For European and United States–based Zionist bodies alike, the beginning of organized expulsions offered a golden opportunity to transfer the nearly 200,000 surviving Polish Jews to Germany, from whence they could be transported via Italy to Palestine. A Viennese-based underground Jewish agency, the Bricha, had already been active in providing money and documents enabling would-be emigrants to pass themselves off as Greek citizens. With the collaboration and financial backing of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, it now began operations on a much larger scale. In Vienna, Bricha officials like the future Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal recruited collaborators among the occupying forces, humanitarian agencies like UNRRA, and even among the German expellee population themselves, whose local knowledge of the border regions could be put to good use.103 A Polish Bricha leader negotiated a secret agreement with the deputy defense minister in Warsaw, General Marian Spychalski, under which Jews would be allowed to leave the country without exit permits from July 30, 1946.104 In the three months that followed, more than sixty-six thousand Jews left Poland with the Bricha’s assistance. About half were allowed to transit openly through Czechoslovakia, with the connivance of ministers Gottwald and Masaryk, to the U.S. occupation zone of Germany; many of the remainder entered the British zone as bogus “Swallow” expellees.
The possibility that the mass expulsions might be exploited for this purpose had been foreseen by the Western Allies. As early as December 1945, Ernest Bevin had inquired whether Jews had been arriving with the Sudetendeutsch expellees entering Austria.105 Around the same time, Robin Hankey of the British Embassy in Warsaw recommended threatening the Polish government with a postponement of Swallow unless it took effective action to prevent Jewish “infiltration.”106 The problem, though, did not seem urgent; and it was not until the second half of May 1946, after the Polish prime minister, Edward Osóbka-Morawki, publicly declared that the government would place no obstacles in the way of Jews seeking to leave the country, that the exodus commenced in appreciable numbers. On May 26 the British vice consul in Szczecin reported widespread “consternation” among Polish colonists in the town at the number of Jews arriving from the lands east of the Bug.107 The Gentile settlers’ dismay was held in check, however, by the belief that the Jews would quickly leave for the west. This expectation was justified, and within a matter of weeks the British liaison teams began reporting the arrival of spurious expellees on a large scale. As a Military Government officer complained,
this detachment has been placed in an embarrassing position by the arrival of Jews from Poland bearing certificates signed by the so-called Jewish Committee of Breslau certifying that these Poles are Germans…. Some of the Jews sent here by this Committee can hardly speak German yet they carry papers signed by this Jewish Committee stating that they are Germans and, in some cases, that they left Germany because of Hitler’s attitude to the Jews.
It is significant that, whereas practically all Germans entering the British Zone have been denuded of their valuables and new or almost new clothing, these Jews arrive in a state of comparative opulence. This present batch of 30 Jews who travelled in one wagon from New Poland had very extensive wardrobes composed of absolutely new materials. The men were carrying an average of one dozen new shirts each in addition to silk pyjamas, silk underwear and silk handkerchiefs. The women were equally well catered for with silk underwear, silk stockings, etc. All were absolutely firm in their statements that they had passed through the Polish customs at Kaławsk and that no item of finery had been taken from them.108
Not all Jewish would-be emigrants were in so fortunate a condition. Major Boothby ejected 252 Jews from one train at Kaławsk with considerable reluctance, noting that “their sufferings over the past years were only too apparent.”109 These persons, though, had attempted to cross without credentials identifying them as Germans, and were easily detected. It was a mistake the Bricha did not repeat. Later parties of supposed expellees were supplied with “forged papers on a vast scale”—so many, indeed, that the embarrassment of documentary riches occasionally had unfortunate results. “When I turned 40 Viennese Jews off a train a Polish-Jewish Officer came to me and said that they had only showed Austrian papers because they thought they would get better treatment that way. Might they now show me their German papers? They remained Austrians.”110
