By the summer of 1946, the British occupation authorities had concluded that there was a definite movement underway “to recruit by force manpower for the future by turning young Germans into ‘good Poles.’ Eight to fifteen appears to be the age needed.”96 The Polish government also extended its reach to younger children, and those outside the camps. Max Runge, an official instructed by the U.S. military commander at Aš (Asch) to oversee the return of fifty-four Sudetendeutsch babies and toddlers who had been evacuated from their homes in Kłodzko (Glatz) to escape the fighting in the last days of the war, found the Poles in possession of the disputed town when he arrived there and that the children’s parents had already been expelled. The head of the Polish Western Association refused him permission to take his charges to Germany to be reunited with their families. “She intended to send to the Reich [sic] only those children, whose parents reported [in person in Kłodzko], and to make the others Polish subjects. As her endeavours to obtain Polish nuns or other Polish nursing personnel remained unsuccessful (no salary, insufficient food), she declared [herself] prepared to give the children to Polish families.”97
Disputes over the nationality and custody of children would continue to cause difficulties between the expelling countries and the Allies for years into the future. Some mothers “repeatedly tried to reach the Polish Occupation Zone in order to fetch their children.”98 While these efforts were nearly always unsuccessful, the unresolved question of “stolen children” was an obstacle to any normalization of relations between East and West. Ugly “tug-of-love” scenes also ensued as a result of the unplanned separation of parents and children during the course of the expulsions. Under Czechoslovak law, “unclaimed” children whose parents had disappeared would be put out for permanent adoption after twelve months. Often, ethnic Germans had been swept into the camps and held incommunicado, or expelled with the customary fifteen minutes’ notice, while their children were away from home. By the time of their eventual release or discovery of their children’s whereabouts, many had already been placed with Czechoslovak families and formed strong attachments to their adoptive parents, who in turn refused to give them up. Unseemly wrangles between the respective governments frequently ensued.99
The immediate future of these children was an unenviable one. Whether permitted to remain in their homelands with their parents or transferred to the custody of families belonging to the majority nationality, ethnic German children were placed under enormous pressure to expunge every trace of their former identity. Carrying the stigma of having been “born guilty” and penalized whenever they manifested Germanness through their language, accent, or even their names, these young people, as they grew up, learned to keep their German antecedents a dark, shameful secret. In Poland, the possession of a German-sounding name proved a considerable social handicap. “So a Helmut would become a Kazimierz; and a Hilda, a Halina. Surnames were sometimes changed too. Polonization was being pushed into the most intimate corners of identity.”100 For this generation, concealment became a habit of life and social mobility a comparative rarity. The pattern continues to the present day, with Karl Cordell and Stefan Wolff noting that even the younger generation of ethnic Germans in the Czech Republic do not “register their children as German at school and rarely profess to German culture and traditions, partly because of fears of being disadvantaged if they do so.” In Poland, though the remaining German population is larger and better organized, “it is extremely rare to find a member of the German minority born before 1980 who has received a university education.”101
No less traumatic was the experience of expellee children who arrived in postwar Germany or Austria without their parents. The Irish journalist Dorothy Macardle reported that the suffering they had undergone was “indescribable,” and that “there were all sorts of diseases among them … they were in need of careful dieting, but very little could be given to them except gruel and oatmeal soup.”102 Aleta Brownlee, chief of the International Refugee Organization’s Child Welfare Branch in Austria, likewise found that the separated and orphaned children from Yugoslavia that she encountered all had the same story to tell:
[T]hey were interned in Volkesdeutsche [sic] camps operated by the Jugoslav government; their fathers had been in the German army and were either Jugoslav or Russian prisoners of war if they were still living. The women and children had gone to the camps; the women worked as long as they were able; when they became ill, or were too old to work, they slowly starved to death. There were sometimes people to help the children; the guards apparently did not always care whether they escaped or not; they crawled out under the fence and came by a tortuous route usually through Hungary and then to Austria.103
Under the IRO’s regulations Brownlee could do little for these expellee children, to her increasing and oft-expressed frustration. Finally, in September 1948, she lost patience and on her own authority instructed her subordinates that the mark of Cain represented by a Volksdeutsch classification—which rendered a person ineligible for aid from any international organization—was to be applied to no more ethnic German children arriving in Austria. In future, she ordered, they were to be “classified by the country of their birth or presumed citizenship or, in cases of doubt, as of undetermined nationality.”104
In Germany itself, various improvised solutions to deal with the problem of orphaned or separated expellee children were adopted. Colonel Wilfred Byford-Jones of British Military Government was present in Berlin when a “Lost Baby Show” was organized by the Soviet authorities, at which “people could attend to see the children, who were presumed orphans, and to adopt them. The attendance far exceeded expectations, and after a few hours some wit among the organizers erected outside the building where the event was staged the notice ‘Ausverkauft’ (sold out).”105 So many lost children were scattered throughout Germany, though, that expedients like these made little impact. For years after the war, both the Western and the Soviet occupation zones resembled nothing so much as a massive milk carton, with separated parents and children trying desperately to trace each other. As Father Swanstrom reported:
