For these reasons, population transfers did not commend themselves to political leaders in the West between the wars. When they were discussed at all, they tended to be counsels of last resort. A similar forced exchange between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, recommended by the Peel Commission in 1936, was dropped in the face of League of Nations criticism the following year.16 Both the British and the French governments floated the idea of a population exchange between Germany and Poland during the last week of peace in 1939; the British ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, formally proposed it to Hitler on August 25.17 This, though, was exceptional. In the early years of the war, the foremost opponent of the kind of demographic engineering in which Hitler and Stalin had been engaged had been Winston Churchill himself. Explaining to the Australian prime minister, John Curtin, on Christmas Day 1941 why he could not accept Stalin’s absorption of Poland east of the Curzon line and the clearance of much of its population to the USSR, he said that “the forcible transfer of large populations against their will into the Communist sphere” would “vitiate the fundamental principles of freedom which are the main impulse of our Cause.”18 Despite its own history of forced internal displacements of the aboriginal population, the United States too officially opposed population transfers, often citing its own success in “Americanizing” immigrant ethnic groups.19
As we have seen in chapter 1, though, under the stress of total war this principled stance rapidly eroded. The United States carried through a major forced migration of its own after Pearl Harbor, transferring some 112,000 ethnic Japanese from the coastal areas to the interior and lodging them in misnamed “concentration camps” (objectionable though the principle of internment on ethnic grounds may have been, a third of the camps’ population was granted permission during the war to leave, for education or employment). With the United States and the Soviet Union participating in the war, moreover, it was no longer necessary for Britain to point quite so frequently to Hitler’s inhumane population transfers as a point of distinction between the British Empire’s war aims and those of Nazi Germany.
To change one’s mind about what constituted a “war crime” was one thing. To determine how to carry out a mass expulsion of ethnic Germans was quite another. The United States conducted no inquiries into this question, considering it a European responsibility. Preliminary British investigations, though, made clear that it would be a formidable undertaking. The first outline study was carried out by the Foreign Office’s private think tank, the Oxford-based Foreign Research and Press Service (later the Foreign Office Research Department) in February 1942. In typically idiosyncratic style the job of drafting this report was assigned to John Mabbott, a metaphysician at St John’s College best known for works like “The Place of God in Berkeley’s Philosophy.” Nonetheless, Mabbott justified his appointment by producing a lucid, logical, and realistic appraisal of the problem. Unlike previous population exchanges, he pointed out, one of the parties in this case would have no incentive to see it succeed. Responsibility for implementing the transfer would therefore fall entirely on the Allies. If a repetition of the debacle into which the Lausanne exchange had descended, in which the Anatolian Greeks “mostly carried out a ‘Dunkirk evacuation’ at Smyrna,” was to be avoided, both the areas to be cleared and those into which the expellees were to be sent would need to be under the direct control of an international agency. Should this not happen, widespread abuse of the German population by the Poles and Czechoslovaks, and their sending into Germany with “little but the light summer clothes on their backs,” could be expected. If the Allies did not wish to see central Europe’s road and rail network congested with expellees, moreover, a timescale of five to ten years for the completion of the operation would be required. “The estimate of ten years is likely to be nearer the truth if the evacuation of each area is to wait until adequate reception or settlement plans are organized at the other end of the journey.” Because in practice it was unlikely that the expelling states would wait that long, “the surviving Germans would have to be herded into concentration camps in Germany…. Such temporary measures had to be adopted in Greece [after Lausanne], where many refugees spent long periods (frequently several years) in schools, theatres, markets and primitive hovels which tended to become permanent slums.”20
While Mabbott carefully avoided going beyond his brief by volunteering any opinion as to the wisdom or otherwise of compulsory transfers, he offered enough food for thought to make clear that a demographic reshuffle of Europe on the scale Allied policymakers were contemplating would present far greater logistical challenges than anybody had yet considered. Once the Big Three decided regardless to proceed in 1942–43, the obvious next step was a detailed study of the practical aspects of a mass expulsion of ethnic Germans from central Europe. Remarkably, it was not until November 1943 that the British government commissioned such a survey; neither of the other principal Allies is known to have addressed the problem at all. The British investigation was carried out by high-ranking civil servants representing the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office, the Treasury, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the War Office, and the Dominions Office, and was chaired by a senior official of the Foreign Office’s German Department, Jack Troutbeck. After six months’ study this “Inter-Departmental Committee on the Transfer of German Populations” presented its report, which ran to fifty-one printed pages, to the Armistice and Post-War Committee, a group of cabinet ministers charged with making plans for the postwar world. The report’s significance lies not so much in the action taken on its recommendations as in the fact that it represented the only attempt ever made by any of the countries involved to consider what in concrete terms the requirements and consequences of the expulsion project might be.
