Brno will erect a statue of Beneš, some Germans oppose this

Brno - The Czechoslovak Legionnaire Community is erecting a statue of the second Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš in Brno after five years of fundraising and persuasion. Representatives of the resistance and the Brno city hall will unveil it this week in front of the Faculty of Law of Masaryk University. They will do so despite protests from some Germans. In many letters, they called on the city hall not to erect the statue or contribute to it, but they were unsuccessful.
    "It is interesting how much resistance the erection of this statue has aroused among Sudeten Germans,” said Deputy Mayor Daniel Rychnovský (KDU-ČSL) to reporters today. According to him, many letters mentioning Beneš's decrees have arrived at the city hall. Some of the decrees concerned Czechoslovak citizens of German and Hungarian nationality. They stripped them of Czechoslovak citizenship and led to the confiscation of their property. According to historians, the decrees created the precondition for their later expulsion.
    The expelled Germans had to leave almost all their property in the city. The so-called death march of 1945 is also infamously known, during which, according to some sources, hundreds, and according to others, thousands of people perished.
    According to Rychnovský, post-war issues are still alive. "These people feel a sense of injustice, yet none of them recall what the Germans did to our people here during the war,” he said. He personally welcomed the unveiling of the statue.
    According to the press center of the magistrate, the selection of a location for Beneš's statue was difficult because Beneš's public activities are only marginally related to Brno. The site near the Faculty of Law was ultimately chosen by representatives of the city hall and the resistance because Beneš was a lawyer. Additionally, it looks towards the Brno University of Technology building - the former university of technology that Beneš attended.
    Furthermore, the Faculty of Law was a Gestapo station during the war. "It was one of the most feared houses, where people were interrogated, often tortured, and from which decisions on deportations to concentration camps were made, and Beneš was always, as an exiled president, a certain embodiment of resistance for our resistance fighters," said the deputy.
    Beneš's statue is a copy of the one standing in front of the Černín Palace in Prague. Its unveiling in 2005 caused sharp protests from Sudeten Germans, and it was criticized by the then Bavarian and Hungarian prime ministers.
    The cast and projects for Brno, costing about 800,000 crowns, were paid for by the Legionnaire Community, and the Brno city hall provided the same amount for the preparation of the installation area. The memorial will be unveiled on Saturday, April 10, and on Friday, April 9, there will be a discussion meeting at the New City Hall beforehand.