This last round of expulsions from Hungary degenerated into a tragicomic parody of Budapest’s original scheme. Previous removal efforts had focused especially on those regarded as the “guiltiest” Germans: families whose menfolk during the war had joined the Volksbund or the Waffen-SS. These, however, had generally been people at the bottom of the social scale, forced into the armed services less through ideological conviction than as a result of legal coercion or “economic conscription.” The spectacle of poor peasants and workers being deported from Hungary while the better-off German “kulaks,” many of whom had successfully evaded military service during the war, were left undisturbed sat ill with the Hungarian Communist Party. To ensure that class enemies alone should be transferred, the criteria for expulsion were amended in 1947, providing that only those deemed by the authorities to have been “voluntary” adherents to the Volksbund or SS should be marked for removal. Industrial workers, miners, agricultural laborers, and essential workers were to be exempt, in most cases irrespective of their wartime record in the German armed forces. As Michael Mevius dryly remarks, “Dodging the SS draft now seemed more of a crime than fighting with the SS.”74
The Soviets proved far more accommodating than the Americans when it came to minimum standards of welfare for Hungarian expellees. As British military observers found, these were conspicuous largely by their absence. A week-long operation to clear the neighboring small towns of Dunabogdány, Visegrád, and Nagymaros north of Budapest in August 1947 affords an example of the methods with which the removals to the Soviet zone were accomplished. At Dunabogdány, rather more than half of whose population of three thousand were ethnic Germans, Major M. Hanley of the British Military Mission noted that “the Swabians were given at most 2 hours notice and in some cases less.” Some fourteen hundred persons were transported by truck to the railway station at Nagymaros. “Empty space on the lorry seems to have been filled up somewhat at random and there are reports that one or two Hungarians were taken (but more evidence is required here).”75 The scene at Nagymaros was more chaotic still. Corporal C. Sassie, who had been refused access to the Visegrád roundup, nonetheless succeeded in observing Hungarian police in the midst of herding seven hundred Germans toward Nagymaros railway station. Locals to whom he spoke considered that the lowest-ranking constables involved in the operation were “orderly, helpful, sympathetic,” but that “the officers were pigs.” That was Sassie’s conclusion as well. “Bullying attitude, shouting, appeared to be under the influence of drink. 3 were accompanied by civilian female police or girl friends.” The Hungarian policemen cordoning off the town, with whom he spoke, told him that they had turned a blind eye as some Germans fled to the hills; that three elderly expellees had already died during the roundup; that the officers in command of the operation had been observed confiscating property from expellees and loading it into their own cars; and that, contrary to the Hungarian Communist Party’s hopes, “Lots of wealthy Swabians had bought the right to stay [by] bribing the police…. Nearly all the expatriates were the poorer class. Lots of ex-Volksbundists and S.S. had bought their way out.”
Equal disorder prevailed at Sassie’s next stop, the railway station. There he found
20 cattle wagons, some covered, some with no roof, each to hold 35 people and luggage which appeared to be mostly bedding. No sanitary arrangements at the station. No kitchen cars, no ambulance car. No general supply of food, all had to be provided by individuals….
