The Ruling Elite

by Deanna Spingola

  On January 19, they began the first evacuation of 4.7 million people, mostly the elderly, women and children from Upper Silesia. They had already evacuated about eighty-five percent of the Germans from Lower Silesian by way of the Oder River and from there to Saxony or Bohemia. In February, the Soviets arrived in Breslau, but by then it was almost too late and too cold to evacuate. In early March 1945, with frigid temperatures, ice and snowstorms, 18,000 people froze to death.

  On January 23, the Soviet advance had obstructed the route between East Prussia and the western territories. The only passable means of escape was to cross the frozen Vistula Lagoon to get to the waiting ships in the harbors of Gdansk or Gdynia. Operation Hannibal was a naval project involving the sea evacuation of German troops and civilians from Courland, East Prussia, and the Polish Corridor. Roughly, 450,000 Germans fled from East Prussia over the frozen lagoon and then fled to the Baltic port cities, to Germany and to Denmark. The Danes had established post-war internment camps. The pre-war German population totaled 2,490,000, out of which about 500,000 perished during the war, including 311,000 civilians who died trying to escape during the war and in the postwar expulsion. The Allies sunk one of these ships drowning 14,000 people. Almost 2.2 million people survived in this evacuation.

  Local officials expelled between six and 8.35 million Germans from the territory east of the Oder-Neisse line before the Soviets seized the region. On January 30, a Soviet Navy submarine, commanded by Alexander Marinesko, torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea, on its maiden voyage; it sunk in less than forty-five minutes, with nearly 8,000 Germans aboard, mostly women and children escaping from the advancing Soviet Army. It was the biggest maritime disaster of all time with thousands more victims that the Titanic. 2035 The attack killed at least 6,000 civilians and military personnel fleeing from East Prussia. German ships arrived quickly and were able to rescue about 1,000 survivors from the frigid waters. The Soviets and the Allies had already agreed that they would take East Prussia from Germany and give it to the Soviet Union at the war’s end. Before June 1, about 400,000 German refugees crossed over the Oder and Neisse rivers heading eastward, before the Soviet and Polish communist authorities closed the river crossings. Another 800,000 refugees entered Silesia from Czechoslovakia.

  Under Operation Hannibal, officials evacuated many soldiers and civilians from the Baltic coast via ships. On February 4, 1945, Hitler issued another evacuation order. Between January 23, and May 5, as many at 250,000 Germans left East Prussia, Pomerania, and the Baltic states and fled to German-occupied Denmark. At war’s end, five percent of Denmark’s population was composed of German refugees, mainly women, the elderly and children, residing in numerous military-guarded camps throughout Denmark, supposedly where they would be safe and nourished. Beginning in March, at least 10,000 vulnerable, innocent German children under the age of five perished out of a total of 13,492 German refugees. The last refugees fled by February 15, 1949. The war in Europe had ended with Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945. 2036

  On July 5, 1946, before an American tribunal in Neu Ulm, the former Chief of Staff of the German Fourth Army in East Prussia, Major General Erich Dethleffsen, interned by the British on May 23, 1945, would state, “When in October, 1944, Russian units temporarily… broke through German defences and advanced as far as Nemmersdorf, they tortured the civilians in many villages south of Gumbinnen, specifically they nailed some of them on barn doors and shot many others. A large number of women were raped. The Russian soldiers also shot some fifty French prisoners of war. The affected villages were re-occupied by German forces within forty-eight hours.” 2037

  Millions of Germans suffered and died because of the Allies’ brutal deportation policy, many of whom were women, children and the elderly. FDR, Churchill and Stalin mandated expulsions, but they failed to make plans for how they were going to accomplish them, but left them up to the expelling countries. On the evening of May 30, 1945, in Czechoslovakia during the purification expulsion of about 25,000 Germans from Brünn, young revolutionaries went through the streets just prior to 9 pm telling the German citizens to appear outside their door at 9 pm with one piece of luggage each. Mothers had about ten minutes to prepare their families, pack and relinquish all their remaining belongings, never to return. Guards ordered citizens to surrender all of their jewelry, watches, furs and money. Since politicians would not allow them into Austria, guards sent them into a field which they soon turned into a concentration camp where many of them died as typhus erupted. 2038

