[T]he committee desires to draw attention to certain political aspects of the problem. In the first place the human suffering involved would inevitably be very great. Secondly, the actual physical problem of uprooting compact blocks of German population (amounting to some 6 million persons and possibly to as many as 10 million) from their long-established homes and transporting them across the frontiers could not fail to be the main problem of the Succession States during their reconstruction period, just as the resettlement of these Germans in Germany would be one of the main problems for that country. Having arrived in Germany, the migrants would be impoverished and embittered, and would for a long time represent a distinct and undigested element in the population of Germany as a whole. Nor has it yet been proved that the mere process of removing persons of a particular nation from territory long settled by them diminishes the sentiment of that nation for the lost territory or its determination to regain it.
Foreboding as the committee’s conclusions were, as the actual history of the transfers was to show it had erred in many significant respects on the side of optimism. The possibility existed, it considered, that almost the entire population of the territories to be handed over to Poland might flee the advancing Red Army of its own accord, leaving only 750,000 people to be removed after V-E Day. It assumed that slightly more than half of the Sudeten Germans would be allowed to remain in Czechoslovakia. It took into account the transfer of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia only, ignoring the possibility that other countries in the region might seize the opportunity, with or without the assent of the Big Three, to disencumber themselves of their Volksdeutsch populations. Lastly, it counted on there being no more than 10 million expellees in total. None of these assumptions would be borne out in practice.
Nevertheless, the report proved far too gloomy for the politicians who had commissioned it. When the members of the Armistice and Post-War Committee met to discuss it in July 1944, the general response was one of disbelief and anger. Sir James Grigg, the war secretary, complained that “some of the statements in it were much too lenient from the War Office point of view.” The minister of labor, Ernest Bevin—who the following year would assume overall responsibility for British expulsion policy as foreign secretary in the postwar government—at first confused ethnic Germans and those from the Reich, and then farcically claimed that “breaking up the great German landed estates—on which the strength of Prussian militarism was largely based” would create farms for three million expellee families.31 After a detailed study of the question pointed out that many of the estates to which Bevin referred were in the same eastern German territories from which the occupants were about to be expelled and that, if all publicly as well as privately owned holdings elsewhere were to be redistributed, a maximum of only 110,000 farms could be found, the minister of labor continued in the teeth of the evidence to insist that the problem could be resolved by dispossessing the remaining Junkers of Prussia.32 Clement Attlee, the deputy prime minister who chaired the Armistice and Post-War Committee, received the Inter-Departmental Committee’s report even more critically. For the previous year, Attlee had been insisting that Germans in the mass must be made to suffer as a matter of policy and a salutary form of reeducation. While reluctantly conceding that considerations of humanity could not be “left entirely out of account,” he had also argued: “the criterion that should properly be applied in these matters is, I suggest, not how hardly will a particular course of action bear upon Germany, but how far can we go in the direction of achieving our desiderata in Germany without serious embarrassment or injury to ourselves…. everything that brings home to the Germans the completeness and irrevocability of their defeat is worthwhile in the end.”33 He now underlined this punitive stance, taking, as Troutbeck recorded, “a very stern line about any thought of giving undue consideration to German feelings or interests in this matter.”34
Lacking a sponsor in Cabinet, the report was shelved. No further discussion of the document took place after January 1945, nor were any of its recommendations ever implemented. That no minister other than Bevin had been willing even to dispute the committee’s findings was an indication that for the British government the expulsion project had become an end in itself, one that it was determined to carry through regardless of the cost.
Ignoring the unpleasant facts to which the committee had drawn attention, though, did not make those facts go away. For a while British ministers and officials took refuge in wishful thinking, attempting to persuade themselves that the problem might either resolve itself or be taken care of by others. Arnold Toynbee, head of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, who had been appointed an expert adviser to the Foreign Office in the Great War on the strength of his encyclopedic knowledge of the literature of ancient Greece, typified this attitude of ostrich optimism. “It looks,” he wrote at the end of January, “as though the clearance of the German civilian population of all categories from territories east of the Oder–Western Neisse line and south of the frontier of Czechoslovakia may well be a fait accompli by the time hostilities cease…. The question, after the end of hostilities, will then be, not whether a German population, so far undisturbed, is to be uprooted in cold blood, but whether a German population already uprooted and transferred into the post-war German area is to be moved again and re-transferred to its previous domiciles.”35 The Political Warfare Executive and the U.S. Office of Strategic Services—the precursor of the CIA—were no less cocksure, advising in an intelligence summary of the same day that 4.5 million Germans had already fled the advancing Soviet armies from the eastern territories, including the million-strong population of the Warthegau.36 The Foreign Office warned in response that these cheerful reports were not to be relied upon. As Con O’Neill of the German Department dubiously replied, “It seems to me inconceivable that 4 1/2 million civilians could have extricated themselves from the path of the astonishingly rapid Russian advances of the last fortnight, even if they had wished to.”37
The British and American political leadership, however, were reluctant to abandon the beguiling vision of a land that would have spontaneously cleared itself of its own population. Stalin, for his part, was only too happy to play on these illusions when he met again with Churchill at Moscow in October 1944, and with both the British and U.S. leaders for what would prove to be the last wartime Big Three conference at Yalta four months later. Although Churchill had already reconciled himself to the inevitability that the Polish lands absorbed by the USSR as its share of the spoils from the Nazi-Soviet Pact would never be returned, he was torn between his sense of responsibility to Poland and his apprehension over the consequences of delivering large portions of Germany over to it in compensation. An additional complication was the fact that by now there were two entities claiming to be the legitimate government of Poland: the London-based government-in-exile headed by Stanisław Mikołajczyk, and a Soviet puppet regime, the “Polish Committee of National Liberation,” based in the recently liberated eastern city of Lublin.
