WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (13 page)

Czechoslovakia

1938–45

Czechoslovakia (now The Czech Republic and Slovakia) was the site of some of the worst war crimes and atrocities of World War II. As in other European countries, such as Belgium, France, The Netherlands and Poland, once the Nazis had assumed control, the Jewish communities living there were mercilessly persecuted, along with other minority groups. The population figures for Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere, tell their own tragic story: at the beginning of the war, there were 350,000 Jews living in the country; by the end, only 20,000 remained.

The savage treatment of these peaceful, industrious communities who had contributed so much to the life of the nation met with little resistance from the majority of Czech people, where a strong current of anti-Semitism was apparent. However, there were also brave Czechs who fought to protect their compatriots, and who showed great courage in doing so, for the Nazis wreaked a hideous revenge on anyone found helping the Jews, or defying the regime in any way. One of the most notorious instances of Nazi brutality towards the civilian population of Czechoslovakia was at Lidice, a small town whose inhabitants were exterminated, at the specific request of the Führer himself, in order to set an example to those who even considered resisting the Nazi reign of terror.

D
EMOLITION OF A STATE

In 1938, Hitler signed the Munich Agreement with Britain, France and Italy. Under the terms of the agreement, an area of western Czechoslovakia known as the Sudetenland was to be taken over by the Germans. Although there was a substantial German-speaking population in this region, who were mostly anti-Semitic and complained that they were oppressed by the Czech majority, there was no legal basis whatsoever for this seizure of power. The other European nations simply allowed Hitler to walk in to Czechoslovakia, hoping that signing the agreement might appease him and gratify his need for territorial expansion. They could not have been more wrong.

When the Nazis arrived in Czechoslovakia, they met with little resistance. Within months, the entire autonomous structure of the country, including its armed forces and its democratic political apparatus, had been destroyed. First, the Czech army was demolished, and its arsenal of weapons taken over for use by German forces. Next, Hitler encouraged Slovakian fascists to declare independence for Slovakia, creating a state that was entirely under the power of the Third Reich. Subsequently, the Germans invaded the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, declaring them to be a German protectorate, and appointing one of their leading figures, Konstantin von Neurath, as the ‘Reichsprotektor’ of the new territory.

T
HE 
H
ANGMAN

Von Neurath immediately set to work, abolishing political parties and trade unions, and arresting students who protested against the situation. However, despite his brutal suppression of all forms of political opposition to the fascist regime, Hitler did not consider him fanatical enough, and in 1941 replaced him with one of the most feared figures of the Third Reich, Reinhard Heydrich. Von Neurath remained a nominal figurehead until 1943, but from that time, the real power lay with Heydrich.

Known as ‘The Blond Beast’ and ‘The Hangman’, Heydrich was soon to receive another nickname, as ‘The Butcher of Prague’. As the head of the Reich Security Services, which included the Gestapo, he was also one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. It was Heydrich who had organized and chaired the infamous Wannsee Conference of 1942, laying out his plans for the extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe: the ‘Final Solution’, as it became known. He was a close friend and confidant of the Führer, who much admired his skill and prowess as a sportsman, and considered him to be the prototype Aryan (even though it was rumoured that, in fact, Heydrich had a Jewish grandparent). According to some sources, Hitler considered Heydrich to be a possible candidate for leader of the Third Reich in the future.

T
HE 
F
INAL 
S
OLUTION

In his new position as head of government in Czechoslovakia, Heydrich lost no time in putting his nightmare plan into action. Already, von Neurath had announced a long list of anti-Jewish laws, designed to make the Jewish communities as powerless as possible, both in terms of business and social life. There had also been deportations of Czech Jews to concentration camps in Poland. However, under Heydrich the campaign was now stepped up, and thousands more Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Most of them met their end in Auschwitz, either being gassed to death, or perishing from malnutrition and disease. By the end of the war in 1945, around 75 per cent of the Jewish population had been murdered in the death camps.

As in other European countries, the Nazi regime mined a deep seam of anti-Semitism running through Czech culture, and there were many who enthusiastically collaborated with the Final Solution programme instigated by Heydrich. However, there were also brave souls who were prepared to risk their lives to oppose the Nazis, and who eventually succeeded in ridding Czechoslovakia of its tyrannical ruler – but with devastating consequences.

