Even more frequently, expellees were coached to lie about the reason for separated family members’ absence, on pain of severe punishment if they failed to convince the U.S. inspectors. In May 1946, for example, U.S. officials refused to accept Anna Laner and her daughter Maria, expellees from Olomouc, because records showed that a teenage son, Ludwig, had been kept in Czechoslovakia presumably for labor services. Two weeks later, the two Laner women were again presented at the border post. On this occasion they pleaded not to be returned because “they had been threatened by the Czech officials and told that if they insisted upon having the son evacuated with them disciplinary action would be taken.”129 On another occasion Lambert interrupted a Czechoslovak army officer, Staff Captain Meitner, in the act of instructing German car leaders “to tell any separated families in their cars that if questioned they were to state that the retained member was either dead or missing.”130 As Colonel Fye reported, expellees were reminded at such briefings that “If any complaints were made it would go hard with the car leader.”131
Similar too were the tales of venality and corruption associated with the operation. A Czech expulsion officer discovered two Prague lawyers to be selling entry permits with which expellees could enter the U. S. zone independently for fifteen hundred crowns each; the permits themselves appeared to have been provided by an equally shady American partner.132 The commandant of the main camp at Liberec, one of the very worst Czechoslovak detention centers, worked out an ingenious scheme for enriching himself by forbidding expellees to take any baggage on their journey, instead requiring them to use a commercial shipping agency in the town and pay “customs charges” on the property. The shipments were never made; when the agency was pursued for two trainloads of expellee baggage, it said that it had dispatched them to the border, where they had all been confiscated by the SNB. The agency produced a “receipt” to that effect, declaring that it considered itself to have fulfilled its part of the contract. The same misfortune occurred to other shipments using the same firm.133 On the other hand, valuables that ought not to have been on expellee trains sometimes were there—as when the U.S. authorities discovered, through intercepted telephone calls, that the transports were being used by an international currency smuggling ring to move laundered money across the border.134
The composition of “expellee” transports had an all too familiar ring. Indeed, an even more heterogeneous cross-section of the central and southeastern European population was to be found on the Czechoslovak trains than on the Polish or Hungarian ones. Lieutenant Colonel Edgar Jordan of the Office of Military Government in Bavaria conducted a check at the Freilassing border crossing of train no. 7315-A, said to contain 1,265 Sudetendeutsche. In reality fewer than half were from the Sudetenland; the train also carried 256 Yugoslav Volksdeutsche, 126 Germans from the Recovered Territories, 70 Swabians from Romania, 20 Soviet Volksdeutsche, and 94 assorted Reichsdeutsche bound for zones other than the American. Train no. 7527-A, spot-checked at the same place nine days later, featured an even more exotic cross-section of humanity, with genuine Sudetendeutsche representing fewer than one in four of the persons on board.135 In view of the fact that at least half the complements of Czechoslovak expellee trains destined for Soviet-occupied Germany absconded while transiting the U.S. zone, the American CRX representative lugubriously concluded that a situation of virtual open borders prevailed, making a nonsense of any attempt to achieve demographic balance between the districts controlled by the four occupying powers.136
Once again, though, the factor that gave rise to the greatest tensions between expelling and receiving states was the condition in which the deportees were reaching their destination. Though fewer new arrivals in the U.S. zone died or had to be sent to hospital because of the rigors of the journey, the gain to American military authorities was small if, through systematic abuse or long detention in internment camps, they needed emergency medical treatment on arrival in any event. A transport from Jablonec to Furth im Wald in April 1946, the Americans recorded, consisted of expellees in a “terrible” condition, some having been reduced to mere “skeletons.” As a consequence of their stay in one of the Liberec camps, where they had nothing to drink but stagnant water from pools on the ground, 70 percent of these Sudetendeutsche arrived suffering from severe diarrhea and some were expected to die of the consequences of starvation in the near future.137 Even with immediate medical attention, such deaths were far from unusual. A Red Cross medical report, for example, noted that two weeks of hospital treatment had not been sufficient to prevent the death from starvation of a forty-five-year-old male expellee from one of the early Czechoslovak transports who had spent the previous ten months in an internment camp.138
