After the Reich (29 page)

Reports indicate that Czechs particularly loathed German innkeepers and physicians. Innkeepers perhaps looked down on Czech customers, and physicians either refused to treat Czechs or were suspected of being involved in Nazi genocide. Carl Gregor was a general practitioner in Freudenthal (Bruntál) in the north-eastern sector of the Czech lands. He was taken to the Freudenthal camp and accused of having murdered 150 foreigners. He laughed off the accusation, and was tortured by eighteen men who beat his back so badly that the skin burst on his buttocks.

In Freudenthal all the inmates had to witness the executions, which took place behind the barrack block. Gregor’s knowledge of Czech and Slovak meant that he had to translate the orders given by the commandant. On one occasion twenty men had to dig their own grave and then climb in. They were shot in the back of the head. One man had to be shot three times, yet he was still alive when the prisoners filled in the grave. The excuse for this slaughter was an accident with a grenade that killed a Russian. The Czechs then told the Russians that the death had been the result of a German-laid time-bomb and demanded that a hundred hostages be shot in reprisal. The Russians allowed them to kill just a score.
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In Freiwaldau (Jeseník) they marched the camp inmates to the border and pushed them into Germany. The ordeal took seventy-two hours, while the Germans were beaten with whips and pistol butts.
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Alfred Latzel was the proprietor of a large sugar refinery and farm. On 20 June he was dispossessed and warned that he would have problems were he to remain in Czechoslovakia. He felt he had done no wrong and decided to brave it. He was taken in for a short interview by the local police, at the end of which he was delivered to the Camp II Jauernig - a former RAD or Reichsarbeitsdienst camp. Latzel learned much later that he had been incarcerated because he had allegedly denounced communists during the Third Reich. He denied it. At Jauernig, the gaoler was a German communist. German denouncers were also present at the torture sessions egging on the others.

After four days Latzel was taken to another camp in an old work-service barracks at Adelsdorf, a former POW compound. Here his father-in-law, the estate owner Dr Erich Lundwall, was the representative for the prisoners. The partisan guards wore old SS uniforms, although they sported red stars in their caps together with the letters KTOF - Koncentrační Tábor Okres Frývaldov (Concentration Camp Area Freiwaldau). The same legend hung over the door of the camp, but later this was changed first to ‘internment camp’, then ‘collection point for internees’. The restructuring of the Freiwaldau camps by the authorities in Prague was not popular with the partisan guards. In the period of the wild camps, the partisans not only wielded power, but allegedly amassed quantities of valuables, food and drink, some of which might have been intended for the prisoners. New arrivals were worked over by the guards, beaten with whips and rifle butts. Latzel describes two boys of fifteen or sixteen who tried to escape and were brought back to the camp by their own communist fathers. They were slowly tortured to death after swastikas were carved into their buttocks. They were finally shot in front of two prisoners chosen from each hut. A Nazi greengrocer was selected for special treatment. He eventually vanished. It was assumed he had been killed. The guards also enjoyed whipping a seventy-year-old man. After each stroke he had to say ‘Děkuji!’ (Thank you!).
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Once the camps were taken over by the regular gendarmerie, the brutality was moderated, if never exactly stopped. The bourgeois Latzel was given unusual work to do outside the camp. He ploughed the fields and worked in the woods and factories; he plundered farms and factories and dismantled machines. Nothing was ever entered in an inventory. The food improved with time. To a diet of dried-potatoes-and-water soup unbelievable delicacies were added: vegetables and pearl barley and, once a week, meat. Every now and then there was jam, and cakes at Christmas. Eventually there was even a visit from a priest, though he was not allowed to deliver a homily, and some amateur dramatics were permitted, as well as a cabaret. Some mild, anti-Nazi propaganda appeared, such as an obituary for the Third Reich that was intended to be witty. The Nazi Karl Froning thought it tasteless and silly. When they were shown films of the Nazis’ victims they thought they were falsified (a common enough reaction at the time) - ‘most of us had seen enough of these atrocities ourselves and suffered them on our own bodies’.

