When attempted “wild expulsions” failed, the consequences could be lethal, for army and militia units were sometimes determined not to take “no” for an answer. On June 28, 1945, a party of twenty-one Germans was conducted from Teplice nad Metují (Wekelsdorf) to the nearby Polish border. After the Poles refused to admit them, the expellees, most of whom were children and elderly women, were taken by the leader of the military escort, Captain V. Svoboda, into the forest at Buky in what is now the Krkonoše National Park and executed there. The bodies were exhumed in 1947, when a Czech witness wrote of the scene: “the sight of a baby in swaddling clothes was terrible, its face crushed beyond recognition, obviously by the butt of a rifle.”97 In many cases, however, guards considered their duty to have been discharged once the expellees had been conducted to the border, whether the occupying powers admitted them or not. Thus two “wild expulsions,” each of more than a thousand Germans from Ostrava, on June 13 and July 2, were rejected by the Poles and Soviets respectively. Although many expellees had died in the course of their journeys to the frontier, the survivors were abandoned there by their escorts and instructed to fend for themselves. Some found refuge in neighboring villages; others were left to wander in the forests before eventually finding their way back to Ostrava to await their roundup for another transport.98
Balked to the north and east, the Czechoslovak authorities in the late summer and autumn of 1945 turned once again to the west. Though “wild expulsions” were becoming increasingly difficult, with only a comparative trickle being accepted by the Soviets through a narrow corridor between the Elbe and the hamlet of Boží Dar near Jáchymov, the Allies were still admitting convoys of “voluntary emigrants” into Germany.99 According to the regulations in force, ethnic Germans wishing to leave Czechoslovakia of their own accord were supposed to obtain a release certificate from their local District National Committee and confirmation from the occupation authorities in Germany that no objection would be raised to their entry. In reality the number of genuine voluntary emigrants was small: by the end of 1945 a total of just eleven thousand had entered the Soviet zone, in what was sometimes referred to as Aktion Zhukov.100 Insubordinate local authorities, however, seized upon this category to continue “wild expulsions” by another name, especially in south Moravia and western Bohemia.
In many cases their subterfuges were even more elaborate. A typical example is provided by a pair of transports organized by the local authorities of Stříbro, a town in northwestern Bohemia under U.S. military occupation. Three weeks after the announcement of the Potsdam moratorium on expulsions, Dr. Josef Hrdliĉka, head of the Stříbro District National Committee, issued an order requiring 1,236 German residents of the town to assemble at the railway station two days later “under threat of severe punishment.” Simultaneously, the District National Committee applied to the American military authorities for permission to send the Stříbroites to the Soviet occupation zone as compulsory labor for the beet harvest, stating that they would return in three or four weeks. Smelling a rat, the U.S. authorities examined the “agricultural workers” and found that at least half were incapable of work, including amputees lacking artificial limbs, cripples, pregnant women, babies, blind people, and “many elderly persons in need of medical attention.” Undaunted by the Americans’ refusal to permit the expellees to cross the zonal boundary, the District National Committee entrained them on August 29 and tried to pass through, only to be turned back at the checkpoint at Rokycany. Dr. Hrdliĉka then sought and obtained approval for the train to go to Blatná, south of Stříbro and still in the U.S. zone. Instead it reappeared at the U.S.-Soviet zonal boundary at Ĉáslav in central Bohemia the following day. The Americans directed that it be returned to Stříbro. Hrdliĉka, however, insisted that “there would not be a German removed from the train and, if necessary, he would use Czech soldiers [against American forces] to prevent it.” The passengers remained on a siding at the village of Chrást near Plzeň for thirty-six hours, without food or water, until the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague prevailed upon the U.S. authorities to allow it to pass through. Encouraged by its success, the Stříbro National Committee tried the same tactic four weeks later. On this occasion, the Americans insisted that 167 Sudetendeutsch forced laborers of a batch of 1,299 rounded up at thirty minutes’ notice in Dobřany be exempted for medical reasons and sent back to Stříbro. The District National Committee kept the rejects in four boxcars for eleven days and, on October 13, attempted to transport them, unsuccessfully, to Blovice. Two days later the train was sent out a second time to try its luck at the boundary. Once more the Americans refused to let it through and a three days’ standoff ensued during which the expellees were again left without food or water. Finally, on October 18, the 167 passengers were given K rations by troops of the 94th Division and returned to Stříbro. After sixteen continuous days in the boxcars, nearly half required medical treatment on arrival; twenty-two of the patients were children under ten years of age.101
Though the Soviet authorities were usually more accommodating than the Americans, they too had their limits. The hapless Regional National Committee of Moravská Třebová discovered these when, in another of its ad hoc initiatives aimed at reducing the Sudetendeutsch population of the town of Svitavy and without notification to any higher authority, it organized a “voluntary transfer” of seven hundred Germans on October 12. Like many such “voluntary” transports, the expellees involved had simply been rounded up at random and “had no idea how they got there.” After a journey of some 200 miles, the train arrived at Löbau, west of Görlitz, in the Soviet zone. The Red Army refused to accept the transport and ordered its immediate return to Czechoslovakia, without allowing the passengers to get out. The train made the short journey back to the border town of Hrádek nad Nisou, from whence it made another attempt at crossing into Germany on October 16. On this occasion it got as far as Zittau in Germany, where the Soviets once again stopped it and allowed three corpses to be unloaded. Finally it was returned once again to Hrádek, where the Czechoslovak Army found it on October 17 and permitted the expellees to be disembarked. By now a further eighteen had died. The survivors were incarcerated in Hrádek concentration camp, while the army sought further instructions.102
