Bombing in the early hours of peace

Although World War II officially ended at midnight on May 8, 1945, losses in human lives continued throughout the next day as well. The Czechs were returning from forced labor and concentration camps, as long columns of German refugees from the front and the liberated territories were passing through the cities. Eva Machková, who was 14 years old in those days, recalls the events: "Columns of German fugitives were streaming bound for the south through Mladá Boleslav. They were running away from the Red Army. It was mostly the remnants of the Wehrmacht accompanied by the field hospitals. These soldiers were predominantly the soldiers of the end of the war - fifteen-year-old boys and old men in their fifties. They willingly disarmed. The Germans calmly handed in their weapons and tried to find an escape route." One morning, Eva Machková went with her parents to the city: "We walked down the road from Kosmonosy to where the bus station is located today and as we looked around, we saw a few planes coming. There was a Czech officer standing behind us and suddenly he shouted 'get down on the ground!' So we jumped into a ditch. Everything was bombed and most of the bombs exploded right in the midst of the crowd. I know, for instance, the story of a man who came back home from the concentration camp Buchenwald on one day and the next day the bombing killed his wife and daughter in their home. And it was also a terrible massacre of the fleeing Germans." On that day, the city was hit by 700 bombs. Witnesses still interpret the event as an attack by the Germans, who wanted to destroy the archives and some key factories that they were leaving behind. In fact, Mladá Boleslav - at that moment already quite unexpectedly - was bombed by the Red Army. The reasons for this have so far remained uncertain and historians still speculate about it. The most common answer is: the Soviets were worried that the German troops retreating to the West into American captivity could endanger Rybalkov's tank breakthrough from Dresden to Prague, and thus they tried to destroy the traffic hubs north of Prague. Only the opening of the archives will provide an answer.