956 and 1958, Rudolf Hilf, a key policy adviser and member of the German Sudeten committee, built up contacts in the Arab World through Dr. Hassan Fakoussa, the delegate of the Arab League in the Egyptian Embassy in Bonn. Fakussa brought Hilf together with all the ambassadors of the Arab countries based in Bonn and with various Arab and Muslim persons whom he had met in his journeys in Arab countries. Hilf's initiative was not coordinated with the West German Foreign Office (a recent reference he made about the Foreign Office expresses a deep disrespect for that ministry).Footnote 38 In a memorandum he had written a couple of years earlier in 1954, Hilf had maintained that the “expellee lobby had to generate ‘an impression of harmony’ between [their] policies and those of the federal government, particularly of the chancellor.”Footnote 39 This subversive initiative put a new slant on the word “impression.”
In the Middle East, Hilf met several well-known persons who, he hoped, might strengthen his initiative; these included the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, exiled in Cairo together with his entourage. Another was Haris Korkut, a Bosnian Imam who had volunteered during World War II for the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Handschar (1st Croatian) and lived in exile in Egypt and Lebanon after the war.
Another important target for further connections with the Egyptian supreme leadership was Anwar el Sadat, the late Egyptian president and, at that time (since 1954), the Minister of State. As with the Mufti, Hilf also counted here on past Arab sympathies toward Nazi Germany. In 1942, as a young officer in the Egyptian army, Sadat had hoped, vis-à-vis the weakening of Britain in the early years of World War II, that if Rommel succeeded in occupying Egypt, the Germans would agree to liberate Egypt from foreign occupation. In that year, 1942, Sadat made contact with two German agents who had sneaked into Egypt.Footnote 40 One of Hilf's contacts to Sadat was Hassan Gafar, son of an Arab father and a German mother. Gafar's German name was Johann Eppler. His half-brother was Johannes Eppler, one of the two German agents mentioned above.Footnote 41 Even today, Rudolf Hilf, now an old man, adamantly refuses to answer my question whether he had ever met Sadat.Footnote 42
Hilf believed that what he saw as a satisfactory solution to the expulsion problem, as well as the revision of Germany's borders, could be achieved only by a decision by the super powers. He reckoned on a long period of stagnation. He thought, therefore, that the only place where an understanding for the Expellees' cause might be found would be among the Afro-Asian bloc of non-aligned states, especially among the Arab world, where pro-German sentiments had remained popular.
In a memorandum that Hilf wrote to Seebohm in October 1958, he maintained, “Similar to us [Germans], the Arab states confront a problem of expellees: one million Arabs from Palestine. In fact, this is the only ongoing expellee problem today on the international agenda.” He hoped to persuade the states of the Arab League to submit to the United Nations plenary a proposal for a convention regarding the right to a homeland (Heimatrecht). In the short run it would have served the Arab interests regarding the Palestinian refugees. In the long run, however, it would be directed against the expulsion policy of the Soviet Union regarding the German expellees. Hilf was interested in a general convention (i.e., one that would not refer explicitly to the problem of the expulsion of the Germans). “If the Arabs were to suggest a general convention on the right to a homeland (one without any reference to our problem, as they cannot afford such a position today, just as we, too, do not need to be amalgamated with the Israeli problem), then the East would arrive at a very embarrassing situation and, simply might not be able to oppose the convention. Other friends of ours in the United Nations such as the Spaniards and the Latin Americans might then be able to broaden the debate against the East with our problems.”Footnote 43
On the eve of Seebohm's official visit to Cairo and his meeting with the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, planned for the beginning of November 1958, Hilf described in a very detailed memorandum dated October 30, 1958, to Seebohm, his conspiracy and his liaisons in Cairo. In this, he encouraged Seebohm to promote the initiative during his Egyptian visit. On November 14, following his visit to Cairo, Seebohm responded to Hilf's letter. Seebohm apologized for not being able to meet with Hilf's liaisons during his stay in Egypt and to promote the conspiracy. He continued by telling Hilf that while he had met Nasser, “I was not in a position to address the problems, especially as I could not visit him alone, but only in the presence of six Bundestag delegates, who probably might demonstrate very little understanding for raising such a topic.”Footnote 44
Seebohm's behavior regarding Hilf's scheme is far from clear, although his words probably reflect the expellee activists' view of themselves as a national avant-garde movement. It seems that he saw himself as equipped with a deep insight of the nation's needs and will, feelings that the general public and the politicians, due to their shortsightedness, were not yet able to recognize and understand.
