In reality Beneš had no intention of creating a Soviet-style command economy in postwar Czechoslovakia; his intimations in Moscow that he was contemplating something of the kind were as deliberately misleading as his assurances to the Western Allies that only “fascists” and “collaborators” in the Sudetenland were being targeted for removal. There is no question, though, that he desired to move the country far to the left after the war, extending state control of the economy in the process. His reason for doing so was not only to facilitate a close relationship with the USSR, in his view a sine qua non of Czechoslovakia’s future security, but to solidify his political standing at home. A “progressive” redistribution of national wealth, Beneš believed, would at once weaken the social classes on which the National Socialist and Peasant parties relied for their support, and reduce the appeal of communism, leaving the president of the Republic, standing above politics, in a position to dictate the national agenda. In the event, Beneš would greatly overestimate both his ability to carry off this act of political triangulation, in a milieu in which the influence of the Red Army and of the National Committees would substantially outweigh that of the Prague government, and his own indispensability to Czechoslovak public life. The Czechoslovak Communist Party, for its part, had its own contrasting ambition: “to make the [border] region both a model and a laboratory for the building of socialism.”4 To the extent that the president was willing to help prepare the way toward this objective, it was happy to proceed in harness with him; once his usefulness was exhausted, it would take the lead on its own.
Equally grandiose visions of turning the borderlands into a Socialist showcase were entertained by the new Polish government also. At a week-long celebration in Wrocław and Jelenia Góra “to welcome the Potsdam territories back into the Polish State,” the Communist Minister of Industry, Hilary Minc, rejoiced over “the acquisition of a completely equipped territory with a certain residue of German population which we have every moral and international right to liquidate at a time and by methods which we consider appropriate.” He added a warning: “The greatest danger in our western territories is the danger of having small-minded men with a small perspective.”5 Certainly no one could accuse Minc himself or his ministerial colleagues of such a shortcoming. To the contrary, the set of objectives announced by the Polish government for the Recovered Territories seemed ambitious to the point of having become divorced from reality. In August 1945, for example, it set a target of 500,000 colonists to be settled in Olsztyn province before the onset of winter. Predictably, when a count was taken on January 1, 1946, only about 20 percent of that number were to be found in residence.6
A factor that hampered the colonization program was that neither the Czechoslovak nor the Polish governments had drawn up a detailed plan during the war to determine the method by which German property was to be seized and redistributed. Initially, to secure Western support for the expulsions, Edvard Beneš had promised the Allies that no expellees would be expropriated without compensation, unless their property had been obtained illegally. The government in exile, though, had no intention of making good on his commitment, which would have imposed an unsustainable economic burden on the postwar state. In an elegant reconciliation of these competing demands, Herbert Ripka revealed in October 1944 the formula upon which Prague would rely when he announced that all Sudetendeutsche with a record of collaborationist activities or “Pan-German sentiments and mentalities” would forfeit their property to the Czechoslovak state, and that any compensation due them would be paid by “appropriately adjusting the financial and economic claims which Czechoslovakia will have against Germany.”7 According to Ripka, expellees would be issued with a receipt by the Czechoslovak government stating the value of the possessions taken from them. Czechoslovakia’s demand for reparations from Germany would be reduced by an equivalent sum; the expellees could then use the receipts to claim compensation from the postwar German government. This was, though, little more than a propaganda gesture, which had the further advantage of deflecting attention from the precise scale of the country’s wartime material losses. In fact, though this could hardly be considered adequate recompense for the systematic terror to which its people had been subjected as a result of the German occupation, economically Czechoslovakia had had a “good” war. According to Jaroslav Krejĉí’s calculations, real income rose around 20 percent for working-class men, and