As it turned out, these concerns were exaggerated. The USSR, whose own occupation zone was swamped with destitute Germans from the Recovered Territories and the Sudetenland, was in no greater a hurry than the British to see the organized expulsions commence. Believing, though, that no advantage could be gained by further prevarication, the British CRX representative signed a final agreement with his Polish counterpart the following day. Under its terms, a thousand expellees were to be transported daily by sea across the Baltic from Szczecin to Lübeck, from whence they would be taken by truck to the transit camp at Pöppendorf. A rail route from Szczecin to Bad Segeberg, fifteen miles west of Lübeck, would carry another 1,520 expellees a day in a single train. A second route from Kaławsk via Helmstedt to Marienthal or the adjoining railhead at Alversdorf would receive two trains daily, with a maximum combined capacity of 3,000. The third planned rail route, from Kaławsk to Friedland near Göttingen, was to carry 2,500 expellees each day; for logistical reasons this never came into operation. Expulsions along the Szczecin-Segeberg and Kaławsk-Marienthal-Alversdorf lines were to commence on February 20; the starting dates for the commencement of the other routes were to be decided later. Although it was not expected that the total throughput of 56,000 expellees per week would be attained immediately, the British declared their willingness to admit at least 45,000 per week by March 1, 1946.10
The Anglo-Polish agreement also laid down detailed norms for the conditions under which expellees were to be transported. The British undertook to accept the Germans at the embarkation points, and—as the Soviets had demanded—to establish six-man liaison teams at Kaławsk and Szczecin for that purpose. After these squads had inspected and approved the transports, they would proceed without further interference to their final destinations in the British zone. All locomotives and rolling stock were to be provided by the Poles, or, where applicable, the Soviets; the Poles also undertook to provide a guard of ten soldiers for each transport who would be accommodated overnight at the British reception centers. The expellees were to be dusted with DDT at the embarkation points. Each was allowed to take as much baggage as he or she could carry by hand, and no more than five hundred Reichsmarks in paper currency. Families were not to be divided, nor were pregnant women to travel within six weeks before and after their predicted or actual date of confinement. On the first two routes, the Poles were to provide sufficient rations for a two days’ journey to be carried on the transport, with a further day’s rations held in reserve. On the second pair of routes, three days’ rations, along with the one-day reserve, were required. The physically and mentally ill, orphans, and criminals were not to be removed until the very end of the operation. Lastly, a nominal roll—or list of names—of the expellees and a medical certificate attesting that all those traveling were free of communicable disease were to accompany each transport.11
Other agreements between the expelling and receiving authorities followed a similar pattern. The Soviet authorities in Germany drove an even harder bargain with the Czechoslovak government, requiring that the 600,000 expellees from that country receive a baggage allowance of fifty kilograms per person and that each arrive with not less than five hundred Reichsmarks or occupation marks—if necessary to be furnished by the Czechoslovaks themselves. Two medical certificates, signed by both a Czechoslovak and a German doctor, were to confirm the fitness to travel of the expellees, and two German nurses were to travel in each train. Separate coaches were to be provided for those requiring medical treatment and the mentally ill. No more than thirty expellees were to be loaded into each of the forty-two or forty-three closed wagons attached to the trains, making for a maximum of approximately twelve hundred persons per transport. In return, the Soviets agreed to accept with effect from July 10, 1946 three daily trains, six days a week, on the short Podmokly (Bodenbach)–Bad Schandau route, and three more originating from Tršnice and terminating in Gera or Altenburg in Thuringia. A strict arrival timetable would be adhered to so that the trains could return to Czechoslovakia by the same evening. During the summer months, river barges of expellees would also be received at Wittenberg in Saxony and Wittenberge in Brandenburg. The agreement between the USSR and Poland, on the other hand, reflecting the Soviet Union’s strategic interest in clearing the Recovered Territories of Germans as expeditiously as possible, was much more rudimentary. The USSR promised to admit trains at Forst and Görlitz, each with a complement of fifteen to seventeen hundred expellees, and to require no more elaborate documentation than a dispatch order and a sanitary certificate for each transport, along with the expellees’ own personal identification.12
The most stringent conditions of all were imposed by the U.S. zonal commanders, who were required under the ACC plan to accept expellees from both Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The Americans had learned a hard lesson when they allowed themselves to be talked into agreeing on a premature beginning to the organized expulsions, without seeking any written standards for the operation. At the end of November Colonel John H. Fye, the former deputy chief of staff of the U.S. Army’s XXII Corps, was appointed liaison officer for expulsion affairs with the Czechoslovak General Staff. The “unit” he headed consisted of himself, a local interpreter, a clerk, and a driver. “Throughout the entire operation the section was an orphan.” Ill-advisedly, Fye agreed with his hosts that transports could commence to the U.S. zone just two weeks later. The results were disastrous. The first trains, which embarked on December 13, 1945, “brought a loud protest from OMG Bavaria” on account of “the stripped conditions of the expellees” arriving in Germany. A train reaching Hof on December 16, 1945 contained 650 expellees who had traveled while the external temperature was minus nine degrees centigrade. When the doors were opened at the destination, representatives of the Red Cross awaiting the transport found that ninety-four of the passengers, including twenty-two children, were dead.13 Complaints by the U.S. forces over the conditions of these transports were rejected by the Ministry of National Defense, which pointed out that “there was no prescribed allowance for expellees other than ‘minimum essential clothing and bedding.’ This did not necessarily mean too much in the way of clothing and a blanket could be considered minimum essential bedding.” Due to a combination of American protest and Czechoslovak lack of preparation, however, further transports were suspended on December 29, pending negotiations with a team of U.S. officers from Munich and representatives of the Czechoslovak civil and military authorities the following week.14
