Brno death march

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Brno city center towards the end of the war (April 1945)

The Brno death march was part of the collective expulsion of the German-speaking population from Moravia . It began on May 31, 1945, Corpus Christi Day, in Brno (Czech: Brno ) and led via Pohořelice (German: Pohrlitz ) across the border into Soviet-occupied Lower Austria.

course

Augustinian Monastery (2008)
Monastery garden (2008)

The expulsion of German-speaking residents from Brno is considered a so-called "wild expulsion" . On May 31, 1945, these residents were rounded up at the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Old Brno . On the following day, people were driven around 55 kilometers towards the Austrian border together with the German and bilingual residents of the surrounding villages. The train consisted mostly of women, children, toddlers and babies, as well as old men. Most of the younger men were at that time in captivity or in camps in the city or the surrounding area, e. B. interned in the Brno fortress Spielberg . Many were unable to cope with the rigors of the march in extreme heat and without an organized water and food supply and collapsed on the side of the road.

After the crossing at the Austrian border was initially refused, the survivors in Pohořelice were locked in warehouses for grain. More people died there because hunger and epidemics broke out in this camp.

Another march took place from the lines office in Wiener Strasse on June 6, 1945. Food should be taken with you for three days. Jewelry and money had to be surrendered under threat of being shot. Every 20 paces there was a Czech or a Russian. At 11 p.m. they marched via Mödritz to Raigern with blows with rifle butts and knocks and insults. There you took a break on a large sports field. After three hours, we drove to Pohrlitz in the pouring rain for six hours. There they slept on sawdust in barracks. About fifty people died of dysentery and typhus every day. Some stayed in the camp for more than three days because of weakness. The displaced were now left to their own devices.

Only after a long hesitation was the border to Lower Austria, which was then occupied by the Soviets, opened in June 1945. Even after reaching Austrian territory, the sick and malnourished victims continued to die. About 1000 of them found their final resting place in Austrian cemeteries.

Victim

Memorial plaque on the mass grave in the cemetery in Drasenhofen

The number of participants in the march can now be given relatively reliably by Czech files at around 27,000. This corresponds to almost exactly half of Brno's then German population of around 53,000.

Estimates vary widely when it comes to the number of victims of the Brno Death March . On the side of the displaced, the range 4,000 to 8,000 was mentioned, on the Czech side only a few hundred. More recent studies from the 1990s lead to a death toll of around 5,200. A little over 2,000 deaths have been documented with certainty, 890 of them in a mass grave near Pohořelice and a little more than 1,000 that were buried in individual graves in several cemeteries on the Austrian side (in the immediate border area and along the road to Vienna). Since the entire historiography assumes that there were far more victims on the Czech side of the border than in the final chapter of the death march between the border and Vienna, the number 5,200 can be considered well-established. In contrast to the massacre in Aussig on the Elbe (Czech: Ústí nad Labem ), there are also reports of missing persons in a corresponding number. The victims perished during or immediately after the march. Most of the victims died of exhaustion, hunger, thirst and typhus; some were probably shot by Czech escort teams.

Culprit and consequences

The Brno death march was mainly planned and carried out by the Czech workers of the Brno weapons works (Czech: Československá zbrojovka ). The chief organizer of this crime is the Czech staff captain Bedřich Pokorný . A little later he moved to the Czech Ministry of the Interior and is also considered to be the organizer of the Aussig massacre on July 31, 1945. Due to the “Amnesty Act” No. 115 of May 8, 1946, the crimes committed went unpunished, so it is not actually a crime Amnesty, but an impunity law . When attempting a post-war order, the victorious powers of the Second World War did not take a specific position on August 2, 1945 in the Potsdam Protocol , Article XIII, on the wild and collective expulsions of the German-speaking population. However, they explicitly called for an orderly and humane transfer of the parts of the German population who remained in Czechoslovakia .

Processing and commemoration

Places of remembrance

Memorial stone in the Augustinian monastery in Brno (place of compilation). Erected for the 70th anniversary (2015)
  • At Pohořelice, halfway between Brno and the border with Lower Austria, there are several mass graves of the victims of the death march. One of them with 890 graves is recognizable as a grave with a simple memorial stone; however, the area above the graves is still used for agriculture.
  • In the garden of the Augustinian monastery of St. Thomas in Old Brno, a memorial stone has been commemorating the victims of the Brno death march since 1995.
  • In numerous local cemeteries along the route of the death march in Austria , graves and memorial stones commemorate the events, for example in Drasenhofen , Steinebrunn, Herrnbaumgarten , Poysdorf , Wetzelsdorf, Mistelbach , Wolkersdorf , Bad Pyrawarth , Willersdorf, Stammersdorf , Purkersdorf and Erdberg .
  • In 2004, a memorial plaque for the victims was attached to the outer facade of the new Altvaterturm on the Wetzstein in the southern Thuringian Forest.

