The disruption caused by these events, the National Committee recorded, was so great that in the end it proved necessary to call a temporary halt to the operation. Further “concentration” of Germans was suspended until proper lists of detainees could be drawn up. In conformity with guidelines received from the Ministry of the Interior, young children and their mothers were taken out of the internment camps—although, to appease public sentiment, it was decided not to release them into the community, as the regulations stipulated. Instead they remained confined to a “ghetto.” A “control committee” had been established which, it hoped, would assist the authorities in fending off further pressure from below and avoiding similar “errors” in the future. No fewer than 15,500 of the original German population of 26,000, though, still remained to be expelled, and the National Committee left the government in no doubt that more trouble awaited unless these could be removed quickly.41
Even the rather less shambolic expulsions conducted by the Czechoslovak Army ran into increasing difficulties with the advent of midsummer. One of the most serious was a shortage of suitable border crossings. At first some of the U.S. forces occupying western Bohemia had been willing to help. Lieutenant Colonel V. Drozda reported on June 19, 1945 that in his district the Americans were cooperating with the Czechoslovak authorities in the latter’s roundup of “the local nationally unreliable population” and that U. S. military police were involved in the majority of these operations.42 According to an American journalist on the scene, Edward Angly, the U.S. role in the “wild expulsions” had gone further even than this. Assisted with “an occasional well-planted kick to hurry them along,” he reported, expellees were “being herded into the custody of the United States Third Army … since they came here, troops of the Fifth Corps have removed an average of 1,000 Germans a day out of Czechoslovakia in trucks.”43 It is probable, though, that such unofficial U.S. participation in expulsion operations was not continued after the announcement of the Potsdam moratorium. With the passage of time, American commanders became steadily more uneasy about the methods being used by the Czechoslovaks to rid themselves of the Sudetendeutsche, so that by October Major General Ernie Harmon of XXII Corps, headquartered in Plzeň, was advising the U.S. ambassador that “I do not feel that the American Army can be a party to this.”44 Consequently, by midautumn 1945 the U.S. Army was placing so many obstacles in the way of movements of expellees through western Bohemia that they had become almost impossible. On the other side of the country, the absorption by Poland of the Recovered Territories had shrunk the northern Czechoslovak-German frontier by about half, seriously impeding operations there. To the south, Austria’s absorptive capacity was much lower than Germany’s, and Soviet military commanders there were particularly unsympathetic to Prague’s difficulties. As a result, Czechoslovakia found its expulsion actions being channeled into a comparatively narrow frontier strip between Jáchymov and Liberec, with the town of Děĉín at its epicenter. Even here, the Soviet military authorities in the adjacent German districts became ever more demanding in their requirements. The Red Army’s 13th Division, for example, specified that large columns must be accompanied by Czechoslovak troops for twenty kilometers beyond the border; they were to carry food for several days; the expellees were not to have their possessions and rations pillaged; the very old and very young were to travel on wagons; and the center of the town of Zittau was to be circumnavigated. Other commanders imposed a weekly limit of two parties of 250 each at the frontier post at Boží Dar; demanded that no expellee be admitted who did not possess at least twenty-five kilograms of baggage and personal documentation; or required forty-eight hours’ prior notice for all movements. A Czechoslovak Army memorandum noted, however, that gifts of alcohol had a most helpful effect in eliciting a flexible attitude respecting these criteria among the Soviet border guards.45
Curiously, bearing in mind the infinitely more savage and inhumane nature of the German occupation of Poland, the initial occupation of the Recovered Territories was not marked by the kind of violent reprisals seen in Czechoslovakia—though this would soon change. Removals of Germans from Danzig began as early as mid-April 1945, and were voluntary rather than coerced. Those willing to depart by themselves were issued certificates requesting the civil and military authorities to facilitate the bearers’ travel to Germany, valid for a month from the date of issue. These were usually accepted on trains in lieu of tickets. The mood turned darker in early June, however, when the first of a series of military directives requiring the immediate expulsion of the German population was issued. General Karol Świerczewski, commander of the Second Army Corps, referred specifically in an order he issued on June 24 to the Czechoslovaks’ success in driving out their Germans, and urged his troops to do likewise. “One must perform one’s tasks in such a harsh and decisive manner,” he told them, “that the Germanic vermin do not hide in their houses but rather will flee from us of their own volition and then in their own land will thank God that they were lucky enough to save their heads.”46 Little more detailed advice was offered as to how the mission was to be accomplished, leading, as in Czechoslovakia, to many local variations. In the area covered by the Fifth Infantry Division, expellees were allowed to carry twenty kilograms of baggage consisting of clothing and food only. The commander of the Eleventh Division, for his part, sanctioned the use by Germans of horses and ox-drawn carts, though these needed to be turned over to the Polish authorities upon reaching the border. On the whole, though, the expulsions were attended with an extraordinarily high degree of violence; in the view of Bernadetta Nitschke, the methods used by the Polish Army “were far from humane, and often no different from those of Hitler.”47 Civil authorities often protested the expulsions, citing the impact on the economy and above all the fact that they were occurring as the harvest was approaching. The Red Army, too, sometimes interfered, leading General Świerczewski to remind his subordinates of the importance of avoiding discussions with Soviet commanders and instead presenting them with faits accomplis.
