As the true extent of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime began to emerge, and as the tide against the Third Reich began to turn, Allied leaders clearly felt the shackles and conventions of traditional diplomacy need not apply in dealing with Nazi Germany. Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on the 15th December 1944 laid bare this desire to see that, ‘They (those to be ‘transferred’) do away with the mixing of peoples, which has led to so many problems… We will make a clean sweep. These large transfers of populations do not concern me, which under modern conditions can be carried out far more easily than in the past.’(10) A conversation between Stalin and Churchill, in Yalta, February 1945, provides an even more graphic description of their states of mind:
Stalin: There won’t be any Germans left when our soldiers march in, the Germans will run away and none will remain.
Churchill: Then there is the problem of how we deal with the issue of Germany itself. We have killed six or seven million of them and perhaps before the war is over we will have killed a million more.
Stalin: One or two million!?
Churchill: Don’t get me wrong, I would not propose to put a limit on the number. There should be room enough in Germany for those that will fill these gaps.(11)
On the 12th May 1945 in a speech in Brünn (Brno), Beneš stoked the fires again saying, ‘We have said and taken it upon ourselves to liquidate, in its entirety, the German problem in our Republic.’(12) That was a fateful day for the Germans of Bohemia and the Hungarians of Slovakia. Beneš proclaimed the first of his ‘Retribution Decrees’, which allowed for the establishment of kangaroo courts known as ‘People’s Courts’. They generally included people with little or no legal experience and reached their conclusions in ten minutes, after which execution was carried out. They by no means targeted only high-ranking Nazis but were also used to instil terror into the hearts of the country’s minorities. On the 21st June the second set of ‘Retribution Decrees’ were enacted. These dispossessed all German and Hungarian minorities of all their land, properties, businesses and assets held in Czechoslovakia, without recourse to any compensation. In addition, it also demanded reparations from Germany.lvi The final set of decrees were issued on the 27th October and related to punishments for acts which contravened ‘Czech honour’. There would be precious little honour left in many quarters by the end of the year. By this time wild ethnic cleansing, mass murder, rape and pillage had gone on with bestial abandon, with the full support of the Czech and Soviet authorities.
Beneš very much wanted to present the Allies with a fait accompli, as Stalin had done with Churchill in what became Poland — along the lines of ‘Germans, what Germans? They’ve all fled.’ He knew the longer he waited, the more likely it was that the pent up anger and hatred over the occupation would dissipate, that people would want the war and the killing to be over, and would be ready to get on with their lives. The idea that the mass expulsions were just spontaneous outbursts of popular anger and revenge is largely fictitious. Individual incidents did take place, especially in Prague, where SS units had systematically tried to put down an uprising in the final days before the German capitulation, but these were the exception. In numerous communities where Germans and Czechs had lived cheek-by-jowl for centuries, and where Czechs had formed the minority, there are also many examples of Czechs trying to protect their neighbours from lynch mobs which had been trained in from other parts of the country.(13) What made the following Czech atrocities all the more incomprehensible is the fact that Czechoslovakia had, by and large, remained a haven of peace and tranquillity in Europe, especially compared to the sheer bloody murderous hell that had erupted in many parts of the Continent. As A.J.P. Taylor put it, ‘The Czechs were spared the horrors of war, not only in 1938 but throughout the whole Second World War. Afterwards, surveying Prague from the President’s palace, Beneš could say, “Is it not beautiful? The only central European city not destroyed. And it was all my doing.” ’(15) And Giles MacDonogh wrote that, apart from Lidice and Lezaky, ‘There were no startling atrocities. The country was hardly touched by the aerial bombardment that struck terror into the rest of Europe. The French bore far worse, and behaved far better toward the defeated Germans…’(16)
Children from the Reich had been sent to Bohemia to protect them from the bombing. Prague’s indigenous German population had swelled from 42,000 to near 250,000 with the influx of the refugees from the bombed-out cities. In addition there was an estimated 600,000 refugees flooding through Bohemia and Moravia from East Prussia and the Baltic coast, a further 1.6 million Silesian German refugees fleeing the Red Army’s murderous rampages and 100,000 Slovakian Germans. Bohemia had been seen as a safe haven, a place spared the ravages of war. Pity their innocence — they were walking into the mouth of hell.
FEVERISH ETHNIC CLEANSING
There was a new frontier spirit when it became clear that vast riches were to be had, in the form of property, land, possessions, and other booty of war, rape and pillage. Trains heading out into the Sudetenland were nicknamed the ‘Alaska Express’, reminiscent of the American gold rushes.(17) The oppressors were now defenceless, sandwiched between the American army in the west, who had penetrated deep into Bohemia, and the approaching Russians, Czech communists and Beneš’ nationalists. It became a free-for-all, and as always in the aftermath of war, it was the civilians who bore the brunt of the casualties. By the time the rampage was over, Czech militias, or soldiers, had by some estimates murdered over a quarter of a million German civilians. Countless witness statements exist and are logged in the archives at the Bonn Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims, where there is a published account of the results of a fact-finding commission entitled ‘Documentation on the expulsion of the German population in East Central Europe’, which contains thousands of verified eyewitness accounts. It runs to 5,000 pages in eleven volumes. Similar accounts were compiled by the Göttingen Research Institute and the Bishops of Western Germany(18) and as part of the German government’s Lastenausgleich (restitution/literally equalisation of burdens process) undertaken to help the expellees make a new start in West Germany. These records are held at the Archives in Koblenz and Bayreuth; bitter testimonies to man’s inhumanity to man. In the sober light of today, reading these accounts, it is almost unimaginable that human beings could commit such acts of bestiality against one another.
