Abstract
The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSČ) was the only party in interwar Czechoslovakia that united members of all nationalities living in the state, and approximately one quarter of its members were Czechoslovak Germans. The importance of their role is evidenced by the fact that the
Communist Party was founded earlier in German-speaking Reichenberg (today's Liberec) than in
Prague. German Communists subsequently strongly influenced party policy in the 1920s, and that the character of the party was predominantly Czech-German. Germans were also in the group of younger radicals led by Klement Gottwald who came to lead the party in 1929. Despite the decline in the electoral preferences of the Communist Party in the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, representatives of Czechoslovak Germans were in the party leadership until 1945, and
Germans also formed a significant part of the Communist exile during the Second World War.
This paper will focus on the politics of the KSČ and its German section in the 1930s and 1940s, which oscillated between nationalism and internationalism, between rejection of the Czechoslovak state and backing it. A specific form of Sudeten German nationalism established itself in the ranks of the
German Communist Party in the 1930s, but after 1935, it became complementary to the People's
Front policy with a kind of supraethnic Czechoslovakism, promoted as part of the defence of the state against the danger from Nazi Germany. This was also similar in some respects to the policy of the then Czechoslovak German Social Democracy. These motives can also be traced in the
Communist Czechoslovak German exile groups during the Second World War, when the
Czechoslovak government's plans for the expulsion of the German population from the country became a crucial question. In spite of internal contradictions, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia supported a broader ethnically based expulsion of the German population at the end of the war, which, despite the fact that some German communists remained in the country, also marked the definitive end of the Czech-German character of the party. Yet it represents an important chapter in the history of the party, which usurped power in 1948 and had to continue to reflect the multi-ethnic nature of the state in its policies.