BBC 1945 The Savage Peace - atrocities against Germans

When the Second World War ended,
the people of liberated Europe celebrated their freedom from Nazi tyranny.Show more

Years of suffering had ended, but for millions of Germans,
a new and terrible chapter was beginning.

This remarkable history documentary on BBC Select reveals
the appalling violence meted out to the defeated Germans,
which mirrored some of the worst cruelty of Hitler’s Nazi forces.

When the Second World War ended, the people of liberated Europe celebrated their freedom from Nazi tyranny.
Their years of suffering had ended, but for millions of Germans,
the end of the conflict opened a new and terrible chapter.
The Savage Peace reveals the appalling violence meted out to the defeated,
especially to those ethnic Germans who had lived peacefully for centuries in neighbouring countries.

Using rare and unseen archive film, the documentary tells a harrowing story
of vengeance against German civilians,
which mirrored some of the worst cruelty of the Nazi occupiers during the years of war.
The Savage Peace includes the unique testimony of eyewitnesses and victims,
who recall the horrors with searing clarity, their memories undimmed 70 years after the events took place.

This a story that has, until now,
been untold amidst the justified celebration of an end to an unspeakable tyranny.
But as the writer George Orwell said,
the treatment of the defeated Germans was a terrible crime that has gone unpunished.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/11624618/1945-The-Savage-Peace-review.html

1945: The Savage Peace, review: 'shocking'

Peter Molloy’s thought-provoking documentary about postwar reprisals against Germans
in Eastern Europe was most effective in highlighting the scale and savagery of the events
By Gerard O Donovan and Gerard Odonovan 24 May 2015 •

I’ve watched so many harrowing war documentaries linked to World War and Holocaust commemorations recently,
I sometimes fear my capacity to be shocked will be blunted.
Then a film like 1945:
The Savage Peace (BBC Two) comes along, and reboots the scale of man’s inhumanity to man.

Peter Molloy’s documentary told the little-known story of post-Second World War reprisals
against ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, unearthing
– in often gruesome archive footage and painful eyewitness testimony –
crimes committed against the vanquished that have gone largely unacknowledged for 70 years.

All too understandably, after the horrors inflicted by the Nazis on civilian populations throughout Europe,
few of the victors had the inclination or ability to prevent the venting of vengeance
on those held responsible (however wrongly) for supporting Hitler’s occupying regimes.

Molloy’s film was most effective in highlighting the scale and savagery of the reprisals
– shootings, forced death marches, the rape of two million German women and children,
the public humiliation, torture and execution of countless ethnic Germans,
particularly in Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Less impressively, the film didn’t seem concerned about acknowledging the enormity of horror
inflicted on Czechs and Poles (and others) to inspire such savage retaliation.

And too often there was a tendency to equate crimes of vengeance
with the systematic industrial-scale inhumanity of the Third Reich.

Many viewers may also have felt that the film’s condemnation
of the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe
as “the largest ethnic cleansing in history” wasn’t only too strident but downright insensitive.

Still, few would deny that this was a deeply thought-provoking documentary.
By giving voice to just a few of the millions whose lives were ruined
by the peace rather than the war,
Malloy shed new light on a very dark time in Europe’s history.