By mid-June, the roads between the Recovered Territories and the river Oder were thronged with parties of Germans, ranging in size from twos and threes to hundreds, who had been forced out of their homes with little or no notice and pointed westwards. Lacking food or shelter, and with journeys of hundreds of miles on foot in front of them, their survival depended on what they could beg or steal en route. Nor were they left unmolested while on the road. The experience of Johanna Janisch, a twenty-five-year-old mother of three small children, can stand for thousands of others. Evicted in the middle of the night from a village near Świebodzin (Schwiebus), Janisch was already suffering from gonorrhea contracted as a result of having been raped some twenty times by Red Army soldiers. (The Polish police of the village, she testified, had shielded her and her sister from still further assaults by pretending to the Soviets that the German women were their wives.)
At Schwiebus, the fugitives from many surrounding villages met and formed a great trek which now started on its way towards Frankfurt an der Oder. We spent the first night in the open; later we found barns or sheds to protect us against the weather during the nights…. During the walk of five weeks on the road we lived only by eating potatoes and fruits from the fields which we digged ourselves…. Many weak and sick people, old folks and children had to be left on the road dead. It was a lamentable procession of utmost misery. We had all lost much weight and many of us looked like skeletons. Heaven only knows how often we were plundered by Poles or Russians and how many times the women were [sexually] assaulted again and again.48
However great the hazards and miseries of life on the road may have been—in a report to Bishop Stanisław Adamski, the vicar general of Wrocław diocese called them “indescribable”—they were to be preferred in most cases to the expulsion trains that the Polish authorities now began to operate. Taking up to two weeks, and sometimes longer, to reach Berlin, the focal point of most of these transports, the trains were usually unprovisioned
and lacking the most basic of amenities. Unsurprisingly, the death rate soared.
In our freight wagon there were about ninety-eight people, and it is no exaggeration to say that we were squeezed against each other like sardines in a can. When we reached Allenstein people started to die, and had to be deposited along the side of the rails. One or more dead bodies greeted us every morning of our journey after that; they just had to be abandoned on the embankments. There must have been many, many bodies left lying along the track …
The train spent more time stopping than moving. It took us more than fourteen days to reach the Russian occupation zone. We rarely traveled at night…. We had no idea where we were, because the names of the stations were now all in Polish. For a long time we were afraid that we were being taken to the interior of Poland to be left somewhere to die of hunger. But in the end we realized we were traveling in a westerly direction. After a few days we had no more to eat. Sometimes, by begging the Polish driver, we were able to get a little warm water drawn from the engine…. The nights were unbearable because of the overcrowding. We could neither keep upright nor sit down, much less lie down. We were so tightly squeezed together that it was impossible not to jostle each other occasionally. Recriminations and quarrels erupted, even attempts to exchange blows in the middle of this human scrum. The very sick suffered the worst. Typhus was widespread throughout the entire transport and the number of deaths grew with each passing day. You can well imagine the state of hygiene that prevailed in the wagon.49
For the two smallest expelling countries, Yugoslavia and Romania, all removals of Germans were by definition “wild expulsions” inasmuch as the Allies never undertook to accept their minorities into occupied Germany or Austria. Tito’s government did belatedly, on January 16, 1946, submit a formal request for authority to carry out an organized transfer of its German population. “For ten years before the Second World War,” it alleged, “the destruction of Yugoslavia was systematically planned and prepared by the German minority”; according to a postwar Yugoslav state commission of inquiry, “only one thousand … remained neutral during the occupation.” The Germans thus constituted “a pernicious enclave within the national blood of the Yugoslav peoples,” and the menace they posed to international peace and security was so immediate that their removal should receive priority over all other such transfers.50 If the request was approved, Belgrade proposed to expel all 130,388 Yugoslav Volksdeutsche in a fifteen-day operation.51 Although the Foreign Office in London supported the idea, reasoning that “it would be difficult to refuse to the Yugoslavs what we have granted to