O
PERATION 
A
NTHROPOID

Operation Anthropoid was a daring plan to assassinate Heydrich, masterminded by the British spy unit, the Special Operations Executive. Under the plan, several soldiers from Czechoslovakia’s erstwhile army, including Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, were to covertly enter the country to assassinate the Nazi leader. On the night 28 December, 1941, the soldiers were parachuted in by RAF planes. Once on the ground, they made their way to Prague, where they contacted anti-Nazi resistance groups and prepared to make their attack.

Heydrich was known for his habit of riding around Prague in an open-topped car. He was supremely arrogant and appeared to believe that he was invincible, especially since his henchmen had brutally suppressed all forms of opposition to his regime. However, on 27 May, 1942, his confidence in his total control of the country was proved wrong.

That day Heydrich set out to commute from his home to Prague Castle, the Nazi headquarters. Ever careless of security, he did not wait for a police escort that day, but ordered his driver to take him in to work in his Mercedes-Benz. As the car travelled along its accustomed route, Kubis and Gabcik stood at a bus stop outside a hospital. When the car passed, Gabcik stepped out and opened fire with a Sten gun, but it jammed. Heydrich promptly told his driver to stop, and stood up in the car to shoot Gabcik. At this point, Kubis intervened, throwing an anti-tank grenade at the car. The grenade damaged the right fender of the car, but did not penetrate into it. Nevertheless, Heydrich was badly injured as pieces of shrapnel and upholstery fibres lodged in his body. Undeterred, Heydrich continued to shoot at his assailant, but eventually collapsed, whereupon his driver, a man named Klein, ran out in pursuit of Gabcik. Klein was shot dead during the chase.

C
ONSPIRACY THEORIES

Heydrich was taken to hospital, but Czech doctors were forbidden to attend to him. Instead, he was operated on by the personal physicians of Heinrich Himmler, his direct superior. However, Heydrich died of his wounds, apparently in agony. Himmler maintained afterwards that Heydrich had died of blood poisoning, as the result of an infection set up by the horsehair in the car’s upholstery. This odd diagnosis prompted speculation that Himmler was responsible for Heydrich’s death, as it was known that Himmler was both afraid of Heydrich and jealous of his close relationship with the Führer. Other conspiracy theories suggest that the hand grenade lobbed into the car by Kubis contained botulin, and was the result of an experiment in biological warfare by British scientists.

Whatever the truth of the matter, the outcome of the situation was that Hitler’s favourite had been assassinated. The Führer’s revenge, whatever form it would take, was sure to be savage indeed.

W
ADING IN 
B
LOOD

Hitler immediately gave orders that his men should ‘wade in blood’ until they found the assassins. However, the Gestapo were unable to find them until its officers bribed a resistance fighter named Karel Curda with the promise of a million Reichsmarks, a new wife and a new name. Curda accepted the bribe and led them to the Moravec family, who had been sheltering the soldiers. The family were arrested, held captive and tortured. Mrs Moravec managed to commit suicide, taking a cyanide capsule. With typical sadism, the Nazis later put her head in a fish tank and showed it to her son, Ata. Not surprisingly, the young boy told the Gestapo where the assassins were hiding. Over 700 Nazi troops laid siege to a church in the city, but were unable to take the assassins alive; Kubis was killed in the gun battle, while Gabcik and others committed suicide to avoid being captured alive.

Not content with this outcome, Hitler planned to unleash untold violence on the entire Czech people, but was persuaded out of this by his advisers who told him that military productivity would be adversely affected in the region if he did so. Instead, the Nazis went on to arrest more than 13,000 people, and also committed one of the worst atrocities of the war: the destruction of the village of Lidice.

MASSACRE AT LIDICE

The massacre that took place at the small village of Lidice, just northwest of Prague, on the night of 9 June, 1942, was one of the greatest atrocities to hit Czechoslovakia during World War II. The whole village was completely eradicated along with the majority of its inhabitants. The violence started following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Security Police and deputy chief of the Gestapo. Two Czech men, Jan Kubis and Josef Gabeik bombed Heydrich’s car while he was on his way to the castle in Prague. Heydrich was badly wounded and died from his extensive injuries on 4 June.

