Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War

by R. M. Douglas

  The disentanglement of populations which took place between Greece and Turkey after the last war … was in many ways a success, and has produced friendly relations between Greece and Turkey ever since.47

  The prime minister had little to say to a House that listened to his address, as another speaker in the same debate pointed out, in “a sort of awful, ugly, apprehensive, cold silence,” about how this “disentanglement” was to be accomplished.48 His sole reference to the practicalities of the operation was to promise that there would be ample room in the truncated postwar Germany for the expellees. “After all, 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 Germans have been killed already…. Moreover, we must expect that many more Germans will be killed in the fighting in the spring and summer….”49 The response of the Labour elder statesman, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, was much more in tune with the mood of the House. Even if the Germans had forfeited the moral right to protest expulsions, Pethick-Lawrence replied, “[t]hat is not to say that we can play about with territories … and that we can move about not hundreds of thousands but millions of people…. we are creating a situation for the future that will not make for the peace either of Poland or of the world.”50 The reaction of some London Poles was also unenthusiastic. Tomasz Arciszewski, Mikołajczyk’s replacement as prime minister, rejected Churchill’s offer of German territory ad libitum the same evening. “Poland does not desire to annex Breslau and Stettin,” he told the press; at most it wanted East Prussia, cleared of its Germans.51 The most acid commentary of all came from George Orwell, writing in the staunchly antiexpulsionist left-wing journal Tribune.

  This is equivalent to transplanting the entire population of Australia, or the combined populations of Scotland and Ireland. I am no expert on transport or housing, and I would like to hear from somebody better qualified a rough estimate (a) of how many wagons and locomotives, running for how long, would be involved in transporting those seven million people, plus their livestock, farm machinery and household goods; or, alternatively, (b) of how many of them are going to die of starvation and exposure if they are actually shipped off without their livestock, etc.

  I fancy the answer to (a) would show that this enormous crime cannot actually be carried through, though it might be started, with confusion, suffering and the sowing of irreconcilable hatreds as the result. Meanwhile, the British people should be made to understand, with as much concrete detail as possible, what kind of policies their statesmen are committing them to.52

  If the response to Churchill’s revelations was uneasy in London, however, they generated a full-blown furor in Washington. Outraged Republican senators demanded to be informed when the Atlantic Charter of August 1941, an Anglo-American statement of war aims that declared the two countries’ opposition to “territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned,” had been abrogated. The Polish-American community, which only weeks previously had helped return Roosevelt to a fourth presidential term, scoffed at the notion that territorial gains in the west could compensate Poland for its losses in the east. In an effort to diminish the storm of criticism that erupted, the newly appointed Secretary of State, Ed Stettinius, publicly revealed Roosevelt’s pledge to Mikołajczyk promising U.S. aid to Poland to remove Germans from the western lands to be given to her. This maneuver had little impact either.53

  Churchill’s attempt to “sell” mass population transfers to the general public was thus a failure. Yet the basic terms of the equation had not changed. The United States’ and Britain’s most important aim was to preserve the alliance of the Big Three into the postwar era. That this aspiration, laudable in itself, would even be possible was based largely on the belief, for which no credible evidence existed, that Stalin and the Soviet system had undergone a Damascene conversion after the Nazi invasion of June 1941; had renounced both the objectives and the methods for which they had become notorious prior to that date; and were now committed to a future of peaceful coexistence with the West. While Roosevelt has been the target of much deserved posthumous criticism for giving way to wishful thinking on such a heroic scale, it is clear that Churchill too for a time indulged the same fantasy.54 Ironically, their stance with respect to Stalin closely paralleled that of the appeasers with respect to Hitler in the 1930s. In both instances, Western leaders substituted an evidence-based appraisal of the totalitarian dictators with whom they had to deal with a more pleasing image of their own making, largely because the alternative—and the deeply unappealing choices they would then be compelled to make—were too disturbing to contemplate. So long as the Anglo-Americans pursued the mirage of a close postwar relationship with the USSR, however, the German card, along with whatever population adjustments might prove necessary to make it work, was the only one they had to play.

  In one respect, though, their task was made a little simpler. In the winter of 1944–45, as the Allies prepared for the Yalta Conference, it became increasingly clear that there was little future for the London Polish regime. Stalin had already severed relations with it when it refused to accept his patently false claim that the USSR was not responsible for the massacre at the Katyn Forest of almost twenty-two thousand Polish Army officers who had been taken prisoner by the Red Army after the Soviet invasion of 1939. The more “pragmatic” among the London Poles, like Mikołajczyk himself, were indicating their willingness to abandon the exile administration and join a Soviet-dominated “government of national unity.” Most important of all, the Red Army, not Western forces, was driving the Germans out of Poland and would be in a position to determine what happened there afterwards. The need for “sweeteners” in the west to induce Poland to swallow the bitter pill of the new frontier in the east, therefore, no longer existed. As Eden reminded the War Cabinet, “Since the Lublin Poles are ready to accept the Curzon Line anyhow, there is no longer any need for His Majesty’s Government to support more extensive transfers of German territory than we think convenient and proper on other grounds.”55 Accordingly, Churchill at least went to Yalta resolved to scale back the extent of the German territories to be given to Poland as much as possible.

