CFM Files
United States Delegation Journal
USDel (PC) (Journal) 45
The Commission invited the Hungarian Delegation to express its views on the Czechoslovak amendment (CP (Gen) Doc. 1 Q 5) to insert in the treaty a provision to transfer 200,000 Hungarians from Czechoslovakia to Hungary. The entire session was devoted to hearing the speech of the Hungarian representative, Mr. Szegedy-Maszak, who spoke for almost an hour in opposition to the amendment. After questioning the accuracy of the population statistics given by the Czechoslovak Delegation, he replied in detail to the Czechoslovak arguments for the transfer as presented by Mr. Clementis in the previous meeting of the Commission. He pointed out that after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire, minorities were incorporated without their being consulted in all neighboring states. Only Czechoslovakia, however, had now expressed a desire to get rid of these minorities by such [Page 482] drastic means. The proposal to make a forced transfer of populations part of a treaty of peace created a dangerous precedent. The Council of Foreign Ministers had not accepted such a principle in any of its draft treaties. He described the post-Munich attitude of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia as passive and quoted from published statements of Beneš and Clementis in 1943 to the effect that the Hungarian minority had held different views than the Sudeten Germans and had not been guilty of collaboration. He pointed out that German documents recently uncovered substantiated this viewpoint. Unlike the Slovaks the Magyar minority had not been a factor in the disintegration of the Czechoslovak Republic. Why did they now wish to expel these Hungarians? First the Slovaks wished the world to forget the role the Hitlerite Slovaks played in the disruption of the Republic and secondly they wished to deprive the industrious Hungarian peasantry in Slovakia of their wealth. At Potsdam it had been agreed only that the Germans might be expelled. Czechoslovakia was now endeavoring to have the Potsdam decision extended to include the Hungarians.
Mr. Szegedy-Maszak then elaborated on the economic difficulties involved in receiving a large number of destitute deportees into Hungary, which because of an over-density of population, unemployment and present low standard of living could hardly hope to absorb any more displaced persons. In conclusion he said no other country at the Peace Conference had requested that 200,000 innocent people accept the stigma of collective responsibility or had attempted to persuade other hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants to deny the nationality of their forefathers by accepting Slovak citizenship in order to assure right of life and liberty. He asked the Commission’s members to remember instead of Munich, the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms, for which the war was fought. There were too many displaced persons in the world already. On these grounds, he hoped the Commission would reject the Czechoslovak amendment.