While there was every excuse for the British looking on the Soviet data with a jaundiced eye, they were mistaken in their explanation for Moscow’s all too obvious exercise in creative accounting. In reality, the Soviets were not seeking to wriggle out of their obligations under the ACC agreement. Like the British themselves, they were simply swamped. Having borne the brunt of the “wild expulsions” from both Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1945, during which nearly a million and a half newcomers had been disgorged, often without warning, into an area that was predominantly agricultural and rural, the Soviet zone’s absorptive capacities were strained to the utmost. According to the USSR’s own internal figures, at least another 248,000 had arrived in 1945 as “wild repatriants.” An early attempt to accept organized transports from the Gdańsk and Poznań regions in late November 1945 had had to be abandoned after a few weeks due not only to the inclement weather but to the strains it imposed on the transport system.33 As the harried and short-fused General Kvashnin, chief of the Transport Administration in the Soviet zone, had told his Czechoslovak counterpart in March 1946, even providing transit facilities for the British in the early stages of Operation Swallow was overloading the eastern German railway network.34 The Soviet authorities’ chief priority in 1946, therefore, was to delay the restart of the transfer from Poland as long as possible, especially while they were attempting to cope with the prospect of another 750,000 expellees from Czechoslovakia. Hence an agreement specifying the conditions of the transfer was not signed with Poland until May 5, and large-scale removals only began on June 17. At all times, nevertheless, the USSR reassured Warsaw that it would fully discharge its commitments; in the late summer of 1947, it even undertook to admit to its zone as many Germans as remained in Poland, without limit of number. Why, then, the Soviets should have been so anxious to conceal their difficulties from the Western Allies must remain a matter of speculation. The most likely explanation is that both they and the Poles feared that any admission on their part that the schedule in the ACC agreement was not being strictly followed would be seized upon by the Americans and British as a pretext for going back on their own promises.
If the Western powers were not yet willing to go that far, at all events they were determined not to admit a single expellee more than they were contractually obliged to receive. Their nightmare scenario was a situation in which, having accepted their full complement according to the ACC agreement, they would then find themselves the unwilling hosts of an endless stream of additional Germans entering illegally across the “green frontier” (unguarded places along the zonal boundary)—supplemented by large numbers of political and economic refugees fleeing the Soviet zone. As a result, they began pressing for all arrivals from Czechoslovakia and Poland, including “wild repatriants,” to be counted against their respective quotas. Some ingenious British administrators even suggested that the estimated 550,000 Germans from the Recovered Territories who had entered the British zone in 1945 prior to the conclusion of the ACC agreement should be deducted from the total of 1.5 million expellees to be accepted, which would make it possible to declare Operation Swallow as having been completed by July 27, 1946. They were persuaded not to press this argument by the reminder that—as a Soviet official had half-seriously maintained the previous April—nearly 3 million Germans from the Recovered Territories and another 800,000 Sudetendeutsche had already entered the Soviet zone. If these arrivals were also to be taken into account, the USSR could claim to have fulfilled the entirety of its commitments before the first train of the “organized expulsion” had ever departed.35 But the British and Americans insisted that at least those “wild repatriants” who had been processed in transit camps in the Western occupation zones since November 20, 1945 should be credited to their accounts. By early August the British were claiming to be accommodating 184,182 of these from Poland, the equivalent of one trainload of “wild repatriants” for every five train-loads of expellees accepted through official channels. There were also in the U.S. zone 100,000 Germans whose homes were in the Recovered Territories; rather than send them back to Poland only to have them reexpelled to the British zone in considerably worse condition, London had agreed to admit them directly and count them against the Swallow quota. The United States used a different basis of calculation for their own claimed figures, adding to their total those entrants to the American zone who had arrived from Czechoslovakia prior to the signing of the ACC agreement. Nonetheless, as of March 31, 1947, U.S. authorities were demanding credit for 325,439 Sudetendeutsche who had arrived in their zone by unofficial means, together with another 118,574 who had fled or been driven into Austria but of whom the government in Vienna wanted to be rid.36
