The Forgotten Atrocities Against the German People in 1945 | World War II
May of 1945, the Third Reich has fallen. Germany has been reduced to rubble after 12 years of dictatorship and a devastating war. But peace does not arrive on its ruins. Instead, a new period of darkness begins. Less told, but equally brutal. In Berlin, the Red Army advances through charred buildings and unburied corpses.
In the Chancellory lie the bodies of Gerbals, his wife, and their six children. The remains of Hitler and Ava Brown have yet to be confirmed. The resistance has collapsed, but the violence continues. Food lines guarded with weapons become scenes of repression. German officers are discovered, stripped, and executed.
In lakes and basement, nameless bodies begin to appear, and sexual assaults against German women become a routine part of the horror. Meanwhile, in Bohemia and Moravia, the reprisals take a more ferocious turn. Families of German origin are marked, expelled, and detained without trial. Schools and stadiums are turned into centers of humiliation, beatings, and executions.
Age and personal history do not matter. Being German is enough. The first days of the New Order in Berlin. On May 2nd, 1945, after weeks of street fighting, General Helmouth Widling signed the surrender of Berlin. The capital had been reduced to rubble. Of the 150,000 residences in the city center, only 18,000 remained standing. More than 30,000 had been completely destroyed.
That same day, Hans Fritzer broadcast the ceasefire order over the radio, putting an end to a resistance that no longer made sense. Amid the collapse, around 134,000 soldiers surrendered. For many Berliners, the regime ceased to exist overnight. The Soviet troops entered without organized resistance, occupying the buildings of the former regime.
Inside the Reichtag, blackened by flames, Marshall Jukov left his signature on the wall. Near the Chancellery, counter intelligence agents found the bodies of Joseph Gerbles, his wife, and their six children. The remains of Hitler and Ava Brown had still not been identified. In Tear Garden Park, among shattered trees, lay the corpses of soldiers and zoo animals.
In the flack tower, used as a lastminute refuge, bodies, bloodstained uniforms, empty bottles, and scattered papers piled up on the floor. After the final fall of the city, looting intensified day by day. Houses were raided by soldiers searching for food, valuables, or reusable clothing. Whatever they could not carry, they destroyed without hesitation.
Smashed display cases, burned furniture, and fires set without apparent reason created a chaotic landscape. At first, many feared the Americans. They soon realized that the most immediate threat was already inside their own homes. In No, sexual assaults began even before the official end of the fighting.
It is estimated that around 20,000 women were raped in Berlin alone, although the actual number was likely much higher. There was no clear pattern among the victims. Some were hidden in attics or basement. Others agreed to live with a single soldier to avoid being attacked by many. There were also those who sought protection from Red Army officers, accepting their presence in exchange for a limited and fragile sense of safety.
Over time, infections spread uncontrollably, fueled by the lack of medicine. Unwanted pregnancies increased. Some children were handed over to institutions. Others did not survive. By mid 1946, it was estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 children had been conceived during the occupation. Many women were unable to recover, not only because of the assault itself, but because of the stigma that followed the silence.
On May 8th, while the final surrender was being signed in Carl’s host and officers toasted with wine requisitioned from the hotel Adlon, much of Berlin still had no water or bread. The gunfire fired in celebration of victory caused panic in several districts. The population believed the war was starting again.
That same day, the first exile German communists arrived from Moscow, led by Valter Ulrich. Their priority was not to assist civilians, but to establish structures, distribute positions, and ensure political control from the outset. In the face of abuses, they chose silence. showing emotion even in the face of others suffering was seen as an ideological weakness.
Administrative purging was enforced without the need for trials. Those who had been linked to the former regime were removed from their positions. Many businesses closed. Properties were confiscated. Former members of the Nazi party were excluded from the distribution system. Some were assigned to cleaning or rubble clearing tasks with no rest and no tools.
In Vanzi, denunciations became a form of currency. A single accusation was enough to be arrested. One of the most common punishments was shippen, prolonged physical labor under guard without breaks or consideration. In the absence of men, women took over the task of reconstruction. The so-called trimmer frown rubble women formed human chains to clear debris, salvage reusable bricks, or unblock obstructed streets.