As a result of fiascos like these, the Czechoslovak government itself was becoming disillusioned with “voluntary transfers” by the end of 1945. Regional National Committees, the Ministry of National Defense reported, were misusing this category to sweep entire areas clean of Germans on their own initiative, decanting the expellees into trains, and sending them off to the Soviet zones in Germany and Austria without notice. The USSR authorities were no longer accepting these transports, but returning them, accompanied by cascades of outraged protests, to their Czechoslovak counterparts. The wasted journeys were placing an unnecessary burden on the barely functioning railway system. Moreover, Czechoslovak Railways refused to acknowledge any responsibility for transporting the Germans on the return trip, for which the company received no payment, and were simply dumping the expellees on the side of the rails as soon as the trains crossed back into Czechoslovak territory. Most of them were taking two or three days to straggle back on foot to the nearest camps, and had nothing to eat during that time. The ethnic Czech population in the border regions was becoming alarmed by the presence of these starving returnees, some of whom were burglarizing houses in search of food, and was loudly demanding better frontier security.103
For these reasons the government in Prague at last began to assert its authority, cracking down on further misuse of the “voluntary emigration” category. As the year 1945 drew to a close, unauthorized transports from Czechoslovakia gradually ceased. No sooner had they begun to do so, though, than “wild expulsions” from Yugoslavia came to fill the vacuum. From September, using methods pioneered by the Czechoslovaks, Tito’s regime sent large parties of Volksdeutsch expellees into Austria, either directly across the border from Slovenia in northern Yugoslavia or, wit
h the cooperation of the Budapest authorities, along a circuitous route to the northeast via Hungary. The Yugoslav expulsions differed from their Polish and Czechoslovak counterparts in being entirely illicit, apart from the transit facilities granted by the Hungarians. Not even the Soviets at this time had any desire to see the Volksdeutsch population in their zones of Austria or Germany increase. In defying them, therefore, Tito was risking alienating his ideological allies as well as his opponents.
The Yugoslavs became particularly adept at finding soft spots in the border across which parties of expellees could be spirited. In some cases, whole trains and their passengers were simply abandoned once they had crossed the frontier. The Reuters news agency reported the fate of a cattle-truck train containing 650 Volksdeutsch women and children from Maribor in Slovenia which had been sent northward at the end of September 1945. Its passengers received no food other than what they had brought themselves. After reaching Vienna the train was turned away by the authorities. Sixteen days later, it remained “in a siding at Wilfersdorf, forlorn and unattended, while children die and women go insane.”104 More often, however, the finding of a remote location where expellees could be “pushed in” to Austria was a torturous process taking days or even weeks. In December 1945, partisan soldiers descended during the night on the town of Tržiĉ (Neumarktl) in northern Slovenia, rounded up the ethnic German inhabitants, and took them to camps. Nine days later the troops conveyed the detainees by train to Rateĉe (Ratschach) on the Italo-Austrian border, where an initial attempt to cross ended in failure. The villagers were returned to the train and transported eastward to the opposite side of Slovenia. After a lengthy forced march on New Year’s Day, during which “there were repeated threats that those who could not keep up will be shot,” the escort tried again to push the party across the Austrian-Hungarian border at Szentgotthárd, only to be intercepted by Soviet troops. Following another detour, the Yugoslav troops finally found an unguarded point opposite the Lower Styrian town of Fehring. “Before they left us they took away everything we had with us, clothes, underwear and valuables and said: ‘This is the frontier. Get across it. Anyone who comes back will be shot.’”105
That such warnings were not to be taken lightly was indicated by a discovery made in March 1946 by Jean Pfeiffer, a Swiss Red Cross official working at Hof in Bavaria. For several weeks previously, the Soviets had been preventing unauthorized Sudetendeutsch expellee trains from crossing into their occupation zone in Austria. As a result, the persons responsible for the transports had been disembarking the expellees at the frontier and pushing some three or four hundred across each night. While walking in the woods near the Austrian border town of Lichtenberg, one of the principal crossing points, Pfeiffer had discovered the bodies of a man, a woman, and a little girl of about six years of age. All had been shot—whether by the Soviets attempting to prevent them from entering, or by the Czechoslovaks attempting to prevent them from returning, was not known.106
