Bishops defend Czech-German reconciliation against populist attacks

Archbishop Stanislav Pribyl of Prague criticised the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Andrej Babis, which on the initiative of the right-wing Freedom and Direct Democracy party called for cancellation of the Sudeten German gathering in Brno.

The Czech Catholic bishops criticised populist attacks on the annual Sudeten German congress in the Czech city of Brno that reignited long-running historical tensions over the post-war expulsion of ethnic Germans from former Czechoslovakia. 

The annual congress of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft, representing expelled Sudeten Germans and their descendants, was held in the Czech Republic for the first time following an invitation from the reconciliation-focused cultural initiative Meeting Brno. 

The multiday programme in Brno on 22-25 May included public events, commemoration of the victims of the Shoah and a reconciliation Mass celebrated at the Brno Exhibition Centre. 

The organisers called it a symbolic milestone in Czech-German relations. However, the event became a political flashpoint. Several public protests in Brno against the gathering were monitored by the Czech police.  

“We have nothing to reconcile with the Germans,” said former president Vaclav Klaus. “We did not trigger two world wars,” he said, and “are not the cause of tens of millions of victims” of the Second World War.

The new Archbishop of Prague Stanislav Pribyl expressed support for the event.

“The Brno meeting grew from the bottom up, it is a meeting of Czechs and Germans who long for reconciliation and who together ask for forgiveness,” he told The Tablet.

Archbishop Pribyl criticised the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Andrej Babis, which on the initiative of the right-wing Freedom and Direct Democracy party called for cancellation of the gathering in Brno.

The coalition also approved a resolution in the lower chamber of parliament opposing it because of concerns over historical revisionism, the “relativization” of Nazi crimes, and alleged attempts to challenge the Czech Republic’s post-war legal and property settlement. 

“I do not want to comment on individual statements by politicians, but politicising the entire event certainly does not contribute to reconciliation. I think that what happened in the Chamber of Deputies is more a calling card of the politicians who voted for it than a manifestation of any prevailing mood in the country,” Archbishop Pribyl said. 

As Bishop of Litomerice in the former Sudetenland until his appointment to Prague in February, Pribyl repeatedly said the post-war expulsion of Germans was one of the most painful and sensitive chapters of Czech-German history. He declared 2026 a Year of Reconciliation, including monthly gatherings in locations from which people were expelled, reconciliation Masses and Czech-German debates.

The Bishop of Brno Pavel Konzbul also expressed support for the Czech-German gathering. 

“Reconciliation between nations and individuals does not come about by denying or simplifying the past, but by being able to talk about it truthfully and respectfully. I see the presence of the descendants of Sudeten Germans in Brno primarily as an opportunity for such a meeting,” he said.

Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, the majority-German region in Czechoslovakia, in 1938 and later established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the country.  

The region suffered around 350,000 deaths during the Second World War, most of them Jews who died in the Holocaust as well as nearly 100,000 ethnic Czechs and Romani individuals who died in concentration camps or in Nazi suppression and retaliatory massacres.

Following Germany’s defeat, Czechoslovakia expelled approximately 3 million ethnic Germans. Several thousand Germans died violently during the expulsion and many more from hunger and illness. 

Around 25,000 people in Czechia declared German ethnicity (including multiple identities) in the 2021 census, with only about 9,000 declaring it as their sole ethnicity. This remnant, roughly 0.23 per cent of the population, represents the descendants of the small number of Sudeten Germans who remained after the expulsions, plus some later returns or mixed-heritage individuals.

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