Everybody appeared to be crying. Scene was very much like a prisoners’ transit point. Saw one mother imploring guards for her child who was left behind with the eldest daughter…. Saw an old man hurrying towards the station and was told he was lying in hospital when he heard that his wife was already at assembly point, whereupon he proceeded to join her.76
Despite the arbitrariness and disorganization of the expulsions to the Soviet zone, they were relatively short-lived. After the 50,000 Volksdeutsche had been removed, a process that was completed by August 1948, no further transfers from Hungary took place. There is no doubt that the go-slow mounted by the U.S. authorities almost from the beginning of the “organized expulsions” saved many Germans of Hungary from being driven out of their homeland. Of the 25,000 to have been deported in the month of January 1946, only 3,866 were removed; the number had reached just 41,500 by the end of April, out of a planned total of 250,000.77 All told, 126,843 Hungarian Volksdeutsche were forced to leave for the U.S. zone, and 50,000 to the Soviet zone, instead of the 447,000 originally marked for deportation by the Budapest government. The Hungarian case, therefore, is a vivid illustration of the truth that expulsions that could not be carried out immediately could not be carried out at all. As an unsympathetic Molotov told Rákosi in 1948, “You missed the favourable moment.”78
The fact that the United States had simply declared an end to further admissions from Hungary and made it stick also served as an inspiration to British policymakers, who dearly wished the same to happen to Operation Swallow. After the debacle of the Marienthal transports of December 1946, CCG officials had suspended further acceptances for two weeks in the first instance. Sir William Strang, political adviser to the commander in chief of the British occupation zone, thought that in addition, the Poles should be warned against “accumulating refugees at the starting points where they appear to be kept under even worse conditions than in the trains,” and that “any disposition on their part to resist this measure will be met by full publicity for the conditions in which they have been carrying out repatriations in recent weeks.”79 Just ten days after the suspension, however, the Polish authorities tested British resolve by sending another trainload of expellees to Marienthal. Because this train contained straw as floor covering, was heated, and arrived with only seven dead passengers, it was admitted to the British zone. But the liaison team at Szczecin finally balked at the train provided by the Poles to carry a transport of Germans to Lübeck, 220 miles away, on January 6, 1947. By the time it appeared, two days behind schedule, the expellees, 693 of whom were children, had already been waiting in the open in a temperature of minus twenty-one degrees centigrade for nearly six hours. The train, which the British Liaison Team considered “unfit for cattle let alone human beings,” consisted of nine passenger cars, all without windows, and twenty-three freight wagons, half of whose doors could not be closed. With expulsion trains along the route typically making no more than forty or fifty miles per day, it was obvious that there would be many deaths if it were allowed to proceed. For the first time on record, consequently, the British refused to allow the expellees to be entrained and lodged a strong protest with the Polish railway authorities.80
Polish warnings—or threats—that this would do nothing to diminish the suffering of the expellees were soon borne out in practice. By the beginning of February, more than four thousand Germans were piled up at Kaławsk, with their numbers daily increasing, in spite of the fact that there was no accommodation for them.81 Thousands more—“mainly women, old people and children,” according to the Polish Red Cross—were being decanted by the authorities outside Szczecin-Golęcino assembly camp, which had been temporarily closed because of a typhoid outbreak. These were squatting in ruined buildings surrounding the camp, “in indescribably bad sanitary conditions and lacking any social services or welfare.” The local Red Cross officer sourly reported that “the delegate of the American Red Cross, Mr. Slendziński, desired during his last stay to visit the… Camp…. With some difficulty I managed to dissuade him, as I knew well that his report in this matter would be extremely unfavorable and would have caused us international embarrassment.”82 An even worse state of affairs existed in Gdańsk, where Marta Dobrzyńska, the voivodeship Plenipotentiary for Settlement Affairs, reported that the condition of the remaining German population had deteriorated precipitously after the suspension of expulsions:
In the Gdańsk Voivodeship there are 34,500 Germans. The vast majority are women, children, and old people.
The death
rate among the Germans is frightening—between January 1, 1947 and April 1, 1947 5.7% of the Germans have died.
