Original subtitles

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

Two days after the end of the Second World War, 42 defenceless men,

women and children are lined up to be shot.

Their moment of execution is captured in this rare home movie.

Their only crime is that they happen to speak German.

Their murder is part of a little-known story

about the fate of millions of ethnic Germans after the war.

They are the casualties of a peace that will prove anarchic,

vengeful and bloody.

Victory celebrations and dancing in the streets - the traditional

images we associate with the end of the Second World War.

In reality, peace was a violent and chaotic process.

# You've got to accentuate the positives

# Eliminate the negative... #

For the defeated Germans, peace meant dislocation.

# Don't mess with Mister In-Between... #

It meant revenge...

..and rape.

# You've got to spread joy up to the maximum

# Bring gloom down to the minimum

# Have faith... #

It meant the ethnic cleansing of over 12 million Germans

living in Eastern Europe.

# Man, they said we'd better accentuate the positive... #

And the deaths of over half a million of them.

The nature of the war,

the scale of its violence - aimed as much at civilians as soldiers,

and the enormity of the hatreds unleashed - meant there was little

chance that the blood-letting would end when the fighting finished.

Small wonder German soldiers had joked,

"Enjoy the war for the peace will be savage!"

Germans call it their Zero Hour.

The country lay in ruins, literally, and morally.

26 million Germans had lost their homes.

A third of all German children had lost their fathers.

It was a land of old men, women, and children.

16-year-old Berliner Christa Ronke kept a diary throughout 1945.

TRANSLATED: The war is lost.

I went into the city again and was shocked to see so many ruins.

And the large number of women trying to rebuild everything.

And then I got dysentery. It spread in Berlin.

TRANSLATED: I must be very careful and only drink boiled water.

TRANSLATED: Around midday, I saw three soldiers in strange uniform.

The first Russians.

TRANSLATED: Stalin had reportedly allowed his soldiers to do

anything for three days as a reward for taking Berlin.

There were rumours that the Russians raped women.

TRANSLATED: And, well... that's how it was.

The first Russians banged on the door.

TRANSLATED: And then the next Russian,

he dragged me straight away onto the sofa.

And as I fought back, he showed me the gun. It was terrible.

It was over quickly, thank God.

And I was glad to be back alive with my mother.

And then it went on like that.

The other women in the house were raped too.

Other children witnessed rape at close quarters.

TRANSLATED: We were all scared. We were all scared.

At around five in the morning the first Russians arrived.

They wanted watches.

And we sat in the cellar for the whole day and then at night,

the house was burning and we all had to get out.

And our nanny took me by the hand and my mother took

both my brothers and the little suitcase I had and nothing else.

And then our nanny was raped by the Russians, and she didn't

let go of my hand throughout what happened in the cellar.

And when we came out it was night. There was nothing.

It was dark, everything was burning.

TRANSLATED: I can't. It was upsetting.

I don't know what I thought, but thank God it's over.

But it wasn't over.

Now ten-year-old Marianne Becker's mother was kidnapped

and subjected to a mass rape by Russian soldiers.

TRANSLATED: My mother was driven to Sopot.

There was an aeroplane hangar there.

And the women were raped there 24 hours a day -

in front of the children.

And my mother kept on saying - "We have to return to Danzig.

"We have to."

Well over two million German women

and children were raped at the end of the war.

Many of them died or killed themselves as a result.

Peace brought dislocation too.

It seemed like all of Europe was on the march -

a tidal wave of nomad people looking for the long road home.

All displaced by a war that was as much about race as territory.

Unsurprisingly, it was Eastern Europe,

whose ethnic tensions Hitler had exploited in his move towards war

that witnessed the worst peacetime violence.

Liberation cast Germans in the unfamiliar role of victim.

These pictures show a group of German soldiers

in Czechoslovakia after they have surrendered.

Many of them have been beaten to death by partisans.

Such brutal reprisals seemed

unimaginable only a few weeks earlier.

Prague, shortly before liberation.

Known as a cushy posting for Nazi officers, it had experienced

a relatively quiet war, like much of the rest of the country.

