Theresienstadt concentration camp exchanged its Czechs and Jews for Germans. Germans of all kinds: former Nazis, refugees from Silesia and as far away as East Prussia, as well as women and children, and nuns from nearby religious orders. It was a favourite haunt for Russian soldiers and members of the Czech Revolutionary Guard to raid the camp for their primary pastime — raping — in particular the children, as they were less likely to give them venereal diseases. The camp had a special children’s section. The new guards simply stood aside, allowing them to take whoever they pleased. The Czechs set up a number of internment camps for Germans awaiting transfer. A former Jewish inmate, H.G. Adler, stated, ‘The majority were children and juveniles, who had only been locked up because they were Germans. Only because they were Germans… ? Sounds frighteningly familiar; only the word “Jews” had been changed to “Germans”. The rags the Germans had been clothed with were smeared with Swastikas. The people were abominably fed and maltreated, and they were no better off than those in the old German concentration camps.’(30)
Czech citizens who felt the urge to torture or kill could also personally select their German victims ‘like live lobsters in a fish restaurant’, from the cellars of partisans where they were being held.(31) At Camp Twenty-Eight in Tabor, the Commandant Karel Vlaska, known as the ‘Beast of Twenty-Eight’, used whips and pistol whipping as a favourite pastime. He is witnessed as having beaten a crippled war veteran to death with his own crutch.(32) On 23rd May, at Hohenelbe (Vrchalbí), Richard Rosenberg reported seeing a mixed mob of Czech civilians and militia, beating and then shooting forty Sudeten Germans in the town square and side streets. Up to 300 people are said to have been killed in the town. He was interned near Schadowitz where the inmates were forced into slave labour at a local mine. In subsequent beatings he had seven teeth knocked out and was left with a broken left cheekbone and a broken shoulder blade. He recounts the names of other fellow prisoners who were beaten to death.(33) Many thousands from the Riesengebirge region, which borders Silesia, were chased across the border into what had become Poland, where they were hunted down like animals. One of the escaping refugees, Dr Seidel, recorded the woods on both sides of the border as being strewn with dead bodies.(34)
In Brünn (Brno, the capital of Moravia), the German community had made up 70 per cent of the population before the war. Those who had not already been driven out or fled met a similar fate to their compatriots in Prague. On an unusually hot day, 30th May, in Brünn the remaining German community of approximately 25,000 people were rounded up and forced to set out on what became known as the ‘Death March of Brünn’. The march was mostly made up of old men, women and children; all the able-bodied German men aged thirteen to sixty-five having been conscripted at the end of the war, and had either died, or were already in prisoner of war camps. They headed out of the city towards the Austrian border. Their route became a trail of misery, rape and death, with many of the worst excesses being carried out by the Czech National Guard. Reports exist from numerous witnesses, including an English woman married to a German, as well as a seventy-year-old Austrian and an eighty-six-year-old Italian woman, not to mention local Czechs who often tried to give assistance to those passing through their communities.(35)
On the way to the Austrian border an improvised camp was set up in Pohrlitz (Pohorelice), 30 kilometres from Brünn, where Germans from surrounding communities were also interned. They were held under increasingly appalling conditions, with a total lack of hygiene or shelter. Between 31st May and 5th July 1945, 408 people are logged as dying in the camp. The Czechs are reported as having ‘behaved with inhuman cruelty’ as were the local Russian contingents who came at seven-thirty every evening and stayed to indulge in rape until the early hours. The Red Cross were present; their reports sickening, their bravery unquestionable. One Red Cross nurse tried to stop Russian soldiers from raping an eleven-year-old girl. She could not save the girl and was gang raped herself by five Russians. The youngest victim was reported to be just seven years old. Another Red Cross nurse recorded a woman who took poison and crushed her baby to death (its impossibly hard to imagine the circumstances that would drive a mother to do that to herself and her child), an act that incensed the Czech guards so much they threw her and the infant’s body into the latrine and told the prisoners in the camp to keep shitting on the ‘dirty German whore’ until the bodies were completely covered up.(36) The man responsible for running the camp was given a commendation by the new Czechoslovak government.
