{"id":2355,"date":"2010-08-25T16:01:01","date_gmt":"2010-08-25T16:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=2355"},"modified":"2023-10-19T12:32:24","modified_gmt":"2023-10-19T12:32:24","slug":"the-ddr-and-the-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-in-1968","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/the-ddr-and-the-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-in-1968\/","title":{"rendered":"The DDR and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a <a href=\"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2010\/08\/recent-reading-achtundsechziger\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent post<\/a>, I briefly reviewed Hans Kundnani&#8217;s fascinating book about the German left, <em>Utopia or Auschwitz:&nbsp; Germany\u2019s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust<\/em>.&nbsp; I said that he had overlooked that the army of the DDR joined the Warsaw Pact forces which invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in August 1968.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It turns out I was wrong.<\/p>\n<blockquote><\/blockquote>\n<p>My apologies to <a href=\"http:\/\/hanskundnani.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mr Kundnani<\/a>, to whom I also owe the knowledge of this correction.&nbsp;&nbsp; Although forces of the army of the DDR, the National People&#8217;s Army (NVA), did assemble near the border ready to invade, at the last moment their action was stayed.&nbsp; The decision to stay them seems to have been made in the Kremlin on the advice of senior Czech communists who were supporting the invasion, a fact only confirmed recently.&nbsp; Interestingly, it seems that during and subsequent to the invasion, the SED Government of the DDR never corrected reports which said that they had participated.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It was not until 2008, at an international joint project on the &#8216;Prague Spring&#8217;, that researchers from the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in Graz, from Russian institutes and archives [sic] from other research institutions were able to provide a clear answer.&nbsp; In Moscow they found previously unknown documentary evidence that the decision for the non-participation of the NVA in the invasion was indeed made on short notice by Soviet Party leader Leonid Brezhnev following requests by high-ranking Czechoslovak opponents of Dubcek.&#8221;&nbsp; (Wenzke, p. 155)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>References:<\/em><br \/>\nRudiger Wenzke [2010]: &nbsp; The role and activities of the SED, the East German State and its military during the \u201cPrague Spring\u201d of 1968. pp. 137-164 in:&nbsp; M. Mark Stolarik (Editor): <em>The Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, 1968: &nbsp;Forty Years Later.<\/em> Illinois, USA: Mundelein.<br \/>\nHans Kundnani [2009]:&nbsp; <em>Utopia or Auschwitz:&nbsp; Germany\u2019s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust<\/em>. London, UK:&nbsp; Hurst and Company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a recent post, I briefly reviewed Hans Kundnani&#8217;s fascinating book about the German left, Utopia or Auschwitz:&nbsp; Germany\u2019s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust.&nbsp; I said that he had overlooked that the army of the DDR joined the Warsaw Pact forces which invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in August 1968.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It turns out I was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2355","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","p1","y2010","m08","d25","h16"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2355"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11600,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2355\/revisions\/11600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}