After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  To implement Beneš’s various decrees there were ‘judicial volunteers’ and a Central Committee of Investigation (Ústřední vyšetřujicí vybor). There were a fair number of KZler, or former concentration-camp inmates, among them, graduates of Dachau and Buchenwald. Many of their acolytes were mere ‘half-grown’ boys.18 Those who suffered agreed that the sixteen to twenty-five-year-olds were the worst.19 By September they had around 100,000 prisoners: 89,263 German-speakers, 10,006 Czechs and 328 others. They had released 1,094 Czechs and 613 anti-fascist Germans. The most pernicious decree was the ‘Little’ one, employed for ‘settling various personal accounts’, although the process had started long before. Beneš himself was not immune, and wrought his revenge on various Czechs. His apologists admit a popular desire for retribution;20 it was the ‘duty of the government to turn the turbulent mood’, however.

  Instead, many politicians, including Beneš himself, exploited it. As another historian puts it, the atrocities ‘were not driven from above, but without the toleration of the authorities in Prague they would hardly have been able to persist into the summer months’.21 In the end even the British (who had encouraged the purge) protested to Beneš about ‘excesses’ and there was a distinct turning down of the heat while the Big Three met in Potsdam.22 Expelling the Germans was a vote catcher, but not a measure likely to make friends - except possibly with the Poles. In retrospect it has been hard to find mitigating circumstances to excuse Beneš, apart from the fact that he was old and ill and thought he might defeat the communists by unleashing the terror himself.23

  Revenge

  For seven years the Czechs and Slovaks had suffered humiliation at the hands of the Germans. In the extreme Nazi view all Slavs were Untermenschen and the German regime treated them as second-class citizens. As in other Slavic lands there were plans to ‘Germanise’ parts of the country, no doubt partly in response to the cold wind that had greeted the Germans after 1919, which had - for example - seen the decline of the German population in the city of Brno from 60 to 20 per cent. In Znaim the number of Germans had also dwindled after 1918, but had increased sharply after 1938. A Bohemian and Moravian Land Company had been formed to find areas for settlement by Germans. The company ran a model farm. During the Protectorate 16,000 agrarian holdings were confiscated, totalling 550,000 hectares. Some 70,000 Czechs lost their homes. At the beginning of April 1945 treks were organised to evacuate the German colonists and take them back to the Sudetenland.24 The numbers of Germans had been further expanded by evacuations and the advance of the Red Army. There were around 600,000 of the former and 100,000 Slovakian Germans together with 1.6 million Silesians taking refuge in the region.25 Some of the Slovakian Germans had already gone to Lower Austria.26

  The resistance had been wiped out as early as the autumn of 1941, and was unable to re-form until 1943 and 1944, when there was an uprising in Slovakia. Nazi brutality was measured: apart from the massacre at Lidice - provoked by the British-masterminded assassination of the deputy protector Reinhard Heydrich - there were no startling atrocities.27 The country was hardly touched by the aerial bombardment that struck terror into the rest of Europe.28 The French bore far worse, and behaved better towards the defeated Germans; but then again, the French were not considered to be racially inferior.

  The clue to the severity of the post-war response is the Revolution. This was to be revenge for everything that had happened since the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620 when Imperial troops wiped out the native Bohemian nobility. Germans were still the masters, the Czechs the servants; the nobility was all German- or Hungarian-speaking and gravitated towards Vienna or Budapest. Prague’s old university was German once again, and there were German Gymnasiums and Realschulen. The Czechs resented these institutions as many of their own had been closed during the ‘Protectorate’. It is significant that these were turned into ‘wild’ or unofficial concentration camps in May. Brno too had its Technische Hochschule, German institutions, shops and pubs. With the backing of the Red Army, and a clear idea that the Western Allies would turn a blind eye to all that happened, the Czechs would seize their moment for some spectacular ethnic cleansing.

