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

by R. M. Douglas

  4

  THE “WILD EXPULSIONS”

  In calling for “orderly and humane” population transfers, the Potsdam Agreement was attempting to close the door upon a horse that was already halfway out of the stable. For more than three months, German civilians had been displaced from what the Polish government was now calling the “Recovered Territories”—a reference to the fact that Poland had once ruled Silesia and Pomerania under the Piast dynasty some six hundred years previously. Czechoslovakia had been following the Polish example since mid-May. Further to the south, although Yugoslavia had neither asked nor received permission from the Allies to expel its Volksdeutsch population, large-scale deportations would soon begin from that country. Though never issuing a formal expulsion order against its ethnic Germans, Romania too would find effective means of compelling them to depart. Disorganized and crude as these operations were, they were neither spontaneous nor accidental. Instead they were carried out according to a premeditated strategy—if also an inefficient and in many respects counterproductive one—devised by each of the governments concerned well before the war had come to an end.

  For Poland and Czechoslovakia, the “wild expulsions” were a way to hedge their bets. While it was true that the Big Three had stated their support for a wholesale eviction of German minorities, the Czechoslovaks and Poles knew from bitter prewar experience how much trust was to be reposed in the “solemn undertakings” of the great powers. There was no guarantee that the leaders of one or more might not renege on previous commitments to the central Europeans, nor any doubt that they would not hesitate to do so if it appeared to be in their national interest. The Western Allies were also in a state of political flux. The untested and almost anonymous Harry Truman had succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945; while his views on the future of Europe were an unknown quantity, there was no reason to suppose he would prove as accommodating in the matter of expulsions as his predecessor had been. A general election was due in Great Britain which Winston Churchill might very well lose—as indeed, in July 1945, he did. Lastly, even if the Western leaders remained true to their word, British and American public opinion might recoil from the suffering that was an inescapable element of mass population transfers and exert irresistible pressure on both governments to allow international humanitarian agencies to play a part in their supervision, a prospect that threatened to derail the entire operation. The safest course, then, seemed to be to take the decision out of the great powers’ hands by creating “facts on the ground” before the eventual peace conference convened and presenting them with a fait accompli.

  Ironically, however, the Polish and Czechoslovak governments had given scarcely more thought to planning the removal of the Germans than did the Big Three. They may have been misled by their recent harsh experience under Nazism to overestimate the efficacy of force alone: their constant invocation of Hitler’s deportations and forced migrations as justifications for the actions they now proposed to take perhaps blinded them to the abysmal failure of those wartime precedents even to come close to their stated objectives. At all events, with the exception of some outline schemes drafted by a “Secret Study Group” of the Czechoslovak military in exile—most of which assumed frontier adjustments that would not, in the event, occur—nothing in the nature of a coherent plan for identifying, assembling, and transporting millions of people at short notice was ever put together by any of the expelling states.1 Instead, most relied almost exclusively on the use of terror to try to stampede the German minority across the frontiers. So chaotic was this process that foreign observers, and even many people in the expelling countries themselves, mistook the violent events of the late spring and summer of 1945 as a spontaneous process from below, in which members of the majority communities rose up to purge their towns and villages of the Germans in their midst—a process that has been given the name of “wild expulsions.” It bears emphasizing that this is almost entirely incorrect. Except in a very few instances, deportations as a result of mob action did not feature in the Europe of 1945. Rather, the so-called “wild expulsions” were in almost every case carried out by troops, police, and militia, acting under orders and more often than not executing policies laid down at the highest levels. The notion that true “wild expulsions” were taking place, nonetheless, amply suited the interests of the expelling governments, which were more than happy to allow the myth to grow. It enabled them to disclaim responsibility for the atrocities that were essential components of the operation; supplied fictitious but plausible evidence for the proposition that the German minorities must be removed or face immediate massacre at the hands of their neighbors; and strengthened the argument that the only humane alternative to “wild expulsions” was a program of “organized transfers” to be carried out by the Allies themselves.