For every party turned back, though, dozens more were able to proceed without interference. A British officer investigating the influx considered that the “organisation of parties is a masterpiece in an almost completely disrupted country like Poland.” Payment on a lavish scale, in sterling and dollars, smoothed the emigrants’ path out of the country and across states of transit like Czechoslovakia and Hungary. So efficient, indeed, was the Jewish network that “many Polish Gentiles of a normally considered good type of citizen … [who] cannot obtain visas in the normal way … have been known to get them and leave the country by applying under Jewish names!”111 Although the numbers of “infiltrators” escaping Poland by these means were comparatively modest when set against the total number of Swallow expellees—probably fewer than fifty thousand in total—the realization that nearly all were likely to end up in Palestine caused the British authorities to expend a great deal of energy in trying to check the influx. It did not take them long to confirm the existence of an elaborate and well-funded organization behind the sudden upsurge in Jews masquerading as Germans. Servicemen in the Polish, Czechoslovak, British, and U.S. armies, as well as UNRRA and Red Cross officials, were discreetly scrutinized for indications that they were recipients of Bricha largesse. Military intelligence cast suspicion on the commanding officer of the British liaison team at Szczecin on account of his Jewishness. But the authorities found it more difficult to convert suspicions into proof. All efforts to obtain definite information, the chief of the British Army’s Intelligence Division in Germany fulminated in July 1946, had failed because “the moment an investigation comes into non-Aryan [sic] hands a blank wall is reached.”112
Even if inquiries had proven more successful, cutting off the flow would have been far from easy. When the problem was first addressed in the winter of 1945–46, Sir George Rendel of the Foreign Office Refugee Department, who feared that if Warsaw was allowed to get away with sending fake Jewish expellees to Germany, it and other central European governments would rapidly unleash a tidal wave of “undesirables” on the British zone, had advocated a hard line. Should eastern European Jews succeed in reaching Germany as expellees, he said, they should be treated as such and held in transit camps alongside the Volksdeutsche. It was true that this would have the unfortunate consequence of detaining them alongside “people who had persecuted them in the past,” but such measures might prove “the most effective deterrent to further unauthorised movement.”113 As other officials pointed out, though, quite apart from its impracticality—in July 1946 there were already almost two thousand ex-Swallow Jewish residents of the Hohne (Bergen-Belsen) displaced persons camp alone, who could hardly be made to leave other than by arresting them—the idea of according Holocaust survivors “treatment no more favourable than that accorded to the defeated enemy” would infallibly set off a firestorm of international criticism.114
An indication of the sensitivity of the Jewish question was provided by a series of cloak-and-dagger meetings between British and U.S. officers in the summer of 1946 to exchange information about the involvement of Allied and UNRRA personnel overseeing the expulsions in people smuggling. The American colonel participating in the discussions said that “the U.S. Authorities considered the subject so delicate that he was not allowed to put anything on paper.” Lieutenant General Sir Brian Robertson, deputy military governor of the British zone, found that this apprehensiveness extended to the highest level when he gave his American counterpart, General Lucius D. Clay, the name of a U.S. Army officer believed by British intelligence to be working for the Bricha. A nervous Clay confirmed that the name of the officer concerned was known to him and promis
ed to do what he could to prevent infiltration via expulsion trains, but “emphasized throughout that his instructions precluded any drastic action on his part towards Jewish refugees.”115 The British were unimpressed by what they saw as American pusillanimity in the face of Zionist pressure—Colonel Ralph Thicknesse, a senior officer administering Operation Swallow, had already placed on record his belief that the U.S. authorities’ stance in the matter was “ostensibly directed by the principles of protectors of the oppressed but in fact more probably by the power of their own Jewish-controlled newspapers”—but ultimately thought that the only solution was a complete end to organized expulsions.
Officials in the U.S. zone, for their part, were independently coming to the same conclusion. According to conventional wisdom, transfers from Czechoslovakia were the best-organized of the three major expulsion operations from the “Potsdam” countries. The shortness of the distance to be traversed simplified the process, and meant that some of the worst consequences associated with crowding masses of expellees without food or water into carriages for journeys in adverse weather conditions that might last for weeks were avoided. By and large this is correct. In a significant number of cases, however, reports from U.S. and Czechoslovak officers on the ground tell a story that in some respects was not materially different from what had already been seen with Operation Swallow.
