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This article examines how the complexities of the Sudeten German expulsion and resettlement of the former Sudetenland spawned the notion that certain groups of people were unreliable or suspicious and, therefore, unwanted inhabitants. The intolerance and suspicion that setters, local and central officials, and others voiced toward different groups and actions directly related to the expulsion of Germans. The rapid influx of new settlers in search of German property and social mobility had a destabilizing effect on the region as well. The category of unwanted elements changed over time and reflected not necessarily the arrival of particular people but the problems unleashed by expulsion and settlement. The emergence of this category demonstrates how ethnic cleansing affected not only the targeted ethnic group but also how that process transformed people and places. This article offers new insights into the increasing body of literature on this topic in Central and Eastern European history by expanding the focus beyond Czechs and Germans. By examining a range of different sources, it also demonstrates that local actors as much as central ones created and sustained repressive attitudes in the borderlands.

In the first issue of Settlement (Osidlování), the weekly paper of the Czechoslovak Settlement Office, an article entitled, “So That It Is Not Forgotten,” explained the reasons for the Czech hatred of Germans: “[I]t is hatred as the reaction for the most ruthless attack which was undertaken by Germans against humanity and not least against us.” After invoking the authority of Jan Hus, the fifteenth-century religious reformer and longtime Czech national icon, the author concluded: “It is the spontaneous wish of the entire nation that we completely get rid of the Germans with final certainty, even at the price of clear material loss. It is up to us to prove that all Germans are replaceable, and that we not only have the ability, but especially enough good will and self-sacrifice to prove this in deed.” This column became a regular series that provided different examples of Germans betraying the Czech nation and thereby helped to justify the need to expel them from the country. Coming as it did in the spring of 1946, when the pace of the Allied-sponsored “population transfer” began to accelerate, the column seems somewhat out of place. Hundreds of thousands of Sudeten Germans had previously been expelled in 1945; with current Allied support there was no apparent need to justify the policy further. Yet the attempts to rekindle the atmosphere of hatred spawned by the war came at a time when some Czechs sought to retain Sudeten Germans for labor needs, especially in the borderland regions where the vast majority of these German speakers lived and worked. The “spontaneous wish of the nation” to expel every last German needed some prodding.