Aussig massacre

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The Aussig massacre (also known as the Aussig massacre ) was a pogrom directed against the German civilian population on July 31, 1945 in Ústí nad Labem (Aussig) in Czechoslovakia .

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Dr. Edvard Beneš Bridge ( Most Dr. E. Beneše ) in Ústí nad Labem, site of the 1945 massacre

The reason for this pogrom was the explosion of an ammunition depot in the Krásné Březno ( Schönpriesen ) district that day, which was portrayed as an attack by werewolves . According to research findings and secret Czech documents, it can be assumed that the attack on the depot and the alleged reaction of the population were a targeted action by Department Z of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior, the OBZ . The aim of the campaign was to create a reason that was clearly recognizable abroad for the complete expulsion of the German minority from the Sudetenland . In order to steer the relevant information and connections in the desired direction, Chief of Staff Bedřich Pokorný was commissioned with the official investigation of the events.

Immediately after the explosion , German civilians were identified by the Czech Revolutionary Guard as allegedly guilty without further investigation. The Germans were recognizable by their white armbands, which all Germans in Czechoslovakia had to wear from the end of World War II until at least the end of 1946.

The people were slain, stabbed with bayonets, drowned in a fire water reservoir or pushed from the Elbe bridge and shot at in the water. The corpses drifted into neighboring Saxony. On the days in question, 80 corpses of slain people were recovered from the Elbe there, according to the death records of the riverside communities .

Victim

The exact number of victims was difficult to determine because the Czechoslovak side did not release their archives. In Sudeten German publications, based on the information provided by German survivors, the number of deaths in this massacre was given as over 2000 for years. One argument against such high numbers of victims is that no corresponding number of missing persons reports were submitted later. In the case of other pogroms against Germans, such as the Brno death march and the shootings of Saaz / Žatec and Postelberg / Postoloprty in early June 1945, the lists of missing persons drawn up in the 1950s correspond well with the numbers of victims that were plausibly quantifiable from Czech sources after 1989/90 . The lack of missing persons reports could also be due to the fact that many of the victims were displaced persons and thus unregistered Germans (e.g. Silesians) from other regions.

Czech historians speak of 43-100 dead; German historians assume a maximum number of 220 victims.

Perpetrators and their convictions

There have long been allegations that this massacre was organized by the then Czechoslovak government under Prime Minister Zdeněk Fierlinger . Thanks to the work of Otfrid Pustejovsky, it is now certain that the chief of staff, Bedřich Pokorný, who worked in the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior, was one of the main organizers of this crime. He had organized the Brno death march nine weeks earlier (beginning May 31, 1945). An official legal preparation of the event did not take place. The Beneš decree 115/46 declares such actions until October 28, 1945 in the struggle to regain freedom ... or which aimed at just retaliation for the acts of the occupiers or their accomplices ... not unlawful.

The time of the massacre

Memorial plaque to the Aussig massacre on July 31, 1945 on the Elbe bridge in Aussig

A peculiarity of the massacre is its late date , because the wave of open violence against the Sudeten Germans was stopped by President Edvard Beneš under pressure from the British government on July 16, 1945 and thus almost to the day at the beginning of the Potsdam Conference .

Commemoration and reappraisal

On 31 July 2005, the mayor unveiled Petr Gandalovič on the Dr. Edvard Beneš bridge a memorial plaque for the victims of the massacre of German civilians as a sign of reconciliation. The text of the inscription reads “In memory of the victims of the violence of July 31, 1945”. It is not mentioned that this was all about Germans, but the text is bilingual (Czech and German).

On August 28, 2005, a bronze relief plaque was attached to the outer facade of the new Altvaterturm on the Wetzstein near the town of Lehesten in the southern Thuringian Forest.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vladimir Kaiser cites the personal information from the Pirna City Museum Director as the source ; in: ders .: The end of the war and the expulsion of the Germans from the Aussiger area . In: Detlef Brandes : Forced Separation. Expulsions and resettlements in and from Czechoslovakia 1938–1947 compared with Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia . Klartext, Essen 1999, ISBN 3-88474-803-3 , p. 215.
  2. ^ Wilhelm Turnwald: Documents on the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. Self-published by the working group for the protection of Sudeten German interests, Munich 1951; on Aussig pp. 95, 119, 121 ff., 131, 133 f., 152, 318, 340, 397.
  3. ↑ Vladimir Kaiser: The end of the war and the expulsion of the Germans from the Aussiger area . In: Detlef Brandes : Forced Separation. Expulsions and resettlements in and from Czechoslovakia 1938–1947 compared with Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia . Klartext, Essen 1999, ISBN 3-88474-803-3 , p. 215.
  4. ^ Peter Steinkamp: Aussig 1945. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (Ed.): Places of horror. Crimes in World War II. Darmstadt 2003, p. 16.
  5. ↑ Aussig and Potsdam 1945 . Review by Karl-Peter Schwarz, Frankfurter Allgemeine , February 3, 2002.
  6. ↑ on the frequent new editions, the preparatory work by Fritz Valjavec since 1951 and the online access see lemma of the ministry