The assassination incited the German people into taking revenge, and the village of Lidice took the brunt of their anger. Just five days after Heydrich’s death, ten trucks full of Security Police stormed the village and forcefully removed all the inhabitants from their homes. No one was allowed to leave the village and anyone trying to escape was shot. All the men and boys over the age of 16, 172 in total, were separated from their families and locked in a barn. The next day they were all lined up in groups of ten, and mercilessly shot. The massacre lasted from dawn until 4.00 p.m.

The women, as a whole, fared better than their menfolk but they were still subjected to excessive cruelty. Seven of the women were taken to Prague where they were shot. The remainder, 195 in total, were sent to Ravensbrüeck concentration camp in Germany. They were kept in squalid conditions with very little nourishment and 49 of the women died. Seven were gassed while the rest died from the appalling conditions and treatment they received at the hands of the Germans. The children, who the Germans considered to be the fittest, were chosen and sent to live with German people with a new identity.

The village itself was completed razed to the ground, and any building that was not destroyed by fire was dynamited and bulldozed so that nothing was left standing. Today there is no sign of the village of Lidice except for the open fields where the children once played. It is a stark reminder of the grim atrocities that took place in the long and harrowing war.

Yugoslavia

1941–45

In April 1941, German Nazi troops, together with troops from Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy, invaded what was then known as Yugoslavia in the Balkans. Their combined military force quickly overcame all opposition, and the region was soon occupied. The victors then proceeded to share out their gains, with Germany and Italy establishing a puppet fascist state in Croatia. Germany also occupied Serbia and annexed parts of Slovenia, while Italy occupied the coastal regions of Yugoslavia. Bulgaria annexed Macedonia, and Hungary took control in Backa, an area in the north of the country. This complex division of power meant that there were many conflicts in the country, not only between the occupied peoples and their rulers, but between the rulers themselves. However, the invasion proved disastrous in all regions for the 78,000 Jews who, since the 1930s, had come to Yugoslavia to escape persecution. Not only the Jews, but thousands of Roma people (commonly known as gypsies) also lost their lives, as the fascists began on their programme of genocide, exterminating entire communities whose ethnic backgrounds or religious beliefs they considered undesirable.

Croatia was perhaps the country worst affected, mainly because the Croatian fascist movement, the Ustasa (which still exists to this day), set about murdering as many Serbs, Jews and Roma as they could lay their hands on. Immediately after the invasion of the Axis powers, they murdered, tortured and raped thousands of Serbs, burning down Serbian villages all over the country. Within a year, almost two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Croatia had been sent to concentration camps, including Jadovno, Loborgrad, Djakovo, Tenje, Osijek, Kruscica and the notorious Jasenovac. In Jasenovac alone, more than 20,000 Jews met their deaths. Not only this but Croatia also deported thousands of Jews to concentration camps in Germany and Poland, especially to Auschwitz.

J
ASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP

After the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers, the fascist Ustasa established a so-called Independent State of Croatia, and they set up Jasenovac between August 1941 and February 1942. The Ustasa were a far-right political group who had a long history of animosity towards the Serbian people of the former Yugoslavia, with whom they shared citizenship. With the Nazis now in control, the Ustasa took the opportunity to persecute hundreds of thousands of Serbs, as well as Jews and Roma people. Thus it was that over 250,000 Serbs died in the Croatian concentration camps, along with 20,000 or more Jews. And this was only in a single year: 1941 to 1942.

Situated only a few miles outside the Croatian capital of Zagreb, Jasenovac was a complex of several camps: Krapje, Brocica, Ciglana, Kozara and Stara Gradiska. Krapje and Brocica closed down after four months, but the others were not dismantled until the liberation of the country at the end of the war. Stara Gradiska was initially a camp for political prisoners, but then became a camp for women in 1942.

Conditions in the camps were absolutely horrifying. Prisoners were forced to live in cold, insanitary conditions without enough food to eat. The Ustasa guards, who were paramilitaries, showed extreme sadism in their treatment of the prisoners, torturing and murdering their victims on a whim. Often, prisoners would be taken out and shot at killing sites nearby, for example at Gradina and Granik. Others were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in Germany and Poland: a total of 7,000 Jews were sent to Auchwitz. Yet others, who had skills useful to the Croats, such as carpenters, electricians and tailors, were used as forced labour in workshops.

