German president pays ČR state visit

German President Christian Wulff said the time has come for the Czech Republic to open a public debate on its ancestors' actions during the post-World War II period of Czechoslovakia.

Speaking to journalists Nov. 22 after meeting his counterpart Václav Klaus on an official visit to the Czech Republic, Wulff said Germany does not want to interfere in the debate.

He also said he would not like Nazi crimes against Czechs to be compared with what the Czechs did to Sudeten Germans, saying Germany must always be aware of the crimes that it committed against the Czech nation, and that it must be responsible for these atrocities.

"On the other hand, I also think that now, 65 years after the end of World War II, we can also talk about the old things that sometimes occurred in this connection," the Czech News Agency (ČTK) reported Wulff as saying.

"I would like the debate to not be tense," he said, adding that he hoped such a debate - which he did not think should be restricted to intellectuals - "would be brought to a successful end."

Wulff said this debate would not worsen Czech-German relations, and that he believed the current good relations were a basis for the "further processing of history."

For his part, Klaus welcomed Wulff's description of contemporary Czech-German relations as being "a gift of history," adding that he saw bilateral ties as being at a historic best.

On Nov. 17, Klaus said the Czechs' postwar violence against Germans was incomparably smaller than the violence committed by the Nazis against the occupied territories. He told daily Právo it was frustrating that this sense of proportion and chronology is forgotten.

As many as 3 million Sudeten Germans lost their property and civic rights in Czechoslovakia under the infamous Beneš Decrees of then President Edvard Beneš.

Today, Sudeten German representatives continue to call for the annulment of the decrees as well as the law pardoning the violent excesses of the postwar expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia.

A number of other issues were discussed, including a potential embassy land-swap deal involving the Lobkowicz Palace in Malá Strana.

Bill Lehane can be reached at
blehane@praguepost.com