Many had recently been victims. themselves and worked in silence without help or recognition. Hunger, meanwhile, dictated new rules. Ration cards were distributed based on the type of work or family connections, leaving many excluded from even the minimum provisions. The black market grew in parallel. A piece of meat could cost weeks worth of wages.
In vacant lots and parks, people collected roots and any edible plants. Milk disappeared. Some women begged for a bottle and received no response. In the lakes, the bodies of unidentified women began to appear. Some had been assaulted. Others simply no longer wished to continue living. Due to the lack of coffins, they were buried however possible, wrapped in blankets or placed on makeshift planks.
Searching through soldiers trash became a daily routine. A squeezed lemon or half a pudding could mean one more day of life. Even women working in military kitchens were forbidden to bring leftovers home to their children. If they did, they were punished. At the same time, more than 3,000 homes were expropriated, regardless of the history of their former owners.
Some of the previous female residents, stripped of everything, ended up serving in the households of those now protected under the new occupiers. In the months that followed, the former concentration camps began to be reused. Avitz, Saxonhausen, Bkhenvald, Bergen, Bellson, and Dhau were taken over by Allied forces.
The Soviets established detention centers in the very same places where millions had previously died. In Dhao, American troops found thousands of corpses piled up. Shortly thereafter, tension erupted when one of the SS guards pointed his weapon. Several soldiers returned fire. According to witnesses, some inmates joined in the reprisal.
At least 40 members of the camp staff were killed without trial or oversight. President Roosevelt had already predicted it. The Germans deserved only soup for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Churchill, for his part, said it was necessary to force-feed the Polish goose until it dies of indigestion. In that atmosphere, the occupation was neither moderate nor just.
The image of the liberator, so present in public discourse, stood in stark contrast to what was happening in the shadows. Not even children escaped the consequences. In Vienna, the Soviet monument was nicknamed the Unknown Rapists Monument. The Red Army consumed alcohol and hunted for women. Sometimes, without explanation, children were given a cookie, a smile, or an unexpected gesture.
In 1946, one out of every six children born out of wedlock had a Soviet father. The forgotten revenge, the German hell in Bohemia and Moravia. While Berlin burned among the ruins, a wave of reprisals was unleashed in the former protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. For 7 years, checks and Slovacs had lived under an occupation that treated them as inferiors.
Since 1939, they had endured the shutdown of their institutions, the confiscation of their lands, and the Germanization of their cities. Naim and Bruno saw their German populations artificially multiplied after 1938 as part of a plan to consolidate Nazi rule. Thousands of agricultural properties changed hands, leaving tens of thousands of checks homeless.
In April of 1945, even while the war was still ongoing, caravans began to attempt the retreat of German settlers toward the Sudatan land. But it was already too late. The number of Germans in the region had grown with evacuees from the east and refugees from Cellesia and Slovakia. More than 2 million people were seeking refuge in a land that was now turning hostile.
Although the local resistance had been dismantled in 1941, the Liddich massacre and the execution of Hydrich remained open wounds. What had not been destroyed by the bombings would now be destroyed by revenge. Beginning in May, reprisals came quickly. In Prague, former German buildings were turned into improvised detention centers.
Schools, universities, and hospitals were occupied. Within those walls, internment camps were born. Backed by the Red Army, and knowing that the Western powers would not intervene, local leaders saw an opportunity to settle grievances that, in their view, stretched back centuries. In many streets, resentment looked not toward 1939, but toward 1620 and the defeat at the Battle of White Mountain.
Restrictions multiplied. The German population was forced to wear a white armband with the letter N. They could not use public transportation, shop freely, or send letters. They were excluded from rationing, denied meat, eggs, dairy products, or fruit. Radios, cameras, watches, and jewelry were confiscated.
Many were forced to work in factories, mines, or agricultural fields without pay or rest. With the Soviet advance, chaos broke out. Red Army troops committed lootings and assaults often followed by Czech militias such as the revoluter or units of the SNB. They wore German clothing and acted indiscriminately. The homes of well-off families were occupied without notice.
Their contents were loaded onto trucks that vanished inland. Some properties were simply taken over by neighbors who now wore the clothes of the former owners. The train between Prague and the North was nicknamed the Alaska Express in reference to a new gold rush. By 1947, expelled Germans estimated that they had lost property worth 20 billion.
