Like the British, the Americans saw no good reason not to make the “temporary” hiatus a permanent one, by adding to their count another 118,000 Sudetendeutsche who had arrived in their zone via Austria, and a further 325,000 entering between the conclusion of the ACC agreement and the beginning of organized expulsions two months later or by illegal means. Combining all these figures, together with those expelled Germans who properly belonged to the Soviet or British zones but were unlikely to be removable, the U.S. embassy in Prague calculated that the Americans had already overfulfilled their quota by about 30 percent.100 Major General Frank Keating, Clay’s deputy, privately confirmed in April 1947 that so far as OMGUS was concerned, expulsions from both Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the U.S. zone had concluded and would never be resumed.101 The U.S. authorities did not announce their decision, though, until the following August, eliciting “a howl from the Czechs who said that the Americans were going back on their word, breaking the Potsdam Agreement and so forth …”102 Trying the same tactics that had already been used by the Poles, Interior Minister Václav Nosek denied in back-channel representations to the American authorities that more than 230,000 unofficial expellees could possibly be in the U.S. zone. OMGUS, according to Czechoslovak calculations, was liable to admit nearly 400,000 more Sudetendeutsche. However, in the interest of a quick resolution of the matter, Prague volunteered to waive all further claims if the Americans would take just 100,000 additional Germans.103 This offer made as negligible an impression on OMGUS as did Colonel Prawin’s similar overture to the Foreign Office. As an American official pointed out to Eric Mayer of the CICR, the admission of each additional expellee burdened U.S. taxpayers with more than a hundred dollars per year in enhanced occupation costs, which the American government was no longer prepared to pay.104 Like their British counterparts, then, by the end of 1946 the United States authorities were no longer in the expulsion business.
That left the USSR as the last remaining power that still was. Shortly after the Anglo-Americans had suspended movements into their zones at the end of 1946, the Soviets took the opportunity to do likewise. With previous experience in mind, they were in no hurry to resume them. Negotiations with the Poles proceeded at a deliberate pace, and were not concluded until April 12, 1947. This time, in return for removing the 520,000 Germans that Wolski estimated still remained in the Recovered Territories, the Soviet authorities in Germany insisted on a protocol considerably more favorable to them—and, hence, to the expellees—than its 1946 predecessor. Under its terms, Prawin was obliged to lift all limits on the quantity of baggage and German currency expellees were permitted to carry with them; to enforce the rules concerning medical certification (the previous year the Soviets had repeatedly complained about the “poor sanitary conditions in which the sick were transported”); to ensure that each expellee carried his or her own personal identity document; and to provide all necessary food for the journey with a three days’ reserve.105 In return, the Soviets agreed to accept two trains on weekdays, each of no more than 1,500 Germans, at the Kaławsk or Tuplice entry points.
Some evidence suggests that the Soviets did try harder than in previous years to maintain these standards. Once again, though, the overriding necessity of transporting a large number of people in a short period of time made any kind of systematic enforcement impossible. Soon after the trains began running again on April 18, the same complaints about overcrowded wagons, malnourished and diseased Germans, the separation of families, and illegal confiscations and robberies began to resurface. Within less than a week, the Soviet Military Mission had presented its Polish counterparts with a comprehensive laundry list of grievances: the provision of unsanitary cattle cars without floor covering; insufficient food for the journeys; medical certificates that were dirty, written in pencil, and illegible; inaccurate nominal lists; ambulance cars that were unhygienic or missing; and many similar deficiencies. Part of the problem, the official who forwarded these representations to the PUR director in Wrocław reminded him, was that his personnel had received no wages for the previous month.106
At least twice during the 1947 expulsion season, the Soviet authorities imposed partial suspensions of transports due to outbreaks of typhus among the expellees.107 As the PUR office at the Kaławsk transit point splenetically reported, a “violent breakdown” of the repatriation action had occurred even before the second of these shutdowns as a result of mismanagement, ignorance of duty, poor communication of instructions, and alcohol abuse on the part of the Polish personnel. While the hiatus lasted, Kaławsk—lacking as it did adequate accommodation, toilets, and delousing facilities—had degenerated into a shocking state of dung-covered filth. “One would have supposed that the railway authorities, the train dispatcher, the medical officer on duty, etc., were working with all their strength to furnish the representatives of first the British and then the Soviet Missions with arguments to discredit contemporary Poland.” The PUR demanded that the head of the transfer point be given the powers of a “repatriation dictator” over all other officials, who were “graciously condescend[ing]” to comply with requests that they follow regulations only when they could be bothered to do so.108 No action, however, was taken to address these shortcomings. A CICR delegate who revisited Kaławsk in August found much with which he was dissatisfied, including an elderly couple who had been beaten up and robbed by the People’s Militia. (When he complained to the Polish commandant, the latter initially claimed that this was the first such incident that had ever occurred—as the CICR man dryly observed, “a rather strange coincidence” with his own visit—and then explained that “this act had undoubtedly been perpetrated by bandits disguised as Militia.”)109 Theft from and abuse of Germans continued, to such a degree that an MZO inspector based in Olsztyn recommended that nighttime expulsions be discontinued so as to reduce the vulnerability of the deportees to the bands that preyed upon them.110 The Soviets, it is true, did crack down on the practice of separating families, on one occasion sending an entire transport back to Potulice camp because family members had been removed en route.111 As Bernadetta Nitschke points out, though, the reduced number of deaths occurring in the course of the 1947 transports had as much to do with the fact that they avoided the winter months as with any supposed improvement in organization.112
