Occasionally, specialized children’s camps were established in which inmates, some of whom were orphaned or had become separated from their parents in the course of the expulsion, were treated humanely. The British member of Parliament Richard Stokes was generally impressed by the standard of care provided at the children’s camp at Litoměřice when he visited it in September 1946, although he cautioned that he had been able to spend very little time there.35 The CICR also recognized the efforts made by the camp authorities at Brno-Jundrov and Ĉeské Křídlovice. Even though the children lacked adequate clothing and footwear and were forbidden to speak German, the Red Cross was favorably impressed when it viewed the camps in the summer of 1947 by the evident attention being paid to their welfare.36 In both cases, though, the inspections were made at a time when the great majority of the Sudetendeutsche had already been expelled.
Elsewhere, however, the general picture at children’s camps was far bleaker. Two fifteen-year-old German boys who escaped from the vermin-ridden Bolesławiec camp in Polish Lower Silesia in the summer of 1948 reported that the twelve to thirteen hundred children detained there were being put out to work on building projects. In December 1947 a thousand of the boys had been deported to the Soviet Union; nothing more was known about what had happened to them.37 Children’s camps, staffed by female Volksdeutsch internees, had also been set up for a brief period in 1946 in Yugoslavia to house children whose parents had died in institutions like Gakovo or Kruševlje. After three months the children were taken away by the authorities and the camps dissolved. Again, the Red Cross could obtain no further information about their fate.38
However poor conditions in even the worst children’s camps like Bolesławiec may have been, they were nonetheless preferable to many of the facilities in which children and adults alike were detained. To be sure, the care that parents could provide was a definite survival advantage in some facilities. The British officers who visited the squalid Turnu Măgurele camp for Volksdeutsch internees in southern Romania in September 1945 and recommended that the children under twelve years of age incarcerated there be set free only “where there is no political objection to the mother or father being released” no doubt feared that these young people would fare still worse if left to fend for themselves outside the camp.39 But in other detention centers, juvenile inmates shared all the hardships to which their elders were subject, with the predictable consequences. The CICR complained to Nosek in September 1945 that in the Czechoslovak camps, the young male guards treated detainees with “the utmost cruelty” and that beatings of children as well as adults were widespread.40 Physical violence was compounded by psychological abuse of children, some of whom were compelled—as at Kruševlje in Yugoslavia—to witness their parents’ torture or execution at the hands of camp guards.41
By far the largest number of child deaths, however, occurred as a result of starvation and its attendant diseases rather than overt maltreatment. Again, the very youngest were the most vulnerable. A credible and detailed account by a female detainee at Potulice recorded that of 110 children born in the camp between the beginning of 1945 and her eventual expulsion in December 1946, only 11 were still alive by the latter date.42 Investigations by the CICR found high rates of infant mortality attributable to malnutrition to be no less widespread in Czechoslovakia, where a few Western journalists like Eric Gedye had also managed to see inside the camps.
The most shocking sight was that of the babies with which most huts were filled.
One woman sat with a medicine bottle full of mothers’ milk—there is no other milk in the camp—trying to moisten the lips of something which she called her baby.
Two months old, it was smaller than a healthy newborn baby. It had a wizened, monkey-like face, dark brown skin stretched taut over the bones, arms like matchsticks—a starving baby.
