After the Reich (27 page)

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

Hans Wagner went to the Russian commander to beg for more beds for the sick and wounded. He took the precaution of going with a Czech colleague, Dr Dobbek. The Russian general Gordow was not in the slightest bit interested: ‘If you have no room for your wounded, throw them in the Vltava, there is plenty of room for them there!’
⁴⁹
Wagner went for a walk on the afternoon of the 14th. Hanging from the sign to the famous restaurant U svatého Havla were the half-carbonised remains of a German soldier who had been strung up by his heels. His right arm was missing from the shoulder. Wagner concluded that he was an amputee. Everywhere he noted the signs that the communists had taken over, under the shadow of the liberating Red Army. After popping into the Elekra, the family coffee house, he went towards the railway station. A blonde woman was being attacked by a mob. She was shouting in perfect Czech, but in a moment she was surrounded and stripped of her clothes. A dray wagon came by, and each of her limbs was attached to one of the horses. The beasts were driven off in opposite directions.

With the re-establishment of government, the wild concentration camps in Prague’s cinemas and schools were wound up and the prisoners despatched to proper camps. One woman who had been in the Slavia cinema and claimed to have been spared from lynching by a semi-miraculous thunderstorm was taken to the main station on a sort of death march, which saw many German Bohemians beaten to death to the applause of the local mob. They were pushed into coal trucks where they were robbed one last time and then taken away. Others endured the death march to Theresienstadt. It is estimated that only 10 per cent of those who set out from Prague survived.
⁵⁰
Modřany was another infamous Czech camp, mostly populated by Prague Germans; another was Bystřice, where Margarete Schell went on 28 July. The prisoners were welcomed by a demonstration of brutality. Anyone with professional titles was singled out for extra beating. She was whipped. She began to despair: ‘We will never get out of here, this is the last stop.’
⁵¹

The fate of the Prague Germans slowly became known to the outside world. The Austrians were busy trying to show the Allies that they had never had any affection for Germany and the Nazis, and they had their own problems. In Vienna the former diplomat Josef Schöner was visited by a Prague Czech on 18 May who gave him a misleading report that all the Germans had been interned or were working on rebuilding. The German-speakers were finished; they had defended themselves fiercely during the uprising, particularly the women, while the Russians had plundered the city like Vienna. They had also looted freely in Bratislava, and there had been a high incidence of rape, ‘so that the first elation at liberation had much abated’.
⁵²

Many Germans spent a prolonged period in Pankrác Prison. Wagner claimed that a special treat for visiting Russian bigwigs was to be taken over the prison and witness a German being beaten to death. Another was to toss a prisoner from a second-floor parapet and shoot at him while he plummeted to the ground. Some boys from Reichenberg were accused of being Werewolves. They had to fight one another until they were bloody and then lick up the blood. When that resulted in vomiting, that too had to be licked up. When they had cleaned up the mess they were stripped and beaten with whips until the skin hung from their bodies. Then they were tossed into a cellar. Those who did not die from their wounds were later hanged.
⁵³