Public humiliations, collective punishments, and forced expulsions became routine. Although sexual violence was less prevalent than in Germany, rumors spread about militia men collaborating with Soviet soldiers to select victims. At times even the Red Army intervened to stop the most brutal excesses. On May 5th, Prague erupted.
Radios openly called for attacks on Germans. Arrests multiplied. Neighbors pointed out houses. Actress Margaretta Shell was handed over by those close to her. A university recctor was lynched. Some tried to hide their origins. Few succeeded. Alexander Thur and taxis and his children were forced to witness sexual assaults on his wife before being deported to a camp.
The city became overwhelmed. Stadiums like Straov held up to 15,000 detainees. There, human hunts were organized. Others were executed in bathous or forced to run while being shot at. In hospitals like Mottle, 14-year-old teenagers were beaten daily. In a former brothel converted into a prison, inmates were stripped and abused to the point of madness.
Czech women who had maintained relationships with Germans were also punished publicly. Many were raped in Wakovitz. Thousands of bodies were buried without names. Yet not everything was driven by hatred. Some checks and even Soviet soldiers risked their safety to protect German neighbors or hide the most vulnerable.
But such gestures were the exception. In the Oko cinema converted into a prison, each night soldiers roamed the hallways selecting women at will. Anyone who tried to stop them was beaten without mercy. Children were torn from their mother’s arms. Some women finding no escape chose suicide. On Pentecost night, while prayers for compassion rose from the neighboring church, only screams could be heard from the former riding school next door.
After Pentecost, the transfers continued. Several detainees were taken to the Shanhost school where a hastily written sign at the entrance announced its new function, concentration camp. The former classrooms had been turned into punishment rooms. There, beatings, humiliations, and executions followed one another with methodical brutality.
Cinemas like the Slavia on Ripcar Street were also repurposed as improvised detention centers where hundreds of prisoners were crammed together in extreme conditions, direct consequences of the uprisings that had occurred days earlier. On May 10th, a group of detainees was transferred to Weslas Square.
There they encountered three naked bodies hung upside down from an advertising structure. They had been dowsted with fuel, set on fire, and beaten until they were unrecognizable. By direct order, the prisoners were forced to drag the bodies back to the school. Shortly afterward, several were taken to a basement known as the death cell, where they were executed by beatings without warning or distinction.
Some managed to survive only by speaking Czech, although even that did not guarantee safety. The violence was not limited to the detention centers. In districts like Smeishov, elderly women of German origin were dragged from their homes and publicly marked. Their heads were shaved.
Swastikas were tattooed on their foreheads and they were forced to insult themselves while being paraded through the streets on trucks in front of crowds. If their voices were not loud enough, they were beaten again. Afterwards they were sent to pankra prison and in many cases to Theresian where confinement could last for months. At the same time in facilities such as Hagibbor or Colin the abuses reached another level.
Young women were selected and handed over to Soviet soldiers who carried out repeated assaults in a single night. A local collaborator allegedly linked to the Red Cross assisted in selecting the victims. Those who survived returned covered in wounds, bite marks, and clear signs of torture. Only on rare occasions under pressure from foreign diplomats were some released, especially if they had been connected to embassies or consulates.
The pleas addressed to Soviet commanders went unheard. When medical assistance or beds for the injured were requested, a high-ranking officer responded that they could throw them into the river where, according to his words, there was still space. Violence had already become part of the urban landscape.
At the entrance of a restaurant, the charred body of a German soldier hung upside down from an iron beam. His right arm was missing. Everything indicated that the amputation had occurred before the execution. By the end of May, the epicenters of violence shifted toward Moravia. Bruno, a city historically linked to the Germanic sphere, came under Soviet control on the 25th.
Shortly thereafter, local militias established their headquarters in the former Countit school. There, prominent figures of the German community were imprisoned, beaten, and forced to crawl on the ground imitating animals. Some, already too weak, were taken to the nearby hospital and thrown into the basement where several died from their injuries.
One of them had been accused of selling goods during the occupation. 5 days later, on May 30th, Feast of Corpus Christi, the mass deportation began, later known as the Berno Death March. Nearly 25,000 Germans were given 15 minutes to pack only the essentials and gather in the garden of the convent. There they spent the night under armed guard.
