Die Karpatendeutschen im Blick der tschechoslowakischen Staatssicherheit in den 1950er Jahren
The Carpathian Germans in the eyes of Czechoslovak state security in the 1950s

Summary/Abstract: The observation of the Carpathian Germans by the Czechoslovak secret service has hitherto received little attention. The security files of the Czechoslovak foreign secret service, the counterintelligence and individual agent files, which are kept in the archives of the Nation’s Memory Institute in Bratislava, can serve as a primary source for this research. The resettling of Carpathian Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945, together with a German minority remaining in Slovakia, represented both a domestic and foreign policy problem for the communist regime. In order to manage this, state security monitoring was used as an effective means of control. Not only were the Carpathian German organizations and their protagonists, as well as their contacts to Slovak political exiles in the FRG, observed, but also Germans in Slovakia. Important instruments included the infiltration of agents, the instrumentalization of individuals’ Nazi past and the creation of internal conflicts. The article also provides initial suggestions for further research.

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