Ingomar Pust

A chapter in its own right is the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from their homeland. Theirs was ancestral German land which had been inhabited by their German forebears for at least 2,000 years¹ and of which their centuries of hard work and diligence had wrought a paradise.

In time, Czechs trickled into the region, and soon the invaders tyrannized and oppressed the good-natured Sudeten Germans, with the intent to eradicate them, as the following accounts clearly show:

"The district physician of Graslitz, a district with a population of 25,000, reports officially and on his professional responsibility: black barley-malt coffee without milk or cream is the food that babies are given, and older children get coffee, bread and potatoes. The children are undernourished and anemic. They have no clothes. Entire families live in cramped holes where the floor is the only place to sleep.

"In winter there is no coal with which to heat. Mother, give me some water, I'm so hungry, beg the children - and the physician (who clearly feels that this will perhaps be disbelieved) says that he can take it on his oath that this is a direct quote, and that there was cause for it. In one family of six - parents, three children and a mother-in-law - the family members literally go naked. They have neither stockings nor shoes, nor shirts. They live on black coffee for breakfast, soup for lunch, and there is no supper. They are slowly but surely dying out. In the Adlergebirge mountains the people supplement their bread with tree bark, while the government orders tons of grain dumped into the Moldau river to keep the prices from dropping. A large part of the population has been eating cats and dogs."²

And what was the public response to this? "Embarrassed silence abroad, and at home, vile incitement against all those who allegedly sullied the Czech nation's reputation with their warnings.

"Now it was clear that the Sudeten Germans were supposed to be wiped out, for economic impoverishment plus social ruination, plus political hopelessness, plus national chauvinism on the part of the Czechs, added up to the destruction of the essence of the Sudeten German ethnic group, despite all Sudeten German efforts to ward this off. The systematic displacement of the Germans from the employment scene resulted in a catastrophic drop in the birth rate." ³

This is how matters stood in the Sudetenland when it was forced to become part of Czechoslovakia in 1918. And if Hitler had not restored the Sudetenland to the German Reich, the genocide of the Sudeten Germans would already have been a fait accompli even then. Yet despite all this, the two ethnic groups, the Czechs and the Sudeten Germans, lived peaceably together during the Third Reich. This fact casts a highly significant light on the character of the Sudeten Germans: after all, they could have taken revenge now.

But after the end of this deplorable war, in 1945, the tables once again turned to the disadvantage of the unfortunate German population, and the Czechs in their godlessness were seized by a blood frenzy that could not possibly have been any more gruesome.

They must have been possessed by the devil: who else could have guided their hands as they celebrated slaughter feasts and intoxicated themselves with orgies of murder? Whose voice was it that ranted from the lips of their 'men of God': "You can kill the Germans, that's no sin!" Were those God's words? Surely not. I myself heard such a call to mass murder as it was being preached from the pulpits of the German churches by the Czech 'servants of God' in those days.

The Czech President Eduard Benes, back from exile in London, incited the already-crazed population via the radio: "Take everything from the Germans, leave them only a handkerchief to weep into!" In Prague Germans were hung head-down from the lamp posts and set on fire as living torches in Benes's honor. Ever since, the number of victims has been cited as 250,000. "Files from the SBZ/German Democratic Republic which were not accessible until 1990 showed that this figure was actually much higher and must now be set at no less than 460,000."⁴

And now, half a century later, a "New Order" is to be established. Over the decades, the Sudeten Germans' suffering was mentioned less and less, until finally the topic was banished into the darkest corner of history's broom closet by the German government itself. This government now supports the Czech Republic's admission to NATO; it reassures the Czechs that the Sudeten German expellees make no claim for restitution, and the Czechs need not even renounce their Mr. Benes's disgraceful decrees. That is nothing less than legitimatized genocide, for in just one more generation there will be no more Sudeten Germans - the survivors have become assimilated by the rest of the German population. At the same time the Czechs grow ever more brazen and even demand "restitution" from the Germans! For what, is beyond me. As though it were not enough that they stole the land and the people's wealth - goods of inestimable value - they let this former gem of a region go to rack and ruin and even want to be paid for it!

On this putrefaction, a "New Order" is now to be built; on a foundation of unatoned-for crimes, festering wounds, and the bitterness of the unfairly treated! And this is supposed to end well? I doubt it will.

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Prologue

And so our incarnation - or anthropogenesis, if the reader prefers - brought with it an unconditional cosmic morality that progressed to cultural levels whose degree and promise varied with the races and tribes that sprang up in the course of mankind's development. While some pursued their genetic impetus to the pinnacle, others have remained in spiritual narrowness and intellectual inadequacy, at a stone-age level to this day. Others again, however - particularly tribes and peoples that developed in a tradition of warlike violence - have retained incomprehensible sadism, inhuman cruelty as indestructible and unfortunate characteristics.

