Crimes and Mercies (17 page)

Greer saw no men, only women and children. One of the boys was so thin ‘you could see the cords of his legs quite clearly. The rest of the skin was tight about the bones. His face was expressionless, his mouth hung open, he was bent with a large bundle, he just tramped along behind the woman and followed where she led with no real consciousness at all. Terrible, wasted half-dead people. Alf took the boy out to the car and gave him bread and cocoa and some stuff we had, and he took it with still no expression. He was so hungry that even the sight of food didn’t arouse him. As he left one of the Germans in the crowd handed him
a 20-mark note … incredible encouraging touch. But the rest … I wanted to run from it all.

‘That’s some of it. The rest is like that … all mixed up, all different, yet all with the same terrible helpless almost hopeless sense of destruction about it. British officers in the mess … eating meat and cucumbers and lettuce and fried potato admitting that they expected thousands to die this winter.’
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And these were the lucky ones.

The people Greer described had survived the expulsions in their eastern homelands, where everything was even worse. Some of it was described by the curate of the parish of Klosterbrück in Silesia, who observed in the summer of 1945 that, ‘In every town and village in Silesia, the Poles have affixed placards bearing the words, “The harvest is like the seed.”’
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The atrocities of the Nazis would now be avenged by Polish atrocities.

In one Sudetenland village, all the German women were seized, and their Achilles tendons were cut. As they lay on the ground screaming, the Czech men raped them. Some of them were raped many times in a day, day after day. Frau X’s eighteen-year-old daughter was raped about fifteen times every day for weeks. This was what the Czechs, Poles and Russians did in 1945.

Hermine Mückusch, grandmother, of Jägerndorf in the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, saw scenes like this almost every day in June and July of 1945 as she was herded west on foot with a few belongings. Behind her lay her whole life, all her possessions, her history, her friends, her relatives. She, her daughter and two grandchildren were allowed to take almost nothing. ‘It was a terrible sight which our transport now presented. The young mothers with their children sat on the side of the road, dirty and mainly without shoes, thirsty and emaciated. The older children, red in their faces from fever and heat, lay in the grass, asking for something to drink, which we were unable to give them as the Czechs had made no arrangements whatsoever to look after these transports. It seemed that they had deliberately omitted to supply food or drink so that people should perish.’ Women were shot at random by the guards, and no medicine was available for them
among the expellees. Her mother and her own sister, hearing that the ‘transport’ was in their village, came to see her. The guard pushed the great-grandmother away brutally, threatened to beat her and sent her away. That was how Mückusch said farewell to her mother and her sister. She never saw them again.
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When her grandson got fever, the Czech transport commander, in her words, ‘generously’ gave her aspirin. In Spornhau, they were led past a garden fête of Czechs under a marquee tent eating, drinking and playing band music, which showed her poignantly how much the war had cost her – and might have reminded her of painful scenes for Czechs when the Germans had ruled here. That night they had to stay in a dirty, bug-infested building with no latrine facilities. The people were so exhausted that they literally lay down and died, in their own excrement. ‘No one who had been outside could go indoors without horror.’ At the beginning of the march, they had with them twenty-seven children. Within fourteen days in the overcrowded hospital, twenty-six children aged one year and under had died. The one who lived was Wolfi, her youngest grandson. ‘The bodies of the children were put in adult coffins, five to seven in each, and buried together. They all died with their eyes and mouths open and the certificates stated “starvation” as the cause of death.’
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After 9 May, when the Red Army marched into Pribram, one of the women was told to go with a Russian soldier. She knew what he would do, so she refused. He threw her out of the fourth floor window, killing her. In the same camp, another woman was seized and raped so often that she died. Her children were watching and weeping beside her the whole time. In the transport of 1,300 people who had left Pribram for Strahov, about 300 died in a few weeks that spring.

