The newly discovered video shows a massacre of German civilians in Czechoslovakia after World War II. The footage was filmed by Jirí Chmelnicek, a civil engineer and amateur filmmaker who wanted to document the liberation of Prague from Nazi occupation. The footage shows Germans being rounded up and forced to stand in a line before being shot and falling forward over a low embankment. This event has been described repeatedly by eyewitnesses and historians as the systematic killing of German civilians. The shaky images are a shock to Czechs, who had no previous footage of such executions. Czech documentary filmmaker David Vondracek showed the historical images on television, and his documentary about Czech atrocities, called „Killings, Czech Style,“ aired on Czech state television. Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Czechs and Red Army expelled around 3 million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia. Up to 30,000 civilians fell victim to acts of revenge. The Germans and Czechs had lived side by side for decades before Hitler’s annexation of Bohemia and Moravia in 1938. The exact reason for the killings in Borislavka remains unknown, but those firing the shots may have included former Czech collaborators who had previously worked with the Germans and wanted to clear their names with a show of anti-German brutality. The filmmaker, Chmelnicek, kept the film hidden at home for decades, even when communist police came to ask about it. After his death, his daughter offered the footage to a Czech television historian, but he kept it hidden. Documentary maker Vondracek found it later in the state television station’s archives. Today, Borislavka is a nice district in Prague, and the meadow where the executions took place is covered in tall grass. Vondracek now wants to start a search for the mass grave.
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