After the Reich
Page 22
The survivors were marched out through Görkau, Eisenberg and Kunersdorf. On the way they passed a half-dead local official who had been strapped to a telegraph pole. They spent three nights in Gebirgsneudorf before moving on to Brüx and Maltheuern. Here they were given their first food for four days. The Germans worked in the hydro-electric works. When the anniversary of Lidice came round the camp commandant personally slaughtered the Komotau optician and his two sons and another boy in front of one another. Germans were forced to beat each other up. Their Calvary came to an end when 250-300 of them were sent to Germany in August 1945.84
The Czechs indulged in a little orgy of shooting in the small town of Duppau near Kaaden (Kadan). First they shot the soldier Franz Weis and threw his body on to the town square; shortly afterwards it was the turn of two SS men who had been invalided out of the army, Josef Wagner and Franz Mahr. The headmaster of the secondary school, Andreas Draht, and his assistant teachers, Damian Hotek, Franz Wensich and Rudolf Neudörfl, were next in line. The Czechs then turned their attentions to the chief postmaster, Karl Schuh. The men who carried out this little massacre were Captain Baxa and Lieutenant Tichý. In the village of Totzau close by they killed thirty-four Germans because they found arms, although permission to keep them had apparently been granted by the American Army Command in Karlsbad. In another place they shot the wife of the roofer Holzknecht because she looked out of the window at the wrong moment. In Podersheim they killed the farmer Stengl, and another eighty Germans were massacred in the Jewish cemetery. None, according to the witness Eduard Grimm, was associated with the Nazis. Josef Jugl was accused of being a Werewolf, and hauled off to the camp at Kaaden. On the way the Czech guard took pity on him. ‘Kaaden Prison bad,’ he said, ‘you still young.’ He told him to scarper, and Jugl did.85
On 30 July there was an explosion in Aussig (Ustí nad Labem). The Svoboda Guards had arrived that night in the town, forcing the Germans to wear white armbands and walk in the gutter. About 300 young men from Prague turned up. At about 3.30 a.m. the eyewitness heard a terrible bang, and thought a cupboard might have fallen over. He climbed on the roof and saw smoke billowing from somewhere behind the Marienberg: it was a huge ammunition dump, filled with captured German weapons. Later the Germans were accused of having sabotaged it. He went out on to the street. Luckily he wore no armband, for the explosion was also the signal to attack the Germans with whatever weapons came to hand. As the town commander allegedly put it: ‘Now we will start the revolution against the Germans.’ He saw men and women with prams thrown twenty metres off the bridge into the Elbe and then shot at by the SNB guards with machine guns. Any that managed to reach the bank were beaten with iron bars. Eventually some Russian soldiers succeeded in clearing the streets and a curfew was established. About 400-1,000 people had been killed.86
Anti-fascists did not necessarily have any advantages. As one Czech told Herbert Schernstein, ‘Němec jest němec’ (A German is a German). Schernstein had just returned to his home town after seven years in concentration camps as a communist. He had endured Theresienstadt, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. His friend Willi Krebs, who had been the founder of the Prödlitz Communist Party, had been robbed of his shop.87 Near Aussig were the concentration camps Lerchenfeld and Schöbritz. Heinrich Michel was actually working as a policeman for the newly appointed police director Douda when he was arrested on 16 May. Douda was a Muscovite who had been employed in the local gym. He had gone to Russia in 1938 and therefore had the complete confidence of the new regime. After insulting Michel, he had him thrown into a cell in the courthouse prison with a painter, a gunsmith, a lawyer and others. On the second day the cell began to fill up. One man brought a ‘bestial stench’ with him. It soon became clear why: he was seeping excrement from his trouser legs to his collar. When they undressed him they found no appreciable part of his body that was not covered in blood. He had been caught trying to escape and suffered the consequences.