  The few people who the authorities allowed to stay in their homes suffered the least but were still unable to acquire adequate food. The expellees experienced the horrors of the internment camps where sadism was prevalent and inmates often starved to death. At Svidnik, in Czechoslovakia, they forced inmates to clear mines, an incredibly dangerous activity for unskilled, unprotected civilians. They incarcerated German civilians primarily because of their nationality. They fared worse in the camps awaiting expulsion than those who survived the hazardous trek to Germany. 2039

  The Allies created the expulsions as part of a punitive policy designed to ethnically reconfigure postwar Europe and to function as ethnic cleansing. The allies blamed the war on Germany and, as part of their retribution, Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill, the real warmongers, agreed to shift Poland’s border west. Then they suggested that the Polish authorities expel the remaining German population. They assured the potential leaders of Poland and Czechoslovakia, then occupied by Germany, of their support in the latter stages of the war.

  Post-war, the Allies with their Berlin Declaration, of June 5, 1945, established their supreme authority over Germany and a Council of Foreign Ministers to facilitate peace treaties for Bulgaria, Finland, Hungary and Romania to enable them to join the UN. At the Potsdam Conference, July 17 to August 2, 1945, they adopted the Protocol of the Proceedings. The signatories included Stalin, Harry S. Truman, and the new British Prime Minister Clement Attlee. The Provisional Government of the French Republic signed the agreement on August 4. On July 30, they created the Allied Control Council (ACC) in Berlin to execute the following: de-Nazification, demilitarization, democratization, decentralization and disassemblement.

  Because of the border changes, the Allies recognized that it was necessary to transfer German populations remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary to Germany. These transfers, they agreed, should take place in an orderly and humane manner in cooperation with the Allied Control Council in Germany determining “the equitable distribution of these Germans among the several zones of occupation.” The ACC, because of the huge influx of Germans, would coordinate the transfers with the Czechoslovakian Government, the Polish Provisional Government and the ACC in Hungary who were “to suspend further expulsions” until further directions. 2040

  The evacuation of German nationals to the west took place in three stages (1) the spontaneous flight as a result of the advancing Red Army—mid-1944-early 1945; (2) the disorderly expulsion following Germany’s defeat; (3) the organized expulsion subsequent to the Potsdam Agreement, issued on August 2, 1945.

  The Potsdam Agreement was their plan for military occupation and retributive restructuring of Germany to its pre-war 1937 borders. The agreement also addressed the punitive prosecution of war criminals, specifically just those from Germany. The Allies demanded the reduction or destruction of all civilian heavy-industry with war-potential and the restructuring of the German economy with a focus on agriculture and light-industry. The agreement did not constitute a peace treaty. The Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, dated September 12, 1990, superseded the Potsdam Agreement.

  The Potsdam Agreement included the Soviet’s reparation claims from their occupation zone in Germany. The Allies agreed to transfer ten percent of the unessential industrial capacity of the western zones to the Soviet Union within two years. They decided to sink all but thirty of the submarines in the German Navy and divi
de the ships in the Merchant Marine equally between the three powers who would allocate some of the ships to the other Allies. America and Britain agreed to transfer the city of Konigsberg and the adjacent area to the Soviet Union, which they would then call the Kaliningrad Oblast. The three powers would meet in London to devise what would become known as the London Charter based on the Moscow Declaration, signed in Moscow on October 30, 1943. That declaration, signed by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, included a Statement on Atrocities.