The smiling faces of liberation belie

the savagery of the revenge Czechoslovaks are about

to wreak on their country's

substantial German-speaking minority.

The "ethnic Germans", many of whose families have lived

here in Eastern Europe for centuries.

The Czechs treated the Germans so badly.

They were catching them and shooting them.

Something I saw abhorred me so much that I said

I would never want to live in this country again.

There were isolated groups of Germans and they carved

swastikas into their flesh and rubbed salt into the wounds.

TRANSLATION: I saw German women paving the street,

because they were dismantling the barricade

and they had swastikas painted on their backs

and a former concentration camp inmate was in charge of them.

I saw horrible things.

There were places where the Germans sat,

exhausted, their clothes ripped off and they, the Czechs,

were sticking pins into their breasts. It was shocking.

And I went on to the station

and I saw a dead body hanging by a rope, in Vodickova Street.

I remember how I ran up to my cousin and said,

"I never want to live here again!

"It's terrible what's happening out there!"

I can remember it very well. I'll never forget it.

Jiri Chmelnicek, a civil engineer and keen amateur photographer,

on his wedding day.

He took his 8mm camera everywhere with him.

It's made in Germany by Siemens and Dad bought it when he was young

before his wedding, so his friend filmed his wedding on this camera.

Two days after VE Day,

he filmed a drama unfolding outside his own front door.

Those wearing armbands are Czechoslovak Revolutionary Guards.

They started rounding up Germans in Hanspaulka and Dejvice

and bringing them over here.

You can see them in the film, how they march them,

drive them up the hill towards the Borislavka cinema.

They locked them in the cinema and then they took them out,

about 42 people, in front of the cinema, on to Kladenska Street,

and then they shot them dead there.

A stills photographer was also there that day.

They shot a lot of them dead.

It was really bad, because those who organised it

wanted to have it photographed

and came to my father and asked him to take photos.

My father didn't know what was going on and when he came back,

he was totally devastated.

Devastated and his nerves were shot through

and my mother had to nurse him for the rest of the day.

But it was happening everywhere. There were a lot of cases like this.

I was there with my parents and my grandma.

My grandma turned around and hid my head in her apron

because one action was quite extreme.

The nasty moment when lorries arrive and drive over their legs,

which is really horrible.

Jiri Chmelnicek films one victim praying in his final moments.

You can see in the film how they had to dig their own graves.

Not all of them were German.

There were people who just spoke German.

I think a Swedish family were there.

I despair that things like that could happen here in our country.

Put simply, there are also good Germans,

or rather there are more good Germans than bad ones.

Such murders remain unpunished.

The Czechoslovak government issued an amnesty for all

"just reprisals" carried out before 28th October 1945.

No-one has ever been convicted for what happened

here, in Mirosov Castle.

These stills show the treatment of German prisoners of war

awaiting transportation to Germany.

Czech partisans force the soldiers to strip, beat each other,

and dig their own graves.

The German prisoners are executed, before their bodies

are disposed of in a mass grave in the castle garden.

Over 200 Germans died at this camp.

Such methods deliberately mirror those used by the Nazis,

whose leader casts a long shadow over all ethnic Germans.

CHEERING

Germans in Brno enthusiastically greet the arrival of Adolf Hitler.

Unlike most Czechoslovaks,

they view his takeover of the country

as a liberation, not an occupation.

Even young children get caught up in the atmosphere of the occasion.

I was six years old.

I pushed to the front row.

I pushed in front of the SS.

They stood in double rows.

They fenced off the entire population with ropes

when Hitler drove past.

He came to the town hall in an open car

and we stood in front of the town hall.

I saw when the car drove past.

He, a man with his arm raised.

Goodness, goodness. Someone important,

but who would have guessed that this was Hitler?

And the people with all the flags. And "Heil", of course,

fanfares up on the roof.

For a child, that was an adventure.

SHOUTS OF "SIEG HEIL!"

Three years later, Hugo Fritsch

was so keen to join the junior section of the Hitler Youth

that he lied about his age.

I was exhilarated because I had joined

and in the first summer, we went to this summer camp at a castle,

a palatial castle that the Nazis had seized.

So we sang this back then...

