Postwar Expulsions Test Czech-German Relations : Sudetenland: Many of those expelled from Czechoslovakia for backing Hitler seek to return to the farms their ancestors plowed. Others just want an apology.

The Iron Curtain long stifled their hopes of returning to the homes they lost as punishment for fighting Hitler’s war. But the Germans forcibly exiled from Czechoslovakia after World War II are speaking louder now.

Many Sudeten Germans still dream of returning to the farms their ancestors plowed for six centuries in the 10,400-square-mile Sudetenland, an area encompassing about a third of today’s Czech Republic. About 2.5 million German speakers were expelled from the area in 1945-46.

Some press for the recovery of the property or at least compensation. Others would settle for a formal admission from the Czechs of the wrong done to them.

The German government is backing the Sudeten cause in a way it never could during the Cold War. Having accepted the shame of Nazism, Bonn is prodding its weaker Czech neighbor to accept responsibility for the postwar treatment of the Sudeten Germans.

The Czechs’ refusal is holding up a treaty that would recognize the Czech-German border, open the way for German compensation to 17,000 Czech Holocaust survivors, and expand German investment in the Czech Republic.

The Sudeten Germans were among 14 million ethnic Germans expelled after World War II from lands east of the Oder River. Most were forced from areas of Germany given to Poland; most of the others had to leave the Sudeten region. Two million were killed or died of starvation and illness on the trek west.

Many of the ethnic Germans in Sudetenland had supported Adolf Hitler’s annexation of the region in 1938 and later served in his army. The Allied powers agreed the Sudeten Germans should be confined to the smaller German state created after World War II that eventually became West and East Germany.

The exiles and their offspring--about 6 million people--make up about 15% of the German electorate, and their nostalgia and resentment have never died. The fact that they were on the wrong side of history does not lessen the injustice they suffered, argues their leader, Franz Neubauer.

“Our exile was one of the great injustices of this century,” said Neubauer, 65, sitting in his sixth-floor office as head of Bayerischer Landesbank, Germany’s sixth-largest bank. “We know we can’t change the borders. But we have the right to a Heimat. “

Heimat means home, with an untranslatable additive of nostalgia. As much as anything else, Germany wants the Czechs to symbolically recognize the Sudetenlanders’ feeling that they belong in the Czech Republic.

Publicly, Neubauer’s group wants a dialogue with the Czech government, the right of the exiles, their children and grandchildren to return with dual citizenship, and recognition of German as a second language in Sudetenland.

But no one really thinks Prague will let Germans return en masse and few would return even if they could. As Neubauer’s example shows, the Sudeten Germans have reached heights of wealth and status in Germany that they never had as Sudetenland farmers.

“No politician in his right mind thinks their demands are realistic,” said Peter Glotz, 56, a Social Democratic leader who fled Sudetenland with his mother in 1945. “But no one has the honesty to tell them.”

In 1990, bucking opposition from German exiles from Poland, Chancellor Helmut Kohl signed a treaty with Warsaw recognizing the postwar German-Polish border. It opened the way for Germany to pay compensation to thousands of Poles who spent years in Nazi concentration camps.

Pressure is building on Kohl to sign a similar treaty with the Czech Republic. Foreign Ministry officials said the likely compromise would be the creation of a German-Czech foundation to compensate Czech victims of Nazism and a few thousand ethnic Germans who suffered particularly brutal expulsions.

But “sometimes the intangible is more important than the tangible,” Kohl said recently. He wants the Czechs to hold talks with representatives of the Sudeten Germans.

“The injustice of their expulsion does not in the slightest way mitigate Germany’s [wartime] guilt,” Kohl said in Parliament in May. “Nor does Germany’s guilt cancel out that injustice.”

Eager to enlist the help of its powerful German neighbor in gaining quick admission to the European Union, Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus has described the mass expulsion as a “great wrong.”

But the Czech Republic, population 10 million, cannot recognize citizens from the giant next door as a minority, although they are free to return as individuals, Klaus said. He refuses to meet with Neubauer.

Anti-German sentiment runs high among Czechs, who have never forgotten the Sudeten Germans’ enthusiasm for the annexation of their land to Germany under Hitler’s infamous Munich Pact with Britain and France.

In a move that signaled Prague’s determination to move ahead heedless of the Sudeten Germans, the Czech government last year began paying compensation to Nazi victims itself. The intention was to shame Germany into paying compensation to the victims, who include 3,000 Jewish survivors.

Neubauer leads the chorus of conservatives opposing a deal, and he has clout. He places his calls to politicians from the glass-and-steel headquarters of his bank, which was built over the foundations of the bombed-out Gestapo headquarters in Munich.

On the other side of the border, Herta Knappova, an 82-year-old Jew in Prague, nurses her grievances silently.

Knappova, a retired clerk, spent four months in a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II. Her husband and all her relatives perished. Germany never paid her a cent.

“In any case, money cannot compensate the suffering we endured,” she said.

As for the Sudeten Germans, she added, “I don’t agree with what happened to them after the war. . . . But it is also necessary to remember how they treated us.”