Devil take the Germans! During the war, they decimated our nation and now, because of them, along comes a fresh scandal….
Let nobody fall back on the excuse that the Germans have done the same things. Either we are qualified to stand as their judges, in which case we cannot conduct ourselves as they do, or we are no different from them, and give up the right to judge them.98
If the detaining governments could not credibly invoke the pressure of public opinion for the treatment accorded to internees, however, it remains the case that the principle of detention, as opposed to elements of its operation, was loudly applauded by the populations of these countries. In both Poland and Czechoslovakia, many hundreds of rallies were held by political parties demanding the total removal of Germans from society; one, in the Polish county of Kępno, called for all Volksdeutsche to be imprisoned “regardless of their behavior during the occupation.”99 Leszek Olejnik points out that this stance was driven by more than anti-German animus alone. Because there could be no redistribution of German property until its owners had been taken into custody, members of the majority populations, many of whom had lost everything in the war, regarded a comprehensive roundup as a necessary step toward making good their own losses.
By autumn 1945 Western governments had received so many reports of human rights abuses in the camps as to cause apprehension that public opinion might demand the suspension or even the abandonment of the entire expulsion project. Such concerns were probably groundless: an exposé of camp conditions in Czechoslovakia by the British journalist Eric Gedye, in the governing Labour Party’s Daily Herald newspaper, was exceptional for attracting any public attention at all.100 Nonetheless, American and British representatives on the scene warned that misplaced expressions of humanitarian concern might produce an eruption of popular feeling in central Europe against the Western powers in light of what they perceived as a massive local consensus in favor of the detention of ethnic Germans. Laurence Steinhardt, the U.S. ambassador in Prague, feared that any appearance “of favoring the German population as against our Czech allies may in the course of time have serious political consequences in Czechoslovakia, particularly in the struggle between the Communists and the moderates for control of the country.”101 When Philip Nichols, concerned about reports he was receiving on conditions in the camps, took it upon himself to remind Beneš that it was “important that our public opinion, which was, I am sure, at present strongly in favour of a radical solution of the minorities question, should not have the issue clouded for them by stories of Czech cruelty, etc.,” Sir Orme Sargent at the Foreign Office cautioned him that “this line can easily be overdone with the Czechs and we must be careful not to get the reputation of being unnecessarily soft-hearted with the Germans.”102
The firm resolve of the Western powers to “see no evil”—in October 1946 British Ambassador Victor Cavendish-Bentinck declined an invitation while visiting Szczecin to speak with German detainees, remarking to his Polish hosts that “he is convinced that as usual they will complain”103—proved increasingly difficult to sustain. Since the end of the war, the International Committee of the Red Cross had been making determined efforts to gain access to the camps. Although a proposed Geneva Convention extending the CICR’s remit to civilian victims of conflict had not yet been adopted when the Second World War began, both the German, Italian, and Western Allied governments had agreed that civilian internees should receive conditions similar to those enjoyed by prisoners of war. No such consensus prevailed after the war. Romania’s government, which initially permitted Red Cross inspections of its Volksdeutsch civil internment camps, prohibited further visits in March 1945.104 Its counterpart in Prague, where a well-established CICR delegation had been present throughout the war years, promised in late May 1945 that the organization would be permitted to visit all Sudetendeutsch detention centers, an undertaking on which it too promptly reneged.105 Only in Slovakia, where the President of the Slovak National Council provided the local CICR delegate with a laissez-passer authorizing him to enter any camp unannounced, was the Red Cross able to carry out its mission. In the Czech lands, the organization was permitted to make visits only in the presence of the senior official of the Ministry of the Interior responsible for camp administration, to whom prior notice of each intended inspection had to be given. In May 1946 even this limited facility was withdrawn. The Yugoslav Red Cross, one of several national affiliates whose primary allegiance lay with its own government rather than the organization of which it was a part, assured the CICR in Geneva that the eleven “labor colonies” in the country to whose existence it admitted were so perfectly conducted by the People’s Federative Republic that no improvement, far less inspection, of the facilities could possibly be envisaged.106 The Polish authorities from the beginning responded with a blanket refusal to all applications from the CICR or from Western journalists to see the camps; and although the Polish Red Cross was more impartial in the matter of the German detainees than its Yugoslav counterpart, it had “hardly any influence in certain regions, notably in Lower Silesia.”107 Most of its resources, moreover, were already devoted to caring for colonists displaced from the lost eastern lands who were arriving, often in a pitiably debilitated condition, to take up residence in the Recovered Territories, as well as for Polish survivors of Nazi concentration camps.108 Even if the will to succor the German inmates of the internment camps had been present, the means were not.