The Inter-Departmental Committee’s work was made more difficult by the fact that at the time of its creation, no decision had been made as to how the postwar frontiers of Germany were to be redrawn and, consequently, how many Germans it might prove necessary to remove. In the summer of 1943, the Cabinet’s Military Sub-Committee had suggested that approximately 4.5 million Germans be expelled from the area to be given to Poland after the war. Anthony Eden was disquieted by the scale of the proposed transfer, and recommended to the War Cabinet that Poland receive a smaller tranche of German territory with fewer removable inhabitants. Churchill, however, seemed to be pushing in the opposite direction, making an informal commitment to transfer an undefined number of Germans to benefit the Poles at the Tehran Conference in November 1943. This first wartime meeting of the Big Three nearly broke down over Stalin’s truculent and insulting treatment of the British prime minister, and Roosevelt’s unwise decision openly to demonstrate his sympathy for Soviet geopolitical aims in Europe. In an impulsive attempt to regain the initiative and, perhaps, prove his continued relevance, Churchill held a private meeting with Stalin and, using three matchsticks as visual aids, outlined a scenario in which the USSR would be allowed to keep its conquered Polish territories of 1939 in exchange for which the Poles would gain an equivalent amount of territory from Germany in the west. Although the question of transferring the German population was not discussed in detail, the clear implication was that Poland was not to be burdened with a substantial alien minority. If the London government in exile did not agree, the prime minister declared, he would wash his hands of them. Stalin was delighted with Churchill’s concession, and the conference closed in a much more cordial atmosphere than when it had begun. The Soviet dictator showed how much importance he attached to Britain’s sacrifice of Polish, German, and British interests by sending Edvard Beneš in hot pursuit of the homeward-bound Churchill, bearing “a map of Poland personally marked by Stalin” as confirmation of the deal. The Czechoslovak president, who had his own motives for wishing the Poles to be able to displace as many Germans as possible, was eager to undertake this rather demeaning task for his new patron.21
The Inter-Departmental Committee drew up its report, then, in circumstances under which the scale
of the expulsions it had been requested to take into account was expanding, as a result of political decisions at the highest level, almost by the day. Although there was necessarily a large element of guesswork in its approach, the rapid advance of the Red Army in the spring and early summer of 1944 raised the possibility that the war might come to an end leaving the whole of the area in question in the Soviet Union’s sphere. If this should prove to be the case, then no direct British participation in the expulsions might be necessary at all. “Large-scale transfers, however carefully organized, would be bound to cause immense suffering and dislocation and to give rise to widespread criticism. His Majesty’s Government might therefore prefer to wash their hands as far as possible of any active participation in their execution.” The committee was not certain, though, that this Pilate-like stance would in reality be possible, inasmuch as the British government would share responsibility for the policy decision to remove the Germans and “might be unable, even if they wished, to disclaim responsibility for the human suffering and economic dislocation involved, which their active participation might tend to lessen.”22
The number of potential expellees, the committee acknowledged, would dwarf “the Greek-Turkish or Greek-Bulgarian exchanges which followed the last war, or in the various would-be permanent transfers carried out by the Germans in the course of, or just before, this one.”23 Little historical guidance, therefore, would be available to those charged with executing the transfer. According to the most optimistic scenario, some 5,340,000 Germans would be removable if Danzig, East Prussia, and Upper Silesia were given to Poland after the war; if the new frontier ran along the line of the Oder River to the north, assigning Breslau and Stettin to the Polish zone, an additional 3,300,000 would have to leave. While the answers Beneš gave to questions about the number of Sudetendeutsche he proposed to deport fluctuated constantly, the Czechoslovaks for their part were believed to want to be rid of approximately half, or 1.5 million, of their ethnic Germans. The committee thus counted on a total, “at the worst,” of 10,140,000 people to be transferred.
