Harrowing though it was, the Brno episode was a most unusual occurrence in May 1945: firstly for having taken place at all, and secondly because the prime movers were local civilians, albeit highly politicized ones. Few of the misnamed “wild expulsions” that took place later during the summer followed this pattern. To the contrary, Czechoslovak Army units repeatedly complained, in the words of one report, that National Committees in the border areas were dragging their feet and forbidding “strict action against the Germans.” A memorandum of the Ministry of National Defense in mid-June remarked wryly that “it is necessary to support the initiative of national action committees. It would not be detrimental if this initiative got some momentum.”16 Business interests in particular proved resolute opponents of wholesale expulsions, causing impatient military officers to complain that economic experts considered half the German population to fall within the category of “essential workers.”17 One army major, frustrated by the failure of local officials in the municipality of Posevsko to move against their Germans with the necessary ferocity, threatened to make the town “a second Lidice” unless it changed its ways.18 Accordingly, the security forces began to force the pace. A paramilitary police force, the SNB or National Security Corps, was formed to assist with expulsions; satisfy Communist demands for “popular” participation in the operation; and soak up the pool of undisciplined armed groups like the self-styled “Revolutionary Guards” that were responsible for much of the chaos in the borderlands.
Early in June, as a “test,” some 1,300 Germans were rounded up by Czechoslovak Army units from the vicinity of the town of Děĉín, transported to the border, and successfully ejected into the Soviet zone despite the attempts of town police to impede the deportation by occupying the railway station. Thereafter the removals accelerated rapidly. On June 20, for example, soldiers participated in a combined operation with local security corps to march several thousand Germans from the border town of Krnov, northwest of Opava, to Poland. Turned back on this occasion by Polish forces, the column of Germans was led along back roads to Králiky, forty miles to the west, and successfully pushed across the frontier there.19 As the number of expulsions increased, the pattern became stereotyped. Sudetendeutsch expellees would be rounded up, normally at an hour’s notice; permitted to gather together some hand baggage; searched for contraband; and then marched on foot either to the border or to a holding camp. Some of these forced processions were conducted at a ferocious pace, with groups being hustled along the roads by their armed escorts at a rate of twenty-five miles per day for a week or more; made to sleep in factories or barns; and receiving no food or water other than what they could beg from the inhabitants of the villages through which they passed en route. When the passage of these disheveled columns into Germany was refused by the occupying forces, as often happened, the expellees were in many cases returned by the same means to their starting points. Marches of this kind resulted in particularly high numbers of deaths among young children, whose lower physical stamina was unequal to the stresses placed upon them, and especially among babies whose mothers, after several days of extreme physical effort without nutrition, were no longer able to produce milk. The not infrequent protests of District National Committees that these indiscriminate and often futile clearances were unnecessarily disrupting the local economies were brushed aside, sometimes forcibly.
The process of selection for expulsion during this period was to a great degree arbitrary. In Czechoslovakia, until the reestablishment of the National Assembly on October 28, 1945 (the country’s national day), President Beneš was empowered to issue decrees having the force of law. One of the first of these confiscated the property of Germans, Hungarians, traitors, and collaborators; a second that went into force—probably not coincidentally—on the final day of the Potsdam Conference stripped all those who had declared themselves of German or Hungarian ethnicity in any census after 1929 of Czechoslovak nationality. Those affected by the decrees could, however, apply for restoration of their property and citizenship if they could prove that they had actively resisted the Nazis, or had suffered persecution at German hands because of their loyalty to the Republic. As critics pointed out, this formula contained many flaws. Ethnic Czechs and Slovaks who had merely kept their heads down during the era of the Protectorate were unaffected by the law; ethnic Germans who did precisely the same became liable to expropriation and removal. Jews—even concentration-camp survivors—who were German-speakers acquired no immunity on account of their oppression unless they had been part of a resistance movement. In all cases, those wishing to claim immunity as “antifascists” had to petition “verification” committees, whose standards and procedures differed widely, to prove their case.
