![]() ![]() |
![]() Brünn
(Page 2 of 2)
Report No. 9Death March and Concentration Camp: an Old Woman's Account Reported by: M. K. ![]()
Outside the barracks a pit had been dug and a bar was placed over it, which we had to sit on in order to answer the call of nature. Sick people, approximately 450 of them, were housed in one of the barracks. In this barrack a bathtub was set up in the middle, which the sick had to use as a toilet. The tub was not emptied until it was full to overflowing. It was never cleaned, and so the stench in the barrack was unbearable. In one barrack 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!" Once a Czech commission of five men came to determine if our rations were adequate. Only the doctor and the camp leader were interviewed, and these two people told the commission that all the camp inmates received milk and butter in huge quantities! Even though all of us unanimously denounced this as a lie, the commission chose to believe the doctor and the camp leader, and it was not until later that we found out how a Czech newspaper had announced how exceedingly well we were being taken care of. Then we were taken another 45 km away into a different camp, where we were given horse meat from dead horses to eat. The meat was crawling with worms. I myself had to wash the meat out. I washed the meat in 4 buckets of water and was still not able to get them all out. Nonetheless the people ate it, they were so hungry. In this way we held on to our bare existence for all of 8 weeks. Only now was it possible for some people to sneak out of the camp and flee across the border to Austria. The farmers of the Lower Austrian farmsteads cared for us with touching devotion until we had regained our strength enough to move on to Vienna. Russians came into the women's camps on a daily basis to rape the women. Even an 80-year-old woman was raped in our camp, as well as a 7-year-old girl. I myself spent three nights sleeping over top of a 15-year-old girl because her mother had begged me to protect the girl. The Russians showed up every day by 7:30 and stayed until 2 o'clock at night. Every day the Czechs went around to the camp inmates and collected money, with promises to protect us from the Russians in the evening, and to lock the camp so no Russians could get in. Punctually at 7:30 these same Czechs escorted the Russians in and showed them which of us they should rape. And it went on like that every day. From time to time different Czechs went around to collect the money because no-one believed the others any more. One day it was announced that those of us prisoners who had relatives in Austria might cross the border unmolested. They were given a document to enable them to cross the border. Everyone had to pay a certain fee for it. The people lined up in droves to get a border-crossing permit and to be discharged. In the evening these people returned to the camp and told us that at the border the Czechs had taken away even the very last of their possessions, and that they had had to sign a statement saying that they were leaving Czechoslovakia of their own free will, that they had been taken care of with tender loving care, and that the Czechs had even escorted them to the border. Once they had signed that, they had been whipped and beaten back to the camp.
![]() Reported by: Ed. Kroboth ![]() ![]()
![]() Reported by: Katharina Ochs ![]() ![]()
![]() Reported by: Josef Brandejsky ![]() ![]()
![]() Reported by: Martha Wölfel ![]() ![]()
I am prepared to take this statement on my oath.
