Such cases were neither unusual nor accidental. According to an estimate by Monsignor Edward Swanstrom, who spearheaded the U.S. National Catholic Welfare Conference’s relief effort in Europe after the war, between 160,000 and 180,000 of the children who became separated from their parents in the course of the transfer operation had not been reunited with them by 1950.2 Many of these separations, as he pointed out, were the inevitable consequences of “snap” expulsions, as exemplified by the story of “a young boy who had walked to a nearby town to go to the store, and before he returned his whole family was forcibly loaded on to a truck and taken to a detention camp for expulsion.”3 Others occurred as a result of the equally common practice of separating families during the expulsion process itself, when “men and women, if they were healthy and able to work, were fetched out of the train … and the children were left alone travelling in that train.”4 But in innumerable cases the sins of the parents were knowingly visited on German children, both within and without the internment camps. And many others, like the Duda daughters, were treated as war booty, being kept behind after the removal of their parents to make good wartime losses of population, or in conformity with quasi-racial theories of the proportion of Czechoslovak or Polish “blood” carried in their veins.
Like so many other aspects of the expulsion program, the precedent was set by Nazi Germany in its plans for occupied Poland. Under the Generalplan Ost, the Germans’ master plan for the ethnic cleansing of central and eastern Europe, the Race and Settlement Main Office, an agency of the SS, was made responsible for identifying and removing from their parents “racially valuable” Polish children under the age of eight to ten years. Heinrich Himmler, who visited Poland after the September campaign of 1939, had been impressed by the number of blond-haired and blue-eyed children he found there. Many supposed “Poles,” he believed, were racial Aryans who had undergone “Polonization” and who, if they were young enough, could be reeducated to become part of the German nation. In the following years, teams of women (the so-called “Brown Sisters”) from the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrtsamt or National Socialist People’s Welfare Office scoured occupied Poland in cooperation with SS racial investigators, abducting “potentially Nordic” children from orphanages, schools, and sometimes public streets. These children were subjected to a battery of physical and psychological tests. The many failures—some 90 percent—were returned home, taken as forced labor to Germany, or, in some cases, sent to death camps for immediate extermination. Children satisfying the racial criteria would be placed in Lebensborn institutions; if older, they might be adopted by German families charged with the task of reversing the “Polonization” they had undergone since their birth.5 Most records of the Nazi racial kidnapping scheme were destroyed before the war’s end; estimates of the number of Polish children swept up in it range from 20,000 to 200,000.6 Whatever the true figure may have been, it is thought that no more than 15 percent of the abductees were ever reunited with their parents.7 In like manner, smaller numbers of “racially valuable” children, whose parents had been killed by the Germans as partisans or in the course of reprisals—as in the case of the massacre at Lidice—were removed from the occupied Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia and sent to the Reich for Germanization.8 A further rationale behind the operation, as Himmler explained, was not merely to ensure that reservoirs of desirable genetic material should not be lost, but to weaken the racial stock of Germany’s eastern enemies by diminishing the quotient of “Nordic blood” in the Polish or Ukrainian gene pools.
After the war, Czechoslovak and Polish discourses on the fate of children in the expulsion program sometimes bore an uncomfortably close resemblance to those of their Nazi predecessors. The already vexed question of “who is a German?” presented itself in the case of the offspring of mixed marriages in an especially acute form. The debate often revolved around the supposed “strength” of the respective racial influences: whether “Aryan” or “Slavic” tendencies—which in the postwar era had the values the Nazis had attached to them simply inverted—would gain the upper hand once the child reached adulthood. The answer to this question frequently determined whether the children of mixed marriages would be expelled along with their German parent for possessing “tainted” blood or be permitted to stay with their “Slavic” one. However unsavory such Social Darwinian categories might have been, they nonetheless implied that these children would remain in the custody of at least one of their natural parents. Those officials who maintained that “nurture” was more powerful than “nature,” on the other hand, raised a more ominous scenario yet: that the children of mixed marriages, or even those of purely German descent, could be reeducated as good Czechoslovaks or Poles by removing them altogether from the corrupting influence of their German relatives.
