The most infamous incident attributed to Werewolf activity was the explosion of an ammunition dump in the border town of Ústí nad Labem (Aussig) in northwestern Bohemia on the afternoon of July 31. Twenty-eight people were killed. Although most of the victims turned out to be Sudetendeutsche, the rumor that sabotage was responsible quickly spread, and within an hour of the explosion Germans, easily recognizable by their colored armbands, were being hunted through the streets by workers, Czechoslovak Army units, Revolutionary Guards, Soviet troops, and members of the SNB. Many were beaten to death where they were found; others were hurled from the bridge over the River Labe (Elbe) connecting the two sides of the town and shot as they floundered in the water. In an incident recalled by nearly all observers at the scene, at least one baby carriage with a baby inside was also thrown into the river. Estimates of the number killed vary widely—from several hundred to several thousand—though recent scholarship has tended to coalesce around a figure of 100–150 deaths.
The Ústí massacre quickly turned into a bitter point of contention between the Czechoslovak government and the Sudetendeutsch Social Democrats in London. The Cabinet in Prague, already rattled by reports arriving from low-ranking officers who were anxious to parade their vigilance by depicting every find of discarded weapons or discovery of a German civilian in possession of a pair of binoculars as evidence of a “Werewolf cell,” immediately put two and two together and made five. Even though the army stated that the cause of the explosion had not yet been determined, the Cabinet concluded that it was undoubtedly the fruit of a “planned sabotage action.” Unverified rumors were supplied to—and uncritically published by—the national and international press as confirmed fact, including a story that a Werewolf aircraft had flown low over Ústí and might have dropped a bomb on the ammunition dump at the time of the explosion.68 (Six weeks later, Wenzel Jaksch’s Social Democrats mockingly inquired of Prague why nothing had been heard since then from “the powerful Werewolf conspiracy, its radio stations, its grey airplanes, its centres in Belgrade, Paris and Argentine.”)69 For their part, Sudeten Germans aired their suspicions that the explosion had been the Czechoslovak version of the Reichstag fire of 1933, pointing to what seemed the remarkable coincidence that the Potsdam Conference was taking place at the same time. Rumors circulated in the Sudetendeutsch camp that printed notices imposing a curfew on Ústí to quell the disturbances had begun to be posted up on walls even before the explosion took place, and that the massacre had been deliberately staged to impress on the Big Three at Potsdam what would happen on a far larger scale if they did not give final approval to the expulsions. Neither the government’s nor the Sudeten Germans’ rival conspiracy theories, however, need be taken very seriously. The truth was almost certainly, as a pair of British-born residents in Ústí who had witnessed the killings reported to Ambassador Nichols, that a tragic accident had been followed by “a spontaneous outburst by Czech hooligans” in and out of uniform.70
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, public as well as official paranoia over Werewolf activity escalated considerably, with ludicrous claims like “hundreds of Werewolves have been destroyed and disposed of every day” and “our entire border is now a combat zone, where the hidden enemy launches attacks against the Czech people” appearing regularly in the popular press.71 The precise reason remains unclear. It may be that in the wake of the Potsdam Conference’s call for a temporary suspension of expulsions, Czechoslovak authorities felt themselves under pressure to generate the evidence that would prove the presence of the Germans to be an ongoing threat to the country’s national security and strengthen the argument for their removal. Tomáš Staněk also points out that the Communist-dominated Ministry of Information had a vested interest in generating a steady stream of stories about Werewolves and spies seeking to undermine the “People’s Democratic State.”72 At all events, from early August an atmosphere reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials prevailed in the Czech borderlands, in which numerous Germans were tortured to persuade them to reveal the names of members of Werewolf cells, who would themselves be subjected to equally rigorous interrogation to elicit still more names. As Staněk notes, a high proportion of the “confessions” thus obtained bear an uncomfortable resemblance to those extracted using identical methods from “counterrevolutionaries” and “capitalist spies” after the Communist coup of February 1948.73