Did Seebohm report frankly to Hilf on the true reasons for his refraining from promoting Hilf's initiative in Cairo? Could he have refrained from promoting the initiative after regarding it as too far-reaching and dangerous for a senior member of the federal cabinet? The Foreign Ministry was excluded from and was not briefed on Hilf's contacts with foreign representatives in West Germany or in the Arab countries. Today, the elderly figure of Hilf would not supply much more information on his daring initiative.Footnote 45 I could find no further information on this initiative either in the German Sudeten archives in Munich or in the archives of either the Foreign Office in Berlin, that of the Federal Republic, or that of the German Democratic Republic. It is highly probable that neither of the German state departments was aware of Hilf's contacts and initiative.
The American Conservative Hard-Liners
As the Cold War intensified in 1946, the United States issued a number of public declarations that referred to the wording of the Potsdam Agreement regarding Germany's eastern borders. Among certain expellee groups and in the Eastern Bloc, these declarations were interpreted as American advocacy of a revision of the German-Polish boundary. The first of these was the “Speech of Hope” made by the American Secretary of State, James F. Byrne, in Stuttgart in September 1946. His successor, George Marshall, went even further at the gatherings of foreign ministers in Moscow and London and called for border changes in East Pomerania, East Brandenburg, and Lower Silesia. Poland interpreted these statements as a threat to its western territories, and the Soviet Union objected.Footnote 46
For expellee groups and for wide circles in German society it was a breath of hope that induced them to support the United States, even though the U.S. bore the same responsibility as the Soviet Union for the wording of Article VII of the Potsdam Agreement and for the defining of the Polish-German border, as well as for the mandate for the transfer of German populations in Article XIII. On February 21, 1947, Alfred Noske, an expellee and a representative of the Bavarian Landtag (Parliament) in the Economic Reconstruction Association (WAV), said at a gathering of refugees from all over Bavaria, “We are grateful for what the U.S. foreign minister said on September 6, 1946. We have carefully noted his words and will never forget them.”Footnote 47 During the same period, many more far-reaching rumors and leaflets were circulating among expellees. The intelligence division of OMGUS in Bavaria received a pamphlet, allegedly mailed from America to Silesians and Sudeten expellees, telling them that America would liberate the former German territories from Polish and Czech rule and return the expellees to their former homelands.Footnote 48 The U.S., for its part, viewed the expellees as solidly anticommunist and firm allies in the Cold War. In the expellees' view, the U.S. was the only force that could help them return to their ancestral lands in eastern Europe.Footnote 49
The change of American foreign policy from containment to liberation and rollback policy regarding communism after Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration came to power in 1953 aroused hopes among many expellees, including the extreme rightist Sudeten organization, Witiko Bund, founded in Stuttgart in 1950. The organization had deep ideological roots in the German Sudeten party of Konrad Henlein and in the Nazi party, and many of his activists, nourished on völkisch ideology, were members of these parties. One of these was Walter Becher, a politician and a prominent member of the Witiko Bund and the German Sudeten Homeland society, who after Seebohm's death in 1967 succeeded him as the leader (Sprecher) of the Sudeten Homeland society.Footnote 50 Becher was deeply convinced of the sincerity of the American conservative liberation policy and became the main lobbyist of the Sudeten homeland society in the American political arena.Footnote 51 In a report that he prepared for the German Sudeten Council on his visit to America in April and May 1961, he emphasized that the council had decided to direct its foreign public relations work first and foremost toward America, being conscious that the success of the Czech counterparts of the German Sudeten in the realization of their goals since the days of Masaryk and Beneš was primarily due to their activities in the United States of America. He wrote that the German Sudeten council had started to build contacts on the American political scene, starting in 1950. In February-March 1958 Becher himself visited America for the first time to strengthen political relations with the local politicians. On his next visit to the U.S. in April-May 1961, Becher, who was also a member of the Bavarian local parliament (Landtag), met not only American politicians but also a variety of leaders of American communities of various east-European origins, such as Slovaks, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Czechs. Becher used their political infrastructure and networking in American politics. He also met a very long list of conservative American congressmen and senators of both political parties, people who shared Becher's ardent anticommunist creed. Becher maintained that “almost all his interlocutors welcomed close collaboration of the United States with those West German leading politicians who rejected any form of arrangement and appeasement and wished to develop concrete methods of psychological defense and respectively ‘psychological counterattacks.’”Footnote 52 It seems that he was hinting at the West German Minister of Defense, Franz Josef Strauss, who had used the term “psychological warfare” as early as 1958.Footnote 53 Of all the American politicians he met, Becher was most impressed by the ultra-conservative Republican senator Barry M. Goldwater. He remembers that Goldwater developed a whole philosophy on the need for a political offensive against communist aggression. Becher found it most important to emphasize Goldwater's position regarding the Eichmann trial: “In spite of his Jewish origins he holds the view that now we have to conduct not World War II but World War III, namely the Cold War. But in this war the German people are an important ally of the U.S.A.”Footnote 54 This seems to be a semi-public discourse on this post-Nazi milieu with its resentment toward things Jewish.Footnote 55 From Goldwater's reference to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Becher was sure that he had understood the senator's expression as a strong indication of his true reliability on behalf of the German cause. Such a person could not be considered a friend of the Jews.
