Virtually every report remarked upon the extraordinarily high proportion of elderly persons included in the transports. Two British reception officers, meeting a Swallow train of fourteen hundred expellees at Bad Segeberg in April 1946, found a scene that “resembled an Emmett drawing in Punch…. Very many old men and women, with only a few months to live. Some of these could hardly walk; most of them needed to be lifted down from the train…. We saw only 2 fit young men and we walked the whole length of the train.”30 At the other end of the age spectrum, military observers noted an “alarming absence of young babies under 2 years of age,” a consequence of high infant mortality caused by starvation of the expellee population in the Recovered Territories.31 A series of statistical investigations in March and April made clear that the Polish authorities were taking the opportunity to rid themselves of the unproductive element of the German population, retaining employable males for compulsory labor. Only about 8 percent of the expellees entering the British zone from the Recovered Territories were fit men; the proportion in the same category arriving in the Soviet zone at the same time was estimated by a Red Army officer at 10 percent.32
Of no less concern to the British was the shambolic manner in which Operation Swallow was being administered on the Polish side of the frontier. The Warsaw authorities persistently failed to provide rations for the expellees during their journey or for the day of their arrival in Germany, as their agreement with CRX obliged them to do; even when the British offered to supply the food themselves, the Poles often refused to accept it. As one investigation found, to feed 37,000 freshly arrived expellees for a day at Alversdorf camp the Poles had sent along 198 loaves, 180 kilograms of meat, 10 kilograms of ersatz coffee, and 4 kilograms of onions.33 Sometimes the Polish train guards themselves were not provided for, and were obliged “to beg for rations on arrival.” Nor were the guards able to prevent the Soviets from taking advantage of the passage of Swallow trains through their occupation zone to dump into the British zone persons of whom, for one reason or another, they wanted to be rid. In one instance reported by the Polish authorities, the Red Army stopped the train at Völpke in Saxony-Anhalt and forced 70 Germans, not from the Recovered Territories, on board.34 In another, a standoff at Wittenberg between Soviet forces attempting to place additional passengers aboard an expulsion train and the Polish guards ended tragically when in the course of a heated argument a Red Army soldier accidentally shot a German child.35 The same problem was noted at Pöppendorf, where a random check of 4,000 new arrivals found 195 persons whose names did not appear on the nominal rolls accompanying them, while 100 others listed had gone missing.36
More vexatious still was the train guards’ general trigger-happiness. The crossing points in the British zone were perennial flashpoints, as departing Germans took the opportunity to “heap insults on the heads of the guards” as soon as they passed beyond Polish jurisdiction. It was, however, unwise to yield to such temptations. Many train guards were as quick to respond to any provocation in the British or Soviet zones as in the Recovered Territories themselves.37 By no means, moreover, were Germans the only targets of Polish ire. As a result of these incidents, the commandant at Kaławsk noted, “the Polish Guards, who detrain here, return [from the British zone] very angry and this places members of this unit in no small danger.”38 In April the British submitted a formal complaint to Warsaw that guards on trains departing Marienthal were in the habit of “opening fire with sub machine guns. This has happened on numerous occasions since [the] start of Swallow.”39 In another incident two months later, an intoxicated train guard at Szczecin opened fire with his machine-pistol as Germans were being marshaled for departure, killing a female expellee.40 It was hardly surprising, then, that British officers should have concluded that “the train guards appear to be worthless and utterly undisciplined,” and recommended that they be ordered to stand down whenever an expulsion train halted at a station in the British zone.41 At the end of June, Major Boothby made a direct appeal to Wolski to stop assigning train guard duties to members of the militia, which, he undiplomatically observed, was “composed of youths who have neither military discipline nor military training,” and to reserve the job instead for “disciplined soldiers.”42
