Initially, the Poles were inhibited from pressing their claim for even greater territorial acquisitions at Germany’s expense by their belief that Allied public opinion would never accept the massive transfer of Germans that so extravagant a demand would necessitate.54 They had also by no means abandoned hopes of securing the return of most, if not all, of their lost eastern territories, and rightly suspected Stalin of encouraging them to expand in the west as a way of placing further obstacles in their path. Nevertheless, the temptation was too difficult to resist, especially after Beneš’s success showed that so far as the Big Three were concerned, they were pushing at an open door. Clearly the population of the German lands in question could not be allowed to remain without saddling Poland with a German minority proportionately as large as, and in absolute numbers far greater than, the one in Czechoslovakia. Expulsion consequently became almost as important an element of the Polish government in exile’s postwar planning as it had been for the Czechoslovaks, and they greeted Eden’s conversion to the principle with approval. By September 1944, the London Poles had determined that those Germans “who do not leave Polish territory after the war will have to be removed from it. This applies equally to the area of the Polish state in 1939, and the territories whose incorporation into Poland will be demanded as a result of the present war.”55 Plans to carry out the operation and to confiscate the property of those who would be forced to leave were already in preparation.56
Credible rumors that the British government had thrown its weight behind postwar population transfers came as a bombshell to the Sudeten German refugees in Britain and their leader, Wenzel Jaksch. An estimable and in many respects a tragic figure, Jaksch had been fighting not one but several rearguard actions since his arrival in Britain after Munich. His own exile community was divided between those who wanted to work for a restoration of Czechoslovakia in its pre-1938 borders and others who, while committed to the struggle against Hitler, believed that the Sudetenland should remain attached to a democratic postwar Germany. He was also aware that members of the Czechoslovak government in exile were trying hard to split the Sudetendeutsch émigrés so as to weaken their claim to Allied protection and undermine his own status as their spokesman. As Beneš had done in 1938, Jaksch decided that his best hope of persuading the British to reverse course was to maintain his own and his community’s dignity, avoid responding to provocations or polemics, and remind the Allies of the importance of remaining true to their own public undertakings. His reward for this principled stance was to be the same as the Czechoslovak president’s at Munich. Yet it is unlikely that any other course would have yielded a different result.
The provocations were not long in coming. Since May 1941, Jaksch had made numerous broadcasts to his fellow Sudetendeutsche on the BBC German service, reminding them of their duty to the Czechoslovak state and appealing to them to resist the Nazis. The Czech historian Francis Raška, who has made a study of these talks, is unable to detect in them “even the slightest hint of any disloyalty to Czechoslovakia.”57 Nonetheless they provoked Beneš and his publicist, Ripka, to fury. By advocating Sudeten autonomy within a decentralized Czechoslovakia, they complained, Jaksch was traversing the same ground as had Konrad Henlein in the 1930s and was paving the way for the ultimate breakup of the Czechoslovak state. Such a person had no right to be heard on the radio, or anywhere else. Summarizing their protests in a sentence, Frank Roberts of the Foreign Office wryly remarked that they supposed that “His Majesty’s Government is building up another Sudeten Führer.”58 British officials did not take these fulminations seriously. Both Beneš and Jaksch were well known to them, and if anything they had a higher opinion of the latter than the former. Ever since Versailles, the Foreign Office had considered Beneš prone to double-dealing and duplicity. When in 1925 he had put his name forward as a future secretary general of the League of Nations, Alexander Cadogan had minuted: “If the League is destroyed, it will be by the appointment of an unfit man to the post … Dr Beneš would be an admirable candidate for anyone who desired that result.”59 So far from being a crypto-Nazi, on the other hand, Jaksch was plainly an old-fashioned socialist internationalist of a type that two world wars had rendered all but extinct. British officials recalled his visits to London before Munich at Beneš’s request to try to gain support for Czechoslovakia’s stance against German aggression, and his ongoing wartime work on behalf of Special Operations Executive, the British anti-Nazi sabotage organization in occupied Europe.60 Still more awkwardly for the Czechoslovak president, Philip Noel-Baker, a Labour Party parliamentarian and junior minister in the Churchill coalition government, had already recounted in another BBC broadcast how he had joined Jaksch in Czechoslovakia during the summer of 1938 to rally Sudetendeutsch opposition to Hitler and Henlein.