memory

On May 20, 2015, the Brno City Council apologized for the violent evictions, for the "act of revenge" that was "intended to be a retribution for Nazi crimes" and that "was primarily directed against women, children and the elderly". He said that he sincerely regretted the events at that time and expressed his wish "that all past injustices may be forgiven." On May 30, 2015, a commemorative march (in the opposite direction) from Pohrlitz to Brno was celebrated on the 70th anniversary. The Lord Mayor of Brno, Pavel Vokřál, also invited representatives from associations of expellees in Germany and Austria to use the expulsion of the Brno Germans as an occasion for a joint commemoration. In the subsequent ceremony, he used the term “expulsion” (Czech: vyhnání ) in Czech for the first time in a public declaration . This declaration was distributed in printed form to all those present at the memorial act (including the Austrian and German ambassadors to the Czech Republic).

Historical background

During the six-year occupation of the "remaining Czech Republic " in the newly created Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, according to various estimates, between 8,000 and 40,000 Czechs, regardless of the Jewish victims, were murdered by the occupying power. Many Czechs suffered severe abuse in prisons and camps. When the Czech May uprising broke out on May 5, 1945, three days before the end of the war , the insurgents, which were joined by the Protectorate Police, armed underground organizations and numerous Czech youths, saw the opportunity to retaliate against the Germans . Thus, the massacres and atrocities committed against the German-speaking population are still regarded as spontaneous acts of revenge in Czech public opinion.

literature

Secondary literature

  • Tomáš Staněk: Persecution 1945. The position of the Germans in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia (outside the camps and prisons). 2002.
  • Tomáš Staněk: Odsun Němců z Československa 1945–1947 (deportation of Germans from Czechoslovakia 1945–1947). Praha Acedemia, Prague 1991.
  • Roland Hoffmann, Alois Harasko: Odsun. The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans: Documentation on the causes, planning and implementation of an "ethnic cleansing" in Central Europe 1848 / 49-1945 / 46. Munich 2000, ISBN 3-933161-01-0 .
  • Hans Hertl: The Brno Death March 1945. Home Association of Brno in Germany, 1999, ISBN 978-3-00-002566-2 .
  • Detlef Brandes : The way to expulsion 1938-1945. Plans and decisions to “transfer” Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland. 2nd edition, Verlag Oldenbourg, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-56731-4 .
  • Joint German-Czech Commission of Historians (ed.): Community of Conflict, Catastrophe, Détente. Sketch of a representation of German-Czech history since the 19th century. Oldenbourg / Munich 1996, ISBN 3-486-56287-8 (Czech and German).

swell

  • Hanns Hertl: The Brno death march 1945. The expulsion and mistreatment of the Germans from Brno. A documentation. BHB-Verlag, Schwäbisch Gmünd 1998, ISBN 3-00-002566-9 .
  • Wilhelm Turnwald: Documents for the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans . Published by the working group to safeguard Sudeten German interests. Aufstieg-Verlag, Munich 1951 (on Brno: pp. 63, 66, 69, 72, 77, 173, 249, 307, 312, 321, 331, 345, 366 and 507).
  • Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims (Ed.): The expulsion of the German population from Czechoslovakia (= Theodor Schieder (Hrsg.): The expulsion of the Germans from East-Central Europe. Volume 4). Two volumes. dtv, Munich 1957 and several other issues.
  • Cornelia Znoy: The expulsion of the Sudeten Germans to Austria in 1945/46 with special consideration of the federal states of Vienna and Lower Austria. Diploma thesis to obtain the master's degree in philosophy, Vienna 1995 (on the “Brno death march” p. 81).

Fiction

Web links

Commons : Brno Death March  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Meret Baumann: A gesture of reconciliation from Brno. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, June 26, 2015, accessed on August 18, 2019; also international edition, p. 6 ( Reconciliation instead of death march. With a declaration of regret for the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, the city of Brno sends an important signal for the Czech Republic ).
  2. ^ Charles L. Mee : The Potsdam Conference 1945. The division of the booty . Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 1979. ISBN 3-453-48060-0 .
  3. ↑ a b Deklarace smíření a společné budoucnosti ( Declaration by the City of Brno on the 70th anniversary of the expulsion of the Brno Germans ). In: freunde-bruenns.com, May 2015, accessed on August 18, 2019.
  4. ^ Declaration of May 19, 2015 on the Brno Death March of May 1945 in Wikizdroje, the Czech version of Wikisource
  5. ↑ Brno lituje "pochodu smrti" Němců po druhé světové válce (Brno regrets the death march of the Germans after the Second World War). In: Týden magazine of May 19, 2015, accessed on August 18, 2019.
  6. ↑ For the character of the publication, the editors and the online access see the lemma of the ministry.