  The Soviets occupied most of Eastern and Central Europe, including areas where Germans had resided for several generations. The Allies referred to any expulsions occurring before the formal agreement as “wild” expulsions, which were under the direction of military and civilian officials in Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia and Poland in early to mid-summer of 1945. In Yugoslavia, the authorities transformed German villages into detention camps in which at least 50,000 individuals died. The Potsdam Declaration ordered the temporary termination of “wild” expulsions as the occupying powers within Germany could not handle the influx of desperate people. However, Poland and other eastern territories continued the deportations.

  Following Potsdam, officials in the Soviet-controlled European countries expelled ethnic Germans, seized their land and property, and either nationalized it or distributed it to others. One of the most massive migrations of ethnic Germans was from Sudetenland, which post-war became part of Poland when the Allies simply shifted Poland’s borders much further west to the Oder-Neisse line, to within fifty miles of Berlin. The Soviets then deported 2,208,000 Poles from eastern Poland, the part that the USSR had annexed and resettled 1,652,000 of these Poles in the former German lands that the Allies allotted to Poland. Polish officials deported 518,000 of the 700,000 ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians still residing in Poland to the USSR and resettled the remaining 150,000 to former German lands in Operation Vistula.

  While they allowed the deportees to take a small piece of luggage, criminals exploited the situation and stole most of the deportee’s valuables. Guards shot people who attempted to conceal them. They established numerous camps for the deportees who they prohibited from going into Germany. On July 27, 1945, a boat arrived at the West Port of Berlin containing 300 children, aged two to fourteen years, transported from an orphanage in Pomerania. Blank-eyed children were lying in the bottom of the boat, motionless, and with swollen feet and knees, evidence of long-term, advanced starvation. 2041

  They transferred many of the deportees in cattle trucks, crowded boxcars or they walked. When they arrived in Germany, they had no money, no food, and were starving. Groups of 1,000 to 5,000 people walked hundreds of miles and would often lose half of the individuals from disease or starvation. Graves dotted the sides of the roads. A train arrived in Berlin on August 31, 1945 after leaving Danzig on August 24 with 325 patients and orphans from the Marien Hospital and the Orphanage in Weidlergasse, packed into five cattle cars, unaccompanied by doctors or nurses. They had no medicine, only twenty potatoes each and two pieces of bread for each orphan for the entire trip and no food for the patients. The train stopped periodically so the occupants could forage for something to eat. Only sixty-five people arrived at the destination. Presumably, guards threw those who perished while en route off of the train. Of the sixty-five who survived the trip, nine died within a short time. 2042

  On February 5, 1946, Senator Homer Capehart said, “Since the end of the war about 3,000,000 people, mostly women and children and over-aged men, have been killed in Eastern Germany and south-western Europe; about 15,000,000 people have been deported or had to flee from their homesteads and are on the road. About 20% of these people, over 3,000,000 have perished. About 4,000,000 men and women have been deported to Eastern Europe as slaves… it seems that the elimination of the German population of Eastern Europe, at least 15,000,000 people, was planned in accordance with decisions made at Yalta. Churchill had said to Mikolakczyk when the latter protested during the negotiations at Moscow against forcing Poland to incorporate eastern Germany, ‘Don’t mind the five or more million Germans. Stalin will see to them. You will have no trouble with them; they will cease to exist.’” 2043 The authorities completed the deportations in 1950. Experts estimate that there were between 700,000 and 2.7 million people of German descent remaining in Eastern Europe in 1950.

