![]() The same train cars that had brought the victims of Nazism to the concentration camps were used to move ethnic Germans back to what was left of their homeland, journeys lasting weeks that saw many dying along the way. The ironies of history were as dark as they come. The details were so telling, like how at gatherings of those who had been expelled from East Prussia, the memories of their homeland – of storks and elks – were so particular. ![]() If anything, the remarkable thing seemed that any of those whose memories we heard here had managed to create anything like a normal life afterwards. “I had to end my childhood very early,” was the laconic verdict of one woman, a child refugee who ended up living wild in the forests of Lithuania. The rhetoric of the Potsdam conference about post-war “orderly and humane population transfers” could hardly have been further from reality, with human hostility only part of a wider chaos compounded both by the breakdown of infrastructure and an almost total lack of medical care. The wider story was the expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans from their homes, a process described by George Orwell as an “enormous crime”. The script described the process as anarchic, vengeful and bloody, and you suspect the element of anarchy was as strong as anything else: children as young as six were sent to tribunals, and hanged, even though they could barely reach the gallows. Czechoslovakia was a case in point, and Savage Peace opened with scenes of execution in Prague, taken by a photographer, the father of one of Molloy’s interviewees, who had been specially brought along to record it: no compunction here about repeating the crimes of their previous oppressors, and no sense of restoring order – “just reprisal” was a concept allowed there until as late as the end of October 1945. It can only be salutary to be reminded of that dark side of peaceĮlsewhere the reprisals were of different sorts, often directed at people for no other reason than that they were German by nationality. In a ghastly overlapping of imagery, the troops who had defended their own occupied Motherland at such a heavy price wreaked their unsated lust for revenge on the female population of their erstwhile occupiers. Except it wasn’t, of course: these were violations repeated almost ad infinitum, gang rapes carried on around the clock, with the full knowledge of the army commanders. “It was over quickly, thank God,” we heard Christa Ronke, a Berlin girl who kept a diary through 1945, remembering how she was raped. Soviet troops advancing on Berlin raped German women of all ages on an almost unimaginable scale, not something that’s mentioned in histories of the Red Army, nor a memory to be associated with the grandeur and pathos of Moscow’s Victory Day commemorations. It showed itself in many different forms of vengeance and reprisal.
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