After the Reich (28 page)

Caught up in the massacres were not just Prague Germans but refugees from eastern Bohemia and Moravia. Wagner saw a miserable troop of old men, women and children from Ohlau. He tried to give them milk but the RG dashed the bottles out of his hands and threatened to shoot the children who were prepared to lick it up from the pavement. International condemnation had little effect. In the ‘revolutionary’ days, the International Red Cross was too frightened of the Russians to act. In Prosecnice camp there was an IRC inspection in April 1946. As soon as the visit was over, the treatment of prisoners became worse.
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Landskron

The massacres were by no means confined to the capital. As soon as the Russians had liberated a town or village, partisans arrived to administer revolutionary justice. The primary targets were members of the Nazi or Sudetenland Party (SdP), or members of those organisations Beneš decreed had aided the Nazis in their tyranny. Partisans also listened to denunciations from local Czechs before they struck. The rich were particularly vulnerable. Also susceptible were doctors, grocers, butchers and publicans, and anyone who might have denied credit, or schnapps. In many places all Germans were considered guilty. In other places the action was coloured by some German outrage. In Littau near Iglau, the German-speaking pocket south of Prague, the Waffen-SS had torched the Czech village of Javorička in March 1945. The partisans responded by driving the Germans into a forester’s house and the Schloss and murdering them.
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In Landskron the fighting stopped on the 9 May. The Russian liberators were chiefly interested in the townswomen, whom they pursued into the night. There were few Czechs to speak of, and they were mainly concerned to protect their own property from plunder. This idyll changed when on the 17th some lorry-loads of armed Czech partisans arrived. All the male German inhabitants were hunted into the main square. By the early afternoon there were as many as a thousand. The Czechs amused themselves by drilling them, forcing them to lie down and get up, all the while walking among them, spitting and kicking them in the groin and shins. Those who fell during this humiliation were taken to a water tank and drowned. Any who bobbed up were shot. Meanwhile a ‘People’s Court’ had been established with a jury composed of local Czechs. The Germans had to crawl to the bench. Most of the men then had to run a 50-60 metre gauntlet. Many fell and were beaten to pulp. The next day the survivors were reassembled. One man was strung up from a lamppost. The court adjourned only when a horrified woman set fire to her house which threw the crowd into a panic. Twenty-four Germans had been killed. An even greater number committed suicide.

Brno Death March

Brno was another German enclave. Before the Great War it was considered to be a ‘suburb of Vienna’.
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Even with the post-war migration it contained 60,000 Germans, and there were many more between Brno and the border. The Russians reached the city on 25 April. There followed the usual scenes of rape and violence. The next morning all Germans had to report for work. Czech partisans established their HQ in Kaunitz College, where the city’s leading Germans were beaten and tortured. Sometimes they were forced to go on all fours and bark like dogs. When the Czechs had finished with them they were delivered to the hospital, where they were thrown into a cellar. A Red Cross nurse examined a German who had indescribable wounds to his genitals. Before he died he was able to explain his crime: he had sold vegetables to the Gestapo.
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At 9 p.m. on 30 May began the Brno Death March. It was the Feast of Corpus Christi, normally a day for solemn processions, and the largely Catholic Germans did not fail to draw comparisons. The 25,000 marchers had fifteen minutes to pack a bag and to assemble in the Convent Garden, where they spent the night. At dawn they were driven into the courtyard and relieved of their valuables before marching to the camp at Raigern in the pouring rain. The procession included inmates of the old people’s home, the hospitals and the children’s clinic and one Englishwoman who had been married to a local Nazi. Her case naturally excited the interest of the
Daily Mail
correspondent Rhona Churchill, who filed a story on 30 May.
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Stragglers were beaten with truncheons and whips and those who failed to get up were shot and their bodies stripped and plundered. Survivors were strip-searched before being driven on to a camp at Pohrlitz, about halfway to the Austrian border.
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The Red Cross nurse claimed that a thousand had already died. Another said that the camp claimed a further 1,700 lives. One mother recounts that two of her three children died on the march.
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The marchers were lodged in a car factory. The younger women were raped by the guards. Those still capable of walking were pushed on to the border the next morning, leaving behind about 6,000, who were thrown into grain silos. The Red Cross nurse stayed with them, and her reports do not make pleasant reading. It may be that some of the atrocities committed have been exaggerated in retrospect, but there is more than enough corroboration to make it clear that the Czechs behaved with inhuman cruelty.

The Pohrlitz camp was evacuated on 18 June. Sixty to seventy people had been dying daily, largely from typhus. Nutrition consisted of stale bread and rotten root vegetables. The Russians came every night at 7.30 and stayed until 2 a.m. They raped the women, even a seventy-year-old. When the Red Cross nurse tried to protect a tender eleven-year-old, she herself was taken away to ‘suffer the consequences’ and was raped by five soldiers. Another witness said that the youngest raped was seven years old, the oldest eighty. Some of the healthier ones escaped and made their own way to the border. It was evidently desired that Brno should be free of Germans in time for Beneš’s five-day visit in July. As it happened, the Czechs had failed to round up all the Germans, while others who had broken down on the march were returned to the city. When Beneš arrived they were forced out into the sand dunes without food or water. Many died, others went mad.
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The first to leave Pohrlitz were the sick, who were driven away and dumped in the marshes by the River Thaya on the Austrian border. No one knew they were there and according to the Red Cross nurse they starved to death. The corpses were photographed and shown in newsreels in Britain and the United States. The Czechs responded by saying that they had been killed by the Austrians. There was another massacre at Nikolsburg, where the bodies of 614 men were thrown into a mass grave.
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Iglau and Kladno

