The precise number to be expelled, though, proved controversial. In his early overtures to the British and U.S. representatives, Gyöngyosi had spoken of removing between 200,000 and 340,000 of the German-speaking population. Shortly after the Potsdam Conference, the Soviet representative on the ACC(H), Lieutenant General Vladimir Sviridov, requested Miklós to draw up a plan of action to deport up to 450,000 Volksdeutsche as quickly as possible. His motives for doing so remain a matter of dispute. The French historian Jean-Léon Muller considers that the reason for this urgency was to reduce the number of anti-Communist voters in advance of the upcoming elections; to smooth the process of land confiscation and redistribution; and, perhaps, to destabilize the Western Allies by dumping an additional half-million pauperized Germans in their zones. Some Hungarian historians, on the other hand, have seen the malign hand of Prague behind this request, suggesting that the Beneš government pressed for the largest possible number of Volksdeutsche to be removed so as to deprive Budapest of any pretext for refusing to accept a like number of Magyars expelled from Czechoslovakia.55 Wherever the truth may lie, the Soviet initiative produced divisions within the government between those who wished to make a clean sweep of the Volksdeutsche and more moderate voices who feared that this would play into Prague’s hands. A compromise was ultimately reached under which those who had recorded themselves in the 1941 census as both Germanophone and of German nationality would be expelled: some 303,000 in all.
The Hungarian Communist Party’s failure to make the gains it had expected in the November 1945 elections, however, led it to adopt a more radical stance on the German question. Making clear that it spoke for the Soviet occupying authorities, it successfully prevailed upon the Cabinet to reopen the debate. Imre Nagy, the new Communist minister of the interior who, a decade later, would lead Hungary’s doomed attempt to break free from the USSR’s grasp, took an especially hard line, describing the purification of the country from German influence as “our national duty” and pressing for everyone who had declared themselves as German-speaking in the 1941 census to be transferred. The new, harsher stance was reflected in the draft scheme finally presented to the ACC (H) by the Budapest government in December 1945. This proposed the expulsion of all 510,000 Volksdeutsche, in an operation that would necessitate the employment of nine army battalions, seven thousand railway wagons per month, and twenty-two transit camps. The southwestern county of Tolna as well as Budapest and its hinterland would be cleared first, followed by the county of Baranya on the border with Croatia and finally the rest of Hungary. The principal dangers foreseen were the flight of the Germans and the destruction, concealment, or loss of their property. To guard against this, six of the nine battalions would be employed in sequestering and compiling an inventory of the assets of the Volksdeutsche, who were to be confined to their houses under martial law until taken to the camps. The entire transfer was to be completed by July 1946.56
In practice, though, relatively little of this plan ever got off the drawing-board. Major A. D. Spottswood, an expulsion officer attached to the U. S. element of the ACC (H), accurately described the Hungarians as having created “only a paper organization for operations.” The promised transit camps were never built; instead, villages were cordoned off and designated as assembly areas from which deportees could be sent. Once the “organized expulsions” began, as Spottswood had predicted, disorganization reigned. Not only were trains routinely dispatched without food for the passengers, but no notice of any kind had been provided of two-thirds of the transports in early May before their appearance at Freilassing and Passau in the U.S. zone. Only fifteen trains, composed of wagons pilfered from the Allies or lent by the Soviets, were available for the operation. Some of these were found to be in “deplorable condition.” According to General Clay, “a majority of Swabians arriving in the U.S. Zone are for all intents and purposes destitute and penniless.”57 The American authorities thus had numerous grounds for charging that the deportations from Hungary fell far short of the “orderly and humane” requirements stipulated by the Potsdam Agreement.
The Hungarian people themselves seemed ambivalent about whether or not they wished to be rid of the entire German population. In January 1946, Miksa Fenyö, a Jewish ex-member of Parliament and prominent literary figure, and György Parragi, a survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp, issued a manifesto on behalf of Hungarian intellectuals denouncing the expulsion of those Germans who “did not commit criminal acts and were only part of a mass hysteria, or those who were indifferent.” Many Hungarians, they pointedly observed, could themselves have been placed in both categories during the war.58 The Catholic Primate of Hungary, Jószef Cardinal Mindszenty, and his brother bishops were also outspoken in their condemnation of what they saw as an act of injustice against the German minority (though cynics observed that few of them had dared to speak out against the deportation of Hungarian Jews two years previously). There seemed little reason to fear that a suspension of the transfers would result in an anti-American backlash from Hungarian public opinion. On June 4, 1946, therefore, having accepted 118,474 Germans from Hungary, OMGUS announced that it was imposing an open-ended suspension of further transports. Its stated reasons for doing so were “abuses observed in shipping out the Swabian trains, the disorderly manner in which the program was executed, and the inhumaneness consequent to burdening German welfare agencies with penniless and destitute people.”59 In reality, there was no evidence to suggest that the Hungarian expulsions were any worse than the transports the Americans continued to accept from Czechoslovakia. Nine weeks earlier, Con O’Neill of the Foreign Office had written that “if one had to award marks out of a hundred for good order and humanity, I should give Hungary 40, Czechoslovakia 30 and Poland 5.”60 The U.S. decision to halt admissions from one country and not the other, then, had less to do with the objective circumstances than with the fact that while Budapest could easily be pushed around, Prague could not.
