Tropical overseas cap #1

[90th Light]

Chris to be honest ,dont take me wrong please but you has no idea what happend with Germans in sudetenland under russian from may 1945 ,no one come back as familys are sent to west and a lot of them was shot before they are able to escape.
this cap was worn as a lot tropical stuff that was found in Germans depots by a Czech guy.

I am not taking you the wrong way Alfred but I have to disagree, you might be surprised just how much I do know about what happened in the "Sudetenland" land in 1945 and after the Russians took control.

You see I use to work here in New Zealand with Helga Tiscenko. Her father was Herman Hofle the Waffen SS general who had to put down the "Czech" up rising in 1945.

Helgo has written a book about her experiences growing up in Germany called
"Strawberries with the Fuhrer: A Journey from the Third Reich to New Zealand" by Helga Tiscenko, Shoal Bay Press Ltd., 2000, ISBN 1 877251 03 8

I worked with Helga for over 5 years. What she told me was amazing. Have a look at this video clip to see what I mean http://vimeo.com/8571249

Now I am probably best not to state names but I have also spoken to German veterans who were taken prisoner and held in Czechslovakia. What I have reproduced is but a brief summary of what they have told me that happened;



"The so-called “wild” or spontaneous expulsions in Czechoslovakia began almost immediately after liberation, in May to June of 1945. But there was nothing “wild” about this first wave of what Czech officials referred to as národní ocista (“national cleansing”). These expulsions, which resulted in the removal of up to 2 million Germans from Eastern Europe, were planned and executed by troops, police and militia, under orders from the highest authorities, with the full knowledge and consent of the Allies. Eastern European and Allied observers alike remarked on the utter passivity of the victims, the majority of whom were women, children and the elderly (most German men had been drafted during the war and either killed or interned in POW camps). But the “wild expulsions” were justified as self-defense on the basis of exaggerated or invented reports of ongoing resistance activity by Nazi “Werewolf” units. One of the most infamous postwar pogroms was sparked by the accidental explosion of an ammunition dump in Ústí nad Labem in northwestern Bohemia in July 1945. Most of the victims of the explosion were themselves German, but local workers, Czechoslovak Army units and Soviet troops wasted no time blaming Werewolf sabotage and taking revenge. Germans were beaten, shot and thrown into the Elbe River; many observers recall a baby carriage being thrown into the river with a baby inside. The massacre resulted in at least 100 deaths.

During the “wild” expulsions, lucky expellees were given a few hours’ notice and taken on foot by force to the closest border with only the clothes on their back. The unlucky were interned in concentration and forced labor camps organized explicitly on the Nazi model. At least 180,000 ethnic Germans were interned in Czechoslovakia as of November 1945; another 170,000 were interned in Yugoslavia. The internees included many women, children and even several thousand German-speaking Jews. In many cases, former Nazi concentration camps and detention centers like Terezín/Theresienstadt were converted overnight into camps for ethnic Germans. At Linzervorstadt, a camp administered by a former Czech internee of Dachau, the motto “Eye for Eye, Tooth for Tooth” replaced Arbeit macht frei on the camp gates. Inmates were stripped naked and shorn of their hair upon arrival at the camp, forced to run a gantlet while being beaten with rubber truncheons and then, during their stay in the camp, systematically flogged, tortured and made to stand at attention in all-night roll calls. Interned women throughout Czechoslovakia and Poland were subject to rampant sexual abuse, rape and torture. Germans were also forced to wear armbands or patches marked with the letter “N” for Nemec (German)—collective payback for the humiliation that the Nazis had inflicted on populations in the East. When they were finally transported west, the expellees traveled by cattle car, sometimes going with barely any food or water for up to two weeks. One victim recalled that each morning, “one or more dead bodies greeted us…they just had to be abandoned on the embankments.”


Alfred, I hope you can see that I have meet and spoken to people who were there and witnessed this horrific and brutal chapter of history. In fact I am not prepared to add some of the specfic details that I have documented because they are simply too graphic and horrendous to add to this thread,

Chris

[90th Light]

I apologise if my last post was too long and it looked like I had got off topic. However, I feel for the period of history to which Alfred was referring and what happened should not be dismissed lightly.

Coming back to the cap which started this thread, I agree with Alfred that it could be one liberated from a depot in the "Sudetenland" and used by a Czech fighter or work prisoner.

However, I equally maintain that it could have come back to the"Sudetenland" via a POW returning home after the war. There is every chance that such a POW may have been captured in Afrika given who the maker of the cap is,

Chris

[Tim O'Keefe]

Actually Chris, the previous post is when your at your best. You were very fortunate to work with Helga. Post war Europe was brutal and is often overlooked. Thanks for sharing

Getting back to the cap, since it had a soutache it seems more likely it saw service in the Afrika campaign, than just a post war pickup. & again that maker is known for being there in the beginning as well. & that the insignia has been removed could indicate a POW connection. Or even perhaps both an Afrikan POW connection and then post war use as well....