Viewed in this light, the ACC agreement satisfied the requirements of those who drafted it. One of its immediate effects was to torpedo Robert Murphy’s attempts to generate an official U.S. protest over the means by which the Poles in particular had been clearing the Recovered Territories of their German population. The memorandum he composed the previous month had received an unusually positive response at the State Department, whose opposition to the principle of population transfers was of long standing. David Harris, a Stanford University historian recruited as an expert on central European affairs, concurred that the United States’ effort to reconstruct Germany on a democratic basis would not achieve “any useful and lasting results if we lend ourselves to the indecencies and the obscenities which we have been fighting.” A formal protest, on the other hand, might exercise “some moral influence on the restitution of European decency.”114 Benjamin Cohen, special assistant to Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and another leading member of the U.S delegation at the Potsdam Conference, also recommended that Washington make a formal statement to the various Allied Control Commissions for the ex-Axis countries as well as to the expelling governments “to make clear that we are not a party to these inhumane and terrible things.”115 Accordingly, the State Department prepared a message to be conveyed in the first instance to the Polish government by the U.S. ambassador in Warsaw, Arthur Bliss Lane. The most trenchant condemnation of the expulsions ever drafted by any governmental agency in the West, the State Department’s proposed demarche did not hesitate to draw pointed comparisons between the conduct of the Poles and the transfer operations conducted by the Nazis during the war.
[The] vast bulk of the people arriving in Germany from areas east of Oder-Neisse line are women, children and old people who arrive in all states of exhaustion and disease. Their plight is such as to give the impression they have been treated with utmost ruthlessness and disregard for humanitarian principles.
US Gov[ernmen]t understands Polish Provisional Gov[ernment] takes [the] position [that] exodus of most of these Germans across frontier is “voluntary” on their part. It is doubted that so many would be crossing frontiers under these appalling conditions unless virtually forced to do so by expulsions and other forms of economic pressure….
American people were horrified by mass deportation perpetrated by Nazis and by Nazis’ utter disregard for human life which they exhibited in Poland and elsewhere. This deep seated aversion to Nazi practices and ideology gave American people part of moral basis for their war against Nazi Germany. American people still hold firmly to principles on basis of which they engaged in that war.116
The conclusion of the ACC agreement, however, cut the ground out from under the feet of those in the U.S. government who desired retrospectively to disclaim American responsibility for the more unsavory aspects of the expulsions. Arguably it was as well that it did so, for Washington—as Murphy indicated in his memorandum—had been fully implicated in the decision to proceed with them. The logic of the State Department’s equation of “mass deportation” with “Nazi practices and ideology” was that the principle of forced population transfer was no less unacceptable to the United States than the manner in which it was being carried out. Any attempt to pursue this line, though, would have drawn an immediate rejoinder that the Americans were hypocritically seeking to cast aspersions on their wartime allies for pursuing a policy they themselves had adopted at Potsdam only three months previously. It would also have unleashed a firestorm of criticism directed against the United States by the expelling countries themselves, as Ambassador Lane at the Warsaw embassy hastened to inform Byrnes. Lane had already made it a point of pride to assure his Polish hosts that he fully appreciated the necessity of a policy of “greatest severity” toward the Germans. As he had recounted proudly to a Polish newspaper only a few weeks previously, when confronted with some Volksdeutsche in the Silesian town of Zabrze, “I told them that I cannot understand their complaints about Poles ill-treating the German population. Who started the war; who established concentration camps and Auschwitz? People who are guilty of all these atrocities may not, today, blame anybody but themselves.”117
The ACC agreement, then, provided the secretary of state with an opportunity he eagerly seized to retreat from the exposed position in which his officials had temporarily placed him. Once informed of the deal, the State Department abandoned the uncompromising draft protest with which it had been working.118 In its place was substituted a watered-down remonstrance two weeks later that made no mention of Washington’s second thoughts about the expulsions as such. Instead, the document Byrnes directed to be sent the Poles merely informed them that the U.S. government was “seriously perturbed” by the condition in which expellees from east of the Oder-Neisse line were continuing to arrive in Germany.119 Even this was rejected by Ambassador Lane, who advised Byrnes that he was “not convinced that Germans have been subjected to any widespread harsh treatment” and that many of the reports to the contrary “came from Germans themselves who, in keeping with their characteristic of whining after losing [a] war, make the picture as black as possible.” Lane added that his views were shared by General Eisenhower, who had recently told him that “the view held by others that Germans from Poland were being ill treated” was incorrect, and appealed for “a reconsideration of the instructions given me.”120 The result was that the year ended without any formal U.S. protest over the manner in which the “wild expulsions” had been conducted, Ambassador Lane being directed merely to convey orally to the Polish government the “substance” of American concerns whenever a suitable opportunity arose.
