By then, however, even those children who had thus far escaped being taken into camps were often in dire straits. The expropriation of German religious and charitable organizations, in particular, caused occupants of orphanages and facilities for physically and mentally handicapped children to lose their homes. These residences, many of which were located in imposing buildings with spacious grounds, proved especially attractive to officials of the postwar regimes seeking accommodation appropriate to their new status. In the Polish town of Kladsko, as British diplomats recorded, “two members of the P.P.R. (Communist Party) arrived with a document making over the land of a Children’s Home to them personally.”69 By April 1946 the condition of German orphanages in the Recovered Territories, British expulsion officers advised the voivode (governor) of Lower Silesia, was reported as “desperate.”70
Even for children who were fortunate enough to have a roof over their heads, schooling in both Poland and Czechoslovakia was generally unavailable. The Czechoslovak government ordered all schools providing instruction through the medium of German to close in June 1945.71 Regulations later issued by the Ministry of Education dictated that the pupils enrolled in them during the war would be allowed to attend Czech schools only in “exceptional cases, and if the children are of Czech nationality and can prove that they attended German schools owing to German pressure…. Applications … should be accompanied by a certificate issued by the District National Committee confirming the national reliability of the pupil and his parents.”72 Similar provisions applied in Poland—where, nonetheless, some “underground” schools were able to continue for a time, usually under Soviet protection—and in Yugoslavia.73
In the long run the only hope for these children, as Přemsyl Pitter correctly discerned, lay in their most expeditious possible removal to Germany. Significant numbers, however—how many cannot at present be determined—were never allowed to leave. Some were orphans or the products of mixed marriages; others, of “pure” Slavic antecedents, were simply taken from their parents inside the camps to make good demographic deficiencies caused by wartime losses and by the expulsions themselves.
The problem of “half-German” children was a vexed one for all the expelling countries. Before the war, legal intermarriage between Volksdeutsche and “Slavic” partners had been common. Benjamin Frommer estimates that in Czechoslovakia alone, at least 90,000 mixed couples and 150,000 children of such partnerships existed in 1945.74 Though the majority of these marriages had been contracted before the war, their number continued to grow, albeit at a slower rate: during the first year of the conflict, one in five Sudetendeutsch marriages involved a Czech spouse. More stringent racial criteria adopted in 1941, requiring the Czech partner inter alia to submit a nude photograph of him- or herself to the authorities for evaluation, caused this number to diminish, as did the tendency of many Czechoslovaks during the occupation to regard mixed marriages, especially those entered into by women, as a form of “horizontal collaboration” with the enemy. In Poland, the number of mixed marriages that had been solemnized in the prewar years, especially in the Catholic district of Upper Silesia, may have been even greater, though further unions between Germans or Volksdeutsche and Poles were made virtually impossible after the 1939 September campaign and were outlawed altogether in 1943. Under Nazi rule, the status of the Polish spouse in preexisting marriages was in the majority of cases regularized by his or her inclusion as a “German” of some category or another in the Volksliste. Where the non-German spouse refused, or was denied, “Germanization,” the marriage was normally dissolved, with custody of any children going to the German parent. In both countries, though exceptions existed, the children of mixed marriages were usually categorized as German under Nazi nationality law.75 As Tara Zahra notes, however, such tidy classifications were frequently defeated by the failure of “families that were bilingual, flexible about their national loyalties, or altogether indifferent to nationality” to conform to them. A vivid illustration can be found in the fact that in the Přerov branch of the Hitler Youth in eastern Moravia, “80 percent of the members reportedly spoke Czech, and the leader there was forced to give commands in Czech out of necessity. The Hitler Youth in Bat’ha/Bata was also composed mostly of children of mixed marriages who spoke only Czech.”76
