Brno hosted first-ever Sudeten German convention in Czech Republic amid reconciliation march
For the first time in its 76-year history, the Sudeten German convention was held in the Czech Republic rather than Germany. Around 3,000 people, including Czech and German participants, attended events in Brno, while thousands more joined a reconciliation march linked to the traumatic legacy of the 1945 expulsion of Brno Germans. The gathering has also exposed lingering tensions, with protests and vandalism targeting a memorial site.
Brno is this weekend hosting an event that would have seemed almost unimaginable only a few decades ago. For the first time in the 76-year history of the Sudeten German association’s annual convention, the gathering is taking place not in Germany, but in the Czech Republic itself.
Organisers say the main programme at the Brno Exhibition Centre has reached full capacity, with 1,500 members of the Czech public registered, alongside roughly the same number of German participants. The convention, organised in cooperation with the Meeting Brno festival, is framed as an effort to promote dialogue, reconciliation and historical understanding between Czechs and Germans. But the timing and symbolism of the event are especially powerful.
Remembering the Brno death march
At the same time, around 2,000 people gathered in nearby Pohořelice to take part in the annual Reconciliation Pilgrimage — a walk retracing part of the route taken by thousands of German-speaking residents of the city expelled from Brno in the chaotic aftermath of World War II. The march commemorates one of the darkest episodes in post-war Czech history.
On the night of May 30–31, 1945, roughly 19,500 Brno Germans — many of them women, children and elderly people — were forced to leave the city on foot. They were marched toward Pohořelice and onward toward the Austrian border in what became known as the Brno death march. Historical estimates vary, but Czech sources often cite around 1,700 deaths, while some Sudeten German historians give significantly higher figures.
This year’s pilgrimage carried additional symbolic weight because of the concurrent Sudeten German Days in Brno. Speaking in Pohořelice, German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt praised the reconciliation effort. "Friends from Meeting Brno, through their determination, have turned expulsion into reconciliation," he said.
He described the Brno gathering as “a historic event” and a sign that younger generations want to live together in a peaceful Europe rather than return to nationalism. A joint declaration from mayors of municipalities along the original march route echoed that message, calling for acceptance of the past and rejecting attempts to revive hostility for political gain.
Tensions remain
Not everyone welcomes the event. Small groups of protesters have demonstrated against the presence of Sudeten German participants throughout the week. Overnight, unknown vandals sprayed swastikas on the memorial to victims of the death march in Pohořelice. Police are investigating the incident as suspected property damage and incitement to hatred.
The vandalism underscored the fact that while Czech-German reconciliation has advanced dramatically since 1989, memories of wartime occupation, expulsion and post-war suffering remain emotionally charged for some. Still, the very fact that the Sudeten German convention is taking place in Brno suggests just how profoundly relations between the two countries have changed.
The difficult history behind today’s reconciliation
In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, Brno was a city marked by anger, trauma and political upheaval. Nazi occupation had left deep scars: Czech citizens had endured years of repression, imprisonment and executions, while many ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia were widely seen — fairly or unfairly — as having supported Hitler’s destruction of the Czechoslovak state. In the emotionally charged atmosphere following liberation in April 1945, calls for swift retribution and the removal of the German population gained momentum among local and national political representation.
Finally, at the end of May 1945, Brno authorities ordered the expulsion of the city’s German-speaking residents, primarily women, children and the elderly, since many working-age men were already in detention or labour camps. Around 20,000 people were forced to leave the city on foot and march south toward the Austrian border, with little or no food, water, shelter or medical care. The march took place in chaotic post-war conditions, under emotional calls for retribution after years of Nazi occupation and suffering.
Many of those unable to continue were left in or around Pohořelice, roughly halfway between Brno and the Austrian frontier, where an improvised camp was set up in extremely poor conditions. Overcrowding, exhaustion, malnutrition and the rapid spread of disease — including dysentery and typhus — led to further deaths in the days that followed. Estimates of the total death toll vary significantly among historians, but the episode remains one of the most painful and contested chapters in post-war Czech-German history.