After drinking three-quarters of a bottle of schnapps, the lieutenant commanding decided he would show them how to treat an SS man. The doors to the cells were thrown open, including that housing the SS. He chose Willi Künstner, an honorary member of the SS and personnel manager of the firm of Schicht, a major employer in Aussig. He was so badly beaten that he had to be taken away to hospital where he died without regaining consciousness. The courthouse gaol was the feeder for the local concentration camps. Michel was taken to Lerchenfeld where he was made a kapo. A former Luftwaffe camp that had been manned by Hungarians and wrecked by the Russians during their advance, it was run by a Commandant Vrša. All new arrivals had to sing the ‘Deutschlandslied’ and SA songs while a picture of Hitler was paraded before them. Then they had to run a forty-to-fifty metre gauntlet while they were lashed with bullwhips. SA men received an extra twenty-five stripes on the bottom.
With time the population of Lerchenfeld camp grew to 3,500. Michel himself was severely beaten by a Czech guard. When he asked him why he had treated him that way the guard said it was because he had once reported him for stealing a cake when he was twelve years old. When the Russians took over Lerchenfeld in October, the inmates were moved to Schöbritz. They had to build the camp themselves and that meant spending the first night in the open air. In Böhmisch Leipa (now the ‘Czech’ Česka Lipa), a camp was erected for around 1,200 Germans. In the savagery of the Czech takeover the innkeepers of the area seem to have come out badly, while the local Landrat or councillor had his face pushed in his own excrement until he died from that and other beatings. Two hundred and fifty-one prisoners perished within twelve months.
Theresienstadt
The most notorious camp in Czechoslovakia was Theresienstadt, the Nazis’ show camp where inmates had been required to purchase living space in a ‘model ghetto’. Many of Germany’s, Austria’s and Czechoslovakia’s most famous or most talented Jews had been holed up within the eighteenth-century walled town. They died in droves, either from neglect or when they were shipped out to Auschwitz or Treblinka.
On 5 May 1945 Theresienstadt was taken over by the Red Cross. The commandant, Karl Rahm, tried to escape and the last Jewish administrator (the Jews had their own governing body) tendered his resignation.88 A typhus epidemic kept the prisoners in the ghetto for the time being. The Czechs saw a new use for the citadel: it would be filled with Germans. Some were put to work tending the sick Jews. On 24 May there was a delivery of 600 Prague Germans of both sexes, including Red Cross sisters from the clinics. They were taken to the Little Fortress about a kilometre away from the fortified town. It had a long, dark history. It was here that the murderers of Archduke Francis Ferdinand - Princip and Čabrinović - died in 1918. They had been too young for execution and had succumbed to TB.89 In Nazi times the Little Fortress had been largely devoted to political prisoners. The SS had their amenities there, including a swimming pool and a cinema. In 1943 the Little Fortress was expanded with the construction of a fourth courtyard. The 600 Germans were taken there.
The prisoners were separated into four groups: men, youths, children and women. The entrance was through a low archway covered with grass. Once inside the dark tunnel leading to the cells the RG lashed out at the men with truncheons, beating them to the ground. Anyone who failed to get up was fertiggemacht (finished off). In the courtyard they had to run the gauntlet. Those who fell were dealt with in person by the Camp Commandant Alois Pruša, who beat in their kidneys. He was occasionally assisted in his work by his daughter Sonja, a girl of around twenty. Another source attests to his having two daughters, both equally brutal. One boasted that she had killed eighteen Germans with her own hands. Pruša’s own viciousness might have been explained by the fact that he had been detained in Theresienstadt by the Nazis. Another inmate, Eduard Fitsch, maintained that the guards were all former concentration camp prisoners.
Those who had been ‘finished off’ breathed their last in their own appointed cell. Between fifty-nine and seventy of the 600 died in those first few hours. T
wo hundred more succumbed in the next few days. Pruša and his assistant Tomeš did not give much hope to the survivors, who were told that those who had entered the Little Fortress would never leave it. All their papers, photographs and other - non-valuable - effects were put on a heap and burned. The man who commanded the fourth courtyard was a Pole called Alfred Kling. He claimed that he was an expert in killing and could simply decide by the number of strokes how long a victim would survive his beating. As he put it, ‘We have reduced you to such a state in two months that the Gestapo would have needed five years to achieve.’90
Dr E. Siegel, a Czech-speaking general practitioner working for the Red Cross, was subjected to the full initiating ceremony. Not only was he beaten, but there were attempts to dislocate his arm and break his bones. A truncheon was placed in his mouth to knock out his teeth, and he was told to confess he was a member of the SA - which he continued to deny. When they had finished with him he was thrown on a concrete floor in a pool of his own blood. There he lay for three days until a Czech ‘colleague’ visited him. This man picked him up by the hair and dashed him to the ground again. He still failed to die.91
Siegel was made camp doctor. Not that he could do much for the moment. As a result of his torture he could neither stand nor sit. With his left hand he needed to hold up his head, otherwise it fell on to his breast - so badly damaged were the muscles in his neck. His left eye functioned only when he looked straight ahead, and he could hardly hear as a result of the blows to his ears. His heart gave him trouble, but another doctor was able to give him some injections. They were not short of medicaments - according to Siegel, they lay in heaps around the former ghetto.