[N]ight by night I drove from town to town with their gallant leader, Wenzel Jaksch, to speak with him to great meetings of his followers…. I can still hear the deep, fierce cheers resounding through the hall when Jaksch declared they would rather fight and die for liberty than yield.
And I remember how President Beneš, in his lovely palace on the hill at Prague, told me that these German Social Democrats were nothing less than heroes; that they had shown us all what resolution, what nobility of mind, the fight for human freedom could evoke.61
Whatever shape a postwar Czechoslovakia took, however, Jaksch clearly would have no part to play in Anglo-Czechoslovak relations. Beneš and Ripka would. Inasmuch as there was little evidence to indicate that his broadcasts were making an impact on Sudeten German opinion in any event, from London’s point of view there seemed no point in having an unnecessary row with the future Prague government over them. Jaksch was taken off the air in the summer of 1942. It would not be the last time he, and other German opponents of Nazism, were to be sacrificed to Allied raison d’étât.
Support for ejecting the Sudeten Germans quickly followed from the USSR as well. Sensibly, Beneš wasted little time negotiating with the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the KSĈ, whose absurd contortions in its effort to keep up with the twists and turns of Moscow’s line had already proven that it possessed no independent decision-making capacity. Since its launch in the early 1920s, the KSĈ had staunchly supported minority rights, condemning Czech internal colonialism as an instrument of bourgeois exploitation and upholding the right of the Sudetendeutsche and other ethnic groups to “national self-determination,” even to the point of secession from the Republic. That stance had lasted until the conclusion of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance in 1935, when nothing further was heard about self-determination for minorities. Instead, during the Munich crisis the party had called on Sudeten “antifascists” to “follow the orders of the [Czechoslovak] democratic institutions.”62 When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced, “national self-determination” was once again back on the Communist menu, and party leaflets circulating in the Protectorate warned against “the dangers of [Czech] chauvinism.” It was clear, then, that the KSĈ would invariably follow where Moscow led, notwithstanding the significant proportion of Sudeten Germans in its own ranks. In June 1943, the Soviet ambassador to London advised the Czechoslovak government in exile of the USSR’s agreement with the expulsion of the Germans; Beneš heard the same from Stalin’s own lips when he traveled to Moscow at the end of the year.63 When he met with the exiled leaders of the KSĈ there shortly afterwards, it was to notify them of his expectations of them rather than to solicit their agreement.
In the summer of 1943 Beneš obtained the final endorsement required for the success of his scheme. During a lunch meeting with Churchill in March he had ensured that the prime minister was still firmly committed to the idea of transfer. According to Jan Masaryk, Churchill went further than that. When the war eventually ended, he told Beneš, “Many [Sudeten] Germans will be killed in your country as well—it cannot be helped and I agree with it. After a few months we’ll say ‘that’s enough,’ and we shall start on the work of peace: try the guil
ty men who stayed alive.”64 Whether Churchill’s remark was accurately recorded—and throughout his life he did have a penchant for bellicose overstatement—he is likely to have been speaking of the meting-out of summary justice to highlevel collaborators like Henlein and the Sudetendeutsch second in command in Bohemia and Moravia, Karl Hermann Frank, rather than offering the Czechoslovaks an open-ended mandate for massacre. Beneš felt confident enough in the prime minister’s backing for transfers, nonetheless, to bring it up in Churchill’s presence during a visit to the White House in May 1943 for his first, and only, wartime meeting with Franklin D. Roosevelt. Again, no official record exists of what was said there. On his return to London, though, he euphorically reported to his colleagues that after learning of the British and Soviet support that had already been promised, the U. S. president too had assented to the postwar expulsion of the entire Sudeten German population.