The Hungarian government was completely wrong-footed by OMGUS’s abrupt action. As Mátyás Rákosi later ruefully admitted to Molotov, the authorities had “started the process of eviction assuming that we would be able to resettle 100,000 [more] Swabians in the American zone.”61 Having failed to build an extensive camp network, as in Poland or Czechoslovakia, to intern the Germans and being unable to depend on the support and assistance of the public while they created one, ministers in Budapest had little alternative but to accept any terms for further expulsions the Americans might be willing to offer. After a series of one-sided talks in the summer of 1946, the two governments concluded a revised expulsion protocol on August 22. Budapest was now obliged to give a minimum of ten days’ notice to expellees before attempting to round them up. Expellee trains would consist of thirty-five passenger wagons, five baggage wagons, a kitchen wagon, and a medical wagon; at least one doctor, two nurses, and a guard would accompany every transport. The maximum number of passengers would be eleven hundred. Each trainload of expellees would elect a committee of five who, in cooperation with the train guards, would prevent robberies from occurring. In addition to the hundred-kilogram baggage allowance, each passenger would be furnished with a minimum of five hundred Reichsmarks (fifty dollars) in cash, and allowed to retain wedding rings or watches. The Budapest government was required not to hold back some expellees, nor prioritize the removal of others, on the basis of “present political affiliations, wealth, age, sex [or] physical condition.” ACC (H) or OMGUS inspectors were authorized to carry out spot checks on the trains at the points of departure, arrival, or anywhere in between. Expulsions would be suspended during periods of unfavorable weather or in case of outbreaks of epidemic disease. If each of these conditions was satisfied, the United States undertook to resume admissions on September 1, 1946, and to continue at the rate of twenty trains per month until April 1, 1947, by which date an upper limit of 90,000 Germans would be accepted. If OMGUS was satisfied with the Hungarians’ record of compliance, it would then allow a furth
er 100,000 to enter the U.S. zone under the same terms until December 1, 1947, when the operation would be deemed to have been completed. Budapest was warned that a system of “slots” for the dispatch of trains would be strictly adhered to. Each expulsion train was to provide the American authorities with a month’s notice of its expected arrival at the U.S. zonal boundary. If it failed to show up on the specified day, that “slot” would be permanently forfeited and the Hungarians would not be permitted to send the day’s quota of expellees by a subsequent transport.62
The revised stipulations imposed by OMGUS on the Hungarians were by far the most stringent ever required by any of the countries of reception throughout the expulsion process. Their announcement drew a chagrined reaction from the British, firstly because they showed that it was possible to demand and obtain from the expelling countries standards of conduct that were “much stiffer than anything we insisted on with the Poles,” and secondly because “we are just stopping ‘Operation Swallow,’ and it would have been all to the good if we could have pointed out that the Americans had also on a unilateral basis stopped their intake from Hungary.”63 As experience would show, London need not have been concerned on either count. In Hungary as elsewhere, the organizers of mass transfers faced an inescapable choice between humanity and practicality. As soon as they were obliged by the United States to make the first of these a priority, the second proved beyond their capabilities. According to the revised schedule, in the three months following the resumption of the operation in September 1946 57,200 Germans should have been transferred to the U.S. zone. In fact, only six train-loads, containing a total of 6,090 people, did so, in a two-week period beginning on November 10. Though the Americans declared themselves satisfied with the manner in which Budapest was complying with the agreement, on December 1 they again shut the operation down until the following March, citing adverse winter weather and a buildup of more than 100,000 unhoused expellees in reception camps in the U.S. zone.64 Simultaneously, they declared that the Hungarians’ failure to take up their assigned “slots” for sixty expulsion trains between September and the first half of November—the result, Budapest pleaded, of an insufficient supply of Reichsmarks to give to each expellee—meant that the number of Germans to be accepted by the U. S. zone would now permanently be reduced by 66,000.