almost 30 percent for women, between 1939 and 1945.8 Czechoslovakia also emerged from the war with a larger capital stock than in 1939, thanks to the Germans’ decision to locate many industries there where they would be beyond the reach of most Allied bombing. The eventual figure assigned by the Paris Reparations Conference for Czechoslovak war damage, at 347.5 billion crowns ($69.5 million), took no account of this German investment; not coincidentally, however, it did roughly approximate to an initial Czechoslovak estimate—itself an unrealistically low figure—of the value of seized Sudetendeutsch property.9 In any event, no receipts were ever provided to expelled Sudeten Germans, while at the Paris Conference the Prague government, by a second performance of sleight of hand, successfully argued that the proceeds of the expulsions should not be counted against Czechoslovak claims upon postwar Germany inasmuch as the Sudetendeutsche in 1938 had been not German but Czechoslovak citizens, thereby rendering the link between expropriation and reparations moot. The Hungarians in 1946 announced their intention to follow the Czechoslovak example; in the event, the fact that the Allies found that Hungary was not entitled to reparations from Germany meant that no compensation, even in the form of valueless receipts, would ever be proposed for expellees.10 Neither the Polish government in exile nor its Stalinist competitor in Lublin, on the other hand, thought any similar justification necessary: for them it was axiomatic that as the Germans should leave, their property should remain. No question of “compensating” the expellees, even as a theoretical exercise, arose in Warsaw. Had it ever done so, the colossal material damage sustained by Poland under German occupation—of which its devastated capital city stood as a stark illustration—would have enabled the Polish state to make a far more persuasive case than its Czechoslovak counterpart.
The lack of advance planning, though, was to create enormous practical difficulties. Noting the Germans’ experience of confiscating and redistributing the goods of national minorities during the war, the Economist presciently warned the governments in exile in 1944 that a wild scramble for wealth on the part of the local populations on the ground was likely to be the outcome. “In very many cases,” it pointed out, those who had entered into possession of the seized assets had been “not only—and not even mainly—Germans. Croats took possession of the property of Serbs who had been expelled from Croatia. Hungarians enriched themselves at the expense of Roumanians in Transylvania. While Germans grabbed the estates of Poles, Poles inherited the houses and shops of slaughtered or deported Jews.” There was no reason to suppose that the Polish or Czechoslovak postwar experience would be very different. Extensive confiscations might even impede the process of economic and social reform, by creating “new and powerful vested interests” that would stand in the way of a more general redistribution of wealth.11
These cautions were to be amply borne out by events. As the Wehrmacht retreated north and west in the spring of 1945, the first expropriation decrees were issued by the Polish and Czechoslovak governments. An edict of the Lublin Poles of February 28, 1945, on the “exclusion of elements hostile to the Polish people” from national life, provided for the forfeiture to the state of all property owned by those enrolled on the Deutsche Volksliste. This decree caused instant consternation. Almost 3 million inhabitants of the Incorporated Eastern Territories, at least two-thirds of them ethnic Poles, had allowed themselves to be registered as Germans during the war. In hundreds of thousands of cases they had done so as the only alternative to deportation to the Generalgouvernement; in Upper Silesia, only fifty thousand of a population of nearly 1.4 million had not done so; and both
the London government in exile and local churchmen like Bishop Stanisław Adamski of Wrocław had even urged the population on numerous occasions to sign as a means of avoiding persecution.12 Some Poles, Adamski reminded his more judgmental compatriots after the war, had been “promoted” to the second category of the Volksliste on the basis of their economic importance to the occupiers rather than any professed support for Nazism.13 Not until more than two months later was a second version issued, in an attempt to check the excesses unleashed by the first. This set up a “verification” process, whereby persons in the third and fourth categories who had been included on the Volksliste “against their will or under coercion” and who “proved their adhesion to the Polish nation” would be able to recover their property once they had given satisfactory proofs of their Polishness.
