The “ethnic struggle” was not everywhere waged so fiercely, though even in the much quieter atmosphere of Bohemia and Moravia, ethnic Germans who offended their neighbors by taking out Reich nationality stood in danger of somewhat melodramatically named “‘Czech terror’—being ignored in Czech shops, insulted, and sometimes even beaten up.”61 In fact, a greater problem for the Nazis was to prevent Volksdeutsch colonists from “going native” and making common cause with the indigenous population—with whom, objectively, they often shared closer bonds of culture, religion, lifestyle, and even language than their nominal Volksgenossen (racial comrades). Endless complaints were received from “settlement advisers,” VoMi officials, and SS racial monitors of the failure of the Volksdeutsche to exhibit that “necessary consciousness of superiority which we need to be able to maintain our rights as a colonial state and nation.”62 Colonists “found it difficult to recognize their German heritage and get over their friendliness to the Poles.”63 The same deficiencies extended to lifestyle. While official propaganda represented ethnic Germans as “paragons of Aryan purity and National Socialist loyalty,”
Reich authorities of all kinds griped about Volksdeutschen whom they said lacked proper German qualities: diligence, cleanliness, sexual self-control, and the ability to speak German…. As soon as their husbands were out of the picture, one reporter carped, the women took up with Ukrainians and Poles. The men, the account continued, were no better; they slept with Polish women and assumed the cultural habits of Poles, while the youth were lazy and promiscuous.64
Nazi officials had, of course, many tools of coercion at their disposal to enforce ethnic separation. As early as September 1940, Greiser issued a directive threatening with “protective custody” (i.e. detention in a concentration camp) those persons “belonging to the German community who maintain relations with Poles which go beyond those deriving from the performance of services or economic considerations…. In all cases the maintenance of repeated friendly contacts with Poles must be regarded as failure to observe the prescribed distance.”65 Ethnic Germans could be punished for “having a history of siding with the Poles” by being stripped of their farms and sent back to the settler camps; others were downgraded in or struck off the Volksliste for similar offenses; others again were sent to join labor battalions in the “old Reich.”66 The sins of the fathers could even be visited on their children, and vice versa: Doris Bergen tells the story of an aged woman from Kulm (Chełmno) who “lost her German status and was sent as a Pole to a concentration camp when her grandson deserted” from the German army.67 But as with peoples everywhere throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, many Volksdeutsche became adept at negotiating the conflicting demands of the state and of their indigenous neighbors, keeping their heads down and avoiding taking sides. Gestapo officers noted many cases, especially after the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 (though in the case of some far-sighted individuals, as early as Pearl Harbor in December 1941) of Volksdeutsche prudently insuring their future by returning goods to the Poles they had displaced.68 With the Volksliste becoming ever more elastic, moreover, few if any objective differences could in many cases be perceived between the two peoples. As one young German woman assigned to a village in Danzig–West Prussia reported in 1942, “those belonging to group 3 [of the Volksliste] do not stand out in any way from the Poles and speak just as much or as little German as the Poles. One could even say that those of more valuable [racial] character have stayed Polish.”69 A Nazi Party official in Czechoslovakia formed the same impression, advising Heydrich that in his view “the children of these fanatical Czechs of the past 20 years are much more valuable subjects for Germanization than these unprincipled scoundrels who change their views from day to day.”70
Whether the Volksdeutsche are to be regarded as “perpetrators,” “victims,” or “bystanders” in relation to Nazism and its crimes—to invoke Raul Hilberg’s famous three-part classification—is thus a question without an obvious answer. For half a century the equation of Volksdeutsche and “fifth column” was virtually axiomatic, even in the scholarly literature. Certainly those seeking examples of collaboration by ethnic Germans in some of Nazism’s most horrific atrocities do not have to look far for evidence. In the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania, Volksdeutsch vigilantes participated directly, alongside police, army, and SS units, in extermination actions against Jews. Women as well as men joined in the killing: a female Volksdeutsch translator in the Ukraine, for example, personally shot Jewish children in the clearance of the Khmil’nyk district in 1942.71 Among SS units with the most appalling reputations were some, like the infamous Yugoslav Prinz Eugen division, composed almost entirely of Volksdeutsche. Though only a minority of ethnic Germans during the Second World War were transferred from their homes and settled in other countries, those who did so evinced few conscientious qualms over the fate of the people they had—however unwillingly in some cases—displaced. While many were conscripted into the German armed forces, many more who might have avoided doing so volunteered their services out of ideological conviction, the hope of proving their “Germanness” to their professed co-racials, or the expectation of future reward. And while a small number of Volksdeutsche aligned themselves with the opponents of Nazism—Ludwika von Kleist, the moving spirit behind the Polish underground in Wilkołaz, was a relative of the German field marshal of the same name—the great majority either supported the German cause which, as they saw it, had delivered them from the oppression of their previous rulers or the threat of Bolshevism, or circumspectly said and did nothing to dissociate themselves from it.