In the end, though, both governments decided against taking their stand against further admissions of Germans on the basis of what promised to be an unprofitable wrangle over numbers. Instead, they decided to invoke the Potsdam Treaty’s declaration that expulsions be conducted in an “orderly and humane” manner as a basic law governing all previous or subsequent accords, including the ACC agreement. As British Military Government officers in Berlin pointed out in August, due to the complete saturation of all available or potential accommodation; acute food shortages; the spread of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and typhus; and a demographic balance that was now tilted heavily toward the unproductive cohorts of the population, “a situation has been reached when a further importation of refugees is indefensible on humanitarian grounds.”37 As a result, the British informed the Polish government that, having regard to “the danger to public health arising from the extreme shortage of housing and of food,” it would be necessary to reduce the rate of acceptances in the British zone to two trains a week with effect from September 5, 1946. The note to the Polish Government also announced that the British would seek the formal review of the functioning of the expulsion operation provided for in the Four-Power Agreement of November 17, 1945.38
The British initiative produced an anguished response from both the Poles and Ambassador Cavendish-Bentinck who, in the face of much contrary evidence, had succeeded in persuading himself that the key to good relations between Warsaw and London lay in Britain’s maintenance of an understanding stance on the German question. Communicating Minister Wolski’s urgent request that the decision be reconsidered and that the British commit to accepting a minimum of seven trains a week, Cavendish-Bentinck warned that the government’s action would cause “a considerable shock to Polish public opinion which is very sensitive on this subject.”39 British officials, though, had heard too many variations from the ambassador on this theme, and had waited too long for the gratitude of the Polish government to materialize, to be impressed by these arguments now. Nor were they moved by the broadside launched by Lieutenant Colonel Jakub Prawin of the Polish Military Mission against the new cutbacks. Reminding the British that they must have been satisfied they had sufficient resources to accommodate 1.5 million incoming Germans when they signed up to the ACC agreement the previous November, Prawin insisted that Poland could not be held responsible for Britain’s failure to earmark enough housing for the incomers, nor should it be penalized for demonstrating flexibility when, according to the ACC agreement, Operation Swallow ought to have been completed by July 1946. British claims of concern over orderly and humane conditions, he observed, rang hollow in light of the fact that large numbers of Polish colonists from the east would now have to be put in transit camps over the winter instead of being settled in the ex-German properties promised to them, creating no less serious a humanitarian crisis. As for the appeal to the Potsdam Agreement as an overriding law, Prawin argued that Article 13 imposed “an international obligation on the Occupying Powers concerned, which by no means can be construed in such a way as to make the principle inefficient.” Until such time as the quadripartite review of expulsions for which the British had called actually took place and made its recommendations, the Anglo-Polish agreement of February 1946 remained operative and “can NOT be declared void by
onesided declarations.”40
Suiting the action to Prawin’s word, the Polish authorities sent six trainloads to the crossing points on September 6. Reasoning that the transports might have made a good-faith effort to reach the British zone before the imposition of the previous day’s deadline, Sir Brian Robertson, the deputy military governor, allowed them to enter. But he also made contingency plans against any repetition. After ordering that no further trains be accepted before September 12, and only two per week thereafter, he stationed detachments of the South Staffordshire Regiment at Helmstedt and Lübeck to counter any attempt by the Poles or Soviets to force expellees across the frontier. The troops were, however, instructed that if it should prove “necessary to use force of arms, only firing over heads is permitted.”41 In the event, a confrontation was avoided. Although five more trains appeared at the border on September 9, all were turned back without incident.
