Herbert Smagon was born on January 2, 1927, in the coal mining town of Karviná in Czechoslovakia.
[1] In 1937, due to the closure of German schools and an increasing atmosphere of anti-German sentiment, Smagon's family fled Czechoslovakia and settled in Berlin when he was 10 years old.
In the same year, he began his study at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, attending lectures by Prof. Herbert Boeckl [de].
[3][4] Smagon's historical works included, among other things, images of Soviet troops raping and murdering children in Rössel, child soldiers at the Siege of Breslau, and German children burned alive on Wenceslas Square after the Prague uprising.
[1]In the 2010s, the caricatured faces of the Soviet soldiers in Smagon's painting Besetzung der Stadt Rössel in Ostpreussen am 28/1/1945 became an anti-Russian internet meme.