ORDERLY AND HUMANE
ORDERLY AND HUMANE
The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War
R. M. Douglas
Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2012 by. R. M. Douglas.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Douglas, R. M., 1963–
Orderly and humane : the expulsion of the Germans after
the Second World War / R. M. Douglas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16660-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Population transfers—
Germans—History—20th century. 2. Forced migration—Czech Republic—
History—20th century. 3. Germans—Czech Republic—Sudentenland—
History—20th century. 4. Czechoslovakia—Politics and government—1945–1992.
5. Czechoslovakia—Ethnic relations—History—20th century. 6. World War,
1939–1945—Forced repatriation. I. Title.
D820.P72G426 2012
940.53’14508931—dc23
2011045449
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my beloved wife, Elizabeth
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
ONE The Planner
TWO The Volksdeutsche in Wartime
THREE The Scheme
FOUR The “Wild Expulsions”
FIVE The Camps
SIX The “Organized Expulsions”
SEVEN The Numbers Game
EIGHT The Children
NINE The Wild West
TEN The International Reaction
ELEVEN The Resettlement
TWELVE The Law
THIRTEEN Meaning and Memory
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Considerations of space preclude me from acknowledging more than a handful of the many people who assisted me in the course of a research project that consumed more years than I would have dared to contemplate when commencing it. That this book exists at all is due to three people without whom it certainly would never have seen the light of day. Jane Pinchin, Colgate University’s president, was the person whose justifiable impatience with my endlessly reiterated complaints that a work of this kind did not exist led her to insist that I cease grousing and do something about it myself. And the assurance of Sam Stoloff, my magnificent agent at Frances Goldin Literary Agency, that it would find its way into print at a time when I despaired of its ever attracting the attention of anyone other than my family and increasingly put-upon circle of friends—a promise on which he then proceeded in the face of considerable obstacles to make good—boosted my morale at a time when it was running at a low ebb. Above all my wife Elizabeth, my partner in this academic enterprise and much more than that in life, knows how much the appearance of this book owes to her. Its dedication to her is an inadequate form of recompense.
I should also like to express my thanks to some of those who went far out of their way to assist me without thought of reciprocation. I received especially invaluable assistance from Martina Ĉermáková and Michaela (Misha) Raisová of Charles University in Prague, and from Karolina Papros of the University of Warsaw. The incomparable Fabrizio Bensi and Daniele Palmieri of the Archives du Comité International de la Croix Rouge in Geneva were unfailingly helpful, as was Fania Khan Mohammad of the CICR Library. Mrs. Vlasta Měšťánkova of the National Archives of the Czech Republic provided me with the same unstinting and expert assistance as she does to all who work in this field; and Colonel Josef Žikeš and his staff at the Military Central Archives in Prague exerted themselves mightily in tracking down relevant material. So too did Amy K. Schmidt, the Volksdeutsche specialist at the National Archives and Records Administration in the United States, as well as Paola Casini and Romain Ledauphin of the United Nations Archives, New York City. My former Colgate colleagues Dr. Jim Bjork (now of King’s College, London) and Prof. Jonathan Wiesen (Southern Illinois University) read parts of the manuscript in draft, as did Prof. Timothy Waters of the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University; Dr. Kevin White of the University of Portsmouth; Prof. Rob Nemes of Colgate; and Mic Moroney of Dublin. I am deeply grateful to all of them for their expertise, advice, and guidance. I would also like to mention my particular appreciation of the contribution made by Gavin Lewis, whose detailed knowledge and keen editorial skills rescued me from an embarrassing number of mistakes and greatly improved the final product. Lastly, the Colgate University Research Council, through whom I obtained a Mellon Sabbatical Improvement Grant in 2007, ensured that the financial resources necessary to the completion of the book would be forthcoming. I stand indebted to them all, as well as to many others not mentioned here.
