Word: czechoslovak
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...City that was deemed the world's largest in the 1920s. But Czechoslovakia's German minority suffered greatly in the Depression on the eve of World War II and many threw their support behind Konrad Henlein, leader of the country's pro-Nazi ethnic German party. As punishment, the Czechoslovak government ordered most German-speaking citizens in the country to be deported after the war and their property seized. (See pictures of Adolf Hitler's rise to power...
...Klaus claims his resistance is in defense of ideals like freedom and democracy, but his treaty demands - including one that relates to a long buried dispute that goes back to World War II - are bewildering, say E.U. officials. While in exile between 1940 and 1945, the Czechoslovak government led by Edvard Bene? ordered that all German speakers in the Sudentland region of Czechoslovakia should be deported and their property seized. Klaus now claims that the E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights, which is incorporated in the Lisbon Treaty, might become the basis for property restitution lawsuits by descendants of those German...
Meanwhile, people familiar with how Klaus thinks believe that he will give the Lisbon Treaty a last-minute backing. "He will go to the very brink, but he will sign it in the end," says Jan Strasky, a former Czechoslovak premier who has known Klaus for over four decades and once shared an office with him. "He has a control mechanism. He leaves the barricade when it becomes indefensible." In a sign that he may not intend to kill the reform pact outright, Klaus gave up a chance to chair the E.U.'s June summit in Brussels, at which...
...informer spying on Klaus as he took part in informal economics discussions described him as an abrasive know-it-all. "He makes it clear that who does not go along with his ideas and opinions is simply stupid and incompetent," reads Klaus' secret police file. In team sports, former Czechoslovak premier Strasky recalls, Klaus used to be "insufferable," displaying behavior he would later bring to politics: "He always knew that another player had blundered. He never forgave mistakes and his opinion had to be the final...
...Czech historians suggest that presented with the context, the choice to expose a a suspected enemy of the state would have been quite widespread among Czech students of the time. "It falls within the context of that era," says Ondrej Tuma, director of the Institute for Contemporary History . "The Czechoslovak society, and especially the young people, the intellectuals, were crazy about the Communist ideology. They were absolutely serious about it, including the propaganda and spy-mania. Thousands and thousands of young people would have acted the same...