My family [on my mother’s side] are Austrian - but the family had lived in Czechoslovakia since at least the 1700’s. In the 1800’s, they moved back to Austria [most of them] ...
After the Germans annexed the Sudetenland [where my remaining relatives lived], a VERY distant cousin was a judge working with the occupying Nazis ...
Whether he willingly collaborated, or was forced to work with them, I do not know ...
What I do know is that after the Russians liberated the region, a series of atrocities against German [Austrian] ethnics occurred. These included massacres, kangaroo “trials”, forced one-on-one barehanded fights [between relatives - winner getting to live], rapes, etc.
My cousin realized that he and his family would suffer from this because of his work [willing or not] with the Nazis. So, he took his entire family of 9 out into a field - killed them and then himself ...
It is hard to believe no one seems to have noticed the incredible irony of Russian judges presiding over war crimes trials along side of American and British ones.
That is unbelievably sad. How horrible.
How horrible that he was driven to this point with no way out.
In 1918 when Austria-hungary was broken up and much of what was the Austrian half was disbanded. The Sudentenland should have, ethnically speaking been given to Austria (and Austrians wanted to join the other Germanic peoples in Germany), but that was denied
There were sound defense reasons for the Bohemians for this (since it's always better to own the higher ground), but the Czechs then in the 20s and 30s pretty much banned the German dialect (you can say payback for 500 years of domination by the Germanics)
As an oppressed linguistic group, they unfortunately saw the Nazis as a way out and they had the highest percentage of people joining the Nazis