  Measures were introduced consciously aping those taken by the Germans against the Jews: they could go out only at certain times of day; they were obliged to wear white armbands, sometimes emblazoned with an ‘N’ for Němec or German;29 they were forbidden from using public transport or walking on the pavement; they could not send letters or go to the cinema, theatre or pub; they had restricted times for buying food; and they could not own jewellery, gold, silver, precious stones, wireless sets or cameras. They were issued with ration cards, but were not allowed meat, eggs, milk, cheese or fruit. The Germans also had to be ready to work as slaves on farms, in industry or in the mines.

  There were two waves of atrocities: Russian liberators, who raped and pillaged, and the Czech partisans who arrived in their wake. As elsewhere, the Russians had been given carte-blanche. The Czechs were less prone to sexual crimes, but were often accused of acting as talent spotters for their Soviet friends. There are several reported instances, however, of the Russians putting a stop to the worst excesses of the Czechs.30 The Czech atrocities committed in the following weeks and months were led by the RG (Revolučni Garda) and the special police or SNB (Sbor Národní Bezpečnosti) who wore German military trousers and SA shirts, together with the army, or with civilian mobs bent on plunder and sadistic violence. The reports read like some of the most gruesome moments of the French Revolutionary Terror.

  For prosperous Germans a striking aspect was blatant theft. The Czech partisans took anything that appealed to them and piled it up on a waiting lorry which then disappeared into the Protectorate. Sometimes they simply moved into the house, adopting the former owner’s possessions and putting on the banished Germans’ clothes. The train from Prague to the north was called the ‘Alaska Express’, alluding to the gold rush, and those who took it were zlatokopci or ‘gold-diggers’.31 Once the wilder days were over, the new Czech Republic moved to regulate the plunder so that the booty came to the state. In 1947 the expellees assessed the value of the stolen effects at 19.44 milliard dollars.32

  Prague

  At the end of the war Prague contained around 42,000 Germans native to the city, together with a further 200,000 or so ‘Reich’ Germans working for the various staffs and ministries, as well as refugees.33 The streets of Prague were quite used to hearing the German language spoken - many of Prague’s Jews communicated in German. As soon as the battle for Prague ended, Czech partisan units began to imprison German civilians and intern them at various points around the city. The morning of 5 May 1945 was quite calm. Germans still walked the streets in uniform. The mood changed at 11.00 a.m. Suddenly there was a great cry and people began to wave Czech flags. Arms were being handed out at Buben railway station. Some units of the Vlasov Army appeared. A hospital train was shot up. The insurgents captured the radio station and began broadcasting the slogan ‘Smrt Němcům! Smrt všem Němcům! Smrt všem Okkupanten!’ (Death to the Germans! Death to all Germans! Death to all occupiers!). There was to be no mercy for old men, women or children - even for German dogs: Margarete Schell’s was stoned by Czech children and had to be shot. It was the first day of the Revolution.34

  It was the day Margarete Schell was taken into custody by a ‘nasty butcher’ of her acquaintance. The RG were attended by people who knew the Germans and could show them where they lived. Margarete was well known - a voice on Prague Radio and an actress. She was incarcerated in a cellar and then transferred to Hagibor Camp. It was March 1946 before she was taken in a goods wagon to freedom in Germany. As a born Praguer, she did not know how to answer the ‘Gretchen Question’:bc ‘Why do you admit to being a German?’ She was a Prague German. Doubtless there were Prague Germans who thought it wiser not to say; and some of these would have escaped denunciation. Another ruse was to make out you were an Austrian. The Austrian ambassador appeared in their temporary p
rison to reclaim Austrian subjects, but his intercession did little for the 40,000 Austrians who were living in terror outside the capital.35

  Many of the city’s most notable Germans were put to death during this bloodletting. Professor Albrecht, the last rector of the German university, was arrested at the Institute for Neurology and Psychiatry. He was beaten up and hanged outside the lunatic asylum. The director of the Institute for Dermatology suffered a similar fate. Hans Wagner, a Prague-born German physician attached to the German army, last saw his former colleague, the dean of the German Medical Faculty, Professor Maximilian Watzka, in Pankrác Prison. The German-speaking nobles were also targeted: Alexander Thurn und Taxis was thrown into a wild concentration camp with his family. He and his two sons had to watch while his wife, her mother and the governess were repeatedly raped. When the sport was over he was marched off to a Russo-Polish run Auschwitz.36