Causes: hunger and lack of medical care in cases of disease.83
Military Government officers in Germany, though, took a sanguine view of the situation. “We feel,” one wrote, “that this is a good opportunity for stopping Swallow.”84 While some senior officials in London had difficulty seeing why such a fuss should be made over what they regarded as a comparatively trivial matter—one drew attention to a newspaper report that thirty-seven people in Hamburg had frozen to death in the month of January 1947, adding in a notation: “To restore a sense of proportion on Swallow”—British administrators in both countries saw to it that Polish failure to comply with agreed conditions for expulsions should receive full publicity. Unusually, censors permitted the German press to publish detailed and highly critical accounts of the manner in which transports to the British zone in late December and early January had been conducted. Questions were asked in the House of Commons, where John Hynd stated bluntly that “the Polish authorities have not carried out the movement of these Germans in a humane and orderly manner, as was required by the Potsdam Agreement.”85 The choice that British policymakers now faced was whether to resume accepting expellees under much more stringent conditions, with Military Government officers given “a free hand from London to stop forever the movement immediately any single clause of our agreement is broken,” or, like the Americans, unilaterally to declare without further ado that the period of “organized expulsions” had come to an end.86
After debating the matter through the spring of 1947, London opted for the second alternative. Though the decision immediately “produced a pathetic appeal from H[is] M[ajesty’s] A[mbassador] Warsaw as was to be expected,” both the Foreign Office and the Military Government ignored it and turned their attention to the mechanics of closing down Swallow.87 The first step was to withdraw the British liaison teams at Kaławsk and Szczecin. “Experience has shown,” a Berlin-based administrator wrote, “that they are powerless to prevent Germans from being transferred under inhumane conditions and their presence only serves as an excuse for the Poles to claim that the British authorities have approved the conditions under which the Germans have been expelled.”88 The second step was to concoct a suitable rationale for the termination of the program. To this end, Military Government engaged in a little creative accounting of its own. According to figures it presented at CRX, 1,134,000 Germans had been received from Poland through official channels by the end of November 1946, together with another 184,000 unofficial expellees from the Recovered Territories who had presented themselves at British reception camps. Additionally, 100,000 Germans from the Recovered Territories had found their way, by one means or another, to the U.S. zone. The British were bound to accept these also in an interzonal transfer. Altogether, then, the British zone had admitted or would shortly admit rather more than 1,400,000 Recovered Territories Germans. Because “unofficials” were continuing to arrive at a rate of two thousand per week, Britain’s quota of 1,500,000 million admissions from Poland under the ACC agreement would be fulfilled sometime around the end of July 1947.89 No need existed, therefore, for any further “organized transfers,” and none would be accepted.
Predictably, Colonel Prawin, backed up by Soviet representatives in the four-power administration of Germany, vigorously disputed the British calculations. Prawin disagreed that any “unofficial” expellees ought to be counted against the quota. There was no telling when, or how, these had arrived in Germany, but in light of the fact that the British zone did not share a frontier with Poland, they had clearly not done so directly. According to Polish figures, only 1,156,000 Germans had been transferred to the British zone. Another 334,000 thus remained to be admitted. As the British remained obdurate, Prawin softened his position. His government, he told the British, was “not so much interested in the full amount being received into the [British] Zone as in the fact that British Authorities do not reject the principle of receiving any transferees from Poland altogether.”90 If London were prepared to accept, say, another 150,000 Germans, Warsaw might be willing to call it a day.91 Dangling a still more tempting carrot before the British, Prawin added that “the percentage of able-bodied men among prospective transferees is high, embracing qualified workers in industry and mining who may be usefully employed in your Zone. Under [the] circumstances I strongly feel that British agreement to resume transports into the British Zone would be of real advantage to the economy of your Zone and would certainly be highly appreciated by the Polish Government.” In a face-to-face meeting with Bevin at the end of April 1947, the Polish foreign minister, Zygmunt Modzelewski, intimated he would be satisfied if the British took just 50,000 more expellees. If this were agreed, he promised, “much would have been done to improve Anglo-Polish relations.”92
British officials remained unimpressed. After two years of increasingly acrimonious exchanges between the two countries over everything from the fate of the London Poles to the future of Polish displaced persons still in Germany, they no longer considered that the prospect of better relations with Warsaw was worth paying even the bargain-basement price Modzelewski declared himself willing to accept. The ever-credulous Cavendish-Bentinck aside, they were more skeptical still of Prawin’s offer of skilled workers. Several months previously, the Poles had suggested that the pace of expulsions be doubled before the onset of the worst winter weather, hinting that if the British agreed, they would be rewarded by being sent a large number of German miners—the most valuable category of skilled labor in postwar Europe. The offer was rejected, firstly because the British were convinced “we should not get these miners and it would give the Poles another chance to cheat,” and secondly because if, having insisted that there was no more room in Germany for additional newcomers, Military Government was to find housing and food for especially valuable workers, “the arguments we used when reducing Swallow would look foolish not to say dishonest.”93 In any event, officials saw Prawin’s tacit acknowledgment that the Poles had indeed been holding back fit men while dumping the Recovered Territories’ unemployables upon the British zone as further confirmation, if any were needed, that Warsaw could not be trusted.