Public searches conducted by posters, by advertisements and by thousands upon thousands of radio-broadcasts, have given a tone of tragedy to everyday life in Germany. There are special radio programs for those children who know their names and the former addresses of their parents. There are also special radio programs for parents who still believe that their children who were separated from them during the deportation can be located somewhere in Germany or in the neighboring lands. Day after day, one can hear these heartbreaking announcements of parents who still hope to find their children three or four years after the separation.106
Even for these children the situation was not always hopeless. The astonishingly efficient Red Cross tracing service, based in Hamburg, was still successfully reuniting parents and children well into the 1950s. The majority of expellee children whose families remained intact, moreover, proved more resilient than even the most optimistic had dared to predict. Fears that the “expellee generation” might succumb to widespread juvenile delinquency, sexual promiscuity, or educational underperformance were not borne out by events. Whether these young people would settle down in their new surroundings or whether, as they grew to adulthood, they would seek revenge for their childhood traumatization and demand the right to return to the lands of their birth, however, remained an open question for far longer. On how it was answered would depend the fate of the two Germanies, as well as the future peace of Europe.
9
THE WILD WEST
Kazimierz Trzciński was one of hundreds of thousands of eager colonists from central Poland who flocked to the Recovered Territories in 1947 in search of fortune. A demobilized soldier, he was just the kind of warrior-colonist the Polish government was most anxious to attract to the western borderlands—a man who knew how to fight and would not hesitate to defend his property, with armed force if necessary, should the Germans or, more likely, the peac
e conference attempt to take it away from him. Some of his actions, however, offered hints that he might not be the model settler he first appeared to be. One of them was his request to the mayor of Jelenia Góra (Hirschberg), the pleasant small city in the foothills of the Krkonoše mountains to which he first went, that he be given a confiscated German property opulent enough to support him without his having to work for a living. Any such estates having already been assigned to persons far higher in the pecking order of the Polish nomenklatura than Trzciński, he was instead offered his choice of four small farms, each of which he rejected. Trzciń-ski’s eye then fell on the Jelonka Hotel and Restaurant in the nearby ski resort of Szklarska Poręba, a business which he considered far more appropriate to his status as a brave soldier who deserved well of the Republic than a peasant smallholding would have been. Unfortunately this property was already occupied by a Mrs. Pudlo, who showed no inclination to relinquish it. Although the municipal authorities of Jelenia Góra briefly considered forcing the pair to share the Jelonka, they eventually prevailed upon Trzciński to accept an adjacent corner shop instead. The life of a retailer did not appeal to him and his new venture was not a success, though his pronounced alcoholism may have been the main reason for its underperformance. When another settler opened a competing establishment across the street, Trzciński seized the excuse to abandon the shop and renew his claim, with greater importunity than ever, to the Jelonka. So persistent was he that local officials investigated Mrs. Pudlo’s ownership of the hotel and discovered to their surprise that she had no better a title to it than he did. Upon her arrival in Szklarska Poręba she had been assigned an ex-German villa, but had done nothing more with it than to strip it of every item of its furniture to fit out the Jelonka, in which she had installed herself without authority and restarted in her own name as a going concern. Equipped with these new facts, the municipal council issued an eviction order to Mrs. Pudlo and presented Trzciński with the title to the property. When he arrived to take possession she kept him waiting for a considerable time; eventually opened up the hotel; and then proceeded methodically to smash it to pieces around him as he cringed in the lobby. There being no militia or police in the vicinity, Trzciński turned tail and fled for his life, followed down the street by Pudlo’s curses and threats. After this traumatic experience, the town fathers found it easier to persuade him to content himself with yet another confiscated property in Rokossovski Street—which itself had a complicated history, having passed through several sets of hands since it was first expropriated from its German owners—and leave the terrifying Pudlo in undisputed possession of the Jelonka.1
Trivial though it may have been, this dispute illustrates in microcosm many of the problems associated with “recolonization” of the lands from which the German population had been driven. The removal of the ethnic Germans was not just an enormous logistical undertaking. It was also the source of a highly disruptive economic and social transformation of the affected areas, one whose impact remains to the present day. In much the same way that the wartime cooperation of ordinary Germans (and, indeed, Poles, Ukrainians, and other nationalities) in the persecution and removal of Jews had been obtained by the opportunity it provided to appropriate Holocaust victims’ property, Czechoslovak, Polish, and Hungarian citizens’ enthusiasm for the expulsions owed a great deal to the prospect that they would profit from the confiscation of their German neighbors’ wealth. The new borderlands, however, proved to be no Eldorado, and the new economic and social realities that were produced under abnormal circumstances brought a fresh set of unforeseen complications in their train.
