You can read the whole book about it online for free:
Ingomar Pust: "Cries From Hell, Unheard"
http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/sginferno/sgi01.html
I chose just some parts of that book to let you know what is true, but tabu and most people don't even know about it. I didn't know about it too, I learned about it just recently.
I warn you: it's disgusting, because they tortured them really bestially.
Conspiracy of
Silence
he Federal Convention of Sudeten Germans has offered a prize for
the best movie script written to portray the horrors of the expulsion. But will it be possible?
The historical records exist: a grisly documentation, the mere reading of which is enough to
cause nausea.
But nevertheless it will hardly be possible to turn it into a movie true to life. It might be
possible to reconstruct death marches and
mass executions, to show bodies with their noses,
ears and private parts cut off, wounded being thrown out of windows, people being
roasted head-down over open fires. It might be possible to portray the naked women, on
their knees being whipped through the streets of Prague strewn with glass shards. It might
be possible to film the thousands of women that were thrown into the rivers Moldau and
Elbe together with their children and baby carriages and then raked with machine gun fire.
It might be possible to use dummy dolls to represent the heads of the dead mothers and
babies still sticking out of the filth of the camp latrines where they had been thrown, until
they were finally covered over by the excrement of
their fellow-sufferers. It might even be possible to show bloody bundles of tortured people
on the ground being forced to swallow human excrement, and gags covered in such
excrement being forced into their mouths.
But who would be able to recreate the screams of the Germans whose torn bodies
were
rubbed with hydrochloric acid, who were beaten until their private parts were reduced to
bloody lumps? Who is to recreate the screams of the women, whipped bloody, who were
shoved naked, rear down, onto SS daggers? Hundreds of thousands went through this hell of
torture before they were beaten to death or shot. Specifically: 241,000. The number of
soldiers who died in the course of this outburst of sadism is probably no less.
...
It would be easy to say that the events in the East and Southeast were a just and fair
response to the previous National Socialist misdeeds.
But were the people in Prague,
Warsaw and Belgrade called to avenge the Jewish fate on innocent Germans? Was it right
to speak of "liberation" and then to eradicate entire population groups? To expel 15 million
people from their homes?
Expulsion From
the South Moravian Homeland
In memoirs of
Anna Spangl Wie es wirklich war, she recalls the plundering,
destruction, damage and rape and recounts on
pp. 49-50 how old Frau Rebefka was shot because she had tried to protect the Ukrainian
woman who had worked for her from being raped.
"The women were hunted like rabbits,
the best hiding places were found out, and women were raped with no regard to their age,
whether they were ten or 90. My grandmother's sister was 86 years old and almost blind,
she was raped twice. Because I put up a fight with hands and feet against being raped, those
sadists dragged me like an animal to the
slaughter - right past my father. He cried, 'for God's sake, why didn't I let her go away?'
My mother was sobbing terribly, and my tormentors took me into the neighboring house.
Four men raped me there. The first one was an officer, the last a horribly ugly Asian. There
was sobbing and screaming everywhere.
Often the parents were forced to watch the rape of
their daughters, and vice versa, the children had to watch their mothers being violated.
Many women contracted venereal diseases, and I wasn't spared that either. Some time later,
all women had to go to Rackwitz for a medical exam. Those who didn't go kept it secret
because they were ashamed."
The Mass Crimes Against the Sudeten
Germans
Took Place in Public
Non-Stop Mass Murders
Engineer Franz Rosch reports:
"From May 12 to 15, 1945 I was assigned to a burial commando in Wolkowitz. There I saw how
thousands of German soldiers as well as
civilians - women and men and even young people 10 years and
up - were brutally murdered. Mostly they
were clubbed to death by Czech Revolutionary
Guardsmen. Often the dreadfully battered bodies were rubbed with
hydrochloric acid, just to
torture them. One Dr. Blume of Berlin was in charge of ascertaining the death of these people.
Fingers with rings on them were torn off some people's hands while the people still lived. The
dead were buried in a mass grave in Wolkowitz, by the cemetery.
"From the work unit in Wolkowitz I was sent to the penal camp Kladno, where
I saw inmates
being scalded with hot tea on their bare skin, on their back and buttocks, and being beaten
terribly
afterwards. In the two months I spent there, I myself was beaten daily."
