Günter Bischof - The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968

It appears that the idea of Czechoslovakia receiving economic aid from the FRG rather rattled the Soviet leadership—a flashback to Josef Stalin’s reaction to the Czech government’s resolution in 1947 to accept aid under the Marshall Plan. However, given the state of affairs in the latter half of the 1960s, it was clearly unrealistic to follow in Stalin’s actions in order to solve the problem, that is, to order the Czechoslovak leadership to Moscow and dress them down. The only channel that remained open was propaganda. The task consisted in showing that, while the FRG was ostensibly offering talks on economic aid, it was, in fact, planning a military intervention. Soviet press reports began to announce the discovery of arms caches on Czechoslovak territory that had been deposited there by West German revanchistes close to the Landsmannschaft der Sudetendeutschen , the association of Sudeten Germans. TASS published an announcement from the Reuters News Agency to the effect that “the Sudeten German refugees have rejected Soviet charges today as the products of ‘pure fantasy.’” 11The announcement also quoted the chairman of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft , Walter Becher, accusing the USSR of doing “their utmost to create an atmosphere which made Russian interference in Czechoslovak affairs appear called for”—which was actually the case. At the same time, it becomes quite obvious from the Reuters correspondent’s interview with Becher that the latter did not deny the existence of the arms caches: “These weapons are, as Dr. Becher explained, quite obviously leftovers from the American postwar occupation of this region.”

The activities of the Sudeten German organizations and the statements of its president proved a boon to Soviet propaganda, particularly as Becher also belonged to one of the parties represented in the FRG’s coalition government of the day. In an interview for Der Spiegel of 29 July, Becher quite openly advocated “the return of Sudeten German experts to federal Czechoslovakia, to the federal Bohemian, Moravian, and Slovak state.” 12Because such a program obviously existed, the thesis of revanchiste expansionism and of a threat to the Socialist construction—or even of the already existing statehood—of the ČSSR did not seem utterly absurd any longer.

Becher was planning to expound the rationale behind his program at a projected gathering of 25,000 Sudeten Germans on 24/25 August, the so-called Pear Sunday weekend, in Schirnding close to the Czech border. Planning for this gathering acquired ominous overtones when it was linked directly to plans concerning Bundeswehr maneuvers which were also due to take place in the ČSSR border region. When the Der Spiegel correspondent mentioned the possibility of a link between the two developments, Becher replied:

All the chickens at the Bohemian-Bavarian border will burst their sides with laughter when they hear that a perfectly innocuous holiday of the inhabitants of the Egerland is linked to maneuvers entitled “Black Lion.” Personally, I regret the whole kerfuffle surrounding these maneuvers. It might be a good idea either to give them a different name or to hold them somewhere else. 13

“Kerfuffle” was presumably Becher’s term for the acrimonious polemics that had erupted in FRG political circles around these maneuvers. The FRG press reported at length on the differences of opinion within the ruling coalition on this subject, namely between Minister of Defense Gerhard Schröder and the Social Democrats. This was also documented in some detail in TASS Reports. On 22 July, a report in the “Breaking News” section noted that “the FRG government had decided to either hold the ‘Black Lion’ maneuvers, which had been planned for the autumn, either at a different location or at a different time.” However, this information was not taken up by the press.

As opposed to the “Black Lion” maneuvers, the gathering at Schirnding was not adjourned. In a reaction to this development, the FRG ambassador to the USSR, Helmut Allardt, told the head of the 3rd European Department of the USSR Foreign Ministry, Garal’d Gorinovich, on 31 August that the FRG government had “implemented measures designed to reduce in size the gathering of Sudeten Germans in Schirnding at the border with the ČSSR. What eventually took place there was no more than a religious service for Sudeten Germans.” 14These “measures” neither made it into the press nor the materials of TASS. It appears that the difficult relations between FRG government circles and the Landsmannschaften received scant attention in Western media. The precise timing of the implementation of these so-called measures remains unclear. If they took place after 21 August, it indirectly corroborates the interpretation transported by Soviet propaganda that the military action of the Warsaw Pact countries “caused a certain disillusionment among West German revanchistes .”

Soviet propaganda, incidentally, was directly affected both by what FRG politicians said and did not say and by material lifted from West German media. It is characteristic that the TASS Report memorably entitled “Bonn’s Subversive Tactics against the ČSSR” repeats almost the entire Der Spiegel article. 15It should be noted that Der Spiegel was used in this concrete case as a source of non-partisan, objective information, even though the weekly had exclusively been characterized in extremely negative terms in the past. The report reported that “the West German Secret Service recruits its agents from among FRG citizens traveling to the ČSSR, according to the latest edition of the periodical Der Spiegel .” The weekly reported that West German border police keep tabs on the names, car registration plates, and addresses of those West German citizens who crossed the border from the FRG into the ČSSR. “The data on these persons are then forwarded to the staff headquarters of the West German Secret Service in Munich. On the basis of these data, individuals are selected who are capable of working as agents and informants for the federal Intelligence Service.”

TASS also noted that the police activities mentioned above had been questioned by Werner Porsch, one of the FDP members of the Bundestag , and that the reason given for them by the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior was “considerations of state security.” The communiqué winds up in a manner that makes it difficult to tell whether the concluding remarks are based directly on the Der Spiegel article or on the TASS correspondent’s judgment: “The registration procedure at the border does not serve the purpose of uncovering agents of the East but of recruiting agents for the West. This is how, according to the periodical, the principle of ‘strict non-interference’ in internal affairs proclaimed by the Chancellor is put into practice.”

It must be said that some of the statements made by FRG politicians on this “principle” were, indeed, highly ambiguous. One of the editions of TASS rendered an interview that Willy Brandt had granted a German TV station in which he “advocated not only as Foreign Minister but also as a representative of SPD restraint and strict non-interference in the developments in Czechoslovakia.” 16He “emphatically” declared on the same occasion: “I would like to state with complete candor that this does not come easily to me. It weighs on me that there are people we cannot receive, that there are many one would like to see and to talk to if there were the time to do so. Yet here we have to submit to a higher law.”

Brandt’s afterthought could be interpreted as referring to contacts that had already been established in secret with Prague and to attempts on the part of Prague to upgrade these contacts to a higher level, which would, however, have to wait. Such an interpretation obviously presupposes a certain measure of distrust or even suspicion regarding the intentions and activities of the Prague reformers. Both were present in generous measure in the minds of the Soviet leadership. The question that is interesting in this context is whether these were justified.