In this, though, they differed little if at all from other Germans. And indeed they differed less from the inhabitants of the occupied countries under German rule than is generally acknowledged. It is often forgotten, for example, that more than twice as many Dutch citizens volunteered to fight with the Waffen-SS during the war than joined the Free Netherlands forces.72 The idea that the Volksdeutsche constituted a Nazi fifth column in neighboring countries, awaiting orders from Berlin to stab their own countries in the back before heading off to play their part in extending the New Order in the East, is not one that survives detailed examination. Even if they had had aspirations in that direction, Nazi policy would have doomed them to disappointment.73 In the end, the wave of German-orchestrated population transfers in 1939–41, undertaken above all to avoid premature conflict with the USSR, was a signal failure. Only about half a million Volksdeutsche, of the 20 million envisaged by the Generalplan Ost, were ever placed in new homes. Hundreds of thousands more would-be “settlers” never reached the new colonies, instead spending much of the war in a network of more than fifteen hundred so-called “observation camps.”74 As early as December 1940, Himmler had to row back on his resettlement mania, promising in a speech to disgruntled Gauleiter that he would discontinue further Heim ins Reich propaganda and seek to relocate only the smaller and more scattered German populations in other countries, leaving the larger and more homogeneous ones where they were.75 Hence, although ethnic Germans normally enjoyed a privileged minority status freeing them in many respects from the control of local administrations—the outstanding exception being the three million Sudetendeutsche, nearly all of whom had Reich citizenship conferred upon them after Munich—the Volksdeutsche of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia “were expected to cooperate and remain loyal to their states, rather than serve the Reich as disloyal ‘fifth columnists’ working for their destruction.”76 Some qualification of this general rule, Valdis Lumans reminds us, is necessary in the case of Yugoslavia, where after the German invasion of April 1941 the state was dissolved into smaller puppet administrations. There, a not inconsiderable number of Volksdeutsche had indeed played the part of fifth columnists, heeding German calls to evade military service in the royal army and serving the Wehrmacht as informers, translators, or guides. Even in this instance, though, they were expected after the conquest to get along with the new “Serbo-Banat” and Croatian regimes of the areas i
n which they lived in the interest of lightening Berlin’s administrative burdens.
As the tide of battle turned in 1944 and 1945 and the Red Army began to menace not just the occupied territories in the east but the German homeland itself, the process of colonization was put into reverse. Volksdeutsche who had freely subscribed to the Volksliste began to think of their future; those who had done so under duress assembled evidence that they had not willingly betrayed their country. (Dr Klukowski and his staff, after being forced to sign, placed an affidavit formally disavowing their applications for German nationality in a bottle and buried it in the hospital garden.) Some colonists labored under the delusion that they would at last be able to return to their countries of origin, which they had never wanted to leave. The more realistic understood that their only genuine hope of survival lay in withdrawing to the west as the Wehrmacht retreated. But the majority of Volksdeutsche who had remained in situ throughout the war—the Sudeten and Hungarian Germans, the German-speaking indigenes of the Incorporated Territories, and the Balkan Germans—faced a final agonizing decision about their true allegiance.
