In most cases, though, the detention of the Germans was centrally directed. The Polish Committee of National Liberation issued a decree on November 4, 1944 ordering all Volksdeutsche above the age of thirteen years living within the Generalgouvernement to be placed immediately in camps and subjected to forced labor.16 The measure was extended three months later to those from all parts of the country whose names appeared in the second category of the Deutsche Volksliste. However, large numbers of Germans living in the Recovered Territories were also detained in similar fashion, under decrees issued by local governors.17 More than forty thousand additional Volksdeutsche from Poland were deported to forced labor camps in the USSR in the spring of 1945.18 Though these detention decrees were occasionally countermanded by individual Red Army officers—in April 1945 the Soviet military commander in Tczew (Dirschau) ordered that all Germans in the county’s labor camps were to return to their homes; resume their normal work; and take off the swastika armbands and identification numbers the Polish authorities had compelled them to wear—the USSR authorities normally adopted a policy of noninterference in such matters so long as their own interests were not affected.
In the Czech lands, Decree no. 16 of June 19, 1945 ratified the internment of Sudeten German craftsmen, businessmen, and professionals whose services were considered unnecessary; those representing “superfluous educated people”; and “excess personnel” of industry and commerce, together with their families.19 District National Committees on the ground, however, often took a much more broadly encompassing view of the propriety of detention: a legal interpretation in Plzeň that authorized the roundup of Germans “regardless of whether they were covered by the German provisions of Presidential Decree No. 16 of June 19, 1945 or not” was copied in many other places across the Czech lands.20 In mid-June, too, the Slovak National Council had charged the Ministry of National Security with the establishment, organization, management, and maintenance of camps for the German and Hungarian minorities there, though local roundups had taken place earlier still.21 According to incomplete Czech records, around 152,000 detainees, 93 percent of whom were ethnic Germans, were in custody in November 1945, with at least another 7,000 in various prisons and lockups in Bohemia alone. Up to 40,000 more were in custody in Slovakia. These figures do not, however, include those detained in camps run by the Ministry of National Defense.22 The impression gained by a U.S. officer who visited Prague in January 1946 to coordinate the expulsions and was advised that “there are about 250,000 now collected and concentrated in camps” may, therefore, not be very far from the truth.23
A similar edict of the Tito regime in November 1944 provided for the internment of all Yugoslav Volksdeutsche except those who had played an active part in the struggle against Nazi occupation. Although the Allies would ultimately refuse to sanction the expulsion of Volksdeutsche from that country, the existence of ninety-six separate Yugoslav camps was known to the Red Cross in 1947.24 At least 170,000 ethnic Germans, apart from those who had already been “randomly shot en mass [sic],” had already been taken into custody by mid-1945; “the majority of the internees,” the Extraordinary Review Commission of Vojvodina reported to Belgrade in May, were “old people, women, and children.”25 Though plans by the Budapest government to establish a network of twenty-two “assembly camps” for German expellees never came to fruition, a large camp was established for ethnic Germans in Hungary at Debrecen, where conditions were reported as being “difficult”26 another outside Bonyhád, said to hold some twenty thousand internees from the southern county of Baranya near the Croatian border, was reported by American diplomats in June 1945.27 The Târgu Jiu camp in Romania was soon followed by others, after the Soviet-backed government ordered the internment of the entire adult German and Hungarian minority populations above the age of sixteen in the case of males, and eighteen in the case of females, in December 1944.28 Whereas the population of the German concentration camp system had grown from 21,000 at the outbreak of the war to reach a recorded peak of 700,000 at the beginning of 1945,29 it is possible that the number of persons incarcerated across Europe in similar establishments by the end of that year might have been even higher.