Near her stood another mother holding a shrunken bundle of skin and bones, smaller than a normal two-month-old baby. I stared incredulously when she told me it was 14 months old.43
That Gedye had not exaggerated conditions at Hagibor, the camp to which he gained access in October 1945 by passing himself off as a Red Cross official, was confirmed when a genuine CICR delegation visited the facility three months later. The Czechoslovak commissary officer, “who gave us the impression of being a pretty hard and hypocritical individual,” informed the delegation that pregnant women were not entitled to any nutritional supplement. Nursing mothers, he claimed, received 750 milliliters of milk a day, a statement contradicted by inmates. The “man of confidence” elected by the detainees to speak for them told the CICR that deaths in the camp were running at a rate of three per day, nearly all of whom were infants or the very old.44
The same story was received from camp after camp. A journalist from Obzory, who visited one of the Prague detention centers in the company of a five-year veteran of Hitler’s concentration camps in the autumn of 1945, acknowledged that “mortality has increased to a horrifying degree” among the children, due to the complete absence of infant formula and the fact that the majority of nursing mothers were too emaciated to breastfeed their newborns.45 At Nováky in Slovakia, where the guards often prevented mothers from washing their babies’ linens, inmates of all ages “have their daily ration diminished if they cannot work whatever the reason. Accordingly, a mother who is taken ill will send her children to work, even if they are under 12.” This camp, a perennial black spot, saw an average of one child under the age of three die each day in July 1945 as a result of malnutrition and inadequate sanitation.46 Petržalka I contained 1,279 women and children when the CICR visited in November 1945; the thirty to fifty nursing mothers then under detention were theoretically entitled to a ration of eighteen liters of milk to be shared among them, to supplement a daily regime estimated by the camp medical staff of between 430 and 520 calories. In practice even this meager allotment was often withheld. The CICR noted that among the list of those who had died in Petržalka “the great number of children is truly striking,” and the clothing of surviving children was “in a piteous, terrible state.”47 So prevalent was “malnutrition, leading to many deaths” at the Hradišt’ko prison east of Prague, where a commissary guard ill-advisedly revealed to CICR visitors that “Czech children”—presumably the offspring of mixed marriages—in the prison “receive[d] twice as much as the Germans,” that embarrassed officials of the Interior Ministry who had brought the Red Cross there to display the humane conditions of the Sudetendeutsch camps in the Czech lands ostentatiously dismissed the commandant on the spot.48 Still worse was the Slovakian facility at Trnavská Cesta in Bratislava, where at the end of 1945 the CICR found that every one of the emaciated infants and children was “suffering from hideous skin eruptions,” and at which conditions were “in general so desperate that it is difficult to find words” with which to comfort the detainees.49
An additional reason for the high rate of child mortality was the difficulty, and in some cases the impossibility, of obtaining medical care for sick children. Though Tomáš Staněk notes that as a rule, German detainees in need of hospital treatment were able to receive it, numerous cases nonetheless existed of children being denied care on the ground of their ethnicity. A British national detained at the Rupa internment camp in Prague during the summer of 1945 recorded that even the commandant’s personal intervention had not been sufficient to persuade local hospitals to admit the sick child of a Norwegian fellow inmate, the wife of a German. Not a day passed during the period of her detention, she testified, without the death of a child in the camp occurring; once three of them had perished.50 The commandant of Suchdol nad Odrou justified his refusal to do anything about the appallingly high child mortality rate in his camp by alleging that mothers deliberately made their children ill in the hope of gaining their release. A guard in this camp offered the same explanation; in his view, however, the objective of the mothers in poisoning their children was “to generate propaganda aimed at people from abroad.”51
Many
