Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War
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Both at the time and until the present day, defenders of the postwar expulsions have seen in this fact a complete justification for the policy of population transfer. In Czechoslovakia and everywhere else, when the test came, the Volksdeutsche had proven more loyal to their ethnic community—even in its monstrous Hitlerite form—than to the states of which they were nominally citizens. It was hardly unreasonable, therefore, that after the war they should be made to accept the logical consequences of that choice. Even if this resulted in unfairness and suffering to those whose guilt was less than others, Germany’s neighbors could not be expected to tolerate forever the presence of a permanent fifth column in their midst. And because it would be necessary to reverse the Nazi state’s wartime displacement of peoples in any event, there was no reason not to make a thorough job of it for fear of causing disruption to communities who had no claim to the Allies’ consideration.
There is no question that the postwar expulsions cannot be separated from the wartime experience that preceded them. Yet each of these arguments for transferring the Volksdeutsch populations—questions of ethics or legality aside—is based on flawed premises. While it is going too far to depict ethnic Germans as hapless victims of fate, as in the case of Czechoslovakia the overall picture is far more ambiguous than the conventional rationales offered in favor of the expulsion scheme would suggest. The proposed population transfers were not simply an undoing of Nazi deportations, but a demographic experiment on a scale unprecedented in human history. And whether the Volksdeutsche ought to be regarded as Hitlerite auxiliaries or as something less or more—whether, indeed, in many cases they can meaningfully be considered even as “German”—is a question that can only be answered through a detailed examination of their wartime history.
2
THE VOLKSDEUTSCHE IN WARTIME
In one respect it is misleading to speak of “the postwar expulsions.” From the very beginning of the Second World War, the European totalitarian powers engaged in ethnic cleansing on a scale never before seen in history. For Adolf Hitler, a continent from which “undesirable” peoples—Jews, Slavs, Roma, and others—had been displaced to make room for incoming German colonists lay at the very heart of his nightmarish racial vision. Even the Holocaust, when it had finally been decided upon, was but a means to this larger end. But his fellow dictator Josef Stalin also had grand ambitions to redraw the ethnographic map of the continent. During the two years of their uneasy partnership under the Nazi-Soviet Pact, both men found it convenient to work together.
Neither was a newcomer to the task. Stalin especially had a notable record of moving potentially troublesome national minorities around his empire, both as a form of collective punishment and to ensure that vulnerable borderlands were inhabited by ethnic groups—principally Russians and Georgians—in whose loyalty he considered he could repose greater confidence. To be sure, the internal transfer of smaller nations falling within the Russian orbit already had a long and dishonorable history by the time Stalin assumed control. Tsar Alexander II, the ironically named “Tsar-Liberator,” displaced nearly half a million natives of the western Caucasus in 1863–64 to enhance the security of the border. His grandson, Nicholas II, would follow his example in the first months of the Great War, removing to the Russian interior the ethnic Germans of central Poland along with an even greater number of Polish Jews. With the front beginning to collapse in the face of Hindenburg’s counterattacks in January 1915, Army General Headquarters stepped up this purge of potentially disloyal German, Austro-Hungarian, and Turkish subjects, by the simple expedient of giving the expellees a short period to collect what goods they could and then setting fire to their houses and crops. As the displaced people fled east, without food or any semblance of an evacuation system in operation, they began to die in large numbers.1 In the central Asian regions and the Far East of the Russian Empire, Chinese, Korean, and Moslem populations were removed for similar reasons.2 But it was only after the Bolshevik Revolution that internal deportations of entire peoples became a regular instrument of state policy.
A youthful Stalin cut his teeth as an architect of forced removals when as “Commissar for Nationalities” he assisted his fellow Georgian, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to clear out the Terek Cossacks from the northern Caucasus in 1920.3 In the second half of the 1930s, movements of this kind reached unprecedented levels. “Between 1935 and 1938,” as Terry Martin notes, “at least nine Soviet nationalities—Poles, Germans, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Koreans, Chinese, Kurds, Iranians—were all subjected to ethnic cleansing.”4 Most of these movements were connected to the Soviet leader’s paranoia over “spies” and “wreckers” within the country. In 1937, for example, 11,868 ethnic Germans living in the USSR were arrested as suspected Nazi agents; the following year no fewer than 27,432 were detained on similar charges.5 The number of Soviet Poles held for espionage was greater still. The majority of these detainees were executed; the peoples to which they belonged were internally exiled by police and NKVD units. During the years of Stalin’s “Great Terror,” a total of approximately 800,000 members of national minorities were victims of execution, arrest, or deportation—generally to the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which began to rival Siberia as convenient dumping grounds for peoples the government viewed with disfavor.
