More commonly still, the problem was not too few Germans to deport, but too many. The continuing prevalence of “wild expulsions,” and of Germans lacking any means of support presenting themselves at the assembly camps or embarkation points for expulsion or simply in hope of a meal, could also wreck the PUR’s already shambolic arrangements. Often keyed up to a fever pitch of nationalist fervor by “All Germans Out Now” demonstrations—the Recovered Territories Department of the Polish Socialist Party organized manifestations in fifty-four cities and towns across the country in December 1946 alone—local authorities or militia units were prone to take matters into their own hands, clearing their own districts of Germans of all categories and either depositing them at the nearest assembly camp or organizing unofficial removals to the zonal frontier. The numbers affected by these ongoing “wild expulsions” were significant: in the month of June 1946 alone, 4,447 Germans from Gdańsk voivodeship, 4,268 from Western Pomerania, and 3,694 from the central Polish voivodeships were disposed of in this way.67 The Soviets, too, while continuing to hold Germans back for their own purposes, had an unfortunate tendency abruptly to disgorge those whose services they no longer required onto the streets adjacent to expulsion facilities, whether or not the Poles were ready to accept responsibility for the cast-offs. Even after the internment camp at Koszalin closed in April 1947, Red Army trucks continued to deposit surplus German laborers, like unwanted puppies, on the outskirts of the town.68 But even these clearances were dwarfed by the hordes of Germans who, in defiance of regulations requiring them to remain at their places of origin until called up for expulsion, descended upon the assembly camps or points of embarkation on their own initiative. Frequently they did so because—having been compelled to leave their homes by force or intimidation, lacking ration cards or means of support—swift expulsion or, at the least, admission to an assembly camp was the only alternative to starvation. Just as often, though, Germans who had already resigned themselves to the inevitable reasoned that the sooner they began their new life in postwar Germany the better. These individuals, a British officer thought, were usually from “what, in England, would be described as the Middle Classes.”69 Many were undeterred by the penalties specified for those who sought to jump the expulsion queues, recognizing that local authorities were often willing to turn a blind eye to Germans prepared to collaborate in the process of their own removal. In some cases, those same local authorities earned considerable sums by selling “official” passes to expellees permitting them to leave the country as quickly as they pleased.
These “out of turn” expellees, though, caused immense headaches for MZO personnel and receiving powers alike. By May 1946, the number of “unofficials” at the embarkation points designated for transports to the British zone had built up to such an extent that the complements of “grossly overcrowded” trains were threatening to cause “a breakdown of camp staff … and probable mortality” at the Marienthal and Alversdorf reception centers in the British zone.70 The beleaguered Major Boothby, in response, pointed out that the problem was more acute still at his end. A thousand “unofficial” expellees were descending upon Kaławsk every day. Fifteen hundred were camping out at the railway station, often for days at a time. The Poles disclaimed all responsibility for feeding or accommodating them, and “cases of collapse” from hunger and illness were everyday occurrences.71 Although he made formal protests to the civil authorities, Boothby did not believe that they were making the slightest effort to check the influx.72 “Rather to the contrary, in fact, as it saves a lot of work in conveying people to recognised assembly points and entraining them there.”73 In the circumstances, the British liaison teams considered that they had no alternative but to fill the trains to bursting point, and beyond, so as to prevent an immediate public health catastrophe. “Legally,” Boothby conceded, “the ‘extras’ can be refused and turned back. In fact, no Englishman could do such a thing.”74
Understandable as the liaison teams’ willingness to wink at breaches of the CRX agreement on humane conditions of transfer may have been, this permissive policy gave the Polish authorities every opportunity to continue ignoring its requirements, of which they proceeded to take full advantage. Paradoxically, the best rolling stock was usually reserved for expulsions to the Soviet zone, although the journey times involved were much shorter. This was largely due to the fact that the Soviets did not hesitate to refuse admission to any train that did not conform to the standards they had laid down for acceptance. The difference was evidenced by the trains themselves. The normal allocation for each transport of 1,500–1,750 expellees to East Germany was fifty-five wagons.75 By contrast, the trains provided by Warsaw for removals to the British zone typically consisted of just thirty wagons, and in some cases as few as seventeen—frequently lacking doors or, on occasion, roofs.76 “This subject has been taken to the Polish Officials but they reply that … the Russians are supposed to supply transport, so we are compelled to overcrowd every train.”77 While the British liaison teams attempted to hold the number of expellees on each transport to 1,750, they acknowledged that they usually failed to do so. Instead, complements of 2,000–2,200 on each train were the norm, with still higher loads—in excess of 80 persons per wagon—far from unusual. The inevitable consequence was much needless suffering at best, and at worst deaths through heat exhaustion or suffocation.