the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians,”52 others were skeptical of the remarkably low—and suspiciously precise—figure given by Belgrade for its German minority. This, it was recalled, had been stated as being more than 600,000 strong in prewar censuses. It therefore seemed likely that “the Yugoslavs are deliberately quoting a low figure to us now, in order that we may agree the more easily to the transfer, and will later, after we have agreed, discover that there are in fact two or three times as many Germans left as they first informed us.”53 Even though massacres of Volksdeutsche were known to have taken place on a massive scale, with the British military mission reporting in January 1945 a typical reprisal action in which “150 Volksdeutsch in the Vojvodina were shot for the murder of a Russian soldier by a local woman,” it seemed unlikely that these alone could account for the missing half-million.54 By the time the Yugoslav request was taken up by the Allied Control Council in Berlin, moreover, the occupying powers were struggling to cope with the influx of Germans from the three “Potsdam countries” of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. All feared that to grant Tito’s request would set an unfortunate precedent that would greatly add to their troubles. “It is known that there are German minorities in Bulgaria, Rumania, Iran, Turkey and other countries, and it is therefore not unlikely that requests for the transfer of these minorities into Germany will be received.”55 General Vasily Sokolovsky, Red Army commander in chief in the Soviet occupation zone, had already rejected a back-channel approach by Belgrade to accept expellees in the area under his administration.56 In a rare display of four-power unity, therefore, the Allies supported a Soviet proposal to shelve the Yugoslav application indefinitely. Though this did not deter Tito from driving out his Volksdeutsch population regardless, it did at least have the effect of stretching out the process and thereby reducing to a degree the difficulties of resettlement.
A similar pattern can be seen in the removal of the Volksdeutsche from Romania. Uniquely, the Bucharest government neither formally demanded their expulsion, nor issued an expulsion decree against them. Indeed, Bucharest formally protested the first move made in this direction by the Soviet military authorities. In January 1945, General Vladislav Vinogradov required the Romanian government to round up all ethnic German males between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, and females between eighteen and thirty, for transportation to the USSR as forced laborers. The coalition government of Nicolae Rădescu appealed this directive, pointing out that among the 500,000 Volksdeutsche of Romania there were many “of a very remote German origin or simply bearing names of German consonance … [who had] constantly performed their military duties in the Roumanian Army and accomplished faithfully their civic obligations. Their mobilization and removal will be all the more unjust and unfounded.”57 Some Western officials also took a dim view of the Soviet initiative, less on account of its indiscriminate nature than because they considered the use of forced labor to be a form of “reparations in kind,” which could properly be decided only by an Allied council appointed to share out German assets rather than by unilateral action. Sir Orme Sargent at the Foreign Office, however, declared that “we and the Americans will have to get used to these mass deportations, which the Russians are certainly going to carry out when they get into Germany.”58 He was backed up by Winston Churchill, who recalled that in his notorious “percentages” agreement with Stalin at Moscow in October 1944, the latter had been assigned 90 percent of the influence in postwar Romania.59 In a pair of splenetic minutes to Foreign Secretary Eden, the prime minister now demanded to know “Why are we making a fuss about the Russian deportations in Roumania of Saxons [ethnic Germans] and others? It was understood that the Russians were to work their will in this sphere. Anyhow we cannot prevent them.”60
The deportations from Romania were carried out in as chaotic a manner as those that would later take place in Czechoslovakia and Poland. Combined Soviet and Romanian patrols began roundups in the predawn hours of January 11, 1945, requiring deportees to be ready with clothing and sufficient food for ten days within fifteen minutes. The British ambassador recorded, and General Vinogradov admitted, that in many cases “Roumanian police [were] taking bribes from Germans for release, their place being taken by some casual passer-by picked up by Roumanian police. Naturally these are Roumanians.”61 Up to seventy-five thousand Volksdeutsche, nonetheless, were removed from the country by these means. Others were taken up into internment camps, to facilitate the redistribution of their property.