One category of expellee, the so-called “antifascists,” did benefit from preferential treatment. Although opponents of Nazism were theoretically exempted from removal, the difficulty was easily overcome by making their willingness “voluntarily” to be transferred to Germany, “on the ground that they are needed there to reeducate the people,” the test of their antifascist credentials.139 In view of the fact that the Czechoslovak Ministry of National Defense had ruled as early as July 28, 1945 that all inquiries to determine Germans’ antifascist record were to be discontinued, and of the discovery by groups like the Wrocław antifascist committee that “the Poles wanted them out of town, plain and simple, and were not interested in the Germans’ help in rebuilding an antifascist Poland,” there was little point in seeking to remain.140 Instead, by submitting to the inevitable, “antifascists” could at least qualify for more favorable conditions of removal. In Slovakia, proven “antifascists” might be exempted from internment in the camps and allowed to proceed directly to the railway stations on the day of departure.141 Czechoslovak “antifascist” transports normally carried just three hundred expellees on each train, rather than the twelve to fifteen hundred that was the typical complement. Occasionally “antifascists” were allowed to organize their own transport. An enterprising Wrocław German, Paul Eggers, operated in cooperation with the Commissariat for Repatriation Affairs for Lower Silesia an “enormously popular” coach service from the city center to the border crossing at Zgorzelec. For a fare of fifteen hundred zlotys, passengers could travel in relative comfort, benefiting from a baggage allowance of two suitcases and a backpack and protected by an escort of three soldiers or militiamen. The service came to an end at Christmas 1945, however, when the Soviet authorities suspended admissions to their zone for the winter.142
There were, though, definite limits to the indulgence of the expelling and receiving countries alike. The Czechoslovaks, for example, used the “antifascist” transports as a means of recycling the five-hundred-Reichsmark allowance without which expellees would not be permitted to enter the U.S. zone. Passengers were warned before departure that if they did not agree to give back the cash, they would be returned to an internment camp and eventually expelled on a “normal” transport under much less favorable conditions. Once the train had cleared the U.S. inspection point and had entered Germany, a designated person would retrieve the money from his fellow passengers and deliver it to the offices of the Social Democratic Party in Munich, from whence it would be transferred to the Antifascist Central Office in Prague to secure the admission of a fresh trainload of expellees.143 Not only were the benefits of “antifascist” status less favorable than they appeared, then, but those receiving this designation were regarded on all sides with particular suspicion. The “preferential treatment, such as unlimited baggage allowance,” they received aroused “resentment toward them on the part of ordinary expellees,” who speculated darkly about how far the extent of their cooperation with the expelling governments might have gone.144 In the reception areas, “antifascists” were also viewed as being especially untrustworthy, although for opposite reasons. Colonel John Fye warned his superiors that “among them were Communists who will try to undermine and destroy all western influence in U.S. occupied Germany.” The authorities in East
Berlin, contrariwise, regarded them as “voluntary” migrants who deserved no special privileges. Thus the Wrocław “antifascists,” after experiencing a “difficult and humiliating” transport to the Soviet zone, experienced a frosty welcome from local KPD officials and “subsequent confinement in the former Buchenwald concentration camp” before eventually being resettled in Weimar and Halle.145
As 1946, the year of “organized expulsions,” began drawing to a close, each of the Big Three was feeling the strain. “At present,” Colonel Thicknesse warned, “we tend to regard occupied Germany as a waste-paper basket with a limitless capacity for the unwanted waste of the world. We are not convinced that this attitude is correct, either economically or politically.”146 According to figures reported to CRX, by November the Soviet zone had admitted more than 1.8 million expellees from Poland and Czechoslovakia; the U.S. zone approximately 1.7 million from Czechoslovakia and Hungary (including 160,000 who had arrived via Austria); and the British zone more than 1.3 million from the Recovered Territories: a cumulative total of almost five million people. To this figure could be added a number which could not be precisely calculated—but certainly one in the hundreds of thousands for each occupation zone—of Volksdeutsche who had made their way under duress out of their countries of origin, but entered Germany as unregistered “infiltrees.” All were arriving in a country whose urban centers the Western Allies had gone to immense trouble and expense during the previous five years to level to the ground, an endeavor in which they had enjoyed considerable success and which had left Germany with “a worse housing problem than has ever before existed in any area of comparable size and population.”147 Even after every available camp, military base, school, church, barn, air raid shelter, and, in some cases, cave had been filled with expellees, the onrushing human tide continued to overwhelm the best efforts of the rudimentary German administration upon whose shoulders the occupying forces thrust the responsibility. As a rule, according to reception officers in all three occupation zones, the expellees were arriving in possession of little more than the—usually insufficient—clothing in which they stood. The overwhelming majority were women and children. Few could make any meaningful contribution in the short term to their own support. Hundreds of thousands needed immediate care, in hospitals, old-age homes, orphanages, or residential centers for the disabled, though the shortage of resources meant that a great many would not receive it.