In the sixth century A.D. the Czechs advanced into Central Europe in the footsteps of the Awars, without at first forming a unified tribe or nation. Even today the physical appearance of many Czechs reveals their genetic mixing with the Awars. But the bestialities engaged in by their oppressors is another factor of which they were never able to rid themselves completely. Even once they had begun to develop their own ethnicity they continued to manifest these inherited vices. Particularly since the Hussite wars of the 15th century, and right to the present day, they have tended towards open or (more often) clandestine cloak-and-dagger activity. Yet they have their German neighbors alone to thank for anything and everything they can boast in the line of culture and civilization.

Since achieving ethnic unity this nation has fluctuated between the extremes of obsequious servility and hate-filled presumptuousness. It may be that this nation, wedged as it was right into the living space of the Germans, found itself backed into a moral corner where its baser instincts gained the upper hand. Virtually paralyzed by the unequaled creative genius of their larger German neighbor, the ambitious Czechs developed those complexes which, when additionally fueled by envy and resentment, have resulted in their well-known explosive outbursts. And this soul-deep unease is the driving force behind their boundless chauvinism. Only in this way can their most regrettable characteristic - their occasional blood frenzy - be explained.

Throughout the many centuries that the Germans coexisted with the Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia there was not one single case of a German having killed a Czech out of hatred or revenge. In contrast, what the following chapters describe can hardly be surpassed in its bestiality, or in its death toll of 241,000 German lives!

This would truly be a subject fit for television - yet all the world's media have studiously ignored it for more than 50 years now, for indeed these mind-boggling atrocities were followed up with what may justly be called the crime of the century: the comprehensive expulsion of the entire Sudeten German ethnic group from their homeland which they had settled and made arable seven and even more centuries earlier. And this global crime was part and parcel of the Allied crusade for "Christianity and humanitarianism"!

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Preface

Sadism manifest itself both in individuals and in entire cultures. The German social psychologist Erich Fromm has concluded that collective sadism may often be found in frustrated social strata that suffer from a sense of powerlessness.

The Hussites roasted in their prisoners in pitch-covered barrels. Centuries later, the Czechs of May 1945 burned wounded Germans to death as living torches, hung upside down over blazing fires.

A curious duplication.

In the time of the witch-hunts, women were beheaded or burned for allegedly having slept with the Devil. The imaginary devil of those days has become reality in the form of the serial killers of our time; the victims of the witch hunts were paralleled in May 1945 in Czechoslovakia by innocent German women.

It is understandable that posterity wants nothing to do with crimes it did not commit. But then it can also not presume to freeload off the murderers' blood-spattered loot. The Czechs of today have been made the receivers of goods gained through robbery and murder on a gigantic scale. The gift their forefathers left them is a two-edged sword. Anyone who cannot acknowledge their guilt will never be rid of it.

In spring of 1994 the Neue Kronenzeitung, Austria's largest daily paper, brought a series of exposés titled "Schreie aus der Hölle ungehört" - Cries From Hell, Unheard. This book continues that series with further, detailed accounts. May it help to fill in the historical gap that has been so well hidden for more than half a century.

The author is especially grateful to Alexander Hoyer, Herwig Griehsler and Maximilian Czesany for their invaluable help.

¹Alois Bernt, Die Germanen und Slawen in Böhmen und Mähren. Spuren früher Geschichte im Herzland Europas, Tübingen: Grabert, 1989, pp. 15-16, 21; Emil Franzel, Sudetendeutsche Geschichte, Augsburg: Bechtermünz, 1997, p. 16; Armin E. Hepp, Völker und Stämme in Deutschland. Von der Steinzeit zum Mittelalter, Tübingen: Grabert, 1979, p. 196; Hans Krebs and Emil Lehmann, Sudetendeutsche Landeskunde, Kiel: Arndt, 1992, maps p. 46; Erich Linnenkohl, Die Wenden und die "Slawen" genannten Völker. Sprachliche Widerlegung der These von den "slawischen Völkern", Frankfurt/M.: R. G. Fischer, 1995, p. 9, 12; Hans Riehl, Die Völkerwanderung. Der längste Marsch der Weltgeschichte, Munich: W. Ludwig, 1988, map pp. 160ff.; Malcolm Todd, The Early Germans, Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992/95, p. 6 fig. 1. ...back...

²Reinhard Pozorny, Wir suchten die Freiheit, Vlotho/Weser: Verlag für Volkstum und Zeitgeschichtsforschung, 1978, p. 179. ...back...

³ibid., p. 174. ...back...

⁴Fritz Peter Habel, Eine politische Legende, Munich: Langen Müller, 1996, p. 18. ...back...

Sudeten German Inferno
The hushed-up tragedy of the ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia