Brno death march

The Brno death march (Brünner Todesmarsch) was part of the expulsion of the German inhabitants of Brno (Brünn) after World War II. The march began late on the night of 30 May 1945 when the ethnic German minority in Brno, capital of the Czechoslovak province Moravia, was expelled to nearby Austria: The number of fatalities caused by the march is disputed, estimates range between 700 and 8,000.

The march
The expulsion of the city's 20,000 German inhabitants was directed by the Národní výbor města Brna ("National Committee of the City of Brno"). The psychological motivation was in reaction to the excesses of the war time Nazi occupation. The occupying Wehrmacht garrison occupying Brno had not surrendered the city (analogous to Ostrava and Prague), and the Allies had to seize it by force. Shortly after the war ended, the Czechoslovak government began expelling from the country its large ethnic German minority (over 3 million people, mostly along the German and Austrian borders). Those living in Brno were forced on a Death march 56 km south towards the Austrian border.

Few of the victims were men, since most male adults had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht and were by then prisoners of war. A greater tragedy than expulsion was to befall the expellees after the Soviet authorities refused to allow them to enter their sector of Austria. (Austria had been divided into four occupation zones, and Moravia bordered the Soviet Occupation Zone.) The Brno Germans were marched back to the city and were interned in the village of Pohořelice. What happened next is controversial. About 700 are confirmed as dying, either by disease (shigellosis) or by murder. German sources estimate that between 1,300–8,000 died.

The communist agent Bedřich Pokorný, to whom some authors attribute organisation of the 31 July 1945 Ústí massacre of hundreds of ethnic Germans in Ústí nad Labem (Aussig an der Elbe), was also behind the Brno event.

There have been attempts to confirm statements that Pokorný had thousands of people executed. Austrian historian Emilia Hrabowecz investigated, but was unable to substantiate it. She did, however, find that old people and tired young children had been sent away on trucks under Czechoslovak guards. In 2002, a joint commission of German and Czech historians collected evidence and published the results in a book titled Rozumět dějinám ("Understanding History").

Remembrance
In 2000 a group of young Czech students called for an adequate way to remember the events in Brno. In 2015 the council of Brno officially regretted the harm of the victims of the death march and organized a "Pilgrimage of Reconciliation" along the route.