After the war, the legal status of “hybrid” children was particularly complicated. Prewar nationality laws provided little guidance, yielding different answers according to whether the child was legitimate or illegitimate, the “German” parent was the mother or the father, or the date of birth had fallen before or after the beginning of the Nazi occupation. In a few countries, ex post facto laws ratified the wholesale deportation of children carrying “tainted” blood. Thus a postwar statute in Norway declared that Norwegian women who married German men after April 9, 1940, the date of the Wehrmacht’s invasion of Scandinavia, were deemed to have forfeited their citizenship by virtue of that act (predictably, the law remained silent about those Norwegian men who married German women). A considerable proportion of these women, together with their Norwegian-born children, were interned in camps and later expelled to Germany; not until 1989 was this statute rescinded. A similar law in Denmark, on the other hand, went largely unenforced, although strident voices like that of the underground newspaper De Frie Danskere agitated for “dragons’ spawn,” as it termed the children of mixed marriages, to be forcibly transferred to Germany after the war.77 At the other end of the spectrum, at least in theory, both the Hungarian expulsion decree of December 1945 and Yugoslav government regulations issued six months earlier excluded all children of mixed marriages, as well as their Germanophone parent, from forcible transfer—although, as will be seen below, a wide gulf separated precept and practice.78
More commonly, however, the expelling countries took the same view, mutatis mutandis, of the children of mixed marriages as had the Germans: that those possessing “Slavic blood” must be reeducated and reclaimed for the nation. In some cases, this amounted to no more than attempts to reverse the impact of Nazi racial and settlement policy. The Polish Red Cross in Wrocław, for example, alerted the Ministry for the Recovered Territories in June 1946 that the offspring of many mixed marriages had been placed during the war by the Nazi authorities with German families for the purpose of Germanization. A great danger existed that these children, few of whom spoke Polish or had any awareness of their Polish lineage, would be expelled along with their German adoptive families, to the detriment of Poland’s demographic future. The Polish Red Cross urged that measures be taken to guard against this possibility, and that in particular the birth certificates of such children be carefully scrutinized by the repatriation authorities.79
The same principle ought to apply, many Czechoslovak and Polish authorities held, to the offspring of mixed marriages who remained in the custody of their parents. The fewest complications arose in those cases where the German spouse had died or disappeared, especially if that spouse was the husband. The Office of the Plenipotentiary for Lower Silesia pleaded the case in February 1946 of Polish women whose German husbands could no longer be accounted for. Under existing nationality law, there was no means by which these women could regain their prewar citizenship. To expel them, on the other hand, would result in their children being “Germanized and lost forever to Polishness.”80 Similar representations were made from a wide variety of quarters in Czechoslovakia. Edvard Beneš’s expulsion decree No. 33 of August 1945, which stripped “Czechoslovak state citizens of German or Magyar race” of their nationality, had instructed District National Committees to treat applications from the German wives of Czechoslovak men and from their children “considerately. Such applicants shall be regarded as Czechoslovak citizens until their applications are decided upon.”81 As Benjamin Frommer notes of the sexually discriminatory character of this provision, “The government and the public apparently viewed German women as far less threatening to the state than their male counterparts.”82 This relatively liberal stanc
e, though, was contradicted by other regulations that defined marriage with a German spouse after the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (or, in some more rigorous versions, after the partial Czechoslovak military mobilization in the early days of the Sudeten crisis on May 21, 1938) as a punishable act of collaboration. Under the so-called “small decree” of October 27, 1945, social or sexual relations with Sudetendeutsche, whether or not legitimized by marriage, were commonly treated as “improper behavior … causing offense to the national sentiments of the Czech or Slovak peoples” and punished by up to twelve months’ imprisonment and heavy fines. As we have seen, moreover, the government’s recommendation that “consideration” be exercised with respect to German women and their children did not prevent District National Committees from sending tens of thousands to the camps and eventually deporting them.
