What is lacking at present, however, is a study of the expulsions that examines the episode in the round—from the time of its earliest origins and in all of the countries affected—and that carries the story forward to the present day where it continues to cast a long shadow across European and world events. That is what this book attempts to do. It goes without saying that no single work can hope to encompass the vast range of themes and topics that are involved in such a wide-ranging and multifaceted aspect of European history. In what follows, I have chosen to emphasize certain elements that appeared to me to call for particular attention: among them the mechanics of mass expulsion; the archipelago of “concentration,” “internment,” and “assembly” camps for ethnic German civilians that sprang up across central Europe after the war; the implications of the expulsions for the development of international law; and the underappreciated part played by the Western Allies in the operation, something that went far beyond mere acquiescence. But I make no pretension here to anything in the nature of an encyclopedic treatment of the subject, even assuming that such a thing were possible in a one-volume survey. Some pieces of the puzzle are still missing, and must await the opening of the relevant archives: in this category especially belongs the full story of the part played by the Soviet Union, as well as events in Romania and the former Yugoslavia. Others, for reasons of time and space, will not receive the detailed scrutiny which some readers may legitimately consider they deserve. Nevertheless, a start must be made somewhere. If, in attempting to come to grips with the complexities of the subject, I can do no more than erect a temporary and somewhat rickety edifice that other historians will (as I hope) supersede with taller, stronger, and more durable constructions of their own, it will have served its purpose.
It is appropriate at the outset to state explicitly that no legitimate comparison can be drawn between the postwar expulsions and the appalling record of German offenses against Jews and other innocent victims between 1939 and 1945. The extent of Nazi criminality and barbarity in central and eastern Europe is on a scale and of a degree that is almost impossible to overstate. In the entire span of human history, nothing can be found to surpass it, nor, with the possible exception of recent revelations about Mao’s China, to equal it. Germany’s neighbors suffered most grievously and unjustifiably at her hands, and were profoundly traumatized as a result. Whatever occurred after the war cannot possibly be equated to the atrocities perpetrated by Germans during it, and suggestions to the contrary—including those made by expellees themselves—are both deeply offensive and historically illiterate. Nothing I have written in the book should be taken to suggest otherwise.
But it is a long way from there to conclude that the expulsion of the Germans was inevitable, necessary, or justified. The expelling countries, needless to say, maintained that it was all of those things. Both at the time and to the present day, commentators from outside the region, for wholly understandable reasons, have been reluctant to challenge the judgment of peoples who suffered so greatly under German occupation. When we examine closely the record of the largest forcible population transfer in human history, however, we find that the result is a tragic and largely destructive episode that never fulfilled its professed aspirations—even in the extreme circumstances of postwar Europe when, if anything could ever have justified the use of such an expedient, this situation would.
In what follows, I have made relatively little use of first-person testimonies of expellees themselves, of the kind published in the massive German Federal Government Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa in the 1950s and 1960s, and the almost equally voluminous compilations by organizations like the Donauschwäbische Kulturstiftung in recent times. This is intentional on my part. While it might at first sight seem perverse not to place the voices of those most directly affected by the expulsions to the foreground, the fact that this remains so contentious and emotive a subject for so many people suggested the need for an unusual degree of attention to the matter of verifiability of sources. In the 1950s and 1960s, one of the most common strategies used to dismiss the veracity of events described in works like the Dokumentation der Vertreibung was to challenge the credibility of the witnesses. German expellees, it was alleged, had a vested interest in playing up the wrongs done to them as a means of playing down the atrocities for which they shared culpability. The reasoning of Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš in 1945, that “all German stories should not, of course, be believed, for Germans always exaggerated and were the first to whine and to try to enlist outside sympathy,” has been persuasive to many others also. I have therefore made it a rule to exclude direct expellee testimony that is not supported by independent sources. As my research continued, I found that I lost little in doing so, because the broad picture depicted in the Dokumentation der Vertreibung was confirmed, and in some cases amplified, by the accounts of humanitarian agencies like the Red Cross; other nongovernmental organizations; Western diplomats and officials; foreign journalists; and, most importantly of all, the archival records of the expelling countries themselves.