HE SINGS

Until almost the end of the war,

everything seemed normal for 12-year-old Hugo.

I can remember it was as late as 1945

when I was still running around with the Czech boys.

Everyone had a toy gun that they fired in the air.

Well, we ran through the streets and played war.

With the declaration of peace, ethnic German civilians,

now, overwhelmingly, old men, women and children like Hugo,

are targeted.

They had this huge loudspeaker announcement that the

Czech Republic was declared and that the people will take revenge

in particular on collaborators and on the German people here.

Right in the market place, all the signs written in German had

been torn down...

broken, destroyed.

It was "Death, Death, Death to the Germans."

"Death to the collaborators."

On these low trees, all these life-size dolls were hung

with a noose around their necks.

They had sashes on them.

So just like a sash for the winner of a beauty competition.

They had a "collaborator" sash on them.

I mean, it was very scary for us.

Victims of the Gestapo are exhumed from the grounds of Kounic College.

During the war, it had been a Nazi prison.

Now ethnic Germans were incarcerated here.

I heard one of the guards say to the other, even though

he didn't say it very loudly, "Only kill a third of them.

"We do need some people for work."

One day, 16-year-old Emil Pupik, a former member of the Hitler Youth

interned in Kounic College, was ordered to help build a gallows.

We had to collect the gallows from the cellar first.

And then they showed us where it should be.

Three gallows, that is.

When we had finished that, they said, "Now, we have to try it out."

Therefore, we'll hang someone so we can see if it has been well made.

And they selected someone for hanging.

And another of them came up and said, "Why just one?

"We have three gallows, so we should hang three."

And so I was the second one chosen to be hanged.

And then there was a third.

The rope, we already had round our necks.

My wish was to die as quickly as possible.

They were still busy with the third man, thank God.

And we already had our hands tied behind our backs.

And the rope around our necks.

And a Czech guy came running up and shouted,

"Clear everything away!

"Clear everything away! There's an inspection from Prague."

And quickly enough they cut the rope

and we were chased into the house.

The site of the three gallows at Kounic College.

In May and June, at least 300 Germans were killed here.

Public executions, like that of the notorious

Sudeten Nazi Karl Frank, hanged for mass murder, pulled in the crowds.

The visceral manner of his death reinforced a policy of

"National Cleansing" of all Germans, and deterred opposition.

The Czechoslovak "pole-hanging" method, with its short drop,

causes death by strangulation.

The prisoner goes limp as the blood flow to the brain is reduced...

although it takes at least ten minutes to die.

This amateur footage shows one of at least 1,000 public executions

carried out by self-styled "People's Tribunals"

in the weeks after the war.

Trials could take as little as five minutes

and executions were carried out within two hours of sentencing.

Age was no barrier to persecution.

Kounic College housed prisoners as young as six years old.

They were about six years old, the little ones,

and the eldest was about 11.

And they had to jump up like soldiers, all at the same time.

And then sit down again. Like, "Stand up! Sit again!"

And some of them, particularly the little ones,

they couldn't do it.

So they called one boy over and hit him with a belt.

Then he cried. It was awful.

What had the children... How could someone be so sadistic?

It was terrible.

Children.

They can't defend themselves.

What have they ever... they couldn't have done anything.

Such little children.

But disease, not violence, was the biggest killer.

14-year-old Hugo Fritsch and his family were interned

in a former SS training camp,

with little food, no doctor and no medicine.

Grandmother died first.

Then my brother died, Gerhard.

And then my mother died rather quickly, quickly, quickly.

And I went to see my father almost every day.

And then he died suddenly.

His heart stopped working.

So Father died suddenly.

We had all these deaths from January to February.

It wasn't even two months, during which they all died.

For me, the darkest memory is always my mother's burial,

because I was a mother's boy.

For me, that was the worst because even until today I can't...

I can't because I still have the images.

I did push them aside but they came back in my later years.

And how. That is bad.

You see, I spent my entire life making sure I started a family

because I didn't have one of my own any more.

STIRRING MILITARY BAND MUSIC

Most Czechoslovaks were more concerned

with the heroes of war than the orphans of peace.

A victory parade in Prague of the Czechoslovak First Army Corps.

