The Czech Ministry of Culture on Tuesday hit back at a press report suggesting that a proposed restitution bill offering compensation for property and assets confiscated from the church and religious groups by the near 40-year long Communist regime in Czechoslovakia would also deal with property taken before the Communist seizure of power in February 1948.
The ministry, which is piloting the historic settlement with the Catholic Church and other religious groups, says that it has accepted comments from the Ministry of Interior ahead of the bill being finalized which suggest that some pre-1948 issues should also be “recalled” in drawing up the new bill.
These, for example, include property taken during the Nazi occupation from March 1939-May 1945 and which were subject to legal or administrative proceedings before February 25, 1948, and were not settled properly afterwards.
Such cases, could for example, include the property of the Order of German Knights, a religious order which had large property holdings in Czechoslovakia which were confiscated first by the Nazis, not returned after WWII, with the Communist seizure of power resulting in the freezing of that situation and further brutal persecution.
The Culture Ministry insisted Tuesday that accepting the comments did not mean that the new bill on church restitution would seek to go back further in history than the Communist era and cover property settlement issues outstanding before February 1948.
“Accepting these comments within the framework of inter-ministerial exchanges of views does not, of course, mean the text of the comments will automatically be transformed into the proposed law,” the ministry said.
The ministry’s sharp response was sparked by a front page article in the Czech daily Právo suggesting that the Order of German Knights had a chance to get their property back.
The issue of whether the church restitution will cover property taken before February 1948 is an explosive one in the Czech Republic given the fact that expulsion and expropriation of around 3 million German speakers from the Sudetenland took place soon after the end of WWII under the so-called Beneš Decrees, before the Communists took total power.
A wave of nationalizations of strategic companies also took place during the same period as President Edvard Beneš and a national coalition government dominated by the Communists but including other parties sought to set the country on a new path different from that taken during the inter-war First Republic and more sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
The multi-billion crowns settlement with the church is one of the biggest outstanding issues from the Communist-era still to be solved more than two decades after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989 toppled the Moscow-backed regime.
The costly settlement is controversial in the largely non-religious republic with many Czechs feeling that the Catholic Church violently seized large tracts of land and property at the start of the 17th century when the Bohemian nobility was crushed by the Habsburgs at the Battle of the White Mountain on the outskirts of Prague.