There was a third camp for men in the Freiwaldau area at Thomasdorf; a fourth, Biberteich, housed around 300 women. Karl Schneider spent a gruelling fourteen and a half months at Thomasdorf after he was accused of shooting a Czech. He was tortured and had the usual beating from another prisoner, Franz Schubert from Niklasdorf. Schubert did not hit him forcibly enough and was clouted so hard as a result that he fell dead to the ground. The same night the Czechs killed two others after hours of torture. One of them was a boy of fifteen or sixteen. The commandant greeted the new arrivals with the usual smashing of heads and limbs. When one was seen to bleed profusely he remarked, ‘German blood is no blood, it is pig’s shit!’ The commandant’s name was Wiesner, which suggests he might have had some of that non-blood himself.

The Pg and SA member Karl Froning was the former administrator of Thomasdorf in the days when it had contained Russians. He seems to have fared reasonably well by comparison to others, possibly because some of the Czech passion was spent by the time he arrived in the camp in July. He remembered the Czech lessons in the open air, calculated to humiliate Germans who had always refused to learn that language. Effusions of violence were not unknown, however, and the guards had a particular animus towards a Freiwaldau physician called Dr Pawlowsky, who was obliged not only to lie in his own excrement, but to consume it too. He eventually collapsed before his torturers and died. In four weeks, Froning estimated, some 10 per cent of the 200 inmates died from one cause or another.
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In Bilin (Bilina), north-west of Prague, they had the good fortune to be taken directly to the border without being subjected to a Czech camp. Anton Watzke nonetheless saw appalling scenes along the way with the Czech
soldateska
killing German women. They even shot the priest. In another instance the witness Adolf Aust remembered seeing a man shot who had paused to relieve himself.
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Brüx, Saaz, Komotau, Aussig and Tetschen

It was the Poles who liberated the town of Tetschen (Děčín) in the north on 10 May. For five days they raped, looted, torched and killed. A grocer was taken off to the water tower and thrown in. They shot at him and missed. Finally one of the Poles fished him out, saying he had done well and his life was saved. The Poles reportedly killed scores of POWs; the rest were taken to the camp at Jaworczno where they were sent down the mines. Other Sudeten Germans were deported to Glatz in Silesia, which had been awarded to the Poles. Here they went through their agonies all over again until they were re-expelled with the Silesian Germans - this time to the new slimmed-down ‘Reich’.

According to Franz Limpächer, there was just one Czech in his village of Kleinbocken: Stanislaus Mikesch had moved there from Kladno, married a German girl and become a great enthusiast for Hitler. After the arrival of the Poles he re-emerged wearing a good many red stars and announced that he was now the local commissar. He immediately confiscated his neighbour’s belongings. More Czechs arrived from Prague, Tábor and Pardubice and took over the houses of the Germans.
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In the small town of Brüx (Most) near by, Dr Carl Grimm was attached to the Czech police as a doctor for Germans. He said Brüx had 30,000 inhabitants, of whom two-thirds were Germans. Some of the worst raping and pillaging was carried out by Russian DPs who had been brought in to work at a local dam. Part of Grimm’s work was to certify the causes of death, and he therefore took note of the number of suicides in the months of May, June and July. At its high point, some sixteen Germans committed suicide daily, often entire families. Few could shoot or gas themselves as the Germans had been obliged to hand over their weapons and their gas had been cut off. Most had hanged themselves from whatever convenient perch they could find for that purpose. Grimm thought the total number of suicides amounted to between 600 and 700 - about 3 per cent of the German inhabitants.

Grimm’s work with the local police delayed his imprisonment. The other Brüx men were taken off to a camp at Striemitz, half an hour away on foot, while the women were taken to the Poros glassworks in Brüx itself, from which a thousand were eventually marched to the German border at Deutschneudorf. Some of the men were put to work in the mines and at the hydrogenation works. Others were taken to Concentration Camp 28 at Maltheuren.
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Germans who worked in heavy industry were often protected by the Russians who requisitioned the factories. When the factories were handed over to the Czechs, the Germans who worked there were put into Camp 27. German mine directors were shot: Czechs had been forced to work there during the war.