The German-speaking pocket around Iglau ( Jihlava) in western Moravia was also a sore subject for the Czechs. When the town fell on 5 May it was the signal for a mass suicide of Germans: as many as 1,200 took their lives, and perhaps 2,000 were dead by Christmas. Between six and seven thousand Germans were driven into the camps Helenental and Altenberg. When Helenental was closed, the inhabitants were plundered and herded south towards the Austrian border. Some 350 people are said to have lost their lives on the way. They were detained in another camp in Stannern where hundreds more perished.
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The Germans in Kladno were subjected to the full severity of the Revolution from 5 May onwards. Erika Griessmann’s father was taken away and never returned. She herself was beaten for refusing to tell the RG where the family jewellery was buried. A few days later she saw Germans being chased across a field like hares, gunned down by partisans with submachine guns. Her family was thrown out of their house on the 9th and made to run the gauntlet down their street while the crowd lashed out at them. She spotted some of their neighbours weeping at their windows at the sight.

They joined a group of refugees. Many of them were bloody, after Czechs had hurled grenades into their midst. For the second time the seventeen-year-old Erika heard that she and the better-looking Germans would be raped by the Russians. They apparently had first refusal. The Russians, however, treated her well. She fainted, and was pulled into a car by the hair. She woke on a sofa bound hand and foot. Five high-ranking Soviet officers asked her if she were hungry, and where she wanted to go. She said she wanted her mother. They took her to the football stadium where she found her mother and younger brother.

After threatening to shoot them all, Czechs took the Germans to Masshaupt where they had to stand in a ditch while a crowd spat on them and pelted them with stones. They were then returned to the football stadium on a lorry. There were German soldiers lying all around with bullet wounds in their stomachs and heads. Erika’s party were strip-searched and taken to a barracks. Bodies were strewn everywhere, even small children whose parents had cut their throats to save them from further tortures.

On the 10th they prepared to march. Before the gates of the barracks a jeering crowd had assembled. A Czech read a speech: all Germans were criminals. Hand grenades were once again tossed among the refugees, producing another bloodbath. A Czech priest appeared to administer the last rites. Many of the dying refused his blessing. Erika and her mother managed to get into an ambulance and someone gave Erika a Red Cross nurse’s hat. Russian sentries accompanied the German wounded as they left Kladno. One of the Russians recognised that Erika was no nurse and demanded she go with him. The injured in the ambulance took her side. He then requested either Erika or their watches. The heavily wounded German soldiers gave the Russian their watches and rings and Erika was bought free. That way they reached comparative safety in the American-occupied zone.
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The American Zone

It was the Americans rather than the Russians who liberated western Czechoslovakia. Whatever the Bohemian Germans might have wanted to believe, however, the Americans did not meddle in the activities of Czech partisans. The most that can be said is that the expulsions from their zone were generally more humane than those that took place east of the line.
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They finally left in December 1945.

One woman did however report that Americans helped her cross the border; in another instance a woman was returned to Brno from Germany as a Czech national, and as a German had to suffer the consequences. In Bory Prison in Pilsen, the torture stopped when the Americans came to inspect, and started again the next day. The writer Ernst Jünger had a letter from his friend Sophie Dorothea Podewils on 10 October 1945. She had been in the Pilsen prison. ‘What took place in the German and also in the Hungarian part of Czechoslovakia is a tragedy that is only comparable to what the Jews had to bear here.’
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In Mies near Marienbad, Czech partisans and American soldiers searched German houses together. Later the partisans shot twenty-five Germans in their camp. Elbogen (Habartov) was the seat of the Control Commission, which granted permission to Czechs to cross to the other Allied zones, but its decisions were not always respected by the partisans.
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Franz Weinhand was picked up by the militia in Gfell and taken to the castle in Elbogen. He and his fellow Germans screamed so loudly during their whippings that they began to annoy the American sentries a hundred metres away. One of them fired his machine gun at their window. Two days later members of the American Commission arrived at the castle and took photographs of the Germans’ naked bodies. Weinhand and the others dared not say a word for fear of reprisals. After four weeks the Americans took the political prisoners to Landshut in Bavaria. In September they were sent back to Czechoslovakia.
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In Schlackenwerth a German clockmaker called Müller was tortured to death. He came from the resort of St Joachimsthal (Jáchymov), where a Herr Steinfelsner, the owner of a sawmill, was hanged before the town hall in the presence of the townsfolk. The body hung there until some Americans came by in a jeep and forced the partisans to take it down.
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In Bischofteinitz (Domažlice) the usual scenes occurred when the men were rounded up. Thirty-five of them were called out and butchered. In Blatna a girl who had dallied with the Americans even had her head shaved after their departure. The Americans were also in Chodau (Chodov), where the luggage of departing Germans were plundered almost as systematically as they were across the border in Poland.
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There were Czechs working and living in German areas, and Germans in the towns which lay in the middle of largely Czech areas. České Budějovice or Budweis in south-western Czechoslovakia was in the Czech heartlands. Until the nineteenth century the Germans had dominated the town. There was still an active minority in 1945, who were put to work in the mines. Most of the atrocities took place around the labour exchange. Large numbers of Czech women cheered as the Germans were beaten bloody. The priest, Pater Joseph Seidl, was one of them - he had apparently committed no other crime than being German. The beds in the military hospital were taken over by the Czechs. One severely wounded soldier was given a lethal jab. SS men aged between eighteen and twenty-one were dragged into the courtyard and beaten to death. In Pilsen, another largely Czech city, Franz Wagner, a former communist who had spent a term in Dachau, was robbed and beaten up before being expelled from the country.
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Freudenthal, Freiwaldau and Bilin