The Holocaust of Prague
xcerpt from the book
Zwiespalt der Gemüter by
Alexander
Hoyer:
"In the night of May 4-5, 1945
the mass murders began in Prague.
The most gruesome events of
the Middle Ages pale in comparison to the murderous blood lust that played itself out in the
streets, houses and most of all the hospitals of Prague.
After the all-out war effort had been proclaimed in 1944, medical student Ingrid Langer had
signed up as Red Cross nurse. She was stationed in the Luftwaffe hospital on the right bank of
the
Moldau River in Prague. In the morning of May 6 a sizeable group of young Czech men and girls
arrived howling and yelling at the main entrance of the hospital and, threatening with
submachine
guns, demanded that all Red Cross nurses, as well as all the wounded who could walk, should
come out. When the doctors tried to dissuade the mob from their demands, and pointed out the
regulations of the Red Cross, under whose protection the hospital was, the riotous mob roared
with laughter. The armed ringleaders stormed into the hospital rooms and drove the wounded in
their striped pajamas out before them.
Other heroes of this kind brought out all the nurses on duty, lined them up and selected the ten
youngest and prettiest of them. Ingrid Langer was among them.
After lengthy arguments among the teenaged hoodlums as to what sorts of abuse they would
engage in, they agreed to march their victims into town.
Along with a selected 10 wounded patients,
the nurses had to line up in rows of two and march
off, singing the German national anthem. Anyone who did not sing loudly enough, or at all, was
beaten until his or her voice was audible. To either side of the street the compatriots of the wild
mob stood applauding. The procession was stopped in Peter's Square, which seemed to be the
arena best suited for the planned macabre game.
A bow-legged descendant of the Awars shrieked: "
Undress! Everyone undress completely!"
Since
the unfortunate victims made no move to take off their clothes, he gave his accomplices the sign
to
start beating.
The wounded and the nurses were smashed to the pavement, some beside and on top of each
other, unable even to move.
"Undress or die!" the sadist kept screaming.
The wounded soldiers soon took off their hospital pajamas. Stark naked, they were at the mercy
of
the goggling crowd. The nurses as yet retained their
underwear. No-one minded that their undressing took a little longer, for the surrounding crowd
relished the sight of
these half-naked German Red Cross nurses. But then the ringleader demanded that the stripping
be completed.
"Undress! Finish undressing!" he roared again, "strip to the skin, you swine!" At last, when all
ten
finally stood stark naked in the middle of the square, hiding their faces in their hands, the Prague
citizens' merriment rose to a fever pitch. But Ingrid Langer, who had grown up in Prague, knew
her Czech fellow citizens only too well. She knew that the final act of the drama staged here
would
be a
deliberately drawn-out but all the more gruesome death. Like lightning she made a break for it,
darted through a weak point in their encirclement, and dashed off towards the lower end of the
square. Before the baffled bystanders realized it, she had escaped the arena of death. But at the
square's end Ingrid Langer ran right into the hands of her next tormentors!
A band of plunderers, heavily laden with rugs, paintings, furs, tableware and more, caught the
naked fleeing girl in a flash. They dragged her into the house they had just left, up to the first
floor,
into the home they had plundered. In the hallway on the floor lay a dead woman about 25 years
old. Next to her huddled a child of perhaps
two, blood-bespattered and sobbing bitterly. The captured naked beauty was shoved into a
bedroom to a host of obscene comments. At the sight of the pretty young girl all the plunderers
had turned back, in the certain expectation of a good time. There was not one among them that
did
not participate in the ensuing rape. More Czechs who came running in continued their
predecessors' disgraceful deed. At last the victim mercifully lost consciousness.
Meanwhile, the macabre spectacle in Peter's Square had continued. The nine yet surviving Red
Cross nurses had been lined up opposite the injured men, naked as they were, and
the nurses
were
ordered to tear the men's private parts off. An unbelievably brutish idea. The victims themselves
could hardly believe the perverted orders.
"Rip it off! Rip it off!" And right away
the entire
crowd
joined in, roaring and chanting and clapping their hands in rhythm. None of the German girls
could be forced to even try to carry out the bestial order. They ignored the ever more threatening
demands of the crowd, which was literally going wild. Not one made any move to comply, even
after most of them had already collapsed, unconscious, under the blows from the rifle butts.
Never before in history had the world seen human cruelty to equal what happened here!
