Sexual exploitation was no less prevalent in Poland. Jaworzno, as a pair of official inspections in May and August 1945 revealed, functioned as a sexual supermarket for its 170-strong militia guard contingent, whose practice, Antoni Białecki of the local Office of Public Security reported, was to “take Volksdeutsch women at gunpoint home at night and rape them.”64 At Potulice, one of the largest Polish camps for German internees, the sexual humiliation of female prisoners had become an institutional practice by the end of 1945. New inmates of both sexes were shaved of all body and head hair upon arrival, supposedly as a hygienic measure. “The women had for that purpose to lie on two stools and to spread their legs wide apart so that their body hairs could be removed. The shaving was done by men, and the whole procedure was watched by the Polish officials and militia men.” Beatings during the nightly room inspections, or “controls,” were administered “if possible on the naked body. If a woman was suffering badly during her days [menstrual periods] and asked not to be beaten so hard this time, the men asked her to prove it, and there was nothing left to her but to show it, if she didn’t want to get a worse beating.” In the penal gangs, male detainees were occasionally forced to simulate sexual intercourse with the females for the amusement of camp guards.65 Some of the punishments could result in horrific injuries. A male inmate of Potulice witnessed one procedure in which the victim was forced to perch in a sitting position on the leg of an upturned stool in such a way that the full weight of her body fell upon her perineum. Serious physical harm, including genital and anal lacerations, often resulted.66 In Czechoslovakia, too, a Prague police report of June 1945 mentioned that Revolutionary Guards were in the habit of “exposing women’s body parts and burning them with lighted cigarettes.”67
Sexual abuse or torture of male detainees was by no means unknown—in some cases, they too were compelled to perform sexual acts upon each other. As a rule, though, credible accounts of sexual assaults of males described an escalating crescendo of violence that often ended in the death of the victim rather than the kind of ongoing and systematized exploitation to which female detainees were in many cases subjected. Kicks and blows (including with sharp instruments) directed at the genitals of male prisoners were, however, so common as almost to go unremarked upon. It is not necessary to resort to Freudian interpretations to see in all of these sexualized forms of abuse a desire on the part of the young male perpetrators to exorcise, by such displays of pathologically distorted hypermasculinity, the emasculating and humiliating experience of German occupation during the war.
At most camps, of whatever official classification, inmates were expected to defray the costs of their incarceration either through forced labor or, in numerous cases, by means of ransom payments, especially from detainees with relatives already in Germany or Austria. British military observers learned in 1947 of “a very definite organisation” created by the Yugoslav authorities “for leading people out of the camp and into Hungary against payment…. It is obvious that the Jug[oslav]s approve of this method of ridding themselves of their Volksdeutsche, and probably find it very lucrative.”68 More typically, however, camp administrators relied on the revenue generated by the labor services of inmates. In both Poland and Czechoslovakia, indeed, the German detainee population became an important component of the transitional postwar economy, with prisoners being hired out at peppercorn rates to local authorities and private-sector employers. In most cases the terms were laid down in standard contracts, of which an agreement in October 1945 between the Starost of Wyrzyk and the camp authorities of Potulice was typical. According to its terms, the employer obtained the services of twenty-five male Germans for a two-month period, at a rate of 1.50 zlotys (a little under three cents) per person per day, plus a 15 percent administrative charge. The hirer assumed responsibility for the feeding, housing, and guarding of the prisoners, as well as the costs of any accident insurance or medical care; transport to and from the camp; and losses through escapes. The camp reserved the right to recall the prisoners, and to carry out snap inspections at any time. Regulations for those obtaining labor from Mirošov camp in Czechoslovakia were remarkably similar. At this establishment, workers could be obtained at either an hourly (Kĉs 3.60 [seven cents] for males, Kĉs 3.00 for females) or a daily (Kĉs 11 for males, Kĉs 8.20 for females) rate. The hirer was obliged to promise that the work-week would not exceed ninety-eight hours and was responsible for delivering the detainee back to the camp after use. The contract specified that no private arrangements between employer and detainee—e.g., subcontracting the detainee to other employers, or granting him or her free time or other benefits—could be entered into without the permission of the camp authorities.69 Central government also benefited from these labor contracts, the Ministry of the Interior ordering that 20 percent of the gross receipts were to be remitted to the Treasury.70 Frequently, however, employers withheld payment on the ground that the workers provided to them were too elderly, sick, or malnourished to be productive; wrangles in court sometimes resulted.71
Living and working conditions for detainees put out to labor varied immensely. Some prisoners were marched to their workplaces each morning and back again at night, using the camp only for sleeping and the twice-daily parades. Others went to their jobs in workshops attached to the premises. Agricultural laborers could spend months or years with a single private employer, being treated almost as members of the family and sometimes attracting denunciations from neighbors or officials for excessive leniency. In August 1945, for example, Bohumil Pechman of the Terešov District National Committee complained to the local SNB about two employers who were feeding detainees on what he considered to be too lavish a scale, and two more who permitted their workers to travel the roads without supervision.72 But workers seconded to state-owned enterprises, especially mines or farms, could fare much worse. Ignacy Cedrowski, the camp physician at Potulice between 1945 and 1948, was not noted for his solicitousness for the welfare of his charges—an understandable attitude, in light of the fact that he was himself a survivor of Auschwitz whose entire family had been killed in the Holocaust. Even he, however, was taken aback by the often lethally exploitative regime to which German workers were subjected on state farms in the Pomerania voivodeship (province) in 1946 and 1947. In some cases, he reported, the administrators hid diseased Germans from quarantine inspectors, fearing that they would be deprived of valuable workers. Up to two hundred prisoners were herded together in these establishments in a single dwelling space.