Goldwater's campaign as the nominee of the Republican Party for president in 1964 aroused new hopes in Becher and the German Sudeten Council for a sympathetic view of the expellees' cause. Hoping that “their candidate” would win the 1964 National Convention of the Republican Party in San Francisco, Becher again went to America to follow the events closely. During the Republican convention, the New York Times published that Goldwater and Seebohm had conducted a friendly correspondence dealing with a wide spectrum of political issues. The American newspaper reported that “It seems that the senator is especially interested in West-German conservative politics.”Footnote 56 On his return from America, Becher hurried to share his euphoria with Seebohm. He maintained that out of the logic of Goldwater's program and on the basis of his personal inclination he held an absolutely positive position vis-à-vis the German central issues and recommended that the German political centers establish contacts immediately with the candidate and his aides. Becher defined the nomination of Goldwater as a “conservative revolution” and claimed that this revolution was carried out by grassroots groups, especially young circles all over the country. He maintained that it would not be absurd to expect Goldwater to win the election. In such a case “the Federal Republic would face totally different and better premises.”Footnote 57 Goldwater's failure in the election and the victory of Lyndon B. Johnson as president put a bitter end to their hopes. Becher continued to cultivate the relationships with these circles in American politics until the end of his term of office as leader of the Landsmannschaft in 1982.Footnote 58
Even during the Indian summer of the American liberation policy in 1953, however, the American media and probably also public opinion expressed a fear of German attempts to regain the territories in the east. These feelings were also reflected in American policy seen in ambivalent positions regarding West German revisionism.Footnote 59
The Need to Demonstrate Moderation and Commitment to the Zeitgeist
Together with his flamboyant statements and attempts to find foreign allies supporting his hard line, Seebohm also tried to mitigate the political implications of his controversial statements in speeches addressed to the Landsmannschaft, as well as in public speeches, by saying that the demand for the return of the Sudetenland was not tantamount to a demand for border revisions.Footnote 60 This was similar to the call of Konrad Adenauer in an interview with the Associated Press on September 8, 1953, to place the German territories beyond the Oder and Neisse rivers under joint German-Polish control or under the control of the United Nations.Footnote 61 This creative position that no doubt was highly irritating to the Soviet and Polish governments still complied, however, with the American policy that regarded the Oder-Neisse line as a permanent German border and one that complied with the wording of the Potsdam agreement.Footnote 62 Seebohm suggested adopting this model for Czechoslovakia in the framework of a future European Union. In 1960, during a talk to the Sudeten Home Society, Seebohm also highlighted the need to give up on war and aggression as a means of achieving political goals, as their implications are “Annihilation in Europe. We have no interest in a totally destroyed home country.”Footnote 63
As early as 1951 Seebohm proposed that the Sudeten Germans return to their homeland, which would be placed under United Nations rule. He claimed that central Europe's problems could not be solved by the establishment of nation-states, as the powers had sought in 1919. Since the peoples of central Europe lived in overlapping territories that could not be separated, the only way to resolve all problems was to place human rights and, above all, the Recht auf die Heimat above the interests of nation-states in the framework of a new, supra-national European order. The new order would be based on peoples rather than on nation-states. Like the United Nations, which was founded on the principle of the rights of the individual, so should the new Europe (after the eastern European countries had been liberated