Second only to the scale of the postwar camp system was its variety. At the end of the war, the same pattern of haphazard local improvisation that had marked the establishment of the German concentration camp system in the early 1930s was much in evidence in central and southeastern Europe also.30 Complementing the “wild expulsions” of the summer of 1945, many of these first detention centers were “wild” camps created by local government agencies, elements of the Czechoslovak SNB and Polish Milicja Obywatelska (“People’s Militia”), or self-appointed “citizens’ committees” without explicit instructions from—or even notification to—any higher authority.31 As noted above, existing facilities, including former concentration camps, prisoner of war compounds, prisons for ordinary criminals, and Labor Front workers’ barracks were immediately reconstituted as civilian internment camps. But a wide assortment of temporary establishments, ranging from sports stadia and abandoned factories to churches and private houses, were also pressed into service. At Prague at least 10,000 detainees were corralled under the open skies in the Strahovský football ground until September 1945 under conditions described by the Red Cross as atrocious, before being transferred to other camps; the Workers’ Sports Ground at Popo-vice (Pfaffendorf) near Děĉín served a similar purpose.32 The makeshift camp at Patrónka airfield near Bratislava held 2,449 internees, almost three-quarters of whom were women and children, when the Red Cross visited it in July 1945.33 Though Patrónka was by no means the largest such establishment—some of which, like Rudolfsgnad (Knićanin) in Yugoslavia, had populations well in excess of twenty thousand—the tiny Svidník camp in eastern Slovakia, which housed a mere fifteen men of the German-speaking Zipser minority, may well have been the smallest, consisting of “a cave, damp, with one small window giving hardly any light … [Inmates] sleep on the ground with some straw; on account of the smoke no fire can be lit.”34 Svidník detainees were employed in land mine clearance operations; ten of them had been killed on this work within a two-month period prior to the CICR’s visit. Koszalin camp in central Poland crammed 1,090 expellees into two center-city residences that lacked any toilet or cooking facilities, and only one of which possessed a source of water: by March 1947 dysentery and typhus had broken out among the inmates.35 In Yugoslavia the largest “camps” took the form of entire villages into which German-speakers were corralled behind barbed-wire perimeters, although the death rate as a result of overcrowding, malnutrition, infectious diseases, and beatings in the worst of these, like Gakowa and Kruševlje in the Baĉka, rivaled mortality levels in any barracks camp.36
While it is impossible to say how large the total camp population may have been—though undoubtedly the majority of ethnic Germans were not interned before their expulsion—few differences are observable between the cohort taken to the camps and those spared detention. Regulations exempting the young, the old, pregnant women, or the disabled were routinely ignored: as was true of the expellee population in general, the majority of inmates in many camps were women and children. Additional evidence tending to the same conclusion is the indiscriminate nature of the roundups, which made no distinction in practice between those who had welcomed and those who opposed the German occupation. In numerous cases the net even drew in the Nazi regime’s victims. Some two to three thousand inmates of the Czechoslovak camps were Jews who had attempted to reduce their exposure to anti-Semitic attacks by registering as “German” in the 1930 census. Although a few succeeded, after considerable effort, in gaining their release, others were “forced to wear the white armbands that designated Germans; were given smaller rations”; and were ultimately expelled to the very country that had sought their extermination.37 (The interior minister, Václav Nosek, created a minor international furor in February 1946 when he declared that the mere fact that certain Jews had “suffered somewhat