The British responded even more forcefully to Soviet accusations that they were engaging in deceptive practices to wriggle out of full compliance with the ACC agreement. To include “unofficial expellees” in the overall tally, the Soviets argued, meant that a German officially transferred from the Recovered Territories to east Germany who then made his way into the British zone would be counted twice, to Poland’s disadvantage. Furthermore, British claims that their occupation zone was full were belied by the presence in displaced persons camps of 260,000 anti-Soviet Poles, and tens of thousands of anticommunist Balts, Yugoslavs, and others to whom the authorities were giving asylum. Let these elements be forcibly returned home, Soviet delegates proclaimed, and there would be plenty of room in the west for the remaining Germans of the Recovered Territories.94 To these arguments Military Government officials responded with spluttering fury. As one officer fumed, “We don’t care a damn whether these [unofficial expellees] have been counted twice (once over Soviet border, once over ours)—the fact is we have them and they are eating here and living here.” After insisting that its own occupation zone could accept no more expellees, moreover, the USSR was in no position to cast aspersions at others in light of its recent unilateral decision to admit fifty thousand more from Hungary to spare the blushes of its protégés in Budapest. “This is a breach of faith and also an excellent reason for [the Soviets] keeping their mouths shut about our Chetniks and Yugoslavs.”95
On July 28, 1947, consequently, the British Government officially announced the termination of Operation Swallow. Its end went unmourned in the West, especially among those humanitarian organizations whose resources had been stretched beyond the breaking point in trying to mitigate the suffering it had caused. A great deal of this distress nev
er found its way into official statistics. In this context “Operation Swallow,” Father Edward Swanstrom of the U.S. Catholic Church’s War Relief Services remarked, had been “as callous a bit of human engineering as the post-war west can boast.” In a single makeshift geriatric infirmary that he visited at the former Salzgitter concentration camp southeast of Hanover, “more than 400 old people, weakened by the deportation and the consequent hunger and lack of care, had died while Swallow was in progress.”96 Human consequences like these, no mention of which is to be found in the Foreign Office files, should be borne in mind in light of recent assertions that Operation Swallow was accomplished “with very little loss of life …”97
The process by which the U.S. authorities cast off the burden of further “organized transfers” from Czechoslovakia was almost identical to the method used by the British, though there is nothing to suggest coordinated action between the two Western powers. In April 1946, Colonel Fye had obtained a private interview with President Beneš and “told him quite frankly of the difficulties we were having as a result of the ‘little people’ in his machine, who either through willfulness or indifference, were ignoring the terms of the transfer.” Fye was struck by the president’s “complete familiarity with the expulsion movement as far as the technical details were concerned,” but noted that Beneš offered “no commitment or promise of corrective action.”98 Accordingly, the U.S. authorities had proceeded to unilateral action. As noted above, admissions were curtailed from six daily trains to four on July 15. On October 4, OMGUS informed the Czechoslovaks that no trains at all would be accepted from eight named districts, in light of their persistent lack of compliance with the transfer agreement. Twelve days later, the daily flow was reduced to three trains, and from November 1, to just three ordinary trains and five “antifascist” trains—each carrying just three hundred especially privileged Socialist or Communist German expellees, with their luggage—per week. Finally, after admitting about 1,340,000 Sudetendeutsche through official channels—a figure the Czechoslovaks disputed, claiming that only 1,222,000 had been transferred—OMGUS declared an open-ended suspension of further acceptances on December 1, 1946, citing unfavorable weather conditions and “the desperate economic and housing conditions prevailing in the [U.S.] Zone.”99
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