This was not at all how the Allies had envisaged the population transfers when they had been sold on the idea during the war. Then the stated rationale had been to remove a cohort of “dangerous” Germans—above all, fit men of military age—who might threaten the security of the countries in which they lived. Instead, it had been the least dangerous Germans who had been deported, while the fit men were being held back for forced labor, and in many cases pressured to take out Polish or Czechoslovak nationality against their will. The occupying powers thus found themselves presented with a first-class social, economic, and humanitarian crisis that threatened to undo whatever plans they had made for German reconstruction, as well as to disrupt the economies of the expelling states for years to come. Predictably, each of the Big Three with the benefit of experience discovered its enthusiasm for this novel method of “stabilizing” the European continent shrinking to the vanishing point. After coping—or failing to cope—with the “wild expulsions” of 1945, and finding the “organized expulsions” of 1946 from their perspective to be less satisfactory yet, each of the Allied powers entered 1947 with the same overriding objective: to put an end to what was proving an intolerable burden to it as quickly as possible.
7
THE NUMBERS GAME
The screams that alerted Dr. Loch, formerly the chief medical officer of St Joseph’s Hospital in Wrocław, that his services were required at the other end of the pitch-black cattle car provided his only means of locating his patient. As a skilled worker the doctor was not supposed to have been on the train, as it jolted across the darkened Polish countryside on the night of December 20, 1946 en route to the Marienthal reception center in the British occupation zone. His sick wife, however, had been scheduled for deportation, and rather than waiting his turn and being separated from her, he had elected to become a “wild repatriant” and smuggled himself on board the transport.1 As he clambered over fellow expellees, piles of baggage, and buckets that were being used in lieu of toilets, his path was blocked by an old woman who ignored his request to move out of the way. On closer examination, the doctor found that she had frozen to death. Having no time to spare on her, he struggled onward until he eventually reached his patient, a pregnant woman who had gone into premature labor.
She was bleeding a great deal. When I tried to get her into a more comfortable position, I discovered that she was frozen to the floor with her own blood. Someone still had a little spirit-lamp. With its help we prepared some hot water from pieces of ice. After sprinkling hot water for some time I managed to get the unfortunate woman free. With the exception of a hypodermic syringe and some blood-stanching preparation that happened to be at hand, I had nothing of what was necessary for such an operation, not even cotton-wool. By means of an injection I managed to stop the bleeding. That was all I could do. During the task my own feet all but froze.
Whether the woman lived, I do not know. In view of the tremendous amount [of work] that fell upon we doctors, I lost sight of her.2
Most of Dr. Loch’s fellow passengers were scarcely less vulnerable. Of the 1,543 expellees from Poznań and łódź crammed into the train, 600 were over sixty years of age. Many more were babies in arms aged between three and twelve months; twenty-two were children from an orphanage in Leszno. They had boarded the train five days previously, when the temperature was already minus fifteen degrees centigrade, to find that the cattle trucks into which they were herded contained neither any form of heating nor straw to cover the floor. During the four and a half days it took to complete the 240-mile journey to Marienthal, each passenger received a daily ration consisting of three ounces of bread, two-fifths of an ounce of barley, one-fifth of an ounce of sugar, a twelfth of an ounce of coffee, and a fifteenth of an ounce of salt. A single herring was to be shared between each group of twenty-five. The intense cold meant that there was no liquid water to drink; mothers placed vessels filled with ice between their thighs in an attempt to thaw the contents and assuage their children’s thirst. Rations on such a scale provided little nutrition to ward off hypothermia and, as the temperature fell further, the very old and the very young began to die. As one woman recalled:
Up to 40 people were packed into one truck. It got colder and colder. In the mornings our luggage, hair and the whole truck were covered with a thick layer of frost. Our breath froze in the air.
The truck leader was an old man. He was always trying to cheer us up. After we had passed Sagan, we were still singing Christmas carols with him in the evening. The next morning the truck leader was dead. Nobody had noticed how he died. So I became truck leader. I could not possibly do anything.
When the train finally reached Marienthal on the evening of December 21, the bodies of sixteen people who had died of the cold were removed. There had been three live births and two miscarriages en route.3 Fifty-three passengers required immediate hospitalization for frostbite, with six emergency amputations being performed. Major E. M. Tobin, the commanding officer at Marienthal, thought that the passengers seemed “to have been living an existence of cowed servitude and gave more the impression of whipped curs than human beings.” Even in comparison to earlier transports, the train carried “a remarkably high percentage of old people and cripples. The degree of infirmity of these cripples was also very high.”4 Marienthal, however, possessed no accommodation of its own, and after disinfecting the expellees and giving them a hot meal the British military authorities returned them to the cattle cars for onward transport to their ultimate destinations. Sixteen more would die by the time the train reached Hameln, with another 130 taken
to hospital. At Runteln 27 additional passengers were removed for medical treatment. When the train arrived at its terminus at Bückeburg in Lower Saxony on December 23, a week after its departure, 141 of the remainder were immediately hospitalized. Before the end of February, a further 26 passengers had succumbed to the after-effects of their ordeal. Among the dead was the wife of Dr. Loch.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 29