of the Soviet yoke) be based not on national sovereignty but rather on the civil rights of the citizens of Europe. One fundamental human right was that of every European to a homeland (Heimat). The expellees would thus be returned to central Europe and would live there, while the Czechoslovak nation-state would be dismantled.Footnote 64 These arguments combined völkisch elements from the past with the discourse of universal human rights that had developed in Germany under Allied inspiration after 1945.Footnote 65 It is far from clear whether Seebohm in fact accepted the right of the region's Slavic nations to self-determination and nation-states. It is more likely that he believed, as did the sociologist and ideologue of the Sudeten Germans, Egon Lemberg, that the Slavs, due to their (racial) characteristics, were incapable of maintaining a proper nation-state.Footnote 66
The experience of the years following 1919, when Slavic nation-states oppressed national minorities and sought to force them to assimilate into the Slavic milieu, served as further evidence that these countries had no right to exist. (It is clear that it never occurred to him that the same argument could be used to obviate the case for a German nation-state, given Germany's oppression of minorities from the nineteenth century onward, not to mention during World War II.) Seebohm, however, equivocated when it came to the question of the German nation-state's relationship with the German populations in central and eastern Europe that would live under his proposed supra-national sovereignty. His declaration contradicted the Bonn government's position that the Munich Agreement no longer had the force of international law (Völkerrecht), and therefore Germany had no territorial claims against Czechoslovakia.Footnote 67
Even Seebohm recognized the urgent need to adopt a universal argumentation for his message in the Zeitgeist to be able to find at least some support and allies in the west: he thus raised a demand for self-determination in the spirit of the Wilsonian principles and the right to a homeland (Recht auf die Heimat) along with some legal and völkisch arguments, remnants of the past. “The right of a person to a homeland is a natural right that is indispensable. Man is set by birth in surroundings of landscape and fellow men [Durch seine Geburt ist der Mensch in eine Gemeinschaft von Landschaft und Mitmenschen gestellt] to which he remains committed.”Footnote 68
This concept was not a total novelty among the Sudeten Germans, who had been integrating the Wilsonian ideas with völkisch arguments, together with their political demands, since 1919. They tried, however, to present their demand for a right to a homeland as a basic human right and to connect the quest for liberation of the Soviet imperialist subjugation in Europe with the return of the Germans to their lands in eastern Europe. This attempt to universalize the problem of the German expellees by using human rights rhetoric according to the Zeitgeist was also shared by the umbrella association of the German expellees.
Three years before the UN proclaimed 1968 as the International Year of Human Rights, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration for Human Rights of 1948, the federal agency of the association of the expellees (Bund der Vertriebenen, or BdV) proclaimed 1965 as The Year of Human Rights. “In all the activities planned for this cause,” the association announced, one had to “demonstrate for freedom, rights, and peace for all men and people.” “Public attention should be drawn, in this framework, to human states of emergency in regions where expulsions have taken place, to the problems of family reunion and the destiny of the political prisoner.”Footnote 69 The report about this initiative of the BdV in the protocol of the 147th cabinet meeting of the federal government of December 16, 1964, was much less pretentious. It read more soberly: “Next year the Association of the Expellees intends—twenty years after the expulsion—to celebrate a series of public performances, under the title of ‘The Year of Human Rights.’”Footnote 70 Thereafter the report discusses the financial demands of the Association of the Expellees on the federal government.