1
THE PLANNER
A week after the Munich Conference of September 1938, the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, composed his letter of resignation. After a quarter of a century at the heart of political life in Czechoslovakia, and almost three years as its unchallenged leader, he had become in the space of seven days a political irrelevance. While the great powers haggled over the future of his country at Munich—Czechoslovakia had not even been invited to send a delegation to the conference—Beneš was made to stand by helplessly, watching his life’s work crash in ruins. Two decades previously, as the foreign minister of the Provisional Czechoslovak Government and right-hand man of the Republic’s “Father-Liberator,” Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Beneš had argued, lobbied, and negotiated behind the scenes at the Paris Peace Conference to brilliant effect, securing the great powers’ agreement to a larger expanse of territory for the new Czechoslovak state than the most optimistic of his countrymen had dared to imagine. Now he looked on as the same powers accepted Adolf Hitler’s demand that the Czechoslovakia he had worked so unsparingly to create and to preserve must be dismembered. More than a quarter of Czechoslovakia’s territory—the German-speaking Sudetenland, extending in a broad band along three sides of the country’s frontier—and a similar proportion of its population were to be turned over to its aggressive northern neighbor as the price of staving off a new world war. Within a fortnight of the Munich accord, the Czechoslovak government had completely evacuated the Sudetenland, which was immediately divided into Gaue (districts) and integrated into the Nazi Reich. What remained of the country, abandoned by its French and British allies, was left to make the best deal it could with Hitler. Having been vilified for six straight months in the Goebbels-controlled Nazi press as Germany’s principal external enemy, Beneš knew that he was not the man to undertake that task. He preferred to go into exile, accepting a teaching position at the University of Chicago as his mentor Masaryk, a onetime philosophy professor, had done in the years before the Great War.
Although world opinion sympathized with Beneš over the manner in which he had been driven from office, a general consensus held that, as the London Times put it, the transfer of territory to Germany had been “both necessary and fundamentally just.”1 The people of the Sudetenland—like the Czechs and Slovaks, citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until its collapse in 1918—had never been consulted as to whether they wanted to be part of Czechoslovakia. If they had been, their overwhelming preference would have been to join their fellow German-speakers in the postwar Austrian state. Even in 1919, Allied diplomats had worried that giving the Sudetenland to Czechoslovakia—making the Germans the second largest nationality within the Republic and relegating the Slovaks to a distant third place—would be to strain the assimilative capacity of the infant state too far. Harold Nicolson, a member of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, recorded hi
s anxiety “about the future political complexion of the Czech State if they have to digest solid enemy electorates, plus an Irish Party in Slovakia, plus a Red Party in Ruthenia, to say nothing of their own extreme socialists.”2 But Beneš and Masaryk had carried the day over these objections. While Czechoslovak troops created “facts on the ground” by forcibly suppressing the provisional governments established in each of Bohemia and Moravia’s four German provinces at the end of 1918, the two leaders persuaded the Allies that only a strong Czechoslovakia could check the revival of German hegemony in central Europe. The Sudetenland with its vibrant export-oriented industries, they argued, was vital to Czechoslovakia’s economic prosperity. Without it the country would be strategically indefensible, vulnerable to attack from the north, west, and south. Somewhat against their better judgment, and in contradiction of Woodrow Wilson’s professed commitment to the principle of self-determination, the Allies assented, as the British prime minister David Lloyd George would ruefully recall, to the incorporation in the new state of “hundreds of thousands of protesting Magyars and some millions of angry Germans.”3 Beneš, for his part, promised the Allies that independent Czechoslovakia would become a model multinational state. The rights of the Sudetendeutsch minority would benefit from the most comprehensive system of protection in domestic and international law in Europe. German, he declared, would become “the second language of the country,” and in public affairs would stand “on equal footing with Czech.” Sudeten rights would be safeguarded by a nationality law based on the principles of the Swiss constitution. Proportional representation would prevent the Germans from being subjected to the tyranny of the Czech majority.