  A truce was declared at midday on the 8 May when the German army began to leave the city. No adequate arrangements had been made between the Czech National Council and the Wehrmacht for the transport of sick and injured soldiers and some 50,000 soldiers were left behind. On the 9th the Red Army finally appeared in Prague and Germans were told to bow when they saw a Soviet car.37 The physics graduate ‘K.F.’, who had been imprisoned on the 5th, was taken out and forced to clear the barricades which had been built by the Czechs as they rose up against the garrison and which were preventing the Russians from getthing their tanks down the streets.38 Germans were beaten bloody with iron bars and lead pipes by a civilian mob and made to remove their shoes and run over broken glass. The biggest barricades were 2.5 to 3 metres high, and made up of paving stones, iron bars and barbed wire. They had to dismantle the obstacles and repave the streets.

  Women too were forced to clear the barricades. Helene Bugner was first beaten by the porter of her block of flats, then a Professor Zelenka drove her and twenty other women off to clear the streets. ‘Here, I have brought you some German sows!’ said the professor. Their hair was cut with bayonets and they were stripped of shoes and stockings. Both men and women died from the beatings. A large crowd of Czechs stood by and cheered whenever a woman was struck or fell. At the end of their work they had to tread on a large picture of Hitler and spit on it. Margarete Schell saw people being forced to eat pieces of such pictures as she too was put to work on the barricades.39 As they were driven off, one woman heard a Czech tell another, ‘Don’t hit them on the head, they might die at once. They must suffer longer and a lot more.’ When Helene Bugner returned that evening she was unrecognisable to her children.

  Marianne Klaus saw her husband alive for the last time on the 9th. She received his body the next day - the sixty-six-year-old had been beaten to death by the police. On the same day she saw two SS men suffer a similar fate, kicked in the stomach until blood spurted out; a woman Wehrmacht auxiliary stoned and hanged; and another SS man hung up by his feet from a lamppost and set alight.40 Many witnesses attested to the stringing up and burning of Germans as ‘living torches’, not just soldiers but also young boys and girls. Most were SS men, but as the Czechs were not always too scrupulous about looking at the uniforms, a number of Wehrmacht soldiers perished in this way too. In part this savagery was a response to a rumour that the Germans had been killing hostages. There was reportedly a repeat performance on the day when Beneš finally arrived in Prague: Germans were torched in rows on lampposts.41

  The Ministry of Education, the Military Prison, the Riding School, the Sports Stadium and the Labour Exchange were set aside for German prisoners. The Scharnhorst School was the scene of a massacre on the night of the 5th. Groups of ten Germans were led down to the courtyard and shot: men, women and children - even babies. The others had to strip the corpses and bury them. Alfred Gebauer saw female SS employees forced to roll naked in a pool of water before they were beaten senseless with rifle butts. There were as many as 10,000-15,000 Germans in the football stadium in Strahov. Here the Czechs organised a game where 5,000 prisoners had to run for their lives as guards fired on them with machine guns. Some were shot in the latrines. The bodies were not cleared away and those who used the latrines later had to defecate on their dead countrymen. As a rule all SS men were killed, generally by a shot in the back of the head or the stomach. Even after 16 May when order was meant to be restored, twelve to twenty people died daily and were taken away from the stadium on a dung wagon. Most had been tortured first. Many were buried in mass graves at Pankrác Prison where a detachment of sixty prisoners was on hand to inter the corpses. Another impromptu prison was in a hotel up in the hills. This had been the Wehrmacht’s brothel. A number of Germans were locked up in the cellar, and the whores and their pimps indulged in a new orgy of sadism and perversity. German men and women had to strip naked for their treatment. One of them was Professor Walter Dick, head of a department at the Bulovka Hospital. He was driven insane by his torturers and hanged himself on a chain.

