June 11, 2012
The Chronicle
Review:
The European
Atrocity You Never Heard About
Hoover Institution Archives
In the largest episode of forced migration in history, millions of
German-speaking civilians were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia (above) and
other European countries after World War II by order of the United States,
Britain, and the Soviet Union.
By R.M. Douglas
The screams that rang throughout the darkened cattle car crammed
with deportees, as it jolted across the icy Polish countryside five nights
before Christmas, were Dr. Loch's only means of locating his patient. The
doctor, formerly chief medical officer of a large urban hospital, now found
himself clambering over piles of baggage, fellow passengers, and buckets used
as toilets, only to find his path blocked by an old woman who ignored his
request to move aside. On closer examination, he discovered that she had frozen
to death.
Finally he located the source of the screams, a pregnant woman who
had gone into premature labor and was hemorrhaging profusely. When he attempted
to move her from where she lay into a more comfortable position, he found that
"she was frozen to the floor with her own blood." Other than
temporarily stanching the bleeding, Loch was unable to do anything to help her,
and he never learned whether she had lived or died. When the train made its
first stop, after more than four days in transit, 16 frost-covered corpses were
pulled from the wagons before the remaining deportees were put back on board to
continue their journey. A further 42 passengers would later succumb to the
effects of their ordeal, among them Loch's wife.
During the Second World War, tragic scenes like those were
commonplace, as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin moved around entire populations
like pieces on a chessboard, seeking to reshape the demographic profile of
Europe according to their own preferences. What was different about the
deportation of Loch and his fellow passengers, however, was that it took place
by order of the United States and Britain as well as the Soviet Union, nearly
two years after the declaration of peace.
Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of
forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in
human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the
overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under
16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of
people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same
as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since
the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied
Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a
result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but
conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in
the course of the operation.
Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result
of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical
formulation, "reparations in kind") in a vast network of camps
extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz
I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation
for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill's
private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946,
it was clear that "concentration camps and all they stand for did not come
to an end with the defeat of Germany." Ironically, no more than 100 or so
miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders
were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of
indictment that listed "deportation and other inhumane acts committed
against any civilian population" under the heading of "crimes against
humanity."
By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and
one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in
recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of
peace, and in the middle of the world's most densely populated continent, they
remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. On the rare occasions that they
rate more than a footnote in European-history textbooks, they are commonly
depicted as justified retribution for Nazi Germany's wartime atrocities or a
painful but necessary expedient to ensure the future peace of Europe. As the
historian Richard J. Evans asserted in In Hitler's Shadow (1989) the decision
to purge the continent of its German-speaking minorities remains
"defensible" in light of the Holocaust and has shown itself to be a
successful experiment in "defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass
transfer of populations."
Even at the time, not everyone agreed. George Orwell, an outspoken
opponent of the expulsions, pointed out in his essay "Politics and the
English Language" that the expression "transfer of population"
was one of a number of euphemisms whose purpose was "largely the defense
of the indefensible." The philosopher Bertrand Russell acidly inquired:
"Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and
justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time
of peace?" A still more uncomfortable observation was made by the
left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who reasoned that "if every German
was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a
democratic country and not a fascist one with no free press or parliament, were
responsible individually as well as collectively" for what was being done
to noncombatants in the Allies' name.
That the expulsions would inevitably cause death and hardship on a
very large scale had been fully recognized by those who set them in motion. To
a considerable extent, they were counting on it. For the expelling
countries—especially Czechoslovakia and Poland—the use of terror against their
German-speaking populations was intended not simply as revenge for their wartime
victimization, but also as a means of triggering a mass stampede across the
borders and finally achieving their governments' prewar ambition to create
ethnically homogeneous nation-states. (Before 1939, less than two-thirds of
Poland's population, and only a slightly larger proportion of Czechoslovakia's,
consisted of gentile Poles, Czechs, or Slovaks.)