They are battle-hardened troops who had fought against the Germans

under Soviet leadership.

Some of them are involved

in the peacetime murder of German civilians.

This rural hop-growing community in

Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, where Germans had lived for centuries,

was the setting for the second largest atrocity in post-war Europe.

16-year-old Peter Klepsch, who had opposed the Nazis

and ended the war in prison, was one of 5,000 ethnic Germans,

men and boys, ordered to the town square in Zatec.

We were already under the impression

that the Czechs had gone completely crazy.

There were spontaneous executions, people pulled out and shot.

I still remember a friend of mine,

he said, "I was a German officer I want to be treated differently,

"there is still the Geneva Convention".

Or...something like that.

He was shot on the spot.

And other people I knew, they were whipped in public.

The Germans were interned at

the army barracks in Postoloprty.

On the third day, five boys, aged between 12 to 15,

were caught absconding to steal fruit.

Policeman Bohuslav Marek wanted the boys flogged,

but a Czech army captain

ordered them to line up against the barracks wall.

Oh, it was so horrible, they begged for their lives

and screamed for their mothers.

And then they were just bumped off like cattle.

They stood there facing the muzzles of the rifles.

And if you didn't die immediately, they fired again.

To me, it was very distressing.

One boy was shot in the throat, then his blood spurted out

with the last beat of his heart,

a stream of blood came out.

They were buried in the barracks yard by me, among others.

And for me, that was actually the worst thing.

Many of the dead were buried in a mass grave

at this pheasant farm.

Altogether, 2,000 Sudeten Germans

were murdered in just five days in June.

Well, I certainly saw it as genocide.

They just let out their inner bastard on these defenceless people.

That was clear.

It took decades to get this small memorial to the killings

erected in the teeth of local Czech opposition.

I can say that what happened here in '45 is no different

at all to the Third Reich -

the morals of these people who did this, they were the same.

Local Germans are forced to confront the horrors of the Third Reich.

A lamp shade made of human skin,

human organs in jars...

..and half a severed head.

Notions of collective guilt

and punishment for such atrocities meant that few were prepared

to contemplate the idea of Germans as victims,

especially in countries that had borne the brunt of Nazi atrocities.

Warsaw, like much of Poland,

lies in ruins after the war.

Amidst such bleak reminders of the price of Nazi occupation, the Poles

now targeted the almost six million Germans living inside the country.

Secret footage of a Nazi concentration camp in Poland -

shot, at great personal risk, during the war.

In 1945, the Poles used such camps

to incarcerate Germans,

often under similar conditions.

The gates of Zgoda.

Once a satellite camp of Auschwitz,

it was reopened by the Poles as a "punishment camp".

And you could be punished simply for being German.

The 26-year-old Jewish commander of the camp was

Colonel Solomon Morel of the Polish Secret Police.

He introduced himself to us on the first night.

"My name is Solomon Morel

"and I am the commandant of this camp.

"I was with the partisans.

"My parents were gassed in Auschwitz by you Germans."

14-year-old Dorota Boraczek, from a wealthy Polish family,

was incarcerated with German prisoners.

I thought we were going to be shot, there and then,

because Morel received us saying,

"Come here, you Hitlerite whores.

"You will remember this for ever and once you have experienced

"Zgoda, you will think of Auschwitz as a kindergarten in comparison".

In one bizarre punishment in the camp, Morel forced

the 14-year-old Gerhard Gruskcha and other prisoners to sing Nazi songs.

Then there was an order that he gave. I thought,

"I am in a fantasy world, to sing the Horst Wessel song?"

I could still can hear it today, even his tone...

"Horst Wessel song - sing, quick!"

I thought, "they know the Horst Wessel song?"

It was basically the second national anthem.

I thought, "This can't be true."

Then the ones who'd been there longer struck up straightaway.

"The Flag on high" - I sang along, too.

Morel personally fostered a culture of sadism.

The pyramid method was when four were thrown next to each other...

And four then diagonally on top of them

and then another four until they were quite high.

And then not always, but every so often, the militia climbed on top.

And they danced on the prisoners.

No-one came away from this unharmed, and people died.

