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.

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