The British, for their part, made clear to the Poles their determination not to yield. As Andrew Franklin contended, it was “essential to take a firm line even if this means a bit of a row.”42 Replying to Prawin in uncompromising terms, General “Bobby” Erskine made clear that he was fully prepared for one. The Potsdam Agreement, he maintained, unambiguously stated the will of the Big Three that any transfers “should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.” This could not be superseded by any decision of the ACC, a subordinate body. The schedule providing for the removal of all Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary by July 1946, moreover, was a mere plan, not any kind of binding commitment to have completed the operation by then. “According to my information,” Erskine pointed out, “none of the Occupying Powers has in fact found it possible to accept Germans at those rates.” Indicating exactly where he thought responsibility for the problem lay, Erskine assured Prawin that “The British authorities are fully aware of the importance which the Polish Provisional Government attach to the movement from Poland of the German population, but for which they might well have reduced the rate of acceptance sooner in view of the deplorable condition in which many of the expelled persons have been arriving in the British Zone and the extremely low proportion of able-bodied persons included among them.”43
Later Polish appeals were greeted with the same curt dismissiveness. Wolski’s lament to the British Embassy in Warsaw that the Soviet authorities were “being more helpful” by accepting fifteen trains a week into their zone cut little ice with officials in the British zone. “If this is being quoted to us as an example to follow, it leaves our withers unwrung, since through the summer months we were moving 30 to 40 trains per week.”44 The British were equally unmoved when Warsaw, having discovered that attempts to arouse their sympathies over the plight of Polish colonists got them nowhere, tried to see whether they were more sensitive to hints that German expellees would be made to suffer in Poland if not quickly removed. At the end of September the Ministry of Foreign Affairs advised the embassy that “The greater part of the German population in Poland… is at present housed in transit camps. Those Germans would have to remain in those camps throughout the autumn and winter periods in conditions which it is easy to understand would be hard. The British order would therefore affect painfully this population as well.” To this veiled threat, Duncan Wilson of the Foreign Office acerbically commented, “The Poles might some time be reminded of what their champion, Stalin, said at Potsdam—that there were neither 7 nor 3 nor 1 million but no Germans in the area taken over by the Poles. But better not now.”45
Although surprisingly little discussion took place between the two English-speaking democracies about expulsion matters, OMGUS in Germany by the early summer of 1946 was independently dissolving into much the same exhausted and angst-ridden state as was its British counterpart. The U.S. military governor, General Clay, calculated in May 1946 that there were already nearly 2.9 million expellees living in the U.S. zone, at a time when only 375,000 of the expected 1.75 million Sudetendeutsche and 75,000 of the 500,000 Germans from Hungary had been admitted.46 While OMGUS reluctantly accepted that it was obliged to make good on its commitment to Czechoslovakia, the same was not at all true of Hungary. In view of the fact that the Budapest government was all too plainly a Soviet puppet, little or no advantage was to be gained from accommodating its wishes over the German question.
Because Hungary was an ex-enemy state, no agreement had ever been required, or sought, with the provisional government in Budapest over the procedure for removing the Germans. Instead, the Potsdam conference had made the Allied Control Commission for Hungary (ACC [H]), composed as in Germany of military commanders from the USSR, the United States, France, and Britain, responsible for overseeing expulsions from that country. That does not imply that the Hungarian government was opposed to the idea of driving out the German populations, but rather that the planners could not count on the groundswell of popular anti-Germanism that facilitated removals in Poland and Czechoslovakia. During the war, the half a million or so Germanophones of Hungary had greeted Nazi Germany’s initial victories with the same enthusiasm as did Volksdeutsche elsewhere in central Europe. Some forty-six thousand had volunteered for service with the German forces, even though by doing so they forfeited their Hungarian citizenship. When the tide of war turned after the Battle of Stalingrad, though, the supply of additional recruits quickly dried up. Under heavy pressure from Berlin, the Hungarian government agreed in April 1944 that the Volksdeutsch population could be drafted into the German army. Unwilling to become cannon fodder in a losing cause, the German minority quickly rediscovered their Hungarianness, attempting to enlist in the Hungarian army and publicly demonstrating against their conscription into “the army of a foreign state.” This had little effect, and it is estimated that some 100,000 Hungarian Volksdeutsche became unwilling wearers of German uniform by the end of the war.47 Nevertheless, the dilemma of divided loyalties that the Volksdeutsche faced was appreciated by some elements at least of the majority population. Many Magyars were sympathetic to the argument that it was by order of their own government in Budapest, in fulfillment of its accord with Nazi Germany, that the Volksdeutsche had been compelled to enlist in the German armed forces. The postwar regime, for its part, while never questioning the desirability of forced migrations, was ambivalent about their scope. The most determinedly expulsionist group in the four-party coalition was the National Peasant Party, whose motives were frankly confiscatory. Speaking on behalf of the country’s small farmers, who hoped to benefit from the expropriation of the Volksdeutsche, the party’s leader, Imre Kovács, insisted that they “should leave the country as they had come, with a single bundle.”48 The Communist Party of Mátyás Rákosi, too, launched a press campaign in the spring of 1945 demanding the de-Germanization of the country. The Smallholder Party, on the other hand, represented by Ferenc Nagy, speaker of the National Assembly, and János Gyöngyösi, the foreign minister, pointed out that it was at least injudicious to seek to drive out the whole of Hungary’s German population at the precise moment that Budapest was trying to prevail upon the Big Three to prevent Czechoslovakia from expelling its 500,000 Magyars.49 The remaining party in the coalition, the Social Democrats, took little active part in the discussion beyond attempting, by various largely specious expedients, to have its German-speaking activists reclassified as “Magyars” or “antifascists.” As in September 1938, then, when it had joined enthusiastically in Hitler’s intimidation of Czechoslovakia and been rewarded with a slice of Czech-administered territory in Ruthenia for its services, Hungary in 1945 was a “vulture state,” for which material rather than ideological considerations came uppermost. In general, Hungarians after the war were torn between their desire to profit from the expropriation and removal of a prosperous but temporarily powerless minority, and anxiety over setting a precedent that might later rebound upon themselves.