If appeals for more generous treatment of Sudetendeutsch women largely fell on deaf ears, the plight of Czechoslovak wives and their children did, over time, begin to arouse some popular sympathies. Reports of these former members of the national community being detained in squalid and brutal camps, forced to wear armbands identifying them as German, and undergoing the death-by-inches punishment of “German rations” troubled an increasing number of Czechoslovak consciences. The newspaper Nová doba, for example, carried a series of articles in the summer of 1946 devoted to the plight of ethnic Czechs who were “condemned by Czechs and the Czech Republic for taking their German partner at a time when that was no treason.” As one embittered Czech man rhetorically inquired, “Are we now supposed to leave our German women and spit on our children?”83 Relatives and friends took action to ensure that anomalies like these were not forgotten by politicians and the public. A particularly large quantity of journalistic ink was spilled over the frequent spectacle of hundreds of Czech-monoglot children being transported, with their Czechoslovak mothers and Sudetendeutsch fathers, to the only country against which Czechoslovakia would in future find it necessary to defend itself. Obzory argued that so inhumane and short-sighted a policy would leave a legacy of bitterness with which the next generation of Czechoslovaks would have to deal. “It is in the republic’s interest to keep these children within the State and within the nation inasmuch as they are—or at the very least half of them are—Czech children who, once expelled from the land of their birth, will detest it with all their strength for the manner in which their mothers were treated!”84 Appealing still more directly to raison d’étât, the Ministry of the Interior warned the following year, “Many hundreds of children are being gratuitously delivered, thoughtlessly or maliciously, to certain Germanization and are thereby being consciously consigned to the ranks of the greatest enemies of the Czech nation—for these children will be turned into German janissaries. While impoverishing our own nation, we are enriching a foreign nation inimical to us.”85
The authorities in Prague, however, were to find that even when it came to children the expulsion process had a momentum of its own, being easier to initiate than to restrain. On December 31, 1945, as the Allied-sanctioned mass expulsions were about to commence, the Ministry of the Interior issued regulations extending the indulgence previously granted to Sudetendeutsch wives of Czechoslovak citizens to German husbands also, provided that the marriage had been solemnized before the mobilization of May 21, 1938. Prevailing upon District National Committees to recognize this exemption, on the other hand, proved to be another matter entirely. Six months later, the ministry complained that notwithstanding its instructions, an expulsion train had carried off hundreds of Czech children and their Czech mothers to southern Germany. “The Czech language predominated throughout the entire transport—as if it were a transport of Czechs not Germans—because in the transport were mainly mixed marriages, Czech women with their German husbands.” Similar scenes were being reported as late as the following September, as the Czechoslovak phase of the mass expulsions began to draw to a close.86 Material rather than ideological considerations, Frommer suggests, best accounts for the insubordination of the national committees in this matter. To exempt mixed-marriage families from expulsion was to forego the opportunity to seize and redistribute their property. However concerned they may have been in the abstract about the nation’s demographic future, few local authorities were capable of the level of self-denial adherence to this policy would have demanded of them.