Once he was able to walk again, Siegel was ordered to kill a number of allegedly elderly prisoners in Cell 50 by lethal injections as it would be a pity to prolong their agonies. He tried to get out of the order, even going so far as to hide the poison. In the account he wrote later, he says he was saved by a visit to the camp by a Czech doctor who proposed the creation of a typhus ward. Siegel was put in charge. It was set up in the old SS cinema on 6 June. Later he had the chance to look into Cell 50 on his rounds. He discovered its occupants to be aged between sixteen and eighteen, and apparently members of the SS. Many of them had freshly amputated legs and dislocated joints. Their bandages had come off and their stumps were septic. They were so thickly crammed into the cell that their bodies touched. They begged for their dressings to be changed, but Siegel was forbidden to touch them or mention that he had seen them, lest he be locked up with them himself. He said that these miserable boys were Pruša’s pride and joy, that he would literally jump around like a clown at the sight of them - although he was careful to show them only to his special friends and not to the authorities from Prague.
The hundred or so children under twelve had a special building to themselves. At first this was used for propaganda purposes as there was a courtyard for them to play in and a place to hang out their washing. Journalists were brought to the camp to see the children and note how well they were treated. It was a case of history repeating itself: there was a famous film produced by the Nazis in Theresienstadt, made to show the outside world how humane it was. At the onset of winter, however, the children were not so happy, because their quarters offered them little or no protection from the cold.
Pruša maintained that everyone in the camp was a member of the SS or the Gestapo. When the Russians expressed doubts about a number of boys aged from twelve to fourteen, he replied that they were detained as the children of SS or Gestapo men and that one of them had managed singlehandedly to kill eleven Czechs. A similar story was retailed by the Czech Ministry of the Interior: Theresienstadt contained only SS, despite the fact that half its inmates were women of ages ranging from suckling children to one old lady of ninety-two. There were also a number of blind people who had been brought to the Little Fortress from Aussig after the massacre. Much of the savagery stopped when Pruša was replaced by a Major Kálal, who had no time for Germans but had, at least, a proper soldier’s dislike of torture.92
Pankrác
One September evening in Pankrác (Pankratz), Hans Wagner had a little performance to distract him from his sufferings: public executions. A gibbet was set up outside the prison. Children stood on the cars to get a better view of the hangings and there was a crowd he estimated at some 50,000. After each execution they cheered.
The first in line was Professor Josef Pfitzner. He was followed by an SS Gruppenführer Schmidt from Berlin. Next came the lawyer Franz Schicketanz, who had prepared the case for the Sudeten Germans presented to the British mediator Lord Runciman in 1938. Then it was the turn of Dr Blaschtowitschka of the German Special Court. His father, the president of the Prague Senate, died of hunger a few days later. Among the other victims that day were Dr Franz Wabra, who headed a unit for internal medicine at the hospital in Beraun, and an insurance official called Straněk. The Czechs were killing some of their own collaborators: General Blaha, the founder of the Society for Czech-German Friendship, together with its president, Richtrmoc and its chief executive, Major Mohapl. The first two were condemned to death. Mohapl was sent down for twenty years.
The most prominent denizen of Pankrác was Karl-Hermann Frank. Wagner saw him exercising in the yard every afternoon. The former Reichsprotektor had been handed over by the Americans and was publicly hanged on 22 May 1946. At the beginning of 1947, another group of German Czechs were strung up: Ernst Kundt, Hans Krebs and Hans Wesen. The leading doctor, Karl Feitenhansl, was sentenced to life imprisonment. The cases against Rudolf Jung and Dr Rosche were dropped - both had already died from hunger in prison.