The Budapest government attempted to resolve the difficulty by seeking to throw the entire responsibility for the expulsions upon the Big Three, of which i
t depicted itself as merely the reluctant instrument. In reality its part in removing the German minority had been considerably more active. When the Red Army cleared the last Wehrmacht units from Hungary in December 1944, it promptly announced the conscription of all Volksdeutsch males aged between seventeen and forty-five, and females aged between eighteen and thirty, for forced labor in the Soviet Union. Far from seeking to impede or resist this roundup of Hungarian citizens, the new interior minister in Budapest, Ferenc Erdei, issued decrees providing for the enumeration and processing of the potential deportees. Up to sixty-five thousand Hungarian Germanophones were removed from Hungarian soil by February 1945 of whom, it is estimated, a third died in Soviet camps. Many of the survivors were never allowed to return to their homeland, being transferred directly from the trains bringing them back from the USSR to others bound for the U.S. occupation zone of Germany.50 Those who did return typically found that their homes had been expropriated and their families deported to Germany in their absence.51 A series of further Hungarian decrees created tribunals to try as war criminals all those who had served in the German armed forces or police (a later ruling by the prime minister, Béla Miklós, specified that no distinction was to be drawn between volunteers and conscripts); made all German citizens—a category expanded in practice to include members of the Volksbund der Deutschen in Ungarn, the ethnic Germans’ prewar representative body—liable to internment; and finally, on May 14, 1945, authorized the rounding-up of detainees’ family members as well.
Long before the ACC (H) took up the question, then, an expulsionist dynamic in Hungary was well under way. Indeed it was the Budapest Ministry of Foreign Affairs that first approached A. D. F. Gascoigne, the British diplomatic representative in Budapest, a week after V-E Day to inquire semiofficially about the possibility of expelling 200,000 Volksdeutsche to Germany, a request it repeated at the same time to Moscow and Washington.52 Joseph Grew, acting secretary of state, replied that the State Department had “no desire to be solicitous on behalf of a group probably largely made up of Nazis,” although the U.S. government’s general reservations about the principle of mass expulsions still applied.53 London greeted the suggestion with great disfavor in light of the enormous numbers of expellees expected to arrive from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Notwithstanding a British request at the end of May 1945 to drop the idea, however, Budapest replied that it had already proceeded to round up its Volksdeutsche as a preliminary to deportation. The purpose, as Gyöngyösi explained to Gascoigne, was both as a punitive measure and to make room for ethnic Magyars who had been, or would be, evicted from neighboring countries, especially Czechoslovakia.54 Indicating where its true priorities lay, Budapest proceeded first to expropriation rather than expulsion. A decree of July 1, 1945, set up district committees to enquire into the wartime loyalties of the German-speaking population aged sixteen years or more. Those found to have been leaders of the Volksbund, or members who had taken a definitely collaborationist stance during the war, would be interned forthwith and their property confiscated by the state. Four days later, the Hungarian government addressed a note to the ACC (H) formally requesting its cooperation in deporting the Volksdeutsche from the country.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 31