In Perau (Prevov), on 18th and 19th June, members of the Fourth Division of the Czechoslovak army shot women and children, with the cynical excuse of ‘what were we supposed to do with them, after all we’d just shot their parents?’(37) News of the atrocities was spreading fast. At Iglau (Jihlava), there was a mass suicide of over 1,200 of the German inhabitants. Those who could not take their own lives had plenty of others willing to help them. The remainder of the town population was taken to camps at Altenberg (Starý Kopec) and Stannern (Stonarov). At Brüx (Most) a further 3 per cent of the population took their lives, the rest being sent to a nearby ‘evacuation’ camp. At Kladno, the Czech militias needed more machine gun practice and told the locals to make a run for it across the fields. Villagers reported seeing parents cut the throats of their children rather than have them endure more rape and torture.(38)
The Americans, from their idyllic headquarters at Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary), sent out patrols. Their soldiers reported massacres in Bischofteinitz (Domažlice), prisoners being forced to dig their own mass graves before being executed at the inappropriately-named Freudental (Valley of Joy) and the abuse of prisoners at the Bory Prison in Pilsen.(39) In Postelberg (Postoloprty) and Saaz (Žatec), Czech soldiers estimated that they massacred around 2,500 civilians and buried them in mass graves, after the women had been stripped, robbed of their jewellery and any remaining dignity. The boys and men aged thirteen to sixty-five were generally shot, the women sent to holding centres. Any men in uniform, and particularly the SS, were in for special treatment, which included having their ears cut off, being beaten to an unrecognisable pulp, doused in petrol and set alight. There are no accurate testimonies as to whether the men were still alive at this point.(40) The actions of those responsible are well documented. The Czech government did investigate a limited number of these in an attempt to protect its reputation abroad from increasing media criticism. However, Beneš’ general amnesty for all actions taken by the resistance during the occupation and up to the end of October 1945 meant that no one has ever been brought to justice for these crimes in Czechoslovakia.
Aussig (Usti nad Labem), in northern Bohemia, witnessed some of the most appalling examples of ethnic cleansing between 30th and 31st July, after train loads of soldiers arrived and coordinated the massacre: One woman who was trying to escape with her baby in a pushchair across the Elbe bridge was surrounded and clubbed to death. Following this, the two bodies were tossed into the river and used as target practice. Many other civilians were thrown in the river too. On 31st July, within a three-hour period, estimates range from 200 to 2,700 Germans were murdered on the bridge or in the main square — many of the bodies were taken to Theresienstadt for cremation.lx (41)
German communities came to fear the Czech National Revolutionary Guard whose sadism became legendary. They oversaw camps where there are documented cases of them drowning babies in camp latrines and forcing their mothers to look on, and where German doctors trying to help their fellow country men and women were forced to crawl on the ground and eat their excrement, along with a catalogue of other crimes. The Americans of General Patton’s army group, who had taken the territory west of Karlsbad, grew ever more disgusted by the activities of those they had liberated, and increasingly intervened to protect German civilians. Beneš grew agitated at these reports and wanted the withdrawal of the Americans at the earliest possible opportunity. He was supported in this by his communist Minister for Information, Václav Kopecký, who later stated that the
Americans did not come into western Bohemia ‘to help free our nation, but to protect the Sudeten Germans and all their Nazi, SS and Gestapo and the traitors as a whole.’ The Cold War started early in Czechoslovakia.(42)
The only people ever to be brought to trial as a result of these mass expulsions were the commander of a camp near Budweis in southern Bohemia, named Václav Hrneček, who fled to Germany, of all places, after the communist coup in 1948. He was recognised by one of his former inmates and brought before an American Court of the Allied High Commission in Germany. The court found that ‘Although there were no gas chambers or systematic extermination, the camp was a centre of criminal sadism where human life and human dignity had lost all meaning’.(44) Jan Kouril, who had been a guard at the Kaunitz College in Brünn (Brno), was also caught in Germany while trying to sell gold fillings to a dentist who had been one of his victims. A gravedigger at the college gave evidence, along with a number of other witnesses, that 1,800 bodies were removed from the college after the atrocities. Kouril got fifteen years. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of other Czech murderers were never brought to trial. While the hunt goes on for Nazi war criminals, these monsters are allowed to live out their days in peace.(45) Hungarians fared little better in Slovakia. All their schools were closed; 50,000 were sent to forced labour camps in the Soviet Union, and a further 80,000 to the former Sudeten areas to work as forced labourers. Some were expelled in the same brutal way. More were ‘transferred’ later but eventually the majority of the Hungarians were allowed to remain, as the impetus went out of the expulsions and as rapprochement between the new Communist Bloc states was enforced from above.