At dawn they were marched in the rain toward the Reagan camp. Among them were elderly people, children, hospital patients, and pregnant women. Those who could not keep up were beaten with batons or executed in the roadside ditch. Their belongings were looted along the way. Upon arriving at the first camp, the survivors were searched, registered, and transported to Pitz halfway to the Austrian border.
Some, too weak to continue, were locked inside grain silos without ventilation or drinking water. Food consisted only of hard bread and rotten vegetables. Typhus began to spread rapidly. A Red Cross nurse documented what happened. According to her testimony, more than 1,000 people died before reaching the second destination.
Another report spoke of 1,700 deaths. One woman recounted losing two of her three children during the journey. But the suffering did not end at nightfall. Each early morning, Soviet soldiers entered the camp and assaulted the women regardless of age. The nurse was attacked for trying to protect a young girl.
Witnesses claimed that some victims were as young as 7 years old. Those who managed to escape did so on foot, attempting to reach Austria on their own. Everything suggests that the operation aimed to empty Brano of its German population before President Benes’s visit. But when he arrived, some deportes who had not survived the march were returned.
Instead of receiving assistance, they were expelled to a dune area without food or water. Many died. Others lost their sanity. The first to leave pooritz were the sick. They were taken to the swamps of the th and abandoned there without help. According to medical personnel, they died without receiving any form of aid.
Images of their bodies circulated in western news reels. In response, Czech authorities blamed Austria. Days later in Nichollsburg, more than 600 men were executed and buried in a mass grave. It was the brutal conclusion of an operation designed to eliminate all traces of German presence from the territory. After the executions in Nichollsburg, the detention camps in Czechoslovakia began to empty through new waves of covert deportations.
One of the most symbolic destinations was Terasian, the former Nazi model ghetto, where thousands of Jews had been held before being sent to Awitz. In May of 1945, the Red Cross took control and found the site in the midst of a typhus epidemic. After the departure of the last Jewish administrators, the location was turned by the new authorities into an internment center for Germans.
On May 24th, 600 people arrived from Prague, men, women, miners, and Red Cross nurses. They were taken to the small fortress used under Nazism as a political prison and now controlled by Czech militia men. As soon as they crossed the entry tunnel, the assaults began. Those who fell were immediately finished off.
In the courtyard, the survivors had to walk through a gauntlet of beatings. Some did not make it to the end. Testimonies identified former prisoners of the Reich as responsible for the new system. The detainees were separated by age and sex. Their belongings were confiscated and burned. One of the guards boasted that he could predict how long a prisoner would last based on the number of blows received.
Among the internees were teachers, doctors, civil servants, and teenagers accused of belonging to the Hitler youth. Some had untreated amputations, infected wounds, and torn off bandages. They were displayed as trophies. Anyone who tried to help them was threatened. An improvised infirmary was set up in the camp’s former cinema to isolate those infected with typhus.
There, some medicines seized from the ghetto were still stored. Children under 12 were housed in a separate wing. During the first days, the press was allowed access. The children were shown playing or hanging clothes, repeating the previous propaganda narrative. But with the arrival of winter, that space became a freezing trap.
The guards claimed that all internes were criminals or direct relatives of the SS, even the youngest ones. Among them were 90-year-old women, blind individuals transferred from Oig and people who were immobilized. With the arrival of a new commander, some of the torture ceased, although overall conditions barely improved. While the trains with deportes moved away from Moravia, the most visible reprisals began in Prague.
On the walls of Pancra Prison, dozens of Germans and collaborators were publicly executed before crowds. On one day alone, up to 50,000 people attended the hangings. Some children climbed onto cars to get a better view. After each execution, applause erupted. The condemned included former Reich officials, German Czech judges, doctors, and members of the Sudatan party.
Cultural sympathizers and interwar diplomats were also executed. Some, like the chief of police of Prague, died of starvation before ever reaching trial. In that same prison was held Carl Lovenstein, a German Jew accused of collaborating with the Nazis in Terresian. He had served in the internal police, but multiple testimonies confirmed that he had tried to protect other inmates.
Despite this, he remained imprisoned for 15 months, sharing a cell with members of the SS. The hunger was so extreme that prisoners ate grass and garbage. When the charges were finally dropped, he was transferred without being released to another camp, surrounded by those who had previously persecuted him. Torture was not an exception.