In spite of all these rebuffs, and notwithstanding the reservations of some of its own leaders,109 the CICR continued to exert pressure on detaining governments about the state of the camps. Walter Menzel, head of the CICR delegation in Prague, warned Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk in February 1946 that “it would go against my conscience for me to continue keeping silent about the conditions prevailing in the camps in Czechoslovakia.”110 Several months previously, Menzel had leaked information to the British ambassador about “the disgraceful condition of the camps for German civilians in Slovakia.” As had been its practice during the Second World War, however—a stance for which it was later to be much criticized111—the CICR rarely shared its knowledge with third parties. Fearing that its reports might be used as propaganda fodder in the intensifying war of words between East and West, the Red Cross typically kept to itself the particulars it gathered of human rights violations, especially if it considered that a possibility existed of being able to modify the conduct of the government concerned through “quiet diplomacy.”112
For the same reason, as the Cold War intensified and the prospect of any meaningful Western influence in central and southeastern Europe receded, British and American governments evinced a new sympathy with persons they had previously denounced as collaborators and fifth columnists. That sympathy did not, however, extend so far as to offer asylum for the internees in the Western occupation zones of Germany or Austria, already staggering under the weight of a vast influx of malnourished, penniless, frequently diseased, and predominantly unproductive Volksdeutsche. When the British Embassy in Belgrade pointed out that “we feel that those now in the [Yugoslav] concentration camps cannot all be guilty of great crimes, particularly the women and children,” and suggested that the Allies, notwithstanding the noninclusion of the Yugoslav Volksdeutsche in the Potsdam scheme, should attempt to save their lives by “encourag[ing] the Jugoslavs to deport them to Germany,” the German Department of the Foreign Office warned against “any tendency to put ourselves too much in the forefront over this. With the present food difficulties it is almost certain that we shall not want to have any extra Germans in our zones, and we do not want to give anyone the impression that we are ready to do so.”113 While humanitarian considerations continued to be raised from time to time, the British Embassy in Belgrade protesting in the summer of 1946 that the “indiscriminate annihilation and starvation” of the Yugoslav Volksdeutsche “must surely be considered an offence to humanity” and warning that “if they have to undergo another winter here, very few will be left,” the
Foreign Office devoted its efforts instead to prevailing upon the Yugoslav authorities to take measures to stop any further influx of Volksdeutsche into the Western occupation zones.114
In default of any more tangible form of assistance, some British officials pinned their hopes on a publicity campaign. “Conditions in which Germans in Yugoslavia exist,” the Belgrade embassy reported in 1946 in a dispatch that was circulated to Attlee’s cabinet, “seem well down to Dachau standards.”115 There was little to be lost by placing these facts before the public, embassy staff added, “as it will hardly be possible for the position of those that are left in camps to deteriorate thereby.”116 In London, too, the idea of “naming and shaming” the Yugoslavs found some support. No immediate action was taken, however, and the proposal was eventually dropped in the face of the U.S. State Department’s fear of worsening relations with Tito; the opposition of British occupation authorities in Austria; and the perceived indifference of the Western press to atrocity stories of any kind.