The principal obstacle to a streamlined expulsion process in Czechoslovakia was the extraordinary degree of bureaucratic infighting and interagency conflict that marked the operation. At the outset, the Ministry of the Interior claimed precedence in organizing the expulsions, setting up a special section for the purpose headed by Dr. Antonín Kuĉera, counselor of the ministry. It was to oversee the selection of the Germans; assemble them in camps; and see that the necessary documentation, medical inspection, and personal baggage for each expellee required by the U.S. and Soviet authorities was in order. The Ministry of National Defense, represented by Colonel František Dastich, would be responsible for shipment across the border and for coordinating transports with the principal liaison officers for expulsions to the U. S. and Soviet zones, Colonel Fye and General S. N. Gorochov respectively. In practice, it proved impossible to prevent almost every ministry of the Czech government from demanding a say in the conduct of the expulsions. The young, energetic, and highly ambitious Communist head of the Settlement Office of the Czech Lands, Miroslav Kreysa, responsible for overseeing the colonization of the vacated Sudetenland, had his own ideas about the order in which removals of Germans should proceed, independent of the Interior Ministry of which his office was nominally a part.116 The Ministry of Agriculture was concerned both with the timing of German transfers, so as not to interrupt the crop-growing cycle, and the process of redistributing farmland to incoming colonists. The Ministry of Social Welfare and Labor Protection was often at odds with the Ministries of the Interior and National Defense, which it accused of taking an unnecessarily hard line with regard to especially vulnerable expellees and thereby damaging Czechoslovakia’s image abroad. The Ministry of Health was concerned about the possibility of epidemics spreading from camps and ghettoes crowded with diseased Germans, and the disruption caused to the health sector by the loss of so many highly trained German doctors and nurses. The Ministry of Justice opposed the expulsion of suspected war criminals, or persons who might be called as witnesses in trials. The economic ministries—Finance, Industry, Internal Trade, and Foreign Trade—fretted about disruption caused to Czechoslovakia’s precarious postwar recovery. The Office of the Prime Minister considered itself entitled to give instructions to all the other agencies. And at the bottom of the Czechoslovak administrative pyramid, Provincial, District, and Municipal National Committees attempted to comply with, ignored, or openly subverted the torrent of directives—often mutually contradictory—that cascaded upon them from above.
Compounding these difficulties was the fact that, as previously mentioned, the actual expulsion protocols with the U.S. and Soviet authorities were not concluded until just before the movements into the two zones were to begin, in January and June 1946, respectively. As a result, a great deal of the early planning was wasted, as it was based on scenarios that failed to materialize. The location of some assembly camps, for example, was decided at a time when some elements of the Ministry of National Defense were thinking in terms of an expulsion operation that would be completed in thirty to forty days, along routes the U.S. and Soviet authorities would not ultimately use.117 Logistical difficulties also compelled last-minute changes of plan. Due to a shortage of covered wagons, the Czechoslovaks were forced during the early summer to set down expellees at Pirna and Plauen in the Soviet zone, only six to ten miles across the border, rather than carry them to the originally agreed disembarkation point at Gera, forty miles further on.118 OMGUS officials, on the other hand, found a different solution to the problem of obtaining sufficient rolling stock. Because a very high proportion of Czechoslovakia’s own freight wagons were being used by the Soviets to carry German booty back to the USSR or to transport units of the Red Army, the Americans turned to the only significant remaining source: the freight trains employed by UNRRA to carry aid supplies into Czechslovakia. In the spring of 1946, these were pressed into service to transport the expellees to the U.S. zone. Not only did this diversion of UNRRA resources from the humanitarian purpose for which they had been provided contravene the organization’s charter, which limited its activities to “the administration of measures for the relief of victims of war,” but the logistical tangles affecting the expulsion program soon ensnared UNRRA as well. By early April, according to U.S. figures, no fewer than six thousand UNRRA freight cars were stranded in Czechoslovakia.119
As in Poland, the process of removal was also impeded from below, especially by the expansive interpretation Czechoslovak employers often gave to the definition of “essential worker.” Examples included a sixty-five-year-old man with bilateral hernias employed as a “miner”; doormen, maids, and chauffeurs classified as “indispensable labor”; and workers in a knife factory in Mikulášovice whose services were said to be vital to the Czechoslovak economy.120 The manufacturing sector, Dr. Kuĉera alleged in June 1946, was deliberately trying to obstruct or delay the transfers.121 Rudé právo too claimed that numerous cases still existed of Czechoslovaks concealing Germans from the authorities.122 Often enough, though, the government griped about the opposite problem: the carelessness of overzealous army units or District National Committees which indiscriminately threw out all the Germans of a particular locality without sparing a thought for the impact on production.
