published in the official Collection of Laws of Czechoslovakia after the liberation in 1945. Other (not re-published) decrees were ineffective in the liberated Czechoslovakia already in 1945. Loss of citizenship and confiscation of property Legal basis for expulsions The Beneš decrees are associated with the 1945–47 deportation of about 3 million ethnic Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia. The deportation, based on Article 12 of the Potsdam Agreement, was the outcome of negotiations between the Allied Control Council and the Czechoslovak government. The expulsion is considered ethnic cleansing (a term in widespread use since the early 1990s) by a number of historians and legal scholars. The relevant decrees omit any reference to the deportation. Of the allies, the Soviet Union urged the United Kingdom and the U.S. to agree to the transfer of ethnic Germans and German-speaking Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Yugoslavs and Romanians into their zones of occupation. France, which was not a party to the Potsdam Agreement, did not accept exiles in its zone of occupation after July 1945. Most ethnic-German Czechoslovak citizens had supported the Nazis through the Sudeten German Party (led by Konrad Henlein) and the 1938 German annexation of the Sudetenland. Most ethnic Germans of the Sudetenland, many of whom had wished their region to stay as part of Austria in 1919, failed to follow the mobilization order when Czechoslovakia was threatened with war by Hitler in 1938, crippling the army's defensive capabilities . Decree subjects In general, the decrees dealt with loss of citizenship and confiscation of the property of: Art 1(1): Germany and Hungary, or companies incorporated in Germany or Hungary and selected entities (e.g. NSDAP) Art 1(2): Those who applied for German or Hungarian citizenship during the occupation and specified German or Hungarian ethnicity in the 1929 census Art 1(3): Those who acted against the sovereignty, independence, integrity, democratic and republican organization, safety and defense of the Czechoslovak Republic, incited such acts or intentionally supported the German or Hungarian occupiers (Polish occupiers were omitted) The defining character in definition of the entities affected was their hostility to the Czechoslovak Republic and to the Czech and Slovak nations. The hostility presumption was irrebuttable in case of entities in the Art.1(1), while it is rebuttable under Art.1(2) in case of physical persons of German or Hungarian ethnicity, i.e. that they were exempted under Decrees 33 (loss of citizenship), 100 (nationalization of large enterprises without remuneration) and