You won’t find in history books: After WW2, Czechs bestially tortured and murdered innocent civil people – Sudeten Germans
You can read the whole book about it online for free: Ingomar Pust: “Cries From Hell, Unheard”
http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/sginferno/sgi01.html
I chose just some parts of that book to let you know what is true, but tabu and most people don’t even know about it. I didn’t know about it too, I learned about it just recently.
I warn you: it’s disgusting, because they tortured them really bestially.
Conspiracy of Silence
But who would be able to recreate the screams of the Germans whose torn bodies were rubbed with hydrochloric acid, who were beaten until their private parts were reduced to bloody lumps? Who is to recreate the screams of the women, whipped bloody, who were shoved naked, rear down, onto SS daggers? Hundreds of thousands went through this hell of torture before they were beaten to death or shot. Specifically: 241,000. The number of soldiers who died in the course of this outburst of sadism is probably no less.
…
It would be easy to say that the events in the East and Southeast were a just and fair response to the previous National Socialist misdeeds. But were the people in Prague, Warsaw and Belgrade called to avenge the Jewish fate on innocent Germans? Was it right to speak of “liberation” and then to eradicate entire population groups? To expel 15 million people from their homes?
Expulsion From
the South Moravian Homeland
In memoirs of Anna Spangl Wie es wirklich war, she recalls the plundering, destruction, damage and rape and recounts on pp. 49-50 how old Frau Rebefka was shot because she had tried to protect the Ukrainian woman who had worked for her from being raped. “The women were hunted like rabbits, the best hiding places were found out, and women were raped with no regard to their age, whether they were ten or 90. My grandmother’s sister was 86 years old and almost blind, she was raped twice. Because I put up a fight with hands and feet against being raped, those sadists dragged me like an animal to the slaughter – right past my father. He cried, ‘for God’s sake, why didn’t I let her go away?’ My mother was sobbing terribly, and my tormentors took me into the neighboring house. Four men raped me there. The first one was an officer, the last a horribly ugly Asian. There was sobbing and screaming everywhere. Often the parents were forced to watch the rape of their daughters, and vice versa, the children had to watch their mothers being violated. Many women contracted venereal diseases, and I wasn’t spared that either. Some time later, all women had to go to Rackwitz for a medical exam. Those who didn’t go kept it secret because they were ashamed.”
The Mass Crimes Against the Sudeten Germans
Took Place in Public
Non-Stop Mass Murders
Engineer Franz Rosch reports: “From May 12 to 15, 1945 I was assigned to a burial commando in Wolkowitz. There I saw how thousands of German soldiers as well as civilians – women and men and even young people 10 years and up – were brutally murdered. Mostly they were clubbed to death by Czech Revolutionary Guardsmen. Often the dreadfully battered bodies were rubbed with hydrochloric acid, just to torture them. One Dr. Blume of Berlin was in charge of ascertaining the death of these people. Fingers with rings on them were torn off some people’s hands while the people still lived. The dead were buried in a mass grave in Wolkowitz, by the cemetery.
“From the work unit in Wolkowitz I was sent to the penal camp Kladno, where I saw inmates being scalded with hot tea on their bare skin, on their back and buttocks, and being beaten terribly afterwards. In the two months I spent there, I myself was beaten daily.”
The Holocaust of Prague
“In the night of May 4-5, 1945 the mass murders began in Prague.
The most gruesome events of the Middle Ages pale in comparison to the murderous blood lust that played itself out in the streets, houses and most of all the hospitals of Prague.
After the all-out war effort had been proclaimed in 1944, medical student Ingrid Langer had signed up as Red Cross nurse. She was stationed in the Luftwaffe hospital on the right bank of the Moldau River in Prague. In the morning of May 6 a sizeable group of young Czech men and girls arrived howling and yelling at the main entrance of the hospital and, threatening with submachine guns, demanded that all Red Cross nurses, as well as all the wounded who could walk, should come out. When the doctors tried to dissuade the mob from their demands, and pointed out the regulations of the Red Cross, under whose protection the hospital was, the riotous mob roared with laughter. The armed ringleaders stormed into the hospital rooms and drove the wounded in their striped pajamas out before them.Other heroes of this kind brought out all the nurses on duty, lined them up and selected the ten youngest and prettiest of them. Ingrid Langer was among them.