Despite all these efforts, nobody regarded Seebohm as a moderate. His rhetoric angered both the west and the eastern European governments and public opinion, and he was lambasted by the German media and political opposition.Footnote 71 They called for his dismissal, but Adenauer, while harshly critical of Seebohm in internal forums, took no such action.Footnote 72 On occasion, the chancellor even made excuses for Seebohm's pronouncements.Footnote 73 Chancellor Erhard also refrained from firing Seebohm in 1964 after the latter's remarks about the validity of the Munich Pact of 1938. In response to the astonishment of American journalists at his failure to act, and despite the frequent international brouhaha that Seebohm was causing, Erhard said that there were ten to twelve million refugees and expellees in the Federal Republic. “Everything that hints at their homeland (Heimat) activates here, not so much and not only a political issue, but rather sentimental feelings, and I believe one had somehow to spare them.”Footnote 74 It seems that Erhard regarded Seebohm's declaration as a vox populi of the expellees. Yet most of these people did not vote for Seebohm, nor did they see him and other expellee politicians and organizations as their political representatives.Footnote 75
The tragic portrayal of the helplessness of the expellee lobby by Stickler and Kittel retrospectively reflects the sympathetic reflections of these historians, focusing on the failure of the expellees' lobby to coerce the Federal Republic into committing itself to its revisionist position following the Cold War regarding the Potsdam Treaty. The various independent, partly concealed, initiatives in the field of foreign policy of Seebohm and his colleagues in the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft during the late 1950s and early 1960s discussed here demonstrate certainly not helplessness but creative and daring attempts of the German Sudeten leadership, against all odds, to break the stagnation regarding the expulsion and expellee problem during the Cold War, independent of the official German foreign policy, and regarding a very complicated situation. At least, at one point, namely in summer 1964, some of them even felt that a turning point might be very close. Adenauer was first and foremost interested in the Federal Republic being integrated with the west, and for him the issues of borders and expellees were, at best, tactics and rhetorical concessions. Diametrically opposed to him was the position of the expellee politicians. Even former Nazis among the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft, such as Becher, were wholeheartedly ready to accept integration into the west, as this was the only chance that might (in a very specific constellation—under a hard-line administration) lead to satisfactory results regarding their cause.
Seebohm's position on the Egyptian initiative is rather obscure. It is far from clear whether his behavior reflects his loyalty: was it first and foremost committed to the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft and less to the government in which he served? He might have acted in a subversive manner together with Hilf against his government without briefing the Foreign Office on Hilf's initiative. It is also possible, however, that he, in fact, had deceived Hilf, and had only pretended to cooperate with his conspiracy, while maintaining his loyalty to the government, and had hampered Hilf's wish to discuss the initiative with the Egyptian president. It seems to me that the whole initiative was a result of the disillusion among the members of the German Sudeten Council. They had hoped that the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as the U.S. president in 1953 and the subsequent hardening of the American positions toward the Soviets would bring about a change in their situation. It was an attempt to solve central issues on the international agenda through an initiative in a politically very remote and not influential periphery (i.e., the Arab world). This very fact points at the isolation of the German Sudeten Council and the Landsmannschaft in the democratic bloc during the Cold War and their awareness that no ally in the west would support them in realizing their most essential political goal. Nevertheless, they did not let despair paralyze them and initiated a very daring conspiracy, designed to enhance and improve the global political prospects to achieve their future goals. It failed and it had probably been doomed to failure. But the prospect of political change in America in 1964 took them back from the subversive initiative to return to a normative lobbying activity abroad, coordinated with the Foreign Office.
Pertti Ahonen regards Seebohm's “occasional, radical-sounding addresses” as being directed only to the Sudeten German audience, while he “took care to toe the government line on other issues and to explain away any rhetorical excesses as soon as protest emerged within the cabinet.”Footnote 76 Contrary to Ahonen, I feel that Seebohm directed his scandalous statements not only to his domestic audience, but also to world public opinion. He conveyed his message and by so doing, promoted his agenda on both the domestic and international levels. Seebohm, of course, took advantage of his own status as a senior minister in the federal government, as well as of Germany's negative image in world public opinion after 1945. This, paradoxically, empowered his own voice. As a very skilled politician, Seebohm knew very well that his statements would be interpreted in the world media as genuine West German positions, concealed by Adenauer's diplomacy that was creating a moderate image for West German policy. It would therefore evoke greater resonance through the world. He was perfectly conscious of the capability of the media to amplify political messages, especially those regarding extremely explosive issues such as German demands for border revisions during the Cold War. He surely knew that any statement made by a German federal minister on border issues in a tiny German Sudeten assembly, in a most remote town of Germany, would appear on the following day in the headlines of the world's most important newspapers in the east and west. Seebohm's message was unequivocal: despite what one might have thought, the problems of German expellees and the eastern borders, including the Sudeten issue, were far from being resolved. The problem was still waiting for a satisfactory solution, one acceptable to the expellee lobby, including the German Sudeten Landsmannschaft, rather than to the federal government. Seebohm realized that because of the limited confidence that Germany enjoyed in the world, the headlines of his flamboyant statements would create a greater effect than his subsequent denials would.