According to the written protocol agreed at this meeting, Sudetendeutsche were to receive from the local authorities at least forty-eight hours’ notice of their deportation. They were then to be assembled at a transit camp for medical examination and documentation. Once this procedure had been completed, they would be entrained at a maximum rate of fifty expellees per freight wagon. The American authorities would become involved only when the train reached the boundary of the U.S. zone. There they would inspect the train; check the nominal roll and ensure that no expellee was being removed unaccompanied by his or her family; and either accept the train, direct that unauthorized persons be removed, or reject the entire transport. Once admitted by the Americans, expellees would be given a hot meal, disinfected, and passed on to the German Land authorities who would see to their further resettlement.15 In contrast to the British, who provided the expellees with documentation upon arrival, the U.S. authorities insisted that each Sudetendeutsch be furnished with an identity card in Czech, German, and English before embarkation. The printing of these papers alone, the Czechoslovak authorities complained, would set back the resumption of the operation by several weeks.16 Initially, one train per day, containing twelve hundred expellees, was to be accepted at Fürth im Wald. The dispatch rate doubled after a month, when Wiesau, east of Bayreuth, was brought into service as a second reception point. By May 1, seventy-two hundred expellees were entering the U.S. zone daily at the two stations, with smaller numbers continuing to travel by road or cross the border on foot. A Czechosl
ovak General Staff proposal to use ships on the Danube to bring additional Sudetendeutsche from Slovakia to Passau was rejected by the Americans for logistical reasons.17
Reflecting the fact that Hungary was an ex-enemy state, the Allied Control Commission for Hungary (ACC [H]) did not engage in discussions with the interim Budapest government, but rather issued directives to it. In practice, the U.S. authorities, to whose zone ethnic Germans from Hungary, the so-called “Swabians,” would go, were given a free hand to dictate their requirements to Béla Miklós’s provisional administration. The Americans ordered that expulsions would begin on December 15, 1945, with a single train of forty heated cars or wagons, carrying a total of one thousand passengers, who were to be medically examined and provided with the necessary documents before embarkation. Each expellee, including children, would receive a baggage allowance of one hundred kilograms. An inspectorate composed of representatives from the three occupying powers would ensure that conditions in the “concentration areas” and on the trains were appropriately humane, though Marshal Voroshilov pointed out to his colleagues on the ACC (H) that “the word ‘humane’ could only be considered relatively, having regard to the conditions of the whole move.”18
In all three “Potsdam” countries, foreign diplomats and representatives of the world’s press were invited to witness the model conditions of the initial “organized expulsions.” Predictably, the Czechoslovak government was the most successful in arranging a suitably reassuring spectacle for the observers. The British consul at Karlovy Vary, Oswald Bamborough, formerly a journalist for the state-owned Czechoslovak Broadcasting Corporation, attended the first “official” transport of Sudetendeutsch expellees from Mariánské Lázně on January 25, 1946. Like the other invitees, the U.S. ambassador, Steinhardt, who was present together with various other foreign dignitaries, marveled at the evident pains to which the Czechoslovak authorities had gone to ensure that the deportees should have no legitimate grounds for complaint. Almost 1,000 women and children, and 240 men, had first been assembled in a former U.S. Army barracks capable of accommodating at least six times that number. A week’s ration of food was immediately issued to each expellee, with an additional three days’ supply held in reserve. The train supplied to remove them to Bavaria included a “Red Cross” compartment, staffed by German nurses, and all passengers were first medically examined by a German doctor. The Czech commandant overseeing the proceedings confirmed that none of the expellees’ possessions had been confiscated, and that so far as the fifty-kilogram baggage allowance was concerned, “his instructions were to exercise benevolence in this matter.” Indeed, those who arrived lacking adequate clothing were provided with what they needed by the Czechoslovaks themselves. A March of Time film crew, brought there for the occasion, recorded footage of smiling, neatly dressed Sudetendeutsch women and their babies queuing to receive a last hot meal from the camp commissary before their embarkation.19 Bamborough was moved by the spectacle, and in his official dispatch testified to “the deep impression the conduct of the Czech officials made on me; I am convinced that they are determined to implement the words frequently uttered by their spokesmen, that the transfer of Germans should be carried out humanely.”20 A British journalist, invited by the authorities to witness another staged transport near Karlovy Vary, found the scene “more like the end of a village garden-party than part of a great transfer of population.” Like many of the foreign observers, he expressed gratification over the poetic justice that had overtaken the Sudetendeutsche. “As their train bumps on towards the Reich, the Sudetens will perhaps recall the happy days when the Jewish shop-windows went flying into smithereens and the fires in the trade-union buildings were starting up, and the folk, the ordinary folk, were running about looking for somebody to take a smack at, and shouting, ‘We want to be home in the Reich!’ Soon they will get their wish.”21