Those antifascists who did so faced high obstacles. The man who would become the most celebrated Sudetendeutsch antifascist of all—Oskar Schindler, rescuer of Jews from Gross-Rosen and Auschwitz, who was born in Svitavy in 1908 and himself narrowly escaped internment by fleeing from Czechoslovakia into Germany disguised in the uniform of a concentration camp inmate during the chaotic first days of peace—never submitted an application, considering that as a onetime Abwehr agent and Nazi Party member he had no chance of succeeding.20 The experience of other, lesser Schindlers bore out the accuracy of his belief. In September 1945, for example, forty-two British former prisoners of war from Stalag IV C near Teplice petitioned the Ministry of the Interior in Prague and the Foreign Office in London on behalf of H. and J. Kunert, owners of a textile factory in Varnsdorf. During the war the Kunerts had protected the British POWs working in the factory from German mistreatment, provided them with food, and enabled them to listen to the BBC. On several occasions the pair had narrowly escaped imprisonment for their unpatriotic solicitousness for the welfare of the British workers. During the “May days,” the liberated POWs had taken it upon themselves to guard the factory from violent Czech mobs. Despite these unsolicited testimonials, however, the government in Prague saw no reason to intervene. After the Czech workers in the factory threatened to strike unless their “German” bosses were removed, the Kunerts were imprisoned in Varnsdorf; their property confiscated; and following their eventual release they were forced to go to Germany.21
Cases of this kind were not unusual. The minister of defense and future president of Czechoslovakia, General Ludvík Svoboda, took a typically robust stance in a speech calling for “the complete expulsion from Czechoslovakia of all Germans, even those so-called anti-Fascists, to safeguard us from the formation of a new fifth column.”22 Verification committees typically suited the action to the minister’s word; those that did not, as in Ostrava, were dissolved and replaced by more pliable ones.23 The names of applicants were publicly displayed, so that any citizen might voice his or her objection—anonymously, if desired. By the end of June 1945, of some four thousand applications submitted in Ĉeské Budějovice, only thirty-four were accepted.24 To be successful, applicants normally required affidavits from ethnic Czechs or Slovaks attesting to their loyalty; those who provided them faced public ostracism, or worse. A “spontaneous” demonstration by Communist women in Žižkov, a working-class district of Prague, was one of many that condemned Czechoslovak nationals who provided positive testimonials for Germans.25 In Nýřany near Plzeň, another “spontaneous” women’s initiative prevailed upon the District National Committee to have the names of those who had vouched for antifascist Germans publicly displayed outside the town hall. “So today everyone has the opportunity to read the names of these ‘patriots.’”26 Often, political tests were applied. At first only Communists and Social Democrats qualified for antifascist status; later, in a very few cases, members of nonleftist parties might also pass muster after meticulous scrutiny. Some commissions interpreted the criterion of “resistance” to Nazism literally, requiring a record of armed partisan activity as the sole acceptable measure of antifascist status. Others issued certificates of exemption, but withdrew them in the face of pressures from above or below.27 Pola
nd, too, saw little reason to exert itself in trying to distinguish between “innocent” and “guilty” Germans. Stanisław Mikołajczyk, now deputy prime minister in the Communist-dominated coalition government, urged in 1946 that no exceptions be made for Germans who had worked with the resistance movement during the war. “If someone is a German, then his place is in Germany, and not in our country.”28
In these circumstances, luck and connections counted as much as anything else in determining who was to stay and who to go. Colonel František Havel of the Ministry of National Defense reported, with some understatement, that members of District National Committees in border regions were not “always completely reliable and unbiased” when compiling lists of Germans for transfer. Often the lists included the names of their own estranged relatives, or acquaintances against whom they harbored some grievance.29 At the other end of the spectrum, Colonel František Dastich discovered that numerous National Committees were actively hiding Germans to prevent their removal, and that agencies of the state were routinely exempting Sudetendeutsche who had joined the Communist Party after the end of the war.30 Enough complaints of this kind were made to state authorities to undermine the official contention that all Germans had to be removed to prevent them from being lynched by their neighbors. In spite of a decree by the Ministry of the Interior making it a criminal offense for anyone to harbor, conceal, feed, clothe, or provide overnight accommodation to Germans, many newspaper articles subsequently upbraided “unpatriotic” Czechoslovaks who continued to hide or protect them from the authorities, as well as lamenting “the increasing number of cases, in border areas, of benevolent people succoring German workers and prisoners of war escaping from internment camps in our area.”31