![]() returning from Russian captivity Reported by: Emil Hulla ![]() ![]()
![]() Reported by: Franz Exler ![]() ![]()
![]() before the jury court of Karlsruhe Excerpt from "Die Brücke", edition of June 10, 1951 ![]()
This Karlsruhe Trial, which was observed with great interest both at home and abroad, was the first to go into the gruesome events that took place in Czechoslovakia and some other countries after the German surrender. Unnoticed by the world public - which at the time was horrified and outraged by the news of the mass murders committed in the German concentration camps - another tragedy took place which rivaled the other in terms of brutality. When the first news and eyewitness accounts of it leaked across the borders, they seemed just as unbelievable and exaggerated as the reports about the German camps had seemed. And just as some of the German people still refuse to believe the extent of the tortures and mass murders reportedly committed in the "Third Reich", a large part of the world public also refused to acknowledge the full extent of the 1945 catastrophe as a fact. And so the significance of this trial is not so much that one of the guilty was brought to justice, but rather that these events - even though they are only a small sample - was for the first time ever investigated and confirmed by a court. Probably the trial was possible in the first place only because the accused came to West Germany not for political reasons but for personal motives. In the course of his "activity" in the camps he fell in love with a captive German girl, which he later wanted to marry. But since he was unable to secure residence rights for her in Czechoslovakia, he followed her to West Germany. In 1949 an inmate of an IRO Camp offered to sell a Munich dentist some loose gold. When the dentist met with the seller, he recognized him as Johann Kouril, the former deputy commandant of the Kleidovka Camp, who was trying to turn a bag of broken-out teeth and [dental] bridges into cash. Later, Kouril, who was living unregistered in the Baden town of Spöck, was seen by Sudeten expellees and reported to the public prosecutor. In the course of the investigation more than 200 people came forward who had been imprisoned in the camps in question. Kouril was unable to claim even one witness for the defense from the list of names shown to him. Under questioning, the witnesses related atrocities such as were committed at all times when sadism and man-hunting were turned into patriotic and religious duty. Kouril was the terror of the camp. On his orders the prisoners were beaten, trampled and tortured. The prisoners were forced with beatings to drink buckets filled with urine and blood. They had to dance naked for the entertainment of the guards. On one Czech national holiday, prisoners were strung up and pulled up and down on a gallows. Others were branded with a red-hot iron. In the interrogation quarters one witness was shoved face-down into a toilet bowl while having to sing the German national anthem. The former gravedigger of the Kaunitz College camp testified that during his work in that capacity he had had to take away the bodies of approximately 1,800 Germans who had been hanged and beaten to death, among them 250 soldiers who had been handed over to the Czechs. The accused denied all the crimes he was charged with and merely admitted to first one, then three and finally one-hundred slaps in prisoners' faces. His standard reply was: "The witness is telling tales. He must be insane, I don't even know him." "The witness is undermining himself with his own lies." "The statements of this witness are a disgrace," etc. It is interesting, but not surprising, that Kouril's defense attorney tried to excuse his client's actions with the same arguments also used by Gestapo people etc. who were charged with crimes. According to him, Kouril should be considered a victim who blindly obeyed his government's orders. The public prosecutor agreed that the attitude of the Czech government at that time had been the cause of the German suffering, but added that the accused was not charged with political acts but rather with crimes for which the legal systems of every nation provide severe penalties. In the main, the Court agreed with the public prosecutor's view. The trial, said Chairman Dr. Ernst, had revealed the sufferings of an ethnic group that was supposed to be exterminated over night. However, the blame must not be placed on the entire Czech people, for it had been the mob, the rabble, that had descended on the Germans. However, he added, one must also consider that some individual Germans, by virtue of what they had once done to the Czechs, bore some blame for the events in Czechoslovakia after the surrender. The accused, who by his own admission had not been harmed in any way under the German regime, was no Czech patriot; rather, he had offered his services as slave driver in order to prove his nationalist inclinations after the fact. A person of sadistic and cruel disposition, he got pleasure from the bloody deeds that took place in the Czech internment camps. Concentration camps are despicable in and of themselves, but when they are additionally turned into sites where brutality is free to run rampant with impunity they can only be described as a disgrace to humanity.
Mankind Must Protect Itself Mankind continues to stand at the threshold of barbarism. The recent years' events in Europe have proven that. The "Christian West" itself is often little more than a veneer that can quickly flake off; and the face thus revealed can inspire a deadly horror, as we have just recently seen. It is a psychosis that seizes not only the mob and the rabble; in that regard the Court was wrong. Cruelty and inhumanity can only be eliminated if they are combated everywhere and on principle. One cannot speak out against the brutalities committed by the Czechs while downplaying the inhumanities of the Nazis; but one can also not condemn those of the Nazis while refusing to see those that were committed against the Germans. Unfortunately, both are the case.
The verdict of the Karlsruhe Jury Court punished one culprit, but at the same time many of the
originators, such as Mr. Ripka and his friends, are considered to be allies in the "battle against
inhumanity", just as in Germany people who bore substantial blame for the crime of the "Third
Reich" could be busy preparing another one.
|