After the Reich (26 page)

It was enough for a lawyer to have practised German law to receive a death sentence.
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The Czechs had not welcomed Hitler as the Austrians had and even some members of the German-speaking population had been more than apprehensive: socialists, Jews and the large number of Germans from the Reich who had sought refuge in Prague. When the tide turned in the war the Czechs looked forward to the moment when they could deal with the ‘German problem’ once and for all.

When he felt that victory was certain, Beneš had left London for Moscow. Before he went he told the British ambassador to the Czech government in exile, Philip Nicols, that he would need to effect the transfer of the German population and deprive them of their citizenship, otherwise ‘riots, fights, massacres of Germans would take place’. Molotov assured him that the expulsions would be but a ‘trifle’. Beneš received the necessary assurances from Stalin: ‘This time we shall destroy the Germans so that they can never again attack the Slavs.’ He also assured the Czechs in Moscow that he would not meddle in the domestic affairs of a Slav nation, which, in retrospect, gives a rather clearer idea of how much his word could be relied upon.
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Beneš’s Return

Beneš left Moscow on the last day of March 1945. On 1 April he was in the Ukraine. His goal was Košice in Slovakia where he remained for thirty-three days while the Russians and Americans carved up the country and the Czechs rose up in their wake. Patton’s American troops moved up rapidly behind Field Marshal Schörner’s 800,000-man army. On 4 May they crossed the mountain passes from Germany to assume their preordained positions along the line Carlsbad-Pilsen-Budweis. The American general had been told that Prague was out of bounds. He stopped in Beraun. The Czechs wanted to grab the credit for the liberation of the capital. On the night of 8 May the Red Army formed a protective shield around the city allowing the uprising to take its course.
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On 6 May the Red Army reached Brno. The day before Beneš heard that Prague had risen against the Germans. He moved on to Bratislava. The progress of the Russians was the signal for most of Vlasov’s divisions to head south into Austria;
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the Cossacks were in two minds about being captured by the Red Army, although some did go into Prague, and effectively liberated it before the regular Russian forces.
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In Prague the resistance formed the ČNR (Česka národni rada, or Czech National Council). The first Red Army tanks entered the city on the 9th and military operations ended two days later when Schörner retreated. Beneš did not make his triumphal entry until the 16th. His excuse for coming so slowly had been his own safety - there were German snipers about.
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Beneš showed his hand first in his Košice Statutes
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of 5 April 1945: ‘Woe, woe, woe, thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate you!’ he intoned on the wireless. There followed his famous decrees. Number five, for example, declared all Germans and Hungarians to be politically unreliable and their possessions were therefore to fall to the Czech state. The Košice Programme unleashed a ‘storm of retribution, revenge and hatred . . . Wherever the troops of the Czech General Svoboda’s army - which was fighting alongside the Russians - and the Revolutionary Guards (Narodni vybor) emerged, they did not ask who was guilty and who was innocent, they were looking for Germans.’
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On 12 May Beneš repeated his threats in Brno: ‘We have decided . . . that we have to liquidate the German problem in our republic once and for all.’
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On 19 June came the first of the ‘Retribution Decrees’: ‘Nazi criminals, traitors and their supporters’ were to be tried before ‘Extraordinary People’s Courts’. These were primitive tribunals. It took all of ten minutes to try a man and send him down for fifteen years. There were 475 ‘official’ capital sentences. Thirty death sentences were handed out for those involved in the Lidice Massacre.
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A national court would examine war crimes. On 21 June came the next decree: all persons of German or Hungarian nationality, traitors or Quislings were to lose their land. Germany would pay reparations. There was to be no compensation for loss of citizenship or property. The last measure was the so-called ‘Little Decree’ of 27 October which laid down the punishment for those who had offended against national honour.
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On 6 August Beneš had spoken at Prague University, a discourse that had particular resonance for Germans, not least because it was considered Germany’s oldest seat of learning. He had hardened his heart against all pleas for humanity: ‘We know that liberal society is in theory and practice an anachronism.’
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Already 800,000 Germans had been chased out of the country.

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.
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Those who suffered agreed that the sixteen to twenty-five-year-olds were the worst.
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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;
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Some of the Slovakian Germans had already gone to Lower Austria.
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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.
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The country was hardly touched by the aerial bombardment that struck terror into the rest of Europe.
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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;
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’:
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‘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 prison to reclaim Austrian subjects, but his intercession did little for the 40,000 Austrians who were living in terror outside the capital.
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