Although Hitler had less scope than his Soviet counterpart for large-scale transfers of population, he too worked energetically to convert Germany into an ethnically and racially homogeneous state even before the war. The persecution of the Jews since 1933 had the explicit intention of compelling them to leave the country: in its crudest form, this consisted of physically pushing those who held dual citizenship across the borders into the territory of neighboring countries.6 A further wave of coerced migrations, this time under international auspices, ensued as a result of the Munich Agreement, which provided a six-month window of opportunity for ethnic Czechs and Slovaks to move out of the Sudetenland (and Germans elsewhere in Czechoslovakia to transfer in) and established a German-Czechoslovak commission to “consider ways of facilitating the transfer of population.”7 In the spring of 1939, Germany browbeat neighboring Lithuania into ceding the largely German Memelland to the Reich, though tens of thousands of Volksdeutsche were left in the areas remaining under Lithuanian control. Lastly, at Mussolini’s behest, Heinrich Himmler opened negotiations with Italy in May 1939 to secure the removal of the 200,000 ethnic Germans of the Alto Adige region in the Italian Alps. Notwithstanding his “Pact of Steel” with Hitler concluded in the same month, the Duce had not been oblivious to the recent fate of countries bordering on the Reich that harbored German minority populations. After the Nazi state’s absorption of Austria in the Anschluss of 1938, Mussolini considered it wise to remove temptation, and his ethnic Germans, from his new partner’s field of vision. By July, an agreement in principle had been reached for the “voluntary” departure of the German-speaking population, though no decision was taken as to their ultimate destination. Although the pact supposedly required the ratification of the ethnic Germans themselves in a plebiscite, an affirmative vote was ensured by declaring that any who elected to remain ipso facto consented to be resettled anywhere within the Italian domains that Mussolini chose to send them. According to rumors deliberately spread to make certain that voters saw the matter in the correct light, this was to be Abyssinia.8
Only the war itself, though, would provide the opportunity for creating the ethnically and racially “pure” spaces that were Nazism’s ultimate objective. In its most grandiose and unhinged expression, the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East) drawn up by the SS in 1939–40, up to fifty million people in central and eastern Europe were to be killed or expelled over a period of some thirty years to make room for settlement colonies of Germans and other “Germanizable” peoples like Czechs and Aryanized Ukrainians.9 The first steps toward this goal were taken in the secret protocol attached to the Nazi-Soviet Pact. In the cynical horse trade signed by Hitler’s foreign mini
ster Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow on August 23, 1939, it was agreed that Stalin would be allocated a “sphere of influence” extending over the eastern half of Poland, as far as the line defined by the Vistula, Narev, and San Rivers. German hegemony was confirmed over the western portion. The Soviets also demanded, and received, a similar sphere of influence over the Bessarabia and northern Bukovina regions of Romania and the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia. Lithuania would remain a German concern. Left unmentioned, though hardly forgotten, was the question of each country’s national minorities in the other’s sphere. Eastern Poland was of little immediate moment to Hitler—only about 128,000 ethnic Germans lived there, in comparison to the 500,000 or more inhabiting the western districts—but there were centuries-old German-speaking communities in the Baltic. Alfred Rosenberg, the Estonian-born chief Nazi ideologue and editor of the NSDAP daily newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was only one of many leading party members to hail from this region. Obviously the Baltic Germans could not be allowed to remain where they were. Stalin, as noted above, already considered the existing ethnic German settlements of the USSR to be hotbeds of anti-Soviet espionage, and would hardly shrink from taking what he saw as the necessary murderous steps to neutralize threats from that quarter. For his part, Hitler, about to go to war with Poland on the pretext of protecting the Volksdeutsche of that country, would not be able to stand by with folded hands as his new ally consigned his racial comrades to the Gulag or the grave.