Whether they made their own way to the assembly and embarkation points or were sent there by the Polish authorities, expellees faced hazards at every stage of their journey. Tens of thousands of them spent weeks or months shuttling through one assembly camp after another, as the authorities engaged in a game of “pass the parcel” to relieve local overcrowding. The greatest perils existed during these intercamp transfers within Poland, with militia bands, who sometimes operated in collusion with the train guards, preying on the transports en route. Most commonly the bandits’ objectives were robbery or rape, but the lawlessness of the Recovered Territories also provided ample opportunity to run lucrative protection rackets. On one transport from Świdwin in Pomerania to Szczecin, the guards solicited and obtained a “voluntary contribution” from expellees to ensure their safety.78 On another, a band of would-be plunderers from the Red Army ambushed a train late at night as it stood at the Świdnica station and tried to break into the wagons with crowbars. The guards, resentful of this Soviet incursion upon what they considered ought to remain a wholly Polish enterprise, began shooting at the raiders, and a full-scale firefight ensued. After the Soviets had been driven off, the Polish noncommissioned officer warned the German transport leader that “there would be incidents until Kohlfurt.” He added that the train would stop overnight at Chojnów “in a completely evacuated area. If the refugees preferred to be in safety they [would] have to make financial sacrifices to the Polish guard.” The transport leader gave the NCO fourteen hundred Reichsmarks and his wedding ring to insure against further incursions, though this did not prevent the demand for money being repeated once the train reached Kaławsk.79
The assembly camps themselves were no safe havens. Originally intended to accommodate expellees for a day or two before their departure, by the autumn of 1946 each was housing thousands of people, often put out to forced labor during the daytime, for weeks or months. The British ambassador, who viewed Szczecin’s two assembly camps in April and considered them adequate for a short stay, was dismayed by how far conditions had deteriorated when he revisited one of them in October. “Since I have been promoted to be Ambassador I have smelt many nasty smells, but nothing to equal the immense and over-powering stench of this camp.” The commandant confessed to Cavendish-Bentinck that he was unable to feed the long-stay inmates, and that he had been releasing them to try to find work with local employers in exchange for food. The normally Germanophobe ambassador advised Wolski that the camp should be closed down, fumigated, and repaired.80 In the event this was never done, and the assembly camps continued to be centers of hunger and disease. The resulting mortality
was on a significant scale. At the Gumieńce camp in Sczcecin, fifty-two inmates died, “mainly through undernourishment but [in] one or two cases … also through frost-bite” in the month of January 1947 alone.81 Its twin on the northern side of the city, Golęcino (Frauendorf), had to be temporarily closed due to a pair of typhoid fever outbreaks in February and March.82 Other assembly camps were still worse. Ninety-five inmates died of disease in the month of February at the Dantesque facility at Świdwin, which lacked water, heat, bedding, intact roofs, and medical supplies; as the local PUR medical officer of health reported, “the grounds of the entire camp are atrociously polluted with waste of various kinds, e.g. human excrement.” Nearly thirty-five hundred cases of illness were reported from the camp in the same month.83
Many MZO and PUR officials on the ground were no more satisfied with the conditions of the assembly camps than the foreign dignitaries and journalists. Captain Edmund Kinsner, a roving MZO camp inspector, discovered massive levels of overcrowding at Wrocław, a facility that he thought was to all appearances being run for the sole benefit of the corrupt camp administration. On the day of his visit in July 1946, there were 4,213 Germans in residence; another 1,778 were admitted before his departure that night. A further 800 expellees were turned away because there was no room for them and told to return to their places of origin, notwithstanding the fact that their homes had already been allocated to Poles. Still another 1,300 were scheduled to arrive the following day. Those admitted, Kinsner reported, were being systematically robbed by representatives of the state Tax Office, who conducted individual searches of the expellees in defiance of MZO regulations.84 At Świdwin, about 1,000 of the expellees admitted in December 1946 were still there when two MZO officials conducted an inspection the following May.85 Kazimierz Kuźmicki, Deputy Commissar for German Repatriation Affairs in Wrocław, found that the story was the same in the Lower Silesian assembly camps of Legnica, Jawor, and Świdnica, the population of the last of which grew by more than 500 during the six hours he spent there.86 Virtually no administration at all, corrupt or otherwise, could, according to Kuźmicki, be discerned at Ząbkowice Śląskie (Frankenstein), a camp with 1,500 inmates. The militia commander theoretically in charge was rarely if ever to be seen; and although his subordinates were conducting an illicit traffic in Reichsmarks confiscated from the expellees, their invariable state of dipsomania rendered them so ungovernable that nothing could be expected of them other than hooliganism and indiscipline.87