To a substantial degree, the scramble for booty dictated the breakneck pace of the expulsions, as local authorities, militia bands, or politically connected individuals rushed to grab the most desirable German properties for themselves before others, or the central government, got in ahead of them. The lion’s share of the loot, nonetheless, wound up in the state’s hands, where it became an important instrument of communization. Before the Second World War, Communist parties had been negligible influences throughout central and eastern Europe. The Nazi-Soviet Pact; Stalin’s treacherous attack on Poland’s eastern frontier when the country was fighting desperately for its life; the expulsions and massacres that had followed, at the Katyn Forest and elsewhere; and the Red Army’s cynical abandonment of the Polish Home Army to the Nazis in the Warsaw Rising of August 1944 did nothing to persuade ordinary Poles that the Russian leopard had changed its spots. Though the USSR’s standing in Czechoslovakia was higher—thanks in large measure to the perception that Moscow, in contrast to the appeasement-minded Western powers, had been ready to assist Prague militarily before the Munich Conference—there was little enthusiasm for state socialism on the Soviet pattern. Because Communists controlled the Ministries of the Interior and of Agriculture in both countries after the war, however, they were also in a position to decide the redistribution of confiscated German property. They took full advantage of the rich sources of patronage this provided to buy, if not the support, then at least the acquiescence of citizens in their continued rule. The expulsions, then, provided the material basis that enabled the governments of the Soviet satellites to solidify their domestic standing at the moment of their greatest vulnerability.
As the dispute over the Jelonka Hotel demonstrated, though, property redistribution could be an instrument of social disruption as well as social cohesion. Disputes over the true ownership of a confiscated house or farm, in a situation in which the premises might have changed hands several times over the card table in a single weekend, would clog up the court systems of the expelling countries for years into the future. Overnight, the borderland areas were stripped not just of population but of agencies of government: when a German town was cleared of its residents, its local council, police force, municipal administrators, and providers of essential services like waste removal or water supplies usually went with them. Even in those relatively rare cases when replacement officials from the majority population could be found to take their place, Soviet military commanders, preferring to concentrate the skeins of power in their own hands, often prevented them from taking up their positions. In a literal and not merely a metaphorical sense, then, many of these districts became lawless areas—as the hapless Kazimierz Trzciński had discovered when he tried to take possession of his hotel. For several years after the change in jurisdiction, a vacuum of state authority existed and the rule of the gun prevailed. It was hardly surprising, then, that fewer people than resettlement authorities hoped were willing to put down permanent roots in such areas; or that a disproportionate number of those who did, like Trzciński himself, turned out to conform poorly to the image of the sturdy, self-reliant pioneer depicted in Communist propaganda. The name that both Poles and Czechoslovaks gave to their frontier regions after the war—the “Wild West”—reflected their awareness that even after the Germans’ departure, these were places that remained alien in many respects from the countries of which they were nominally a part.
When the expulsion schemes were first conceived, few of these difficulties were foreseen. Their authors were enthusiastic about the opportunities the colonization and redistribution programs would offer not just to create new social and economic realities in the borderlands, but to use them as templates to reshape society in the heartland as well. On his visit to Moscow in December 1943 to obtain Soviet support for the expulsions, as we have seen, Edvard Beneš described to his hosts the prospect that removing the Sudetendeutsche would pave the way for the socialization of the Czechoslovak economy as a whole. “Seventy percent of Germans,” he told Molotov “are rich people and the transfer of their property would mean not only Czechization, but also the beginning of a large social upheaval.”2
The distribution of German property into private hands would create fierce rivalries between people, Beneš indicated; in consequence, the Czechs would be asked to make similar sacrifices as well by accepting far-reaching nationalization. Answer
ing Molotov’s question, whether it would be acceptable to the Czechs, Beneš said that it would be hard to convince them, but that the transfer of German property would signal the beginning of general nationalization.3
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 38