For the moment, however, the Nazis had bigger fish to fry. On the morning of September 1, 1939, German armies swept into Poland. Ostensibly their mission was to rescue the ethnic German population of that country from oppression. For the previous three weeks, the Nazi press had worked itself into an officially inspired frenzy over the supposed sufferings of the German minority, in conformity with a directive by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, on August 11 that “as of now, the first page should contain news and comments on Polish offenses against Volksdeutsche and all kinds of incidents showing the Poles’ hatred of everything that is German.”10 Not every one of these stories was manufactured out of whole cloth, though most were exaggerated out of all recognition. Between the wars, Poland’s record of respecting the rights of its Jewish, German, and Ukrainian minorities had been a thoroughly undistinguished one. Some eight thousand Germans were interned in a former prisoner of war camp for several months in 1919; most ethnic German state employees lost their jobs; boycotts of German businesses were common; and German schools, associations, and newspapers were frequently shut down by the state, often acting in response to pressure from nationalist organizations eager to complete the Polonization of the country by repressive means.11 In September 1934, the authoritarian regime of Field-Marshal Józef Piłsudski announced that it would no longer regard itself as bound by the minority protection treaties it had concluded in 1919 with the League of Nations.12 As Nazi policy toward Poland became more bellicose and menacing in the winter of 1938–39, moreover, the government in Warsaw cracked down hard on what it was coming to regard as the snakes in Poland’s bosom. The use of the German language in newspapers published in Poznań-Pomorze was banned in February 1939; German cultural festivals were suppressed; and up to seventy thousand Volksdeutsche, their homes and farms subject to attacks by the majority population, were forced to flee across the border.13 The true objective of the German invasion, though, had been set out by Hitler himself in his “Second Book,” the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, as early as 1928: “[A Nazi Germany] must under no conditions annex Poles with the intention of wanting to make Germans out of them someday. On the contrary, it must muster the determination either to seal off these alien racial elements … or it must without further ado remove them and hand over the vacated territory to its own national comrades.”14
The point, then, was never to “rescue” Volksdeutsche under Polish administration. Making up no more than 3 percent of the prewar population of Poland, from the very beginning they were cast as no more than bit players in the larger drama of building a racial empire in the Nazi Lebensraum to the east. Within a few years of the conquest, it was envisaged, they would be reduced to numerical insignificance by millions of colonists arriving from elsewhere. Typical of the ad hoc improvisation and lack of planning that characterized the Nazi regime’s operations, however, Hitler had given practically no thought since his seizure of power to the question of what was to be done with the conquered territories, beyond pushing their Polish Gentile and Jewish populations out of them.15 Still less attention was devoted to deciding from where the new German colonists were to come, how they were to be transported to their future destinations, or what kind of logistical preparations would be required to induce them to remain there.
Ironically, the German invasion of September 1, 1939 itself led, in some cases, to the kind of atrocities against the Volksdeutsch population that the Goebbels-directed press had been assiduously fabricating or, at the least, embellishing. Like other countries menaced by German invasion in 1939–40, Poland in the first chaotic days of the war gave way to a fifth column panic of considerable proportions. The same rumors that were to become familiar in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Great Britain—of ethnic German saboteurs cunningly disguised as Polish servicemen or nuns, of farmers who pointed out targets to Luftwaffe bombers by plowing or mowing their fields in the shape of an arrow, of francs-tireurs who fired on troops from bedrooms or cut telegraph wires—received their first public airing in the “September Campaign” of 1939.16 As in those other countries, nearly all such stories were unfounded. It is certainly true that there were pro-Nazi organizations of long standing among the German minority in Poland. In February 1936, for example, around a hundred members of a shadowy group with links to the Nazi government, the Nationalsozialistische Arbeitsbewegung, were tried for subversion in Katowice and received sentences of between six and ten years. Members of another German political group, the Wanderbund, from Tarnowiskie Góry received lesser sentences in the same year. Some evidence exists, moreover, to suggest that Himmler’s intelligence organization, the Sicherheitsdienst, had been recruiting members of the German minority for service in underground militia units up to a year prior to the outbreak of war.17 But there is little to suggest that the Volksdeutsche in Poland as a body were let into the secret of the German invasion or—with the exception of a coordinated assault by saboteurs on Polish forces in the city of Katowice—played any significant role in facilitating the Wehrmacht’s advance.18 Neither the Polish authorities nor ordinary Poles, though, had any way of knowing this, and their reaction, while understandable, was excessive. As soon as the war began, some fifteen thousand Volksdeutsch suspects were rounded up and forced to march to internment camps in the interior. One of the deportees, Fr. Hilarius Breitinger, an assistant to the auxiliary bishop of Gniezno and Poznań, Dr. Walenty Dymek, kept a record of his experiences on what the historian Michael Phayer describes as “a three-week, death-threatening ordeal.”