Similar attempts at Potemkin expulsions organized by other Potsdam countries were markedly less successful. British and U.S. military observers and a correspondent of the Reuters news agency, invited to witness the first group of deportees leave Hungary, found that contrary to the government’s undertakings, those rounded up had in some cases been given no more than ten minutes’ notice of their removal. Many took the opportunity provided by the general chaos surrounding the operation to flee into the countryside; of the thousand Volksdeutsche from the small town of Budaörs, eight miles outside Budapest, who were to travel on the first expulsion train on January 19, 1946, only seven hundred—not all of whom were Germans—could be found when they were counted at the station. The system of predeparture medical screening quickly broke down and was abandoned, and the train, when it eventually got under way, proceeded so slowly—taking nearly three days to cover the 160 miles between Budapest and its initial stop at Vienna—that passengers were seriously affected by hunger. Contrary to the expulsion protocol, no food had been provided for the journey, and the inspectors who met the train as it entered the U.S. zone at Freilassing concluded that taking all the various breaches into account, the conditions under which the transport had taken place constituted “inhumane treatment.”22 The story was similar in the case of a Polish “Red Cross” train intended to show the special care taken by the authorities with sick and elderly expellees from the Recovered Territories. On its first, well-publicized trip from Wrocław to Aurich, west of Wilhelmshaven, the desired effect was undermined by the fact that “rather a number” of the passengers were Alzheimer’s patients who “did not realise even during the journey what was going on with them,” and by the inadequacy of the food ration—less than 150 grams of bread per person per day. Five of the expellees died en route, and another two shortly after arrival.23
Notwithstanding the general disorganization, some Allied military officials considered that the Hungarian government at the outset was at least trying, however ineffectually, to meet the ACC (H)’s requirements. The same was not at all true, though, of the expulsions from the Recovered Territories to the British zone of Germany, which had been given the designation of “Operation Swallow.” The correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, who met the first transport from Szczecin to Lübeck on March 3, 1946, found that 250 of the expellees were so seriously ill as to require immediate hospitalization; a child of eighteen months and a seventy-three-year-old man were dead on arrival. “In later transports the figures have been higher.” The expellee convoys bore a distinctly geriatric aspect, most of those removed being over fifty with “many in their eighties.” A considerable proportion had had no food for up to a week, in transit or while detained at the Szczecin-Gumieńce assembly camp before their embarkation. However, the most disquieting aspect was the marks they bore of systematic maltreatment over a long period, with the scars of physical and sexual abuse much in evidence. “Most of the women,” it was established by the examining British medical officers, “had been violated, among them a girl of 10 and another of 16.”24
After only a few weeks of the “organized expulsions,” it became clear to the occupation authorities in Germany that the Swallow removals, rather than the stage-managed deportations, would be the template for the operation as a whole. From all sides, reports began to flood in from reception centers of the immense strain exerted upon them by attempting to cope with the consequences of systematic maltreatment of the new arrivals. The first three Swallow trains received at the Pöppendorf transit camp in the British zone contained a “large percentage of old people, most of them in very bad condition with a good many almost on the verge of death with bruises and other marks of having been beaten up.” Of the 4,100 expellees on these three transports, 524 were admitted directly to hospital on arrival.25 Once again, the camp commandant reported to his superiors that most of the women in these transports were multiple rape victims, as were some of the children.26 A British Army colonel meeting an expellee train at Bielefeld in April was struck by the “remarkable and terrifying fact” that nearly all the passengers had been “severely ill-treated” in th
e recent past, exhibiting “deep scars in the skull bone, fingers crippled by ill-treatment, fractures of the ribs which were more or less healed, and partly large [sic] bloodshot spots on their backs and their legs. The latter was also seen with women.”27 There too a “high percentage” of expellees was being sent straight to hospital upon arrival.28
A detailed report on the first Swallow train received at Detmold in Westphalia paints a typical picture of “organized expulsions” from the Recovered Territories at this time. Of the 1,507 expellees on board, 516 were children, many of whom were barefoot. The passengers had been awakened from their beds during the night of February 20, 1946, and told to be ready to leave at ten minutes’ notice, which proved insufficient for many of the parents to be able to find their children’s shoes. The Germans were brought to a camp, where the men were taken away; nothing more was known of them. The women and children were then marched to a railway station, their baggage being taken from them and some beaten along the way. They were then placed on a train, which did not arrive in Detmold until March 3. “Passing through the Soviet zone the Reds had given some of them coffee, about a pound of bread and some sugar, which was all the food they had for the ten days of their journey.”29 Surprisingly few deaths had occurred in the course of this evacuation.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 25