There were German Jews in Pankrác too. Dr Karl Loewenstein, once a prominent Berlin businessman and former marine officer, had been in charge of the Theresienstadt ghetto police. The Czechs accused him of collaboration, assisting in the deportation of two Jewish policemen to Auschwitz. Loewenstein remained fifteen months in the prison. He was cast as a ‘typical Prussian officer’ who fulfilled his duties with an unbending zeal. He remained in Pankrác despite letters of protest from the Jewish leader Leo Baeck in London and others. He shared a cell with other Germans, chiefly SS men. There was so little food that the prisoners ate grass and eggshells. In March 1946 the Czechs finally decided that the accusations were groundless: Loewenstein was simply a disciplinarian who had done more to alleviate the sufferings of the Jews than to aggravate them. He was released from Pankrác but not freed. He went to the camp at Leitmeritz (Litoměřice), where once again he was surrounded by the race that had locked him up in the first place and slaughtered his friends and relations. He was not released from his Czech captivity until January 1947.93
Torture
Torture appears to have been the rule. In Prague, Johann Schöninger, who had been based in London before the war, was hit with iron bars and had nails driven into his feet. His assistant, Schubert, was beaten to death. In Domeschau Johann Rösner had lighted matches pushed under his fingernails. In Komotau, the torture seems to have been similar to the rack. A Waffen-SS man’s penis and testicles had been so worked over that the former had swollen to 8-9 cm thick and the latter were septic. The whole area round to his anus was filled with pus and stank. In Theresienstadt one woman observed a female SS member being forced to sit astride an SA dagger: ‘I can still hear her screams.’ The chief torturers in the Little Fortress were two guards named Truka and Valchař. Guards used a variety of instruments for beating and lashing their victims: steel rods sheathed with leather, Spanish pipes, rubber truncheons, iron bars and wooden planks. In Klattau (Klatovy) one man had wooden wool soaked in benzene put between his toes and set alight so that it burned his sexual organs. Siegel thought they must have had orders from above, because the methods used in all Czech camps were broadly similar.94
The first time the activities of the Czech torturers ever came to court was in Germany itself, with the trial of Jan Kouril, one of the most brutal guards at Kaunitz College. Kouril had later
been assistant commandant of Kleidova camp. He made the mistake of trying to sell gold fillings to a German dentist in Munich. The dentist recognised him as one of his torturers, and Kouril was tried and sentenced to fifteen years in prison by a court in Karlsruhe. During the trial the grave-digger from the College gave evidence that 1,800 bodies had been removed, including the corpses of 250 soldiers. While Kouril could find not one witness in his defence, 200 came forward for the prosecution.95
In June 1945 a law was introduced to stop beatings in the camps. It was not always heeded, but it alleviated some of the sufferings. The Czechs also punished commandants and warders who overstepped the mark. By all accounts this had less to do with the prisoners than with the pocketing of their effects. Dr Siegel tells us, for example, that the ‘monsters’ Pruša and his two daughters, as well as Kling and Tomeš and others from Theresienstadt, were tried in the court in Leitmeritz.96
Expulsions
The end of the nightmare was the beginning of another: the march to Germany or Austria. The deportations were sanctioned by Article 13 of the Potsdam Accords, although it was stipulated that the expulsion of the civilian populations should take place in the most humane manner possible. Hans Freund went to Dresden in the blistering heat of June 1945. No water was provided and many of the older Germans died.97
It went relatively smoothly for Margarete Schell, who found herself on the same train as her mother and stepfather. She arrived in Hesse ‘a beggar, homeless, outlawed - but free!’ They had been allowed to take just thirty kilos of possessions with them (later this was increased first to fifty then to seventy kilos) and were assigned to a numbered goods wagon. In each car there was a little stove to warm them, but not enough room to lie down. Right up to the last moment there was a worry that the Americans were not going to let them in. They were Czechs, not ‘Reich’ Germans after all.98