The fact nonetheless remained that proven cases of opposition to forced removals were somewhat nowhere to be found. The uniform, almost eerie, meekness of the German population was recorded in report after report in both Czechoslovakia and Poland. The month before the Ústí explosion, the commander of the gendarmerie declared the area to be entirely peaceful; and although the local SNB headquarters three weeks later complained of shootings and robberies occurring on a daily basis, it placed the blame for these on Czechoslovak military and Red Army elements.74 Elsewhere, even after the massacre, police and army accounts spoke overwhelmingly of the “passivity and servility” of the Germans; of their evident appearance of being “frightened” and “depressed”; and of the security forces’ confidence that any truly dangerous elements among them had already either been removed from the country or were safely in custody.75 Newspapers likewise testified to the Germans behaving with the “servility to which the Czechoslovaks ha[d] become accustomed.”76 Much the same was true of Poland. With the exception of isolated incidents like a standoff in Prudnik, when looted Germans laid siege to a militia barracks suspected of holding the officers who had robbed them, overt resistance was conspicuous by its absence.77 A Polish observer who traveled from Poznań to Szczecin and back again at the end of August dismissed as propaganda government claims of Werewolf activity, testifying instead to the “nauseating obsequiousness” and “cowardly” demeanor of the ill-fed Germans he encountered on the trip.78 In Wrocław only twenty-five cases of oppositional behavior, nineteen of which involved the distribution of leaflets protesting the actions of the authorities, were attributed to Germans by the security forces in 1945. For the whole of 1946 the number of recorded cases, all consisting of leaflet distribution, had fallen to a mere nine.79 In Olsztyn province, too, as Claudia Kraft has found, “The source materials are full of references to the Germans’ utter passivity.”80
Neither the Polish nor the Czechoslovak governments expected that the period of “wild” expulsions would last for ever. Their aim had been, through the strategic use of terror, to cause the remaining German populations to flee by themselves, preferably before the Potsdam Conference and certainly before the eventual Peace Conference. “Organized expulsions” would come into play only if this attempt to create facts on the ground proved insufficient. This may not have been true of Yugoslavia. According to Vice President Milovan Djilas, while the decision to drive out the Volksdeutsche of that country had been taken in principle, “we might have changed our minds had not the Russians, Poles, and Czechs already decided for, and partially carried out, the expulsion of their Germans. We adopted this stand without any discussion, as something which the German atrocities made understandable and justifiable.”81 Klejda Mulaj, on the other hand, considers that Tito’s regime used extermination as a catalyst for expulsion as early as the autumn of 1944, engaging in mass killings of German civilians in a “well-planned and systematic” operation for that purpose.82
For the Czechoslovaks and Poles, though, despite all their efforts the operation was proceeding much too slowly. Notwithstanding the violence, few ethnic Germans voluntarily left their homes—a fact that came as no surprise to Wenzel Jaksch, who recalled that a decade previously only 10 percent of the Sudetendeutsch Social Democrats, despite facing the real possibility of arrest and punishment by the Gestapo, had fled to the Czechoslovak interior after the Munich Pact.83 At the midsummer peak, some 5,350 Germans were being forcibly removed from Czechoslovakia, and probably a somewhat larger number from the Recovered Territories, each day.84 Even if such a rate could be sustained thr
ough the winter season, which was highly unlikely in light of the fact that freight wagons sent to Germany often never returned, the clearances would take at least two years to complete. In view of the near certainty of a backlash by the Big Three long before then, this was even more unrealistic a proposition.
The backlash, indeed, was not long in coming. Throughout the summer of 1945, trains of expellees continued to pour into Berlin and other German and Austrian cities, becoming the earliest and most enduring symbol of the operation. Despite their understandably Germanophobic inclinations, the Western journalists who had flocked to Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference found themselves aghast at the scenes they encountered at the main line stations in the summer of 1945, with dead and dying littering the platforms. Charles Bray, German correspondent of the London Daily Herald, described finding four corpses on a visit to the Stettin Station, with “another five or six … lying alongside them, given up as hopeless by the doctor, and just being allowed to die.” Others in the same condition were in what his colleague Norman Clark of the News Chronicle called a “cattle truck mortuary,”85 which was cleared each night to make room for the next day’s dead. Bray discovered to his chagrin that the spectacle of German suffering “gave me no satisfaction, although for years I have hoped that the Germans would reap from the seeds they had sown.”86 A Times reporter found at a Berlin hospital the following month another sixty women and children who had been “summarily evicted” from a hospital and orphanage in Gdańsk. They had been transported in cattle trucks without food or water: by the time of their arrival in Berlin twenty were dead.87 Major Stephen Terrell of the Parachute Regiment, outraged at the spectacle of “entire populations dying by the thousands on the roads from starvation, dysentery and exhaustion,” broke the chain of command by sending an eyewitness report, via Bray, to the Foreign Office. “Even a cursory visit to the hospitals in Berlin, where some of these people have dragged themselves, is an experience which would make the sights in the Concentration Camps appear normal.”88 A British military doctor, Adrian Kanaar, working in another Berlin