A more ruthless method of resolving the problems posed by the existence of ethnically mixed families was simply to remove the offending parent from the equation. During the occupation, the Nazis had exerted intense pressure on Czechoslovak Gentiles married to Jews to divorce their spouses and thereby escape the range of discriminatory measures to which members of “non-Aryan” families were subject. After V-E Day, National Committees attempted to induce Czechoslovak partners to do likewise, holding out the possibility of the restoration of normal rations, the right to attend public venues or to travel, and the removal of curfew restrictions. These inducements were successful in some cases, the legal scholar Josef Frydruch sardonically observing in 1945 that the boom in divorces by Czechoslovak “Aryans” from their Jewish mates during the war “now has its analogue in the … divorce litigation between spouses, where one is Czech and the other is a German citizen.”87 But others were made of sterner stuff, though it is likely that few displayed the commitment that one Czech man from Šumperk did when he attempted to pass himself off as an expellee and gain admission to a camp so as not to be separated from his German spouse.88 To encourage the dissolution of mixed marriages, the revision of Polish family law that immediately followed the war provided a specific ground for divorce in one of the partners “having declared allegiance to the German nation” or being designated for expulsion, though the strength of Catholicism in that country stood in the way of state-sponsored dissolution of marriage as a general solution to the German problem.89
If numerous obstacles made it difficult to remove the parents from their children, administrators in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia found it a great deal easier to separate the children from the parents, as the Germans had done during the war. As the story of Emma Duda and her daughters illustrates, the abduction of Volksdeutsch children began as soon as the German armed forces withdrew. Sometimes, as in Duda’s case, the children were taken away at the time of the parents’ arrest. At other times, a policy of selecting parents for transfer led to the abandonment of their children. Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty complained in a letter to the Hungarian prime minister—to which no reply was ever received—that local transfer commissions were illegally detaining and sending to Germany both partners in mixed marriages, leaving behind “children whom no one dared to protect for fear of political consequences.”90
More typically, especially in Poland, periodic visits were made by social workers to detention camps, enabling them to make a more leisurely selection of the most desirable candidates in an environment occasionally resembling a Roman slave market. In the majority of cases, the removals were carried out on the spot, offering no opportunity for parents and children to make their goodbyes. At the Potulice camp, the first children’s transport in the summer of 1945 “was carried out so quickly that the mothers did not even have time to tie a name plate on the children. Many of the small children did not know their names yet.”91 Martha Kent, an American neuropsychologist who as a seven-year-old was confined in the children’s barracks at Potulice (and whose autobiography is a classic of expellee literature that regrettably has not yet been published in English) has described the pressure to which older children were subjected, and to which her sister, a fellow internee, almost succumbed, to “opt” to remain in Poland after their parents’ expulsion, with better food and living conditions being held out as inducements.92
When the “organized expulsions” commenced in 1946, consequently, the Allied authorities began to be inundated with pleas from distraught parents arriving in Germany after having had their children taken away at the camps. A Frau
Bauer of łódź, interned since April 1945, saw her four-year-old son Gerd removed from her in November, the camp authorities telling her that “her child would remain in łódź and be educated as a Pole.” She was expelled to the British zone of Germany six weeks later, and had heard nothing by the time the authorities took note of the matter in September 1946.93 Twenty-three-year-old Lydia Hauk, interned at Jaworzno, was separated from her younger brother Robert in May 1946 by the Polish militia, who assured her that “her brother being only 13 years old would certainly become a good Pole.” Josefa Arndt, her husband, and five children were also detained at Jaworzno, where the Kraków police took away the three youngest—aged fourteen, nine, and eight years—for adoption. Ida Hartmann of Matzhausen and her two sons, aged sixteen and nine, were arrested at the end of the war, detained in the notoriously harsh Sikawa camp near łódź and put out to forced labor; on February 6, 1946, Polish soldiers took the nine-year-old away and expelled the other two to Germany. The same happened to Magdalena Martin, another Sikawa detainee who lost the two youngest of her four children, a boy aged twelve and a girl of nine. Lisbeth Fladda of Szczytno (Ortelsburg) in East Prussia was detained in a variety of Polish detention facilities with her mother, fifteen-year-old daughter, and eleven-year-old son. Her mother starved to death while in custody. Fladda’s son was taken to Skierniewice prison upon her expulsion and afterwards given to a Polish woman living at Strzyboga near Skierniewice to rear as her own.94 Similar cases were reported from Czechoslovakia. A Sudetendeutsch prisoner of war in British custody, for example, sought to enlist the assistance of the CICR after learning that his children, aged two years and six months respectively, had been removed from the custody of his wife, a detainee in an improvised Prague camp, by the Czechoslovak police who proposed to place them in a home in Ústí nad Labem “so as to be able to bring them up as Czechoslovakians and incorporate them into the Cz[echo-] Sl[ovak] nation.”95
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