Ethnic Cleansing, Communism, and Environmental Devastation in Czechoslovakia's Borderlands, 1945–1989*

Visitors to north Bohemia from the 1960s to the 1980s reported a landscape of environmental and social devastation: depopulated villages with decaying churches and abandoned houses, vast coal pits where once towns had stood, smog so thick that it stopped traffic and sent pensioners to the hospital. It was a region infamous for the “perks” the government offered its residents: free trips for children to the mountains for clean air and a special financial supplement for residents known locally as the “pohřebne,” or burial bonus. North Bohemia had Czechoslovakia’s highest mortality rates and ranked at or near the top in alcoholism, crime, and suicide.2 Travelers could, and did, compare the postwar north Bohemian borderlands negatively with their previous incarnation as part of the German-inhabited Sudetenland. By all environmental, social, and aesthetic measures, north Bohemia declined dramatically after the expulsion of the region’s 1.2 million Germans in 1945 and 1946.3