Throughout the war, relations between Reichsdeutsche and Volksdeutsche had always been strained. At mealtimes in Germany itself, according to the VoMi, “people tried to relegate the Germans from the southeast (i.e. Yugoslavia and Romania) to the table with the alien workers and the prisoners of war.”77 Elsewhere, Volksdeutsche resented the Reichsdeutsch monopoly over the best jobs and the choicest spoils: “in the small towns, even the tennis-club membership was split down the middle between Volksdeutsche and Reichsdeutsche.”78 Now, mutual mistrust rose to the surface. Germans from the “old Reich” often regarded their ethnic German counterparts as a craven rabble indifferent to the fate of the Fatherland and concerned only with saving their own skins; Volksdeutsche took note of the elaborate evacuation procedures prepared by the Wehrmacht for “real” Germans, and suspected their better-connected co-nationals of planning to fight to the last Volksdeutsch. In such an atmosphere of paranoia, the decision of not just whether, but when to flee was fraught with danger. To leave too soon was to risk condign punishment for “desertion” or “spreading defeatism”; to wait too long opened one to accusations from the German authorities of being an “amphibian,” scheming to betray the Volk and resume one’s former non-German nationality as soon as the Wehrmacht retreated from the scene. Dr. Klukowski witnessed both elements of this dilemma in Zamość, where in February 1944 he recorded that “Our ‘own’ … Volksdeutsche are just waiting to move out, but so far German authorities are trying to force them to stay. They are under constant surveillance. They cannot leave their homes without written permission.” Three months later, he observed, “the Gestapo began interviewing Volksdeutsche to learn why they are still in town. Some were beaten, such as the barber Gortner.”79
The evacuation and flight of the German population in the eastern part of the Reich, when it finally began in earnest in January 1945, is one of the few episodes of the Second World War whose public discussion was not surrounded by taboos—mainly because it was one of the few not to be disfigured by a lengthy list of Nazi atrocities. In the postwar years, the experience of die Flucht was memorialized and mythologized, becoming one of the founding tropes of the Federal Republic in 1949: a new democratic Germany, born in victimhood and suffering, standing as a beacon of hope and a haven for those seeking refuge from the Bolshevik hordes. Unquestionably, for the millions who fled the Soviet offensive, and the millions more who, after days or weeks on the roads of East Prussia and German Silesia in subfreezing temperatures, were overwhelmed by the Red Army’s shockingly rapid advance, the withdrawal was a grim ordeal. Large numbers did reach relative safety, thanks in part to the greatest seaborne evacuation in history in which more than two million refugees were transported from the collapsing northeastern provinces by the German Navy. From the insignificant Baltic port of Pillau (Baltiysk) alone, a larger number of people were evacuated than had been rescued at Dunkirk five years previously. But the death toll among the refugees was on no less dramatic a scale, certainly reaching the hundreds of thousands. Almost entirely ignored in this narrative, however, is the fact that large-scale evacuations of the Volksdeutsche had begun a year and a half previously. As early as June 1943, as the Soviets pressed forward into the Black Sea region, the first ethnic German communities were moved to the north and west; in a repeat of earlier history that was in equal parts tragic and ironic, the following spring Poles were driven out of the Warthegau to make room for them.80 The first withdrawals in Ukraine commenced at the end of 1943, and were followed six months later by the dismantling of Volksdeutsch villages in the Generalgouvernement. By the autumn of 1944, the process was in full swing, with 160,000 following the Wehrmacht out of the Banat and Baĉka in Romania and Yugoslavia, and more than 100,000 from Slovenia. In a pattern that would be repeated in the future, most of the evacuees were women and children, a large proportion of the adult men having already departed to Germany as members of the armed forces or war workers.
Obtaining reliable figures on the numbers of ethnic Germans who fled, as opposed to those who remained, is difficult even more than sixty years later. Nearly all of those living in the Generalgouvernement, and around half of the Volksdeutsche who had resided in the Incorporated Territories before the war, were withdrawn to the “old Reich.” The Yugoslav Volksdeutsch population was similarly reduced by perhaps a third in 1944–45. In contrast, few departed from Hungary. The Wehrmacht briefly considered forcing them to leave, but gave the idea up as impracticable; during the closing weeks of the war, about 50,000, or one in ten of the prewar German community, decamped on their own initiative. The single largest ethnic German population, the Sudetendeutsche, with minor exceptions did not have the option of withdrawal: not until the war’s last days did the area fall to General George Patton’s Third U.S. Army advancing from the west and Marshal Ivan Konev’s First Ukrainian Front coming from the east, making any large-scale evacuation impossible.
