A tiny handful of other perpetrators also faced prosecution, though few spent much time in prison unless, like Hrneĉek, they were so foolish as to go to Germany or, if they remained in Czechoslovakia or Poland, were German themselves. Jan Kouřil, a guard at the gruesome Kaunitz College camp in Brno who was later promoted to be deputy commandant at the typhus-ridden Kleidovka detention facility on the edge of town, was tried at Karlsruhe in 1951—reportedly after having tried to sell to a dentist a bagful of gold fillings harvested from former detainees—and received a fifteen-year sentence.131 Kurt Landrock, an ethnic German Kapo at Theresienstadt, was somewhat hypocritically tried by the Czechoslovak authorities for his part in the deaths of some thirty prisoners under his control and sentenced to twenty years in 1947. Lieutenant Karol Pazúr, author of the Přerov massacre who had rationalized his decision to kill children by arguing “What am I supposed to do with them, now that I’ve shot their parents?” was one of the few ethnic Czechs or Slovaks to answer for his crimes, however inadequately. In January 1949 he was sentenced to a twelve-year term at a court martial at Bratislava, but was freed in an amnesty three years later.132
Efforts to bring perpetrators in Poland to justice were still less successful. Czesław Gęborski, the youthful commandant of łambinowice, was removed from his post in October 1945 after an atrocity in which he ordered guards to shoot ethnic German inmates attempting to flee a camp barracks that had caught fire. He was quickly restored to the Polish regime’s good graces, however, and was promoted to the rank of captain in the secret police. The investigation against him was reopened by Władysław Gomułka’s government in 1956, but once again dropped. Following the fall of communism, Gęborski was at last arraigned by Polish prosecutors in the year 2000 on charges of murder, torture, and rape of prisoners. Though a vast amount of evidence was collected, no trial had taken place by the time Gęborski died in 2006. The price paid by Salomon Morel, commandant of Świętochłowice-Zgoda, was smaller yet. So notorious did the abuses for which he was responsible become that the director of the Department of Prisons and Camps, Colonel Teodor Duda, punished Morel with three days’ house arrest and a reduction in pay in the autumn of 1945. Like Gęborski, nevertheless, he quickly resumed his upward career trajectory, retiring in 1968 as a colonel. The Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation began an investigation in 1990 of Morel’s tenure at Świętochłowice-Zgoda, prompting him to emigrate to Israel. Attempts by the Polish authorities in 1998 and 2003 to have him extradited were rejected by the Israeli Ministry of Justice, which asserted that it considered there to be “no basis to charge Mr. Morel with serious crimes, let alone crimes of ‘genocide’ or ‘crimes against the Polish nation.’”133 His prosecution, the former director of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) Elan Steinberg asserted, was part of a politically motivated effort by Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis to “relativize” Germany’s crimes against the Jews. Morel died of natural causes in Tel Aviv in 2007.134
Leaving to one side the question of Morel’s guilt—the evidence for which is overwhelming and incontrovertible—the WJC director had a point about the willingness of some Germans to proffer equations between the camp experience of Jews and other victims of Nazi Germany during the war and that of ethnic Germans afterwards. The far right Deutsche Volksunion includes Gęborski, Morel, Ignacy Cedrowski, and Jana Dragojlović (head of the women’s and children’s camp at Baĉki Jarek in Yugoslavia) alongside such figures as Sir Arthur Harris and Dwight Eisenhower in a rogue’s gallery of “the 100 terrible armchair perpetrators and executors of the war of extermination against Germany.”135 Maria Tenz, a former inmate of Rudolfsgnad, describes it as an “extermination camp” in her published memoirs.136 However forgivable rhetoric of this kind may be on the part of former inmates—and Tenz was one of those who could justifiably consider themselves fortunate to have escaped with their lives—no such excuse can be found for others. In reality, there is no valid parallel between even the worst of the postwar camps and their wartime predecessors. With the possible exception of the Yugoslav detention centers in 1945 and 1946, in which a policy chillingly reminiscent of the Nazis’ Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“extermination through labor”) did indeed for a time prevail, the inmates of camps for Volksdeutsche were the victims of maltreatment, abuse, and malign neglect, not a systematic program of mass murder. The great majority, even in Yugoslavia, survived their incarceration; eventually all the central and southeastern European countries would voluntarily release their captives. None of this can be said of the camp system operated by Nazi Germany during the war.