Throughout the country, abuses were documented. Beatings with metal rods, wooden sticks, or rubber whips. In some cases, fingers were burned with gasoline soaked cotton or victims were forced to sit on sharp objects. The after effects included fractures, infections, and mutilations. According to forensic experts, the methods followed similar patterns across all centers.
In June, an official order banned physical punishment, but enforcement was inconsistent. Some local commanders continued to apply violence, sometimes out of resentment, other times for greed. There were, however, exceptions. Certain perpetrators were brought to trial. One of the most notorious was identified years later in Germany while attempting to sell gold teeth.
Recognized by a victim, he was arrested and convicted. More than 200 people testified against him. In later excumations, civilians and German soldiers were found buried in mass graves, many without names or records. As the detention centers emptied and mass deportations advanced, a new phase began in the so-called orderly transfer to Germany and Austria.
What had been defined in the pot stem agreements as a regulated and humanitarian process soon turned into a chain of precarious journeys without water or shelter through war- ravaged regions. Some railway cars departed from Bohemia filled with men, women, and children crammed together, unable to lie down or even move while the elderly could not withstand the heat or exhaustion.
Along the way, bodies were abandoned without ceremony by the roadside. Those who managed to reach their destinations were allowed to carry only a few kilos of belongings and were labeled as displaced persons with no rights. At some stations, American authorities hesitated to accept the new arrivals. Many were not citizens of the Reich, but German-speaking individuals born outside its borders.
Some received minimal medical attention and were relocated to rural areas to start over, while others were rejected and forced to wander until they found temporary refuge in improvised camps. Not everyone shared the same fate. Hundreds of detainees remained imprisoned in facilities such as Murau, a medieval fortress previously used by the Nazis to isolate tuberculosis patients.
There overcrowding persisted and judicial processes were little more than formalities. People’s courts handed down summary sentences ranging from years of forced labor to execution. The atmosphere evoked the trials of the Reich, but with the roles reversed. In some cases, trials lasted no more than 10 minutes, and the verdicts were read with no opportunity for defense.
At the same time, groups of Sudatan communists who had opposed Nazism from the beginning were also expelled. The authorities deemed them Germanized and their ideological loyalty had not been enough to spare them from exile. Only in their case were efforts made to follow certain guidelines of the Potam plan with more controlled departures, numbered trains, and health inspections.
However, these were the exceptions. The vast majority of expulsions, especially those carried out during the summer of 1946, followed a different logic. Train cars packed to the limit, convoys of individuals without supplies or clear destinations, and unburied bodies at intermediate stations. Meanwhile, in the American occupation zone, the capacity to receive newcomers was beginning to overflow.
Lucius Clay, head of the sector, ordered a temporary halt to incoming trains, arguing that the transfers did not respect the agreed conditions. But this suspension only prolonged the suffering of those waiting between borders without documents or resources. Even so, the process continued. In September of 1947, the trains resumed, and each month around 20 convoys crossed the border.
It is estimated that more than 1,400,000 Germans were ultimately absorbed by the western zone. However, tens of thousands remained behind. Many were used as labor in mines and forests within the Czech interior. In 1950, the authorities acknowledged the presence of more than 160,000 German-speaking individuals in the country, although some sources raised that number to a quarter of a million.
By that time, entire villages remained abandoned, fields uncultivated, and entire regions lacked a stable population. The human cost of the operation continued to rise even after the visible phase of the transfer had officially ended. The day Prussia ceased to be German. With the expulsions already underway in Czechoslovakia, events in the former Reich territories to the north were advancing under a different logic.
In East Prussia and Pomerania, the retreat of the Vermacht had left a vacuum first filled by the Soviets and later by Polish authorities who acted swiftly. Among the first structures created was the Miliss, an improvised force between militia and police, composed of young men who in many cases had suffered under the German occupation.
Their motivation came not from a sense of order, but from a desire for revenge. In just a few weeks, these units assumed roles of surveillance and punishment. The Soviets delegated to them the task of registering homes, detaining the remaining Germans, and organizing the first deportations. Women, the elderly, and children were sent toward the border.