After lengthy arguments among the teenaged hoodlums as to what sorts of abuse they would engage in, they agreed to march their victims into town.
Along with a selected 10 wounded patients, the nurses had to line up in rows of two and march off, singing the German national anthem. Anyone who did not sing loudly enough, or at all, was beaten until his or her voice was audible. To either side of the street the compatriots of the wild mob stood applauding. The procession was stopped in Peter’s Square, which seemed to be the arena best suited for the planned macabre game.
A bow-legged descendant of the Awars shrieked: “Undress! Everyone undress completely!” Since the unfortunate victims made no move to take off their clothes, he gave his accomplices the sign to start beating.
The wounded and the nurses were smashed to the pavement, some beside and on top of each other, unable even to move.
“Undress or die!” the sadist kept screaming.
The wounded soldiers soon took off their hospital pajamas. Stark naked, they were at the mercy of the goggling crowd. The nurses as yet retained their underwear. No-one minded that their undressing took a little longer, for the surrounding crowd relished the sight of these half-naked German Red Cross nurses. But then the ringleader demanded that the stripping be completed.
“Undress! Finish undressing!” he roared again, “strip to the skin, you swine!” At last, when all ten finally stood stark naked in the middle of the square, hiding their faces in their hands, the Prague citizens’ merriment rose to a fever pitch. But Ingrid Langer, who had grown up in Prague, knew her Czech fellow citizens only too well. She knew that the final act of the drama staged here would be a deliberately drawn-out but all the more gruesome death. Like lightning she made a break for it, darted through a weak point in their encirclement, and dashed off towards the lower end of the square. Before the baffled bystanders realized it, she had escaped the arena of death. But at the square’s end Ingrid Langer ran right into the hands of her next tormentors!
A band of plunderers, heavily laden with rugs, paintings, furs, tableware and more, caught the naked fleeing girl in a flash. They dragged her into the house they had just left, up to the first floor, into the home they had plundered. In the hallway on the floor lay a dead woman about 25 years old. Next to her huddled a child of perhaps two, blood-bespattered and sobbing bitterly. The captured naked beauty was shoved into a bedroom to a host of obscene comments. At the sight of the pretty young girl all the plunderers had turned back, in the certain expectation of a good time. There was not one among them that did not participate in the ensuing rape. More Czechs who came running in continued their predecessors’ disgraceful deed. At last the victim mercifully lost consciousness.
Meanwhile, the macabre spectacle in Peter’s Square had continued. The nine yet surviving Red Cross nurses had been lined up opposite the injured men, naked as they were, and the nurses were ordered to tear the men’s private parts off. An unbelievably brutish idea. The victims themselves could hardly believe the perverted orders. “Rip it off! Rip it off!” And right away the entire crowd joined in, roaring and chanting and clapping their hands in rhythm. None of the German girls could be forced to even try to carry out the bestial order. They ignored the ever more threatening demands of the crowd, which was literally going wild. Not one made any move to comply, even after most of them had already collapsed, unconscious, under the blows from the rifle butts.
Never before in history had the world seen human cruelty to equal what happened here!
Frau Theresia Beichl, who was on this death march with her little daughter, recounts the following: “I saw a woman giving birth in a ditch. Afterwards the Czechs beat her to death and trampled the newborn until it was dead too.”
That such incredible brutishness was not an isolated case is shown by the account of Frau M.v.W. (Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, op.cit.), who recounts being ordered (with reference to a dead mother and child) to “throw the sow into the latrine together with her bastard!”
When M.v.W., a Red Cross nurse, refused, two other women were forced to perform the abominable deed and to throw the dead mother and baby into the open latrine. Weeks later it was still possible to see the baby’s head and one of the mother’s arms sticking out of the filth.