A
 SCENE OF CARNAGE

There was little opportunity for the inmates of these camps to mount any opposition to their brutally violent masters, but towards the end of the war, news came that the Nazis were about to be defeated. In 1945, Communist leader Josip Tito, who later became a national hero and ruled Yugoslavia for many years, advanced on the camps with his partisan troops, and as the soldiers approached, the inmates rose up in rebellion against the Ustasa guards. However, in the fighting, many prisoners died. The rest met their deaths when the Ustasa guards, knowing the game was up, murdered as many prisoners as they could before surrendering. In May 1945, Tito’s troops invaded the camps and found a horrific scene of carnage and devastation there that was far beyond anyone’s worst nightmare.

In German-occupied Serbia, the nightmare continued, with a military government that set up concentration camps in 1941. Virtually the entire Jewish population of these areas were imprisoned in the five camps at Nisch, Schabatz, Sajmiste and Topovske Supe. They were dealt with in the most horrific way. In the summer of 1941, the majority of Jewish men in the camps were shot. The following year, at Sajmiste, the Nazis brought a specially designed ‘gas truck’ to the camp and proceeded to dispense with almost all the Jewish women and children there. The women and children were herded into a hermetically sealed gas compartment in the truck and gassed to death. In all, 8,000 women and children were put to death in this way, over a period of less than a year.

In the areas of Yugoslavia occupied by Hungary and Bulgaria, who had joined the Nazis, more horrifying events took place. As well as deporting Jews and Serbs from these territories, the Hungarian army police units took to murdering them in the streets. In January 1942, in the city of Novi Sad, thousands of Jews and Serbs were killed in this way. After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Jews from the Hungarian-occupied territory of Yugoslavia were also deported to the death camps, along with thousands of others across Europe. In the Bulgarian-occupied areas of the country, non-Bulgarian Jews were handed over to the Germans for extermination at the Treblinka death camp in Poland: in total, about 11,000.

By the end of the war, around 60,000 Yugoslav Jews, out of a population of 78,000, were dead. Those who survived managed to do so by hiding with friends and relatives for the duration of the war, or by joining the partisan forces.

R
EPRISAL ATROCITIES

As well as the systematic genocide of innocent victims, including thousands of Serbs, in the concentration camps, the war years in Yugoslavia were characterized by appalling atrocities that took place in the cities, towns, villages and countryside. This was partly as a result of the activity of the National Liberation Army, the force commanded by Communist leader Tito, which was the largest resistance force in Europe. The Germans vowed that each time the liberation army killed a soldier, they would kill 100 civilians in reprisal; for a wounded soldier, the price would be 50 civilians. As a result, civilian losses in Yugoslavia were high, estimated at more than one million. However, on the more positive side, the NVA’s campaign of guerrilla warfare resulted in the eventual defeat of the Axis powers, with the help of the Red Army and Allied forces.

In response to guerrilla warfare against his troops, Hungarian General Ferenc Feketahalmy-Czeyder launched a vicious reprisal campaign at the town of Novi Sad. There, his Arrow Cross militia rounded up a group of over 800 Jews and Serbs and forced them, at gunpoint, to walk over the frozen Danube river. The ice was too thin to hold them, and most of them drowned. Those who did not drown in this way were shot at point blank range. In the six days that followed, there was more carnage as the troops rampaged around the town, killing over 3,000 more victims.

T
HE 
S
ERBIAN 
M
ASSACRES

One of the worst aspects of the war in Yugoslavia was the wholesale massacre of a large percentage of the Serbian population by the Croatian fascist army, the Ustasa, who were given carte blanche by the Germans to pursue this objective without interference. As a result of this policy, thousands of Serb men, women and children all across the country were murdered at random, often being brutalized and tortured in the most sadistic way before they were killed. Stories abound of children’s heads being cut off and thrown at their mothers, of women’s breasts being severed, and childrens’ bodies mutilated. The true facts of the mass genocide of Serbs during the German occupation of Yugoslavia were suppressed for many years after World War II, and in many cases, accurate records of what took place did not exist (or were destroyed). However, today there remains little doubt that the treatment of the Serbs by the Croatian fascist militia was at least as vicious as that of the Jews by the German Nazis, if not more so. For this reason, among many others, animosity between the Serbs and the Croats continued to run high for decades after the war, resulting a renewed period of conflict in 1980, after the death of President Tito, who had managed to hold these warring factions together during his premiership.