Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War
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By that point the Nazis had turned their attention to the much more ambitious task of reshaping the ethnographic character of their freshly conquered territories. The matter became more urgent after the Soviet Union, in accordance with the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, invaded Poland from the east on September 17—ironically, using precisely the same pretext as Germany, the only difference being that the minorities Stalin accused Warsaw of mistreating were in this case Byelorussians and Ukrainians. As the USSR proceeded forcibly to expel a quarter of a million ethnic Poles from what would become the western provinces of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics,28 the Germans arrived at a similar solution. After weighing and then abandoning the idea of leaving a much-truncated Polish state as a sop to appeasement-minded Westerners, Hitler resolved to bisect the part of Poland under German occupation. Approximately half would be incorporated directly into the Reich as two new Gaue, or districts, named Danzig–West Prussia and the Warthegau respectively. The remainder—a forty-thousand-square-mile tract of central Poland, including the cities of Warsaw and Kraków, named by the Nazis the Generalgouvernement (General Government)—was to become a demographic dustbin for inhabitants of the annexed districts found unsuitable for Germanization.
The acquisition of the Incorporated Eastern Territories, as the new Reichsgaue became known, and the problem of Volksdeutsch populations within the Soviet orbit were intimately linked. A week after the USSR’s attack on Poland, Stalin notified Hitler that he intended to claim his reward in Latvia and Estonia. On September 28, the day Warsaw fell, Berlin and Moscow concluded a further secret agreement, transferring Lithuania with its substantial German minority to the Soviet sphere in exchange for the addition to the German portion of the districts of Lublin and eastern Warsaw, originally assigned to the USSR the previous month. For Hitler, the removal of the German population of the Baltic had become a matter of urgency, as Stalin had intimated he was in no mood to be patient. The availability of the Incorporated Eastern Territories enabled him to kill two birds with one stone. Jews and racially unassimilable Poles would be forcibly transferred to the Generalgouvernement. Their houses, farms, and businesses would be assigned to the Baltic Germans, for whom persuasion to move to the newly conquered lands would hardly be necessary. Fear of the Soviets would see to that. The solution was of the kind that appealed most to Hitler, being simple, symmetrical, and brutal.
It did not, on the other hand, appeal to many Volksdeutsche. In a keynote address to the Reichstag to mark the end of the Polish campaign, Hitler announced on October 6, 1939 a “new order of ethnographic conditions” to be accomplished by a “resettlement of nationalities in such a manner … as to remove at least part of the material for European conflict.” Germany and the USSR, he intimated, had already agreed on such a transfer. What would be called the Heim ins Reich (Back to the Reich) program was thus revealed to the world. The prospect horrified many ethnic Germans, much of whose enthusiasm for Nazism had been predicated on the expectation that the boundaries of the Reich would, as in the cases of Austria, the Sudetenland, and Danzig, extend to embrace them. The prospect of being uprooted from their homes to face an uncertain future not even in Germany proper, but in the considerably less salubrious environment of western Poland, was much less attractive. So far from rallying enthusiastically to the Führer’s call, therefore, many Volksdeutsche greeted the declaration of the Heim ins Reich initiative with a deep sense of betrayal.
Their disillusionment would have been all the greater had they known how few preparations had been made for what was to be to that point the second largest population transfer in history after that between Turkey and Greece—and one, moreover, that was to be completed in a matter of weeks rather than years. Not until the morning after Hitler’s Reichstag speech was Himmler commissioned with the task of overseeing the “return” of ethnic Germans from overseas, “eliminating harmful alien elements” in the conquered territories, and accomplishing their colonization. Establishing an agency for the purpose to which he gave the grandiose title of Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom (RKFDV), Himmler worked quickly to bring the Nazi Party’s competing liaison agency for ethnic Germans, the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (VoMi) under his control. From then on, the SS would take the lead in reconfiguring the distribution of population in central and eastern Europe so as to make the region into what Hitler would optimistically describe as an Aryan “Garden of Eden.”
From the very beginning, things started to go wrong. As daunting as the challenges would have been under normal conditions, it immediately became evident that neither Himmler nor anyone else concerned had the least idea how to address them in the midst of a world war. Slapdash improvisation was the order of the day, with the Nazis largely unable to cope with any problem associated with the resettlement for which mass murder, summary expulsion, or recourse to fanciful racial theories did not provide a solution.