As events were to show, a well-directed publicity campaign against the European camp system might well have had some impact, if not in Yugoslavia, then at least in Czechslovakia and Poland. In September 1946 the prominent British member of Parliament and future minister in the Attlee government, Richard Stokes, made a visit to Czechoslovakia and succeeded in briefly gaining access to the camps at Most, Ústí nad Labem, Hagibor, and Litoměřice. Upon his return, he published a lengthy letter in the Manchester Guardian detailing his findings, including the disturbing fact that “many of the Sudeten German Social Democrats who were put in concentration camps by the Germans for being anti-Nazi when liberation came were transferred to Czech labor camps merely because they were of German origin.” The daily food ration at Hagibor he calculated to be “750 calories a day, which is below the Belsen level.”117 Stokes had also, to the chagrin of the camp authorities, witnessed the daily selection of prisoners for labor details. “Around 6 A.M. the employers started to arrive in cars and lorries to select and transport their slaves for the day…. Three or four hundred slaves were then let in from the camp end and the visitors made their selection, giving a receipt for the persons carried off, returning them at the end of the day.” At Ústí he had interrupted the camp commandant “in his shirt sleeves rifling the belongings of an old man of 65 whilst other officials stood by, one of whom was helping himself to what looked like a silver snuff box, empty silver match box and a cigarette lighter from one of the other elderly prisoners near by.” With what may have been studied naïveté—for he had first discussed his discoveries with local representatives of the CICR, who had presented their complaints about the camps in person to the Czechoslovak president on five separate occasions between May 1945 and April 1946—Stokes wondered “whether Dr Beneš knows that these dreadful happenings are going on.”118
The Stokes report, in marked contrast to the revelations by the Daily Herald a year previously, created a minor sensation in Britain and was deeply embarrassing to the Czechoslovak government. Unwisely relying on a briefing document filled with unblushing fictions that had been prepared for him by the Ministry of the Interior, Prime Minister Fierlinger asserted at a press conference that “Czechoslovakia had no concentration camps” but rather nine “internment camps” with a total population of just two thousand, all of whom were awaiting trial for various offenses. Inmates in these camps received the same food rations as the rest of the Czechoslovak population.119 The Ministry of the Interior issued an equally mendacious point-by-point rebuttal of Stokes’s charges, in the course of which it asserted that—by a series of improbable coincidences—every one of the individual prisoners named by him had independently been found suitable for release by the Prague authorities, and that the Hagibor camp had already been scheduled for immediate closure.120 The Czechoslovak authorities publicly called upon the CICR to inspect its places of detention to verify the truth of these assertions.
The pressure of international public opinion thus achieved what the Red Cross, by its own unaided exertions, could not. At the end of January 1947, the Ministry of the Interior granted the CICR a laissez-passer authorizing it to visit all camps in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia under ministry control during the month of February, with the sole proviso that any report resulting therefrom first be submitted to Prague.121 The impact was immediate. One of the longest-serving detainees at Linzervorstadt, a man whose camp number was 83, recalled that “After each visit [from the CICR] conditions improved considerably.” The number of guards was decreased; inmates were permitted to walk unescorted to their work details outside the camp; Sunday labor ceased; and forced laborers even received small sums of pocket money in respect of their work.122 While progress in other countries was on a less dramatic scale, CICR relief supplies had begun to reach inmates in Polish internment camps from June 1947 onward, and some limited inspections of assembly camps in that country were sanctioned at the end of 1948.123
For most detainees, however, the only effective amelioration of their condition would come as a result of their eventual expulsion to Germany or Austria. By mid-1947, so many had already been removed as to make it possible for the detaining governments to scale down the camp networks. Romania, the first country to intern German-speaking civilians, declared to the Red Cross in June 1946 that all of its camps had been closed.124 Czechoslovakia, having already expelled most of its Sudetendeutsche by December 1946, was next to follow suit, dissolving some camps and consolidating others. According to the Prague government, only nineteen detention centers remained on May 31, 1947.125 The expulsion action in Poland was also nearing completion by the same time, making it possible to close many of the smaller camps like Oświęcim in the spring of 1947.126 By early 1948, according to Polish Ministry of Public