This is an important distinction. Nonetheless, the threshold for acknowledging mass human rights abuses for what they are cannot be the unprecedented barbarities of the Hitler regime. With the exception of the war years themselves, Europe west of the USSR had never seen, nor would it again see, so vast a complex of arbitrary detention—one in which tens of thousands, including many children, would lose their lives. That it largely escaped the attention of contemporaries elsewhere in Europe, and the notice of historians today, is a chilling commentary on the ease with which great evils in plain sight may go overlooked when they present a spectacle that international public opinion prefers not to see.
6
THE “ORGANIZED EXPULSIONS”
Major Frederick Boothby, commander of the British Liaison Team at Kaławsk (today’s Węgliniec), a railhead seven miles east of the new Polish-German frontier, eyed expellee train No. 165, as it pulled up to the platform on the evening of May 18, 1946, with considerable suspicion. The first curious thing he noticed was the unusually large quantity of personal effects, including “everything from commodes to double beds,” that the expellees had been permitted to take with them. In contrast to most Germans arriving from Poland, they were without exception well nourished and adequately clothed. Furthermore, practically all of them appeared to be Jewish. Lacking the facilities to examine the documents of all 1,572 people on board, he sent the train onward to its destination with a request that the authorities at the point of arrival check it and its passengers carefully.1 The British Army contingent at the Marienthal transit camp in Lower Saxony, who did so, found that Major Boothby’s reservations were amply justified. By the time it reached Marienthal the train had acquired an additional 456 passengers, presumably placed on board somewhere between Kaławsk and the frontier. The supposed expellees were accompanied by a thirty-four-year-old man named Günther Sternberg from Wrocław, who wore a homemade UNRRA arm-band and whose identity papers, purporting to have been issued by a “Captain Baker, Royal Signals, U.S. Army,” gave the camp authorities still more reason to question his bona fides. Field Security officers promptly placed Sternberg under arrest, but persuading the “expellees” to leave the train proved a far more difficult matter. All of them appeared “surprised to learn on arrival that they were going to be treated as refugees” and refused to cooperate. In the end, for the first time in Marienthal’s history it was necessary to call out a company of the Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment to induce them to obey orders. The soldiers had a great deal of trouble disinfecting and registering the passengers, a process that took nine hours and revealed that only 56 of the more than 2,000 persons screened were genuine expellees. Sternberg, under interrogation, acknowledged having forged identity papers for 180 of his charges, and having sold them seats on the train in Warsaw at a rate of five to six hundred dollars per head. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place the following morning when a Dr. Sanek of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a New York–based relief and emigration agency, put in an appearance. He explained that he had made arrangements with the American authorities for the passengers, Polish Jews, to proceed southward to Oberammergau in the U.S. zone and thence to Palestine. A freight ticket was produced showing that the train had been chartered in Poland for a fee of RM 26,152 ($2,600), which also had paid for its complement of Polish Army guards. Unable or unwilling to pursue the matter further with thousa
nds of additional expellees following hot on train No. 165’s heels, the Marienthal officers passed the émigrés along the line and released Sternberg to continue his journey to the U.S. zone.2 Nine weeks later, the American authorities reported that they knew nothing of the train or its passengers, and had granted them no facilities to travel to the U.S. zone or anywhere else.3