Breitinger, along with other mostly lay Volksdeutschers, were led endless miles around the countryside by Polish vigilantes. Poles heaped abuse on them, stoned them, threw garbage and horse droppings at them and beat them with whatever was at hand. Breitinger was struck in the head by a brick which, he thought, would have killed him had it not struck the arm of his glasses. This treatment continued day and night without the captives having much to eat or to drink. The elderly, physically unable to keep pace, were murdered. “It was clear to us what the purpose of all this was,” Breitinger later wrote, “we were open game.”19
In the western town of Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), events took a still more tragic turn. Three days after the invasion, a retreating Polish military unit, believing itself to have come under attack from a German-owned house, commenced a massacre of elements of the civilian population. Similar episodes occurred elsewhere in the town. The number of Volksdeutsche killed over the next two days in the course of what the Nazis described as “Bromberg Bloody Sunday”
is still a matter of fierce dispute between German and Polish historians, as is the question of whether the Polish soldiers’ belief that they had been fired upon was well founded.20 There is no doubt, though, that many German civilians were killed after mistakenly being taken for fifth columnists, at Bydgoszcz and other places. Perhaps a hundred Volksdeutsche died in the course of a forced march to Kutno; thirty-four others were executed in Toruń on suspicion of having signaled to German aircraft flying overhead.21 Similar, though generally smaller-scale, excesses occurred elsewhere, often directed against other minorities, like Ukrainians, Byelorussians, and Jews, whose loyalty to the Polish state was also regarded as doubtful.22 Altogether, a German Criminal Police investigation in 1940 calculated that 5,437 civilian members of the German minority had been killed by the Poles during the five-week-long “September Campaign”—although, typically, Goebbels inflated that figure more than tenfold in the version he released for public consumption.23 More recent scholarship suggests a death toll of 4,500 is nearer the mark.24
Nevertheless, the attacks on ethnic Germans provided the invading forces with a convenient ex post facto justification for their onslaught against Poland. During the weeks to come, both they and the Volksdeutsche themselves would take their revenge on the Poles in a manner that vastly exceeded whatever provocation they had suffered. In Bydgoszcz itself, ethnic Germans would accompany Wehrmacht and SS units, identifying alleged perpetrators who were shot out of hand. Under Hitler’s direct order, about five hundred Poles from the town were executed. The Security Police also carried out a search of the Schwedenhöhe suburb for suspects, in the course of which approximately two hundred more people were killed.25 The pattern was repeated in other occupied towns and cities. In the weeks immediately following the invasion, moreover, Volksdeutsch males aged between seventeen and forty-five flocked to join so-called Selbstschutz or “self-defense” militias to assist the German police battalions that assumed responsibility for security in German-occupied Poland. These quickly took on a much more sinister complexion when, in October 1939, they were placed under SS control. By then, there were more than seventeen thousand volunteers serving in Selbstschutz units in the region of West Prussia alone. There and elsewhere they played an important role in fingering Polish suspects and Jews to the police and SS; they guarded internment and forced labor camps in which the detainees were held, often in atrocious conditions; and, before long, they were assisting the murderous Einsatzgruppen, the SS bands charged with liquidating political and racial enemies in the occupied lands, to carry out large-scale massacres of Polish Jews and Gentiles.26 The Danzig Selbstschutz took a prominent role in the murder of three thousand patients in Polish mental asylums; many more were killed in hastily erected detention camps. In total, the “self-defense units” may have been responsible for as many as twenty thousand killings in the twelve months following the German invasion; they also assisted in the removal of another ten thousand to the new concentration camp at Stutthof. Their career, though, was short-lived. As the Polish “pacification” campaign drew to a close, Himmler decided that such amateur bodies had served their purpose and, with all danger of further Polish resistance eliminated, directed in August 1940 that they be wound up.27