Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (23 page)

It is not surprising, therefore, that when the population of Prague rose up against the Nazis in the last week of the war, these long-standing resentments finally gave birth to violence. Captured German soldiers were beaten, doused in petrol and burned to death.
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Dozens were hung from the city’s lamp posts with swastikas carved into their flesh. Guerrillas broke into the cellars where German men, women and children were hiding and beat, raped, and occasionally slaughtered them.
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Thousands of Germans were taken from their homes and interned in schools, cinemas and barracks, where many were subjected to brutal interrogations in an attempt to discover their political affiliations.
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The atmosphere in the city during these few days was thick with fear. Some residents of Prague spoke later of an ‘infectious’ panic that reminded them of the feeling in the German trenches during the First World War. One German civil servant described Prague at this time as a succession of ‘barricades and frightened people’. As he tried to make his way home he repeatedly ran into groups of outraged men, cursing mobs, screaming women, German soldiers surrendering, and in amongst it all a lad selling pennants and badges with the Czech colours. ‘Shots are being fired from every house,’ he wrote afterwards:

Czech teenagers, often a revolver in each hand, demand to see identification papers. I hide in the porch of a house; from upstairs I can hear hair-raising screams, then a shot, and then silence. A young man with a face like a bird of prey comes down the stairs, quickly hiding something in his left trouser pocket. An old woman, obviously the caretaker, shouts: ‘Did you let her have it, that German slut? That’s right, that’s how they all must perish!’

Germans across the city were hiding in their cellars, or at the houses of Czech friends and acquaintances, in order to avoid the wrath of the mob.
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At the beginning of the uprising, on 5 May 1945, there were some 200,000 Germans in Prague, most of them civilians.
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According to Czech reports, just under a thousand of them were killed during the rising, including scores of women and at least eight children. This is certainly an underestimate, especially considering the scope and nature of the violence that took place in and around the city, and doesn’t take into account official attempts to play down the violence against civilians. For example, a mass grave was later discovered in a cemetery in the suburb of B
evnov containing 300 Germans who had been ‘killed during the fight westwards’. The majority of the victims were in civilian clothing, and yet the Czech report assumed that three-quarters of them had been soldiers, and so listed them as military rather than civilian deaths.
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Given such unreliable reporting, and an unknown number of Germans whose deaths went unrecorded, it is impossible to determine the true number of German civilians killed in Prague during the uprising.

In the days after the war was over, thousands more Germans were interned in Prague, first in makeshift detention centres, then in large collection centres such as the sports stadium in Strahov, and finally in internment camps on the outskirts of the city. According to eyewitnesses, the German inmates of these internment centres were routinely beaten, and occasionally executed without trial. A civil engineer called Kurt Schmidt, for example, found himself interned in Strahov after being force-marched from Brno to Prague at the end of May. ‘Hunger and death ruled in the camp,’ he later claimed:

We were even more forcibly reminded of death by the executions which took place in full public view inside the camp. Any SS member who was discovered in the camp was killed in public. One day, six youths were beaten until they lay motionless, water was poured over them (which the German women had to fetch) and then the beating continued till there was no sign of life left. The terribly mutilated bodies were deliberately exhibited for several days next to the latrines. A 14-year-old boy was shot together with his parents because it was alleged that he had tried to stab a Revolutionary Guard with a pair of scissors. These are only some examples of the executions which took place almost daily, mostly by shooting.
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According to Schmidt the supply of food was sporadic and always insufficient, and recent Czech research certainly backs this impression up.
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Hygiene was primitive at best, and the buckets in which the food had to be fetched were used ‘for different purposes’ during the night. An epidemic of dysentery raged through the camp, and Schmidt lost his fifteen-month-old son to a combination of this and starvation. The absence of sanitation and sufficient rations are subjects which come up again and again in statements of all those interned after the war.

The women at Strahov had a particularly bad time of it, and were constantly subjected to the depredations of Czech guards and Russian soldiers. As Schmidt explained, he and the other men were powerless to protect them:

If any man had tried to protect his wife, he would have risked being killed. The Russians, and the Czechs as well, often did not even trouble to take the women away – amongst the children and in view of all the inmates of the camp, they behaved like animals. During the nights one could hear the moaning and whimpering of these poor women. Shots rang out from every corner and bullets passed over our heads. The presence of so many people created an incessant noise. The darkness was lit up by search lights and the Russians continuously fired flares. Day and night there was no peace for our nerves and it was as if we had entered hell.
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In an effort to escape such conditions many Germans volunteered for work outside, particularly for the repair work that was needed in the city, including the dismantling of the barricades thrown up by the insurgents during the uprising. But if they believed that they would be treated better outside the prisons they were sorely mistaken. Schmidt describes being beaten, spat at and pelted with stones by the crowds that accumulated around such work parties. His description is corroborated by a woman from another prison camp, who had served in the German Women’s Signal Corps in Prague during the war.

