Lord, what have we done that they must sin so!

 In the street, crowds were waiting for those who were marched out of their prisons to remove the barricades. Eager eyes watched from the windows. No one can tell how many turned away in shame and horror—there must have been some, and probably their number was large enough. But the masses in the streets knew what they wanted—and they had come equipped with everything their aroused passions might desire, from hot pitch to garden shears. 

So began a day as evil as any known to history. They were human beings who in the streets and squares* of Prague grabbed Germans—and not only SS men—drenched them with gasoline, strung them up with their feet uppermost, set them on fire, and watched their agony, prolonged by the fact that in their position the rising heat and smoke did not suffocate them. 

They were human beings who tied German men and women together with barbed wire, shot into the bundles, and rolled them down into the Moldau River—who drowned German children in the water troughs in the streets, and threw women and children from the windows. 

* The German author mentions specifically Wenceslaus Square (Vaclavske Namesti, or Wenzelsplatz), Charles Square (Karlovo Namesti, or Karlsplatz), and Rittergasse, or Knights' Lane. (Translator's note.)

They beat every German until he lay still on the ground, forced naked women to remove the barricades, cut the tendons of their heels, and laughed at their writhing. Others they kicked to death. And yet these acts were only a few among many compared to which a simple shooting—like that accorded to the several hundred boys of the Adolf Hitler School—seemed a special privilege. 

This was the beginning. Prague set the example for the entire country, for every town and village throughout Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland where there were Germans. A tidal wave of torture and rape, murder and expulsion rose up in May of 1945 and ebbed through months and years until the last German had fled the country or died in prison—all but those few who, expropriated and disenfranchised, were retained because of some irreplaceable ex-pert knowledge. 

Later generations may judge these events no worse than the destruction or expulsion of the Jews of Germany. They may find that the destruction of the political freedom of the Czechs, and the horror of Lidice, called for such an explosion of hatred and revenge. And they must not forget the millions of Czechs who stood apart—who had to fear that they themselves might fall victim to the aroused masses if they said a single word of decency; nor the thousands and thousands of Czechs who even in the darkest days of the storm helped German refugees on their flight with food and clothing. 

We of this generation cannot hope to achieve a full understanding. The best we may hope is that these events did not implant in some hearts a still more cruel hatred and desire for revenge. 

In the evening of May 20, Pastor Karl Seifert and some elderly peasants were standing on the banks of the Elbe River, about fifteen miles upstream from the city of Dresden. The Soviet occupation commander of their little Saxonian village had given them permission to bury the corpses that the river cast ashore here day after day. 

They came floating down from Czechoslovakia, women and children and old men and soldiers. Thousands floated past— but for those who were stranded here, the pastor and his men opened a grave, and buried them and said a prayer. 

The river had brought the bundles tied with barbed wire, and corpses that had lost their tongues, their eyes, their breasts. But this evening, the river brought a wooden bedstead, floating like a raft, to which a family, children and all, had been nailed with long spikes. The men pulled the spikes out of the children's hands, and the pastor tried to say to him-self the words he had said so often in his heart when the horror seemed too great: "Lord, what have we done that they must sin so!" But tonight the words would not come. 

All he could say was: "Lord, have mercy on their souls !"

From: Defeat in the East

Russia Conquers—January to May 1945 by Juergen Thorwald