Although most ethnic Germans from Romania were not formally deported, both they and the survivors among the forced laborers in the USSR, who were progressively released between December 1945 and 1949, were confronted with conditions that made it impossible for many of them to remain. After the Soviets engineered the fall of Rădescu’s government in March 1945 and replaced it with a pliant Communist administration, a pair of decrees forfeited ethnic Germans’ real property to the state and stripped many of them of Romanian citizenship. Both the remaining Volksdeutsch population and returning deportees, therefore, found that ethnic Romanians were living in their former homes and that they themselves were officially classified as illegal immigrants. The new Bucharest government denied the Red Cross the right to extend charitable assistance to the Volksdeutsche “on the ground that these people had lost Romanian nationality.” Their situation, consequently, was pitiable. The returning deportees, the CICR found, “generally cam
p out in the open air or in cellars and sometimes they have nothing to eat but what they can find growing in the fields.” Those who had escaped deportation were not much better off: “they have literally been put out into the street…. Usually, their houses were given to Gypsies who, often, employ the former owners as domestic servants.”62 Deprived of the means of existence, Romanian Volksdeutsche were in the position of having been “constructively expelled.” Significant numbers began making their way to Germany and Austria; by August 1945, some twenty-one thousand were in the latter country, most having arrived in a very poor state of health.63
Greatly to the surprise of many observers, the Germans in each of the expelling countries put up little or no resistance to their removal. The demographic profile of the expellees no doubt had something to do with that—women, children, and the elderly are rarely in the forefront of popular insurgencies. But the quiescence with which the German populations greeted their fate was positively unnerving to the Polish and Czechoslovak governments, which expected to encounter fierce opposition from “stay-behind” German guerrilla units—the so-called Werewolves. Though it is now clear that no organized activity of this kind ever took place,64 the authorities in the borderlands of both countries did their best to imagine a Werewolf conspiracy into existence. This was especially true of Czechoslovakia, where a sabotage panic of considerable proportions was constructed on a foundation of “sweeping statements, half-truths and sometimes outright inventions” in the summer of 1945.65 Just as the Nazis during the occupation had exaggerated the scale of Czechoslovak resistance and categorized accidents as examples of sabotage, so now any unexplained occurrence resulting in death or injury tended to be attributed to Werewolf activity.66 In mid-July, for example, nine Sudetendeutsch civilians were summarily executed in Rudoltice, northwest of Olomouc, in reprisal for a gunshot wound inflicted upon a Czechoslovak soldier that upon further investigation turned out to have been caused by the man carelessly discharging his own weapon. Werewolves were also blamed for an altercation in which U.S. forces and Revolutionary Guards blundered into each other in the dark near Aš on the night of June 30–July 1 and began exchanging fire, wounding three. Such minor incidents often had large-scale ramifications. When an SNB officer accidentally blew himself up in Bruntál while handling a grenade, Colonel V. Janko of the notoriously trigger-happy 1st Czechoslovak Armored Brigade jumped to the conclusion that the explosion had been caused by a radio-controlled bomb; his subordinate, Captain I. Gaš, retaliated by shooting twenty local Sudetendeutsche on July 5; interning hundreds of others; driving 4,300 over the border on July 10 and 11; and sending some 750 more for labor service in the interior. Again, after members of the brigade began shooting at a unit of the Financial Police near Javorník on the outskirts of Svitavy on the night of July 9–10 after mistaking them for Werewolves and triggering a full-scale firefight, the commanding officer of the brigade covered up the debacle by blaming “saboteurs” and ordering as a punishment the expulsion of the entire unproductive Sudetendeutsch population of the district. Forty-eight hours later, the men and childless women were rounded up into camps; 340 elderly people, mothers, and children were driven into a makeshift ghetto in the village of Vápenná. In a similar vein was an explosion on July 9 at the Körber munitions factory in Hrádek nad Nisou, two miles from the border opposite Zittau, in which seven Czech soldiers and seven German workers were killed. The evidence pointed to mishandling of detonators as they were being loaded on trucks; the authorities, however, preferred to believe that one of the dead Germans had carried out a suicide-bombing operation. A collective fine of more than one hundred thousand Reichsmarks was imposed on the local German community, who were then driven across the border a week later. The Hrádek incident became an oft-quoted piece of evidence by Czech officialdom to prove the reality of an organized resistance movement.67
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