  Here too he failed. Part of the difficulty was the lack of support he received from the visibly ailing Roosevelt, who was in the final weeks of his life and, like Woodrow Wilson, was looking to an international organization—in FDR’s case, the United Nations—to resolve the numerous problems that the peace settlement would leave unaddressed. A UN without the Soviet Union was futile, and the president was willing to give way on almost every other point to secure its participation. Hence he ignored Stettinius’s advice that the United States at the conference should “oppose, so far as possible, indiscriminate mass transfer of minorities with neighboring states.”56 In the discussion of the matter on February 7, Churchill tried to persuade Stalin that while he himself saw no objection to displacing very large numbers of Germans, public opinion in Britain was unlikely to view the matter in the same light. While transferring 6 million people from East Prussia and Silesia should prove “manageable,” any removals beyond that number should be geared to Poland’s ability to colonize the cleared areas. “It would be a great pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion.”57 Stalin replied that the problem was solving itself, “for when our troops come in the Germans run away and no Germans are left.”58 Though Churchill was unpersuaded by this assurance, he chose not to contradict it. The conference ended without any decision having been reached as to how much German territory Poland was to receive, the official communiqué speaking only of “substantial accessions of territory in the north and west.”59 Throughout, Roosevelt had made virtually no contribution to the discussion on Poland’s western frontiers.

  Choosing not to make a decision, however, was a decision in itself. By the time the Yalta Conference opened, the Red Army had already reached the Oder. The only remaining question was whether the Western Allies were willing to risk a confrontation with the USSR over recognition of Poland’s western front
iers—and, it followed, over their willingness to cooperate in the expulsion of the German population—or whether conciliating Stalin and the Lublin Poles was still the most important consideration. To senior British policymakers, this question answered itself. Oliver Harvey, the staunchly Germanophobe assistant under-secretary at the Foreign Office, who had Eden’s ear, set the tone at the end of March: “I am afraid I regard the possibility of an orderly transfer of population from Eastern Germany on old-fashioned League of Nations lines as so improbable that I do not believe that it is even worth trying, at the price of incurring enmity both in Czechoslovakia and Soviet Russia. Nor do I believe that the arrival of these refugees will necessarily be so catastrophic if it is carried out once and for all and immediately.”60 The deputy prime minister Clement Attlee backed him up two weeks later, when he formally vetoed the Foreign Office’s renewed proposal to establish a Transfer Commission to organize the expulsions. “I cannot really see that there is any need for us,” he wrote, “to take the initiative in this matter. The outflow of Germans, whether from Poland or Czechoslovakia, will go first into the Soviet and American zones. We are the last to be affected.”61

  When the Big Three assembled for their last-ever summit at Potsdam on the outskirts of Berlin in mid-July 1945, therefore, they did so less to take decisions on Poland’s future than, in the case of the Anglo-Americans, to reconcile themselves to—or rationalize to themselves—the decisions they had already taken. Fifteen miles to the northeast, as they conferred, spectacularly overloaded trains from the German territories under Polish administration were disgorging cargoes of the dead, the dying, the diseased, and the destitute onto the platforms of Berlin’s main line railway stations. Hundreds of thousands more were arriving in the city, in no better condition, on foot. To the south, similar ragged columns were being driven across the Bohemian and Moravian frontiers by Czechoslovak troops and militia. Reading about one of these “wild expulsions” in a London daily newspaper shortly after the Potsdam Conference opened, Churchill expressed his alarm at what was unfolding. On July 21, he brought the matter up at a plenary session with his fellow heads of government, complaining about the “wholly disproportionate number of Germans” who would have to be accommodated in “a greatly reduced Germany” if Poland’s full claims to the line of the Oder and western Neisse were to be admitted. Up to 9 million Germans, he reminded his Soviet and American opposite numbers, would be removed to make room for well under half that number coming from what had previously been eastern Poland. When Stalin repeated his incredible Yalta assertion that “Not a single German … remained in the area from which it was suggested that Poland should get her accessions of territory,” the prime minister pointed out that even if true, this hardly addressed the problem.