These prisoners live in unsuitable rooms, sleeping on the ground on matted foul-smelling straw, having neither soap nor laundry soda with which to do washing, working from early morning until night-time without any days off, leaving them no time to put their lodgings in order, or to wash their dirty laundry or their own persons. Their level of lice infestation reached a point of up to 60 percent and in some places 100 percent. They lack medical and hygienic care. The prisoners suffer from itching to an unbelievable degree.73
Conditions at all camps were not uniformly so harsh, and international observers as well as prisoners noted cases in which individual commandants or guards made energetic efforts within the limited means at their disposal to treat their detainees humanely, often at some risk to their own careers.74 A common feature of life in most camps regardless of the country in which they were located, however, was the provision of so little food as to make not merely malnutrition but actual starvation largely a function of the length of incarceration. The Red Cross, which investigated this matter in some detail, found that in Czechoslovakia published regulations regarding the dietary allotment to internees were almost invariably ignored, with the open connivance if not at the insistence of the very authorities that had issued those regulations.75 Against the daily minimum of 2,000 calories required for adult humans not engaged in manual labor to sustain their body weight, Pierre W. Mock, head of the CICR delegation in Bratislava, calculated the calorific intake of prisoners at the Petržalka I camp at 664 pe
r person during the third week of October 1945; when he returned in the last week of December it had declined to 512. The daily ration to which this corresponded—an issue of ersatz coffee in the morning with a calorific value of zero; a watery vegetable soup accompanied by 100 grams of bread at midday; and additional coffee in lieu of dinner in the evening—was not atypical for other detention centers also. As Mock noted, Petržalka I was comparatively speaking not a very bad camp. At Nováky, a former German concentration camp with a population of more than five thousand, 250 babies, 33 invalids, and 13 pregnant and nursing women shared 18 liters of milk, and the 100-gram bread ration was distributed only two or three times a week. The nominal ration of 100 grams of bread issued at Trnavská Cesta (Bratislava), when Mock weighed it, was found in reality to be 45 grams; the soup the Red Cross inspectors viewed “had the appearance of a slop of tepid, dirty water, without definition and without anything in it.”76 The regime at the hospital camp of Selmovska for German detainees suffering from infectious diseases was somewhat better, with a daily ration of 800 calories; even so, a CICR medical official observed that most of the patients exhibited cachexia—a condition in which the body consumes the long muscles of the arms and legs in a last-ditch effort to maintain life, resulting in the stereotypical skeletal appearance of camp inmates—and that their typical weight had fallen to 30–40 kilograms (70–90 pounds).77 In the Jaworzno camp in Poland, too, the soup issued to inmates was described as “pure water” by an inspector of the provincial office for public security, who found that large quantities of food was being withheld on “the Commandant’s orders.” The death rate, he noted, was running at a rate of “about 50 people per month as a result of the cutbacks in food rations.”78 At Oświęcim (Auschwitz I), an official report recorded shortly after its reopening as a Volksdeutsch detention center that “Prisoners do not receive any food, and hunger is steadily increasing. They sustain themselves with food sent from their homes.”79
Worst of all were the camps in Yugoslavia. The British embassy in Belgrade, which succeeded in securing the release of a Canadian woman with dual nationality in the summer of 1946, reported that the ration at the Riđica labor camp at which she was first detained “consisted of watery soup, and 200 grammes of maize bread, of so rock-like a consistency that it had to be soaked in water to be edible…. At the end of January, [she] was transferred to the internment camp at Kruševlje, where work was not compulsory and where consequently the food consisted of two wooden spoonfuls of maize porridge a day and nothing else. In this camp there was a mortality rate, especially among children, as high as 200 a day.” The embassy noted that this account was consistent with reports it had received about other Yugoslav establishments for Volksdeutsche from various sources.80
When protests were made to the governments administering these camps by charitable bodies and nongovernmental organizations, the invariable response was that the food situation was exceptionally difficult all round, and that prisoners received no worse rations than those provided to the indigenous civilian population.81 While even the first of these assertions was of questionable accuracy so far as Poland and Czechoslovakia were concerned and was often contradicted by official statements in other quarters,82 there was no truth to the second. To the contrary, at least in 1945 and 1946 the detaining governments as a matter of policy contrived to ensure that there would be no improvement in the rations provided to ethnic German civilian internees, regardless of the availability of food. A social worker attempting to ameliorate the worst elements of the Czechoslovak camp system confidentially advised the British Foreign Office in February 1946 that there was no point in organizing relief supplies from abroad even for Sudetendeutsch women and children only, as his government would not permit them to be distributed to their intended beneficiaries.83 The Red Cross found this assessment to be justified when it learned that none of the 4.5 tonnes of food it had delivered shortly before Christmas 1945 to the Hagibor camp, at which malnutrition-related deaths were occurring