Not all the cross-border traffic was in a single direction. At the end of the war, many hundreds of thousands of Germans from what would become the Recovered Territories who had fled the Red Army’s advance to the west now returned to their homes. Gunter Lange, a twelve-year-old boy expelled in June 1945 from Neumarkt (Środa Śląska), west of Wrocław, encountered “thousands of refugees” at Görlitz heading in the opposite direction to their places of origin in the east. “They did not believe that we had had to leave there. They could not understand that there was not going to be a return home.”32 The alarming spectacle of the population of “New Poland” actually increasing in the weeks after V-E Day was one of the factors spurring local authorities to proceed with “wild expulsions” as quickly as possible, and to reinforce their precautions against further unwanted arrivals.33 At Frankfurt an der Oder, a city bisected by the river bearing its name, Polish soldiers routinely opened fire from the east bank at Germans approaching the western shores to fish.34 Emilie Melina, a thirty-seven-year-old woman who found herself on the wrong side of the river Neisse when the war ended, had an even more distressing experience when she tried to get back to her mother and sisters at Rakau (Raków). She and two other young women were arrested as they made their way across the border near Kohlfurt and placed in a cell with sixteen other illicit frontier crossers of both sexes. Although the women were not abused, they were traumatized by the spectacle of their male cellmates repeatedly being beaten by the prison officers for thirty-minute stretches in front of them. Melina’s terror was so great that she could not raise her eyes from the floor at her feet. To her consternation, an attempt was then made to compel her and the other women to hit the men with clubs. Though the Polish guards were displeased with the few half-hearted blows they delivered, shouting “We stuck it out in your concentration camps for six years, but you can’t stand even one week with us!” Melina and the other women were not further mistreated. After four days in custody, they were marched back to the Neisse and reexpelled into Germany.35
Hazards like these did not deter many others from trying to return to their homelands, in the hope of reaching separated family members, retrieving hidden property, or being able to live there undetected. Like the expellee population in general, most of these would-be returners were female. By November 1945, so many of them were finding their way back into Czechoslovakia that Major Otakar Fischer of the Ministry of National Defense recommended that they be given short-term residence permits, valid for a year. The majority, he wrote, were young women of the manual working class who posed no political threat and were readily finding work in Czechoslovakia because of the depleted labor pool.36 Fischer’s proposal, however, was not adopted. Instead, returners were typically given prison sentences of a few months and then reexpelled to Germany. In Poland the Ministry of the Recovered Territories gave up the unequal struggle of trying to deter illicit border-crossers through prison sentences, ruling that they should not be detained but instead escorted back to Germany immediately upon apprehension.37
Although nearly all “wild expulsions” were carried out under color of authority, some were “wilder” than others. Impatient local agencies or security forces, responding to pressure from below, often decided to solve their problems on their own without involving, or even informing, the central government. In some cases this involved conducting their own “foreign policy.” Thus the National Security Office in Jablonec nad Nisou, assailed by “increasingly radical voices” in the town demanding that something be done about the Germans and anxious about the apparent insouciance of the local Sudetendeutsche, visited the local Red Army commander, General Samokhvalov, and obtained his blessing for a thousand expellees to be marched to the border east of Polubný, about four miles away. The Jablonec National Security Office carried out the operation in mid-June without notifying the military authorities, a tactic that almost went awry when a Polish army officer, pointing out that the area into which the Germans were being driven was now part of the Recovered Territories, refused to let them enter. While the officer was diverted by being engaged in day-long negotiations, the Germans were put across the border elsewhere.38 Although the Ministry of National Defense was unamused by this usurpation of its authority, similar cases were common. The Děĉín-based newspaper Severoĉeská Mladá fronta lauded the local authorities of the area for their effectiveness in this regard. “How many journeys to Dresden and how many successful actions have we carried out thus far in this matter, without having to wait upon the permission of any higher expulsion authority!”39