appalled local people did what they could to alleviate the suffering experienced by Volksdeutsch child detainees. The Potulice inmate quoted above testified that “kind farmers” had rescued some of the children of the camp as they were being transported to Bydgoszcz and brought them into their own homes. Some members of the majority populations pinned their hopes on the Western media, to which they appealed to bring the pressure of international public opinion to bear against their own governments. A guard at Hagibor confessed to Eric Gedye: “I have a baby of my own at home. Cannot someone do something, at least about the horrors these children here suffer? Sometimes I feel I cannot stand it here another day.”52 The CICR, for its part, attempted to follow up some of the many tip-offs it received—both anonymously and “on the record”—from ordinary citizens, but because of the inadequacy of the information provided was often unable to help. In January 1946, for example, the Prague delegation received a letter from a Czech woman informing them that the inmates in a camp for little girls in Veltrusy near the capital were suffering most severely from neglect. A party of Red Cross officials spent a day searching the area, but was unable to find the camp from the information provided. Later they learned that about fifty inmates were interned there. All had been detained on V-E Day in Prague and transferred to Veltrusy a month later. Six of the children had died since then from malnutrition.53
Any hopes that the governments or peoples of the Western Allies would intervene to assist at any rate the children behind barbed wire were quickly to be dashed. While sympathy for and outrage over their plight was expressed by a vocal minority of nongovernmental organizations and lower-ranking politicians—sometimes in the most vehement terms—Western opinion in general was not ready to deviate from the established narrative of Germans as perpetrators, regardless of the age or exact ethnic status of the “Germans” concerned. Although both the expelling countries and the Western Allies had subscribed in 1926 to the International Declaration on the Rights of the Child, which stipulated that children were to “be the first to receive relief in times of distress” without taking into account “considerations of race, nationality or creed,” this remained a dead letter throughout. Like their parents, Volksdeutsch children were denied aid from international relief bodies like UNRRA and the International Refugee Organization (IRO) as a matter of policy. In a typical ruling of January 1948, the chief of IRO’s Eligibility Division in Austria declared nine children “ineligible for any kind of assistance due to the fact that they are of German ethnic origin …”54 Even the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) maintained a discriminatory stance, assigning priority in the provision of aid to the children of “victims of aggression” and relegating those of German background to the end of the queue.55
In the face of such a mentality, attempts by concerned citizens both inside and outside the expelling countries to ameliorate conditions for child detainees were uniformly unsuccessful. A letter writer in the London Daily Herald spoke for many of his fellow Britons when he wrote: “Enemies remain enemies in spite of the cessation of the activities of their respective armed forces, and anything done by us to alleviate their well-earned misery is against British interests.”56 In a Commons debate in October 1945, the minister of state at the Foreign Office, Hector McNeil, refused to admit any distinction between Volksdeutsch babies and their parents, or to “accept the suggestion that these are comparatively innocent people.”57 The German people as a whole, he declared, shared collective responsibility for the misdeeds of their political leaders. The former Minister of Food in the Churchill coalition, Lord Llewellin, took a similarly robust stance: “I remember that at the end of the last war appeals were made on the basis that the youth of Germany were suffering from malnutrition and rickets and that we ought to do something to save them from the dreadful conditions under which they had to live. Good gracious me! Those were the people who became Hitler’s S.S. men twenty-five years later. Do not let us run into that kind of stupidity again this time.”58 Llewellin’s Conservative colleague, Lord Mountevans, strongly agreed, expressing outrage at the damage to British prestige that humanitarian pleas on behalf of ethnic German children were doing abroad. “We are asking Europe, in fact we are asking the whole world, to laugh at us…. Why all this sloppy sentiment?”59 In vain did Michael Foot, a newly elected Labour backbencher, remind Parliament of the passage of St. Luke’s Gospel containing Jesus’ warning that “whomsoever should offend against one of these little ones, it were better that a millstone be fastened around his neck and he be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Foot disconsolately noted that “If these infamies are to be allowed to continue there will be a shortage of millstones to set beside the other shortages in Europe.”60 The left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz likewise demanded to know why McNeil, an “unusually decent and humane” man, should feel compelled “the moment he becomes a Minister, to talk like a Nazi?”
At what age does a child become “guilty” or “responsible”? At twelve? At six? At the moment of conception? Before conception? A hair-splitting question, I suppose: they are all guilty, says Mr McNeil, in their own persons or “through their rulers”—because “they are Germans.”
