Helping will kill you. WW2 recollections and how to be better

Imagine German women, men malnourished, extremely thirsty, wounded, crawling on the soil. What would you do now? Call emergency services immediately and provide immediate CPR if needed. Giving them food, and water. Not at the end of WW2 in the former Czechoslovakia territory. Helping will kill you.

Well, it is 2024. I hate nationalism, it brought nothing but violence, division, genocides, gas chambers, and stupid incompetence in how to rule (or rather not rule) this world thanks to divided national entities. But nowadays “Germans” have nothing to do with what their ancestors did.

My native language is Czech and I am culturally Czech, even though with completely different political preferences. I fully acknowledge there are hundreds of patron-client networks in politics. For example, crooks, lobbyists, oligarchs (in the Czech environment), movers and shakers. And then our beloved international structures (super-rich families and their interconnected banking structures). If every voter, policeman, soldier, and citizen were like me, the aforementioned would have to emigrate to Mars.

Germans want to kill all Czechs and vice versa

Second World War proved every dark finding of evolutionary psychology (which actually didn’t exist at the time) and evolutionary biology (ditto).

Famous Steven Pinker’s quote goes: “When a man meets a man, he doesn’t have to kill him, he may even be helpful.”

The worst (but actually not the worst of the worst) had emerged during WW2. People, or respective nations (with all the disdain for nation identities I can muster), wanted to kill each other.

A sniper in Prague killed tens of people, his death was gruesome

When the war was about to be over, the fanatical Germans remained in Prague and were killing ethnic Czechs.

Well, when one sniper was caught, he was hanged upside down and they lit a fire underneath him. Geneva Conventions, which didn’t exist at the time, at their best.

What former Austria-Hungarian rulers had done

During World War II, the German occupation of Czechoslovakia resulted in significant loss of life and suffering for the Czech population. There was the Munich Agreement in 1938. And the subsequent annexation of the Sudetenland occured. The Nazis fully occupied the remaining Czech lands in March 1939, establishing the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 36,000 Czechs were executed, and many others died as a result of repression, deportation, and forced labor. Notable resistance members, such as those involved in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, faced brutal reprisals. The destruction of Lidice stands as a symbol of Nazi terror: the village was razed, its male inhabitants were executed, and women and children were deported, with many sent to concentration camps.

Czechoslovakia’s Jewish population suffered heavily under the Nazi regime. Before the war, approximately 118,000 Jews lived in the Czech lands. But by 1945, around 80,000 had been murdered, primarily in Auschwitz and other extermination camps. The Theresienstadt ghetto, located within the Czech borders, served as a transit camp for Jews destined for death camps, but it was also used for Nazi propaganda purposes to deceive the international community about the fate of European Jews. In addition to the Jewish population, the Nazis targeted the Romani community and political dissidents, with thousands more falling victim to Nazi brutality.

By the end of the war, Czechoslovakia had lost an estimated 330,000 people, including soldiers, civilians, Jews, and other targeted groups. The atrocities left deep scars on the nation’s demographics, economy, and cultural landscape.

The brutal Czech retaliation

After World War II, in the aftermath of Nazi occupation, the Czechoslovak government sanctioned the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans. This resulted in widespread violence and suffering. These expulsions were authorized by the Beneš Decrees and affected nearly 3 million ethnic Germans. Many of whom had lived in Czechoslovakia for centuries. The expulsions were brutal, and in many cases, local Czechs “took justice into their own hands”, leading to atrocities. One of the most violent incidents occurred during the Ústí nad Labem massacre in July 1945, when a mob of Czechs attacked German civilians. The victims included women and children. Some of whom were thrown into the Elbe River and shot as they tried to escape. Eyewitness reports suggest that Czech militia and civilians, angered by rumors of German sabotage, participated in the killings, which claimed the lives of an estimated 80 to 100 people.

