Exorcising Hitler (16 page)

Certainly, there was some
Werwolf
-style German guerrilla activity in the Czech borderlands, as there was in Silesia, where inter-communal warfare and expulsions were also rife in the months following the end of the war. However, that these were actually all official
Werwolf
units seems unlikely, and the Aussig disaster seems more likely to have been due to negligence. The aim of such pronouncements as Svoboda’s, drawing on hoary lies from the Stalinist propaganda store, was quite clear. Every possible excuse was to be found in order to justify the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from their homeland – no matter how cynical.

During the previous winter, East Prussian and Silesian refugees had struggled through snow and ice, desperate to keep ahead of the Soviet tank spearheads, knowing full well that if they were overtaken, murder and rape and pillage could be their fate. In the sweltering May of 1945, their cousins in the Sudetenland suffered less from the depredations of the Russians – the western districts were largely occupied by the Americans, in any case – than from the Czech ‘revolutionary guards’, whose motive was not just to gain momentary pleasure and revenge, but to drive the Germans from their country. There were many cases where the Germans were forced to appeal for help from the Soviets against the Czechs, and the slogan among them was: ‘When the Red Army withdraws, it is the end for us!’
⁴⁷

Three weeks after the end of the war, on 29 May 1945, the revolutionary guard in the important Moravian city of Brünn (Czech: Brno) ordered its remaining German-speaking citizens to assemble at dawn the next day in the garden of the old Augustinian monastery, carrying only hand luggage. By this time, Germans made up 10 per cent of the town’s quarter of a million inhabitants, totalling around 25,000 souls (the previous year, the German population had been around 60,000 but more than half had fled in advance of the war’s end).

By 6 a.m. the German civilians had duly assembled to await the Czech militants’ pleasure. A little later, with the sun rising on what would become a blazing May day and the church bells ringing for the Feast of Corpus Christi, the long column of Germans began to move off. They were told they were going to the Austrian border. The armed militants’ meaning was clear: Brno’s German population was leaving, never to return.

Escorted by armed revolutionary guards, the Germans trudged out of the city, heading south on the highway that led to the Austrian border some fifty kilometres distant. As far as the city limits they were watched by people who had once been their Czech fellow citizens, but who now applauded their departure and pelted them with any objects they could lay their hands on. The heat built relentlessly, until by late morning the refugees, without water or food, began to slow, to stagger, eventually to collapse on the open road. They were beaten with rifle butts until they moved on. Those who didn’t or couldn’t were frequently dispatched with a rifle bullet.

An officer of the Czechoslovak army, Josef Kratochvil, set off that morning with his brother, a doctor, on a motorcycle, and was able to see the full horror of what would become known as the ‘death march of Brünn’. They reported ‘dead old men, women and children collapsed in the ditches, women who had been raped’. They intervened where they could, but they could not be everywhere at once. Later that afternoon they returned to the city, where the officer told his commander what he had seen. The major, just returned from exile in England, shrugged. ‘Are you telling me to conduct a private war against those crazy partisans?’ he asked, and did nothing.
⁴⁸

Only when the column reached the small town of Pohrlitz (Pohořelice), a little under thirty kilometres from Brünn, were those who could no longer walk allowed to stop. In effect, they were interned here under guard, crowded into an improvised camp set up in a warehouse by the side of the highway. Meanwhile, the young and the relatively fit were forced to continue on their way. Days passed. Sanitary conditions in the warehouse were unspeakable and soon became lethal. There was no food. Typhus broke out. The stench of diarrhoea and death filled the air. Any local Czech who took pity on the Germans was liable to get a beating from the revolutionary guards for his or her pains.

Altogether, some 800 German expellees died of hunger, exhaustion or dysentery at Pohrlitz. According to a then member of the revolutionary guard who was interviewed almost half a century later, 1,700 of the 25,000 or so who had set off for the Austrian border on the day of the Feast of Corpus Christi perished en route, many murdered by their ‘escorts’.

Elsewhere, there were especially brutal massacres of German internees at Miröschau (Mirosov) near Pilsen and at Duppau (Doupov) near Carlsbad.

At Duppau, the headmaster of the local secondary school, who had habitually appeared before his pupils dressed in full SS uniform, was, according to a reported deathbed confession by the bricklayer involved, immured alive on the orders of Czech partisans. Other prominent local Germans were shot or beaten to death.
⁴⁹
One twenty-year-old Sudeten German woman later reported how a group of German men were forced to dig a mass grave. Then they were ordered by Czech soldiers to stand in line on the edge of the pit while the soldiers formed a firing party.

One [soldier] gave the order and the men were shot. I don’t know if all the soldiers fired. Afterwards big white sacks filled with a white powder were dragged there, and the German men who had not yet been shot sprinkled it all over the corpses. It was very bad. When I saw it, I cried very hard. A woman told me I didn’t need to cry, because the Germans had done exactly the same thing to the Jews. I stood there as a young woman and didn’t know what to say. Probably it was good that I said nothing.
⁵⁰

A letter published in the London
Times
in mid-June 1945 from three former Sudeten German deputies to the Prague parliament, now refugees in Britain, protested against the persecution of their German-speaking compatriots. ‘Almost one-third of the population of the new Czechoslovakia is thus outlawed by their own Government, the decisive criterion of guilt being merely language or racial origin’, they wrote, adding, ‘the present position of Czechoslovakia’s minorities is worse than that of war criminals, who will be judged on their individual guilt and by fair standards’.
⁵¹

The exiles’ appeal fell on deaf ears. Thousands of Sudeten Germans had not supported the Nazis, and many, like the letter writers, had been driven into exile or, like their Czech fellow citizens, suffered from persecution during the occupation years. However, many more had been eager to accept Hitler’s solution to the ethnic problem in Czechoslovakia – a solution which formally acknowledged them as the ‘master race’ and the Czechs as disposable sub-humans.

