Before the war, Ústí nad Labem was an industrial city on the Elbe in northern Bohemia, and most of its residents called it Aussig. Like much of the Sudetenland, it was overwhelmingly German-speaking — that was why Hitler had used Sudeten German grievances as the pretext for the 1938 Munich Agreement and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. By summer 1945, the war had reversed everything. The Beneš decrees stripped most Sudeten Germans of their citizenship and property. Roughly three million ethnic Germans were being expelled from the reborn Czechoslovak state, in what remains one of the largest forced population transfers in European history. Many of those expulsions were chaotic, brutal, and fatal. The Brno death march in late May 1945 had killed an estimated 1,700 to 8,000 Germans on a forced 55-kilometer trek to the Austrian border. The Ústí massacre would be added to that grim ledger.

Eyewitness accounts from the Beneš bridge are some of the most detailed, and the hardest to read. A German named Georg Schörghuber shouted something — the witnesses disagreed about what — and was thrown by the crowd into the Elbe below. When he tried to swim out, soldiers shot at him until he stopped. The killings spread quickly to the train station, where Germans waiting for trains were attacked. At the fire pond, victims were drowned. Two women with baby carriages reportedly escaped almost by miracle. The white armbands that the postwar Czechoslovak authorities had required ethnic Germans to wear after the German surrender turned out to be exactly what they sounded like: an identification system that worked both ways. In peace, it marked the wearer for surveillance and discrimination. In a moment of mob fury, it marked them for death.

The official Czechoslovak government investigation blamed Werwolf saboteurs — Nazi diehards who had vowed to keep fighting after the surrender. Contemporary historians find this explanation unsatisfying. Vladimír Keiser, a former director of the Ústí archives, told Czech Radio that there are about eight credible hypotheses for what caused the explosion. The historian Jaroslav Rokoský agrees that the cause is not clear. František Hanzlík, who was in the city as a child that day, attributes the blast to the misfiring of a Panzerfaust — and argues that the explosion and massacre were prepared by communists within the Czechoslovak secret services, particularly Bedřich Pokorný, who had also organized the Brno death march. The proposed motive: orchestrate an incident that would justify, at the upcoming Potsdam Conference, the wholesale expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia. Whatever the cause, that is precisely the use to which the massacre was put.

The Beneš decrees, the expulsions, and the violence that accompanied them remained taboo subjects in communist Czechoslovakia. For decades the Ústí massacre was barely discussed. Václav Havel was among the first postwar Czech leaders to publicly acknowledge the cruelty of the expulsions. In 2005, on the 60th anniversary, a memorial plaque was unveiled at the bridge for the victims. The Czech and German governments have built a careful, contested reconciliation around these events — one that does not excuse the Nazi occupation that produced the Czech rage, but does insist that the expulsions and the massacres that punctuated them be remembered honestly. The civilians killed at Ústí — most of them women, children, and elderly people who had lived in the Sudetenland for generations — were nominally enemies in a war that had ended. They were also, simply, people. The bridge is still there. The Elbe still runs beneath it.