In the event, the record of the First Republic never lived up to these lofty aspirations. Although Czechoslovakia’s constitution declared the equality of all citizens “without consideration of race, language or religion,” in reality an ever-present tension existed between “the ideal of building up a State on a modern, democratic basis … and the psychologically comprehensible but in practice self-destructive tendency to transform that State into an instrument of Czech and Slovak nationalism.”4 Little was done to make good on Beneš’s undertaking to the Allies at Paris to convert Czechoslovakia into “a sort of Switzerland.” And indeed, to have done so would have required a degree of generosity and far-sightedness of which few Czechs—not even Beneš himself—fully recognized the necessity. It would also have made the Republic into a very different kind of country from the one of which Czech nationalists had dreamed. Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Czech and—to an even greater degree—Slovak speakers had received scant consideration at the hands of the dominant German and Magyar linguistic groups. Now the boot was on the other foot, and the temptation to reply in kind was almost irresistible. Even the popular and conciliatory Tomáš Masaryk, himself the son of a Czech-German mother and who grew up speaking German more fluently than Czech, had sometimes displayed a degree of triumphalism, in his inaugural address referring infelicitously to his Sudetendeutsch fellow-citizens as “immigrants and colonists.”5 Many Czechoslovaks, less diplomatic than he, made no secret of their conviction that German-speakers, the human residue of an alien and oppressive culture, had no place in their new Republic. If the Germans were a minority within Czechoslovakia, moreover, the Czech people never forgot that they were a small linguistic island in a larger Germanic sea extending across central Europe in which they were outnumbered by more than ten to one. The concept of “Czechoslovakia” was itself a fragile structure, to which even a large proportion of Slovaks were not fully reconciled. To try to accommodate the cultural idiosyncrasies of yet another people might sow the seeds of separatism, and eventually of national disintegration.
After the Munich conference, Czechoslovakia’s many Western defenders unanimously asserted, in the words of one of their number, that “these German-Bohemians were the best-treated minority in Europe.”6 The truth was more complicated. Certainly the Sudeten Germans were never the targets of a systematic government-directed persecution, though physical attacks on Sudetendeutsche and their institutions and symbols were far from uncommon during the Republic’s early years. But neither were they treated on anything like terms of equality.7 By a variety of means, the state from above and Czech nationalists from below tried to eliminate manifestations of German culture, especially by using administrative expedients to drive down the number of officially registered “Germans” in each district below the critical 20 percent threshold that, under Czechoslovak law, entitled minority populations to formal recognition. Thus, as Tara Zahra notes, “Thousands of citizens who professed to be Germans on the census of 1921 were subject to interrogations, fines, and imprisonment for illegally declaring a ‘false’ nationality.” The fines involved were usually modest, typically a week’s salary for an ordinary worker, and the periods of imprisonment brief. Nevertheless, “in all the cases in which individuals were fined or imprisoned for declaring a false nationality, self-declared Germans were changed into Czechs.”8 When the next census was taken in 1930, ethnic manipulation occurred on an even larger scale. One investigation by the Ministry of the Interior found that enumerators in Brno had forged 1,145 signatures and reclassified another 2,377 individuals so as to reduce the town’s German population to a whisker below the 20 percent threshold. The central government in Prague, for its part, attempted to dilute the ethnic composition of the Sudetenland by posting Czech civil servants and their families there; dismissing tens of thousands of German public servants either for their inability to pass newly required examinations in Czech language and culture or in response to denunciations (which were officially encouraged and received on a massive scale), and replacing them with Czech functionaries; and selectively closing German schools. Lastly, a controversial land reform program benefited Czech and Slovak farmers at the expense of their German- and Magyar-speaking counterparts: “a social policy in its original intention,” in Zbyněk Zeman’s summation, “became, in its execution, a national policy.”9 Between the wars, Zahra concludes, “Czech nationalists finally enjoyed the opportunity to realize nationalist fantasies unchecked by the moderating influence of a neutral state.”10