From the moment of its creation, the Lublin regime, in contrast to the vacillating attitude taken by its London counterpart, had declared itself in favor of extensive annexations of German lands in the west. This was Stalin’s objective also. The further that postwar Poland encroached into eastern Germany, the further Soviet influence too would extend, for Stalin had no intention of tolerating anything but the most subservient of Polish neighbors. Both the annexation and the transfer of population, moreover, were certain to create a permanent enmity between Poland and Germany. So long as this remained the case, Poland would have no option but to turn to the USSR to help defend its new frontiers against a Germany whose population would be more than twice as large as its own. The Soviet leader intended to extract a high price for this service. To be sure, there were limits to the extent to which the USSR wished to see even a communist Poland grow; nobody in the Kremlin had forgotten the historic antagonism existing between the two peoples.38 But however unrepresentativ
e the Lublin regime might be, it would need to demonstrate some concern for Polish national interests. Expanding to the west would enable it to do so without clashing with Soviet objectives.
In a series of secret meetings with the Lublin Poles during the midsummer of 1944, then, Stalin laid down the line that he and they were to pursue in their discussions with the western Allies. Not only would Poland be obliged formally to renounce the eastern territories seized by the USSR and agree to the compulsory transfer of their population, but the German seaport of Königsberg and its hinterland in East Prussia, which both the London and Lublin Poles had long expected would be allotted to their portion, would become a Soviet possession also. But as compensation, Stalin assured the Lublin element, the USSR would support Poland’s claim not only to the German port of Stettin but to the line defined by the rivers Oder and the western Neisse, one of the two relatively small tributaries of that name. Although some mention of the “Oder-Neisse line” had already been made as a possible frontier between Poland and Germany, the supposition had been that the river in question was the eastern Neisse, which had at least some ethnographic logic in separating the two countries. The western Neisse lay 120 miles further to the west. “This move,” R. C. Raack notes, “would at least double the number of Germans who would have to be forcibly evacuated from their homelands and housed and fed in whatever remained of occupied Germany after the war.”39 Stalin sardonically assured the Lublin Poles that Churchill would never notice the difference.
For the next six months, indeed, both Moscow and Lublin maintained a studied ambiguity when speaking of the “Oder-Neisse line,” being careful never to specify which of the two tributaries they meant. But to ensure that the Lublin Poles did not waver, Stalin proceeded, even while the fighting was still under way, to implement the population transfer from eastern Poland to which he had compelled them to agree. Beginning in the autumn of 1944, more than two million Poles living east of the river Bug were removed, in the brutal and chaotic manner which had by now become a hallmark of both Stalin and Hitler’s style of rule, and deposited in the devastated and freshly reconquered former General-gouvernement. The prospect of having them remain there, an alienated, rootless and dangerous population, would provide more than sufficient incentive for the Lublin regime to press for the shifting of Poland’s boundary with Germany as far as possible to the west, regardless of the difficulties involved. The same consideration, according to Władysław Gomułka, head of the Polish Communist Party and deputy prime minister in the Lublin Polish regime, made necessary the wholesale removal of the Germans. In the first place, he reminded the party’s congress in May 1945, clearing the new western territories of its inhabitants would provide land for redistribution by the new people’s government and thereby “bind the nation to the system.” In the second, “We have to expel [the Germans], because all countries are built on the principle of nationality rather than [multi-]ethnicity.”40 As members of a party owing whatever influence it possessed to the Soviet Union’s patronage, it was especially important for Polish Communists not to allow themselves to be outflanked by their rivals to the right on the “national question.”
