The situation in the easternmost provinces of Germany in 1944–5 was not so different, for the process of expulsion was likewise double. Polish-speaking people were forced to leave the area occupied by the Soviets in 1939 and now reoccupied in 1944, and, like the Greek Muslims and Anatolian Greeks, they were expected to move into the villages, towns and farms in which the ‘enemy’ had once lived.
Anatolian Greeks – who often spoke little Greek or, if they did, spoke it with almost incomprehensible provincial accents – had been offered homes in formerly Muslim areas in Greece, while Greek-speaking Cretan Muslims were moved by the Turkish authorities into formerly Christian Greek homes in Smyrna or Ayvalik. A quarter of a century later, the dispossessed eastern Poles were ordered to settle in formerly German areas. Meanwhile, the expelled Germans, on the heels of the terror and the rape and the violence, were to trek west and be taken in by their compatriots within what was left of Germany.
The truth about the so-called ‘population exchange’ carried out under the Treaty of Lausanne was, when seen from the ground by those affected, savage and sordid, but it was seen by contemporaries as a ‘successful’ solution to the problem. And it was sanctioned by the international community.
So, when it came in the last years of the war to similar suggestions regarding the fate of Germany and the population of its easternmost provinces, given Stalin’s insistence on holding on to eastern Poland, Lausanne was eagerly seized upon as a ‘respectable’ example of how the seizure of a quarter of Germany’s territory and the rendering of around ten million of the country’s pre-war population homeless could be effected while retaining some façade of legitimacy.
By February 1945, the great historic cities of eastern Germany were all in Russian hands, or – in the case of Königsberg (pre-war population 300,000 inhabitants) and Breslau (pre-war 650,000) – under siege. Surviving civilians and soldiers were forced into suicidal defensive fighting by fanatical Gauleiters and last-ditch generals.
In the case of the undoubtedly heroic defence of Königsberg, there was some excuse. Just as the Greeks and other Christians had once been trapped in the port of Smyrna, the quaysides of the besieged East Prussian capital were thronged with Germans waiting for a boat – any boat – to carry them westward across the wintry and treacherous Baltic Sea to territory still under German control.
Tens of thousands of refugees were safely evacuated from the port of Königsberg, in a fleet of over a thousand vessels, merchant and military – no less than an East Prussian Dunkirk. The numbers saved from the shrinking area of the Baltic coast in German hands ran after January 1945 into hundreds of thousands. It was an astonishing achievement, despite the sinking by a Soviet submarine of the heavily overloaded converted cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff (named after a Swiss Nazi leader assassinated in 1936). The Gustloff catastrophe resulted in the deaths of 8,000 human beings, mostly refugees – the greatest single mass drowning in maritime history.25
By contrast, the stubborn defence of Breslau – historic, landlocked, clearly doomed – tied up a few Soviet regiments but was otherwise entirely pointless. This futile resistance, made worse by the authorities’ refusal to allow a proper civilian evacuation until it was too late, was led by the fanatical and overbearing Gauleiter Karl Hanke. Still only forty-two, Hanke was former Under-Secretary at the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and rumoured lover of Goebbels’ wife, Magda.26
Since the end of March, boys as young as ten and girls of twelve, and even pregnant women, had been conscripted by the Nazi die-hards into labour gangs that often worked under fire. Bunkers and barricades were constructed from dynamited buildings, whole streets razed to provide free-fire zones. Civilian casualty rates were appalling, especially during the forced construction of a second airfield in March, in the centre of the city, to enable it to be supplied from the air. Entire familiar Breslau streets and landmark buildings were demolished by dynamite and fire to create the space between the Kaiser and Fürsten Bridges from which an air link could be re-established. Figures as high as 13,000 dead have been claimed for just this one project, which in any case resulted in a landing strip which was eventually used by no more than a handful of aircraft.27
Despite freezing weather, which in itself caused the deaths of thousands, vicious house-to-house fighting comparable to the horrors of Stalingrad, and heavy bombing by the Soviet air force, some German units in Breslau held out until the last days of the war.
Gauleiter Hanke, meanwhile, had been appointed Reichsführer SS at the end of April in succession to the disgraced Himmler. He disappeared from Breslau in a light aircraft – ironically one of the few planes to lift off from that same, tragically underused second airfield – three days before the war ended. He may have hoped to evade retribution. If this was true, his hopes were in vain, for he ended his life a little over a month later in Czech captivity, disguised as an ordinary SS soldier, by various accounts shot while trying to escape or beaten to death.28
There were fanatics among those who fled before the Russians as well as among those who resisted them, but the vast majority of fugitive Germans, no matter how enthusiastic they may have felt about the Nazi regime in earlier times, were by the spring of 1945 concerned with only one thing: survival.
Not all of those in the doomed provinces of eastern Germany were strong enough, physically or mentally, to undertake the trek west. One young Wehrmacht soldier, home in Breslau on convalescent leave in mid-January, two days before the evacuation of civilians began, found his family in a hopeless state.