Before the Second World War, heated disputes over the national identity of children had been a regular feature of Czechoslovak life in the First Republic. Schools in particular were seen as key battlegrounds in the quest to de-Germanize the country. As Tara Zahra notes, in the early years of Czechoslovak independence “local Czech nationalist associations flooded the government with petitions urging the state to eliminate German schools … in the name of protecting both Czech ethnicity and democracy.”9 Sudeten Germans responded by vandalizing Czech-language schools, a practice that had been a popular pastime for Czechs and Germans alike before the Great War when both linguistic groups were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.10 Under the First Republic, the tendency of some Czech parents to send their children to German-language schools, believing that they would receive a better education there and that the language would be more useful to them, caused particular anxiety to the majority population. Members of the local gendarmerie often intervened in such cases to seize the children and enroll them compulsorily in Czech schools; sometimes German schools were closed by the state for admitting children of the “wrong” ethnicity. Where ethnic German parents sent their children to the better-funded Czech schools, on the other hand, the fact was taken by census authorities as evidence for reclassifying them as ethnically Czech. The result was to sharpen the self-segregation of the two communities, as ethnic Germans found themselves compelled to enroll their children in German institutions and associations in an attempt to provide the “objective” markers of national identity that might hold sway with a Czechoslovak court. “In its determination to prevent the Germanization of Czech children,” Zahra concludes, “the Czechoslovak state imagined [into existence] extraordinary social and cultural boundaries between the German and Czech populations in the Bohemian Lands.”11
During the war years, although the tables between the two ethnic groups were turned, the underlying equation was not. Nazi occupiers and Czech nationalists continued to try to police the national identities of the Protectorate’s children, and enjoyed little more success in this endeavor than their prewar counterparts. Upwardly mobile Czech families had additional incentives to place their children in German schools or to enroll them in German-language courses; on the other side of the ethnic divide, a surprising number of Sudetendeutsche resisted what they saw as the obtrusive Germanization policies of the occupiers, even to the point of refusing to apply for the German citizenship for themselves and their children to which, under Nazi law, they were entitled.12 In general the children of mixed marriages were automatically classified as possessing German nationality. Nonetheless, the comparatively light hand with which the Germans governed the Protectorate—such a qualification, needless to say, having only a relative meaning in the Nazi spectrum of brutality—as well as the degree of respect accorded by the occupiers to “German-loyal” Czech culture; the noninterference of the Germans in the educational policy of the collaborationist Tiso regime in Slovakia; and the brevity of the occupation meant that the war years witnessed fewer attempts to conscript Gentile Czechoslovak children of all ethnicities into the Nazi new order than might have been expected.
Poland’s experience was v
ery different. Between the wars, attempts by the Polish state to eradicate “Germanism” within the republic, again especially within the schools, had been pursued even more vigorously and coercively than in Czechoslovakia. Aided by lavish subventions from Berlin, the German minority vigorously resisted these efforts, hiring itinerant German teachers to provide home schooling to children who otherwise would have been obliged to attend a Polish institution.13 Both sides’ paranoia over “Germanization” and “Polonization” of each other’s children was fueled by a sense of vulnerability. From the earliest days of the Polish Second Republic, the Warsaw government remained keenly conscious of the tenuousness of the Polish nation-building enterprise. The state contained within its borders more than a dozen ethnic minorities, from Ukrainians in the east to Lithuanians in the northwest. Less than two-thirds of the republic’s population at the moment of its creation was Polish. The dominance of the Catholic Church over the Polish education system also gave rise to constant tensions with the country’s Volksdeutsche, the majority of whom were Protestants. By 1939, in response to Hitler’s increasingly menacing stance vis-à-vis his Polish neighbor, the Warsaw government was actively targeting members of the German minority who sent their children to private German-language schools.14 If the grievances of the German population had been greater than in Czechoslovakia, however, the revenge taken by Poland’s German conquerors after 1939 was disproportionate in the extreme. Other than the compulsorily Germanized youth of the Incorporated Eastern Territories and the “racially valuable” component of the juvenile population elsewhere in Poland, the Nazis regarded Polish children, like the Polish people in general, as suitable only for satisfying the manual labor requirements of the Reich. All Polish schools above the elementary level were closed, their teachers often being murdered as part of a deliberate strategy to deprive the Polish nation of an intellectual class; children were made liable to eviction from their homes or to compulsory labor service in the German war economy; and some were subjected to medical experiments in the camps.