Frau Theresia Beichl, who was on this death march with her little daughter, recounts the
following:
"I saw a woman giving birth in a ditch. Afterwards the Czechs beat her to death and
trampled the newborn until it was dead too."
That such incredible brutishness was not an isolated case is shown by the account of Frau
M.v.W. (
Documents on the
Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, op.cit.), who recounts being ordered (with
reference to a dead mother and child) to
"throw the sow into the latrine together with her
bastard!"
When M.v.W., a Red Cross nurse, refused, two other women were forced to perform the
abominable deed and
to throw the dead mother and baby into the open latrine. Weeks later it
was
still possible to see the baby's head and one of the mother's arms sticking out of the filth.
The Expulsion From Brünn
(The "Death March of Brünn")
by Theresia Beichl, Meisenweg 10, Königsbrunn;
born in Prittlach, South Moravia
...The most horrible thing
I
saw was when a young woman lay on a meadow and had just given birth. She screamed and
cried, but both she and her newborn were beaten and kicked until they lay dead. They were left
there, and I heard our "escort" say: "Let them croak, they're just Germans." I had a fair command
of the Czech language and so I was able to understand everything they said.
...
We were not "allowed" to be hungry. Every now and then we were given some soup
of watered-down roasted flour. Festering feet, the result of our long march, were the order of the
day. The worst was diarrhea, dysentery and typhus. As I've said before, there were no sanitary
facilities - only a latrine, but the sick people couldn't use that because they were too weak to
walk
there to relieve themselves. There were two toilets, but only the Czech guard personnel were
allowed to use them. An
old, beaten-up man always had to clean these toilets, but with his bare hands. The fine
gentlemen
that could use them to answer their calls of nature did not do so into the toilet bowls, but
rather beside them, and deliberately so. One day we found the old man beaten into a
dreadful shape, lying dead in front of the toilet door. People were dying like flies in Pohrlitz.
Hounded to Death!
eport of
Karl K., teacher and former registrar of the South
Moravian
market community Grusbach:
...Then we trekked on to Znaim, where we arrived in the evening and were
taken to the Robotarna prison. In one of the basement rooms we had to take our shirts off and lie
down on the ground with bare upper body and buttocks. Four partisans flogged us mercilessly
with whips and straps. For hours all one could hear was the brute cursing of the partisans and the
whimpering and cries of the tortured. Men had also been brought in from other parts of South
Moravia, and they fared no better than we did. Our countryman Josef D. must have received the
greatest part of the beatings. When he was thrown into our cell as the thirteenth of us, there was
no part of his body that was not covered with welts (back, buttocks, chest, abdomen). He
moaned
pitifully without cease and died several hours later that same night. Our torturers ordered his
body
taken into a different cell. The next day he was probably thrown into the pit that already held the
bodies of other victims who had been beaten to death or shot. The following day (May 22, 1945)
the rest of us men were taken under heavy guard to the concentration camp Mannsberg. For two
weeks Josef D.'s name was still read out at the daily roll call, even though they knew perfectly
well that he had been tortured to death in the Robotarna prison.....
Concentration Camp Inmate Sandor Kovac,
Hungarian,
on the Czechs in 1945
itness statement of the Hungarian half-Jew Sandor Kovac, who was in a
concentration camp shortly before the end of the War and passed through Prague on his way
home:
"In Hitler's concentration camp I saw things I would not have believed possible, that people
would do to other people.
But in May 1945, when I was traveling homeward, I was caught
unawares in the outburst of Czech insanity in Prague, and I witnessed an inferno of human
depravity and moral baseness compared to which my concentration camp days had almost been a
holiday.
Women and children were doused alive with petroleum and set on fire, men were
murdered under inconceivable tortures. And I must make it an emphatic point that it was
the
entire population that participated in these crimes, not just the usual rabble.
I saw stylish, elegant
young Czech ladies, who had perhaps flirted with the German officers not too long before, now
walking the streets with guns and dog whips and torturing and murdering people, and I saw
Czech officials, evidently of higher rank, raping women together with the howling Czech street
mob and then killing them as painfully as they possibly could. I feared a German reawakening,
for
what was done to the Germans defies description!"
