After the Reich (31 page)

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. Two 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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The expulsions did not cover all Germans. Some were left to rot in Czech prisons. Alfred Latzel’s father-in-law, for example, was sentenced to eighteen years by a People’s Court in Troppau, to be served in Mürau bei Hohenstadt, a medieval castle once the most dreaded prison in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the war it had been used to house Czechs and Polish prisoners suffering from TB. The death rate had been alarmingly high. Other Germans were retained after 1946 to work in the mines or forests. The People’s Courts were painfully reminiscent of their namesakes in Nazi Germany: justice was summary, death sentences ten a penny, life imprisonment was an option, otherwise the culprit received five or ten years in the mines. Max Griehsel had worked at the main office of the DAF, the Nazi forced-labour organisation. He received a five-year sentence. The trial was over in ten minutes.
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The Sudeten communists, who had never supported Henlein and who had suffered under the Nazis, fared no better. Like the new Poland, Czechoslovakia would not suffer minorities (except Slovaks). About 10,000 of them were expelled. It was a rare example of a deportation that followed the rules laid down at Potsdam. It was orderly and relatively humane.
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Less so were the first organised shipments of non-communist Germans in the summer of 1946: pictures show some of the 586,000 Bohemian Germans packed in box cars like sardines.
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The behaviour of the Czechs and Hungarians created more frustrations for Lucius Clay. He was worried about the definition of ‘German’ in February 1947, especially as a number of pure Czechs were seeking refuge in the West to escape from the communist shadow that had been cast over their country. The expulsions were suspended for a time. When the Soviet-inspired communist coup took place in 1948, many Czechs followed the path of the Germans across the border. They became refugees in their turn. As Clay was quick to point out, they were ‘not loved in Germany’ as a result of the expulsions.
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From Hungary came ‘Swabians’, a development which perplexed him.
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The process was revived on 1 September 1947 at a rate of twenty trains arriving from Czechoslovakia every month.
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At the end of the official expulsions the Americans asserted that they had received 1,445,049 Czech Germans to settle in their zone, of whom 53,187 were anti-fascists; the Russians had accommodated 786,485, including 42,987 anti-fascists. The rest came in dribs and drabs, as many were still held to work in the mines. In 1950 the Czechs admitted to having 165,117 German-speakers, but the figure was probably somewhere between 210,000 and 250,000. The expulsions had caused an economic crisis in Czechoslovakia. Despite the pickings for the Czechs, whole villages remained empty and the fields around lay fallow for want of labour.
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It is thought that 240,000 Germans, German Bohemians and Moravians died at the hands of the Czechs.
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