Many did not see the necessity to leave. Taking comfort from the good relations they possessed—or imagined themselves to possess—with their non-German neighbors, their lack of Nazi Party membership, or Allied disavowals from the early part of the war of “territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned,” they assumed that at worst their situation would revert to what it had been between the wars. They entirely failed to understand how profoundly the experience of living for years in an environment of unbridled terror, in which any non-German had been liable to imprisonment, deportation, torture, or execution for any reason and at any time, had traumatized and radicalized the societies of which they were a part. Themselves the beneficiaries of a Herrenvolk status that even in the midst of war surrounded them in a cocoon of relative privilege, they were unaware of how much resentment their taken-for-granted advantages—better food, housing, and employment; the right to sweep to the head of the queue at shops and post offices; the marking in most towns of theaters, cinemas, park benches, and even street pavements as nur für Deutsche (“Germans only”)—generated among those they had usurped.81 They did not recognize how hollowly Wilsonian rhetoric about self-determination now rang in the ears of Nazism’s victims, or why it seemed illogical that the victorious Allies should continue to bind themselves to apply to Germany a principle that Germany itself—with the seeming approval of its people—invariably honored only in the breach. This failure of imagination and of empathy, which with rare exceptions would continue to be the most distinctive psychological trait of the “expellee generation,” was to have fateful and tragic consequences in the months and years to come.
In the last analysis, though, the fate of the ethnic Germans, and of Germans in general, would be determined not by their immediate neighbors but by the great powers. It was they, not Poland or Czechoslovakia, that had defeated the Axis; their armies of liberation or of occupation would dictate the strategic, political, and demographic future
of the European continent. While each of them found it convenient from time to time to depict their choice of action as having been dictated by popular feeling on the ground, in reality no initiative was under-taken—or was allowed to continue for very long—in the areas under their control that did not conform to their wishes. It is at the level of Allied high policy, therefore, that explanations for the decision to repeat at the end of the war a policy that Adolf Hitler had already shown to be a disastrous failure during it must be sought.
3
THE SCHEME
The expulsion of the ethnic Germans was not only to be by any measure the greatest forced migration in human history, but may well constitute the greatest single movement of population.1 No precedent—not even Hitler’s or Stalin’s—existed for rounding up, transporting, and resettling so massive a number of people in such a short time. Nor did recent experience of the totalitarian states’ smaller-scale attempts to displace and transplant the indigenous populations of a given region augur well for the operation that was now being contemplated.
Among the most remarkable aspects of the expulsion was the deliberate refusal of those who carried it out either to seek to learn the lessons of those previous examples or to make any preparations, of however rudimentary a character, for an enterprise whose disruption to the normal life of central Europe was second only to that caused by the war itself. Although the Allies could not even guess at how many people might need to be removed—that would depend on the number of ethnic Germans who would be killed, or flee to the west, before the war came to an end—it was clear from the outset that many millions would remain for deportation. Quite apart from any ethical considerations, the scale of the logistical effort involved was immense. The Allies would require to arrive at some definition of who was a “German,” in one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the continent—a process that, whatever criteria might be imposed, would inevitably leave hundreds of thousands of families divided by nationality. The expellees would have to be concentrated in some fashion so as to facilitate their deportation and ensure that they did not go underground among the majority population. Decisions would have to be taken as to how much of their property, if any, they were to be allowed to take with them, and what would happen to the houses, businesses, and farms they left behind. They would need to be moved along a European transportation network that the Allies had attempted during the previous five years, with considerable success, to disable or destroy. They would have to be rehoused in that part of Germany that the Allies, with still greater success, had worked assiduously to bomb flat. In the longer term, jobs would have to be found for masses of expellees who, coming as they did from the largely agrarian east, would require retraining to take up whatever positions might become available in the predominantly industrial west. Postwar German society too would have to adapt as best it could to the influx of a huge number of outsiders the majority of whom were unproductive and a significant proportion of whom spoke German poorly or not at all. Lastly, some means would need to be found, for at least a generation and perhaps for several, to prevent these millions of uprooted, embittered people, possessing no stake in the status quo and every reason to wish to see its destruction, once again from setting whatever German polity would ultimately emerge along the path toward revising the postwar settlement and regaining the country’s lost eastern territories by force.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 10