The mob in the streets behaved even worse [than the guards]. Especially the older women excelled themselves and had armed themselves for this purpose with iron rods, truncheons, dog leashes, etc. Some of us were beaten so badly that they collapsed and were unable to get up again. The rest, including myself, had to remove barricades at the bridge. Czech police cordoned off the place where we worked, but the mob broke through and we were again exposed to their maltreatment without any protection. Some of my fellow sufferers jumped into the Moldau in their desperation, [where] they were immediately fired at … One of the Czechs had a pair of large scissors, and one after another of us had her hair cut off. Another Czech poured red paint over our heads. I myself had four teeth knocked out. Rings were torn by force from our swollen fingers. Others were interested in our shoes and clothes, so that we ended up by being almost naked – even pieces of underwear had been torn from our bodies. Young lads and men kicked us in the abdomen. In complete desperation, I also tried to jump into the river. But I was snatched back and received another beating.
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It is unsurprising that some Germans preferred to commit suicide rather than endure such treatment. In Prague’s Pankrac prison, for example, two young German mothers strangled their children to death and then tried to kill themselves. When they were revived they claimed that they had done this because the guards had threatened to ‘gouge their children’s eyes out, torture them and kill them, just as the Germans had done with Czech children’.
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There are no reliable statistics for suicides in the immediate aftermath of the war, but Czech reports from 1946 list 5,558 amongst ethnic Germans in Bohemia and Moravia. Once again, the real figure must have been even higher.
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The situation for Germans in Prague is broadly representative of the rest of the country, although in many areas the worst excesses did not happen until later that summer. Perhaps the most famous massacre occurred in Ústí nad Labem (formerly known to Germans as Aussig), where over a hundred Germans were killed at the end of July – although shocked eyewitnesses later exaggerated the numbers to ten or even twenty times that number.
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Much worse but less well known was the massacre in the northern Bohemian town of Postoloprty, where a zealous Czech army detachment carried out orders to ‘cleanse’ the region of Germans. According to German sources, 800 people were killed in cold blood. Czech sources agree: two years after the event the Czech authorities uncovered 763 bodies buried in mass graves around the town.
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In Taus (known to the Czechs as Domazlice), 120 people were shot behind the station and buried in mass graves.
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In Horni Mošt
nice, near the Moravian town of Prerov, a Czech officer named Karol Pazúr stopped a train full of Slovakian Germans, ostensibly to conduct a search for former Nazis. That night his soldiers shot 71 men, 120 women and 74 children – the youngest of them an eight-month-old baby. Once again, they were buried in mass graves. Pazúr later justified the killing of the children by saying, ‘What was I supposed to do with them after we’d shot their parents?’
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This behaviour was by no means sanctioned by the new Czech authorities, who often condemned such excesses.
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However, this does not quite absolve them of any responsibility. On his return to Czechoslovakia President Edvard Beneš issued a series of decrees that singled out Germans for punishment, including the appropriation of their land, the confiscation of their property and the deprivation of Czech citizenship along with the dissolution of all German institutions of higher education. The rhetoric used by Beneš and others in the new government was hardly designed to pour oil on troubled waters. For example, in his first speech in Prague after his return from exile Beneš did not blame just the Nazis for the moral crimes of the war but the whole German nation, which deserved ‘the limitless contempt of all mankind’.
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His future Justice Minister, Prokop Drtina, went further, claiming openly that ‘There are no good Germans, only bad and even worse ones,’ that they were a ‘foreign ulcer in our body’ and that ‘the whole German nation is responsible for Hitler, Himmler, Henlein and Frank, and the whole nation must bear the punishment for the committed crimes’.
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In July 1945 Antonin Zápotocký, the future Czech president, wrote an article in
Práce
claiming that the authorities should not bother to follow the law when punishing suspected collaborators, on the grounds that ‘When you chop wood, the splinters fly’ (a Czech expression that means something along the lines of ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’).
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Similar sentiments were voiced by Prime Minister Zden
k Nejedlý, Deputy Prime Minister Josef David, Minister of Justice Jaroslav Stránský and many others.
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