In Czechoslovakia the government’s expropriation order, Presidential Decree no. 12, was published still later, on June 21, 1945. Under its terms all land held by Germans, Hungarians, and “traitors and enemies of the Republic” was to be taken over by the state. A National Land Fund under the Ministry of Agriculture (headed by the Communist Julius Ďuriš) would take the land in trust and oversee its redistribution, in tracts of twelve hectares (30 acres), to Czech and Slovak settlers. For commercial enterprises that were too large to be run by a single owner-operator, “national administrators” were appointed by District and Local National Committees. The task of these persons was to assume trusteeship over the businesses and maintain them, where possible, as going concerns until their eventual fate could be decided by the authorities. Offering many opportunities for peculation and personal enrichment, the position of national administrator constituted an important form of patronage and vote buying. Although members of the Communist Party were especially likely to be granted these plum appointments, often the offer of a national administratorship and membership of the party were made simultaneously. Hence confiscated German property became in effect a virtually inexhaustible political slush fund, enabling the Communists to gain the support of persons who would have never been attracted to them for ideological reasons. It was no coincidence that in the May 1946 election, the Communist Party obtained up to 75 percent of the vote in the Sudeten-land, approximately double the share it gained in the remainder of the country.14 The same was true of Poland, where Władysław Gomułka, the future supervisor of the resettlement program, frankly admitted to a Communist Party congress early in 1945 that “the western territories are one of the reasons the government has the support of the people.”15
An unexpected difficulty for Poland was finding a sufficient number of people to colonize the newly cleared areas. Contrary to the constant declarations of government ministers that Germans had to be removed as quickly as possible to make room for the settlement of Poles displaced by Stalin from the annexed areas east of the River Bug, it soon became clear that the Recovered Territories were in fact facing an acute population shortage. Only about 1.7 million “repatriates” from the east—a figure that includes ethnic Poles expelled from the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics, the Baltic states absorbed into the Soviet Union, and survivors of Stalin’s 1939 clearances of eastern Poland to Siberia—were transferred to postwar Poland, ostensibly to take the place of up to 8 million Germans evicted from the Recovered Territories. A surprisingly low proportion of these eastern “repatriates” found their way to the new western lands, and fewer still stayed there. Many traveled no further than the central provinces, preferring to take up residence in a part of the country they could feel confident would remain Polish rather than face the risks of a pioneer life in another unstable borderland region from which, if the great powers so decided, they might once again have to depart. Still, even if every “repatriate” and all displaced persons of Polish nationality had gone to the Recovered Territories, the numbers simply did not add up. As the Foreign Office in London calculated in 1945, well over a third of the settled population in postwar Poland would have to migrate to the new borderlands if these were to be resettled immediately. To populate them using the natural increase of the rest of the country, on the other hand, would mean that the task would not be completed until 1977.16
As a result, the immediate impression taken away by visitors to the Recovered Territories in the early postwar years was of the uncanny emptiness of the landscape. Radio Lublin scarcely exaggerated when, in a call for colonists to populate the region, it announced at the end of May 1945 that “East Prussia is empty.”17 A British commercial attaché, Leonard Holliday, found much the same to be the case when he toured the area in September. Visiting East Prussia, he wrote, was
indeed an excursion into the wasteland. Field after field lay shoulder-high in a tangle of weeds, indicating clearly that for at least a year they had not been touched. The towns of Deutsch Eylau [Iława], Freistadt [Gdańsk] and to a lesser extent Marienwerder [Kwidzyn], as well as the smaller villages, are not only devastated but also almost empty. These are ruins in the raw, untouched and untidied, looking like horses disembowelled in a bull-ring. The Polish population in this area is still minute. In each town or village there is a post of the Citizens’ Militia, manned by fierce-looking characters who might have stepped straight out of some tale of frontier days in the Wild West of Buffalo Bill.18