  One of the factors that made the scenario of spontaneous “wild expulsions” more credible was the brief but intense outbreak of revenge-taking that occurred across Czechoslovakia in May 1945. Emotions were raised to fever pitch, especially in Prague, by the determination of German forces to continue fighting up to, and even after, V-E Day. On May 5, having misjudged the proximity of American and Soviet forces and mindful that Karl Hermann Frank had already ordered a partial German evacuation of the city, Czechoslovak resistance forces launched a rebellion the aim of which was largely demonstrative. Although the war was in its final hours, units of the Waffen-SS declined to withdraw, instead mounting a ferocious counterattack—including the use of civilians as human shields—against the lightly armed and poorly trained Czechs. Only the providential intervention of a pro-Axis Russian force, the so-called “Vlasov Army,” that belatedly turned its coat and came to the rescue of the insurgents, prevented a bloodbath; as it was, the Czech fighters were compelled to negotiate a ceasefire on unfavorable terms on May 8. The fact that fighting nevertheless continued in some parts of Prague until the following day, and that isolated German units in western Bohemia were still engaging in combat as late as May 11, aroused intense public anger. That Czechoslovak citizens were still dying violently at German hands while the rest of the continent was celebrating the end of the war seemed an especially bitter coda to an occupation that had already lasted longer than in any other country in Europe.

  It was, then, unsurprising that the “revolutionary days” in Prague and elsewhere that followed the final German capitulation should have been marked with violence and revenge-seeking. Even so, foreign observers and some Czechs themselves were shocked by the scale, the intensity, and above all the lack of discrimination of the reprisals.

  Retaliation was blind. An old woman was defenestrated; a member of a visiting German orchestra was beaten to death in the street because he could not speak Czech; others, not all of them Gestapo members, were hanged, doused with gas and lit, as living torches. Enraged mobs roamed through hospitals to find easy victims there. One [of those murdered] was a Czech patient, who happened to be the father of the writer Michael Mareš, but his papers listed a Sudeten birthplace.2

  Colonel Harold Perkins, a Czech-speaking British intelligence officer and no Germanophile, was nonetheless appalled by the scenes of violence he witnessed in Prague, including the spectacle of two German women who had been beaten by a large crowd until they were “one mass of blood from head to foot.”3 Marjorie Quinn, another Briton living in the town of Trutnov near the Polish border, wrote to her sister that although the local Czechs, in contrast to the Red Army, “seldom murder or rape,” they had “developed plundering and torturing to a fine art…. The English prisoners of war here have made themselves very unpopular among the Czechs by protecting German women and children as far as they could; they too are horrified at what is happening here.”4

  As a general rule, though, the worst atrocities during the so-called “May days” (which, in reality, ran well into June in many cases) were perpetrated not by mobs but by troops, police, and others acting under color of authority. Some of the earliest internment camps for German civilians
functioned less as detention centers and more as temporary holding pens from which their inmates could be taken out and put to death. At the most notorious of these, a pheasant-raising plant converted into an improvised compound at Postoloprty in northern Bohemia, parties of up to 250 Germans at a time were removed and shot by Czechoslovak soldiers on June 5 and 6. The precise number who were killed remains unknown; estimates range from a low of 763 (the number of bodies unearthed in 1947) to a high of 2,000. In a similar category was Kaunitz College in Brno, where a subsequent Czechoslovak investigation found that at least 300—a number that is almost certainly an underestimate—died as a result of torture, shooting, or hanging in May and June 1945.5 In a single incident, 265 Sudetendeutsche, including 120 women and 74 children, were killed on June 18 by Czechoslovak troops who removed them from a train at Horní Moštěnice near Přerov, shot them in the back of the neck, and buried them in a mass grave that they had first been forced to dig beside the railway station.6 By no means were all official “repressions” carried out in secret. At Lanškroun, the head of the National Revolutionary Committee, a prominent member of Beneš’s party named Josef Hrabáĉek, presided over a two-day “People’s Tribunal” in front of the municipal hall in which at least twenty people were shot; two hanged; others tortured; and others again drowned in the town’s fire pool. Still more ghastly was the “cleansing operation” conducted by Staff Captain Karel Prášil in the city of Chomutov in which, following a roundup of several thousand German inhabitants, up to a dozen were tortured to death on the Jahnturnplatz sports field on the morning of June 9 in full view of sickened Czech passersby. Although no one was brave enough to intervene, one anonymous Czech correspondent wrote to the prime minister’s office to express disgust at the spectacle: “Even the brutal Germans did not get rid of their enemies in such a manner, instead concealing their sadism behind the gates of concentration camps.” Similar killing, raping, and looting sprees, perpetrated by soldiers, “partisans,” and “Revolutionary Guards” acting for no more cogent reasons than avarice and the gratification of sadistic or sexual impulses, occurred on a greater or lesser scale at hundreds of other locations throughout the Czech lands.7