The Expulsion From Brünn
(The “Death March of Brünn”)
by Theresia Beichl, Meisenweg 10, Königsbrunn;
born in Prittlach, South Moravia
…The most horrible thing I saw was when a young woman lay on a meadow and had just given birth. She screamed and cried, but both she and her newborn were beaten and kicked until they lay dead. They were left there, and I heard our “escort” say: “Let them croak, they’re just Germans.” I had a fair command of the Czech language and so I was able to understand everything they said.
…We were not “allowed” to be hungry. Every now and then we were given some soup of watered-down roasted flour. Festering feet, the result of our long march, were the order of the day. The worst was diarrhea, dysentery and typhus. As I’ve said before, there were no sanitary facilities – only a latrine, but the sick people couldn’t use that because they were too weak to walk there to relieve themselves. There were two toilets, but only the Czech guard personnel were allowed to use them. An old, beaten-up man always had to clean these toilets, but with his bare hands. The fine gentlemen that could use them to answer their calls of nature did not do so into the toilet bowls, but rather beside them, and deliberately so. One day we found the old man beaten into a dreadful shape, lying dead in front of the toilet door. People were dying like flies in Pohrlitz.
Hounded to Death!
…Then we trekked on to Znaim, where we arrived in the evening and were taken to the Robotarna prison. In one of the basement rooms we had to take our shirts off and lie down on the ground with bare upper body and buttocks. Four partisans flogged us mercilessly with whips and straps. For hours all one could hear was the brute cursing of the partisans and the whimpering and cries of the tortured. Men had also been brought in from other parts of South Moravia, and they fared no better than we did. Our countryman Josef D. must have received the greatest part of the beatings. When he was thrown into our cell as the thirteenth of us, there was no part of his body that was not covered with welts (back, buttocks, chest, abdomen). He moaned pitifully without cease and died several hours later that same night. Our torturers ordered his body taken into a different cell. The next day he was probably thrown into the pit that already held the bodies of other victims who had been beaten to death or shot. The following day (May 22, 1945) the rest of us men were taken under heavy guard to the concentration camp Mannsberg. For two weeks Josef D.’s name was still read out at the daily roll call, even though they knew perfectly well that he had been tortured to death in the Robotarna prison…..
Concentration Camp Inmate Sandor Kovac,
Hungarian,
on the Czechs in 1945
Women and children were doused alive with petroleum and set on fire, men were murdered under inconceivable tortures. And I must make it an emphatic point that it was the entire population that participated in these crimes, not just the usual rabble. I saw stylish, elegant young Czech ladies, who had perhaps flirted with the German officers not too long before, now walking the streets with guns and dog whips and torturing and murdering people, and I saw Czech officials, evidently of higher rank, raping women together with the howling Czech street mob and then killing them as painfully as they possibly could. I feared a German reawakening, for what was done to the Germans defies description!”
Czech Clergymen
Forget Their Christian Brotherly Love
“What ye have done,
inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me!”
Five pages further, on p. 179, we read the account of Captain Bruno Knösel, a Sudeten German homecomer: “There I saw unbridled, wild nationalism visit unutterable suffering on innocent women, children, elderly and soldiers. To this day I see these victims expelled from their homeland. The terrible guilt, where not even the Czech priests shied back from soiling their sacred vestments with blood…”
Anton Beck, who arrived in his hometown Cernosín, in Mies District, on June 12, 1945 and was thrown into prison there following gross abuse by Czech partisans, tells of being denied spiritual aid (p. 189):
“Many of those imprisoned asked for a clergyman. A Czech priest came. He stood by the cell door and asked what they wanted from him. Those that were critically ill and already marked by Death lifted up their arms and asked him to take their confession, or asked for a rosary or prayer book. But the priest said cynically, ‘that’s forbidden for Germans…’, turned away and left.”
At a public assembly on June 24, 1945 in Libenec, Msgr. Stasek, who had already been an active member in the First Republic’s “Lidova Strana”, the Czech People’s Party, proclaimed: “The precept of brotherly love is void where Germans are concerned!” And Oliva – a clergyman and Director of Charitable Works – was a member of the People’s Court and frequently contributed to unjust verdicts!