While on a much reduced scale compared with the mass deportations of the previous year, the 1947 population transfers from Poland still posed a significant administrative burden in the Soviet zone. As the autumn approached, and despite their earlier promises to take as many Germans as the Poles were prepared to send, the Soviet authorities in Germany began dropping increasingly heavy hints that the time to draw a line under the operation would have arrived when the number of acceptances reached the figure of 520,000 that Wolski had mentioned earlier in the year. In the event, that target was overshot slightly. The last official transports accepted were those already on their way to the Tuplice crossing point by November 1; others arriving later were turned back. Nonetheless, according to MZO figures a total of 593,120 Germans were removed from Poland in 1947; when unofficial departures are included, the average weekly rate of deportations during the thirty weeks of the year in which organized expulsions had taken place exceeded 20,000. By the time they came to an end, the number of Germans remaining in “New Poland” was insignificant, consisting of a few hundred thousand skilled workers, detainees in labor camps, unreleased prisoners of war, spouses (usually wives) in mixed marriages, and children whose relatives could not be traced. With the main phase of the expulsion program completed, the Polish state’s concern increasingly swung round in the direction of trying to retain and Polonize its remaining Germans, in the face of their desire not to remain as members of a shrinking and discriminated-against minority.
Even so, small-scale aftershocks of the mass expulsions persisted into 1948 and 1949. Between October 1947 and October 1948, around 100,000 Germans were deported by the Red Army from the East Prussian territory around Kaliningrad
(Königsberg) annexed by the USSR to the Soviet occupation zone. Each family was allowed to bring three hundred kilograms of personal possessions, in an operation that earned praise from expellees for the efficiency with which it was conducted.113 In a bilateral accord concluded with Warsaw in May 1948, the Soviets promised to accept up to 30,000 additional Germans, dispatched in twenty trains via Tuplice during the summer and early autumn, in exchange for Poland’s guarantee that the deportation would be accompanied by 3,000 German miners (70 percent of whom, the Soviets prudently specified, were to be under the age of forty-five years) and their families.114 The final organized transports occurred in the summer of 1949, when another Polish-Soviet agreement provided for the dissolution of the remaining labor camps for Germans in Poland and the removal of their inmates, a total of 24,000 persons, to East Germany. Under the terms of this arrangement, every individual transport was to carry a specified minimum percentage of fit workers, the precise number to be determined by the age distribution of the expellees concerned. The operation was completed between April and August 1949.115 Of all the transfers that had taken place since the war, these came closest to satisfying the Potsdam Agreement’s demand for “orderly and humane” conditions. The reason was less the result of any steps taken by the Warsaw government—the assembly camp at Glubczyce, for example, remained a black spot in which far too many expellees were crowded in unsanitary conditions for many days—than the final exhaustion of the Soviet authorities’ patience with Polish breaches of the agreement.116 From the summer of 1948 onward, the Red Army liaison team at Tuplice developed a hair-trigger mentality, rejecting any train that was not in full compliance with the minimum standards specified.117 This, in turn, obliged the Poles to pay greater attention to the fulfillment of their commitments. Thus when Jerzy Szczepanik of the PUR found that a train of 1,528 expellees from Gorzów Wielkopolski in June 1948 was predominantly composed of paralyzed and disabled people, invalids, mothers of small children, nuns, and individuals with no experience of agricultural work—and that none was in possession of identification papers—he insisted that it be returned to its place of origin and the process of assembling the transport be started again from scratch, in view of the near-certainty that the Soviets would refuse to admit it.118
In this final phase of mass expulsions, about seventy-seven thousand Germans were deported from their birthplaces. A comparative trickle would continue to be removed in subsequent years, with a total of approximately thirty thousand former Volksdeutsche from Poland being transported to the DDR, with the agreement of the East Berlin government, in the years 1950 and 1951.119 Long before then, the expelling countries began a series of public celebrations, both local and national, to mark the “cleansing” of their territories. In Lower Silesia, for example, a bonus pool of 300,000 zlotys was established for PUR staff in recognition of the expulsion of the 500,000th German from the province.120 The passage of the half-millionth expellee through the Kaławsk border point was also the occasion of festive events. The German concerned, a small child, was given a bar of chocolate by the PUR in recognition of the milestone; the Polish expulsion staff celebrated with a banquet the same evening.121 In Czechoslovakia, too, a series of commemorative functions was organized to mark the last official transfer of Germans. The Prague government had tried hard to complete the operation by October 28, 1946, the country’s Independence Day. Although that deadline was missed, with eight transports to the U.S. zone continuing each week until December 1, elaborate ceremonies were held in numerous towns across the country at the close of 1946, to which foreign dignitaries were invited and decorations awarded to those who had distinguished themselves by their zeal in the de-Germanization campaign.122 Particularly helpful Allied officers were also honored: Colonel John Fye, for example, was awarded the Order of the White Lion, the country’s highest decoration for foreigners, in recognition of his services, as Rudé právo put it, “in expelling Germans from Czechoslovakia.”123 In his Christmas Eve broadcast, Edvard Beneš invited his compatriots to rejoice over the fact that “this was Czechoslovakia’s first Christmas without the Germans.”124