  According to the census and official records from Ambassador Robert Murphy, between October 1946 (the hunger year), and September 1950, in the four allied-occupied zones, about 5.7 million German civilians perished. However, officials initially under reported these deaths. Most of the deaths were due to malnutrition and starvation. World food production during this time had returned to ninety-seven percent of its prewar capacity. However, the Allies did not allow charitable donations and their policies eliminated all opportunities to earn a living. The majority of the deaths were women and children, the most vulnerable in any society. At least 1.4 million, of the 5.7 million, were POWs who failed to return home from the Allies’ POW encampments. 2044

  There were about 1,200 Polish concentration camps. At Potulitz, guards took frightened and hungry children away from their parents and placed them in separate children’s barracks where the mortality rate was incredibly high. Dr. Martha Kent, an inmate, stated that possibly as many as two-thirds of the children starved to death (1945-1947). At least fifty German women in one barracks gave birth. Within a few weeks, forty-six of those infants perished due to a deliberate starvation policy at Potulitz. Most of those babies were the result of rape by the Soviets and the Poles. Potulitz’s capacity was about 37,000 people (1945-1949). The death rates were 100 times as high as the average Polish death rate. In 1945, 12,000 deportees died at Potulitz; more deportees quickly replaced them. 2045

  Camp Lamsdorf, in Upper Silesia, held 8,064 Germans who they starved, mistreated, and forced to labor. Inmates suffered from diseases caused by malnutrition and overcrowding. Out of the total number of inmates, 6,488 people died, including 628 children. By mid-1947, many of the camps had closed as they had expelled most of the survivors to Germany. 2046

  Author James Bacque gives the following death totals as a result of evaluating U.S. Government records, the administration of Konrad Adenauer, census records and other available records:

  MinimumMaximum

  Expellees (1945-1950)2,100,0006,000,000

  Prisoners (1941-1950)1,500,0002,000,000

  Residents (1946-1950)5,700,0005,700,000

  Totals9,300,00013,700,000 2047

  Soviet leaders continued to exhort and influence their soldiers to take personal revenge and punitive actions. They issued suggestions and instructions in the soldiers’ newspapers and broadcasts, regarding their occupation of areas where Germans lived, generating countless acts of rape and violation of women and girls. The German population viewed this as their worst degradation. Because politicians initially failed to manage the expulsion, habitual insecurity and oppression reigned. Czechs also participated in the atrocities, raping and looting, against the Germans. Often the Czechs initiated the acts committed by the Soviet troops, especially in the Eastern Sudetenland and other German settlements within Czech territory. 2048

  The women in the streams of refugees en route to Germany had little help or protection. The women and girls in internment camps, guarded by Czechs, were at the mercy of the Soviets. The Czech guards, for the most part, allowed and even encouraged the Soviets to carry out their vile actions. There were some Czech camp commandants and guards who attempted to protect the female inmates. During this horrible episode in European history, there was almost a kind of suicide psychosis amongst the German population. Suicides numbered into the hundreds. Even families, fearing atrocities, especially the rape of their wives and daughters, preferred death. The general population, worrying about potential expulsion, experienced constant anxiety and fear. 2049 Author Louis Marschalko claims that 600,000 Germans perished in the camps in Czechoslo
vakia. 2050

  The Soviets systematically rounded-up and deported German citizens to Russia for forced labor. This was especially the situation in the territories east of Oder and Neisse, in Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Officials arrested many of the captive Germans and took them to Auschwitz, to await transportation to Russia. A huge number of those who went to the gulag died from exposure, deprivation and from the subhuman working conditions. Some survivors actually returned years later to their homes and families if they could locate them after their expulsion. 2051

  Alfred M. de Zayas wrote, “If the conscience of men ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all who committed or connived at them… The Germans were expelled, not just with an absence of over-nice considerations, but with the very maximum of brutality.” 2052

  The Allies perpetrated one of the worst forced mass relocations of the 20th century against Europe’s German population. During this mass exodus, thousands were robbed, raped, killed and ultimately, many starved to death. Over 15,000,000 Germans had lived in Eastern and Central Europe, some families for as long as 700 years. After World War II, because of the territorial changes devised at Potsdam, officials promptly deported these citizens, allowing others to quickly requisition their homes, land and personal belongings without any kind of compensation to the owners. 2053 However, the origin of this huge evacuation began a few decades earlier as a result of the calculating decisions made by the victors after World War I.