For the Soviets, who had "compensated" Poland for its
territorial losses to the Soviet Union in 1939 by moving its western border
more than 100 miles inside German territory, the clearance of the newly
"Polish" western lands and the dumping of their millions of displaced
inhabitants amid the ruins of the former Reich served Stalin's twin goals of
impeding Germany's postwar recovery and eliminating any possibility of a future
Polish-German rapprochement. The British viewed the widespread suffering that
would inevitably attend the expulsions as a salutary form of re-education of
the German population. "Everything that brings home to the Germans the
completeness and irrevocability of their defeat," Deputy Prime Minister
Clement Richard Attlee wrote in 1943, "is worthwhile in the end." And
the Americans, as Laurence Steinhardt, ambassador to Prague, recorded, hoped
that by displaying an "understanding" and cooperative attitude toward
the expelling countries' desire to be rid of their German populations, the
United States could demonstrate its sympathy for those countries' national
aspirations and prevent them from drifting into the Communist orbit.
The Allies, then, knowingly embarked on a course that, as the
British government was warned in 1944 by its own panel of experts, was
"bound to cause immense suffering and dislocation." That the
expulsions did not lead to the worst consequences that could be expected from
the chaotic cattle drive of millions of impoverished, embittered, and rootless
deportees into a war-devastated country that had nowhere to put them was due to
three main factors.
The first was the skill with which the postwar German chancellor,
Konrad Adenauer, drew the expellees into mainstream politics, defusing the
threat of a potentially radical and disruptive bloc. The second was the
readiness of most expellees—the occasionally crass or undiplomatic statements
of their leaders notwithstanding—to renounce the use or threat of force as a
means of redressing their grievances. The third, and by far the most important,
was the 30-year-long "economic miracle" that made possible the
housing, feeding, and employment of the largest homeless population with which
any industrial country has ever had to contend. (In East Germany, on the other
hand, the fact that the standard of living for the indigenous population was
already so low meant that the economic gap between it and the four million
arriving expellees was more easily bridged.)
The downside of "economic miracles," though, is that, as
their name suggests, they can't be relied upon to come along where and when
they are most needed. By extraordinary good fortune, the Allies avoided reaping
the harvest of their own recklessness. Nonetheless, the expulsions have cast a
long and baleful shadow over central and southeastern Europe, even to the
present day. Their disruptive demographic, economic, and even—as Eagle
Glassheim has pointed out—environmental consequences continue to be felt more
than 60 years later. The overnight transformation of some of the most
heterogeneous regions of the European continent into virtual ethnic monoliths
changed the trajectory of domestic politics in the expelling countries in
significant and unpredicted ways. Culturally, the effort to eradicate every
trace of hundreds of years of German presence and to write it out of national
and local histories produced among the new Polish and Czech settler communities
in the cleared areas what Gregor Thum has described as a state of
"amputated memory." As Thum shows in his groundbreaking study of
postwar Wroclaw—until 1945 and the removal of its entire population, the German
city of Breslau—the challenge of confronting their hometown's difficult past is
one that post-Communist Wroclawites have only recently taken up. In most other
parts of Central Europe, it has hardly even begun.
Still less so in the English-speaking world. It is important to
note that the expulsions are in no way to be compared to the genocidal Nazi
campaign that preceded them. But neither can the supreme atrocity of our time
become a yardstick by which gross abuses of human rights are allowed to go
unrecognized for what they are. Contradicting Allied rhetoric that asserted
that World War II had been fought above all to uphold the dignity and worth of
all people, the Germans included, thousands of Western officials, servicemen,
and technocrats took a full part in carrying out a program that, when
perpetrated by their wartime enemies, they did not hesitate to denounce as
contrary to all principles of humanity.
