Killing... Czech Style

10. 5. 2010

The Czech public television broadcast a documentary film on Thursday, 6.5.2010, which showed footage of the massacre of German civilians in Prague soon after the end of World War II. The scenes were shot by an amateur who lived nearby and the footage had been hidden for over 6 decades by his family, who feared that it would be seized by the Communists.

The controversial short movie shows German civilians being paraded through Prague's streets, walking to a field, then lined up and shot from behind, falling into ditches. Some scenes show a truck running over bodies, some not dead yet, as one elderly man who is seen praying and begging for his life.

Stories emerged reminding the nation that some of those killed were not even German, but Swiss or Swedish, besides some members of mixed families and other innocents.

Some Czech historians claimed that the footage actually shows Soviet troops doing the killing. The film is a testimony to the lynching some Czechs committed on their ethnic German neighbours out of revenge after the war ended.

Here is a link to some of the scenes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1wLajNjQPw

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Obsah vydání | Pondělí 2.8. 2010