Czech police to start DNA probe into alleged post-war massacre

Dec 10, 2010, 12:19 GMT

Prague - Czech police said Friday that they are ready to do DNA tests to determine the identity of remains found at a site where local Czechs allegedly murdered German civilians shortly after the end of World War II in 1945.

In August, investigators dug up human bone fragments at a field near the eastern town of Dobronin, where the post-war massacre had reportedly taken place.

The DNA examination comes after anthropologists at Brno-based Masaryk University said the exhumed remains are likely those of 13 men. The ages of six of these men are estimated at between 30 and 60.

Experts at the Criminology Institute in Prague now hope to identify the victims with help of DNA samples that will be collected from potential relatives in Germany. Preliminary results should be available in late February, a police spokeswoman said.

A decision on a final resting place will be made only after the investigation is over, police said.

Former Czechoslovakia was home to a large ethnic German minority.

Soon after the war ended, some Czechs lynched and massacred their German neighbours out of revenge for wartime atrocities by the occupying Nazis.

The Dobronin case, which was largely unknown in the Czech Republic until the investigation went public in August, was described in a novel, titled Bergersdorf, by German writer Herma Kennel.

In May 1945, a group of local drunken Czechs reportedly paraded some 15 local ethnic Germans outside the village. They were allegedly forced to dig their own graves and then either shot or beaten to death.

But the anthropologists said that they were unable to confirm that the alleged victims met a violent death, possibly because the bones found in the grave were fractured and in a very bad shape.

'The bones did not manifest traces of violence, which would point with a certainty to a cause or circumstance of death,' said anthropologist Petra Urbanova in a statement.

She said that injuries that the scientists spotted on the bones were already healed before death.

Aside from Dobronin, police have also launched an investigation into a similar case in the eastern Czech town of Moravsky Krumlov, a police spokeswoman said.

Officers are collecting archival information and looking for potential witnesses in order to determine whether a dig similar to that near Dobronin would be possible.

Some 3 million Czechoslovak Germans were expelled after the war to Germany in an act of collective punishment. The issue has been long an obstacle to Prague's ties with Bavaria, a German state that had then accepted many expellees.

In a breakthrough in Czech-Bavarian relations, a Bavarian premier is to conduct the first official visit to the Czech Republic on December 19-20.

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