In light of these facts, one might conclude that never before in European history did those responsible embark upon so ambitious a program in such an insouciant, even reckless, frame of mind. This would, however, be to misread the mood of the times. The Big Three were under no illusions as to how much chaos the expulsion would, even under the best of circumstances, involve. They refrained from setting up international machinery to oversee the transfers and minimize the suffering of the deportees principally because they attached no great importance to that goal. To the contrary, indeed, they considered the anguish the displaced population would undergo to be a salutary form of reeducation, bringing home to the mass of ordinary Germans the personal risks involved in lending support to extremist regimes and wars of aggression. They fully recognized that to impose even a semblance of order on the population transfers would, as expert opinion unanimously advised them, require a vast and expensive international machinery—one they had no intention of creating. In a period of great scarcity, they firmly believed, resources dedicated to relief and resettlement should be applied to the victims of Germany rather than to Germans themselves. Any international organizations that might be created to conduct or supervise the transfers, moreover, would almost inevitably become lobbies in favor of adjusting governments’ utopian ends to available means as soon as serious economic or humanitarian problems arose, as they were certain to do. The leaders of the Big Three knew that the immediate postwar period offered them an all-too-brief window of opportunity to redraw the political and ethnographic map of central Europe, and in the process to achieve a social as well as a political revolution in the region. Though their respective visions of the forms those revolutions ought to take profoundly differed, each saw the expulsion project as a vital component of the changes they desired to achieve, and was willing to accept the risks involved in the pursuit of their goals.
The driving out of unwanted peoples, to be sure, is a practice almost as old as recorded history. The Old Testament tells the story of numerous forced migrations carried out by the Israelites and their neighbors against each other, the Babylonian Captivity being the most celebrated. Philip II of Macedonia was renowned for the scale of his population transfers in the fourth century B.C., a precedent that his son, Alexander the Great, appears to have intended to follow on a far more massive scale.2 The colonial era witnessed many more forced displacements, often accompanied or initiated by massacre. Some of these bore a distinctly “modern” tinge. The Act of Resettlement that followed Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland, for example, ordered Irish property owners in three-quarters of the island to remove themselves to the impoverished western province of Connacht by May 1, 1654, to make room for incoming English and Scottish colonists; those remaining east of the River Shannon after that date were to be killed wherever found. “The human misery involved,” in the judgment of Marcus Tanner, “probably equaled anything inflicted on Russia or Poland in the 1940s by Nazi Germany.”3 On a smaller scale, but proportionately just as lethal, was the United States’ forced relocation of part of the Cherokee nation from Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama to eastern Oklahoma along the so-called “Trail of Tears” in 1838; perhaps a quarter of the fifteen thousand men, women, and children who were driven out perished, most of them while detained in assembly camps. Extensive forced migrations occurred in Africa and Asia also. In what is today Nigeria the Sokoto Caliphate, the largest independent state in nineteenth-century Africa, practiced slavery on a massive scale—by 1860 it possessed at least as many slaves as the United States—as an instrument of forced migration, the purpose being to increase the security of disputed border areas. “Enforced population displacement … was supposed to strengthen the Islamic state, which was achieved through demographic concentration.”4 On the western borderlands of China, the Qing Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “used deportations and mass kidnappings to build a human resource base.”5
Contemporary scholars agree, though, that the twentieth century has been the heyday of forcible population transfers. The rise of the nation-state, in place of the dynastic multinational empires of the earlier period, was both cause and effect of the ideological claim that political and ethnographic boundaries ought to be identical. The Industrial Revolution and the quantum leap in military technology produced by it created an insurmountable imbalance between the ability of the state to impose its will and that of ordinary people to resist, rendering the most extravagant visions of nation and empire builders not merely possible, but relatively easily achievable. This combination of totalizing ideologies and technological capability, Richard Bessel and Claudia Haake argue, has in the modern age given “this dreadful phenomenon a qualitatively and quantitatively new character.”6 Whereas in the past unwanted minority populations had, in many cases, been able to fly beneath the radar of the governments that persecuted them—either by an outward show of compliance or, for those living in disputed borderland regions, by assuming an “amphibian” identity—the modern bureaucratic state with its elaborate systems of classification, surveillance, and control made this impossible. And because the twentieth century was incomparably the most violent in human history, featuring more and bloodier wars than ever before, motive and opportunity for displacing minorities were joined to means. It is no accident that few modern wars, from the former Yugoslavia to Darfur, from Iraq to the Caucasus, are now unaccompanied by overt attempts to alter the demographic character of the contested areas by forcibly driving out some or all of their peoples.