Czech Clergymen
Forget Their Christian Brotherly Love
"What ye have done,
inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren,
ye have done it unto me!"
n 1945 many Czech clergymen failed miserably to live up to
this well-known Biblical teaching of our Lord Jesus where their
desperate German co-religionists were concerned. Unbridled, chauvinistic Czech nationalism
took
precedence over the dissemination of the Catholic faith and teachings as ordered by the Church.
They maintained this attitude towards their
German co-religionists, as the following witness accounts show. Even the Ten Commandments
were grossly violated.
Five pages further, on p. 179, we read the account of
Captain Bruno Knösel, a Sudeten German homecomer: "There I saw unbridled, wild
nationalism visit unutterable suffering on innocent women, children, elderly and soldiers. To this
day I see these victims expelled from their homeland. The terrible guilt, where not even the
Czech
priests shied back from soiling their sacred vestments with blood..."
Anton Beck, who arrived in his hometown Cernosín, in Mies District, on June
12, 1945
and was thrown into prison there following gross abuse by Czech partisans, tells of being denied
spiritual aid (p. 189):
"Many of those imprisoned asked for a clergyman. A Czech priest came. He stood by the cell
door
and asked what they wanted from him. Those that were critically ill and already marked by
Death
lifted up their arms and asked him to take their confession, or asked for a rosary or prayer book.
But the priest said cynically, 'that's forbidden for Germans...', turned away and left."
At a public assembly on June 24, 1945 in Libenec, Msgr. Stasek, who had already been an active
member in the First Republic's "Lidova Strana", the Czech People's Party, proclaimed: "The
precept of brotherly love is void where Germans are concerned!"
And Oliva - a clergyman and Director of Charitable Works - was a member of the People's Court
and frequently contributed to unjust verdicts!
"The measures being taken against the Germans are clearly and wholly against natural law,
against the Divine Laws, and against all humanity and culture. The fact that Czech priests in
leading positions give their approval to the dreadful brutalities of the Czech Revolution is one of
the saddest aspects of Czech history."
The Danse Macabre Began in
Prague
The Germans of Prague who were already rounded up on this May 5th already got their first taste
of the tortures in store for them on their way to the movie theaters and schools where they were
to
be interned. Gatherings of Czechs from all social classes were waiting for them in the streets.
The
arrested
Germans - men, women and children alike - had to run the gauntlet through the streets. They
were
attacked with stones, canes, umbrellas and even with boiling water. Arms raised, they staggered
on. Women were yanked out of the groups they were in and dragged into the nearest houses and
other buildings. Whoever wanted to could rape them. Nurses were stripped naked and publicly
violated. The women's heads were shorn bald with paper scissors. Their faces were painted.
Their
clothes were torn off their bodies, and swastikas were painted on their backs and breasts. They
were raped by the thousands. Many were forced to open their mouths so that their torturers could
urinate into them.
Elsewhere one could see naked women being forced to wipe up the pavement on their knees.
Hundreds of Germans were driven into the underground sewers of Wenzel Square, where they
stood crowded so tightly together that none could even move their arms.
Prague: Sea of Inhumanity
"While the wounded were still standing pale and frightened beside the truck they had come in, a
group of rioters that had been lurking in the yard pounced on them, snatched away their crutches,
canes and bandages, beat them to the ground and proceeded to pound away at them with clubs,
rails and hammers until they lay unmoving in their blood." ...
"Were they still human, those beings on Wenzel and Karls Square and in the Rittergasse who on
May 9 doused Germans with gasoline, hung them by their feet from poles and lamp posts and set
them on fire, and then laughed and howled and cheered to their agony, which lasted all the
longer
because the victims had been deliberately
hung head-down so the rising smoke could not suffocate them? Were they still human, those
beings who took German soldiers, but also civilians and women, tied them together with barbed
wire, shot them and then threw the bundles of people into the Moldau River? Were they still
human, those beings who drowned German children in the tubs of water intended for putting out
fires, and who pitched women and children out the windows into the streets? They had human
faces. But they were no longer human."
"They were not human, those beings who indiscriminately bludgeoned any and every German
they
got hold of until he or she collapsed. They were not human, those beings
who forced naked
German women to clear out rocks, who cut their Achilles tendons and reveled in their
helplessness. No, they were no longer human, those beings who dragged the Germans out of the
underground sewers of Wenzel Square, clubbed them to the ground and literally
trampled them
to
death, and they were not humans who took the German girls, the Wehrmacht assistants who had
fallen into their hands, stripped them of their clothes, and herded them through Fachoba Street
towards the Wolschaner cemetery, where
they machine-gunned them, or clubbed and stabbed others so that they sought refuge in piles of
hay, which the howling torturers promptly set on fire."
