Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich by Volker Ullrich

Author:Volker Ullrich [Ullrich, Volker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781631498275
Google: zwUtzgEACAAJ
Amazon: B08X94XXH2
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2021-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

The nadir was reached on May 30 with what Germans call the “Brünn death march.” While Czech onlookers applauded and church bells rang, some 26,000 Germans, primarily women, children, and old men, were forced to leave the city of Brünn (Brno). During their march to Austria, hundreds died of exhaustion.35

All told, around eight hundred thousand Sudeten Germans were affected by the first wave of expulsions from May to July 1945. By July 3, the council of the Moravian regional committee was able to report that most parts of southern Moravia had been “cleansed of Germans.” A week later, Social Democratic vice–prime minister Zdeněk Fierlinger informed a meeting of his party in Prague that “cities like Litoměřice and Ústí nad Labem, to say nothing of Brno, Jihlava, and Znojmo, are Czech once more.”36

The removal of Germans from various parts of eastern and central Europe would continue for decades, but they would never be accompanied by the sort of extreme violence that marked the immediate aftermath of the German occupation.

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