Although the logistics of transfer from Poland to the Soviet zone were less complicated, in view of the shorter distance to be traveled, the USSR’s experience of dealing with the Poles—as evidenced by the litany of formal complaints with which the Red Army began to bombard the Ministry for the Recovered Territories (MZO)—did not differ greatly from what the British had already encountered. Though large-scale removals would not begin until midsummer, army commanders in the Soviet zone did try to accommodate their Polish counterparts by accepting a modest number of transports before then. They soon came to regret their helpfulness. Thus in early March the Soviet Military Administration in Germany demanded to know why a train had arrived with 379 fewer passengers than shown on the nominal roll, and how it was that the train guards had apparently done nothing to prevent them from absconding en route. Three days later, the Soviets protested the Poles’ action in rounding up some 350 Germans from the town of Toruń and, without notice, transporting them to Frankfurt an der Oder, and unceremoniously dumping them in the city center.43 The inadequacy of food provided to expellees featured prominently in the Soviet list of grievances also.44 Consequently, British expulsion officials on the ground were surprised to find that their Soviet counterparts, confronting many of the same problems with the Polish authorities, were uncharacteristally helpful and cooperative. In some cases, Red Army officers even took it upon themselves to conduct medical inspections of trains bound for the West and, when necessary, to give the British liaison teams “a friendly warning that, in their opinion, conditions were not satisfactory.”45
Only two months after the beginning of the Polish “organized expulsions,” then, the operation had already degenerated into such a state of near chaos that officials in the reception areas had begun to press for its immediate suspension. The British mood was not improved by the tenor of the statements about the transfers emanating from the Polish official media. At the end of March, Radio Warsaw unwisely reassured listeners that they need not be concerned about the economic effect of the expulsions because the persons transferred thus far “were mostly nonworkers.” The same broadcast claimed that the departing Germans were always given ample notice and “allowed to take all the belongings they could carry. In practice they have been taking a great deal more.” The expellees were leaving “in distinctly cheerful mood, amid laughter and jokes…. Not infrequently Germans have expressed eloquent thanks to the Polish authorities. This should be noted by certain foreign circles which cannot find words strong enough to commiserate with the Germans.” Radio Warsaw went on to chide the British for impeding the pace of transfers by refusing to allow the Poles to squeeze a greater number of expellees into each railway wagon than was specified in the CRX agreement. “[T]his change would require the consent of the British authorities who so far, have shown more concern for the Germans’ comfort than for our facilities.”46
Contradicting his formerly unsympathetic attitude to the sufferings of Germans, Jack Troutbeck of the Foreign Office responded to the many reports of Polish failures to live up to their agreements by suggesting that the British “might take a leaf out of the American book” and require the Polish authorities to ensure that minimal standards respecting the conduct of the expulsions were observed. In default of compliance, “we should cut off transport and close down transfer routes.”47 Bevin concurred with this hardline approach, and Ambassador Cavendish-Bentinck at the Warsaw Embassy was told on April 10 to threaten the Poles with suspension of Operation Swallow and to inform them that “as we control the transport, we have no intention of continuing to accept immigrants in the conditions which have hitherto prevailed.”48 The ambassador was aghast at this uncompromising instruction, which threatened to undermine the rapport he believed he had established with th
e Polish government. In a flurry of telegrams to London, he pleaded Warsaw’s case. It was inappropriate, he argued, to apply Western concepts of human rights to Slavs. “Whilst the conditions under which the Polish are expelling Germans may seem to us inhumane, the Polish—like the Russians—have different standards from ourselves.”49 The following day, he made a special visit to an assembly camp at Szczecin to view the expulsion facilities. What he saw there persuaded him, he reported to London, that “the Poles are not to blame” for any difficulties that had arisen. Deaths and births in transit were the result of sick people and pregnant women concealing their condition so as to avoid being separated from their families. The reason that women, children, and the elderly constituted the overwhelming majority of expellees, he believed, was that “there are very few able-bodied male Germans” left in the Recovered Territories. Cavendish-Bentinck also enlisted the support of Frank Savery, onetime British consul general in Warsaw, who advised the Foreign Office that “it looks as if British public opinion had been led up the garden-path by the German propaganda.”50