Security data, the total camp population in Poland had fallen to forty-seven thousand of all nationalities; only half that number, the majority of them “old and feeble persons,” remained in custody a year later.127 Yugoslavia, which had already had to dissolve several camps—notably Baĉki Jarak, Sekić, and Filipovo—because the mortality in them was on so excessive a scale as to render them no longer viable, also took initial steps to wind down internment operations early in 1947, in the process realizing from its remaining camp population whatever sums the market would bear. According to British intelligence officers, inmates could either buy their way out using the services of human-trafficking networks which would pay off the camp authorities, or, for the higher price of one thousand dinars128 per person, deal directly with the camp staff, who would conduct groups of about sixty inmates at night to the border. “The advantage of leaving the camp under official arrangements is that, if the party is turned back by the Hungarian Frontier police … they are then taken again to the frontier on the following night without having to pay another 1,000 dinars. If, however, an unofficial party is caught the leader and the entire group are arrested by the Jugoslav authorities who presumably object to their cut-price competitors.”129 In the summer of 1947, thanks to the operation of these networks and to instances of Yugoslav camp commandants throwing open the gates of their establishments and inviting their more impecunious detainees to depart for the frontier without further ado, the number of Yugoslav Volksdeutsche illegally crossing into Austria via Hungary more than doubled. Rudolfsgnad, the last remaining camp for ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia, closed in March 1948, although many former inmates remained liable thereafter to forced labor in state “enterprises” or farms.
Inspired by such developments as the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia of February 1948, the Berlin crisis in the summer of that year, and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany the following spring, Western governments came to view the relatively small number of Volksdeutsche remaining behind the Iron Curtain, and especially those still detained in camps, in an entirely new light. With relations between the two superpower blocs having irretrievably broken down, Western governments could occasionally use the camps as a propaganda foil with which to attack their Commu
nist counterparts. Christopher Mayhew, minister of state at the Foreign Office, for example, publicly upbraided Czechoslovakia at the UN in February 1949 for maintaining concentration camps for Sudetendeutsche and subjecting 170,000 of them to forced labor.130 (With this figure, however, Mayhew appears to have confused the number of Sudeten Germans performing compulsory labor with the number said to be remaining in Czechoslovakia.) Nonetheless, Western leaders, with rare exceptions, adhered to the principle of “least said, soonest mended” with regard both to the past incarceration of Volksdeutsch civilians and to the fact that a few camps containing ethnic German detainees, like Jaworzno, continued in operation well into the 1950s.
Except in the rarest of instances, the government officials, commandants, and guards of the Central European camps never faced trial for the abuses they had perpetrated. One of the unlucky exceptions was Wenzel Hrneĉek. Although he had risen rapidly as Linzervorstadt’s de facto chief, arriving as a corporal and finishing as a first lieutenant, after the Communist coup of February 1948 Hrneĉek incurred the disfavor of the new regime in Prague. According to his own account, he was arrested and charged with “high treason for collaboration with the United States of America”; former internees spoke of his having been accused of misappropriating large quantities of expellee property instead of turning it over to the state. Fleeing across the border to Bavaria in 1949, he adopted the persona of “Johann Richter,” a Sudetendeutsch expellee, and found work with the U.S. Army in Munich. His decision to remain in southern Germany was unwise, inasmuch as many of his former prisoners were now living there. Soon reports that Hrneĉek had been seen on the streets of Munich were circulating in the expellee press. It was not until July 1952, though, that he was arrested after a desperate struggle outside the Munich telegraph office. At the time of his detention he was found to be in possession of passports in four different names; his car contained a loaded Walther PPK, a nine-millimeter Belgian FN handgun, and a starting pistol. Placed on trial by the U.S. authorities—the scene of his crimes having been under American military administration in 1945—he was charged with forty offenses ranging from simple assault to manslaughter. Hrneĉek was convicted on eighteen of these and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, three of which were suspended. After he had served six months, the balance of his sentence was remitted on condition that he leave the Federal Republic of Germany within forty-eight hours.
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