Many German women and children suffered particularly harsh treatment during the expulsions. Reports from the time recount forced marches, beatings, and public humiliations as they expelled them from their homes. Thousands of Germans perished, not only from direct violence but also from malnutrition, exposure, and the effects of forced relocation. The Ústí nad Labem incident remains a symbol of the retribution inflicted on ethnic Germans, many of whom had little or no connection to the Nazi regime. But they targeted them due to their ethnicity. The broader expulsions caused immense hardship, as entire communities were uprooted and left to fend for themselves in war-torn Europe. These events have remained a sensitive and controversial chapter in Czech-German relations, with debates over whether the scale of violence was justified by the preceding Nazi occupation.

An intellectual, humanist, and Czech president Edvard Beneš stirred violence

You get the notion that people are evil. But bringing up collective guilt is grossly inhumane. “We must liquidate the German problem in our republic. The Germans must be expelled, and those who remain must be exterminated.” This is really worth someone who considers himself a humanist. And then sadly, his calls were answered.

Post-war: The Czechs wanting murder German people as a family memory

My grand-grand father was a CFO for a nobility member who became a Nazi (because he gained from it).

When the war was over, Russian lieutenants occupied a castle where my grandmother and her family lived. Since the grandmother of my grandmother had a family member who was considered an elite highly rank member of the Czechoslovakian army, she had thought these would have been elites as well.

No way, they were drinking to unconsciousness, peed, s**ted, and destroyed everything that was considered noble.

But this is not the end. They went to my great-grandfather’s office and told him to clean the mess with a pistol pointing at him. And since he was instructed to call some number in case of a problem, he did it. Their fate (of the Russian soldiers) likely ended in collective execution.

So since he was humane and didn’t want the next ones to be murdered, he picked up the phone, with a picture wall of Stalin, and started pretending he was calling their supervisors (the Russians have a bleak notion of what a phone was). They crawled on their knees, nearly drunk to unconsciousness, saluted to Stalin’s image, and didn’t bother him again.

There are German women and children, let’s kill them

Another story of my family. The women who stayed in the castle, no matter how adhered to Nazi ideologies, lost their husbands and were left foodless.

So, those Czechs that had no problems with Nazis during the war, had an idea to shoot the poor women and children. My grand-grandfather couldn’t have said he would have liked to preserve their lives. This would fulfill the motto of this article more than literally: “Helping will kill you.”

So my grand-grandfather came up with a false story: “Well, Germans had (even though the war was over) some elite squad nearby and if you do it, they will come up and kill all of us.

Immediately, nothing happened, however, the fate of those civilians remained unclear.

Famous Czechoslovakian WW2 footage: Helping will kill you

A footage (WARNING: graphic content) of German soldiers, crawling, with the last breath, malnourished, thirsty.

While I completely get the notion the soldiers are regular military targets, these people just want to be POWs (in the West, for sure), they did not pose any strategic threat.

Now imagine, if I had lived in that era and helped them, human nature would have unfolded completely. The fellow Czechs would have undoubtedly killed me, maybe with some torture. So helping will kill you finally.

Conclusion: eternal hate, urge to kill, and why helping will kill you

The horrors of World War II revealed some dark aspects of human nature, as both sides of the conflict devolved into brutal cycles of violence. In the waning days of the war, German soldiers, women, and children – malnourished, wounded, and desperate – were left to crawl through the devastated landscape of Czechoslovakia. The instinct to help, to offer food, water, and medical care, which would be automatic today, was a death sentence in 1945 (helping will kill you). The chaotic post-war environment, filled with hatred and vengeance, turned former neighbors into executioners. In this atmosphere, helping the suffering Germans could easily have led to retribution from fellow Czechs. They saw mercy as betrayal.

During the postwar chaos and violence, one teacher uttered: “Don’t do anything you would regret in the future.” Too late!

Today, Germans have no connection to the crimes of their ancestors, and many people strive to distance themselves from the destructive ideologies of the past.

Yet, the lessons of that time still resonate. The brutal expulsions and the dehumanization that followed the war in places like Czechoslovakia remind us that collective guilt is inhumane, and justice built on vengeance only perpetuates cycles of violence. Helping, today as ever, is the better path, but in the wake of WWII, it was sometimes a deadly act of defiance.


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