HLAVIENKA, Lubomír – KOLÁŘ, Ondřej: Excesy příslušníků Rudé armády ve východních Sedetech v dubnu a květnu 1945

HLAVIENKA, Lubomír – KOLÁŘ, Ondřej: The Excesses of Red Army Personnel in the Eastern Sudetenland in April and May 1945.

Autor: HLAVIENKA, Lubomír

Vojenská história, 4, 29, 2025, pp 44-73, Bratislava.  

The arrival of the Red Army in the territory of the Czech Lands was accompanied by violence against the civilian population. Whereas in the Protectorate Soviet officers made efforts to curb these excesses, often using drastic methods to punish perpetrators of violent acts, a different situation prevailed in the Sudetenland. This region was predominantly inhabited by a German population, and consequently, many Red Army soldiers behaved as they would on German Reich territory, which included violence against civilians and the looting of their property. The article aims to document this wave of violence and to reconstruct the events that accompanied the arrival of Soviet troops in the region. Given that no comprehensive study of this phenomenon currently exists, one of the article’s aims is to quantify the number of victims of these excesses. For the sake of completeness, the study also examines the mass executions of captured German soldiers, dozens of which took place throughout the region immediately after the cessation of hostilities.

Keywords: Czechoslovakia, borderlands, liberation, violence, repression.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.69809/vojhist.2025.29.4.3

Ročník: 29 | Číslo: 4/2025 | Stránky: 47-73