These difficulties came to the fore with the first wave of movements from the Baltic states. Scant respect was accorded to the sensibilities of the governments concerned; the agreement governing transfers of the sixteen thousand Volksdeutsche from Estonia was signed on October 15, a week after removals began. Similarly, the first ship to commence the transport of fifty thousand Latvian Germans docked on October 9, three weeks before the conclusion of negotiations with the Riga government. The Baltic states took their revenge for these slights by driving exceptionally hard economic bargains with Berlin. Taking full advantage of the minimal period allocated for the transfer—the Estonian protocol specified that the operation was to be completed by December 15—the two Baltic states snapped up German properties for a fraction of their true value. Estonian Germans were permitted to take with them only the equivalent of twenty dollars in local currency, together with household furniture and tools; all remaining assets, including real property, were to be assigned to a German Resettlement Trust in Tallinn which would oversee their liquidation and the application of the funds thus realized to the settling of the Deutschbalten in their new homes. Disputes concerning ownership or valuations were to be settled by a bilateral commission. In the end, official Estonian intransigence compelled the Resettlement Trust to sell off German-owned lands to the government at fire sale prices. The Latvian government took a still more avaricious stance. No more than ten dollars in Latvian currency could be taken out of the country; the export of precious metals or jewelry was prohibited; and all productive equipment larger than hand tools had to be left behind. The Latvian state moved to acquire German-owned lands and settle Latvian citizens on them in exchange for the promise to supply commodities to Germany, and to a still greater degree than their Estonian cousins low-balled the former owners on a massive scale.29 Cynics declared the initials of the UTAG, the Latvian equivalent of the Resettlement Trust, to stand for Untergang Tausender Arischer Geschlechter, or “Ruination of Thousands of Aryan Descent.” Joseph Schechtman has estimated that the Estonian and Latvian governments paid a mere $16 million in 1939 values for the German assets they acquired.30 The Nazis, though, were not disposed to quibble over pennies. Any sums realized from these transactions, however meager, were regarded as a bonus in light of the certainty that Stalin would soon take over in both countries and nullify all previous agreements made by their governments—as he duly proceeded to do in June 1940.
A similar process of horse trading took place, this time directly between the two principals in Berlin and Moscow, over the “return” of the 128,000 Volksdeutsche living in the Polish areas assigned to the USSR under the Nazi-Soviet Pact, most of them Volhynian and Galician Germans from the districts on the border with Ukraine. Their property, valued at $1.6 billion, was made over to the Soviets in exchange for a like amount in oil and foodstuffs to be delivered to the Reich. Meanwhile, after the conclusion of the Alto Adige “plebiscite,” Himmler reached a final settlement with Mussolini providing for the removal of the Germans there by December 31, 1942. He had already set aside for th
em a part of the Beskid mountain range in southern Poland, whose geographic and climatic conditions were thought to be equivalent to those they were leaving.
The process of moving all these peoples in wartime was at best haphazard. With great difficulty, fifty thousand Deutschbalten were evacuated on Kraft durch Freude cruise ships before November 15, 1939. Even so, thirty-five hundred Estonian and more than twelve thousand Latvian Germans—many of them partners in mixed marriages—stayed behind, their places being taken by individuals who had no connection whatever to Germany but who, by dint of bribery or connections, had fraudulently obtained the certificates testifying to their Germanness that would enable them to escape Stalin’s clutches. Though a large number of “returnees” were brought by train, many of the Volhynians, Galicians, and others arriving from central and eastern Poland were left to transport themselves and their possessions on horse carts, their livestock being driven along beside them. Their trek westward in the depths of winter was grueling, with many appalled and angered by the lack of assistance and organization from Reich authorities. “Usually nothing went smoothly,” one disgruntled settler recalled.31 Throughout the journey, the caravans were not allowed to rest for more than two hours at a time, for fear of frostbite and hypothermia.32 Nonetheless, the Volksdeutsch exodus was mythologized by a tidal wave of Himmler-inspired Heim ins Reich propaganda depicting the emigrants as hardy pioneers striking out for a new life in the frontier lands of the West. As one breathless chronicler of the movement put it, the settlers were the modern analogue of the Germanic tribes who, in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., had dealt the ailing and corrupt Roman Empire its final death blow. The agents of this latter-day Völkerwanderung were “in the midst of their new mission posed to them by the Reich, finally to settle the German east as a German area.”33
That turned out to be precisely the problem. The Nazi state’s ability to move large numbers of people, willingly or unwillingly, from one place to another at short notice vastly exceeded its skill at accomplishing the rehousing and resettlement of those thus moved. An early portent was provided when patients in psychiatric hospitals in Gdynia, Stettin, and Swinemünde were murdered under the Nazi “T-4” euthanasia program to enable the facilities to be used as temporary accommodation for some of the incoming Deutschbalten. Altogether, some ten thousand Poles were gassed or shot in connection with the transport. This combination of hasty, slapdash measures and unbridled savagery would become characteristic of the Volksdeutsche colonization scheme over the following years. In the RKFDV’s early imaginings, scarcely less simplistic than those of Hitler himself, “resettlement” involved nothing more complex than the driving out or murder of Poles and Jews and the reassignment of their property—less a suitable consideration for administration costs—to the newcomers. The reality was to be infinitely more challenging.