In many ways, the Great War of 1914–18 was a dress rehearsal for the gross displacements of population that would take place later in the century. Three-quarters of a million ethnic Germans were expelled into the Russian interior by the tsarist armies during the first months of the conflict; before it was over, Jews, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Chinese, Koreans, and Caucasian Muslims would be added to the list of peoples the Russian Empire would find it expedient to displace. Tens of thousands of Serbs suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.7 The Kaiser’s forces deported elements of the Belgian, French, and Lithuanian populations for strategic reasons, clearing territories for use as specially prepared killing zones that Allied troops would be compelled to cross. Most notoriously of all, between September 1915 and February 1916 the Ottoman Empire drove out perhaps a million Armenians into the Syrian and Iraqi deserts in what would become a template for future genocidal operations: the ejection of peoples accompanied by, and as a means of accomplishing, mass murder. The death rate among the expellees, who were not intended to survive the transfer, may have been of the order of 50 percent; hundreds of thousands of others were done to death by more conventional methods. There is, nonetheless, much justice in Donald Bloxham’s observation that the year 1914 was not some great watershed that disrupted a previously peaceful international scene. Ever since the mid-1880s, southeastern Europe had been the scene of “coercive population movement as well as great violence directed at civilians as well as soldiers…. These were all ethnic wars, and their lineage of ethnicized violence was perpetuated into the First World War and beyond, and provides a continuum upon which the civil conflicts unleashed by Nazi rule in Eastern Europe are best viewed.”8
Even after the return of peace, national governments would pioneer methods of displacing unwanted minorities that would be applied on a much larger scale twenty years later. A case in point was France’s “cleansing” (épuration) of the border provinces of Alsace and Lorraine between 1918 and 1921, in what Mark Mazower describes as “a blatantly racist assault on the civil rights of Germanspeakers” in the region.9 After his victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Bismarck had ill-advisedly annexed the ethnically mixed provinces to the Reich, creating a permanent antagonism between the two countries. When France reconquered Alsace-Lorraine in 1918, it immediately set out to eliminate any basis for future disputes about the provinces’ political complexion by purging them of those who might be thought to favor their reincorporat
ion into Germany. To facilitate the process, the population was divided into four categories by the end of December 1918. Residents whose French loyalties were unquestioned were given identity cards marked with the letter “A,” signifying that they had been citizens of France before the Franco-Prussian War. Those who had at least one pre-1870 French parent received “B” cards. Citizens of Allied and neutral countries were placed in the “C” category; the remainder—a total of 513,000 “enemy” nationals and their children, including those who had been born in Alsace-Lorraine—became members of the “D” class. As we have seen, Heinrich Himmler’s racial gurus would use this system as a model when devising the Deutsche Volksliste in occupied Poland two decades later.
Like the Volksliste, the French classification scheme could readily be applied for the purpose of discrimination as well as expulsion. Category “A” card-holders, for example, could exchange Reichsmarks for francs at a much more favorable exchange rate than members of the other classes. Holders of “B” cards were often turned down for public-sector jobs on the ground of their mixed parentage. The most stringent disabilities, needless to say, applied to the “D” class, whose members among other restrictions were not permitted to travel. Petty persecution, however, soon gave way to deportation. The first to be removed were German-speaking civil servants; later, those marked for expulsion included factory owners and the unemployed. Their fate was determined by commissions de triage that held meetings in camera to assess the French patriotism of the persons concerned, often on the basis of denunciations solicited by local officials from individuals waging personal vendettas. Those who failed this examination were pushed across the frontier into Germany. They were permitted to take thirty kilograms of baggage with them and a maximum of two thousand Reichsmarks, all their remaining property being forfeited to the French state. But an even larger number were induced to opt for “voluntary repatriation” on the same terms. They did so because they expected to be removed eventually; because life in the “D” category had become intolerable; because, although not personally removable, their spouses or children were “D” card-holders; or, in some cases, because they feared physical attack by members of the majority population. Altogether, nearly 100,000 expellees and “voluntary repatriates” were transferred to Germany before the system was discontinued in July 1921.10
Following its genocidal debut in Armenia, Turkey, too, would play a leading role after the war in what would be the largest population transfer in history to that point. After the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918, the Allies punished the Ottoman Empire for its decision to throw in its lot with Germany by stripping it of its Middle Eastern provinces; compensating the Armenians with their own independent republic; and demilitarizing Turkey to an even greater extent than the Treaty of Versailles had done to Germany. All told, the Ottoman Empire lost 72 percent of its prewar land area. The most controversial element of the Treaty of Sèvres, which imposed these terms, however, was the concession of eastern Thrace—the hinterland of Constantinople—and the granting of a provisional administration over western Anatolia and its principal port, Smyrna (today’s Izmir), to the Kingdom of Greece. The Allies’ intention had been to use the Greeks as proxies to enforce the partition of the Ottoman Empire, but the idea backfired disastrously. Ethnic antagonisms between the two countries had been so intense for so long that there was no possibility of the Turks ever reconciling themselves to what in any event was a heavy-handed Greek occupation. Nor could 5 million Greeks constitute an effective counterweight against a Turkish population that was almost twice as large. By 1922 a new and highly effective Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal had forced the Greeks out of Anatolia and Thrace; sacked Smyrna, in the process killing up to 100,000 Greeks and Armenians in one of the most horrific but least-known massacres of the twentieth century; and replaced the ineffectual Sultanate with a Republic of Turkey under the leadership of Kemal, now styled “Atatürk.” As with almost every other Greco-Turkish conflict of the previous hundred years, the conflict was accompanied by ethnic cleansing of towns and villages on both sides. Having lost the war as badly as they did, though, the Greeks got very much the worst of it. Nearly a million fled before the Turkish armies to Greece proper before an uneasy truce was concluded in October 1922. The following summer, the Treaty of Lausanne, undoing most of Sèvres and settling the boundaries of Greece and Turkey, was concluded largely as a result of the diplomacy of the British foreign secretary, George Nathaniel Curzon. One of its key components was a convention providing for a compulsory population exchange between the two countries.
