Exorcising Hitler

by Frederick Taylor

  In the end, almost ten million Germans were forced to leave the territories assigned to Poland under the Potsdam Agreement. A huge, seemingly endless wave of terrified refugees – mostly women, children and the elderly – had been on the move along the highways of eastern Germany since midwinter. They carried their bundles of precious heirlooms and belongings in their hands or on their backs. If they were lucky they had a handcart, or, if they were among the most fortunate, a horse-drawn vehicle. At no time were they safe, at least not until they reached the areas of central and western Germany occupied by the Western Allies. They risked being caught up with the advancing Soviet spearheads, wandering into battles, or falling victim to Allied bombing raids.

  An unknown number of westbound refugees certainly died in the bombing of Dresden in mid-February. In another notorious but less well-known case, on 12 March 1945, thousands of refugees from eastern Pomerania and East Prussia, queuing in the open for the ferry to cross the river at Swinemünde, found themselves trapped beneath a rain of American bombs. The raid, requested by the Soviets, had been intended to destroy the German naval ships concentrated in the town’s harbour. At one time, civilian casualties were estimated at up to 23,000, causing the attack to be dubbed the ‘Dresden of the North’. The true figure is now thought to be between four and five thousand, but it remains a ghastly illustration of how exposed these defenceless refugees were to the vagaries of modern total war.37

  By the spring, the refugee tide had turned into a vast, uncontrollable torrent of misery – and the coming of peace did nothing to halt it, for now the formerly oppressed peoples of Central Europe had their opportunity for revenge. To many among them peace was not an end to violence but a beginning.

  The ethnic cleansing in Breslau had actually begun with the so-called ‘wild’ expulsions of early July 1945, well before the victors had signed on the line and regularised the Polish administration there.38

  However, after the formal ceding of the city to Poland, the cleansing began to move apace. As the summer went on, thousands of Poles forced to leave the formerly Polish territories seized by Stalin began arriving in the former German lands. These new arrivals, angry and bewildered, brutalised by a savage interlude of Soviet rule, followed by German occupation, were mostly not city dwellers but farmers and country people. Not only did they not want to be in this German city, but they did not actually know how to live in such a place.

  There was a period of months when the half-ruined city of Breslau was seriously overcrowded, with Germans often being thrown out of their apartments to make room for newcomers, so that German families were often crammed two or three to a formerly single-family dwelling. In conscious emulation of the Nazis’ stigmatisation of Jews, it was reported that remaining Germans were seen wearing armbands bearing the letter ‘N’ (for ‘Niemiec’, or ‘German’ in Polish). Germans were allowed only one-third to one-half of the general ration, and their children were charged 100 zloty (at a punitive rate against the Reich mark) for inoculation shots against typhus, diphtheria and other diseases of overcrowding and deprivation that now became rife (Poles were immunised for free).39 When asked to show pity, Russians and Poles could, and did, point to the starvation rations and murderous neglect practised during the German occupation of their countries earlier in the war.

  So, after the first wave of German refugees who fled before the Red Army, there followed, as the first post-war summer progressed, a new wave. This one was made up of those who had stayed behind but were now forced to leave.

  At the end of 1945, 33,297 Poles were registered in Breslau (henceforth Wrocław), against more than 160,000 Germans. By the following autumn, the city contained 152,898 registered Poles, against only 28,274 Germans.40

  The atrocities in such eastern German cities were bad enough. In the Sudetenland – the border areas of Czechoslovakia settled for hundreds of years by Germans, part of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, for twenty years part of the Czech and Slovak state, then for seven short years incorporated into the Greater German Reich – they were unspeakable.

  Unlike in the case of Breslau, Königsberg or Stettin, the Germans here had been only briefly ‘Reich Germans’. Czechs of the western part of the country, where most Germans had always lived, had coexisted side by side with them, sometimes amicably but often uneasily, as linguistic components of a cosmopolitan post-feudal monarchy, for centuries past.

  Now, after six years of brutal Nazi oppression, many, perhaps most, Czechs loathed their German compatriots and wanted merely to be rid of them.

  ‘We hated them,’ declared one Czech woman, unrepentant more than half a century later. ‘People who had survived the concentration camps were returning and they were describing what happened to them there. The fact is that people hated the Germans, genuinely hated them so much that there was a spontaneous reaction, and the feeling was that if they liked the Third Reich so much, they could go there.’41

  But first there was revenge to be taken, as one Czech eyewitness – himself a member of one of the makeshift militias that sprang into life along with the liberation – reported:

  As I was marching with my unit of the revolutionary guard, I experienced something terrible. In one town, civilians dragged a German out into the middle of a crossroads and set alight to him. I am haunted by this experience to this day. I could do nothing, because if I had said something, I should have been attacked in my turn. The crowd was fanatical. The person burned for a half an hour. Then a soldier of the Red Army came and shot him. He gave him the coup de grâce.42

  Cynics also pointed out that some of the most violent and apparently vengeful ‘resistance’ fighters who took part in such atrocities had dark pasts to hide. One member of the Czech National Council at the time of the liberation explained, ‘Some wanted to hide the fact that they had previously collaborated with the Gestapo. They just pinned red stars on and set the tone of the outrages that followed.’43

  It also seems to have been true that the majority of the most violent acts against Sudeten Germans were not committed by those Czechs who had lived in the area with them but by outsiders, who had entered the Sudeten areas in the wake of the Soviet and American armies.44

  Just weeks after the end of the war, an armaments depot in the mainly German industrial town of Aussig (Czech name Usti nad Labem), one of the many places where Sudeten Germans had been retained as forced labourers preparatory to their planned expulsion, was blown apart by a massive explosion. Twenty-seven workers died. In the aftermath, rumours spread that this was an act of sabotage by a German Werwolf gang. Up to a hundred Sudeten Germans – easily identifiable by the white armbands they were reportedly forced to wear – were subsequently killed by an angry Czech mob. Most were beaten and bayoneted, with others being tossed off the bridge in the town centre into the River Elbe or drowned in a fire pond.45

  After conducting an ‘inquiry’ into the explosion, Czech Defence Minister Ludvík Svoboda declared:

  It is necessary that we deal with the fifth column once and for all, and we can take the Soviet Union as our exemplar, as the only country that dealt with this problem in a secure fashion: As an example I present the case of the German Volga Republic [in the Soviet Union], where one night dozens of German paratroops were dropped. When they were concealed by the Germans there and not handed over when urgently demanded by the Red Army, it came to pass that, 48 hours after the final ultimatum, this German Volga Republic ceased to exist and will never again exist.46

  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 justif
y 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 propagand
a 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: