THESE ARE HITLER'S HEIRS
Clair, Louis
These Are Hitler's Heirs By LOUIS CLAIR WE all have become very callous indeed in this age of atomic bombs, gas chambers, and extermination camps. The human mind can only absorb a certain amount...
...The special ration cards for Jews, stamped with a big J, now are issued to the Germans, only an N (for the Czech word for German) replacing the J. Holders of these ration cards do not get either milk or meat or flower or vegetables...
...We have risked our lives a thousand times...
...I mourn for my uncle who worked at this factory for 40 years...
...More than three million people of German stock lived in Czechoslovakia...
...Though these rights were often infringed upon, conditions were better than for most other Central European minorities...
...And it is debatable whether the efficient disposal of human bodies in gas chambers is morally more reprehensible than the more disorganized extermination now proceeding in the border regions of Czechoslovakia and Germany...
...A correspondent of the London Daily Express related : "I spent a day yesterday with 518 Germans walking under a blazing sun from Sudetenland into Soviet-occupied Germany...
...They pulled barrows and pushed baby carriages with their belongings...
...Even the "Reichstag fire" is not lacking...
...Watches, jewelry, and money were taken away and some people were killed for trying to conceal a piece of jewelry or a wedding ring...
...After these revelations there was a definite revolt in British public opinion which is reflected in recent parliamentary debates...
...An announcement of the Prague National Committee has decreed that "the term 'German' will henceforth not bs capitalized...
...One turns away from those who have an unpleasant truth to tell—why spoil our new-found quiet...
...The Czechs have been freed of Nazi oppression...
...They have been reported in British papers and magazines...
...A delegation of the Sudeten clergy, who reported to Allied authorities in Berlin, contains the following passage: "By the end of August, a transport of Sudeten Germans arrived in Berlin...
...It is debatable whether there ever was a majority who favored such integration—until the end there existed vocal and militant anti-Fascist parties—but this is a wholly academic question, because the Sudeten-Germans were not consulted when the Munich agreement turned them over to Nazi-Germany...
...One thousand three hundred and fifty remained when the transport arrived in Berlin...
...Conditions in the camp are appalling...
...THE Sudeten Nazis had left long before these expulsions began ; those expelled now are the ordinary unpolitical citizens and the anti-Nazis...
...Those who have monuments with German inscriptions are—with the exception of Austrians—under the obligation of removing them within three months...
...Minister Dr...
...The human mind can only absorb a certain amount of horror...
...People are being savagely beaten up...
...I had not more than half a pound of bread from Wednesday evening till Monday...
...Two thousand four hundred women, children and aged people were counted before the transport left...
...The deportees were allowed half-an-hour for their preparations...
...And to add a touch of macabre ridicule, a Bruenn newspaper of Sept...
...The Prague Municipal Public Services have banned Germans from using street cars or buses...
...Even the trade unions are participating in this disgusting business...
...The border regions are now referred to as "Alaska" because the dregs of the population from all over the land flood the region to "dig gold...
...The harvest couldn't even be fully brought in and many of the most modern factories and mines are idle...
...they cannot be replaced by sufficiently active Czech elements so that these regions which were once the richest of the whole country are slowly perishing...
...This Winter's death rate will be much higher...
...According to an announcement by the Ministry of Transportation, persons of German race are not allowed to use the pub-lie transport system...
...And now these humanistic philosophers, these men who, while in exile, never tired of stressing the democratic tradition of Czechoslovakia, prove the best disciples of the racist theories of .Dr...
...IT is not the Czech people who should be blamed for these outrages...
...The Czech Minister of Education has declared that children who during the occupation attended German schools cannot be accepted in Czech schools...
...We have trusted the words of Churchill and Dr...
...To a Sudeten-German mother, who wrote to her son, an anti-Nazi refugee in England, the letter was returned with the following official remark: "Mail of German or Hungarian senders is not forwarded—Official Gazette 7.25.45...
...Goebbels...
...Indeed, the reports often stress that they are committed not by those Czechs who have long lived in the Sudeten region, but by young hoodlums who are coming in from the interior...
...Thus, while the Germans are driven out...
...During the Austrian regime, they undoubtedly profited, and often were used by the Hapsburg against their Czech brothers, but nevertheless, while relations had often been strained, there had never been any really profound hatred between them and the Czechs...
...They hadn't arrived recently: from the 12th Century on, their ancestors had been invited by the Czech kings to settle there and to bring with them the benefits of more advanced civilization...
...President Benes, allegedly the true heir of Ma-saryk's humanistic tradition, again presides over the destiny of the Czech nation...
...None was allowed to take more than he could carry...
...This policy, consciously carried out as it is, may differ in degrees but certainly not in kind from the Nazi massacre of the Jews...
...FOR good and for bad, they shared the destiny of the Czechs among whom they lived...
...Beyond that, citizens who are not "rassen-rein" are not allowed to even eat the fruit from their own garden or to pick berries in the woods...
...When the world economic crisis set in...
...When a fire broke out in a factory in the Aussig region, the Czech National Committee attributed the fire to German "Werewolf" activities and started wholesale massacres "in reprisal...
...But maybe also there are concrete and tangible reasons why we are not supposed to know: the moans of the dying may disturb the hosannas for victory...
...11, states: "Many workers from the Schicht factory were killed as they returned from their day's work without any idea of what was going on...
...Czech peasants are lured into these regions with the promise of rich reward in the form of the best German farms...
...Hundreds of thousands of Sudeten-Germans, men, women and children, driven from their homes on a few hours' notice, are now straggling along the roads, dying on the roadside, slowly starving in concentration camps...
...Their prediction has come true...
...2 actually wrote: "In order to give the central cemetery a Czech character, it has been decided that the Germans cannot buy family graves...
...Germans are not allowed to frequent bars, restaurants, or cinemas...
...Thus they had populated the border areas of what later was to be Czechoslovakia for centuries...
...Conditions described in this letter are corroborated by many others that have been smuggled out, often through the efforts of American soldiers who had been ordered to stand by and let the Czechs do what they want, but who have often helped as much as they could...
...It is not permitted to change inscriptions without special permission, and such permission will only be granted to Czech applicants...
...Since half of the Aussig population had already been deported previously, the victims of this massacre were mainly the anti-fascist factory workers who had been permitted temporarily to stay on...
...The wholesale looting of German property has become a national industry...
...Says an announcement of Prague Radio: "The Military Command of Greater Prague has ascertained that many Germans are still working in factories...
...Do we dare to say that we don't care for their moans...
...Just as the Jews were forced to wear a Yellow Star, now the Germans have to wear "on the left side, visibly on white canvas, size 10 x 10 cm., a swastika together with the number under which they are registered...
...The courageous leader of the Sudeten-German Social-Democratic Party, Wenzel Jaksch, has published two pamphlets in London which present the Sudeten case in full...
...THE Allies have defeated Germany...
...Now it is safe to speak about the atrocious murder of five million Jews—now that we can no longer do anything about it—but next to nothing is said about the slow extermination of more than three million Sudeten Germans, about whom we could perhaps still do something...
...Maybe this is why we hear so little about the horrible tragedies now happening in the center of Europe...
...ALL this is copied almost word by word from the Nazi manual...
...It is estimated that of the 800,000 Sudeten-Germans deported up to July, 20 per cent perished...
...The population did not carry out the government's plan during the first two months after the liberation and the whole operation has therefore been slowed up...
...The food consisted of black coffee and potato soup in the evening...
...Benes heard over the BBC and have worked underground with the Czechs...
...But the Czechs copied more: the extermination policy...
...Just as the German pogroms against the Jews, these were not so much popular outbursts but rather staged affairs...
...Anyone who buys a railway ticket has to prove that he is a Slav...
...This is tragedy on such a prodigious scale that our imagination hardly can grasp it...
...In Maehrisch Ostrau all Germans were interned irrespective of party affiliation...
...The women with all the children, including babies at the breast, had to go to a factory where they too slept on the concrete floor and were slowly perishing from lack of food...
...The Czech husband as a rule succumbed to the influence of the German wife...
...Above all in the Czechoslovak Republic, the country of Masaryk, the country which in pre-war days seemed to embody liberal democracy at its best...
...But it seems that the lure of all these rewards has not been sufficiently convincing, because the Prague radio continues to complain that not enough Czechs volunteer to settle in the border regions...
...After the creation of the Czech Republic after World War I, the Sudeten-Germans were granted minority rights...
...Slave laborers are summoned daily to a roll-call and one of them is forced to read Benes' address: 'The whole German nation is responsible for Lidice...
...But the American public has been kept in the dark about these happenings...
...if it becomes too great, our awareness begins to shrink, we put wax into our ears to be able to continue living...
...The expulsions were carried out by the so-called National Security Guards resembling the SS in every detail...
...The policy of the government, however, corrupts large parts of the population...
...A leading Czech paper, the Volne Sloro, already concerns itself with mixed marriages: "We shall have to go more closely into the cases of German wives and children of our nationals...
...The Central Council of Trade Unions calls on all committees in Greater Prague to cheek all staff records and take the Germans to camps, after notifying the police...
...One thousand and fifty had died from exhaustion during the 18-days journey on open railroad trucks...
...I was with them from 5 :30 a. m. the moment the Czech police called them out of bed and told them to pack up and leave within three hours...
...A whole people, the guilty and the innocent, the women, the children and the old...
...While the people are in the camps their dwellings are pillaged...
...Everything is patterned on the German model...
...But now I have to see my best comrades not only languishing in prisons and internment camps, but also barbarously tortured...
...The deportees had to walk on foot over the Sudeten mountains...
...The few remaining Jews have returned from their ghettos and places of hiding...
...A leading Sudeten Social-Democrat smuggled out the following report which reached London via Austria: "The barbarism committed by the Nazis should not justify the Czechs in using the same methods, nay, in many cases surpassing them...
...It came from Troppau and was 18 days on the way...
...His body could not be found...
...It is time that this conspicuous silence be broken...
...In one case, a Social-Democrat was beaten to death...
...the strongly industrialized Sudeten area was especially hard hit...
...Even postal services are no longer to be used by these outcasts...
...THESE are the facts . . . some of the facts...
...On Wednesday evening we were told: all men over 10 go into the camp...
...These men used whips and rifle butts freely...
...They were old and young, men and women, little children...
...Goebbels and Hitler often predicted that even if the Nazis should be beaten, their spirit would live on among the victors...
...They are not allowed to frequent the public bath...
...It is time that the American people learn that behind a veil of secrecy a whole people is slowly dying in the center of Europe...
...Among them were even Germans who had come from German concentration camps and they said conditions in the latter had been better than in the Czech camps...
...Ripka, in an interview with a Reuter correspondent, had to admit indirectly that "we were too slow and indulgent with the Germans...
...Maybe the Elbe carried him away...
...Human chaos goes side by side with economic chaos...
...There is a veritable epidemic of suicides...
...One such report states: "Of the twin towns of Tetschen-Bodenbach, with a peacetime population of 42,000, by the end of September 32,000 had either been deported to Germany or taken to slave labor in the interior of Bohemia...
...First parallel with the rise of Nazism in Germany and later backed by the Nazis who had come to power, a strong nationalist movement set in among the Sudeten-Germans who mistakenly hoped that relief from their misery could come from integration into the German Reich...
...A letter from Aussig, dated Aug...
Vol. 9 • December 1945 • No. 50