In August, the Potsdam Agreement finally put the Allies’ stamp on the Czechoslovak and Polish governments’ already proclaimed goal of ridding themselves of all the Germans within their borders. The Sudetenland would be returned to Czechoslovakia, with the Czech government able to dispose of its population as it would. Prague Radio declared the Potsdam Agreement ‘the greatest diplomatic and political victory ever achieved by our nation in its long historical fight for existence against the German nation’.
⁵²
A
New York Times
reporter would later describe its ‘solution’ to the problem of German refugees, rather more accurately, as ‘the most inhumane decision ever made by governments dedicated to the defence of human rights’.
⁵³

The most widely accepted estimate of the number of Germans who died at the hands of their Czech compatriots is approximately 30,000.
⁵⁴
Official Czechoslovak figures registered 3,795 suicides by Sudeten Germans from May to October 1945. The 1946 figure, with many Germans forced to serve under terrible conditions as forced labourers before finally being expelled, would be even higher, at 5,558. Even those who escaped often could not summon the strength to go on. A month after the war’s end, the Soviet NKVD’s senior officer in Germany (and later first head of the KGB), General Ivan Aleksandrovic Serov, told his boss in Moscow, the notorious Lavrentiy Beria, that the death rate among Sudeten German refugees who had fled over the border into the Soviet Zone of Germany was also high:

Every day, up to 5,000 Germans arrive from Czechoslovakia, most of them women, old people and children. Without any future or the hope of anything better, many end their lives by suicide and cut open their veins.
⁵⁵

All the same, the surprising thing was, perhaps, not that so many died, by their own hands or those of others, but that they were relatively so few.

4

Zero Hour

When the dark music of the guns and bombs finally died away, on 8 May 1945, there began what became known to the German people as
Stunde Null
: Zero Hour.

The Nazi regime’s last-ditch propaganda had incessantly repeated the message that, if Germany lost this war, the country would not just cease to exist, but would be systematically ravaged and dismantled. Most Germans, in the end, believed it, especially after the Red Army began its brutal rampage through the Reich’s eastern provinces.

The destruction and loss during the last phase of the war was so tremendous, the chaos so thoroughgoing and the fall from apparent grace so dramatic, that however strong the sense of relief that the fighting was over, there was little hope of a tolerable future. Germans felt anxiety about what the victors would do to them. They also harboured a numb feeling of humiliation and a slow-burning anger, above all against the Nazis who had promised them so much – order, prosperity, first place among the nations of the earth – and failed them. This was especially true of popular attitudes towards the now-dead Hitler, the Führer whom tens of millions had once adored and thought infallible.

The anger against Hitler was sincere and deeply felt, but for many – perhaps the majority – an emotion born of disappointment rather than moral outrage. The Führer had failed his people and then, by his suicide in Berlin, left Germans to face the catastrophe alone.

Ulrich Frodien, the teenage soldier who had escaped Breslau with his father, had come close to being sent back to the near-certain death of the Eastern Front, but then finally, with almost incredible luck, had been packed on a hospital train bound for the west. He had experienced all these feelings all too vividly, even before the war was actually over.

Once, when Frodien’s westbound train stopped, as it did so often in the chaos of the final days of the war, on the open railway line, between stations, he and his comrades heard the distant drone of aircraft engines. Soon the drone turned into a mighty roar. They looked up and saw an apparently endless, perfectly disciplined stream of hundreds of American Flying Fortresses, some 15,000 feet above them, flying east. Accustomed to air attacks, those passengers that could, including Frodien, left the train and scattered into the nearby woods. From there they watched the bomber swarm, which showed no interest in them, and marvelled. Frodien, an idealistic Hitler Youth leader who had volunteered at the age of sixteen and experienced the hell of the Eastern Front, but who still believed in the Führer and victory until close to the end, experienced one of the great realisations of his young life:

It was all definitely over for us. Now, at last and far too late, I had really come to understand this. The much-vaunted miracle weapons and the ‘military genius’ of the Führer were nothing against this casual, relaxed stream of a thousand four-engined bombers passing over our heads. There was no more hope, Germany was finished, it was all over.
¹

Nazi ideology paid little attention to the real practicalities of warfare. At the back of its assurances to the German people lay the idea that, even though the Reich and its European allies totalled at most a hundred and fifty million, and these were up against the military and economic might of two hundred million Americans, plus roughly the same number of Russians – not to mention the British and their empire – the Third Reich could not lose because Germans were inherently, biologically superior to non-Germans.

This extreme, rigid social Darwinism simply could not cope with losing the war; it had, basically, no fallback position for that eventuality. In other words, in the view of the Nazi ideologues, it was not just that Germany would not lose the war, but that it simply
could
not.

In the second week of April 1945, a pair of convalescing Wehrmacht soldiers, dressed in hospital fatigues, watched open-mouthed from the side of the road as the fit, well-fed men of the American army, with its apparently unlimited complement of shiny new tanks, guns and trucks, drove all but unopposed along the Weender Landstrasse into the university town of Göttingen, south of Hanover. For years these German soldiers had had to fight their war using patched-up weapons and vehicles, outnumbered, subjected to constant fuel shortages and supply problems. Now they saw, really saw, what they had been up against all this time.