medical facility, did likewise, reporting on an expellee train from Poland in which seventy-five had died on the journey due to overcrowding.89 Although Kanaar had just completed a stint as a medical officer at the Belsen concentration camp, what he witnessed of the expellees’ plight so scandalized him that he declared his readiness to face a court martial if necessary for making the facts known to the press. He had not, he declared, “spent six years in the army to see a tyranny established which is as bad as the Nazis.”90 The same comparison suggested itself to Gerald Gardiner, later to become Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. A member of a volunteer ambulance unit working with concentration camp survivors, Gardiner was on hand in the late summer and autumn of 1945 to witness the arrival of expellee trains from the Recovered Territories that had taken up to fourteen days to complete their journeys. “The removal of the dead in carts from the railway stations,” he recorded, “was a grim reminder of what I saw in early days in Belsen.”91
This perception was not confined to journalists and members of humanitarian agencies alone. Robert Murphy, a career diplomat who had served as General Eisenhower’s political adviser and was now the State Department’s senior representative in Germany with the rank of ambassador, became so uneasy about the expulsions and his government’s part in facilitating them that in October he sent a combined report and protest to his friend Harrison Freeman (“Doc”) Matthews, Director of the Office of European Affairs at the State Department. Like Freeman, Murphy had been a member of the U.S. delegation at the Potsdam Conference and had raised no objection there to the expulsion scheme. Indeed he had “hesitated” before sending his memorandum, he told Freeman, because “even mentioning the matter exposes one to the charge of ‘softness’ to the Germans.” In the end, however, he found himself “not so much concerned regarding what is happening to the German population as I am regarding our own standard of conduct, because I feel that if we are willing to compromise on certain principles in respect of the Germans or any other people, progressively it may become too easy for us to sacrifice those same principles in regard to our own people.”92
In viewing the distress and despair of these wretches, in smelling the odor of their filthy condition, the mind reverts instantly to Dachau and Buchenwald. Here is retribution on a large scale, but practiced not on the Parteibonzen [Party bigwigs], but on women and children, the poor, the infirm. The vast majority are women and children….
Our psychology adjusts itself somehow to the idea that suffering is part of the soldier’s contract … That psychology loses some of its elasticity, however, in viewing the stupid tragedy now befalling thousands of innocent children, and women and old people…. The mind reverts to other recent mass deportations which horrified the world and brought upon the Nazis the odium which they so deserved. Those mass deportations engineered by the Nazis provided part of the moral basis on which we waged the war and which gave strength to our cause.
Now the situation is reversed. We find ourselves in the invidious position of being partners in this German enterprise and as partners inevitably sharing the responsibility.93
By the time the Potsdam Conference issued its call for a suspension of further “wild expulsions,” Berlin had become the epicenter of an accelerating humanitarian crisis. Most expellees from Poland, and a significant number from Czechoslovakia, were converging on the city “chiefly because rail traffic was possible and with the hope … of finding some central organisation which would deal with them…. In many cases the sick and the aged were left behind and many spoke of thousands of children separated from their families.”94 Despite an alarmed Marshal Zhukov first putting up posters warning expellees to stay away and then declaring the city closed to new arrivals at the end of July, a month during which 550,000 people had entered, another 262,000 came in the first half of August, showing that the prohibition had had no measurable effect on the influx. Proportionately, smaller German cities and towns were in even worse straits. By mid-August about 50,000 Germans displaced from Opava and Ĉeské Budějovice had accumulated in Zittau, trebling the town’s normal population; more than 100,000 were swamping Görlitz.
Although the Soviet ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Valerian Zorin, had told Prime Minister Fierlinger after Potsdam that his government would turn a blind eye to further discreet expulsions, Red Army commanders on the ground, who enjoyed considerable autonomy, took a far less accommodating stance. As early as mid-June, local units attempted to close the Zittau-Görlitz corridor, the main entry point for “wild expulsions” from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet zone, and in some cases physically forced back those already admitted, citing an outbreak of typhus and a lack of food in the border regions.95 At the end of August, when the head of the Czechoslovak military mission in Berlin, General František Hrabĉík, pressed Zhukov to admit another 200,000 expellees immediately, he was met with a flat refusal in light of the masses of new arrivals from the Recovered Territories with whom the Soviet occupation authorities already had to deal.96
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 18