Many of the city’s civilians had already left, despite the authorities’ threats. Others had succumbed to despair. The young soldier, Ulrich Frodien, only eighteen years old, entered the flat of an elderly neighbour in their apartment block to find the bodies of the man and his housekeeper hanging side by side in a grim suicide pact. They would be followed by many others. Towards the end of the coming siege, by one local priest’s estimate suicides would be running at 120 per day.29
Frodien’s mother and sisters had permits to leave, but he and his father, a former First World War military surgeon, had been ordered to stay in the city. The two of them inspected a street barricade being built by the city’s would-be defenders and decided that it would take the approaching Soviet tanks fifteen minutes to demolish it – ‘fourteen minutes for the tank crew to stop laughing, and one minute to brush it aside’.30 They also saw roaming patrols of Wehrmacht field police, who had orders to shoot looters and suspected deserters – the latter category one into which Ulrich, as one of the walking wounded, might conceivably, though wrongly, have been placed.
So, Breslau was not a safe place for males between school and pensionable age to be. As a consequence, he and his father hit on a wild escape plan, and carried it out. Ulrich’s father wore his old First World War surgeon’s uniform, complete with medals, and Ulrich festooned himself with serious-looking, stained bandages. Once they had left the apartment for the main station, the young man was to refer to his father as ‘Herr Hauptmann’ and to behave accordingly.
Even at eighteen degrees below freezing, Breslau’s Hauptbahnhof was besieged by would-be refugees and defended by a cordon of armed soldiers. They found that the only journey scheduled was that of a hospital train. Without further ado, Ulrich’s father put himself at the head of a line of walking wounded, marched them past the point where his son was standing, and growled at him: ‘Private! Take your bag! By the right, quick march!’ Ulrich joined the column as his impressively commanding father led them through the military cordon, waving a meaningless ‘paper’ under the soldiers’ noses as he did so, and on to the hospital train.
The train was overcrowded, malodorous, filled with sick and dying men, and it was hours before it actually left, but soon Ulrich and his father were on their way to the relative safety of Prague, which would remain under German control until the very last days of the war.
As they left, Ulrich’s father had said to him: ‘Take a look:
you’ll never see your homeland again.’ He was wrong. Ulrich would revisit years later as a grown man. But one thing was certainly true. He would never see Breslau again as a German city.
Herr Frodien senior had for a long time been an enthusiastic Nazi. His disillusionment had been a later development, though no less heartfelt for that.
Many citizens of Breslau stayed until the bitter end, which came on 6 May 1945, at six o’clock in the evening, when the last German commandant formally surrendered his forces and what was left of the so-called ‘fortress city’ to the not-so-tender mercies of the Red Army. Rape and pillage proceeded apace. After 7 May much of the remaining architectural heritage of the city centre was destroyed deliberately by fire (and later wrongly blamed on the siege), with the university library and the city museum among the priceless cultural assets to go up in flames. Units of the victorious Soviet forces fought vicious battles against each other for control of the provisions stores on the Sternstrasse.31
By the official end of the war on 8 May, Breslau was a chaotic collection of ruins. But one little-noticed event that took place the next day would turn out to be even more ominous for its remaining German citizens, exhausted, disillusioned and utterly war weary though they might be. A group of thirteen Polish representatives of the as-yet-unrecognised Russian-sponsored government arrived in the city and took possession of one of the undamaged houses in the city centre. They were soon joined by further officials, including representatives of the new Soviet-sponsored secret police force, the Office of Public Security.
At the end of the war, the only Poles in the city had been some forced labourers and servants. This soon began to change. In June the first Polish child was born in Breslau, the first Polish couple married under Polish law and the first Polish newspaper was published. Even before the Allies had met to decide on the city’s final fate, the nascent Polish post-war government had begun to assert a control to which, as yet, it had absolutely no right under international law.
So confused was the situation, however, that many Germans actually returned to their native Breslau in the weeks after the peace. After all, the situation, though chaotic and dangerous, with the ever-growing risk of starvation, was no worse than elsewhere in occupied Germany, especially east of the Elbe, where the Soviets held sway. By the early summer of 1945 there were, despite initial voluntary flights and expulsions of Germans, still around 150,000 left in the city.
Most people found it hard to believe that such a major city of the Reich, in which the German language and culture had been dominant since the Middle Ages, and where by the nineteenth century Poles represented a very small minority, could simply be emptied of its people. It was assumed among those who had already fled that at some point soon, when the war was over and things had settled down, they would be able to return and try to pick up the pieces of their former lives. Such had been the case in many wars, however savage, over many centuries. But the Second World War had been a war unlike any other, right from the start – when Germany had held the whip hand and had broken all the usual conventions of conquest – and now that the Reich was on its knees, the Allies would likewise throw away the rule book when it came to the territorial and human consequences of victory.
It was also true that, as the war ended, many of the plans being discussed by the soon-to-be-victorious Allies were framed so as to leave the eastern branch of the Neisse River, which ran through Breslau, as the new border. This meant that much of Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia would be lost, but historic Breslau would remain German, with only the eastern suburbs in Polish hands.
However, all this changed at the Potsdam Conference in July/August 1945.