Jews got no special treatment from the Czechs, despite their years of unimaginable torment at the hands of the Nazis. Anti-Semitism was rife throughout Eastern Europe and did not dissipate with the end of the war, even with the knowledge of Nazi extermination camps. This reality is brought home by the experience of Reuven Astor, born Hans Georg Zentner in Dux, Czechoslovakia, who a few weeks after the war ended travelled as an emissary of the Jewish Brigade in Czechoslovakia from Pilsen to Prague. He overheard two Czechs who were travelling with him discussing the Jews. One said, ‘So many Jews are back again,’ his companion nodded his head adding, ‘Probably too many holes in those gas chambers.’(46) The Jews in Bohemia had traditionally integrated into the German communities, adopted German names, and were, as such, even now classed as Germans. The Czech Minister for Information used the pretext that in the 1930 census, during the First Republic, the Jews had been counted as Germans and thus would be again. A number of surviving Czech Jews were transferred to Germany regardless of their experiences, which was the last place on earth Jews wanted to go at that time.
The Czechs, Germans and Jews predominantly built the ancient kingdom of Bohemia, in a shared history that stretched back over a thousand years. Even if one chooses to believe the propaganda of Czech nationalists, who portray all Sudeten Germans as ‘settlers and colonialists’ who only overran the country after the Austrian Habsburg victory at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, it would still mean that those being expelled had been there for over 300 years. The same length of time as the British settlers who left on the Mayflower have been in America, and over a hundred years longer than European settlers have been in Australia and New Zealand. Imagine telling a US citizen, or an Australian, that they have an hour to pack their bags and leave; leaving behind everything they have worked for and saved up to build, never to return again. Imagine, in that situation, how hard it would be to ever regard anywhere new as home again. Imagine the ultimate insult of having those who took everything from you spend successive decades trying to write you and your forefathers out of the history books, doing everything in their power to erase all traces and memory of your ancestors’ existence, including their final resting places, memorials and monuments.lxi (47)
The revisionist history of the Communist era has sadly permeated the hearts and minds of many Czechs. The placards held aloft outside the Charles University in 1948 that read ‘Charles University only ever ours’lxii could just as easily be carried today. There is little recognition, and even less remorse, even by those who do know the extent of the atrocities committed in the Czech Republic’s name.lxiii (48) A self-satisfied President Beneš, in his December 1946 Christmas address, smugly stated, ‘This year’s Christmas festivities assume a special significance, as it is the first time that we celebrate it in the history of our homeland without Germans.’(49)
A DESOLATE KINGDOM
One of the leading figures of the Thirty Years War, the Bohemian nobleman Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose palace in Prague once drew hundreds of thousands of visitors, would no doubt have found the question of whether he saw himself as being German or Czech as anathema. He would have seen himself as a Bohemian just as much, if not more so, than if you were to ask a Swiss person today if they were German, French or Italian; they would answer Swiss. The radicalisation of ethnic nationalism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries destroyed what had evolved together over centuries, making Central Europe all the poorer for it. Was there a moral imperative for the expulsions? In the face of overwhelming evidence, clearly not. Was it essential for the economy and stability of the country? Evidently not, as there was a massive labour shortage after the war, and fields lay fallow while people starved in many parts of Europe. Even today, population numbers in some areas of the former Sudetenland are up to a third lower than they were before the expulsions. Once-proud spa resorts like Marienbad (Mariansky Lazne) are crumbling, empty ruins and a shadow of their former selves in their Austro-German heyday.