This sense of satisfaction, though, would not last for long. For one thing, the expelling countries could never be sure that their German populations had gone for good. Because no peace treaty was concluded at the end of the war, the frontiers of the postwar Germany—and those of its neighbors—remained provisional. There was no guarantee that the Allies might not decide after all that it was too dangerous to have a divided Germany filled with rootless, embittered people in the middle of the European continent, and at some point in the future return at least some of its lost territories to it. Nor could the fear that Germany might one day rise again, and seek revenge for what had occurred during the expulsions, entirely be dispelled. In consequence, Poles and Czechoslovaks were never able to stop looking over their shoulders. To this day some continue to do so.
A second sobering consideration was the extent of the self-inflicted damage done to the demographic and economic fabrics of the expelling societies. Already severely disrupted by the war, they were ill prepared for another round of profound upheavals—especially when these were conducted from the top down by politicians and bureaucrats whose ideological idées fixes insulated them from reality. The belief of all the expelling states that eager colonists would flock into the districts newly purged of Germans was quickly disappointed. For decades to come, these borderland regions would remain the most sparsely populated and undeveloped parts of the countries to which they belonged.
Probably the most damaging consequences of the expulsions, though, were the aspects that could not be quantified. In each of the expelling countries, the removal of the Germans had made necessary the suspension of any concept of human rights and the rule of law. Arbitrary decrees had proclaimed entire categories of people to be, as a group of American critics put it, “men without the Rights of Man.” By administrative fiat, individuals were deprived of property, bodily integrity, liberty, and life itself. The exercise of “surplus cruelty” in the accomplishment of the goal of national cleansing—even against the most helpless or unresisting of victims—was deemed a positive good, a demonstration of patriotic commitment, or a necessary catharsis. Knowledge of these abuses was concealed or denied, not just by the state but by ordinary citizens, who in this way assumed a degree of complicity, however remote, in what was being done in their names. The culture of the lie, as a means of assuaging or deadening individual consciences no less than as an instrument of official policy, was allowed to prevail. And even after the supposed defeat of the totalitarian heresy epitomized by the Nazis, entire societies continued to be reinforced in the belief that immensely complex political and social problems, developed over centuries, could be banished at a stroke by the adoption of radical solutions involving massive amounts of violence. The supposition that all these things could be directed against a single group of perceived enemies and then never again resorted to for any other purpose, that afterwards it would be possible to return to a peaceful, ordered existence in which individual rights would once more be upheld and respected, would prove to be the most delusional aspect of this entire tragic episode.
8
THE CHILDREN
In April 1946 Willy Montandon, a member of the CICR delegation in Czechoslovakia, called at the Modřany internment camp in the southern suburbs of Prague. He had brought a doctor with him in the hope of providing medical attention to an elderly female Sudetendeutsch inmate who was soon to be expelled, but was allowed to proceed no further than the camp commandant’s office. There he was shown an order of the minister of the interior, issued two weeks previously, that “formally prohibited any person whatever from entering the camp and speaking with the internees who did not possess a written authorization by the said ministry—the representatives of the International Red Cross and UNRRA included.” On his way out of the compound, Montandon was stopped by a young detainee, Emma Duda, who asked for his help. Duda, a Prague reside
nt, told him that her two little daughters—Inge and Ilse, aged five and three respectively—had been taken from her by the Czech authorities at the time of her arrest during the May 1945 “revolution.” She had heard nothing of them since then.
To our question as to whether she could give us any details, any indications that might facilitate fresh inquiries, she remained silent for a moment, then resumed in that same almost inaudible, quiet, even-toned voice: “Yes, they were both so very pretty and very well-behaved …” That was all. The sight of this mother, indifferent to anything apart from her missing little girls; this almost instinctual grief; this total obliviousness to everything that surrounded her; this perfect unconcern for her own circumstances; the contrast between this steady voice and these drawn, almost hard features, at once calm and tragic, had something unbearable in it that left me, accustomed to such things as I am, speechless. I was unable to do anything except silently grip that unresponsive hand of hers and quickly signal to the driver to move on.1
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