The degree of cognitive dissonance to which this led was
exemplified by the career of Colonel John Fye, chief U.S. liaison officer for
expulsion affairs to the Czechoslovak government. The operation he had helped
carry out, he acknowledged, drew in "innocent people who had never raised
so much as a word of protest against the Czechoslovak people." To
accomplish it, women and children had been thrown into detention facilities,
"many of which were little better than the ex-German concentration
camps." Yet these stirrings of unease did not prevent Fye from accepting a
decoration from the Prague government for what the official citation candidly
described as his valuable services "in expelling Germans from
Czechoslovakia."
Today we have come not much further than Fye did in acknowledging
the pivotal role played by the Allies in conceiving and executing an operation
that exceeded in both scale and lethality the violent breakup of Yugoslavia in
the 1990s. It is unnecessary to attribute this to any "taboo" or
"conspiracy of silence." Rather, what is denied is not the fact of
the expulsions themselves, but their significance.
Many European commentators have maintained that to draw attention
to them runs the risk of diminishing the horror that ought properly to be
reserved for the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, or giving rise to a
self-pitying "victim" mentality among today's generation of Germans,
for whom the war is an increasingly distant memory. Czechs, Poles, and citizens
of other expelling states fear the legal ramifications of a re-examination of
the means by which millions of erstwhile citizens of those countries were
deprived of their nationality, liberty, and property. To this day, the postwar
decrees expropriating and denationalizing Germans remain on the statute book of
the Czech Republic, and their legality has recently been reaffirmed by the
Czech constitutional court.
Some notable exceptions aside, like T. David Curp, Matthew Frank,
and David Gerlach, English-speaking historians—out of either understandable
sympathy for Germany's victims or reluctance to complicate the narrative of
what is still justifiably considered a "good war"—have also not been
overeager to delve into the history of a messy, complex, morally ambiguous, and
politically sensitive episode, in which few if any of those involved appear in
a creditable light.
By no means are all of these concerns unworthy ones. But neither
are they valid reasons for failing to engage seriously with an episode of such
obvious importance, and to integrate it within the broader narrative of modern
European history. For historians to write—and, still worse, to teach—as though
the expulsions had never taken place or, having occurred, are of no particular
significance to the societies affected by them, is both intellectually and
pedagogically unsustainable.
The fact that population transfers are currently making a comeback
on the scholarly and policy agenda also suggests that we should scrutinize with
particular care the most extensive experiment made with them to date. Despite
the gruesome history, enthusiasts continue to chase the mirage of
"humane" mass deportations as a means of resolving intractable ethnic
problems. Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, in a much-cited study, has advocated population
transfers as a valuable tool so long as they are "conducted in a humane,
well-organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by the
Allies in 1945-47." John Mearsheimer, Chaim Kaufmann, Michael Mann and
others have done likewise.
Few wars today, whether within or between states, do not feature
an attempt by one or both sides to create facts on the ground by forcibly
displacing minority populations perceived as alien to the national community.
And although the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has attempted
to restrain this tendency by prohibiting mass deportations, Elazar Barkan
maintains that such proscriptions are far from absolute, and that "today
there is no single code of international law that explicitly outlaws population
transfers either in terms of group or individual rights protections."
The expulsion of the ethnic Germans is thus of contemporary as
well as historical relevance. At present, though, the study of many vital
elements of this topic is still in its earliest stages. Innumerable
questions—about the archipelago of camps and detention centers, the precise
number and location of which are still undetermined; the sexual victimization
of female expellees, which was on a scale to rival the mass rapes perpetrated
by Red Army soldiers in occupied Germany; the full part played by the Soviet
and U.S. governments in planning and executing the expulsions—remain to be
fully answered. At a moment when the surviving expellees are passing away and
many, though far from all, of the relevant archives have been opened, the time
has come for this painful but pivotal chapter in Europe's recent history to
receive at last the scholarly attention it deserves.
R.M. Douglas is an associate professor of history at Colgate
University. This essay is adapted from his new book, published by Yale
University Press, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second
World War.
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