Officials in London did not find these defenses of the Poles especially persuasive. The deplorable condition in which expellees were arriving was not a figment of German propaganda, but an observable fact with whose all too tangible consequences the overstretched British authorities in the reception areas were struggling to cope. Polish radio had already confirmed that a definite policy existed of holding back employable males for compulsory labor, and that expulsions in cities like Wrocław had been halted altogether as a result.51 As for the notion that a different definition of humanitarianism applied to Eastern Europe, one British official commented sourly, “We are always being told what an essentially Christian people the Poles are. Could they not for once behave like Christians?”52 But the Ambassador’s questioning of his instructions did give hardliners in London a breathing-space in which to coordinate their response. Denis Allen of the Foreign Office, who had counseled against “being grandmotherly” during the Czechoslovak “wild expulsions” of the previous year, strongly backed Cavendish-Bentinck. “He has repeatedly warned us that the charge of undue tenderness towards the Germans is virtually the only item of the current anti-British propaganda campaign which never fails to evoke a response from almost all sections of Polish opinion.”53 British representatives in the Control Commission for Germany also recommended taking a more understanding approach with the Poles, who, they pointed out, had confessed on April 29 that they had indeed been guilty of holding back fit men and promised to modify this practice in the near future.54 In the end, raison d’étât triumphed over the complaints of Military Government in the British zone. Bevin sent a countermanding order to Cavendish-Bentinck on May 7, asking him merely to “emphasise informally” to Warsaw that “both we and they are likely to come under strong criticism from world opinion about these transfers” unless conditions improved.55 In the meantime, the British liaison teams at Kaławsk and Szczecin were instructed to refuse onward clearance to any train not in compliance with the CRX criteria agreed with the Poles three months previously.56
In reality, as both the British and the Poles fully understood, this was an empty threat. So immense was the tidal wave of humanity bearing down upon the two embarkation points each day that any attempt to exclude all but a handful of the most vulnerable expellees quickly resulted in a backlog of terrifying proportions. As Lieutenant Colonel Growse, Boothby’s predecessor as head of the liaison team at Kaławsk, explained, “Once let there be a residue left on the station after the departure of the second train [each day] and this will go on increasing daily until eventually the whole town is flooded by a multitude of homeless and half-starved Germans.”57 This had in fact already occurred in Szczecin. One of the city’s two assembly camps, a disused sugar factory in the western suburb of Gumieńce (Stettin-Scheune), lacked windows, doors, furniture, or floor covering; robberies or rapes of the inhabitants at the hands of the People’s Militia were frequent occurrences. Gumieńce had been intended to accommodate expellees for between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. By early April, trains were taking so long to return from the British zone that the camp population ballooned to more than eight thousand, nearly three times its stated capacity, and the supply of food ran out.58 So bad were the conditions in this camp that the Soviets demanded in 1946 that the Polish authorities refurbish the buildings and take action to prevent the spread of disease by isolating sick expellees in hospital. The Poles refused, advising Soviet officials that “most of the Germans were reaching Szczecin completely exhausted and weakened, and that if all of them were to be hospitalized, Szczecin would become a hospital town.”59
The problem of overcrowding—of the camps, the trains and ships, and the reception areas—was to bedevil Operation Swallow throughout its year-long existence. It was, however, to a significant degree a problem of Britain’s own making. After the idea of making a formal protest to Warsaw was abandoned, the British representatives on CRX turned to the opposite strategy. Instead of seeking to restrict the intake to a level that could be accommodated—a policy that would, admittedly, have prolonged the transfer operation into the indefinite future—CRX officials agreed to a Polish request at the end of April to increase the daily rate of acceptances from five thousand to eight thousand. While this was still fewer than the ten thousand who, according to the original plan, were to be expelled each day once Swallow reached its summertime peak, the hope was that an all-out effort, in spite of the difficulties, might enable the program to be completed before the onset of another winter. Defensible though the reasoning behind it may have been, this decision meant that any prospect of imposing a degree of control over the conditions under which expulsions took place evaporated. Already burdened beyond its capacity, the machinery of mass expulsion in the Recovered Territories was reduced to its crudest and most basic form: the cramming of as many bodies into railway wagons as could physically be wrestled inside. In a perpetual crisis atmosphere, with the equivalent of the population of a small- to medium-sized town descending upon the railheads every day, there was neither time nor resources for anything more elaborate. Increased suffering and higher mortality among the expellees was the inevitable result. The British expulsion administrators, however, consoled themselves with the reflection that an even greater number might die, of starvation or abuse, if they stayed very much longer in Poland.