The number of Germans displaced by the “wild expulsions” remains unclear. According to the Red Army’s figures, 775,000 had been transferred from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet occupation zone of Germany alone by December 12, 1945.121 Although these figures do not agree with Czechoslovak data, Tomáš Staněk and Adrian von Arburg point out that official reports often contain “suspiciously precise figures” that may well have been inflated to “increase the prestige of the responsible commanders.”122 Based in part on a study of the number of ration cards issued to Germans, itself an imprecise measure, they believe that between 800,000 and 1 million were forced out of Czechoslovakia by the end of 1945. Seeking hard data for the numbers removed from the Recovered Territories during the same period is probably an exercise in futility. For the two-month period of June and July alone, estimates by Polish historians range from a low of 200,000 to a high of 1.2 million—an indication of the reliance that can be placed on the available documentation. For the whole of 1945 a figure of 1 million deportations from Poland would probably err considerably on the side of conservatism. Bernadetta Nitschke reminds us, however, that there is evidence to suggest that Germans displaced from the Recovered Territories during this first wave of expulsions often returned; that throughout the year refugees who had fled to the west in early 1945 continued to drift back to their homes; and that a significant number of Germans resident in the country districts went underground in the cities for a time before returning to their places of origin.
What remains beyond dispute is that the seven-month-long period of the “wild expulsions” witnessed the eruption of a massive state-sponsored carnival of violence, resulting in a death toll that on the most conservative of estimates must have reached six figures. As such it is unique in the peacetime history of twentieth-century Europe. Yet it was an episode that escaped the notice of most Europeans, and practically all Americans, other than those physically present on the scene. Now the Allies would try their hand at administering the same task of mass deportation, this time by the “orderly and humane” methods that the Potsdam Agreement had specified. In the circumstances, it hardly seemed possible that they would not, at any rate, perform better in this respect than the authors of the “wild expulsions.” Yet as we will see, their actual record was so ambiguous in its results that even this may be open to question.
5
THE CA
MPS
Wenzel Hrneĉek was, in the view of those who knew him before the war, a thoroughly unremarkable young man. Like all Czechs of his generation he had been born a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an entity that had collapsed before he was halfway through his teens. He spent the years of his early adulthood as a citizen of the Czechoslovak Republic in the ethnically mixed city of Ĉeské Budějovice in southern Bohemia, a municipality that under its German name of Budweis had gained a worldwide reputation for the Budweiser beer produced there in vast quantities. Fluent in Czech and German, Hrneĉek joined the town police force in 1928. His work record was good though not outstanding: by the time the Second World War began eleven years later, he had not gained a single promotion. After the Nazi takeover of the Sudetenland in September 1938, Hrneĉek served the third regime he had known in his short lifetime with the same efficiency as he had the previous ones. Catastrophe struck, however, in 1940, when he was falsely accused with other Czechs of possessing an illegal radio transmitter. Although the charges were eventually dismissed, Hrneĉek, like thousands of others who had aroused German suspicions for one reason or another, was placed under “protective custody” in the Theresienstadt concentration camp north of Prague. He would spend the rest of the war being shuttled from one camp to another in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany, including Sachsenhausen and Gross-Rosen, before eventually winding up in Dachau. Here he was appointed Stubenältester, the lowest rank among the category of Kapos, or camp trusties, selected by the Germans to control their fellow prisoners and whose brutality often equaled that of the SS guards. As his fellow prisoners testified, though, Hrneĉek defied his captors’ efforts to make him complicit in their crimes, doing everything he could to shield the Czech detainees for whom he was responsible from the worst rigors of concentration camp life.1 After being liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, he spent three weeks recuperating from his ordeal before returning to Ĉeské Budějovice and reporting for duty at his old police barracks. He was immediately appointed deputy commandant of the Linzervorstadt internment camp for Sudetendeutsche, four kilometers outside the city, in which many of the ethnic German inhabitants of the area had already been corralled. His nominal boss was Staff Captain Alois Veselý; the day-to-day operations of the camp remained in the hands of Hrneĉek himself.