In spite of this unpromising beginning, as the new Republic began to stabilize a real possibility existed that Czechs and Germans, given enough time, would reach a mutually satisfactory modus vivendi in their new country. Tomáš Masaryk, one of the few members of the majority population to recognize the dangers of driving the Sudetendeutsche into a corner, dedicated himself as president to diminishing Czechoslovak chauvinism and German separatism alike. By the mid-1920s, these efforts had begun to bear fruit. In the 1925 elections, the “rejectionists” among the Sudetendeutsch population, who denied the legitimacy of the state and vowed to take no part in it, were decisively outnumbered by the “activists,” who aimed at striking the best possible deal for the German population within the framework of the Republic. The “activists” were strengthened by the support they received from Berlin. Unlike the German territories lost to Poland under the Treaty of Versailles, the Sudetenland had never formed part of the Reich. The Weimar Republic’s leaders were therefore relatively undisturbed by its inclusion in Czechoslovakia. Some of the more far-sighted among them, like Gustav Stresemann, could perceive definite advantages in having a substantial pro-German element represented in the Prague government, which would serve Berlin’s interests in central Europe far better than the addition of a few million more German-speakers to Austria’s population. Consequently, the German government encouraged Sudetendeutsch leaders to play a full part in the political life of Czechoslovakia. Relations between the two communities underwent a definite thaw, assisted by the fact that many Sudeten Germans recognized that their own conditions compared favorably to those of their co-linguists in inflation-ridden, war-debt-burdened and politically unstable Germany. In 1926 Franz Spina, a Sudeten German parliamentarian who served twice as a minister in the Czechoslovak government, told a French newspaper, “We have lived wit
h the Czechs for a thousand years, and through economic, social, cultural and even racial ties, we are so closely connected with them that we form one people. To use a homely metaphor: we form different strands of the same carpet.”11
Unfortunately this positive momentum was not sustained. When the ailing and elderly Masaryk stepped down from the presidency in 1935, he carried away much of the Sudetendeutsch community’s goodwill with him. In contrast to the charismatic Father-Liberator, Edvard Beneš, his long-time heir apparent, seemed a colorless and uninspiring replacement. Across the political spectrum, Czechoslovaks paid tribute to Beneš’s intelligence, diligence, and efficiency. In administrative ability he stood head and shoulders above his peers. But if his talents were those of the skilled bureaucrat, so too were his flaws. Thin-skinned, intensely self-righteous, cold, and prone to bearing grudges, he was to prove an unfortunate choice as Masaryk’s successor. His own secretary, Jaromír Smutný, acknowledged that although a “brilliant master of tactics and strategy, the greatest Machiavelli of our time … he is unable to awaken the enthusiasm of the masses…. People leave him persuaded, but not feeling entirely with him, full of confidence but without affection.”12 Beneš also had a tendency toward political idées fixes that would twice prove disastrous for his country. An ardent Francophile, between the wars he placed his complete trust in the relationship between Prague and Paris, only to be abandoned by the French at Munich. A similar disillusionment lay in his future, after he transferred his unquestioning and unrequited confidence to the Soviet Union. The Sudeten German population’s attitude to Beneš, hence, was at best one of reserve. It was suspicious of his efficient public relations network that ceaselessly reiterated to Western Europeans what they wanted to hear about Czechoslovakia’s and its president’s exemplary liberal and democratic credentials—an image it knew to be more than a little rose-colored.13 It recognized him as a committed Czech nationalist, whose regard for minority rights owed more to pragmatism than conviction. And it had little confidence that in any situation in which Czechoslovak and Sudetendeutsch interests were in conflict, Beneš would treat the two communities even-handedly and impartially. When the resolution to confirm Beneš in the presidency was put before the Prague parliament in 1935, not a single Sudetendeutsch deputy voted in favor.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 2