“The measures being taken against the Germans are clearly and wholly against natural law, against the Divine Laws, and against all humanity and culture. The fact that Czech priests in leading positions give their approval to the dreadful brutalities of the Czech Revolution is one of the saddest aspects of Czech history.”
The Danse Macabre Began in Prague
The Germans of Prague who were already rounded up on this May 5th already got their first taste of the tortures in store for them on their way to the movie theaters and schools where they were to be interned. Gatherings of Czechs from all social classes were waiting for them in the streets. The arrested Germans – men, women and children alike – had to run the gauntlet through the streets. They were attacked with stones, canes, umbrellas and even with boiling water. Arms raised, they staggered on. Women were yanked out of the groups they were in and dragged into the nearest houses and other buildings. Whoever wanted to could rape them. Nurses were stripped naked and publicly violated. The women’s heads were shorn bald with paper scissors. Their faces were painted. Their clothes were torn off their bodies, and swastikas were painted on their backs and breasts. They were raped by the thousands. Many were forced to open their mouths so that their torturers could urinate into them.
Elsewhere one could see naked women being forced to wipe up the pavement on their knees. Hundreds of Germans were driven into the underground sewers of Wenzel Square, where they stood crowded so tightly together that none could even move their arms.
Prague: Sea of Inhumanity
“While the wounded were still standing pale and frightened beside the truck they had come in, a group of rioters that had been lurking in the yard pounced on them, snatched away their crutches, canes and bandages, beat them to the ground and proceeded to pound away at them with clubs, rails and hammers until they lay unmoving in their blood.” …
“Were they still human, those beings on Wenzel and Karls Square and in the Rittergasse who on May 9 doused Germans with gasoline, hung them by their feet from poles and lamp posts and set them on fire, and then laughed and howled and cheered to their agony, which lasted all the longer because the victims had been deliberately hung head-down so the rising smoke could not suffocate them? Were they still human, those beings who took German soldiers, but also civilians and women, tied them together with barbed wire, shot them and then threw the bundles of people into the Moldau River? Were they still human, those beings who drowned German children in the tubs of water intended for putting out fires, and who pitched women and children out the windows into the streets? They had human faces. But they were no longer human.”
“They were not human, those beings who indiscriminately bludgeoned any and every German they got hold of until he or she collapsed. They were not human, those beings who forced naked German women to clear out rocks, who cut their Achilles tendons and reveled in their helplessness. No, they were no longer human, those beings who dragged the Germans out of the underground sewers of Wenzel Square, clubbed them to the ground and literally trampled them to death, and they were not humans who took the German girls, the Wehrmacht assistants who had fallen into their hands, stripped them of their clothes, and herded them through Fachoba Street towards the Wolschaner cemetery, where they machine-gunned them, or clubbed and stabbed others so that they sought refuge in piles of hay, which the howling torturers promptly set on fire.”
“And these were only a few high points in the sea of inhumanity in which a simple shooting – even if it was the shooting of hundreds of students in Prague’s Adolf Hitler School – seemed merciful.”
We Kissed the Rotting Corpses
Hilde Hurtinger (Prague): “On May 5, 1945 a Czech mob took me from my home and, beating and clubbing me all the while, dragged me by the hair some 500 meters into the Scharnhorst School, where I was grossly abused.
“The following night all the prisoners there were repeatedly called into the yard. After that, random groups of ten women, men and children each were assembled and shot. I watched my two brothers and one of their children die like that. The child was only five months old.
Armed Czech women dragged pregnant prisoners from the cells and out into the yard, where they stripped and beat them, then stuffed them into latrines and beat them until their bellies burst. I myself had to help carry off the bodies of the women who had died that way. During the day groups of six to eight women were taken to work in St. Gotthard Church. There we had to kiss the dead bodies that were already rotting, pile them up, and clean the church floor of the blood that ran there by getting down on our knees and licking it up by mouth. A Czech mob supervised this work and beat us. On May 20 we were led into Wenzel Square where German boys and girls, and soldiers too, were hung alive by their feet from lamp posts and trees and, in front of our very eyes, were doused with petroleum and set on fire.”