They should not be forgotten or brushed under the carpet, or even excused as divine retribution for the crimes of the Nazi regime carried out in the name of a Greater Germany. One act of barbarism begets another, and acts of spontaneous revenge are understandable, if regrettable, but orchestrated massacres by those not in the line of fire, months after the event, are not excusable, and it taints the humanity of those who continue to try and cover them up or excuse them. The ‘transfers’ began immediately. In April, Beneš revoked the German and Hungarian minorities’ citizenship calling them ‘traitors’ on the basis that they took German and Hungarian nationality. They did not have much choice, as Czechoslovakia no longer existed as a state, and its passports were no longer valid either. One of Beneš’s many decrees, still controversially on the statute books of the Czech and Slovak Republics today,lvii invoked on 9th May 1945, established the collective guilt of all German and Hungarian minorities. He was under added pressure from the Czechs who had chosen exile in Moscow, some of whom had fought with the Red Army, to up the ante against the German minority in particular.
The Communists began flexing their muscles almost immediately. As per earlier agreements with his Soviet Allies, Beneš was to leave the organisation of the ethnic cleansing and the colonisation of the areas to be cleared of Germans to the Czech Communists, giving them a huge loyal support base for the future expansion of their political power base. In the summer of 1946, in the first elections in the former Sudeten German areas, the Communists received the highest number of votes and became the largest party in the Czech parliament.lviii
The Russians spread
west, continuing to refine the art of rape and pillage that they had begun in Poland and Eastern Germany and they were closely followed by the recently emerged StB (Státní bezpecnost — communist state security service) and by the Czech partisan SNB (Sbor Národní Bezpecnosti — National Security Corps).(19) Beneš’ government wanted a clean slate. They wanted only Czechs and Slovaks in the country, with the Slovaks being made to pay for their acquiescence in the demise of Czechoslovakia. The executors of this new ethnically ‘clean’ state would make no distinction between good or bad Germans, Jews or Hungarians, there was simply to be no room for any of them in the Second Czechoslovak Republic. On returning home, even Sudeten German socialists and communists who had survived the concentration camps found themselves added to a special list called ‘The Antifascist Transferees’. Some had already been given exemptions to remain, but when they tried to claim their pensions or find work they found all doors barred. One such Sudeten German communist, Anton Reinisch, who had spent seven years in a concentration camp, wrote to his party headquarters: ‘There no exceptions are made or consideration given, no matter whether you are a child, a woman, red or blue, all the same, you happen to be German and as such you are even lower than a dog. I have never in my many years of experience as an active Marxist been taught that there is a form of National Communism, but I have come to experience its existence first hand here.’(20) The Prague uprising began on 5th May 1945 with radio broadcasts calling for ‘death to all Germans’.(21) This was met with stiff resistance by German forces until 8th May, when Germany’s formal unconditional surrender came into force. Prague was the last major city in German hands to surrender, nearly a week after the surrender of Berlin. This only increased the ferocity of the Czech revolutionary guardsmen who, in the coming days and weeks, racked up a gruesome list of atrocities against the German population in the city. Their crimes included mass rape, the beating to death of old men and even recorded instances of children being thrown into the river Moldau. The worst treatment was meted out to those in uniform, including children of the Hitler Youth and wounded soldiers, 50,000 of whom had been left in hospital beds by the retreating German army. If they were lucky, they were shot where they lay. The less ‘fortunate’ were tortured to death. Members of the SS were subjected to the most elaborate of tortures, strung upside down from lampposts, doused in petrol and set alight as human torches. Upon Beneš’ triumphant arrival in the city, several streets were lined with this form of ‘festive welcome’.
As a recently rediscovered and released film of the May 1945 Prague pogrom shows, it was not by any means only Nazis that were the target of such atrocities. The horrific film shot on 10 May 1945 shows civilian men, women and children lined up along a roadside who were first shot and then their bodies run over by military trucks, whilst those not yet dead beg for mercy. Helena Dvorackova was only a child when her father filmed the terrifying scene, as her grandmother forced her face into her skirt so she did not see the worst of it. Helena still lives in an apartment opposite the site of the massacre. Her father had hidden the film for fear of retribution by Czech authorities, should it ever be released. Helena recently released the film to David Vondracek, who has used it as part of a documentary entitled Slaughter Czech Style, which was shown on Czech television in May 2010. Helena Dvorackova stated that not only Germans but also a Swedish family had been massacred that day. On being asked why she decided to release the film she stated, ‘Because of the inhumanity of the act… killing people like this. With no legal process, no trial, nothing.’(21a)
The old Czech nobility, many of whom were of German descent, also came in for ‘special treatment’. The Thurn and Taxis family were taken to an internment centre where the father and his two sons were beaten and forced to watch the gang rape of their mother and their nanny. Large buildings, cinemas and sporting stadiums became holding centres and arenas for the most fiendish of entertainments for those Czechs who wanted to take part in the orgy of violence that followed. One of the most infamous was the Strahov football stadium where the new game was making German civilians run across the field trying to dodge bullets from the machine guns firing at them. The mass shootings included men, women, children and even babies. Those not killed by machine gun were often beaten and tortured to death and their bodies interred in mass graves such as those at Wokowitz cemetery.(22)
The OKO and Slavia cinemas in Prague became holding centres for many women and children, and thus soon attracted the attention of lascivious Russian soldiers and Czech militiamen. From 6th May onwards, ‘Children who would not let go of their mother’s skirts were dragged out with them and forced to watch.’(23) German-speaking Jews, even those returning from the concentration camps, often received the same treatment. Their torment must have seemed never ending.