I wanted to force my mother to commit suicide - men took their lives

by hanging and women by walking into the electric fence.

Prisoners were deliberately denied food

and medical care in order to bring about their deaths.

Is it OK if I cry?

This time of hunger was horrific.

They waited at the gate for fresh corpses and there were cases -

it was not habitual - but people ate dead bodies, yes.

Corpses, they waited for fresh ones.

I saw it.

Almost a third of the 6,000 Germans sent to Zgoda died here.

A funeral went like this -

the prisoners dug a hole in the ground

and threw these bodies into it.

They spread the lime and sand on top of it

and then they were told to dance

on the bodies and piss on them.

Three quarters of a million Germans were imprisoned in a massive

range of often secret camps stretching across eastern Europe.

Some 60,000 Germans died in camps like Poland's Zgoda.

Yes - hell.

I went through hell.

And I should LOVE such a nation?

When I look at these criminals, I feel like chopping them

to pieces and feeding them to ravenous dogs.

I hate them so much.

The country's sports stadiums were a traditional setting for revenge.

They were used as prisons, torture chambers and places of execution.

On the morning of June 9, 1945,

8,000 German men and boys were summoned to their local

stadium in Chomutov.

We were all herded together and had to take our tops off.

They were looking for tattoos or SS markings.

There was a tattoo on the upper arm with the blood group sign...

..and those who had it, between 15 and 20, 22 of them...

..these men were hauled out

and beaten to death.

Yes, to death - killed, right in front of everyone.

It was also Czech civilians who beat the SS soldiers with iron bars

and wooden clubs.

And if they collapsed, and did not move,

a bucket of salt water was thrown over them

and when they had revived a little,

they were then beaten again

until they were dead.

So, there was a pile of dead people,

some lying on top of each other, that we had to march past.

And we were given the command, "Eyes left",

so that we had to look at them as we marched past.

Hitler's image, now an object of open desecration,

was used to humiliate the Germans in the stadium.

It was at the beginning of this whole orgy.

There was someone said to be a party member from a mountain village.

There was a big Hitler poster...

..that is a VERY big Hitler poster that he carried in front of him

and he was made to shout over and over again...

.."We thank our Fuhrer, We thank our Fuhrer."

Until he came up to the Czechs and was beaten until he collapsed.

Then the whole column had to run around holding the picture up

and...shouting.

"We thank our Fuhrer."

That was the thing to say at gatherings in the Nazi period.

Horst Theml now experienced another favourite Nazi device

adopted by Czechoslovaks -

the forced death march.

It was a forced march,

a forced march that was demanded of everyone.

If you couldn't keep up

and lagged behind

and couldn't go on,

you were shot.

Or to be precise,

you were first beaten up

and THEN shot.

75 men lost their lives.

Those Germans not arrested were forced to wear white armbands -

and were subject to anti-German decrees, some of them

still on the statute book today.

Then they were expelled on masse.

Entire communities were rounded up at a moment's notice...

Here, the table hasn't been cleared.

Up to 3½ million people were stripped

of their citizenship, homes and property, and denied compensation.

Britain, America and the Soviet Union

ordered the expulsions as part of a plan to reshape

the ethnic composition of Eastern Europe,

and to punish Germany, which now lost a quarter of its territory.

At Potsdam, the Allies spoke of

"orderly and humane" population transfers,

but they turned a blind eye to the catastrophic consequences

of a policy they had connived at.

Soon, the roads and railways of Eastern Europe were filled

with Germans on the move.

Overcrowded trains - of the sort previously used

to take the Jews to their fate -

were filled with the dead and dying, the sick and starving.

This 11-year-old German girl expellee

weighed only 31 pounds on her arrival.

This girl's lower limbs are swollen

from hunger oedema.

Over 12 million Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe -

the largest known example of ethnic cleansing in history.

Over a quarter of a million died in the process.

The writer George Orwell called it "an enormous crime".

The River Oder marked the new German-Polish border.

The six million Germans living east of the Oder were forcibly

expelled as eastern Germany became Western Poland.

We lost everything.

We meet once a month and we bring something about East Prussia.

That is our homeland and we won't forget it.

