All language subtitles for BBC.1945.The.Savage.Peace.576p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup.Forum.eng

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.