This is the pure milk of the Hitlerite word.61
Přemsyl Pitter, for his part, concluded by early 1946 that moral appeals directed at his own government to spare Sudetendeutsch children were pointless. The previous summer, in an effort by the authorities in Prague to deflect persistent CICR complaints about the conditions of the camps, he had been appointed adviser to the Social Commission of the Central People’s Committee, with special responsibility for women and children. In this capacity he had visited several internment camps in and around Prague accompanied by a representative of the Federation of Czech Youth, compiling evidence of homicides, flogging of pregnant Sudetendeutsch women, torture, and theft of food intended for inmates. His career as an official whistleblower was soon brought to a halt by Ladislav Kopřiva, the future minister of national security, who dismissed him from his position in the autumn.62 As the highest-profile advocate of human rights for Sudetendeutsche in Czechoslovakia, however, Pitter continued to receive information from fellow citizens aghast at the scenes they were witnessing—as well, to be sure, as an even larger number of letters and newspaper denunciations accusing him of betrayal of the Czech nation and demanding that he be expelled to Germany along with his young charges.63 He was also supported behind the scenes by elements of the Ministry of Social Welfare, who were fighting a determined rearguard campaign against their colleagues in the Ministry of the Interior and against the District National Committees that bore much of the responsibility for the day-to-day administration of the camps. He and they now concurred that the only chance of saving the lives of Sudetendeutsch children lay in getting them, and their mothers, out of Czechoslovakia as rapidly as possible. Instead of trying to halt the expulsions, these should be speeded up, and the most vulnerable given priority. Even a transit camp in a devastated Germany on the brink of famine offered its inmates a better prospect of survival than continued incarceration at home.
Encouraged by officials of the British Red Cross and by Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who provided him with a letter of introduction to the Foreign Office, Pitter traveled to London in February 1946 to try to persuade the British and U.S. governments to accept ten thousand children and mothers detained in the worst of the camps in central Bohemia. It is unclear why Masaryk should have lent his back-channel assistance to this mission. He may have been overtaken by a belated fit of conscience, after more than half a year of assuring the CICR that conditions in the camps would soon improve; a more likely explanation is that the foreign minister hoped that the removal of these Sudetendeutsche might be made a precedent for the expedited deportation of others whose situation could also be represented to the Allies as especially precarious.
In reality, Pitter’s mission was doomed before it began. Five months previously, the Foreign and Home Offices in London had considered an ap
plication to provide a temporary home in Britain for some of the most vulnerable Sudeten German children to enable them to survive the winter. The Foreign Office was vigorously opposed to the idea. “We feel it would be better to do nothing than to do so little…. If we took a few of these people in we should only be pressed to take more; we should have no equitable basis for selecting them; and we should create a host of awkward precedents.” Even if eligibility for temporary asylum was to be limited to the doubly persecuted Sudetendeutsch Jews, “this would not alter our view, as we feel that we can scarcely continue at this stage to rescue Jews from a Europe supposed to have been made fit again for them to live in.”64 It was, therefore, unsurprising that Pitter—whose British hosts erroneously supposed him to be the Czechoslovak Minister of Social Welfare—should have made no more progress in London than he had done in Prague. Conditions in the central Bohemian camps, he explained to officials in London, “were extremely bad, and infant mortality was 100%.”65 Nor would it be possible “for political reasons, to provide help for them in Czechoslovakia, even from outside sources.”66 British ministers, however, remained unmoved by this appeal also. John Hynd flatly refused to accept any more expellees than those contracted for in the Allied Control Council agreement of November 1945. Czechoslovakia, he pointed out, was already in receipt of large quantities of food aid from UNRRA, and there was no reason why some of this should not be used to feed the Sudetendeutsch detainees. “The idea that they should be forced out of an U.N.R.R.A. country into Germany, where prospects of widespread starvation are already appearing and no U.N.R.R.A. supplies [are] allowed, seems monstrous.”67 A reflection of the urgency Whitehall attached to the plight of the Sudetendeutsch children was provided by the fact that Ambassador Nichols in Prague did not offer his views on Pitter’s appeal until the beginning of April 1946, two months after this visit to London. For “various reasons,” he advised, “it is difficult for the Czechs much to improve the conditions in these camps.” Little could or should be done by the British, he thought, though he optimistically predicted that “with the advent of spring … conditions in the camps will automatically improve to some extent.”68
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