  In spite of their resolve to drive the German population out of the country, some Czechoslovak leaders expressed alarm at both the scale of the violence and the publicity it was attracting. As early as May 12, the prime minister, Zdeněk Fierlinger, proposed to his colleagues that the government make a nationwide radio broadcast calling on Czechoslovaks to desist from their attacks upon “innocent” Germans. Fierlinger found himself, however, in a minority of one, and no appeal was ever made.8 But if Czechoslovak policymakers responded to the moral aspects of the “repressions” with relative indifference, they were aware of the damage it was doing to the country’s reputation in the West. Former pro-Czechoslovak figures like the longtime diplomatic correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, F. A. Voigt, for example, began publishing unattributed, but broadly accurate, accounts of what was happening to the Sudetendeutsch population. The Czechs, he wrote, were themselves adopting “a racial doctrine akin to Hitler’s … and methods that are hardly distinguishable from those of Fascism. They have, in fact, become Slav National Socialists.”9 Responding to similar complaints, especially those raised by the International Committee of the Red Cross (CICR), the Communist interior minister, Václav Nosek, underwent a change of heart at a Cabinet meeting on May 23. It was now important, he said, that “the cleansing (ĉištění) of the Republic … be accomplished according to a central plan,” so as to prevent “wrongdoing and chaos.”10 The chief of staff of the Czechoslovak Army, General Bohumil Boĉek, had already informed subordinate commanders the previous day of his knowledge that “the arrest of undesirable elements (Nazi criminals) in the ĈSR has in some places been carried out with unnecessary brutality” and warned them as to their future conduct of these operations.11

  Yet beyond oft-repeated and universally ignored tut-tuttings of this kind, the Czechoslovak government never seriously attempted to rein in the agencies over which it exercised control. Its reluctance was due in part to the fact that it was a mutually suspicious coalition that included all five legal parties in the state, each of which was looking ahead to the 1946 elections and determined not to let its opponents paint it as “soft” on the German question. But the government was also conscious of the very real limits to its authority. Most local administration throughout the country was in the hands of a network of 156 District National Committees (“National Committee” being the Czechoslovak term for government authorities below the state-wide level), in which Communists exercised disproportionate influence and which answered to few higher authorities for actions taken within their own bailiwicks. The Ministry of National Defense, headed by the philo-Soviet General Ludvík Svoboda, controlled the armed forces and was largely a law unto itself. The civil ministries, of which Interior and Foreign Affairs were the most prominent, feuded constantly. Theoretically President Beneš, who until the restoration of Parliament at the end of October 1945 had the power to rule by decree, could give orders to all of them. But his effectiveness was limited by the need to maintain his perceived position as standing “above parties,” as well as by the fact that two foreign armies—Soviet and American—continued to occupy much of his country. Lastly, nothing but the application of force on a massive scale could rid Czechoslovakia of its German population. Too much terror might result at worst in temporary embarrassment abroad; too little would defeat the entire purpose of the operation. Beneš himself acknowledged as much when he declared in a speech broadcast on Radio Prague, “We are accused of simply imitating the Nazis and their cruel and uncivilized methods. Even if these reproaches should be true in individual cases, I state quite categorically: Our Germans must go to the Reich and they will go there in any circumstances.”12

