The Ústí massacre ( cs, Ústecký masakr, German: ''Massaker von Aussig'') was a

lynching Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor, punish a convicted transgressor, or intimidate people. It can also be an ex ...

ethnic German , native_name_lang = de , region1 = , pop1 = 72,650,269 , region2 = , pop2 = 534,000 , region3 = , pop3 = 157,000 3,322,405 , region4 = , pop4 = ...

s in

Ústí nad Labem Ústí nad Labem (, , ) is a city in the Czech Republic. It has about 92,000 inhabitants. It is the capital of its eponymous region and district. It is a major industrial centre and, besides being an active river port, is an important railway ju ...

(''Aussig an der Elbe''), a largely ethnic German city in northern Bohemia (" Sudetenland"), shortly after the end of

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, on 31 July 1945. During the incident, at least 43 Germans were killed (confirmed

body count A body count is the total number of people killed in a particular event. In combat, a body count is often based on the number of confirmed kills, but occasionally only an estimate. Often used in reference to military combat, the term can also r ...

) but the estimated numbers range from 80 to thousands of victims.

Intelligence officer An intelligence officer is a person employed by an organization to collect, compile or analyze information (known as intelligence) which is of use to that organization. The word of ''officer'' is a working title, not a rank, used in the same way ...

and police commandant

Bedřich Pokorný Bedřich Pokorný (6 March 1904 Brno – 25 March 1968 Brno) was a Czechoslovak communist secret service officer and an agent of the Státní bezpečnost. Pokorný joined the Czechoslovak Army in 1924 and began attending the Military Academy a ...

, who previously took part in the organisation of so called

Brno death march The Brno death marchRozumět dějinám, Zdeněk Beneš, p. 208 (german: Brünner Todesmarsch) began late on the night of 30 May 1945 when the ethnic German minority in Brno (german: Brünn ) was expelled to nearby Austria following the capture o ...

in May 1945, has been sometimes accused of organizing this

massacre A massacre is the killing of a large number of people or animals, especially those who are not involved in any fighting or have no way of defending themselves. A massacre is generally considered to be morally unacceptable, especially when per ...

towards the end of the

Potsdam conference The Potsdam Conference (german: Potsdamer Konferenz) was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Pe ...

(17 July to 2 August 1945) after the government had halted such acts. On 31 July 2005, the mayor of Ústí unveiled a memorial plaque on the bridge with the text "In the memory of victims of violence on 31 July 1945"
photographs
.

Cause and conflict

On July 31, at 15:30, an ammunition dump in the part of the city called Krásné Březno exploded. The death toll was 26 or 27 people (7 of them Czechs), dozens were injured. Immediately after the explosion, a massacre of ethnic Germans, who had to wear white armbands after the war and so were easy to identify, began in four places in the city. They were beaten and bayonetted, shot or drowned in a fire pond. On the

Elbe The Elbe (; cs, Labe ; nds, Ilv or ''Elv''; Upper and dsb, Łobjo) is one of the major rivers of Central Europe. It rises in the Giant Mountains of the northern Czech Republic before traversing much of Bohemia (western half of the Czech Repu ...

bridge, a German, Georg Schörghuber, shouted something provocative and was thrown into the river by the crowd, and shot by soldiers when he was trying to swim out. Soon other people, including a woman with a baby and pram, were thrown into the water and later shot at. The perpetrators were the ''Revolutionary Guards'' (a post-war paramilitary group), Czech and Soviet soldiers, and a group of unknown Czechs who had recently arrived from elsewhere. Local Czechs, including the mayor, Josef Vondra, tried to help the victims. Finally, a state of emergency and a curfew were declared, and by 18:25, streets had been cleared by the army.

Count of victims

The estimated number of victims is 80–120, with 43 being accounted for specifically: 24 bodies gathered in the city were burned in the crematorium of the former

concentration camp Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply ...

Terezín Terezín (; german: Theresienstadt) is a town in Litoměřice District in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 2,800 inhabitants. It is a former military fortress composed of the citadel and adjacent walled garrison town ...

on 1 August; a list was made of the 17 missing clerks from the ''Schicht'' factory, who were returning from work by way of the bridge at the time of the explosion; and two are mentioned in other sources. In Germany, several dozen bodies were recovered from the Elbe river in the following weeks; however, these could have come from elsewhere. The Sudeten Germans organisations give much higher numbers - from 400 up to 8,000.

Subsequent effects

The next day, 1 August, the government of

Czechoslovakia , rue, Чеськословеньско, , yi, טשעכאסלאוואקיי, , common_name = Czechoslovakia , life_span = 1918–19391945–1992 , p1 = Austria-Hungary , image_p1 ...

established an investigation commission led by General

Ludvík Svoboda Ludvík Svoboda (25 November 1895 – 20 September 1979) was a Czech general and politician. He fought in both World Wars, for which he was regarded as a national hero,

. The commission was not able to discover the reason for the explosion but blamed it on the

Werewolves In folklore, a werewolf (), or occasionally lycanthrope (; ; uk, Вовкулака, Vovkulaka), is an individual that can shapeshift into a wolf (or, especially in modern film, a therianthropic hybrid wolf-like creature), either purposely ...

(German saboteurs). The explosion and subsequent massacre were used as a pretext by advocates of the

expulsion of Germans Expulsion or expelled may refer to: General * Deportation * Ejection (sports) * Eviction * Exile * Expeller pressing * Expulsion (education) * Expulsion from the United States Congress * Extradition * Forced migration * Ostracism * Person ...

from Czechoslovakia. During the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia (1948–1989) details of the event were suppressed, to the point of it being almost unknown to most Czechs.

Suspected communist involvement

After the 1989

Velvet Revolution The Velvet Revolution ( cs, Sametová revoluce) or Gentle Revolution ( sk, Nežná revolúcia) was a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia, occurring from 17 November to 28 November 1989. Popular demonstrations agains ...

, city archivist Vladimír Kaiser started to investigate the event, most recently publishing the results together with Jan Havel, another Ústí citizen, and German historian Otfrid Pustejovsky as ''Stalo se v Ústí nad Labem 31. července 1945'' (Ústí nad Labem 2005, ; German translation ''Ein Nachkriegs-Verbrechen: Aussig 31. Juli 1945''; ). While only indirect evidence survived, they conclude that the explosion and massacre were prepared by Communists within the Czechoslovak secret services, specifically Bedřich Pokorný, leader of Ministry of Interior's Defensive Intelligence (''Obranné zpravodajství'') department who earlier organised the

, in order to support the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by presenting to the

Potsdam Conference The Potsdam Conference (german: Potsdamer Konferenz) was held at Potsdam in the Soviet occupation zone from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Pe ...

an argument that further cohabitation of Germans with Czechs was impossible. (Kaiser's 2000 hypothesis that the motive was the Western powers' interest in destroying the new

Daimler-Benz DB 605 The Daimler-Benz DB 605 is a German aircraft engine built during World War II. Developed from the DB 601, the DB 605 was used from 1942 to 1945 in the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter, and the Bf 110 and Me 210C heavy fighters. The DB 610, a pa ...

airplane engines also stored in the dump was found far-fetched and untenable.)

References

External links