This second suspension caused Hungarian and Soviet tempers finally to boil over. In a formal protest, Dr. Gyula Fischer of the Ministry of the Interior demanded to know what would have happened had the Hungarian government been in a position to fill all its “slots” from the beginning of September. “After resettling 5,000 persons, would expatriation have [had] to be stopped owing to lack of accommodation in the camps?” At a meeting of the ACC (H) on December 6, General Sviridov accused the U.S. side of trying to sabotage the process by manufacturing a fresh set of contrived requirements every time Budapest complied with the previous ones. As an example, he cited “a new condition whereby every train was to carry 50 tons of coal without which it would not be allowed to enter Germany.” Even General Oliver Edgcumbe, the British ACC (H) representative, backed up his Soviet colleague, expressing his incomprehension “that the agreement between the U.S. authorities and the Hungarian Government would permit Schwabians to remain in Hungary simply because the timing of the programme had not been adhered to.”65
The man assigned the task of defending this new American policy, Brigadier General George (“Pappy”) Weems, was one of the more exotic personalities involved in the expulsion operation. Assigned to replace the hard-charging General William Key as U.S. representative on the ACC (H) in the summer of 1946, the former horse cavalryman Weems could hardly be considered an improvement over his predecessor. According to one of his subordinates, Lieutenant Colonel William Karp, Weems’s behavior was so erratic that it was widely believed among his staff that he had recently suffered an undiagnosed stroke. In addition to memory lapses, confusion, impaired gait, and a tendency to fly into rages if interrupted, “[h]e was obsessed with the idea that there was some sort of international conspiracy to steal typewriters and any case involving the theft of a typewriter had to be brought to his attention.”66 The appointment of such a man to oversee the expulsions from Hungary is probably an accurate reflection of the extent of Washington’s commitment to the completion of the operation. And at least in carrying out his assigned task of erecting every possible obstruction to its resumption, Weems did not disappoint. For several months, he had complained officially about Budapest’s habit, in the words of his colleague General Edgcumbe, of trying to “make it appear that the deportations are taking place as a result of Allied pressure, and not at the request of the Hungarian Government.”67 Weems now called the Hungarians’ bluff. The ACC agreement of November 1945, he argued, “permitted the Hungarian Government to deport those they wished but did not require them to deport to the U.S. Zone any specific number.” At the beginning of March, when the winter hiatus was due to expire, Weems told Budapest that the program for 1947 would not be resumed unless the Hungarian government sent a delegate to Berlin for discussions about additional conditions to be satisfied before movements would be allowed to resume. When the administration of Ferenc Nagy, Miklós’s successor, acquiesced even in this, Weems once again reverted to wrecking tactics, informing the ACC(H) that the American authorities in Germany could not contemplate new admissions from Hungary unless the social and economic environment in the U.S. zone became more favorable. “It is not anticipated by U.S. authorities in Germany that any substantial improvement in resettlement conditions within the U.S. Zone will occur within a minimum of twelve months.”68
In the face of this renewed suspension—which General Clay privately made clear was, from his point of view, a permanent cessation—Tildy’s government dropped all further pretense that it was doing no more than obediently carrying out the ACC (H)’s instructions. The removal of the remaining Germans, Budapest now protested, was an urgent national priority. Some twenty-five thousand had already been “processed” for expulsion; should the Americans continue their intransigent attitude, the result would be chaos.
The property of these individuals was blocked and the family was either moved into a house with another Schwabian family or a Hungarian settler was moved into the house with the Schwabian. The property then came under the joint control of the new settler and the Schwabian owner, and the population of the villages therefore became mixed. The Hungarian authorities report that fights and quarrels break out daily between the Schwab[ian]s and the Hungarian settlers, and that several murders have occurred…. It is reported that the Schwabians openly state that the Americans are supporting their resistance to expatriation, and have stopped the programme as a means of protecting them….
As a result of the stoppage of the Schwabian expellations [sic], considerable pressure has been exerted by groups desiring the expulsion of all Schwab[ian]s, and some embarrassment has resulted from the inability of the government to meet its commitments in this respect.69
The Hungarian government’s complaints about a rise in the number of clashes as a result of the transfer were certainly grounded in fact, even if most of these incidents were of Budapest’s own making. Hungary, indeed, was the only country in which expellees felt confident enough to display more than negligible resistance to their expropriation and removal. “In Baranya county, Swabians were reported as dubbing the immigrants [ethnic Hungarian settlers] ‘gypsies’ and sometimes physically assaulting them in broad daylight.”70 Often whipped up by Communist and Peasant Party officials, settlers responded by developing a “lynch mob mentality” in which they vented their frustrations over the slowness with which former German property was being redistributed, sometimes with fatal results. But just as disturbing to the authorities were manifestations of sympathy for the expellees, as in the county of Tolna where eighty members of the Magyar majority were arrested for coming to the aid of an expellee convoy and providing them with food for their voyage.71 In desperation over what appeared
to be the program’s imminent breakdown, Rákosi approached Molotov seeking permission to send the Germans rejected by the Americans into the Soviet zone, promising that the expellees’ terror of Bolshevism would surely cause them to infiltrate into Bavaria via the “green frontier.” The skeptical Soviet foreign minister, less convinced than the Hungarians that the Soviet zone would serve as a “scarecrow” in this manner, rejected the request.72 As a gesture to help the Hungarian Communist Party out of its troubles, however, the USSR agreed in an exchange of notes with Budapest in July 1947 to accept fifty thousand Germans directly into the Soviet zone, at a rate of three trains per week.73
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