If the British and Soviets struggled to cope with the logistical problems with which the mass expulsion program confronted them, their difficulties were as dust in the balance compared with the challenges faced by the Polish repatriation agency PUR. Its records testify to the almost incredible disorganization, low morale, and, in many cases, physical danger with which its underpaid and unappreciated employees had to deal each day. In principle, the process of expulsion ought to have proceeded according to an orderly plan. According to MZO circulars drawn up for the use of local officials, nonincarcerated Germans were to be left in situ until the category to which they belonged was called up for removal. In order of priority, those scheduled for deportation were the unemployed and unproductive; “disruptive elements”; agricultural laborers on Polish-owned farms; employees of private businesses; unskilled workers; dispossessed peasants; and all remaining Germans. Following notification by the MZO, Germans from one of these categories in a given district would either be ordered to report at an assembly point at a stated time, usually by posters placed on walls twenty-four hours in advance, or be rounded up by militia or army units. In either case, they would be taken to an internment camp or railway station, when they would turn over the keys to their houses or apartments and any savings deposit books, stock certificates, or insurance policies in their names. They would also be searched on arrival for excess baggage or contraband, both of which would likewise be forfeited to the state. (The definition of “contraband” was normally elastic; as a female doctor testified, on her departure “the custom-house officers even took the women’s knickers [underpants].”)60
They would then be transported to an assembly camp close to one of the main embarkation points—most often Kaławsk or Szczecin for transfers to the British zone, Tuplice (Lubusz) or Kaławsk for those to the Soviet zone—and, after a stay of a day or two, be placed on board the train or ship that would carry them to their destination in Germany. A “car leader” in each wagon, and a “transport leader” in each train, chosen by the expellees themselves, would be appointed to help maintain good order and discipline throughout the journey, and to make any necessary representations on behalf of their fellows to the officials in charge of the operation. Any robberies or violations of the expellees’ human rights in the course of the process, the regulations stated, were to be immediately notified to the proper authorities.61
As MZO and PUR officials reported, however, hardly any expulsions from Poland followed this orderly pattern. The first complications arose with the roundups. Soviet and Polish employers of cheap or free German labor were highly reluctant to be deprived of it. “The Poles … are exploiting these people and are very loath to see them go. They realise that the Germans are good workers, their demands to-day are nil and their upkeep negligible.”62 Giving advance notice of planned deportation actions merely provided an opportunity for these elements to hide their workers until the danger had passed. The Soviets, according to Polish authorities, treated the edicts of the Warsaw government with particular disdain. Registers of German labor supposedly employed by them bore “no relationship to reality.”63 Red Army officers stashed their favorite Germans in barracks, cars, or other places inaccessible to the Polish authorities whenever PUR representatives were in the vicinity. Cases were recorded of Red Army troops opening fire on Polish officials coming to confiscate “their” Germans.64 Potential expellees concealed themselves, or their property, in the cities or took to the forests until the clearance operations had concluded. In one sweep in Szczecin province that had been intended to round up 900 expellees, only 232 were found. Polish enterprises, too, were discovered to be busily falsifying their records in the hope of retaining their Germans’ services. Some were maintained “off the books”; in other cases inessential workers—sweepers, nightwatchmen, or hairdressers—were classified as “specialist labor.”65 And individual Poles, sympathetic to the Germans’ plight, sometimes tried to shield them from expulsion, “even going so far as hiding them in their own apartments.”66
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