On 7th May, a small German troop column was driving through Lesche (Leština) near Hohenstadt (Zábreh) when a shot rang out, killing one of the German soldiers. When another column of SS men came upon the scene they went straight into the town, picked out the first five Czech men they found, took them to a nearby field, beat and then shot them. The military columns moved on, leaving the town’s German inhabitants defenceless in the face of likely revenge attacks, which soon followed. Two days later, the relatives of the murdered Czech men went to find and retrieve the bodies. When the Czechs returned to town an orgy of violence followed, both in Lesche (Leština) and neighbouring Witteschau (Vitošov). Ivo Wagner recalls how they came to Witteschau and killed his uncle’s parents and his aunt, remembering, ‘My aunt was very young at the time. They tortured her abominably. They cut off her breasts, cut open her mouth and cut out her eyes. My aunt was found alive in this terrible state and taken straight to the hospital in the Moravian town of Schönberg (Šumperk). It was too late to save her but she was able to inform them who had done this to her.’ Amalie Winkler, another witness to these gruesome events, lost her father who had been abducted along with sixteen other men from Lesche, who were subsequently taken to an outlying field and beaten to death.lix (24)
Countless gruesome testimonies from citizens in towns and villages close to Hohenelbe in the mountainous region of the Riesengebirge (which straddles the border between Bohemia, Silesia and Saxony) lie in the German archive at Bayreuth, listing the nature of the murders and the names of many of the victims. At Hennersdorf (Dubnice pod Ralskem), near Hohenelbe (Vrchalbí), Frieda Kober witnessed the arrival of the Red Army and their Czech cohorts and describes the neighbours she knew who were beaten, raped and murdered between 8th May and 15th July, when the surviving inhabitants were kicked out across the new border into what became East Germany. She names six men who were shot, three of whom were forced to dig their own graves, and six more she knew who committed suicide.(25) Hilde K. recounts how the population of her village was rounded up into the main square; one of her neighbours, Frau Rummler, was dragged there by her hair. As she shouted abuse at her tormentors, she only inspired them to beat her with truncheons, fists and feet. When her husband tried to help her they beat him. She screamed, ‘If you are going to torment us, why not just shoot us now?’ They were both then dragged to the courtyard of a neighbouring building and shot. Tasting blood, the militias then let loose on the crowd, beating others to death before loading the remainder onto transports. She ends her summary with the words, ‘No, it is better not to think about it. It was simply too terrible.’(26)
On 9th May 1945, the day after the war had officially ended in Europe, Anna Seidel, a sixty-seven-year-old German ‘Prager’ woman, was interned with many others and began meandering from one camp to another, starting at Pankrac prison, moving to Theresienstadt concentration camp and finally arriving at Kolin, where another witness, Helene Bugner, reports that the younger and better-looking women were raped by Russian guards and ‘visitors’ as often as forty-five times a night, with Czech women apparently assisting their Russian liberators as ‘talent spotters’.(27)
Soon the death marches would begin from these impromptu torture
zones in Prague and elsewhere to more solid ‘retribution centres’. As in Poland, the concentration camps were reinstated to take their new batch of inmates, this time Germans. The march from Prague to Theresienstadt concentration camp was carried out in the spirit of ‘wild ethnic cleansing’, with many Germans being beaten to death on the road to the applause of the crowd. Most died of beatings, exhaustion and lack of any provisions during the journey. It is estimated that less than 10 per cent of those who set out on the march from Prague made it to Theresienstadt.(28)
Once there, the commandant, Alois Prusa, and his two daughters had the tools of the inquisition ready to inflict more suffering on those who survived the journey. Witnesses recounted their acts of brutality and murder. Other than the usual beatings with whips and pipes, some were forced to fight one another and lick or eat urine and faeces from the floor, or from symbols of the Third Reich. More elaborate acts of torture, which involved people’s more intimate areas, were invented and did the rounds at several camps. One included using ‘wooden wool soaked in benzene put between the toes of an individual and set alight to burn their genitalia’. The Czech Ministry of the Interior reported that the camp only contained SS captives. In fact, 50 per cent of its inmates were women and children.(29)
Death of a Nation Page 17
