After the Reich (30 page)

The following day there was a small-scale massacre in the Postelberg Barracks. A detail was formed to bury the dead in gravel ditches that would from now on serve as the camp latrine. The men were then robbed of any valuables they had about them. Later a detail went through the prisoners to locate doctors, pharmacists, priests, members of the important professions, useful skilled workers, half-Jews, men married to Jews and any former inmates of German camps. They were transferred to the camp in Saaz.

The hoi polloi spent the night in the stables. In the morning the doors were opened with a cry of ‘Rychle, rychle!’ (Quick, quick!). Those who tarried were gunned down. The dead and wounded were tossed into the latrine. The remaining men were sifted politically. All members of the SS, SA, Nazi organisations, the Wehrmacht and the National Socialist Party had to come forward. The shootings continued throughout the day and night. Five boys of around fifteen who had tried to escape were beaten bloody with whips and executed before the eyes of the others.

The survivors, numbering perhaps 275, were crammed back into the stables. It was four days before they received any bread and by then some had gone out of their minds. When the doors were finally opened, one of the men emerged stark naked and pranced around like a ballet dancer. A German captain begged the chief torturer, Police Captain Marek, for the right to die like a soldier. Marek made him kneel down to shoot him in the back of the head. He fired and missed. The German officer turned and said, ‘Shoot better!’ Marek took two more attempts to finish him off.
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For the former soldier Ottokar Kremen from Komotau (Chomutov), the Russians were sweetness and light compared to the Czechs. Returning from the army on 7 May, he found the town occupied by Russian soldiers. They assured him they would not be staying long and allowed him to take away some clothes. When he discovered that his bicycle had been stolen while he was inside, the Russian major commandeered a motorcycle from another Russian and gave it to him, together with a laissez-passer in Russian. Kremen then went to his sister-in-law’s house in the nearby village of Gersdorf. He was not alone in finding the Russian soldiers more understanding than the Czechs. Dr Siegel in Theresienstadt said the Russians were often ‘notably more decent’. A Russian doctor treated the wounds of those that came out on work details and helped others to flee. Siegel used to tell girls who wanted to escape the misery of the nightly rapes to make friends with a Russian and clear off with him.
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Nearly a month later, at the beginning of June, the Czechs came to Gersdorf and arrested Kremen. He was interrogated and asked whether he had been in the SS, the SA or the Party, all of which he denied. The Czechs seized the motorbike and everything else they could find and took him to an inn where he had to box other Germans. Then he was escorted to the former Hotel Weimar in Komotau where he was locked up in a room with sixteen others, including an eleven-year-old boy who was later shot with his father, the owner of the local bell foundry. They were taken from the hotel-prison to the camp that had been set up in the former Komotau State Farm. As they left, a Czech held a bust of Adolf Hitler and they were told to salute it. Kremen heard one Czech say to another that anyone who made the so-called Hitler Greeting would be shot. Kremen told the others and no one raised their hands. At the camp they had to strip. Any good clothing was carted off and they were given rags that had belonged to those who had already perished; very often they were covered in blood. Kremen was led to a large room with seventy-eight other men. They were drilled all day - including men of eighty. Anyone who did not march properly was beaten.

Kremen found his knowledge of Czech useful. He was able to take over the drilling, and at his own request he taught the prisoners Czech, which meant they could sit down for a while. The SS and SA members were later picked out, beaten up and shot. The other men had to clean up the yard and scatter sand on the blood. The survivors were then sent to the ‘infamous’ concentration camp in the former French POW camp at Maltheuren. But Kremen and a few others were spared. They were put in the old glassworks: him, a doctor called Lockwenz, an engineer, an Austrian who was known to have shown goodwill towards Czechs, a Yugoslav, a staff captain from the Czech army and a local postman. The Austrians and the Yugoslavs were sent home. Meanwhile the glassworks filled up again with more Germans, so that the inmates totalled 360 men and eight women. A lot of local worthies were among them: directors of local industries, including the sausage maker, who was later beaten to death, a priest and a gamekeeper, who also perished. They were put to work on the railways, with Kremen as interpreter. While he was at work, Kremen met a young Czech railwayman who had been offered a three-room flat in Komotau. He had refused. He didn’t want someone else’s flat. ‘Where will it all lead?’ he said. ‘I am not going to take any of the flats here, they have all been stolen.’
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Back in the camp the beatings and torture continued. One Latvian could hardly make himself understood, as he knew little German and less Czech. He claimed that his membership of the SS was an accident. He was shot. A German colonel who had served in the Czech army until 1924 was beaten to death. A geometer who had a Polish-sounding name also died a hideous death. There had been little love lost between the Czechs and the Poles since 1938, when the Poles had seized the moment of the Czech diplomatic defeat to march into the Tetschen area and appropriate it.

Kremen had been lucky he was not in Komotau when they celebrated the Revolution there. All the men aged between thirteen and sixty-five were made to assemble in the square. There were between five and six thousand in all. The area was then cordoned off. The men had to remove their upper garments to see if there were the usual SS markings. Anyone found to have the tattoo was stripped naked and beaten to pulp. One young, blond boy put up a fight. They prized open his legs and destroyed his genitals before beating him to death.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.