"And these were only a few high points in the sea of inhumanity in which a simple
shooting - even if it was the shooting of hundreds of students in Prague's Adolf Hitler
School - seemed merciful."
We Kissed the Rotting Corpses
Hilde Hurtinger (Prague): "On May 5, 1945 a Czech mob took me from my home and,
beating and clubbing me all the while,
dragged me by the hair some 500 meters into the
Scharnhorst School, where I was grossly abused.
"The following night all the prisoners there were repeatedly called into the yard. After that,
random groups of ten women, men and children each were assembled and shot. I watched my
two
brothers and one of their children die like that. The child was only five months old.
Armed Czech women dragged
pregnant prisoners from the cells and out into the yard, where
they
stripped and
beat them, then stuffed them into latrines and beat them until their bellies burst. I
myself had to help carry off the bodies of the women who had died that way. During the day
groups of six to eight women were taken to work in St. Gotthard Church. There
we had to kiss
the
dead bodies that were already rotting,
pile them up, and clean the church floor of the blood that
ran there by getting down on our knees and licking it up by mouth. A Czech mob supervised this
work and beat us. On May 20 we were led into Wenzel Square where German boys and girls,
and
soldiers too, were hung alive by their feet from lamp posts and trees and,
in front of our very
eyes,
were doused with petroleum and set on fire."
Physicist Dr. K. F., who was beaten half to death and imprisoned in a basement,
recalls:
"The afternoon of May 10 brought me what was perhaps the most gruesome experience of all
those days. A troop of armed men came in and selected the six youngest and strongest of us. I
was
one of them. After they had promised our guard that they would bring us back alive if possible,
they led us to Wenzel Square. It was packed with a roaring, howling crowd and they had to clear
a
way for us first.
"Thus we arrived at the junction of Wassergasse street, where we saw the job that awaited us:
from the large advertising billboard at this corner hung three naked corpses, suspended from the
feet and burned with gasoline. The faces were mutilated beyond recognition, all the teeth
knocked
out, the mouths just bloody holes. The roasted skin stuck to our hands. We had to carry them
into
Stefansgasse street, and drag them when we could no longer carry.
A passer-by tried to photograph our procession, but he was seen and beaten half to death.
"When we had put the bodies down
we were forced to kiss them on the mouth. We were told,
'To
jsou prece vasi bratri, ted' je polibejte!' ('
They're your brothers, now kiss them!') I still hear these
words as though they had been said today. No matter how revolting it was, staying alive was
more
important, and so we squeezed our lips together and pressed them into the bloody ooze that
represented their mouths. To this day I can feel
the ice-cold heads in my hands.
50,000 Watched the Executions
"Shouting and yelling carried over from the main gate of Wilson Train Station. I saw that a
blonde
woman was being attacked by the crowd, even though she defended herself in Czech and
without
any accent. In a trice she was surrounded, the clothes were torn off her body, and already she lay
naked and covered in blood on the pavement, where she was beaten further. At that point a
heavy
beer wagon drove past, and in a great commotion the crowd unhitched the horses. One was tied
to
each leg of the prostrated woman and then urged in opposite directions. The body was torn apart;
the woman screamed horribly before she died.
"One Sunday afternoon the Revolutionary Guard invaded one of the double cells in our block,
where 25 boys aged 14 to 16 were housed. These boys were from the Reichenberg area and were
accused of having been 'werewolves'. As we could hear from the orders given, the boys were
lined up outside the door in rows of two, facing each other. First they had to enact a children's
hopping game, after which they were ordered to shout 'Heil Hitler' and to box each other's ears.
Both male and female spectators urged them on, and not only with rubber truncheons. This
'game'
escalated into bloodshed; the boys then had to lick the blood off the stone floor. If one refused,
he
was beaten for it. Some of these children became sick to their stomachs, and the others were
forced to eat their vomit. Then they were forced to strip to their skin, and one after the other had
to
lie on a table where they were flogged until the flesh hung in shreds from their bodies. All the
while their torturers indulged in the most dirty and stupid jokes imaginable. When all the boys
had been thus tortured, they were dragged into the basement, and those that still gave any sign of
life were strung up on hooks on the wall, and liquidated.