Able-bodied men were recruited for forced labor. In towns like Gloitz, the transformation was immediate. Shops changed hands. The German rice mark was replaced by the zooti and the official language was no longer German. For those who remained, the image of the new power evoked a reversal of the old Nazi regime with the roles now inverted.
Confusion deepened with the arrival of autumn. In eastern Pomerania, many civilians did not know whether their region had been formally seeded to Poland or still remained under German jurisdiction. That uncertainty added to the lack of resources. The account of Keteron Norman, a member of the Prussian aristocracy, captures this decline.
Each night, she gathered her children to pray for their missing father while enduring the cold in worn out clothing and inadequate footwear. Meanwhile, thousands of Poles displaced by the Soviet expansion beyond the Bug River arrived to occupy those very same homes. They had been stripped of their villages and were now assigned properties confiscated from Germans distributed by relocation offices set up in Brelau.
On the 6th of July, just before the start of the Potam Conference, the first organized expulsions began from the city. Many of those who remained were employed in marginal tasks, clearing rubble, burying bodies, or removing mines. However, there were no guarantees even for the newcomers. Some, despite having been victims of the Nazi regime, were sent by Soviet authorities to the mines of Waldenberg.
The new regime did not correct the previous abuses. It initiated new ones. As the summer of 1945 progressed, the deportations ceased to be local decisions. They now formed part of a systematic transformation of the human landscape of Eastern Europe. Trains loaded with displaced persons crossed the former borders of the Reich. While on the ground, the decisions of Potdam were being implemented without restraint.
In places like Brelau, renamed Rockwar, the German identity was erased street by street. The elimination of the German clergy illustrated this process. On the 15th of May, the bishop of Katawitz informed the chapter of Brelau that Poland would not admit ethnic minorities. In August, Cardinal Hond decreed the official expulsion of the German clergy.
Archives, diocese, and even religious relics were replaced by institutions transferred from the east. The remaining parish priests such as Helmet Richtor were given instructions in a language they barely understood. Shortly thereafter, Yakim Conrad officiated the last German language mass at the Elizabeth Kirk. The universality of the church gave way to the logic of nationalism.
Danzi experienced this process even earlier. In July, German clerics were forced to leave the city. Although the liturgies were still conducted in Latin, the surrounding conditions left little room for continuity. The local bishop who attempted to defend those born there as not belonging to the Reich was ignored.
For the new authorities, any connection to Germanness had to disappear. Monastic orders were no exception. In the monastery of Grusau, only one Tolian monk was allowed to remain. The rest were expelled without hesitation. By the end of 1945, the semi-destroyed streets of Brelau were still populated by hundreds of thousands of German speakers, but the continuous arrival of Polish settlers accelerated a demographic replacement that in less than a year completely altered the balance.
By the spring of 1946, the newly arrived population outnumbered the previous inhabitants. The routes from Cellesia converged on Brezlau, causing growing overcrowding. The seizure of homes by new residents became common, while the aid system could not even cover its own people. The food shortage became critical. Infant mortality soared, and it is estimated that almost all children born during that winter died.
The suicide rate increased, contained only by restrictions on household gas. Essential goods were traded through bartering, a full dress for some butter. The black market flourished among those who still possessed anything of value. The new currency, the zooti, replaced the reich mark with an arbitrary exchange rate, complicating daily transactions.
Amid this scenario, some survived as best they could. Friedhelm Monv, a German boy, sang to Russian soldiers in exchange for a slice of bread. Others risked entering mind orchards just to pick some fruit. Resentment also left its mark. One priest described the new neighbors as heavy drinkers. Others accused them of using bathtubs as pigsty.
Meanwhile, the expulsions continued. Entire families were crammed into windowless basements where disease spread rapidly. In the words of Helmet Richter, a Polish nurse who administered carbolic acid to children with typhus, summarized the logic of the time. They were going to die anyway. Under Soviet rule, the ecclesiastical structure in Cellesia began to collapse, not only due to direct violence, but also as a result of the gradual dismantling of its institutions.
In traditionally Catholic regions, churches ceased to be sacred spaces and became targets of desecration. In Proish Craman, religious statues were mutilated and altars desecrated, while parish priests, when not deported, were placed under surveillance or replaced by clergy aligned with the new regime. In Clausterbrook, the situation took on a particularly brutal character.