For every Jablonec or Děĉín, however, there were a dozen localities that got in badly over their heads when they tried to seize the initiative in this fashion. A revealing analysis of the difficulties typically associated with “wild expulsions,” based on its own experiences in the Svitavy district of Moravia, was provided by the Regional National Committee of Moravská Třebová to the Ministry of the Interior at the end of August 1945. The report is notable for its frankness; the story it tells could apply equally well to dozens of other districts. On May 12, Svitavy had a population of 34,000 Germans and only 115 Czechs. Some 8,000 of the former quickly left of their own volition or were taken away by the Red Army, but it was far from clear what to do with the remaining 26,000. The authorities in Moravská Třebová—according to their own account, at least—initially held out against pressure from below for precipitate action. Only 291 German suspects were rounded up, on information laid by the few Czechs and German antifascists in the area, and 40 of these were soon released. The position of the National Committee, though, was undercut at the end of May by news arriving of the removal of the Germans at Brno, and of a lethal “wild expulsion” carried out by the Czechoslovak Army in Litomyšl and its environs, ten miles away.40 Members of the public expressed great bitterness that while the new citizens of Svitavy had been instructed to refrain from driving out the local Sudetendeutsch population by force and instead to wait patiently upon the central government, the people of neighboring districts had been allowed to solve their German problem employing as much violence as they pleased. “Radical elements” arriving in the area who sought only to enrich themselves, along with the first of 2,500 Czech “colonists” dispatched from the interior, helped turn this simmering
resentment into a feeding frenzy. Under their influence, young people clamored for immediate action against the Germans; other would-be property seekers attempted to go over the National Committee’s head, sending deputations to lobby ministers in Prague and Brno. These demagogic appeals, the authorities considered, were aimed at causing the maximum degree of chaos so that the self-interested parties behind them could obtain for themselves as much German booty as possible.
After it had become clear that the ever-growing number of settlers would not contain themselves in patience for the “organized expulsion” at which the authorities were aiming, the National Committee at the beginning of June tried to defuse the situation by conducting large-scale roundups of Germans into camps, thereby making possible a swift interim redistribution of their property. Four makeshift detention centers were opened in Svitavy; another was established in Březová nad Svitavou; and part of an adjacent municipality was cordoned off and used as an overflow facility. The National Committee acknowledged that the roundup had been shambolic, and conditions in the camps were grim. Because of the haste with which the detentions had been carried out, entire families were taken into custody, along with proven antifascists and essential workers in industry. As the local medical officer, Dr. Votava, recorded, epidemics of typhus and dysentery soon broke out among the internees. To reduce overcrowding in the camps, parties of two hundred detainees at a time had been quietly taken out and pushed across the border into occupied Germany; these expulsions were always carried out before six o’clock in the morning in the hope of avoiding detection by the American or Soviet authorities. By these means, the number of Germans in Svitavy was reduced by almost half by mid-August. This did not, however, succeed in satisfying the “radicals.” Because “every Czech wanted a house or a villa,” those Germans who possessed the choicest properties were proceeded against first, defeating the National Committee’s efforts to carry out an orderly transfer. Members of the subcommittee charged with expropriating the expellees included “many individuals … who acted in their own interest.” They were abetted by the Czechoslovak Army, against whom many serious and credible allegations—of torture, hangings, beatings, and robbery of Germans—had been lodged. These had reached such a scale that even the Red Army had intervened, tearing off the white armlets which the National Committee had obliged Germans to wear and which marked them out for maltreatment. Once again, though, pressure from “radicals” and from the Czechoslovak Army led the Germans to be relabeled with a letter “N” (for Němec, “German”) on a white square, worn on the breast.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 16