Police find culprits of postwar massacre

Police inspector Pavel Karas recently closed a historic cold case. Concluding a two-year probe, he managed to pinpoint the main culprits behind a 1945 massacre in which at least 763 people were murdered, succeeding where two previous investigations, including a 1947 inquiry by a postwar parliamentary commission, failed.

Sharing this information with the public is nevertheless not on the agenda. "I am not going to comment on this," he told Prague Post reporters, noting that the relevant files had been handed over to his superiors. "It is out of my hands now."

Karas' reticence is characteristic of local officials' attitude toward the post-World War II tragedy in Postoloprty, a small town in the heart of what was once an area populated predominantly by Sudeten Germans.

The file, which police now say has been shelved somewhere in the north Bohemian regional headquarters, contains disquieting details of mass killings committed by members of the liberation army during the government-sanctioned deportation of Czechoslovakia's 3-million-strong German population at the conclusion of World War II.

In May 1945, a division of the Czechoslovak Eastern Liberation Army was dispatched to Postoloprty to secure the border region, which had fallen into chaos with the end of the war. A formerly classified government report of the 1947 inquiry describes rogue "supposed partisans and revolutionaries" lurking in the area, hunting down isolated German units and attacking civilians.

With orders to "cleanse" the area of SS and German army units and prepare the deportation of its Sudeten population, the division set up an internment camp in Postoloprty and began rounding up Germans from the village and the nearby town of Žatec. Women, children and the elderly were interned in the local pheasantry, while men aged 13 to 65 were brought to the town's army barracks.

Žatec native Peter Klepsch, a German, was 16 at the time. "All the Germans were searched and had to explain their political past," he said. "My brother was involved in the conspiracy against Hitler, and I had been in Gestapo prison before, so I was lucky. We were separated into rooms according to our political past, and some 600 of the others were jailed inside the base in a room with hardly any light. They were shot."

While those proved sympathetic to the Nazi regime were executed outright, others were punished for misbehaving inside the camp. Three days into the internment, five boys aged 12 to 15 were caught in a nearby garden. Whether they were stealing fruit or trying to escape is unclear from witness testimonies.

The boys, who commanding officer Vojtěch Černý describe in the 1947 reports as members of Hitler's Youth, were told to take the fruit from their pockets. Each received 25 lashes with a whip "until bits of flesh flew from the body," as one German witness stated.

Witness reports suggest it was Bohuslav Marek, a police officer and cobbler from Postoloprty, who ordered the beating. Afterward, the boys were marched into the courtyard. "I told Captain Černý that they deserved a lashing, but he said, 'No, shoot them!" Marek states in the report.

"They shot these children with one salve. Four of them fell on the ground, but the fifth one, a dirty blond, fell to his knees screaming," one German survivor recalls in the report. The boy then received another gunshot to the back of the head, as did the other four.

The other inmates were reportedly forced to witness the execution. "They were shot, and we had to watch - their fathers were in our group," Klepsch said.

Burying the dead

Klepsch was one of 37 witnesses interviewed in the most recent investigation, launched in 2006 on the basis of a criminal complaint filed by a Bavarian organization seeking the names of those responsible for the five boys' deaths. Based on the testimonials, Karas concluded that Marek and his superior, Černý, were responsible for these and other killings.

Records of their 1947 interrogations indicate that Černý and Marek felt justified in their retaliation.

"The Germans committed so much evil that we can never pay them back, even if we had executions every day," Černý told investigators. "If the German nation was able to kill 25 million people, it's hard to act differently if we want to keep pace with them."

Karas' investigation picked up where the two others had left off - mainly, the 1947 parliamentary probe, the findings of which were concealed for decades following the 1948 communist coup.

Because the communist government felt indirectly responsible for the atrocities committed by the Russia-commanded liberation army, the investigation did not resume until 1997. That probe fingered Marek and Černý as the main culprits, but it was too late. Both died without ever facing prosecution for their crimes.

Estimates of the scope of the killings vary. While the 1947 commission found 763 bodies in nine mass graves around Postoloprty, historians say the total death toll could range from 2,000 to 3,000.

"I buried a total of 12 people in one grave," said Proksch. "Later, the exhumation report said there were only seven skeletons."

Today, few remain in Postoloprty to discuss what happened there 63 years ago. Its pre-war, 90 percent German population was forced to leave, replaced by deracinated Czechs and Slovaks who resettled the area after the war.

"We rarely talk about it," said local priest Rudolf Prey, 70. "I think the locals think it was justifiable, because the Germans started the war."

While the Postoloprty town hall has established a committee comprising three Czechs and three Germans to establish a memorial, differences over its form have so far gone unresolved. "The Germans would like to use terms such as 'exodus' and 'genocide,' which the Czechs do not want to hear," Prey said.

The massacre plays into the ongoing Czech-German rift over the Beneš Decrees, a series of postwar provisions imposed by Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš, which included the deportation and disinheritance of local Germans.

Prey, who said he provides spiritual counseling to Sudetens who remember the massacre, said Czech villagers "are afraid of them, because there is property here that used to be theirs."

"It is important to acknowledge what happened, but we should not drag politics into it."

-Sarah Borufka contributed to this report.

Markéta Hulpachová can be reached at
features@praguepost.com