Expropriating the Untermenschen, a process set in hand by Goering who established the Haupttreuhandstelle Ost (Main Trusteeship Office East) to confiscate Jewish and Polish assets in the conquered territories and redistribute them to colonists, was a far bigger task than anticipated. An unforeseen complication was that there were fewer properties to go around than once believed. Of the 102,800 square kilometers of land annexed by Germany for the Incorporated Territories, three-quarters had been German before 1914. The conquest was thus followed by a flood of claims by former owners whose properties had been acquired compulsorily for minimal compensation by the interwar Polish state, and who now wanted them back with interest.34
The main obstacle, though, was the toxic brew of bureaucratic infighting, institutional confusion, last-minute changes of plan, and clashing objectives that stultified almost every major initiative undertaken by the Nazi state. Initially, Himmler and the RKFDV—aided by two lieutenants, Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann, who would later achieve global notoriety in the context of a still more ambitious and deranged demographic engineering program—set about the task of clearing the two new Gaue of the Incorporated Eastern Territories of their “excess” Polish and Jewish populations. The operation quickly fell behind schedule, however, firstly because of the unexpectedly slow pace of the confiscation bureaucracy, and secondly because of the unhelpfulness of the two Gauleiter concerned, Arthur Greiser of the Warthegau and Albert Forster of Danzig–West Prussia. Each cordially detested the other; both were determined to be first to complete the Germanization of their respective Gaue. The very different ways in which they pursued this objective proved equally subversive to the Volksdeutsch reception program. Greiser, an unbending Himmler loyalist, SS-Obergruppenführer, and race crank, proposed to tackle the problem by the book, calling in the specialists of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office to conduct a person-by-person racial screening to determine who was fitted to remain and who would be forced into the Generalgouvernement. (Jews, being unassimilable by definition, were not subject to screening, but summarily expropriated and deported.) Only a few hundred racial investigators were available, however, and the scale of the task soon overwhelmed their efforts. Albert Forster, a quintessential organization man whose roots lay in the Nazi Party and whose relations with Himmler and the SS grew more poisonous by the day, sought a less cumbersome solution. Convinced as he was that most inhabitants of his Gau were individuals of at least part-German blood who had been led astray before 1939 by “Polonizers,” Forster sent his officials into the midst of the population to sign up erstwhile Poles as “ethnic Germans.” Since the alternative was deportation to the Generalgouvernement, he did not lack for takers. Inability to speak German was no obstacle, nor were many questions asked to verify respondents’ claims of distant German descent. As the Gauleiter ingenuously explained, “We would not be National Socialists if we did not possess the unshakable belief that we will succeed in making men with German blood into enthusiastic Germans through our leadership and education.”35 Apart from its simplicity, the advantage of the bureaucratic approach to the task of Germanization—and probably its chief attraction to Forster—was that it offered no opportunity to the SS and its retinue of race monitors to interfere in Danzig–West Prussia’s affairs. From the point of view of the agencies charged with overseeing Volksdeutsch resettlement, however, neither Gau’s handling of the problem was in the least satisfactory. Greiser’s method of meticulous racial examination meant that Poles would be removed to the east, freeing up space for incoming colonists, only with agonizing slowness; Forster’s, of converting Poles to Germans at the stroke of a pen, meant that they would not be removed at all.
The consequences were predictable. In the winter of 1939–40 a large backlog of colonists for whom no space in the Incorporated Eastern Territories was yet available built up, compelling the RKFDV to house 150,000 of them in improvised camps in the Sudetenland, Saxony, Pomerania, and the Warthegau. Belated efforts to create additional space led only to further confusion. Early in November, for example, the Polish city of łódź was detached from the General-gouvernement and assigned to the Warthegau to provide a suitable home for the highly urbanized Deutschbalten. łódź, however, had a large Jewish population, and the immediate effect was vastly to increase the number of people who had to be deported to the Generalgouvernement, placing additional strain on already overburdened transport facilities. Hence, although Heydrich appointed Eichmann in December as his special officer for clearances in the annexed provinces, the program fell further and further behind schedule. Only 87,838 Poles and Jews had been transported to the east by December 17, when the operation had to be suspended so that the rolling stock could be used to bring Volhynian and Galician Germans in from Soviet-occupied Poland. Large-scale removals were not restarted until April 1940; even then, only 133,000 of a planned 600,000 were removed by early 1941, when the logistical requirements of Operation Barbarossa once again brought clearances to a halt.
Nor did this do anything to reduce the backlog. To the contrary, the number of spaces that needed to be made available to accommodate new participants in the Heim ins Reich progra
m took a sharp turn upward in the summer of 1940. The Soviet Union’s absorption of the three Baltic states in June compelled another hasty exodus of some 12,000 remaining ethnic Germans from Estonia and Latvia and 48,000 more from Lithuania.36 Under the terms of the Second Vienna Award two months later, in which Hitler forced Romania to cede northern Transylvania to Hungary, by now a Nazi client state, the 95,000 ethnic Germans living there were given the right to join the Heim ins Reich scheme rather than be compelled to transfer their allegiance from Bucharest to Budapest. Some 77,000 availed themselves of the opportunity by the end of the year. Stalin, too, had had his eye on Romania, and sent its government an ultimatum demanding the cession of the part-Ukrainian northern Bukovina region, together with Romanian Bessarabia, in June 1940. The Romanians meekly complied. About 137,000 Volksdeutsche lived in the transferred territories; under yet another Nazi-Soviet accord, they were transported to Germany in the autumn. All told, according to Götz Aly’s calculations, about a quarter of a million ethnic Germans were transferred from southeastern Europe in 1940, a larger number than had by that time arrived from the Baltic states and eastern Poland combined.37