Otto Kögler

“There was almost no contact with the Czechs. I remember that during the holidays, I even once drove into the interior of Czechoslovakia to learn Czech, the language. In our village, there was only a Czech gendarme, a post-office employee and a bank employee. Besides them, there were no Czechs living there. It was all settled with Volksdeutsche, with Germans in the region of northern Bohemia. Some jobs, later on, were then given to Czechs. For instance the school director, who was at first a German, was later replaced by a Czech director. And my class teacher, Dr. Schrabal, he was Czech, too. But as I said, we had hardly any contact with the Czechs in that region. It was quite the contrary: we kept together. I have to recall our post master Viclas, who was a very kind man. When he saw what had happened to the Germans from Sandau, he moved out, too. He said that he couldn’t watch on to what they did to his German folks.”

“Being the refugee chief, I witnessed things like that, of course. I had to take care of several municipalities where people had to be quartered for instance. These are, of course, quite different affairs. But in Hofstetten, we didn’t have the slightest trouble. As the refugee foreman, I witnessed it, in the catholic as well as protestant neighborhoods. I found out that the clerics were wholly different, since I was also on the special lodging commission. Some offered me a rack shack dirty hole for accommodation, others were more generous. In Hofstetten, for instance, the priest was so generous that he gave at our disposal his parsonage. So two or three families could reside at the parsonage. That was really generous of him.”