On the whole, the number of expellee deaths occurring in transit was much lower in Czechoslovakia than in the Recovered Territories. This was not only the result of shorter distances to travel, but also of the fact that the operation began in the relatively mild winter of 1945–46 and was largely completed before the far harsher conditions of 1946–47 set in. Nonetheless, the very fact that so many transports were trying to pass along a very few rail routes led to enormous bottlenecks. When expulsions to the Soviet zone commenced in June, trains were taking four days to complete the eighty-mile round trip from Tršnice to Plauen or Pirna, most of which was spent waiting to be allowed to cross the border.123 Congestion on the routes to the U.S. zone grew so severe that a shuttle service was established in May using fifty cars to transport Sudetendeutsch antifascists by road and deposit them on the far side of the zonal boundary.124 With few undamaged railway lines available, the Ministry of National Defense was forced to bring ever more circuitous routes, like the 220-mile Cheb-to-Bebra link which transited the Soviet occupation zone, into operation to meet their daily targets. Though this made for increasingly long journey times, transports taking more than a couple of days were comparative rarities during the “organized expulsions” of 1946, a marked contrast to the weeks-long odysseys that had often occurred the previous year.
This does not mean that the expulsions from Czechoslovakia came close
to satisfying the criteria laid down in the Potsdam Agreement, or those of the protocols concluded with the U.S. and Soviet authorities. As a rule they did not. A retrospective assessment by General Karel Klapálek in December 1946 of the transfer to the Soviet zone identified many shortcomings that had never been overcome (predictably, Klapálek blamed all of these on the deficiencies of the Ministry of the Interior). A very large number of Sudetendeutsche had been transported while suffering from infectious diseases contracted in the camps: at the Meziměstí assembly camp in eastern Moravia, up to five inmates were dying of disease each week in January 1946.125 Trains were persistently dispatched with insufficient rations for the journey, something of which the Red Army complained repeatedly. Endless difficulties had arisen with the composition of trains, with unusable, incompatible, or obsolete wagons being supplied. This had often made it impossible to transport expellees’ baggage, eliciting another flood of protests from the Soviet authorities.126 Other official reports spoke of systematic pillage of expellees by both military and civilian personnel; of ethnic Czechs and Slovaks being included in the transports; and of continued unauthorized expulsions by local authorities under the guise of “voluntary transfers.”
OMGUS officials had their own lengthy list of grievances to present. The Expulsion Officer at Furth im Wald, Captain H. W. Lambert, gained a particularly comprehensive insight into the many ingenious methods particular District National Committees, as well as the Czechoslovak government and army, used to conceal their violations of the protocols. Like the British, U.S. observers were immediately struck by the high percentage of unemployables arriving in the transports from Czechoslovakia. A preliminary survey in June 1946 found that “not more than 15% were men of 15 years or over and capable of work”; by the time the operation was concluded, the number of able-bodied and skilled workers who had been included in the expulsions was described as “ridiculously low.”127 The conclusion that productive individuals were being held back in violation of the requirement that families not be separated was obvious; according to U.S. estimates, this was happening in up to a third of all cases. One of the principal loopholes Czechoslovak authorities exploited was the provision in the agreement that any German sentenced to prison sentences of more than a year for war crimes was not to be considered as having been “held back”; instead, the rest of the family would be admitted to the U.S. zone on production of a certificate from the court attesting to the conviction of the missing family member. Captain Lambert remarked upon the curious fact that trains from districts like Bruntál always contained an exceptionally high proportion of such families, and that “in the majority of cases the men were skilled workers who were sentenced just before the families were expelled. Stranger still, they continued to work at their trades in their same positions while serving the prison terms.” In some cases the District National Committees did not even bother to provide a copy of the court record, merely supplying a note promising that the missing individual would be convicted at some point in the future. U.S. officials found that rejecting such families for admission was pointless, as they “would be shipped again with the next train and with the proper papers, thus mainly working a hardship on the expellees. The Czech authorities always went to some length to point this out.”128
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