We think about the dark forests, the elks, the farmers ploughing

and the flocks of birds that fly, or the many storks

that are there in East Prussia.

Towards the end of the war, as the Russians approached her home town

of Goldap, 9-year-old Marianne Becker

fled with her family to Danzig.

There, she faced months of starvation.

Winter 1945, it was a very cold winter.

I always collected water for the family and for us.

One of my deepest memories is that we always had to clamber over

corpses and a dead horse.

We were all scared, we were ALL sacred.

We didn't know what would happen to us.

We barely had anything to eat.

And then my little brother got sick,

he got diphtheria.

We didn't have a doctor - nothing at all.

You could only give him a hot potato

and he died, aged five.

He was buried in the front garden in a chequered blanket

that my mother had saved from our house.

In the autumn of 1947, Marianne was finally expelled from what

Poland now called its "Recovered Territories".

And then we travelled from Rastenburg in the cattle wagon,

ten days, 43 people,

very many dead people.

And it was a difficult time - we were deloused,

vaccinated and all the rest.

But we survived it.

This film is an official search for the parents

of Germany's lost children.

This two-year-old doesn't know her own name.

25,000 children lost their parents along with their homeland.

Joachim Dietz was found in a cardboard box

in the Brunnenstrasse in Berlin.

Five-year-old Wolfgang Krehmer

was found in a forest with his four-year-old brother.

His wrists had been slit.

When the Russians advanced into East Prussia,

10-year-old Sieglinde Kenzler and her family

fled westwards through the icy landscape.

And in the snowy fields lay what looked to me like dolls,

but in reality they were children who'd died,

but couldn't be buried, because it just wasn't possible.

Sieglinde and her siblings were then imprisoned by the Russians

in a crowded cell - without their mother.

Everyone stood - no-one could sit

and we had a washing basket with us...

not a very big one,

and inside lay our one-year-old brother.

We placed the basket down and the people there, older people,

they sat on the basket.

Naturally, we called out,

but it was not a nice experience.

Without our mum, we shouted out,

"Our baby is in there!"

and I still don't know if he was squashed or starved,

but in any case, he died.

And then, I still remember, we asked the question,

"Do we have to stay in the room and die?"

In fact, the next to die was Sieglinde's mother,

in a Russian internment camp.

Her four children had to dig the grave and bury her body themselves.

We said, we'll take everything we have - the sheets, her coats,

we'll swaddle her all up and bury her in the cemetery at Wehlau.

First, we went to the cemetery on our own and dug a hole.

So then we laid her out and my brother Uli

and my sister Irmgard, we had picked some flowers on the way,

just daisies and buttercups, what we could find.

And then my brother said,

"You hold on there and we'll lower her down. OK?"

That was it.

And then we said, "That's our mum."

That's how it was.

Faced with certain starvation in East Prussia, Sieglinde

and her siblings were among 5,000 lost German children

who made their way to the forests of Lithuania.

Here, they had to fend for themselves like wild animals.

We were called Wolfchildren,

the children of East Prussia - Wolfchildren.

We compared ourselves to a pack of wolves. We always stayed together.

There were farmers who cursed us,

threw water over us or set their dogs on us.

"You Hitler swine" was another insult we received.

We didn't know how to brush our teeth, wash properly.

We had no change of clothes.

We went barefoot.

We said our prayers in the evening

and then we always heard the howling of wolves.

Hopefully, we'll stay alive. And then we slept in the open air.

Eventually, Sieglinde lost contact with her siblings.

Eight years later, some 12 years after the end of the war,

she was finally reunited with them in East Germany.

Let's just say, I had to end my childhood very early.

Today, expellees, like those in this film,

and their descendants,

form a quarter of the German population.

Yet their story, which helped define post-war Germany,

remains largely unknown outside the country.

FOLK MUSIC ON ACCORDION

Peace always has a dark side.

And what happened after liberation

throws the spotlight on the moral compass of the victors.

When ethnic Germans became objects of violence after the war,

many saw, but few were interested.

The largest ethnic cleansing in history,

sanctioned by the victorious Allies,

remains an atrocity hidden in plain sight.