” at the Nazis’ hands did not mean that they had not been complicit in “Germanization” during the First Republic.)38 The same was true of surviving German-speaking Jews in Yugoslavia, as well as of the ethnic German relatives of soldiers of the Yugoslav army who had been killed fighting the Nazi invaders in 1941.39 Others again were political prisoners who had spent part or all of the war in German concentration camps, only to be reincarcerated as ethnic Germans after returning home following their liberation.40 An anti-Nazi Sudeten German émigré who served in the Royal Air Force during the war reported that his Social Democratic party comrades around his home town of Podmokly (Bodenbach) had been rounded up into four improvised camps by the SNB, whom he described caustically as “young men in uniforms resembling those of the SS and in similar boots.”41 Foreigners too were swept into the camps. The Czech Ministry of the Interior complained in June 1945 that Swiss nationals were being detained after having been overheard speaking German in public.42 Similar indiscriminate detentions occurred in the Katowice district of Poland, including a fourteen-year-old boy from the Netherlands whose blond hair and blue eyes sufficed to prove his “German” nationality to the satisfaction of the militia who arrested him at Gliwice. Genuine Dutch people, his captors assured him before incarcerating him in Świętochłowice-Zgoda (Schwientochlowitz), a former sub-camp of Auschwitz III (Monowitz), all had dark hair and spoke French.43
Conditions in the camps, though almost always harsh, exhibited distinct variations. Sometimes no effort was made to segregate ethnic Germans from other categories of detainee. The Autopark camp in the Smíchov district of Prague held German prisoners of war as well as women and children (ironically, camps dedicated exclusively to POWs, whose inmates were protected by the Geneva Convention, featured living standards that were markedly superior to those of the typical civilian internee establishment). Potulice—formerly the German Potulitz concentration camp—near Bydgoszcz contained not just POWs in addition to German expellees, but “politically unreliable” Poles including former Home Army members and soldiers who had fought under British command during the war.44 Jaworzno, previously a subcamp of Auschwitz, was home to a substantial population of ethnic Ukrainian as well as ethnic German minorities, the former detained under still more rigorous conditions. Although family groups were frequently separated, the younger children sometimes being transferred to orphanages or children’s homes for adoption by local families, many camps housed detainees of both sexes and all ages. There were, however, a number of specialized children’s camps: the former Konzentrationslager of Bolesławiec (Bunzlau), a subcamp of Gross-Rosen in Poland, held approximately twelve hundred boys aged between twelve and fifteen, who were used as forced labor on road-building projects.45 Of the ninety-five inmates of the children’s camp at Ĉeské Křídlovice in Czechoslovakia during the month of July 1947, a third were under six years of age.46
The question of how these detention centers are to be categorized is a complex one.47 At one end of the spectrum, the term “concentration camp” is appropriate—not merely because it was at first unapologetically employed by the Czechoslovak and Polish governments that operated them,48 but also because some camps, like Wenzel Hrneĉek’s Linzervorstadt, were purposefully organized so as to replicate, as faithfully as possible, the conditions that had prevailed in their German predecessors. Few distinctions could be observed between these and many “internment camps,” the stated purpose of which was sometimes claimed to be to hold persons suspected of collaboration with the Nazis pending their investigation.49 Given the presumption of guilt that usually prevailed, the regime in such establishments was harsh. Conditions in “labor camps” were typically more variable. Some inmates were serving lengthy sentences for real or fancied offenses; others were technicians and specialists whose skills were considered essential and who enjoyed greater privileges, especially food rations, than many unincarcerated Volksdeutsche. The majority, though, were ordinary civilians who were hired out to local employers at cut-price rates, the revenue thus generated being used to defray camp expenses. In principle, detention in “assembly” or “displacement” camps near railheads in which inmates were intended to spend only a short period before their embarkation carried the fewest risks, if only because of the brevity of the average stay.50 Due to congestion, though, expellees might be obliged to wait many weeks or months at assembly camps. The infrastructure of these establishments was more rudimentary than at many internment or labor camps, with the result that death rates from infectious diseases and the effects of malnutrition and exposure to the elements could, especially in winter, exceed those in even the more rigorously conducted internment camps.