The great post-war conference of the Allies might well have taken place in the city of Berlin – such a venue would, after all, have been satisfyingly symbolic – except that, such was the scale of destruction wrought on the German capital, no buildings existed capable of comfortably housing the Allied statesmen, their advisers and entourages.
The officials of the Soviet Commissariat for State Security (NKVD) and of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, jointly charged with organising the congress-cum-victory-jamboree, therefore moved their field of choice into Berlin’s relatively undamaged south-western suburbs, and finally settled upon Potsdam. More precisely, they found a collection of luxury villas near the famous UFA film studios at Babelsberg, on the town’s outskirts (mostly in the possession of German movie luminaries) that could be requisitioned for the use of the delegations. A former palace of Germany’s last crown prince, the Cecilienhof, situated along with several other royal residences in the idyllic 250-acre Neuer Garten (New Garden), close to the shores of the Jungfernsee, was in fit condition to be used for the conference proceedings.32
Potsdam had been the residence of the Prussian kings and later of those Prussian kings who were also German emperors – its relation to Berlin was rather as Versailles is to Paris. It contained many grand and beautiful buildings, including Frederick the Great’s pleasure dome, Sans-Souci. However, it had not survived the war totally unscathed. In one of the last major air attacks of the war, on the night of 14–15 April 1945, 500 Lancasters of RAF Bomber Command, supposedly targeting troop concentrations and the railway station, had devastated the previously untouched historic town centre. They also killed, by the most reliable estimates, almost 1,800 civilians.33
Less than two weeks later, Potsdam was captured by the Red Army. A further 1,200 deaths and large amounts of artillery damage further wrecked the fabric of the town. Except for the Babelsberg villas, near the film studio, and the Crown Prince’s palace. The palace was modern and comfortable – a 176-room mock-Tudor mansion built between 1913 and 1917, supposedly modelled on a large English country house near Liverpool. The Crown Prince and his wife, the former Princess Cecilie of Mecklenburg, after whom the house was named, had lived there until February 1945. The Cecilienhof remained more or less as they had left it.
It was there, on 17 July, that the leaders of the three victorious nations (France was not invited) settled around a large round table supplied by the state-owned Lux furniture concern of Moscow, to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on the post-war settlement.
President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill had driven to the Cecilienhof through Berlin’s ruins, which in the past weeks had been festooned by the Soviets with propaganda hoardings, including huge billboard posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin – and, of course, Stalin. The thoroughfares were swarming with Soviet soldiery. Although detachments of British and American troops had belatedly been permitted to take up their quarters in the capital ten days or so earlier, as had been agreed at Yalta, there could be no doubt who was in charge in Berlin.
What was decided here, over the following sixteen days, was not good news for Germany in general, and it was even worse news for those Germans still clinging on to their homes in the country’s eastern provinces. The leaders agreed on the ‘Five Ds’ (demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation, decentralisation and decartelisation), which would, it was planned, for ever divest Germany of her potential for aggressive war. They agreed on the destruction of German war industries. They agreed, too, on reparations, including, in recognition of Russia’s special suffering at German hands, the considerable percentages of plant and production that the Soviet Union was to receive from both its own zone and the zones controlled by the Western Allies. But above all, from the point of view of the German expellees, they discussed the formalisation of Germany’s loss of around 25 per cent of its territory – from which its millions of long-established inhabitants would be forcibly evicted.
Churchill had begun the negotiations insisting that these ancient German areas should not be given to the Poles. His own British people, he insisted, would be ‘shocked’ by such a huge movement of population, which was ‘more than I could defend’:
Compensation should bear some relation to loss. It would do Poland no good to acquire so much extra territory. If the Germans had run away from it
they should be allowed to go back. The Poles had no right to risk a catastrophe in feeding Germany. We did not want to be left with a vast German population who were cut off from their sources of food. The Ruhr was in our zone, and if enough food could not be found for the inhabitants, we would have conditions like the German concentration camps.34
Perhaps inevitably, Churchill’s words proved empty. Within days, the Conservative Party was officially declared the loser in the British general election and Churchill was forced to break off the conference and fly home to present his resignation. His successor, Labour leader Clement Attlee, and his new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, took Churchill’s and Eden’s places on 28 July, but had little time to make their presence felt.
The Western Allies, and especially America, should perhaps have been able to get more of their way at Potsdam than they did. On 25 July, the day before Churchill left the conference, President Truman had informed Stalin of the USA’s possession of a ‘new weapon of unusually destructive force’ – the atomic bomb. Stalin reacted with cool indifference (he already knew about it from his spies).
The fact was, however, that on the last day of the month the Americans, though at first they had supported Churchill’s view, eventually settled for a border on the western Neisse, meaning that Breslau would go to Poland. The British, beset by other pressing concerns, including defending their position in the Ruhr, did not contest this at the time.35 The expulsion of the Germans who lived in the areas given over to ‘Polish administration’, like the other ‘transfers of population’, was to happen, in theory, over a period up to August 1946, ‘in a humane and orderly fashion’.36
Since vanishingly little about the occupation of what had been eastern Germany had so far been ‘humane and orderly’, few would have trusted that matters would be any different in future. And they would have been right.
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