Map 1. Principal detention camps for ethnic Germans.
Linzervorstadt was a typical specimen of the thousands of improvised detention centers for ethnic Germans that sprang up across central Europe in the days or weeks after the retreat of the Wehrmacht. Used during the war as accommodation for itinerant workers of the German Labor Front, it consisted of five residential barracks with an administration block, kitchen, and infirmary.2 Even with two prisoners assigned to each bunk, its capacity of two thousand was quickly filled. Whereas one Sudetendeutsch prisoner sent to Linzervorstadt on May 10, 1945—forty-eight hours after V-E Day—received the camp number 682, the number assigned to a retired hairdresser detained in late July was 2212.3 Some of the camp’s administrators and guards, recruited personally by Hrneĉek, were themselves recently released inmates of German concentration camps; others were “young lads of 15 to 18 years of age who we [prisoners] called ‘partisans.’”4 They immediately proceeded to turn the camp into a Dachau on a smaller scale, establishing a regime for the local German civilian population modeled as precisely as possible on their own recent experiences at the Nazis’ hands. In place of the SS motto Arbeit macht Frei, the Biblical verse Oko za Oko, Zub za Zub (“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth”) was inscribed on the camp gate. Newly admitted inmates—often scooped off the streets of Ĉeské Budějovice by Hrneĉek himself, who roamed the area in a police car in search of potential detainees—were stripped and examined for SS tattoos; forced while still naked to run a gauntlet of guards who “initiated” them into camp life by beating them with rubber truncheons, canes, and clubs; shorn of all their hair; and issued with a convict uniform bearing colored markings (some inmates recalled these as being triangular in shape, others remembered stripes) according to their assigned status as “party members,” “collaborators,” or ordinary civilians. Punishments for such trivial offenses as forgetting to remove one’s cap in the presence of a camp “supervisor” or failing at all times to run at the double were frequent and severe, including such characteristic features of the Nazi concentration camp regime as pole-hanging (being suspended from a pole by one’s bound wrists tied behind one’s back), flogging with steel-cored whips, physical exercises while carrying heavy stones or bricks, and all-night Appelle or parades in which the prisoners were made to stand at attention from evening until the following morning.5 Josef Neubauer, a Catholic priest who was detained at Linzervorstadt until his expulsion from Czechoslovakia in November 1945, later testified about a flogging he received for breaching camp rules by administering the last rites to dying inmates in the infirmary:
On June 27, 1945, I was suddenly ordered to the guard-room. There I was made to strip completely naked and was beaten with sticks and fists. As a result, one of my ribs was broken and my teeth were knocked out. I then received at the hands of my two tormenters another 50 strokes with a length of steel cable, the thickness of my thumb, on my stomach, back, chest and buttocks. I was made to count the blows myself. At the end of this beating, my entire body was bleeding. I told my tormentors that I forgave them and that God should not count it as a sin against them. They were baffled by this statement of mine and from that moment onward left me in peace.6
Much of the violence inflicted upon detainees involved private score-settling. Hrneĉek personally took revenge on his former captain in the Ĉeské Budějo-vice police force by pole-hanging the man for four to five hours while having him “beaten with cow-hide horsewhips” until he fainted, and resuscitating him by pouring water over him.7 An inmate recorded how “supervisors” would inspect the barracks and their inhabitants for cleanliness each night, and take to the washrooms for beatings “those persons … toward whom, originating from earlier times, they nourished hatred…. Often you could—after a person had been picked up—from the yard also hear a short salvo from a machine-gun.” Another recalled that “the tortures usually took place in the evening between 21:00 and 22:00 hours. But the roaring of the tortured persons always continued until midnight.” Hrneĉek acknowledged that each evening “former political refugees and prisoners [from the town] were