The Potsdam Conference’s appeal for a suspension of “wild expulsions” had least effect upon the Poles. They too attempted to work the “voluntary emigration” trick, sometimes with the assistance of the German Communist Party (KPD) in the Soviet occupation zone. The KPD played an active part in organizing westbound transport from the Recovered Territories, in what some of its supporters with unconscious irony described as a Heim ins Reich program. With the cooperation of the Soviet authorities, KPD officials laid on freight trains in the autumn of 1945 upon which would-be “resettlers” could ride as far as the new border towns of Küstrin and Frankfurt an der Oder, leaving them to continue their westward journey on foot.107 Polish soldiers and militia bands continued forcibly to remove Germans from their homes and farms, although in deference to the Potsdam decision they no longer conveyed those displaced under guard to the border. In some cases this defeated the purpose. The inhabitants of one village, for example, were transported “some 11 miles to the nearest station—from which no trains were running. However, since there was no one to prevent them from going back, they dispersed again into the countryside.”108 For most such expellees, however, the operation of hunger and homelessness would provide sufficient incentive for them to leave the country by their own efforts. A pair of British diplomats touring Lower Silesia in September found that “There is very little doubt that the Poles will in the future endeavour to use economic pressure to induce even larger numbers of the German public to leave voluntarily if they cannot get rid of them in any other way and the Starost [district administrator] at one place we went to told us so in so many words.”109
“Excesses” like these nonetheless served a useful purpose. As Beneš and his ministers ceaselessly reiterated to the Western Allies, the only alternative to continued abuse of the German minorities was the replacement of “wild” with “organized” expulsions, conducted under the auspices of the Allies themselves. The deluge of German cities with hundreds of thousands of starving, destitute, and unproductive expellees in the summer and autumn of 1945 proved an even more effective means of holding the great powers’ feet to the fire. Negotiations to decide when, how many, and to which destinations expellees would be removed were thus opened between the representatives of the countries concerned at the meetings of the Allied Co-ordinating Committee in Berlin during the late autumn of 1945. These finally bore fruit in an outline scheme devised by the Polish and Czechoslovak governments in collaboration with the representatives of the United States, the USSR, France, and Britain, which was speedily approved by the Allied Control Council, the occupying countries’ temporary governing body for Germany, on November 20.
The so-called “ACC agreement,” a skeletal accord less than two pages in length, did not mean, as Lord Jowitt, the British lord chancellor, explained to Parliament, that there was to be any “international machinery for carrying out transfers or for supervising their execution. The arrangements are left to be worked out directly between the Government of the expelling country and the authorities of the zone in Germany to which the immigrants are to be expelled.”110 Rather, the deal specified the approximate timing of the deportations, and the proportions to be sent to each zone of occupation. Of an estimated 6,650,000 ethnic Germans still living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria, the Soviets undertook to admit 2,750,000 from the first two countries. The United States would take 2,250,000 from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Britain would accept in its zone 1,500,000 expellees from the Polish Recovered Territories, as soon as a “head-for-head” program (“Operation Honeybee”) under which the British and Soviets had already agreed to transfer within Germany those expellees and evacuees with families in the other’s zone had been completed. France, having rejected an initial Czechoslovak appeal to admit 500,000 Sudetendeutsche, would assume responsibility for the remaining 150,000, then temporarily in Austria.111 The expulsions would commence in December 1945, during which month 10 percent of the total were to be transported. Five percent would be removed in each of the months of January and February 1946; 15 percent per month in March and April; 20 percent per month in May and June; and the remaining 10 percent in July 1946, by which time the operation was to be completed. The Paris government successfully sought a rider that removals to the French occupation zone were not to commence until April 15, 1946; London stipulated that the beginning of its acceptance of expellees from Poland would be a matter for negotiation between British and Soviet officials in the quadripartite German administration.112
International public opinion, while generally relieved by the announcement that the Allies were at last proposing to assume control of the expulsion process, was taken aback by the numbers it was proposed to transfer in such a short time. Nothing of the kind had previously been attempted in human history. A New York Times editorial put the scale of the operation into perspective by noting that the number of Germans who were to be removed from their homes in seven months was “roughly equal to the total number of immigrants arriving in the United States during the last forty year
s.”113 In truth, in its specific details the ACC agreement was an almost meaningless document, as well-informed observers recognized from the outset. The idea that “organized expulsions” could begin within ten days of its signing in the midst of winter and without any kind of prior arrangements was hopelessly unrealistic, as was the supposition that more than 6 million people could be moved from one part of the continent to another in half a year without paralyzing what remained of the European transport network. The proposed distribution of expellees between the various zones, likewise, made no provision for the hundreds of thousands who could be expected to travel to their own preferred destinations without waiting to be formally expelled, nor those who would, equally illicitly, gravitate from one zone to another. All the elements that a serious attempt to come to grips with the problem might be expected to include—the appointment of an executive body to conduct and oversee the operation; a description of the means to be used; the assignment of responsibility for making the necessary preparations for assembly, embarkation, reception, and assimilation of this colossal number of people—were absent from the ACC agreement. It would be a mistake, though, to judge the accord mainly from this perspective. Its real objectives were much more limited: to contrive that the number of uprooted Germans arriving in each power’s respective occupation zone would be as low as possible, and, by reassuring an increasingly anxious public that the Allies were finally addressing the problem, to deflect further media criticism.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 19