  In light of the euphemistically styled “excesses” of May and June, it was reasonable for outsiders to assume that a similar dynamic underlay the “wild expulsions.” Yet in most districts pogrom-like actions were conspicuous by their absence. One of the rare exceptions was the so-called “Brno Death March” of May 30, 1945. While much German expellee literature has depicted the events at Brno as a template of the “wild expulsions” in general, the differences are far more significant than the similarities. As an industrial city with a strong Communist trade union movement and an acute housing crisis, Brno was especially vulnerable to pressure exerted from demagogic elements. Throughout the second half of May, a series of incendiary public demands for a radical solution to the German problem were made by local Communist organizations, which threatened a citywide strike if a harder line were not taken. At the least, it was urged, the unproductive sections of the German population should be transferred elsewhere, to enable their houses and flats to be redistributed to Czechs. On May 30, a trade union deputation, headed by the Communist activist Josef Kapoun, descended upon the city hall to threaten the local authorities that if they did not take immediate action against the Germans, he and the munitions workers of Brno would. Faced with this ultimatum, the mayor agreed that an expulsion action would begin the same evening, a decision ratified by Interior Minister Nosek on condition that the expellees not be forced out of Czechoslovak territory. Women, children, and those over the age of sixty were to present themselves at 21:00 hours at the city’s thirteen police stations, which were designated as the assembly points, carrying hand baggage and food for three days. Working-age men were not to be expelled for the time being, but “concentrated” elsewhere. The sick and pregnant, German-speaking Jews and spouses in mixed marriages, and officially recognized “antifascists” were exempted. Shortly before midnight, the first column of expellees was marched off in the general direction of the Austrian frontier. A second, composed of Sudetendeutsche rounded up from neighboring villages and towns, followed them a few hours later. Local Red Army commanders were notified and promised not to intervene. Upon reaching the frontier, some twenty miles away, an att
empt was made in defiance of Nosek’s instructions to push the expellees, who by now numbered some twenty-eight thousand, into Austria. They were, however, denied permission to cross by the Allied occupation authorities. The Brno activists responsible for the expulsion had made no preparations against such an eventuality. Rather than allow the Germans to return home, they confined them in a collection of impromptu camps in the border village of Pohořelice. Lacking food, water, or sanitary facilities, the oldest, youngest, and weakest detainees died there in their hundreds, chiefly of infectious diseases.13

  Marie Ranzenhoferová, a young mother of Czech and Hungarian parentage from Modřice on the southern outskirts of Brno, had been forced to join the exodus by a militiaman seeking revenge for her refusal to sleep with him. While elements of the column were supervised by men liberated from German concentration camps, who protected the expellees as best they could from abuse by the factory workers, she recalled, the treatment she observed of women and children during the night she spent at Pohořelice was far worse than on the march itself. On the march “people were beaten, and they tore their earrings off and took their rings; some people died; but in the camp, it was like a slaughterhouse. The next morning, at around 4 A.M., I got up and wanted to continue walking, and I saw they were loading the trucks with corpses.” The following day Ranzenhoferová and her baby son succeeded in fleeing the column and obtaining the protection of the authorities at Milukov, where she continues to live to the present day.14 The Sudetendeutsche left behind were not so fortunate. Those who were successfully pushed across the border into Austria in the following days and weeks found themselves in camps in which conditions were little better than at Pohořelice and where another 1,062 would perish. Estimates of the number who died in the course of this clearance operation vary widely. Eagle Glassheim has calculated that the total death toll exceeded 1,700—though even this figure does not include those who may have lost their lives during the course of the march itself.15