This intersection of expulsion and entrepreneurialism was in no respect extraordinary. Indeed, just seven weeks later, another “train No. 165”—a number seemingly particularly favored by people-smugglers—arrived at Marienthal. This transport contained seventeen hundred passengers, all of whom carried documents identifying them as expellee German Jews from the Recovered Territories and visas authorizing them to travel onward from Le Havre in France to the United States. Once again, British suspicions were raised. Major-General G. W. E. J. (Bobby) Erskine of the Office of the Deputy Military Governor had already received reports that Polish authorities, whose anti-Semitism remained unaffected by the Holocaust, were solving their remaining Jewish problem by providing Polish Jews with papers describing their nationality as German, as an inducement to leave the country for good. The camp staff at Marienthal interviewed a cross-section of the passengers and found that “practically everyone had paid the sum of 30 U.S. dollars for the passage on this train.” Once again, however, the new arrivals were sent onward for processing “as nothing could be proved that they were not genuine German [expellees] although there is good reason to believe that many of the papers were forged.”4
As episodes like these indicated, from the outset the optimistically named “organized expulsions” of 1946–47 defied the efforts of the countries involved to impose any kind of order on the process. Given the minimal resources dedicated to the operation, the breakneck pace at which it was conducted, and the expelling countries’ ambivalence over whether the efficient removal of the deportees should take precedence over their collective punishment or vice versa, it could hardly have been otherwise. Thus the eighteen-month-long period during which “organized expulsions” took place rapidly degenerated into a macabre race against time, as expelling governments sought to rid themselves of as many unwanted minorities as possible before a combination of a sufficiently large number of deaths en route, and the chaos into which the reception areas in occupied Germany were rapidly descending, should impel the great powers to call a halt to further transfers. That such a point would sooner or later be reached was recognized by policymakers on both sides even before the first “organized” removal took place. Rather than reexamine the wisdom of the operation in light of that fact, however, authorities in the expelling and receiving countries alike embarked upon a course that they fully recognized would result in the immediate impoverishment of both; divert vital transport resources away from reconstruction and relief to a wholly unproductive purpose; and leave a trail of human misery in its wake. Their persistence in such a profoundly self-defeating enterprise raises questions about what lessons, if any, the victors had learned from the unhinged Hitlerian effort to reshape the demographics of the European continent during the Second World War.
The adoption of the Allied Control Council expulsion agreement of November 20, 1945 was followed by the creation of a skeletal logistical and administrative apparatus to oversee the execution of the operation. In view of the fact that mass expulsions were scheduled to begin just six weeks later, this machinery could take only the most rudimentary form. Its most important component was the Combined Repatriation Executive (CRX), an agency set up by the ACC on October 1, 1945 to cope with the enormous transport challenges the expulsions would involve. The remit of CRX was to coordinate and regulate any organized movement of ten or more persons into or out of Germany, or between the four Allied occupation zones. In addition to the expulsions, CRX was responsible for overseeing the transport of almost 2 million Allied displaced persons, most of them forced laborers press-ganged by the Nazis from central Europe, back to their homelands, as well as the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war in captivity in other lands. The possibility thus existed of using the same trains to carry returning Poles, Czechoslovaks, and Hungarians as well as ethnic Germans, gaining maximum benefit from scarce transport resources. It was quickly realized that representatives of the expelling countries, if added to CRX, could play a vital role in smoothing out the difficulties that would inevitably arise. By the end of 1945, the Executive had acquired a definite structure, with fewer than a dozen “repatriation officers,” from all seven countries involved, assisted by a tiny secretarial staff, attempting by themselves to resolve the logistical problems associated with the operation.5 To the degree that any international apparatus existed to impose order upon the process of expulsion, CRX came closest to fitting the bill; and in view of the low priority attached by the Allies to its work—none of its members held a higher rank than lieutenant colonel—and the scale of the task confronting it, its achievements were remarkable.