In this instance also, though State Department officials would later hotly deny that Roosevelt had said any such thing, it seems improbable that Beneš’s version was manufactured out of whole cloth. To obtain American approval of the eviction of the Sudetendeutsche was why he had traveled to Washington in the first place, and there is no reason to doubt that he raised it at the meeting. In its aftermath he would hardly have broadcast Roosevelt’s concurrence so widely had he been given no encouragement to do so; the story would have been too easy to contradict. On the other hand, Beneš’s later claim that the president agreed to a complete clearance of the Sudetenland has less of the ring of credibility about it. In his previous dealings with London and Moscow, he had been studiously vague about the precise number of Germans he intended to expel, and it is most improbable that he would have opted for the high-risk strategy of trying to make Roosevelt accept his maximum demand in their very first discussion of the matter. This interpretation is strengthened by Anthony Eden’s action in instructing the British minister in Washington to repudiate Czechoslovak reports that the United States had endorsed a clean sweep of the Sudetendeutsche, and to point out that the Allies had committed themselves only to agreement in principle on the question of postwar population transfers.65
By the end of 1943, nevertheless, the expulsion project had taken on a momentum that only a decision of the Big Three could have reversed. Not only on the part of policymakers, but among important sections of Anglo-American public opinion as well, population transfers briefly became what C. A. Macartney, an expert adviser to the Foreign Office on international relations, characterized as a “fashionable panacea for all difficulties connected with national minorities.”66 Thus the former U. S. president, Herbert Hoover, called for consideration of what he described as “the heroic remedy of transfer of population” as a means of preventing future European conflict.67 Sumner Welles, previously second in command at the State Department and a man who until recently had been Roosevelt’s closest collaborator in foreign affairs, likewise would abandon his belief that after the war “no element in any nation will be forced to atone vicariously for crimes for which it is not responsible,” and that it was unacceptable that whole peoples should be “transferred, like cattle, from one sovereignty to another.” Instead, he was coming round to the idea that “we should avail ourselves of this moment of world upheaval to effect transfers of population where these are necessary to prevent new conflicts, and thus enable peoples to live under the government they desire, free from racial discriminations.”68 Endorsing Beneš’s expulsion scheme, the Oxford historian A. J. P. Taylor declared that the Czechoslovak state could only be resurrected using the same “ruthlessness” and inflicting “as much suffering” as the Germans had employed in destroying it.69 In the House of Lords, Robert Vansittart, a former Foreign Office mandarin who in the 1930s had been for appeasement before he was against it and who was now the loudest British voice in favor of a Carthaginian peace for Germany, applauded Stalin’s robust indifference to questions of guilt or innocence, when driving the Soviet Union’s German-speaking population from their homes in 1941, as a model for the Allies to follow. “He was a thousand times right; five hundred thousand times right…. I say, these [deportees] were not Hitlerite Germans. They had a quarter of a century’s training in the doctrines of Communism…. Nevertheless they were held to be Germans and unreliable.”70 Even Lord Robert Cecil, president of the League of Nations Union and an impassioned defender of the rights of minorities between the wars, now agreed that the Sudetendeutsche at least would “have to be removed,” and that their fate should be of no concern to anyone but the Czechoslovak government.71
While expulsionist sentiment transcended partisan lines in Britain, it was the Labour Party which greeted the idea most enthusiastically. Between the wars, Labour had been the strongest advocates of internationalist principles in foreign policy, with the ultimate aim of seeing the League of Nations evolve into an embryonic world government. Little of this idealism remained by 1942. The collapse of Wilsonianism in the face of Axis aggression generated a sharp reaction on the left wing of British politics in the direction of national exceptionalism and a great power–dominated new world order. To the extent that minority populations stood in the way of this agenda, Labour policymakers contended, they were to be eliminated, through complete assimilation or forced migration. Philip Noel-Baker and John Parker, both of whom would hold ministerial office after 1945, individually advocated systematic population transfers as a necessary condition of the postwar peace; influential Labour intellectuals like Harold Laski spoke in the same vein.72 In a widely publicized 1944 statement on the foreign policy a Labour government would follow after the war, these views became official party doctrine. Labour warned ethnic Germans who failed to cooperate with their own removal that they would have no valid grounds for complaint if they forfeited their lives as a result.
