the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Chapter VI The Implementation of the Transfer
of war from the concentration camps in
Poland that had been closed down and
from the Sudetenland, and also the
German terrorist actions carried out
against the Czech uprising, which we
described at the end of Chapter IV.
These already strongly anti-German
attitudes were further reinforced by the
information that was received about the
conditions in which Czechs lived who
had been called up to do forced labour in
the Reich or imprisoned in prisons or
prison camps, and from which some of
them had managed to escape during the
chaos of bombardment and evacuation at
the end of the war. Gradually, too, the
horrific facts about everyday reality in
Nazi concentration camps were coming
to light. The fact that this was often
uncorroborated information, consisting
of reports passed on by word of mouth,
did not reduce its credibility among the
general public, rather the reverse.
Nor did the behaviour of most of the
Sudeten Germans during the final
phases of the war do anything to
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moderate the anti-German mood among
the Czechs. The vast majority of them
remained faithful to the Nazi ideology –
either out of genuine conviction or
simply from force of habit. The anti-
Nazi resistance movement among the
Sudeten Germans remained very weak
right up to the last days of the war and
thus was unable to influence the overall
negative view that the Czechs had of
their German neighbours. Many records
A car with revolutionary guards from Prague in Northern Bohemia.The re-occupation
of the territory which had been allotted to the Third Reich after the Munich agreement
at times led to inexcusable violence against the German population.
can be found testifying to the behaviour
of local party leaders and bosses at this
time, and to the transformation brought
about by the end of the war. The author
of the chronicle kept by the local Sokol
[a patriotic sports association, trans.] in
Šumvald, northern Moravia, recorded
one such transformation as follows: “We
will never forget the way they looked.
The faces of these former tyrants of our
people were terrified and so pale as to be
unrecognisable, and they spoke in
unusually restrained tones”.
The numerous chronicles kept by
Czech villages and towns, which have