Whether the expulsions were legal, or not, is another question. The Potsdam Accords are the oft-quoted excuse of the Czech, Slovak and Polish governments for the expulsions. However, these began months before the Potsdam Declaration was made. There was no specific reference to the Sudeten territories at Tehran, Yalta or Potsdam. Section XII of the Potsdam agreement relating to the ‘Orderly Transfer of German Populations’ — following the reaffirmation by the three heads of government that the delimitation of Germany’s borders awaited a final peace settlement — stated, ‘The Czechoslovak Government, the Polish Provisional Government and the Control Council in Hungary… are being requested meanwhile to suspend further expulsions pending an examination by the Governments concerned by the report from their representatives on the Control Council.’ It was anything but a green light to continue the wild expulsions. However, the Czechoslovak and Polish governments lost no time in continuing to bludgeon out new facts on the ground, and the Allies lost no time in placing charges against the Nazis for illegal population ‘transfers’ at Nuremberg. Pierre Mounier, the French prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, stated on 20th November 1945 that, ‘Such transportations contravene the international convention, especially article 46 of the 1907 Hague protocol on the rules of war and their usage, as well as the fundamental basis of the rule of criminal law, as they exist in all civilized countries… as well as contravening article 6b of the Statutes.’(50)
Many would also argue that the expulsions contravened the Czechoslovak Constitution of 1920 and its espousal of the protection of its minority communities. The expulsions were made on the basis of the ‘collective guilt’ of Czechoslovakia’s German and Hungarian communities who were collectively labelled ‘traitors’ and ‘fascists’. This formed part of a historical whitewash that would play down the level of collaboration that had taken place within the Protectorate and to an even greater extent in Slovakia during the Nazi era. As recently discovered correspondence between Beneš and his Interior Minister Nosek in the archives in Prague has shown, it was decided early on that even those who had been ardent anti-fascists within the German community were to be deported to Germany.(50a) The notion of ‘collective guilt’ was to show no mercy, make no distinctions and continues to be used to this day to label Czechoslovakia’s German and Hungarian communities as ‘collective criminals’ and therefore ‘justify’ the illeg
al and inhuman Beneš decrees which unleashed such a tidal wave of human misery.
That the mass transfer of populations, later to become known as ‘ethnic cleansing’, was a war crime, was confirmed by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, precisely at a time when the largest transfers in the history of mankind were taking place at the acquiescence of the accusers. On 11th November 1946, their deliberations were incorporated by the UN General Assembly in Resolution 95.lxiv (51)
The British government felt obliged to make an official protest to the Czech authorities in June 1945, saying that they had not agreed to this violent mass deportation of Germans, passing its complaint on to the Allied Control Council in Germany. This turned out to be hot air as no actions followed.
The West German Federal Ministry for Expellees in Bonn in the late 1950s provided figures showing that 272,000 Germans had died at the hands of the Czechs during the expulsions from the Sudetenland.(52) These figures are still hotly disputed. More recent studies have put the figure of those murdered directly during the period of the wild expulsions at between 20,000–40,000, but these studies do not claim to be able to accurately record how many thousands more died premature deaths during the death marches to the borders, or whilst detained in makeshift camps, in forced labour battalions, let alone establish a figure for those who were shot out of sight in the woods. There is clearly no interest on the part of the Czech authorities to have a comparison made of the atrocities committed by the Nazis or Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia between 1938–46. In the Czech Republic and Poland, the post-war communist authorities cultivated a status of national victimhood that has endured well into the twenty-first century, one that certainly has more merit in Poland, where many of the worst of Nazi Germany’s atrocities took place, than in the Czech Republic. Added to which in both Czechoslovakia and Poland the national inter-war censuses counted Jews either as a separate linguistic or racial group, not as Poles or Czechs. Some time after the war it suited them both to start counting Polish and Czech Jews that had been murdered by the Nazis as their own, so as to bolster their own figures and sense of victim status. Although as we have seen they were not so keen on keeping the living ones, with many of those who survived the Holocaust and the continuing climate of anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe taking the first chance to leave once the State of Israel was founded in 1948. There is no question that Nazi Germany killed many more Poles than Poles killed Germans, in that theatre most of the killing of Germans was done by the Red Army. But in the Czech Republic (and we can only speak of the Czech Republic as Slovakia was a close ally of the Third Reich until very nearly the end of the war) the numbers suggest that substantially more ethnic German civilians were murdered by Czech militias and citizens than Czechs were killed during the Nazi occupation.
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