In the Wake of World War
II: The European Atrocity You Never Heard About
by Prof. R.M.
Douglas
Global Research, June 29, 2012
In the largest episode of forced migration in history, millions of
German-speaking civilians were sent to Germany from Czechoslovakia and
other European countries after World War II by order of the United States,
Britain, and the Soviet Union.
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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