  One witness who was too ill to work was sent to the hospital camp at Motol, where there was an SS ‘cellar’. This contained eighty to a hundred men who were brought out every day for beatings. A local speciality was to get the men to beat one another. In this case they had to slap one another round the face. They were often stripped naked prior to the torture and then literally booted down the steps to their cell once the guards had tired of their fun. The SS cellar contained a number of Hitler Youth boys of fourteen. Whenever it was deemed to be too full, guards fired at random though the bars to create more space. Gebauer swore that Czech collaborators were also badly treated, particularly women who had had German lovers. Thousands of dead Germans were buried in the cemetery in Wokowitz.42

  Some German Bohemians eluded arrest by helping the Russians and Czech authorities. Hans Wagner indicated a Dr Rein from Postelberg, a prison doctor who was especially cruel. The Russians wanted the pick of the women. In the cellar where Margarete Schell was imprisoned, a plump doctor - possibly a Jew - came to take some of the women to safety before the Russians made their tour. A woman wanted to bring her children: ‘Kinder hier lassen, Kindern tun sie nichts,’ he said (Leave the children here, they won’t do anything to the children). When they returned the Russians had taken four girls who returned exhausted in the morning.43 Acts of kindness by Czechs were numerous. Some risked their lives to protect friends and acquaintances. ‘Hansi’ Thurn und Taxis reached safety in Austria through the intercession of a Czech general. He was assisted at the beginning by a Russian forced labourer on his estate.44

  One wounded German officer had been in the Oko cinema since the 6 May. After helping tear down the barricades that day he was taken back to his temporary prison. There was no peace that night: the Russians and Czechs came for the women. Men who tried to protect them were beaten up, children who would not let go of their mothers’ skirts were dragged out with them and forced to watch. Several women tried to commit suicide. The officer remained in the cinema until Whitsun. That day the cries of tortured Germans coming from the Riding School mingled with the voices of churchgoers next door, ‘praying for mercy and neighbourly love’.45

  After Whitsun the officer was taken to the Scharnhorst School. There was an ominous sign over the door reading ‘Koncentrační Tabor’. ‘There they tried to surpass in everything all that they had learned of concentration camps.’ Cinemas were popular sites for ‘concentration camps’. The Slavia in Řipská ulice was also used for around 500-700 prisoners.46 The physics graduate ‘K.F.’ was taken there too and tortured. On the 10th he was taken off to Wenceslaus Square and driven towards three naked bodies hanging by their feet from a billboard. They had been covered with petrol and set alight, their faces punched in and the teeth knocked out - their mouths were just bloody holes. With others he was then obliged to drag the corpses back to the school.

  Once they had laid down the bodies, one of the Czechs told the graduate: ‘To jsou přece vaší bratrí, ted’ je políbejte!’ (They are your brothers, go on . . . kiss them!). Scarcely
had he wiped the blood from his mouth than he was taken to the ‘death cellar’ to be beaten to death. They despatched the young Germans one by one. The graduate was the fourth in line. After the second killing a door opened and a Czech man came in. The graduate learned later that this was the nephew of the minister Stránský. He asked them who they were, and led out the graduate and a seventeen-year-old Hitler Youth, because they were the two that spoke Czech. In general, knowledge of Czech helped, but no one was immune: former officials, police officers and German-speaking Jews were subjected to imprisonment - even if they had just emerged from Nazi concentration camps. The minister’s son told them with a grin on his face that they were the only ones who had ever emerged from the cellar alive.47

  Anna Seidel was a sixty-seven-year-old engineer’s widow living in Prague-Smichow. On the 9th she was rounded up with three other ladies, two of them of her age. They were robbed and beaten black and blue; their hair was shorn, their foreheads daubed with swastikas; they were then paraded through the streets on a lorry, shouting ‘My jsme Hitler-kurvy!’ (We are Hitler-whores!). If they did not shout loudly enough they were beaten again. After four weeks in Pankrác they were taken to Theresienstadt, where they remained for a year. Helene Bugner was taken away to Hagibor, which was seen as one of the better camps. From there she went to Kolin where the younger women were raped by Russians, some of them as many as forty-five times in a night. A Czech woman working for the Red Cross had set herself up as the talent-spotter. The women returned from these nightly sessions badly bitten by their paramours. Helene Bugner was released from agricultural work after three and a half months following complaints by the British: she had been a secretary in the legation for twelve years.48