Physicist Dr. K. F., who was beaten half to death and imprisoned in a basement, recalls: “The afternoon of May 10 brought me what was perhaps the most gruesome experience of all those days. A troop of armed men came in and selected the six youngest and strongest of us. I was one of them. After they had promised our guard that they would bring us back alive if possible, they led us to Wenzel Square. It was packed with a roaring, howling crowd and they had to clear a way for us first.
“Thus we arrived at the junction of Wassergasse street, where we saw the job that awaited us: from the large advertising billboard at this corner hung three naked corpses, suspended from the feet and burned with gasoline. The faces were mutilated beyond recognition, all the teeth knocked out, the mouths just bloody holes. The roasted skin stuck to our hands. We had to carry them into Stefansgasse street, and drag them when we could no longer carry. A passer-by tried to photograph our procession, but he was seen and beaten half to death.
“When we had put the bodies down we were forced to kiss them on the mouth. We were told, ‘To jsou prece vasi bratri, ted’ je polibejte!’ (‘They’re your brothers, now kiss them!’) I still hear these words as though they had been said today. No matter how revolting it was, staying alive was more important, and so we squeezed our lips together and pressed them into the bloody ooze that represented their mouths. To this day I can feel the ice-cold heads in my hands.
50,000 Watched the Executions
“Shouting and yelling carried over from the main gate of Wilson Train Station. I saw that a blonde woman was being attacked by the crowd, even though she defended herself in Czech and without any accent. In a trice she was surrounded, the clothes were torn off her body, and already she lay naked and covered in blood on the pavement, where she was beaten further. At that point a heavy beer wagon drove past, and in a great commotion the crowd unhitched the horses. One was tied to each leg of the prostrated woman and then urged in opposite directions. The body was torn apart; the woman screamed horribly before she died.
“One Sunday afternoon the Revolutionary Guard invaded one of the double cells in our block, where 25 boys aged 14 to 16 were housed. These boys were from the Reichenberg area and were accused of having been ‘werewolves’. As we could hear from the orders given, the boys were lined up outside the door in rows of two, facing each other. First they had to enact a children’s hopping game, after which they were ordered to shout ‘Heil Hitler’ and to box each other’s ears. Both male and female spectators urged them on, and not only with rubber truncheons. This ‘game’ escalated into bloodshed; the boys then had to lick the blood off the stone floor. If one refused, he was beaten for it. Some of these children became sick to their stomachs, and the others were forced to eat their vomit. Then they were forced to strip to their skin, and one after the other had to lie on a table where they were flogged until the flesh hung in shreds from their bodies. All the while their torturers indulged in the most dirty and stupid jokes imaginable. When all the boys had been thus tortured, they were dragged into the basement, and those that still gave any sign of life were strung up on hooks on the wall, and liquidated.
“Pfitzner was followed by a number of other well-known persons. The execution show lasted for hours. 50,000 Czechs watched insatiably.”
Gruesome “Czech Cocktail”
“At first the frightened boys looked over their shoulders, then they turned around. Two of the Czechs who stood fairly close aimed at the first boy in the line-up. Their shots rang out, and the boy sank to the ground. His blood stained the wall behind him. The other boys pleaded, ‘Captain, sir, we won’t do it again!’ The second boy in the line tried to run to the executioners to slap their rifle barrels up – but these murderers had already repeated their guns, and the second boy fell to the ground amid their fire. Mortar sprayed up, and again blood stained the wall. The remaining three boys now faced their fate heroically. The third cried out for his mother before collapsing; the fourth remained on his feet after the first salvo, looked silently into the gun barrels pointed at him anew, and sank to the ground only after the second row of shots. The fifth was also gunned down. These boys were perhaps 15 years old.