  If the Germans had run away from the territory in question, they should be allowed to go back. The Poles had no right to pursue a policy which might well involve a catastrophe in the feeding of Germany…. We did not want to be left with a vast German population on our hands deprived of the sources of supply on which they had previously depended for food…. If enough food could not be found to feed this population, we should be faced with conditions in our zone of occupation such as had existed in the German concentration camps, only on a scale a thousand times greater.62

  These were cogent arguments. Yet they had been no less cogent when the Inter-Departmental Committee had made them more than a year previously, only to be summarily dismissed by Churchill’s own ministers. It is difficult to see what purpose he thought was served by raising them now, other than affording him an opportunity to disclaim responsibility for a policy he himself had been advocating for nearly two years. Such action on his part would not have been unprecedented. In January 1945, he had repeatedly demanded to be told why “large cities in eastern Germany should not now be considered especially attractive targets” for heavy area bombing attacks.63 When the Royal Air Force responded to the prime minister’s urgings with a devastating raid on Dresden two weeks later that aroused widespread international concern, Churchill ran for cover. In a minute to the Chiefs of Staff on March 28, he described the Dresden operation as “a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing” and reminded them of “the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives … rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.”64 On that occasion, the outrage of his military advisers had compelled the quick withdrawal of this attempt at revisionist history.

  When the Big Three returned to the matter in subsequent meetings, therefore, Stalin reminded Churchill, and Roosevelt’s successor Harry S. Truman, that so far from being “averse to making additional difficulties for the Germans,” it was already settled Allied policy “to make difficulties for them and to make it impossible for them to aggress again.” He declared it was now “too late to consider this question.” In the end, the Soviet leader unbent so far as to agree to a pair of compromise formulae presented by the U.S. and British delegations respectively, to enable the Allied leaders to cover their blushes. In the first of these, the Poles were assigned a provisional administration over “the territory in the eastern part of pre-war Germany to which they were laying claim,” rather than a de jure outright transfer. This at least kept open the theoretical possibility that a future peace conference might return some of these lands to Germany, and enabled the Western leaders to maintain for a little longer the fiction that the western boundaries of the new Polish state were yet to be determined. The second concession, drafted by a subcommittee of the three foreign ministers, was included as Article XIII of the final Potsdam Agreement.

  The three Governments having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.

  Since the influx of a large number of Germans into Germany would increase the burden already resting on the occupying authorities, they consider that the Allied Control Council in Germany should in the first instance examine the problem with special regard to the question of the equitable distribution of these Germans among the several zones of occupation….

  The Czechoslovak Government, the Polish Provisional Government and the Control Council in Hungary are at the same time being informed of the above and are being requested meanwhile to suspend further expulsions pending the examination by the Governments concerned of the report from their representatives on the Control Council.65

  The Western Allies attached greater importance to the second of these provisions than the first. As Churchill had already pointed out at the conference, the declaration that the handing over of the German lands east of the Oder-Neisse line to Poland was “provisional” was a meaningless formula. Once assigned this region, the Poles “would be digging themselves in and making themselves masters.”66 It was futile to suppose that anything short of military force would make them relinquish it. On the other hand, the Big Three’s appeal to Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary to put an end to additional “wild expulsions” was not mere window dressing. Soviet military commanders in Germany, as well as their Western counterparts, were facing immense difficulties as a result of the chaotic arrival of masses of expellees in their occupation zone. The prospect of a breathing space was welcome to them.

  The remaining provisions of Article XIII, however, reflected little credit on their drafters. To assert publicly that population transfers should be “orderly and humane,” when the governments concerned had already rejected the idea of setting up machinery for that purpose, implied either cynicism or self-deception on a breathtaking scale. The fact that they would continue to insist that nothing of the kind could be contemplated suggests that the former was the true explanation. The question, though, is largely moot. Even if the Allies had resolved to set up an International Transfer Commission in the summer of 1945, it was already too
late to prevent a humanitarian crisis. Significantly, too, the Potsdam Agreement had nothing to say about Volksdeutsch populations in countries other than Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary—some of which, as in Yugoslavia, were in a still more vulnerable situation. The implications of this silence were ominous.

  As “wild expellees” continued to flood into Germany notwithstanding the Potsdam Agreement’s call for a suspension, the Western Allies began to consider where the responsibility lay for the fact that, as a British government minister put it, the expulsions were “completely disorderly and carried out without any regard to humanitarian considerations, the Germans simply being bundled out without warning or preparation.”67 The blame for this state of affairs, which had led to “high” casualties and “appalling” suffering, lay in their view with the expelling states and with the Soviet Union alone. This was, and remains, a wholly self-serving interpretation. While the expelling countries were undoubtedly guilty of wholesale violations of human rights, the Western democracies were equally implicated in the catastrophe that was unfolding before them. Over a three-year period, they had not just ignored, but consciously and after mature consideration rejected, the unanimous advice of experts who had predicted with great accuracy the state of affairs their policies would produce. They had knowingly opted to pursue a course that would cause greater rather than less suffering, so as to generate what they regarded as an “educational” effect upon the defeated German population. They had dismissed as irrelevant distinctions between the innocent and the guilty, far less any effort to distinguish between degrees of guilt. They had encouraged their allies to carry out, and promised their cooperation in accomplishing, deeds for which they would later prosecute their enemies as war crimes. The suggestion that the Western Allies were somehow surprised by, or unable to prevent, the wave of state-sponsored violence that washed across central and southeastern Europe in the immediate postwar years is therefore not to be taken seriously. When making the choices they did, they went in with their eyes open.