It was clear to the committee that the overwhelming majority could go nowhere other than to whatever postwar German state or states would eventually come into being. While Austria’s absorptive capacity was thought to be proportionately greater than that of Germany itself, the number of expellees who might be resettled there could not be significantly higher than 100,000. Taking up a point previously made by Sir Orme Sargent of the Foreign Office, who had suggested that “the future of these [expelled] people is much less likely to attract attention and give rise to political agitation if they disappear into Siberia,” the committee noted that “The problem of resettlement in Germany would be considerably eased if, at the period when transfers were taking place, some millions of active Germans should happen to be engaged as organised labour forces in devastated areas outside Germany, e.g. in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”24 But there was little prospect, it added, of any substantial proportion of the ethnic German population finding a long-term home in Stalin’s Gulag, noting ruefully that “Siberia must be ruled out for the present.” While some Latin American countries like Argentina might be willing to admit substantial numbers of Germans, the United States would hardly look kindly on the idea of a large and compact ex-enemy colony in its hemisphere. The same consideration was still more true for the British themselves. “As regards the Empire, the objection to flooding the Colonial Empire with immigrants from Germany is too obvious to need discussion.”25
Economically, the committee saw the first few postwar years as the period of maximum danger. Its conclusions about the magnitude of the risks involved were sobering. In the short term, it warned,
the transfers would create economic problems of the gravest character, severe both in Germany and the expelling countries, but more severe by far in Germany. It is not too much to say that the addition of the heavy extra economic burden on Germany which transfers would impose, over and above the grave dislocations following on the loss of the war, the devastation caused by it and the general demands of the United Nations, might create an economic problem which would prove insoluble and lead to a complete German collapse.26
Even in the unlikely event of the Allies foregoing any reparations payments or contributions from Germany for their own occupation requirements, the domestic economy would probably be unequal to the task of providing houses, jobs, and food in the necessary quantities for the expellees. If the number arriving in Germany proved to be at the very bottom of the committee’s range, the Allied authorities would still have to reckon with the entry of “some 6 million persons—say, 1 1/2 million families—into a country already short of well over 4 million dwellings. The new houses which the building industry, working at maximum output, could provide would hardly touch the fringe of this problem.”27 Before the war, German contractors had built 300,000 houses annually. Even if that number could somehow be boosted by 50 percent in the first year of peace and by 100 percent in each subsequent year—a wholly unrealistic prospect—a decade would pass before all the expellees could find accommodation. Assigning the 300,000 peasant families needing to be resettled on new farms created by breaking up large estates would take at least thirty years. As for jobs, only a third of the expellees could expect to find work in their previous fields of employment, with the rest becoming unskilled and probably unemployed labor. For their part, the expelling countries as well as Germany would be hit by the dislocation of production that would result from the loss of so many skilled workers for whom no replacements were readily available, a deficiency that “might have serious repercussions, since it would occur at a time of general agricultural shortage.”28
To minimize the grave difficulties that a population transfer would carry in its train, the committee recommended that an international Population Transfer Commission be established. Representing the Big Three, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, the Transfer Commission’s function would be to coordinate and regulate the scheduling and conditions of the expulsions, subject to the overriding control of the Supreme Allied Authority in Germany. Three Regional Commissions—with responsibility for the Sudetenland, East Prussia-Danzig, and Upper Silesia, respectively—should also be created to supervise the logistical aspects of the removals. The committee insisted, though, that responsibility for resettling the expellees should fall on the shoulders of neither the Transfer Commission nor the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the recently launched agency whose function it would be to provide welfare services for the peoples of liberated Europe. Rather the costs of resettlement should be borne by the Germans themselves. Nor should the Transfer Commission attempt to grapple with the problem of who was, and was not, a German, a question to which no satisfactory answer existed. Unlike the Lausanne population transfers, religion on this occasion would provide no satisfactory marker of nationality. But neither would “race or language” offer any guidance as to how to deal with the many people who were bilingual, partners in or offspring of mixed marriages, possessed of non-German surnames, or had accepted German nationality under coercion. “The Committee has reached the conclusion that the difficulties of selecting by any objective criterion are so great as probably to be beyond the powers of any international authority.”29 It therefore proposed that, as Beneš had suggested, any person regarded as German under Nazi nationality law should be considered removable, but that the expelling governments should possess the power to retain any person whose services were considered economically necessary.
Lastly, the committee thought it vital that the Transfer Commission have exclusive authority to determine the timing and circumstances of the expulsions. The Poles and Czechoslovaks would no doubt wish to force the pace, to a degree that might well propel Germany into economic collapse at a time when the Allies would bear responsibility for its fate. But the precise definition of the parts of Germany to be transferred to its neighbors was unlikely to occur for a long time. It was, moreover, improbab
le that sufficient transport would become available to enable the operation to proceed for at least a year after V-E Day. The expelling governments would be adequately compensated for the costs of the removals, which they would have to bear, by confiscating the whole of the Germans’ moveable and immoveable property. But the Allies would have to reconcile themselves to the fact that to pursue the expulsion project would mean that there would be little or nothing left over for reparations. If it went ahead, Germany’s standard of living even under the best-case scenario would be reduced to “the lowest point considered safe, just or practicable for the first few years after the war. There will be no margin to play with.”30
The committee’s terms of reference explicitly precluded it from discussing the wisdom of the idea of mass population transfers, a policy decision that had already been taken by the Allied governments. Considered in the abstract, it agreed that the removals were “prima facie desirable,” and that if they were to proceed it was important to carry them out as thoroughly as possible. “We do not want to expel enough Germans to create grave problems and bitter feelings in Germany and at the same time leave enough behind to create a standing political problem in the Succession States and a permanent temptation to Germany to intervene.” It is a measure of the anxieties that the study of the problems involved aroused in its members, however, that they took the unusual step of effectively asking the Cabinet to think again.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 12