"Pfitzner was followed by a number of other well-known persons. The execution show lasted for
hours. 50,000 Czechs watched insatiably."
Gruesome "Czech Cocktail"
"At first the frightened boys looked over their shoulders, then they turned around. Two of the
Czechs who stood fairly close aimed at the first boy in
the line-up. Their shots rang out, and the boy sank to the ground. His blood stained the wall
behind him. The other boys pleaded, 'Captain, sir, we won't do it again!' The second boy in the
line tried to run to the executioners to slap their rifle barrels
up - but these murderers had already repeated their guns, and the second boy fell to the ground
amid their fire. Mortar sprayed up, and again blood stained the wall. The remaining three boys
now faced their fate heroically. The third cried out for his mother before collapsing; the fourth
remained on his feet after the first salvo, looked silently into the gun barrels pointed at him
anew,
and sank to the ground only after the second row of shots. The fifth was also gunned down.
These
boys were perhaps 15 years old.
"We grown-ups had to watch the murders helplessly. There was to be no end to the mental
torture
that day. Those marked for death were kept in the stables along the narrow back of the yard.
Punctually on the stroke of every hour, a group of Czechs armed with canes and whips went into
the stables, and then, for about ten minutes, we heard the screams and whimpers of the beaten.
This went on like that until evening. The shootings themselves were not
as nerve-racking as this torturing of people who had been chosen for execution and who were so
brutally tormented beforehand. Every day prisoners were shot and thrown into the slit trenches,
which the rest of us then had to use as latrines."
The Baby's Head in the Latrine
"Night after night the women were raped - even the sick and the elderly, even
the 70-year-olds. The partisans let the soldiers in, and each of the women were abused several
times a night. I once saw a soldier trying to rape a
delicate eleven-year-old girl. The horrified mother tried to fight him off with the superhuman
strength of desperation, and offered herself to the soldier instead, to save her child."
An account from Modrassy:
A mother whose newborn had starved to death committed suicide. One of the gendarmes
ordered:
"Throw the dirty pig and her bastard into the latrine!" Three women had to throw the bodies of
the
mother and her dead baby into the open cesspit. Partisans then forced the inmates of the camp to
use this cesspit as toilet so that "the dirty sow and her bastard disappear as fast as possible," as
they put it. This continued for days, and even weeks later the baby's head and one of the mother's
arms could be seen sticking out of the filth.
In one barracks a young mother of four children, the youngest of which was three years old,
suddenly died. The Czech physician who came to do
the post-mortem barked at the dead woman's sobbing mother: "What are you howling for, you
German bitch, at least one more German pig has kicked the bucket!"
"One pregnant woman was tortured especially badly. When a Czech soldier entered the room
and
spat there, she had to kneel down and lick up his spit. If she had refused, she would have been
beaten to death. Sometimes she was beaten until she vomited blood, and then they forced her to
eat what she had thrown up.
"A 15-year-old boy whose father had managed to escape was beaten daily until they found his
father, who was then tied by the hands and doused with boiling water. His son was also tied up,
and forced to watch.
Line Up to be
Shot
einz Lapczyna of Moravian Ostrau testified about Czech
interrogation methods: "To extort confessions, the prisoner would be stabbed under his finger
and
toe nails
with red-hot needles until he fainted from the pain.
Dismembered Alive
"On June 24, 1945 we were arrested in Engelsberg by the 'German Revolutionary Guard', taken
to the camp, and beaten there day and night by the Czechs. The beatings were repeated
every half-hour six or seven times each night. All of us were disfigured beyond recognition.
The guards indulged in horrible kinds of "fun". A physician who was interned in this forest camp
had turned into one huge festering wound; it literally covered him from head to foot. To move,
he
had to crawl painfully on the ground, as he had not been able to walk any more for a long time.
Others were forced to lick out
his pus-filled wounds. Inmates were forced to eat excrement and had to lick each other's
genitals.
One night a number of the poor souls in this camp hung themselves from the beams in the
barracks; they could simply no longer take the physical and mental torture.
Excrement-covered gags were popular among the Czechs. Dr. Karl Gregor: "Whenever
I
screamed or groaned when they beat me, they would shove a gag covered with human excrement
into my mouth."