‘[N]ational minorities’ in Central Europe, left outside the boundaries of their own nation, should be encouraged to rejoin it. In particular, all Germans left outside the post-War German frontiers, unless they are willing to become loyal subjects of the State in which they find themselves, should go back to Germany. Indeed, they will be well advised to do so in their own interests, for, in the early post-War years at any rate, there will be a depth of hatred against Germans in the occupied countries, which it is impossible either for us or for Americans to realise.
Germans in many of those areas may have to face the choice between migration and massacre.73
That this green light by one of Britain’s governing parties to the use of mass terror to displace ethnic German populations after the war was not intended to be taken lightly was indicated by a speech at its annual conference a fortnight after V-E Day by Denis Healey, soon to become the Labour Party’s international secretary and, in that capacity, a key contact between ministers in the Attlee administration and the socialist parties of central Europe. British leftists, he acknowledged, would probably regard as “extremist” some of the actions Continental left-wing leaders were already taking to settle postwar accounts. But “if the Labour Movement in Europe finds it necessary to introduce … more immediate and drastic punishment for their opponents than we in this country would be prepared to tolerate, we must be prepared to understand their point of view.”74 The appeal of population transfers to Labour, however, went beyond revanchism alone. By the mid-1940s, they were increasingly being regarded on the left as a means of accomplishing not just social but socialist engineering. Inasmuch as movements on such a scale would by definition overturn the socio-economic status quo in the countries in which they occurred, they could be a vital tool in breaking the power of entrenched capitalist interests and paving the way for a once-for-all transition to a planned economy that might take decades to accomplish by other means. Beneš himself was thinking in these terms, pointing out to the leader of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Klement Gottwald, in December 1943 that the expulsions would be accompanied by a state-controlled confiscation and redistribution of all German property. “This will be a national revol
ution,” Beneš promised, “combined with a social revolution. By means of measures taken against German wealth as well as German national characteristics, the way will be opened to radical economic intervention and social change in the Bohemian lands.”75
In the most extravagant formulations of its partisans, population transfer appeared as a cure-all for the difficulties that had ensued as a result of the divergent historical evolution of “nations” and “states.” According to this view, a major cause of world discord was the lack of correspondence between the two, with members of a given nation residing on the territory of a state that was not their own. After the Great War, an attempt had been made to shift the boundaries of states to accommodate the geographical distribution of nations. This had proven a failure. Ethnic intermixing, the existence of linguistic enclaves and islands, and a lack of goodwill on all sides had defeated the best attempts of experts at the Paris Peace Conference to make the “nation” and the “state” synonymous terms. The situation that resulted was unsatisfactory for everyone. The presence of “foreign” elements on their soil provoked postwar governments to adopt coercive policies of national homogenization and forced assimilation that only alienated their minority populations further. Likewise, the plight of persecuted co-nationals in a neighboring state was a standing temptation to the “mother country” to wage aggressive wars for the purpose of—or, as in Hitler’s case, under the pretext of—rescuing them from foreign domination. Population transfers offered a way of cutting this Gordian knot, by making nations accommodate themselves to the existing boundaries of states. Once the operation had been completed, the new international order would start life with the advantage, never enjoyed by its predecessor, of not having to defend itself against peoples bent on its revision in the name of “national self-determination.” But the window of opportunity to bring about this once-for-all reversal of centuries of European settlement patterns was small indeed. As the British Labour Party declared, it was vital to strike while the iron was hot. Only after a major war were such vast changes possible. If the moment was lost, the existing distribution of population would crystallize and become immovable.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 5