“We grown-ups had to watch the murders helplessly. There was to be no end to the mental torture that day. Those marked for death were kept in the stables along the narrow back of the yard. Punctually on the stroke of every hour, a group of Czechs armed with canes and whips went into the stables, and then, for about ten minutes, we heard the screams and whimpers of the beaten. This went on like that until evening. The shootings themselves were not as nerve-racking as this torturing of people who had been chosen for execution and who were so brutally tormented beforehand. Every day prisoners were shot and thrown into the slit trenches, which the rest of us then had to use as latrines.”
The Baby’s Head in the Latrine
“Night after night the women were raped – even the sick and the elderly, even the 70-year-olds. The partisans let the soldiers in, and each of the women were abused several times a night. I once saw a soldier trying to rape a delicate eleven-year-old girl. The horrified mother tried to fight him off with the superhuman strength of desperation, and offered herself to the soldier instead, to save her child.”
An account from Modrassy:
A mother whose newborn had starved to death committed suicide. One of the gendarmes ordered: “Throw the dirty pig and her bastard into the latrine!” Three women had to throw the bodies of the mother and her dead baby into the open cesspit. Partisans then forced the inmates of the camp to use this cesspit as toilet so that “the dirty sow and her bastard disappear as fast as possible,” as they put it. This continued for days, and even weeks later the baby’s head and one of the mother’s arms could be seen sticking out of the filth.
In one barracks a young mother of four children, the youngest of which was three years old, suddenly died. The Czech physician who came to do the post-mortem barked at the dead woman’s sobbing mother: “What are you howling for, you German bitch, at least one more German pig has kicked the bucket!”
“One pregnant woman was tortured especially badly. When a Czech soldier entered the room and spat there, she had to kneel down and lick up his spit. If she had refused, she would have been beaten to death. Sometimes she was beaten until she vomited blood, and then they forced her to eat what she had thrown up.
“A 15-year-old boy whose father had managed to escape was beaten daily until they found his father, who was then tied by the hands and doused with boiling water. His son was also tied up, and forced to watch.
Line Up to be Shot
Dismembered Alive
“On June 24, 1945 we were arrested in Engelsberg by the ‘German Revolutionary Guard’, taken to the camp, and beaten there day and night by the Czechs. The beatings were repeated every half-hour six or seven times each night. All of us were disfigured beyond recognition.
The guards indulged in horrible kinds of “fun”. A physician who was interned in this forest camp had turned into one huge festering wound; it literally covered him from head to foot. To move, he had to crawl painfully on the ground, as he had not been able to walk any more for a long time. Others were forced to lick out his pus-filled wounds. Inmates were forced to eat excrement and had to lick each other’s genitals. One night a number of the poor souls in this camp hung themselves from the beams in the barracks; they could simply no longer take the physical and mental torture.
Excrement-covered gags were popular among the Czechs. Dr. Karl Gregor: “Whenever I screamed or groaned when they beat me, they would shove a gag covered with human excrement into my mouth.”
If you want to read more…
39. The Mass Dying in the Elbe River
40. The Baby’s Head in the Latrine
41. Crucified on the Barn Door
42. “Cesarean Section”, Czech-Style
43. Father lay in the Pile of Corpses
44. The Russians as Life-Savers
45. Toddlers Buried Alive
46. Theresienstadt: Living Corpses
47. “Murder Factory” Theresienstadt
48. Cucumber Salad With Glass Shards
49. Line Up to be Shot
50. Hydrochloric Acid on Sore Bodies
51. Ears Cut Off, Tongue Torn Out
52. Dismembered Alive
53. Shot in the Neck – Survived Thanks to Urine Cure
54. Amnesty For All Crimes
55. The Cruel Order Came at Night
56. The Flood of Degeneracy
57. The Ominous “Yes” to Genocide
58. Sudetenland: A Region of Decay
59. The Crime of Potsdam
60. Our Nameless Dead Call Out To Us
61. Appendix: Comments on Contemporary History
62. Appendix: Conventions on International Law
63. Appendix: God Lives: His Day Will Come!
64. Epilogue: Human Blood Dripped From the Knife of Hate