Pomerania was almost as sparsely populated. When Holliday visited there in mid-1946, he traveled “miles of road between Szczecin and the old border where the fields had not been touched, the general average of cultivated land being perhaps 10%…. Even worse was the area south of Lignica which was reverting to moorland.”19 Even in 1947, by which time more than 360,000 farmsteads had been assigned by the government to settlers, a pair of British officials who traversed the Recovered Territories from south to north encountered many completely deserted villages and observed that “All along the route there are large stretches of land with the remnants of the 1945 harvest still standing.”20 This abandonment of productive farmland led to some curious environmental consequences. Jerzy Morzycki, Chief Commissioner for the Control of Epidemics, revealed in September 1946 that the Recovered Territories, and especially East Prussia, “are smitten with a plague of mice. This is due to the fact that last year owing to the… lack of Polish population, the wheat which had been sown by Germans could not be harvested…. this plague is assuming serious dimensions and the authorities are very anxious to obtain a bacteria [sic] which will produce a pestilence amongst these mice and bring about their death.”21
Though the spectacle of ghost towns and deserted farmsteads was much less in evidence in Czechoslovakia, here too entire districts could be found entirely bereft of people. Godfrey Lias, the Times correspondent in Prague who toured the Sudetenland in the summer of 1947, reported that “Not only are there many empty houses in both town and country but there are even whole villages without an inhabitant…. it is only necessary to go a short distance off the beaten track to find large fields of last year’s potatoes still unlifted and acres of grain unharvested.”22 This was less the result of any shortage of settlers—by the end of 1945, the population of the borderlands was slightly higher than its prewar figure—as of the fact that as in Poland, the new arrivals displayed a marked preference for congregating in the cities and towns rather than remote rural areas, where communications were poor and amenities few. The rate of agricultural turnover was also extremely high, with almost a third of ex-German farmsteads being abandoned by their new owners after a few years.23 Making a virtue out of necessity, therefore, the Prague government elected to abandon the cultivation of a considerable amount of arable land and give it over instead to afforestation, justifying the change on the ground that a physical barrier of woodlands was required to stand in the way of a future German invasion.24 Thus of twenty-nine villages in the neighborhood of Sušice on the edge of the Šumava national park, only seven were chosen for partial colonization in September 1946, the remainder being allowed to fall derelict.25
Where stable communities were absent, so too wa
s law and order. This was especially characteristic of the Recovered Territories, where each new group of settlers soon had lurid stories to tell about the Hobbesean dystopias into which many districts had degenerated in the immediate postwar period. The first advance parties to arrive in Wrocław at the beginning of May 1945 found Soviet troops engaging in full-scale shootouts with each other while disputing the possession of ex-German booty: a particularly fierce firefight between two Red Army units vying for control of the food shops on Sienkiewicz Street lasted for two days.26 “Theft, assault, rape and murder were the (dis)order of the day” among Red Army units in Wielkopolska, where the Polish population was treated by their nominal allies as though they, not the Germans, were the vanquished nation.27 But Polish security forces too were generally perceived as being the cause rather than the cure for rampant criminality. In Bytów near Gdańsk, gang warfare was being conducted by rival groups of the Urząd Bezpieczeństwa (UB), or secret police, two factions of which were enthusiastically beating each other up.28 British observers correctly noted that a great deal of “the lawlessness attributed to the Poles” could be attributed to “the loutish youths, armed to the teeth, that constitute the ‘Militia.’”29 The Polish authorities’ view of the militia was identical. Resettlement officers noted that “there were not enough of them to prevent the looting—or they were too busy doing it themselves.”30 The mayor of the village of Michałkowa was so intimidated by the Mafia-like behavior of the militia unit theoretically under his authority that when he was assigned to be escort of a transport of Germans to the British zone under Operation Swallow, he concealed himself among the expellees in the baggage car and was not discovered until the train reached Marienthal.31 While countless reports of the militiamen’s criminal behavior were received, a Polish observer who conducted a tour of the area between Poznań and Szczecin in August 1945 expressed sympathy for their difficulties, noting that they had little option but to live off the countryside as best they could. “The problem of food supply is as a rule left to the ingenuity of the militiamen themselves. Most of them are young boys…. At best they are armed with rifles, for which in very many cases they have no ammunition…. Hence the role of the militiamen, the upholders of order and protectors of the settlers’ property, is reduced to the passive observation of those cases of armed robbery that take place.”32
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 39