In view of the frequency with which Lausanne was invoked by the western Allies during and after the Second World War as a successful example of mass transfer of peoples, it is remarkable how ignorant they remained of its actual consequences. The first point to be noted about the Lausanne exchange was that it did little more than ratify a state of affairs that already existed. Of the 1.2 million ethnic Greeks affected by the convention, all but 190,000 had taken refuge in Greece before the fighting concluded. The number of Turks living in lands under Greek administration was only about 350,000. The physical removals, therefore, involved only about half a million people, a far cry from the numbers that would require to be moved after the Second World War. The fact that religion could be used as a marker of identity, additionally, greatly simplified the logistics of the operation. Because the number of Greek Muslims and Turkish Christians was negligible, as were mixed marriages, disentangling the two peoples presented few difficulties. The transfer was to take place under international auspices and with international assistance. A Refugee Settlement Commission was established to oversee the operation and settle any points of dispute; the League of Nations provided a loan of £20 million to enable Greece to cope with the task of resettling about a quarter of its population. The expellees were allowed to take all their moveable property with them, and given help in transporting themselves and their goods to their new homes. Lastly, sufficient time was provided to enable the operation to be completed with a minimum of hardship.
Despite all these favorable circumstances, the Lausanne transfer was in many respects a fiasco. The immediate consequences for Turkey were comparatively limited: finding new homes for the expellees from Greece, a mere 4 percent of the total population, presented few real challenges. In the longer term, more serious problems arose, with parts of Anatolia remaining virtually depopulated to the present day and the economy burdened by the loss of a significant component of its entrepreneurial class. While the transfer of Christians, Gareth Jenkins believes, “made it easier to create a nation, it also set back the economic development of the Turkish state by at least a generation.”11 For the Greeks, though, Lausanne had a long-lasting and almost uniformly negative impact. The pressure of the incoming population forced an extensive though mismanaged land redistribution program, as well as the construction of more than a thousand new villages to accommodate the newcomers. Even this was not sufficient. Large numbers of deportees took refuge in shanties in the vicinity of Athens and other large towns, becoming a marginalized element looked down upon by the indigenes as having been tainted with foreign and Turkish habits. The destabilization of Greek society was accompanied by the undermining of the economy. Notwithstanding international assistance, the cost of servicing the debt incurred in rehousing the expellees and building roads, bridges, and schools in the new settlements was high. Between 1922 and 1932, more than 40 percent of the Greek budget was being spent on resettlement activities.12 Worst of all, perhaps, were the political ramifications. Uprooted, impoverished, and unwelcome, the expellees became a natural constituency for extremist political movements, especially the hitherto insignificant Communist Party of Greece. Though the bitter and bloody Greek civil war that erupted in 1946 had more complex roots than merely the social divide between expellees and the settled population, the radicalization of Greek politics that resulted from the transfer did a great deal to make it possible.13
The notion that th
e Lausanne transfers represented any kind of success story thus flew in the face of abundant contrary evidence. Curzon himself was the first to recognize the fact. Although he had reluctantly acquiesced in Ankara’s insistence that the population movements be compulsory, in the face of Atatürk’s threat that otherwise Turkey would proceed to the systematic extermination of the Greek minority, he warned presciently that the driving out of peoples was “a thoroughly bad and vicious solution, for which the world will pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come.”14 The supposition that the displacements prevented further conflict between Greece and Turkey took a heavy blow in 1974 with the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, which was followed three weeks later by a demand from Ankara for a fresh population transfer to complete the work left undone half a century earlier. It is unsurprising, then, that the New English Weekly should have marveled in January 1945 that Lausanne was regarded as “an achievement of ‘peacemaking’ upon which the League of Nations preened itself notably at the time, and is being upheld as an example to be followed in several cases, in which the consequences are not likely to be less incendiary.”15
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 11