permitted to go into the camp to find out persons who had worked against the Czechs” and that “seriously ill-treated [inmates] were often found who had been beaten by these persons.”8 Suicides among the prisoners as a means of escaping further torture, as well as killings by the guards and Kapos, he conceded, were common occurrences. Some prisoners hanged themselves; others put an end to their lives by throwing themselves upon the barbed wire that surrounded the camp and being shot by the guards as a result. Hrneĉek did not deny, though, that many of these so-called suicides may have been faked. “It was always reported to me that during the night the prisoner … had committed suicide by hanging. Whether the man had actually committed suicide or whether he had been hanged by the supervisors, I cannot state. But I do not want to deny this possibility.”9
Again like its German inspirations, Linzervorstadt featured a network of subcamps, including a compound for female detainees at Zámostí near Hluboká nad Vltavou—to which Hrneĉek and his subordinates would also periodically make visits for the purpose of administering corporal punishment to the inmates or, in Veselý’s case, raping the underage girls—and a labor colony at the nearby Mydlovary coalmine. In conformity with a Czechoslovak government decree of September 1945, all Sudetendeutsch prisoners of both sexes were liable to compulsory labor, the men typically being employed on construction projects and the women in the camp cookhouse or laundry. Although work outside the wire sometimes provided opportunities for escape, absconding was no less dangerous for the other members of the work crew, who were liable to receive the same punishment as recaptured fugitives. As was common at Lin
zervorstadt, and indeed at other camps, the beatings or floggings were often administered by fellow detainees. Hrneĉek recalled an episode in which “three or four internees received their corporal punishments simultaneously. These persons had run away, but were caught again. Then a little team was composed who performed the corporal punishment on those who had been caught.”
Conditions at Linzervorstadt were by no means exceptional. Similar tales were recorded, by former inmates and international observers alike, of dozens if not hundreds of the camps for ethnic Germans established in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania in the closing months of the war. The first such detention facility, Târgu Jiu in Romania, was opened in September 1944; others were created in the vicinity of Bucharest and the Baĉka region of northern Yugoslavia in October and November.10 Many ex-Nazi concentration camps like Majdanek or Theresienstadt—and even the camp at Auschwitz—never went out of business, but were retained in operation as detention facilities for ethnic Germans for years after the war. At Oświęcim (Auschwitz), the liberation of the last surviving Jewish inmates of the main camp (Auschwitz I) and the arrival of the first ethnic Germans was separated by less than a fortnight. The number of these establishments, and of their inmates, is impossible accurately to estimate,11 but it was certainly very large.12 Many left no documentary trace behind them—in Poland, for example, the complete prison register of only a single camp, łambinowice, is known to have survived—and in some cases central government remained unaware of their existence. The Polish state repatriation agency and the Szczecin provincial government each learned of a camp in Koszalin holding more than a thousand ethnic Germans only after a typhus epidemic broke out there in March 1947.13 Likewise the Prague Provincial National Committee, supposedly responsible for the day-to-day administration of detention facilities for Germans in the capital region, complained that it did not always know where and by whom camps had been set up.14 The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (CICR) delegation in Czechoslovakia reported in February 1946 that his wife, while making a social call, had accidentally stumbled across an impromptu camp for Sudetendeutsche set up in a wing of a girls’ school in Bohemia. “This is just another example of the ‘hidden’ camps … we only discover their existence by chance or when in search of a particular case, and there is therefore no way of knowing the exact number of internees in the country.”15
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 20