Abbreviations
AAN
Central Archives of Modern Records, Warsaw
ACC
Allied Control Council
ACC (H)
Allied Control Commission (Hungary)
BAK
Bundesarchiv Koblenz
CAB
Cabinet records (Great Britain), in PRO
CAME
Committee Against Mass Expulsions (United States)
CCG (BE)
Control Commission for Germany (British Element)
CICR
Comité International de la Croix Rouge et du Croissant Rouge; Archives du CICR, Geneva
COGA
Control Office for Germany and Austria
CRX
Combined Repatriation Executive
FO
Foreign Office records (Great Britain), in PRO
FRUS
U.S. State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States series
HS
Special Operations Executive records (Great Britain), in PRO
IRO
International Refugee Organization
KPD
Communist Party of Germany
LAB
Ministry of Labour records (Great Britain), PRO
MNO
Ministry of National Defense (Czechoslovakia); MNO records, in VÚA
MZO
Ministry for the Recovered Territories (Poland); MZO records, in AAN
MV-NR
Ministry of the Interior (Czechoslovakia), New Registers, in NAČR
NAČR
National Archives of the Czech Republic, Prague
NARA
National Archives and Records Agency, College Park, Maryland
OMG
/>
Office of Military Government
OMGB
Office of Military Government, Bavaria
OMGUS
U.S. Office of Military Government for Germany
PREM
Prime Minister’s Private Office records (Great Britain), in PRO
PRO
Public Record Office (Great Britain), Kew, UK
PUR
State Repatriation Office (Poland); PUR records, in AAN
PW & DP
Prisoners of War and Displaced Persons Division
RKFDV
Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom
SdP
Sudeten German Party
SNB
Committee of National Security (Czechoslovak secret police)
SOA, Plzeň
State District Archives, Plzeň, Czech Republic
UB
Office of Security (Polish secret police)
UNHCR
Archives of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Geneva
UNRRA
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration
ÚPV
Office of the Prime Minister (Czechoslovakia) records, in NAČR
ÚPV-T
Office of the Prime Minister (Czechoslovakia), confidential records, in NAČR
VoMi
Nazi German Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (Ethnic German Liaison Agency)
VÚA
Military Central Archives, Prague
INTRODUCTION
Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer—and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples—in human history. With the assistance of the British, Soviet, and U.S. governments, millions of German-speaking civilians living in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the parts of eastern Germany assigned to Poland were driven out of their homes and deposited amid the ruins of the Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. Millions more, who had fled the advancing Red Army in the final months of the war, were prevented from returning to their places of origin, and became lifelong exiles. Others again were forcibly removed from Yugoslavia and Romania, although the Allies had never sanctioned deportations from those countries. Altogether, the expulsion operation permanently displaced at least 12 million people, and perhaps as many as 14 million. Most of these were women and children under the age of sixteen; the smallest cohort of those affected were adult males. These expulsions were accomplished with and accompanied by great violence. Tens and possibly hundreds of thousands lost their lives through ill-treatment, starvation, and disease while detained in camps before their departure—often, like Auschwitz I, the same concentration camps used by the Germans during the Second World War. Many more perished on expulsion trains, locked in freight wagons without food, water, or heating during journeys to Germany that sometimes took weeks; or died by the roadside while being driven on foot to the borders. The death rate continued to mount in Germany itself, as homeless expellees succumbed to hypothermia, malnutrition, and other effects of their ordeal. Calculating the scale of the mortality remains a source of great controversy today, but estimates of 500,000 deaths at the lower end of the spectrum, and as many as 1.5 million at the higher, are consistent with the evidence as it exists at present. Much more research will have to be carried out before this range can be narrowed to a figure that can be cited with reasonable confidence.
On the most optimistic interpretation, nonetheless, the expulsions were an immense manmade catastrophe, on a scale to put the suffering that occurred as a result of the “ethnic cleansings” in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s in the shade. They took place without any attempt at concealment, under the eyes of tens of thousands of journalists, diplomats, relief workers, and other observers with access to modern communications, in the middle of the world’s most crowded continent. Yet they aroused little attention at the time. Today, outside Germany, they are almost completely unknown. In most English-language histories of the period they are at best a footnote, and usually not even that. The most recent (2009) edition of Mary Fulbrook’s excellent History of Germany 1918–2008 disposes of the episode in a single uninformative paragraph; the antics of the tiny ultraleftist Red Army Faction in the 1970s and 1980s, in comparison, rate four. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Germany is typical in not according the expulsions even a single mention. What is true of German history textbooks is also the case with those dealing with the history of Europe as a whole, and even of the central European states most directly concerned. Joseph Rothschild and Nancy Wingfield’s fine survey of the region in the postwar era, Return to Diversity—by far the most accessible and reliable one-volume treatment of the subject—takes a cumulative total of less than a page to explain the means by which Poland and Czechoslovakia, until 1939 among the most heterogeneous and multicultural countries in Europe, had just ten years later become ethnic monoliths. It is, then, entirely understandable why so many of my splendid and learned colleagues on the Colgate faculty should have expressed their confusion to me after reading in the newspapers in October 2009 that the president of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, had demanded that the other members of the European Union legally indemnify his country against compensation claims by ethnic German expellees, as the price of his country’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. None had been aware that anything had occurred after the war in respect of which the Czech Republic might require to be indemnified.