After the Nazis’ defeat, the new regimes of central and eastern Europe were in no humor to try to distinguish between culpable and innocent Germans. This uncompromising attitude extended to German children, for whom in practice few exceptions were made. One example of the prevailing mood was the satisfaction expressed by the Prague newspaper Mladá Fronta over the British government’s rejection of proposals to provide a temporary haven for ten thousand starving German children during the winter of 1945–46, against which it had been running a ferocious campaign: its headline, when an announcement was made that the scheme would not after all go ahead, read: “British Will Not Feed Little Hitlerites: Our Initiative Crowned With Success.”15 Another example was the official scale of food rations laid down by the Czech government, which made even the youngest Sudetendeutsch children answerable for the misdeeds of their parents. From August 1945, German children under the age of six were allocated only half the allowance of milk, and rather less than half the allowance of barley, specified for their Czech counterparts. German children were to receive no meat, eggs, jam, or fruit syrup at all, these being reserved for the infants of the majority.16 In the Recovered Territories, on the other hand, such considerations did not arise: as ration cards were progressively withdrawn from the German population, like their parents German children found themselves entitled to no rations at all. Thus the head of the Szczecin-Stołczyn Commissariat indignantly contradicted the allegation of a local newspaper that Germans in his district had been receiving daily supplies of milk; since the end of November 1945, he proudly reported, even German children under the age of two had had their milk allocation withdrawn from them.17 Likewise, the age at which children were counted as “adults” for the purpose of compulsory labor was largely at the whim of local administrators. Normally, Germans in Czechoslovakia were liable to become forced laborers on their fourteenth birthday (sometimes, in the case of girls, their fifteenth). In some districts, though, labor services were required of all those aged ten or above.18 Children of ten years of age and above were also routinely used as forced laborers in Yugoslavia.19
By far the worst conditions were experienced by children in the detention centers. As the first improvised internment camps were thrown up—some forty of these, housing between twenty and twenty-five thousand ethnic German detainees, had been established in Prague alone by the end of May 194520—babies and children were swept inside along with their parents. Their undeveloped immune systems and lack of physical reserves left them particularly vulnerable to the ravages of hunger and disease. The terrifying speed which the condition of the very young deteriorated in the camps was recorded by a social worker from Prague, Přemsyl Pitter, in the summer of 1945. A quietly heroic figure, Pitter had been converted to a profound Christian pacifism by his experiences as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army during the Great War. Between the wars he had directed a shelter for vulnerable children; his courageous efforts to shield his Jewish charges from the Nazis throughout the occupation would later be recognized by his designation as one of the Righteous Among the Nations at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem. After V-E Day, he reopened his shelter at a derelict castle in Lojovice to succor Jewish children who had survived imprisonment in Nazi camps. As he visited the new Czechoslovak regime’s detention centers, however, he quickly found that the overwhelming majority of those who needed his aid were ethnic Germans. At the K. V. Rais school, a makeshift internment camp in the Vinohrady district of Prague, for example, Pitter and his handful of helpers discovered at the end of July 1945 “a hell of which passers-by hadn’t the faintest notion.” More than a thousand German detainees, the great majority women and children, were “crowded together in an indescribable tangle. As we brought emaciated and apathetic children out and laid them on the grass, I believed that few would survive. Our physician, Dr. E. Vogl, himself a Jew who had gone though the hell of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, almost wept when he saw these little bodies. ‘And here we Czechs have done this in two and a half months!’ he exclaimed.”21 Conditions at the other Prague camps, Red Cross officials found, were no better. The CICR informed the interior minister, Václav Nosek, at the beginning of July that the fifty-one ethnic German children interned in another improvised detention center, a house at U Půjĉovny near the Masarykovo railway station, had received so little food that in the previous week two had died of malnutrition. Nosek was advised that the same situation prevailed in other such detention facilities.22 Outside the city, conditions were still worse. 508 children, 74 of whom were under two years of age, were prisoners in the harsh Suchdol nad Odrou camp in late August 1945; by the end of the camp’s first three weeks of operation, thirteen had died.23