Householders were simply at the mercy of Czechs who appeared at the doors and forced them out. Apart from a thirty-kilo suitcase (which would be stolen from them anyhow), they were allowed to take nothing with them. The Czechs were protected by soldiers who then took the Germans off to ‘evacuation camps’ like Negerdörfel in Brüx, which had formerly been an anti-aircraft barracks. Some of them were quickly invalided out to Germany.The worst treatment was naturally meted out to former Nazis, together with the owners of important buildings or impressive houses. They were either taken to Camps 27 and 28 or locked up in the barracks, the police HQ, the local court or Striemitz. Once again the men had to box one another, with the guards standing by to make sure they hit hard.

The terror in Brüx started late, on 1 August. The rest of the German men were rounded up, beaten and marched off to Camp 28. Grimm gives a full list of the camps in the borough of Brüx: 17/18 and 31/32 near Maltheueren, Rössel camp and Camp 37 near Brüx itself, 22/25 at Niedergeorgenthal and 33/34 at Rosenthal. These camps provided workers for the hydrogenation works, which normally employed 35,000 workers. There were also camps for the mines, which employed a further 25,000, but Grimm didn’t know their names. He estimated that there were around thirty camps in all in that part of Czechoslovakia. During the war, the mines and the dams had been staffed by foreign workers - Dutch, French, Italians, Croats, Bulgarians, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians. Now they were to be replaced by Germans.

Grimm himself was in Tabor - or Camp
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- 28, with a fluctuating population ranging from 500 to 1,400 souls. The inmates were not just from the local towns and villages of the Sudetenland; there were Germans from the Reich too and Hungarian Germans. The camp was made up of wooden huts, with around thirty men to a cell. The fury of the Russians and Czechs had not abated. In the interests of maintaining health, fifteen men who were suffering from tuberculosis were shot. Beatings were a matter of course and the work was gruelling enough: eighteen hours a day at the hydrogenation works with six hours’ sleep. Work was a two-hour march away, and a two-hour slog home. The march was all part of the planned humiliation. It was led by two ‘court jesters’, one wearing a top hat and the other a Prussian
Pickelhaube
. The prisoners with white swastikas and ‘KT 28’ on their backs had to sing German nationalist songs. One of the jesters came to a sticky end when the ‘Kadle’ (commandant) Vlasak tried to shoot through the top of his hat as a joke, and hit him in the head by mistake. When he was laid out in his coffin he was found still to be alive and was shot two more times through the heart.

‘Kadle’ Karel Vlasak liked to be called ‘Tgyr’ or ‘Tiger’. The prisoners had their own name for him: ‘The Beast of 28’. He walked around the camp with a revolver in one hand and a
nagaika
or cat-o’-nine-tails in the other. He liked to strike the prisoners with his entire forearm. When they fell, as many did, he would kick them in the stomach and the testicles. His compatriots cheered at the sport. Eduard Kaltofen recounts a story of his beating a crippled solder to death with his own crutch. On another occasion four men had to prepare their own coffins before they received a shot in the back of the head. Vlasak was later arrested - not because of his behaviour towards the prisoners, but because he had taken property from them and not handed it over to higher authorities.
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The occupation of the famous hop town of Saaz (Žatec) and nearby Postelberg (Postoloprty) followed similar lines. On 9 May the liberating Russian armies raped and shot a few of the overwhelmingly German citizenry. Some Germans hanged or poisoned themselves, others vanished. The Russians were replaced by Czech soldiers under General Svoboda on 2 June. In the meantime, the locals had been praying that the Anglo-Americans would step in to create some sort of equitable division between the Czechs and the Germans. That never happened. On the 3rd it was decided to rid Saaz of its Germans. Before the war there had been some 16,000 people in the town. Five thousand men and boys were herded into the market square. Anyone who struck the Czechs as unusual was savagely beaten. The men were then marched off to Postelberg fifteen kilometres away, where the population had already been evacuated. The journey took two hours. If a man collapsed he was shot - boys in front of their fathers, fathers in front of the boys. The Saazer males were installed in an old barracks building. Another 150 men were left behind in Saaz Prison where they were subjected to more sophisticated brutality. They were taken off to Postelberg later that day, leaving only the anxious womenfolk behind.
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