The death rate among the 9,000–10,000 people in the Strahov stadium can be computed from the number of bodies seen by the inmates every day. They averaged between twelve and twenty per day. The death rate for a few weeks was therefore between 43 and 81 per cent per year. Among the people there was a man with a tiny orphan in his arms. He had found the child lying on his dead
mother in a ditch. The author of this account – one of many thousands taken in sworn depositions by the Germans and others after the expellees reached Germany – lost his father-in-law, his sister-in-law, and his fifteen-month-old son. He observed that although some Czechs wanted to help these victims, anyone who brought food, shelter or medicine, was shouted down as a Nazi by his fellow Czechs. This man, Kurt Schmidt, was enslaved for a year in Czechoslovakia. He almost died but was finally expelled to Bavaria.
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The expulsions in the area round Aussig, Czechoslovakia were deliberately compared to a notorious Nazi massacre by a Czech official in the Czech Administrative Commission in Aussig. Writing in a Czech
émigré
magazine published in London in 1948, he said that the Nazi massacre of Lidice ‘lit a torch which roused the whole civilised world against the cruellest [Nazi] tyranny and the debased nature of a totalitarian regime. Truth and humanism were on our side in the world when it happened. It was our right and our duty as soon as the war was over to deal with the criminals who sinned against humanity. But our attempts to settle accounts with these criminals have been overshadowed by even greater acts of inhumanity than those committed by the Nazi gangsters.’ He described one of those acts, committed by Czech soldiers on a bridge over the Elbe who had been specifically ordered by their officers to refrain from attacking some German civilians returning from work. They seized ‘a mother wheeling her child in a pram across the bridge and killed her with sticks. Together with the child, she was thrown over the railings into the Elbe whilst sub-machine guns fired at her.’
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A German who had spent four years in a concentration camp for anti-fascist activities was scalped, shot through the stomach, and died in the street. ‘He died instantly. There were hundreds of similar instances. Within three hours, more than 2,000 people were murdered.’
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A Catholic priest reported that the dead in Dubí near Kladno were thrown into a coffin several at a time and emptied into a pit in Rapice behind the wall of a cemetery. The coffin was re-used.
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The curate of the Parish of Klosterbrück in Silesia observed of
the Poles and Russians, ‘I have heard of cases where the Russians brutally raped mothers whilst their small children were present. After that they took the children on their knee, gave them bread and butter and sugar, and played with them. I am convinced that the Russians would be quite different if there were no bolshevism in their country. They are spiteful in a manner that is different from that of the Poles. The maliciousness of the Polish militia reminds one of the maliciousness of the German SS troops. It is cold and venomous, whereas the Russian maliciousness is somehow warm-blooded.’
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But not all the Poles were like that. The priest at Dittersdorf, who had befriended Poles during the German occupation, feeding and clothing them, allowing them to attend services in his church when this was forbidden by the Germans, was assaulted after the war by Poles. One of these men who beat the priest half to death, came to him two days later to apologize. He had tears in his eyes, begging for forgiveness. The bandaged priest forgave him.
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One man walking along the road near Lamsdorf with his family was assaulted by Poles, who beat and robbed them. After many incidents like this in the summer of 1945, seven of the eight members of his family were dead.
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The railway stations and houses in Lamsdorf were posted with signs saying that the expulsions were to be carried out in ‘an orderly and humane fashion’.

At Neisse in Upper Silesia, the village priest wrote, ‘During the first night of the Russian occupation, many of the nuns were raped as many as fifty times. Some of the nuns who resisted with all their strength were shot, others were ill-treated in a dreadful manner until they were too exhausted to offer any more resistance. The Russians knocked them down, kicked them, beat them on the head and in the face with the butt-end of their revolvers and rifles, until finally they collapsed and in this unconscious condition became the helpless victims of brutish passion, which was so inhuman as to be inconceivable. The same dreadful scenes were enacted in homes for the aged, hospitals, and other such institutions. Even nuns who were seventy and eighty years old and were ill and bedridden were raped and ill
treated by these barbarians. And to make matters worse, these atrocities were not committed secretly or in hidden corners but in public, in churches, on the streets, and on the squares, and the victims were nuns, women and eight-year-old girls. Mothers were raped in the presence of their children, girls were raped in front of their brothers, and nuns were raped in front of young boys.’

The Russians even went so far as to gratify themselves sexually on their victims’ corpses. ‘Priests who tried to protect the nuns were brutally dragged away, the Russians threatening to shoot them.’
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Germans who were still alive in the former eastern provinces under Russians or Poles in 1945 faced one of several fates.
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Most of the soldiers were sent to prison camps in the Soviet Union, although a few dozen thousand were held in camps in Poland. Most of the civilians, nearly all women and children, with a sprinkling of older men, were expelled from their homes and homeland, usually under atrocious conditions, to starve in shrunken Germany. Several hundred thousand people were seized for slave labour in the USSR; many, as we have seen, to replace Wehrmacht prisoners who had died en route from the front to NKVD camps, or who had escaped. But many hundreds of thousands of people were forced at gunpoint into former Nazi concentration camps now run by Poles, there to suffer like those people so recently persecuted and murdered by the Germans themselves. Not only in Poland did such things happen, but in virtually every nation in the east of Europe where ethnic Germans were being expelled.

The fate of these German prisoners in Poland and elsewhere has scarcely been described in historical literature. Polish historians have understandably been averse to this harrowing story of vengeance. Not many Germans survived these camps to bear witness. Those who did were so wounded by the experience that they could scarcely bring themselves to speak about what had happened to them. And if a survivor did attempt to tell others, he was
hampered not only by remembered terror, but by a lack of documents, by incredulity, by cover-ups, by the widespread refusal to believe in the post-war tragedy of the Germans that persists to this day throughout the west. For instance, bones discovered in 1976 and 1981 in mass graves at Kaltwasser/Bromberg were returned to the ground without any marker when it was decided by a Polish commission investigating Nazi war crimes that the dead had been German.
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The investigation ended there. Analogous incidents have occurred at Lambach in Austria and at Rheinberg, Erfurt and Bretzenheim in Germany.

There were approximately 1,200 Polish camps east of the Oder–Neisse line, where the children were separated from their parents and all enslaved. According to one eye-witness who survived, in the children’s barracks at Potulitz (
Potulice
in Polish), the death rate was very high.
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The witness, Dr Martha Kent,
née
Schulz, was there from 1947 to 1949. She knew the children and watched them die. At the end of two years, so many children had died that the three-tier bunks were taken away and replaced by single bunks, for the survivors. ‘Not many children left the barracks alive, but more were added,’ Dr Kent said recently. ‘More were added than left alive.’ It is therefore quite likely that more than two-thirds of the children died in two years. Her experience has been confirmed by the recent extensive research of a German writer, who has described the deliberate starvation of newborn babies in Potulitz. Fifty German women gave birth to fifty babies in one barracks, of whom forty-six died within a few weeks. These were the babies of raping Russians, who were succeeded by Polish men after autumn 1945.
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