It would be incorrect, however, to attribute this pervasive ignorance of the expulsions, their context, and their consequences to any conspiracy of silence. What has occurred in the postwar era is something less calculated in nature, but more insidious in effect: the phenomenon of a historical episode of great significance that is hidden in plain sight. Certainly information, albeit of highly variable quality, on the expulsions is available—for those who possess the requisite language competence and are prepared to go looking for it. A 1989 bibliography lists almost five thousand works dealing with them to some degree in the German language alone. Even today, some sixty-five years later, living expellees are not hard to find; it has been calculated that a quarter of the current German population are expellees or their immediate descendants.1 What is denied, then, is not the fact of the expulsions but their significance. Relegated in textbooks to a single passing mention in a vaguely phrased sentence referring to the “chaos” existing in Germany in the immediate postwar era, or simply passed over in silence, the impression is effectively conveyed that they occupy a less important place in modern European history than the cultural meanings of football hooliganism or the relevance of the Trabant automobile as a metaphor for East German society.
Why this should be so is not difficult to understand, because any discussion of the expulsions immediately brings to the fore a host of deeply uncomfortable and—still—highly contentious and divisive questions. For Germans themselves it invites debate over the dubious wartime record of the ethnic German minorities living outside the Reich—the so-called Volksdeutsche—and the degree to which they can be considered to have drawn their eventual fate upon themselves. For Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and citizens of other expelling countries, it complicates and undermines a series of national narratives, supported by overwhelming consensus, of Germans exclusively as perpetrators and their own peoples exclusively as victims, as well as raising concerns about the durability of the legal arrangements through which ex-German properties came into the possession of their current owners. For citizens of the Allied countries, and especially those of the United States and Britain, it invites scrutiny of the complicity of their leaders and peoples in one of the largest episodes of mass human rights abuse in modern history, which bore a disturbing resemblance in some respects at least to Nazi Germany’s wartime effort to reconfigure the demographic contours of the continent by similar means. The history of the expulsions is one from which few if any of those directly involved emerge in a creditable light. It is not surprising
, then, that there should be a great deal of reluctance to try to integrate a messy, complex, morally compromised, and socially disruptive episode that remains to this day a political hot potato into the history of what most people still rightly consider a justified crusade—or, as Americans put it, a “Good War”—against one of the most monstrous regimes of modern times.
In the long run, however, this refusal to engage with the expulsions and their meaning not just for European history but for our contemporary world is unwise as well as unsustainable. For one thing, to do so is in effect to concede the field to individuals like Holocaust “revisionists” who, seeking to equate the expulsions with the extermination of the European Jews as “war crimes” that counterbalance each other, do not scruple to pervert the historical record for their own ends. For another, from a scholarly perspective it ignores the revolution in central European historiography that has been under way since the collapse of the Communist empire in 1989. With the opening of official archives in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and some at least of the Yugoslav successor states, polemical and ahistorical treatments of the subject have begun to be supplanted by well-researched empirical studies of the policies and processes of expulsion. Although an immense amount of investigation remains to be done in this field, the pioneering studies of scholars like Tomáš Staněk for the Czech lands, Bernadetta Nitschke and Bernard Linek for Poland, Soňa Gabzdilová and Milan Olejník for Slovakia, Vladimir Geiger and Zoran Janjetović for the former Yugoslavia, as well as many others, are accomplishing a transformation in our understanding of the immediate postwar history of central and southeastern Europe. Their work has been broadened and supplemented by an unusually talented cohort of younger Western scholars of the region, among whom the names of Chad Bryant, David Curp, Benjamin Frommer, David Gerlach, Eagle Glassheim, Padraic Kenney, Jeremy King, Andrea Orzoff, and Tara Zahra figure prominently. For all of them, the expulsions and their effects are pivotal factors in explaining what these countries became after the Second World War, and what, despite the fall of Communism, in many respects they remain today. German historians too, working alongside and in cooperation with their counterparts in the countries that were the scene of the expulsions, have made contributions of great importance in this area during the past fifteen years, although paradoxically the justifiable concern of many of them to ensure that discussion of the expulsions does not become the basis for a self-pitying “victim” mentality, in which questions of culpability for Nazi crimes are pushed to the background, has given the debate in that country a sharper tone than elsewhere.
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