That is not to say that CRX’s proceedings were always harmonious. To the contrary, an atmosphere of tension set in from the moment its members tried to agree on norms and procedures for transporting and accepting expellees. The negotiations were long and difficult, reflecting the justified suspicion that the receiving powers harbored both of the expelling governments and of each other. The requirements of the Polish State Repatriation Office (Państwowy Urząd Repatriacyjny, or PUR), headed by Dr. Władysław Wolski, deputy minister for repatriation, were greatest of all, posing a particular challenge to CRX. The Poles needed to coordinate the simultaneous transfer not just of the Germans but of the displaced Poles from east of the River Bug. As Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse point out, “The movement of about six million human beings from the USSR to Poland and from Poland to Germany required administrative expertise of the sort attributed to Adolf Eichmann, and logistical planning on a scale at least twice as large as anything attempted during the Holocaust.”6
The first questions to be decided through the medium of CRX were start dates for the organized expulsions, and the minimum welfare standards to be maintained throughout the operation. In both respects the interests of expelling and receiving countries diverged, with the former seeking to begin the transfer as quickly as possible while retaining as much ex-German property as possible. During preliminary conversations in Berlin at the beginning of 1946, Wolski demanded of both the British and Soviet governments that they not only accept large numbers of expellees immediately but provide the locomotives and rolling stock with which to remove them from Poland. More than a million displaced Poles from east of the Curzon line, together with 170,000 cows, 100,000 horses, 120,000 pigs, and 180,000 sheep, he said, were already on their way to the Recovered Territories. “On the very day of our discussion,” Wolski told one of the British negotiators, “the Minister had 38 trains on his hands loaded with individuals bound for the west.” Unless these colonists and their livestock could be settled on farms in the Recovered Territories in time for the spring sowing, there would be “famine to face the incoming population.” It was pointless, he contended, for the British authorities to agree to accept 1.5 million expellees unless they were prepared to fetch them. Neither the British nor the Soviets, however, allowed themselves to be stampeded into premature action by “this pretty hard-faced demand.” The military commander in the Soviet zone, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, was not inclined to be helpful, having already complained to Wolski that German expellees from Poland were arriving at their destinations in a state of destitution, compelling the authorities to provide them with necessities like blankets, clothing, knives, and forks from local resources. The British reminded Wolski that he had been allocated 2,000 covered railway wagons exclusively for the Polish part of the expulsion operation, whereas the total available to British transport officers to disperse the new arrivals in their zone was 750. As an indication of good faith, they offered to accept four thousand expellees a day if the Polish or Soviet governments provided suitable transport. The Soviet
s, for their part, gave staunch support to the British in resisting the demands of the importunate Wolski. Indicating their suspicion of their wartime ally as well as of the Polish government, however, they went on to insist that British liaison missions whose task it would be officially to accept transports from Poland should be established at the point of embarkation rather than at the new Polish-German frontier, fearing that any expellees rejected by the British would be unceremoniously dumped by the Poles in the Soviet zone.7
At first sight it might appear that the receiving powers had the upper hand in these negotiations, for they could simply close their borders and refuse to accept expellees altogether unless their conditions were met. It is certainly true that the British were in no hurry to see the discussions arrive at a conclusion. By the end of January they had reached an agreement in principle with their Polish and Soviet counterparts governing the routes over which expellees were to be transported and the minimum standards of welfare to be assured. They were much slower, however, to translate this understanding into action on the ground. As the ACC expulsion timetable had specified, they wanted to see the “head-for-head” exchanges with the Soviet zone come to a conclusion before launching into a much larger and more difficult round of population transfers. They also hoped that by drawing the talks out until the worst of the winter had passed, the number of deaths through hypothermia that would inevitably occur in transit might be reduced. But there was a limit to these temporizing tactics, one which a British minister’s injudicious revelation of the motives behind them to Parliament at the end of January 1946 probably brought closer.8 By mid-February the British CRX representatives warned that the Poles were becoming exceptionally agitated over the Western powers’ failure to set a firm date for the start of mass transfers, which had already fallen more than two months behind schedule. Unless the British made a commitment within the following forty-eight hours to begin accepting expellees forthwith, they feared that the Polish authorities “will despatch trains from starting points without our agreement.”9
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 24