at a rate of three per day, had been issued to the inmates.84 (The same was true of medical supplies, which, according to Dr. Novák of the Ministry of the Interior, were being prevented from reaching the camps by “chauvinistic elements” within his own government.)85 Starvation was also a common occurrence at Mirošov, where cachexia appeared as a cause of death on more than half of the 145 death certificates issued during the five-month period between May and October 1945; and at the Hradištko camp near Prague, where the guard in charge of the distribution of food informed a Red Cross visitor that the inadequate ration issued by him to internees was fixed by law and unchangeable and that the few Czech children there “receive[d] twice as much as the Germans.”86 Likewise in Yugoslavia, a Red Cross observer concluded that the ration at the four internment camps of Baĉki Jarak, Filipovo, Gakowa-Kruševlje, and Sekić (Lovćenac), to which detainees from other establishments who were no longer capable of working were sent, had been fixed at so low a level as to have no other purpose than to bring about the death, by “natural” causes, of the inmates confined there.87
Almost from the beginning it became apparent to observers in both the detaining countries themselves and in the West that, in the words of John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill’s private secretary and now a senior Foreign Office official in London, “concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany.”88 As had been the case in the 1930s, however, a combination of policy considerations and a perception that the inmates of the camps had largely brought their sufferings upon themselves militated against any effective response.
Despite the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the war, for wholly understandable reasons few Europeans were disposed to shed tears over the fate of any “Germans,” regardless of age, sex, or nationality, it was not the case, as the Czechoslovak and Polish governments often maintained, that the strength of popular feeling tied the hands of responsible officials in those countries. Some individuals, like the Communist publicist Zdeněk Novák—himself a survivor of Buchenwald—did indeed express grim satisfaction at what he saw as poetic justice for the German population. “How long was it that we sat helplessly behind barbed wire? And now—go home, and the concentration camps are full of Germans.”89 But in many other cases, local sentiment viewed the maltreatment of the German minority with disapproval and dismay. Philip Nichols reported in June 1945 that he and his American counterpart were receiving numerous letters “all complaining bitterly of the way the Germans are being treated … [and] that the Czechs are treating the Germans just as harshly as the Germans treated the Czechs and that this ill accords with the achievements and intentions of the Founder-Liberator Masaryk.”90 Colonel John Fye, deputy chief of staff of the U.S. XXII Corps headquartered at Plzeň, also reported that “many kind hearted Czechs were constantly reporting incidents of mistreatment of every conceivable nature to the XXII Corps.”91 In Slovakia, the Kežmarok District National Committee requested permission of the government in Prague to transfer its internees to the Czech lands, on the ground that the local population had “sympathy with the Germans.”92 A remarkable series of readers’ letters appearing in the Czech journal Obzory (“Horizons”), organ of the Catholic People’s Party, in November 1945 corroborates these testimonies.93 In a previous issue, the journal had published a guarded exposé of conditions in an internment camp for ethnic Germans near Prague. Although Obzory acquitted camp authorities of any vindictive intent and credited the government with wishing “to do away as quickly as possible and as honorably as possible with its concentration camps,” the response from readers revealed that Czechoslovak citizens were under few illusions as to the true state of affairs in the camps—and were prepared to say so openly.94 A Prague lawyer reported his personal observations in terms that might have been taken verbatim from a CICR inspection report:
I have seen several assembly camps and I have gained credible information from others…. In a room measuring 4m by 6m 50 men are housed, without coverin
gs or overcoats (these are confiscated from them upon their entrance to the camp)…. Everything is infested with lice…. The food is notoriously inadequate for workers, and much more so for men engaged in heavy labor. Black coffee without sugar is provided in the mornings and evenings; at midday, a watery soup, made from the remnants of vegetables and potato peelings…. Typhus is in evidence. Guarding the prisoners is assigned to teams of SNB-men. While 20 weak and emaciated prisoners are on the way to work they are escorted by 8 to 10 SNB, strong young men, of course armed with automatic weapons. In contrast, if a peasant woman comes to hire some workers, she is given two prisoners whom she brings home by herself, unarmed.95
Several correspondents did not hesitate to draw uncomfortable comparisons between their own reaction to the existence of such camps and that of ordinary Germans during the Nazi era. A student wrote: “None of us can pretend that we don’t know what is going on behind the gates of prisons and in the assembly camps; however, hardly anyone will say out loud that the Czech nation cannot put up with these shameful scenes any longer. We keep silent; we keep silent; just as the German nation kept silent.”96 A survivor of Auschwitz recalled “how, in the face of the worst brutalities committed by the Germans, we used to console ourselves by saying ‘only the Germans are capable of such things.’ For all the world I would not have it that anyone could speak in the same terms of us.”97 The response of a Prague resident typified the mixture of exasperation and alarm felt by many Czechoslovaks:
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