The Western Allies, however, remained ignorant both of the Polish-Soviet population transfer and Stalin’s behind-the-scenes deal with the Lublin Poles, and as a result their ideas on postwar expulsions from this point became increasingly decoupled from reality. The United States’ thinking on the subject was particularly naïve. A State Department study in August 1943 expressed the unreasonably optimistic view that Poland’s territorial ambitions could be confined to East Prussia and Danzig alone, and that “not all the Germans need be evacuated” from the two districts.41 In several subsequent appreciations, U.S. policymakers continued to delude themselves that, as Secretary of State Cordell Hull advised Roosevelt at the end of August 1944, a middle ground could be found of opposing “the mass transfer to the Reich of Germanic people from neighboring countries” but sanctioning “the removal of individuals and groups who constitute an especially difficult problem …” The supposition that at such a late date a formula of this kind might find favor with Edvard Beneš, much less Stalin, was nonsensical, and indicated above all the almost complete lack of attention the Americans had devoted to the question. The British, for their part, bore some measure of responsibility for the simplistic nature of U.S. thinking, having decided not to furnish Washington with a copy of the Inter-Departmental Committee’s report out of anxiety that learning about the difficulties involved in the scheme might turn the Roosevelt administration off the idea of population transfers altogether.42
Nonetheless, by the time the Moscow Conference convened in October 1944, the Western Allies belatedly began to grasp that they were in danger of being presented with a fait accompli in central Europe. In preparations for the conference, Anthony Eden and the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, attempted to stiffen the backbones of their respective bosses, warning that too extravagant a cession of German lands to the Poles risked creating a state of chaos within Germany itself with which the occupying powers would have to deal. Their representations, though, fell on deaf ears. Both at the conference itself and afterwards, for all his growing suspicions of Stalin’s true intentions, Churchill made it clear that the maintenance of the alliance with the USSR was an overriding priority. That being the case, paying off the Poles with German territories was the only means he had left to avoid exposing himself to the charge that the ostensible reason Britain had entered the Second World War—the defense of Poland’s territorial integrity from external aggression—had not been and never would be achieved. Thus it was “understood,” Churchill reported to Roosevelt after the conference, “that Germans in [the] said regions shall be repatriated to Germany …”43 While the prime minister was neither unaware of nor indifferent to the problems that a big population transfer might cause, those were of less importance than preventing the rise of a new antagonism between East and West.
Though he was less willing to say so in so many words, that was Roosevelt’s position also. A month after the Moscow Conference, he wrote to Mikołajczyk to say that if the postwar Polish government and people should “desire in connection with the new frontiers of the Polish State to bring about the transfer to and from the territory of Poland of national minorities, the United States Government will raise no objections and as far as practicable will facilitate such transfer.”44 An astute politician, Mikołajczyk was able to read between the lines of this message that the United States, and no doubt Britain also, would try to throw the primary responsibility for expulsions, and any international odium that would arise as a result, onto the Poles’ shoulders. Deeply suspicious of the Allied leaders’ eagerness to write blank checks that postwar Poland would be obliged to try to force the Germans to make good, he was nonetheless willing to show some flexibility over the Polish-Soviet frontier. When his colleagues in the London government in exile made clear that they were not, he staged a tactical retreat, stepping down as prime minister on November 24. Yet he continued to believe that the gross population movements the Anglo-Americans were considering in the west would prove not merely misguided but unworkable. In December he told Rudolf Schoenfeld, U.S. chargé d’affaires to the London government in exile, that the British people if not the British government were “conscious of the immense transfer problems that the proposed frontier arrangements would involve.” The right course, he said, was to make the USSR disgorge at least some of its ill-gotten gains in the east. Mikołajczyk went on to ask Schoenfeld why the Western Allies should “make the transfer question harder than necessary, and … expressed his belief that the Prime Minister with all his popularity would not succeed in making so drastic a plan acceptable to British and American opinion.”45
Churchill was aware of this danger also. To avert it, he made a major speech on the future of Poland in the House of Commons on December 15, 1944. Until this moment, the public position of the British government had been that no discussion o
f boundary changes or population transfers could be made in advance of the peace conference. As recently as August, when Eden had been challenged by several MPs to confirm or repudiate the rumors swirling around London that Britain had approved large-scale expulsions from Poland and Czechoslovakia after the war, he had maintained that even to discuss such things was “premature.”46 Now, just four months later, Churchill spelled out in words of one syllable that expulsions on a larger scale than had previously even been imagined would be not just a component, but one of the basic foundations, of the postwar European order.
The Poles are free, so far as Russia and Great Britain are concerned, to extend their territory, at the expense of Germany, to the West…. It would, of course, have to be accompanied by the disentanglement of populations…. The transference of several millions of people would have to be effected from the East [of Poland] to the West or North, as well as the expulsion of the Germans—because that is what is proposed: the total expulsion of the Germans—from the area to be acquired by Poland in the West and the North. For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble, as has been the case in Alsace-Lorraine. A clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 13