In early 1945, the convent was providing refuge for nuns, priests, and some civilians. Outside, the streets were dominated by chaos. Refusing to submit meant immediate execution. Inside the chapel, the atmosphere was fragile. Some officers showed isolated gestures of humanity while others acted with unrestrained violence.
Even during Lent, the nuns tried to disguise their age using ashes. Nothing prevented them from being assaulted. When Polish authorities entered in March, the German language was banned and a few days later, those who remained were subjected to new abuses. Medical care was denied on ethnic grounds. Finally, on the 25th of May, their expulsion was ordered.
Something similar happened further west. In Shunker, Soviet forces repeatedly demanded food, alcohol, or female companionship. The local population responded as best they could, improvising stills to produce liquor, which sometimes allowed them to recover animals or tools temporarily. However, these goods were often confiscated again.
In Hindenburg, the new arrivals reimposed the old Polish name and confiscated what the Russians had not already destroyed. Some Germans chose to fake another identity in order to keep their homes. The forced departures were not a one-time event. They were organized in waves extending until 1947. Further south, Dr. Theophil Peters was initially able to remain in place thanks to his medical knowledge.
Soldiers showed their gratitude with basic goods, but on the 2nd of October, he was notified of his forced relocation. His tools were seized by the state. On the convoy that carried him across Cellesia for nearly 2 weeks, several passengers died due to lack of medical assistance. By the time they reached the outskirts of Geritz, most of the travelers no longer had the strength to walk.
Before crossing, they were subjected to one final inspection. Peters assigned to handle the corpses transported them to the nicer river using an improvised cart. Amid this process, the inhabitants of Upper Clesia were labeled as Ortoinus. This classification allowed them to opt for Polish nationality and gain access to food rations, although it meant giving up any attempt to reunite with family members in the West.
Cases such as that of Carl Ulitzka, who was expelled due to his political past, demonstrated that the margin for choice was more theoretical than real. This dynamic would repeat itself in other towns across the former German East. In the heart of spring 1945, normality remained out of reach. Although the front lines were beginning to stabilize, the violence behind them was taking on new forms.
Basic tasks like fetching water from a public fountain became high-risk activities. Irene Zelda upon returning to Ratibore managed to escape an assault by abandoning her bucket in the middle of the street and locking herself inside her home. From the other side of the door, the asalent demanded alcohol and company, but eventually left when he received no answer.
Similar scenes repeated for weeks, especially in urban areas where epidemics like typhus were also spreading. By midy year in the city of Niser, the assault on religious buildings coincided with the first mass imprisonments. The local fortress built centuries earlier was used to detain civilians. It was not the only facility.
Across the region, similar centers were established such as in Kletchkow, Glats, and Lamsdorf. The latter, renamed Winovich, gained a particularly sinister reputation. Dr. Hines Esser, an eyewitness, described an environment of extreme punishment, starvation, and epidemics. Even minors were among the dead, while among the guards were teenagers wielding absolute power over the inmates.
One 16-year-old boy was in charge of executions until his own companions killed him. That pattern also appeared in the transfers to industrial camps. Ursula Pectel was sent to Avitz where she worked dismantling machinery to be shipped to the Soviet Union. At night, according to her account, many women were forced to go up to the officer’s barracks.
Cases like that of Max Marik assigned to the Jawis subcamp show how forced labor and personal humiliation continued in this new context. The behavior of the occupiers in Boyan the northernmost city did not follow a uniform pattern. Some soldiers offered food to children and even let them ride in their trucks. There were also absurd moments like a failed attempt to ride a bicycle followed by the rider attacking the bike in frustration.
One soldier expressed his bewilderment about the war. In your country, you have more than we do in our whole village. Why fight? That logic extended to former eastern Pomerania. On the von Crockow family estates, the former workers took over the management of the land. Meanwhile, the last remaining nobles were being concentrated in prisons such as the one in stalp.
Jessco vonput karma, for example, was confined to a cell without beds or food, relying on his stepdaughter’s journeys to bring him bread. The atmosphere of scarcity also affected food supplies. Mrs. von Norman had to reserve milk and butter for the local mayor. Whatever little was left went to her family.
