The other Concentration Camps and the Overlooked Czech HOLOCAUST on the Sudeten Germans shortly after WWII

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Because They Were German!
The Stokes Report
Letter of the British Minister and MP, R. R. Stokes to the Manchester Guardian, October 1945, as excerpted from Verheimlichte Dokumente, op.cit., p. 374:

"Months ago I learned of the Czech practice of rounding up young men who, under the Decrees of Potsdam, were to be expelled for reasons of their ethnicity, and shipping them off to labor concentration camps. In fact, many Sudeten German Social Democrats who had been sent to concentration camps for their anti-National Socialist views were now committed to Czech labor camps, solely because they were German."

The 1945 memorandum of Sudeten German Social Democrat Wilhelm Niessner to the government at Prague makes similar observations (as per Brügel, Tschechen und Deutsche, v. 2, Munich, 1974).

The same goes for the shocking letter of Wenzel Jaksch, the Sudeten German Social Democrat in exile, to Dr. Edward Benes, the Czech President-in-exile residing in London.

The Stokes Report continues: "There are 51 such camps in Czechoslovakia, in which thousands of people suffer and starve; and when I say starve, I mean that literally!"

In Account No. 300, p. 431 of the book Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans (Munich: Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Wahrung Sudetendeutscher Interessen, 1951, English translation 2002 by The Scriptorium), Director Pischel of Rokitnitz writes: "The men who escaped death were sent by the Czechs to hastily established concentration camps, 51 of them, where they had to do hard labor, for example underground mining, with lousy rations and constant maltreatment."

A concentration camp inmate tells of the terrorism engaged in by the victorious Allies. (From Die Vertreibung Sudetenlands 1945/46, Bad Nauheim, 1967, p. 299.) Josef Eckert was one of those men whom the National Socialists had thrown into concentration camp Dachau and for whom liberation came on May 8, 1945. He came from Brüx, and after being released from the concentration camp he hurried home to his native city, which he had not seen for many years. Later he wrote one of his fellow-sufferers from Dachau:

"The Czechs came to our city as avengers driven by hatred. First all German signs had to be taken down. Then we had to turn in all bicycles, motorcycles, radio sets, typewriters and telephones, and harsh penalties were in store for anyone who did not obey this order. Then the Czechs proceeded to plunder our houses. They went systematically from house to house, from home to home and stole furniture and linen, clothing and jewelry, in a word, anything they liked. But the plundering was not the end of it. There were also murders. On one of these horrible days they arrested comrade Willi Seifert, from Bandau. He was accused of having hidden a roll of telephone wire. At the Czech command post in the inn 'Gebirgshöhe' they stood him up against a wall and murdered him from behind."


Stigma "N" Even for Anti-Fascists
In 1945 the Sudeten German Social Democrat Wilhelm Niesser sent the following memorandum to the Prague government (quoted from Brügel, op.cit.):

N = Nemec = German
Like the Jews during the Middle Ages and the NS regime, the Sudeten Germans were forced to wear an identifying mark ("N" = "Nemec" = "German") in public.
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"Even today, I, who was perhaps the oldest among those who used to be at the forefront of our movement, still receive cries for help from the most loyal of my comrades, from all parts of the Republic. The bitter suffering that speaks through their appeals distresses me to the depths of my soul. Many of my friends who share my views are still locked up in the various camps. They have lost not only their freedom, but also their homes and what little property they had.
"Socialists and anti-Fascists - among them some who are known to be long-time functionaries of the Socialist parties and who took up arms to oppose the Nazi gangs in 1938 - are being arrested, driven out of their homes right along with the Fascists, and transported off. In terms of rations, the anti-Fascists are put on a par with the Fascists, and are given only the shortened ration cards that condemn them to a life of perpetual starvation. In many places they are made to wear the same identifying mark as the Fascists, 'N' (Nemec = German), that stigmatizes them as defamed.
"The establishment of anti-Fascist committees had been ordered, but even now, months later, work on this has barely even begun in some places. Many of our comrades, men and women alike, have lost their lives in the camps and on the transports." (From: Verheimlichte Dokumente, op.cit., pp. 391-92.)