In a great many instances, nonetheless, differences in official designations attached to various kinds of camp were more theoretical than real. A typical illustration can be found in the Mirošov detention facility near Plzeň, which was opened on May 12, 1945. Until the following August its official designation was “Mirošov Concentration Camp” (Koncentraĉní tábor Mirošov), with rubber stamps on camp documents bearing this title. Thereafter it was renamed “Mirošov Assembly Camp,” though the Ministry of the Interior considered it an “internment camp.” During its lifetime, however, Mirošov’s purpose remained the same: as a holding facility for civilian Sudetendeutsche from the locality, who were put out to forced labor pending their expulsion unless—as was often the case with elderly detainees—they died from hunger or disease before their removal from the country. While it was still officially a “concentration camp,” every seventh prisoner at Mirošov was younger than fourteen years of age; forty-five of them were below the age of six.51
Throughout central Europe, those interned at any time during 1945 ran by far the highest risk of execution, torture at the hands of the camp staff, or death through starvation and preventable infectious diseases, in comparison to later detainees. This in turn was in part the result of the abdication or ineffectiveness of any kind of central control over the camps, and the turning over of their administration to what the British ambassador in Prague accurately described as a class of “young thugs.”52 The Świętochłowice-Zgoda establishment, whose Jewish inmate population was replaced almost overnight by a German one in February 1945, provided one of the worst examples of the consequences of this practice. Its twenty-year-old commandant, a Polish secret police officer named Aleksy Krut, assisted by a camp staff whose ages typically ranged from seventeen to twenty-three,53 presided over a system of organized and ferocious maltreatment of internees, with the stated intention of completing in five months what the Nazis had failed to accomplish at the camp in five years. When Krut was succeeded in May by his deputy Salomon Morel, only six years his senior, that aspiration came closer to being realized. Through physical abuse on a massive scale—in addition to torture by guards and Kapos, prisoners were forced by camp staff to beat each other—the denial of food, overwork, and an outbreak of typhus among the detainees which Morel may have acted deliberately to aggravate, well over a third of Świętochłowice-Zgoda’s inmate population of five thousand, according to camp records, had died by the time the Office of Public Security in Katowice closed it down in November 1945.54
The death rate at Świętochłowice may have been high, but it was by no means unprecedented. Mysłowice, west of Jaworzno, acknowledged 2,227 deaths between March 6, 1945 and the end of the year, under the administration of its hapless twenty-year-old commandant, Tadeusz Skowyra. As Wacław Dubiański cautions, this figure is likely to be an underestimate inasmuch as it does not include those for whom death certificates were not issued, or the inmates who died at Mysłowice’s many subcamps.55 Two hundred sixty-five recorded deaths occurred at the Zimne Wody (Kaltwasser) camp during a ten-day period between late March and early April 1945; by December, the Civil Registry Office in Bydgoszcz had ordered that records of deaths at Zimne Wody be omitted from the register on the ground that the revelation of their causes might attract unwelcome international attention and depict Polish camps “in a negative lig
ht.”56 At łambinowice, whose commandant, Czesław Gęborski, was twenty-one years of age at the time of his appointment, between forty and fifty inmates were killed by shooting in a single day in October of the same year, and a total of nearly sixty-five hundred died before the camp’s dissolution in 1946.57
A notable element of the postwar camp system was the prevalence of sexual assault as well as ritualized sexual humiliation and punishment suffered by female inmates. Women survivors of German concentration camps have recalled that, notwithstanding the unrestrained brutality that pervaded most other aspects of daily life, rape or other forms of sexual maltreatment at the hands of their guards was an extremely rare occurrence, and severely punished by the authorities if detected.58 After the war, in contrast, the Red Cross recorded that the sexual abuse of female detainees by their captors was pervasive and systematic. This verdict was confirmed by Czechoslovak and Polish witnesses themselves.59 A foreign observer of two Czech camps in August 1945 noted that women in the first were “treated like animals. Russian and Czech soldiers come in search of women for purposes which can be imagined. Conditions there for women are definitely more unfavorable than in the German concentration camps, where cases of rape were rare.” In the second, nightly parties were organized in which “fifteen or so young girls would await the arrival of visitors”; Czech and Soviet soldiers would “take away the prettiest girls, who would often disappear without trace.”60 Jean Duchosal, secretary general of the CICR, reported that girls were often raped at the Matejovce camp in Slovakia when he visited it in November 1945, and that beatings were daily occurrences.61 The same was true of Patrónka.62 The British Army received several independent reports of the guards at Riđica labor camp, a subcamp of Sombor in the Baĉka region of Yugoslavia, freely admitting “soldiers and any other person wishing to ‘enjoy’ himself” for similar purposes.63
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