ABSTRACT
Of all the expulsions that followed the Second World War, the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was the most popular and the first one to be approved by the Western Allies. Central to the Czech-German controversy was the desire of both peoples to achieve self-determination, even at the expense and to the detriment of the other. A vigorous and creative people, the Czechs had never wanted to live as subordinates of the Germans and had in fact enjoyed a liberal degree of autonomy throughout their history, both within the Holy Roman (German) Empire and later as part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The world would probably have been spared much misery if politicians in 1919 had recognized the fact that in the same degree that Czechs did not want to live as a minority in a preponderantly German State, Germans did not want to be a minority in a predominantly Slavic State.