Even so, her situation was less desperate than that of those living in the cities, where mothers stopped receiving milk and minor infractions were punished with imprisonment or public humiliation. The denazification of Germany. Under American administration, material conditions did not reach the levels of devastation observed in the east, but daily life remained marked by scarcity, political uncertainty, and a controversial reconstruction.
In cities like Frankfurt, the seat of the military government was located in the former IG Farbin complex, an almost untouched shelter amid the ruins. There, high-ranking officers enjoyed lunches with venison and burgundy wine while local residents scavenged tree branches from the rubble to heat their homes.
Soon the building earned the nickname GI Farburn House, a symbol of the imposed hierarchy and the vast gap between victors and vanquished. In the summer of 1945, the American command passed to General Lucius Clay, whose vision for the post-war period contrasted with the original proposals of the Morgan thou plan.
Klay saw the revitalization of German industry as essential to containing communism. His reports to Washington emphasized the occupation as a propaganda tool. The capitalist model had to be presented as the only path to prosperity in contrast to the Soviet yoke. However, this strategy encountered local resistance when it came to appointing civilian authorities.
In the absence of leaders completely untainted by Nazism, the selection of officials often fell to parish priests or former counselors, with prior membership in the NSDAP not necessarily being an obstacle. In more than a few towns, former Nazi affiliated mayors rebuilt municipal councils with an even larger majority than they had held before 1945.
This practical rehabilitation sparked immediate protests. How could a democratic society be built if those who had been part of the repressive apparatus retained real power? Interpreters and intelligence agents played a similarly controversial role. Many were central European Jews who had immigrated before the conflict or their American-born descendants.
Their fluency in the language was indispensable, but their personal ties to Germany bred suspicion. One case involved an officer who upon arriving in Bavaria secretly visited his parents living there, fueling rumors of divided loyalties. Meanwhile, daily interactions with the civilian population oscillated between humiliation and authoritarianism.
Although official orders prohibited any display of fratonization, complete isolation was impossible. After the liberation of the Ordruff camp in April of 1945, high command urged troops to visit the facilities where the piled up bodies of prisoners and survivors reinforced the myth of the dehumanized German.
In day-to-day life, more than a few soldiers requisitioned items or destroyed documents without reason simply as an assertion of their status as victors. Women in particular suffered from extreme vulnerability. Many hungry and homeless engaged in relationships with occupying forces in exchange for food, coffee or cigarettes. Out of this desperation came tens of thousands of Bzatssung’s kinder occupation children.
It is estimated that more than 90,000 babies were born from such unions in the American zone alone. In rural areas, children born to African-American fathers were often handed over to orphanages, victims of social rejection, and a racial stigma that local authorities barely concealed. The contrast between the privilege of those working for the military and the misery of everyone else was striking.
In H Highidleberg, for example, a German driver employed by the military command saw a hotel deny lodging to his family, claiming that only foreigners occupied the available rooms. In Bavaria, a pregnant woman traveling alone recounted that during her long journey on foot from Rome, an American soldier stole her bicycle along with all her belongings.
This was not an isolated incident, but a reflection of the impunity with which many treated the defeated population. By mid 1946, the initial restrictions began to ease. First, interaction with children was permitted, then greetings, and finally in October of 1945, the ban on public social relationships was lifted.
However, this apparent gesture of normalization did not erase the accumulated resentment. For many Germans, the opening measures were purely cosmetic. Privileges remained under military control, and the social divide persisted. In this atmosphere of scarcity, initiatives emerged aimed at winning hearts and minds. The founding of German American clubs sought to build cultural bridges, and in bad kissing, Prince Lou Ferdinand of Prussia collaborated with American officers to create a space for social exchange.
It was paradoxical. His surname would have disqualified him under the original criteria of denazification. Yet now he was becoming a bridge between both societies. Though this strategy of soft influence showed occasional success, the shadows of war remained present in everyday life.
The rehabilitation of former Nazi officials, the deployment of interpreters with complicated pasts, and the army’s unequal treatment of the civilian population laid bare the catastrophic consequences that defeat and occupation would have on German society. Beneath the appearance of an orderly reconstruction, a web of contradictions was taking shape, one that would shape the destiny of the Federal Republic. In the years to come,