The response of the authorities to appeals on behalf of these incarcerated children, in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, was almost without exception to ignore them. It is true that the first edicts providing for the detention of the Germans in camps usually had exempted younger children, as well as their mothers, from arrest. In practice no such distinction was observed. Precisely because the majority of Volksdeutsche were women and children, to have granted immunity from arrest to both would have been to accept that most of the ethnic German population could not be interned. Nor could the adults alone have been sent to camps without throwing the burden of caring for millions of young people on the detaining governments. The result, therefore, was that—as in the case of similar “exemptions” for antifascists—the Czech, Slovak, Polish, and Romanian governments contented themselves with issuing and, in the face of external protests, repeating regulations that they had no intention of enforcing. Nosek, for example, reiterated in August 1945 that internment camps throughout the Republic were to release immediately all children under the age of fourteen, with the exception of those whose parents desired them to remain pending deportation. Youths aged between fourteen and eighteen would remain interned, but in dedicated camps separate from their families.24 No action, though, had been taken to give effect to t
his instruction by the time Philip Nichols asked Prime Minister Fierlinger in late October to release women and children from the camps. Although the prime minister once again promised to do so, Nichols prudently advised Ernest Bevin that “this was in casual conversation, and I find it difficult to believe that the Czechoslovak Government will in fact be able to follow this policy, at least for some time.”25 Thus according to the CICR, on April 1, 1946, there were approximately 2,000 children under the age of six, almost 3,300 aged between six and sixteen, and more than 1,200 youths between sixteen and twenty confined in camps in Slovakia alone.26 In like fashion, a directive of the Polish Ministry of Public Security issued in April 1945 specifying that nobody under the age of thirteen was to be detained was accorded precisely the same level of compliance as were similar regulations prohibiting physical abuse of inmates.27 More than two years later, the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare was complaining that the regulations against imprisoning children in camps continued to be “completely ignored.”28 As late as January 1949, an interministerial commission ordered the immediate release of 128 German children for whom no legal basis for internment existed, while another inspectorate discovered the following August not only that 171 children continued to be held in the Gronowo camp, but that any contact between them and their incarcerated parents in the same facility was prohibited.29
The camp regime for child detainees varied as widely as it did for adults. With certain exceptions, there is little evidence to suggest that the authorities exerted themselves to shield children from the harsher aspects of camp life. Some detention centers required labor services of children below the age of fourteen.30 (An extreme case was Mirošov, where the local definition of “adult” consisted of all inmates above six years of age.)31 In the immediate postwar period, indeed, incarceration could have no less lethal consequences for children than for their elders. At the Postoloprty camp in northern Bohemia, five Sudetendeutsch children were flogged on the orders of a police officer, Bohuslav Marek, in June 1945 as a punishment for attempting to abscond. As he acknowledged before a Czechoslovak parliamentary commission two years later, however, the army officer overseeing the camp, Major Vojtěch Ĉerný, disapproved of what he regarded as Marek’s unwarranted leniency and had the five executed the same day by firing squad.32 Often justified—as in this instance—by the claim that victims were members of the Hitler Youth and hence were liable to the same treatment as those belonging to other Nazi organizations, extrajudicial executions of children were covered by the same culture of impunity that applied to similar excesses directed against adults. Indeed, the widely held, though inaccurate, belief that under Nazism children had been indoctrinated to become “unquestioning automata” and “fanatical little devotees of the Führer” who robotically obeyed their leaders and routinely “blackmailed their parents by threatening to denounce them to the Party for lack of zeal” could lead them to be perceived as being even more dangerous than adults.33 It was all of a piece, therefore, that the 1947 commission investigating the Postoloptry massacres should have found, notwithstanding Ĉerný’s forthright admission of his actions, that there was no case to answer.34
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 35