Lastly, the embarkation points at which the expellees were entrained presented the same general picture of mismanagement, hunger, disease, and ill-treatment The British liaison team at Kaławsk made numerous protests to their Polish counterparts over abuses they had discovered: pregnant women who had been beaten with rubber truncheons by their guards while working as forced laborers laying railway tracks; rapes of female expellees by militiamen; and failure to provide food for those awaiting transport. Although the Inspection Department of the MZO rolled its eyes at these and similar representations by the two British liaison teams, marveling over their insistence on “the most minute details” of the expulsion protocol and their seeming anxiety to take the Germans “under their solicitous protection, to the extent of frequently threatening to withdraw and thereby disrupt the evacuation,” Polish officials on the ground conceded the general accuracy of these criticisms.88 The commandant at Kaławsk compiled a similar list of the problems with which he had to deal for a meeting with the Commissar of German Repatriation Affairs. The militia supposedly providing security were undisciplined, trafficking in currency with or stealing from the Germans. The trains lacked adequate rations and were habitually late and overcrowded. Necessary documents were not provided (both the British and the Poles agreed that trains coming from Wrocław were the worst organized in the whole of Silesia). The infirmary lacked medicines, and officials were often absent from their posts. It was unsurprising, then, that the MZO should have reported with some alarm in August that a “pretty substantial number of deaths of German repatriates” was occurring at Kaławsk, and requested that more careful measures be taken to prevent a possible epidemic there.89
Confronted with conditions like these and their inability to do much to alleviate them, morale among the more conscientious expulsion administrators underwent a visible decline. Inspector Kinsner was especially angered by the undisguised contempt for his authority displayed by staff at the assembly camps. Because so many items confiscated from expellees at a facility in Wrocław never featured on the returns submitted to the ministry, he decided to compile his own inventory during an inspection in November 1946. Even as he added items to his list, he reported furiously to his superiors, the camp staff did not hesitate to filch others from under his very nose: in the most blatant example, an electric oven beside which he was standing “grew legs and disappeared” as he gave dictation to his assistant.90 Inspector Józef Lipiński of the MZO simply turned in his resignation, tired of being robbed on the job by those he was attempting to supervise.91 The camp staffs, too, had their own grounds for complaint. Militiamen and soldiers at loose ends and lacking money in their pockets quickly discovered that the assembly camps contained unlimited reservoirs of free labor that could be hired out to farmers and other local employers at cut-price rates. Accordingly, they developed a profitable sideline in “sticking up” the camp staff, temporarily kidnapping a few dozen of their inmates, putting them out to manual labor, and drinking the proceeds. In one such incident, two carloads of militiamen swooped upon the Glubczyce camp on the Polish-Czechoslovak border. The raiders in the first vehicle sought out Adam Targosz, the PUR officer in charge, and held him at gunpoint. Their accomplices in the second carried off between forty and fifty of his Germans in trucks and hired them out for work in the fields.92
In such an atmosphere of general lawlessness, all kinds of moneymaking schemes and scams proliferated. Inspector Lipiński collected for his own records a “sheaf” of improper laissez-passers issued, usually for fat fees, by local officials authorizing their German bearers to proceed independently to railheads at the border.93 Some camps levied admission charges upon expellees; those who failed to pay up were left to fend for themselves without food or shelter and denied access to transports.94 At other camps, boxes, carts, or stoves were sold to inmates; confiscated from them hours or days later; and resold to their newly arriving successors.95 An officer at one of the assembly camps in Wrocław displayed a price list on the wall offering such services as expulsion out of turn, transport in sanitarium cars, and the opportunity to circumvent the mandatory baggage inspection for 500 zlotys all-inclusive. For the more impecunious à la carte expellee, sanitarium car berths alone could be had for 100 zlotys.96 Less fortunate Germans scheduled for expulsion could find themselves removed from the transports and returned to assembly camps to make room for others who had paid PUR officials to place them at the head of the queue.97 (This was the principal explanation behind repeated British and Soviet complaints that nominal lists provided with transports failed to tally with the names given by arriving expellees.) Train crews sold, rather than issued, the rations provided for the journey to passengers; on one transport to the Soviet zone, mothers of hungry children were charged up to 120 Reichsmarks ($12) per slice of bread.98 Polish soldiers extracted payoffs by stopping trains after their departure and threatening to load so many additional Germans into the wagons that the expellees already aboard would be compelled to stand for the entire duration of a journey that could last a week or more, unless they were paid off by the existing passengers.99 Others persuaded Germans arriving at the camps to turn over any sums of money they still had concealed about their persons by issuing receipts for the currency which, they were promised, could be redeemed at any German bank on arrival. The receipts, needless to say, were worthless.100
For venal expulsion officials, however, the most profitable opportunities were to be found in collaborating with Zionist organizations working to circumvent the restrictions
imposed by the British authorities on emigration from Europe to Palestine. Despite the virtual annihilation of the Jewish population of central Europe, anti-Semitism remained after the war at pathologically high levels. Nowhere was this more evident than in Poland, where even Ambassador Cavendish-Bentinck appreciatively remarked in September 1945 that “The slaughter of Jews in this country has made the towns a good deal cleaner and has certainly decreased the number of middle-men.”101 Once the war was over, large numbers of Holocaust survivors, facing continued pogroms like the ones at Kielce and Kraków, became convinced that they could never again hope to live in safety in Europe.102 They therefore sought by every possible means to flee to the Holy Land. The British government, which had administered Palestine under a League of Nations mandate since 1919, was no less determined to prevent them. Fearing a renewal of the violent Arab backlash against further new arrivals that had led to widespread rioting in the 1930s, the British imposed a rigid quota of fifteen hundred Jewish immigrants entering Palestine per month, far below the number who wanted to settle there.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 27