Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War
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In Czechoslovakia, too, the borderlands quickly acquired an unsavory reputation as places where people ventured at their peril. While the crime wave that occurred there during the second half of 1945 and into early 1946 was on nothing like the scale seen in the Recovered Territories, bandits, organized and unorganized criminals, and ne’er-do-wells proliferated to a degree unprecedented in Czechoslovakia’s history as an independent state. As in Poland, those wearing uniform, to which they may or may not have been entitled, were if anything more likely than the general population to prey on their fellow citizens. While it was universally acknowledged that Red Army soldiers recognized no distinctions between Czechoslovaks and Germans when it came to robbery, rape, or vandalism, neither did many members of the police, SNB, or Revolutionary Guards. The Czechoslovak Army was blamed for a great deal of the lawlessness, with units like the First Czechoslovak Division that contained a high proportion of Slovaks, Ukrainians, and Volhynians being perceived as especially prone to criminality when deployed in the Czech lands. Frequently, positions of authority were occupied by individuals whose previous record did not bear scrutiny. The head of the so-called “Office for Germans in Svitavy,” K. Haas, was a man with a lengthy criminal record. B. Kovář, a partisan “lieutenant” and self-appointed commissioner in Miroslav, south of Moravský Krumlov, was found at the time of his arrest in June 1945 on fraud charges to have had seven previous convictions. Š. Gába from Olomouc, whose principal duty was the arrest of “hostile” persons and confiscation of their property (and who also had a shadowy partisan background), surpassed him with eleven.33
An especially vivid example of the freewheeling atmosphere that prevailed in the early postwar days, as well as of the fluidity of the line separating criminals from law enforcers, can be found in the border town of Ĉeská Kamenice, near Děĉín. As David Gerlach describes, at the end of May 1945 a Local National Committee was established which, in accordance with regulations, proceeded to confiscate German property; distribute the clothes, household goods, and other everyday items to the local Czech population; and remit the valuables to Prague. However, the dutiful chairman of the committee, Karel Caidler, quickly fell foul of the head of the local Defense Intelligence detachment which, with the aid of another “partisan” leader of dubious antecedents, Adolf Charous, “engaged in massive expropriation” of the ex-German goods, displaying a particular affinity for “collecting motor vehicles.” After Caidler refused to fall in with their money-making schemes, they arrested him and several other committee members on charges of being involved in Werewolf activity; tortured him in an improvised dungeon in the basement of the town’s district court; and elevated Charous to the post of town commissar. The latter proceeded to stalk the streets of Ĉeská Kamenice, whip in hand, confiscating German businesses and passing them on to his cronies. “As one former policeman in the town reported, the looting got so out of control that the police did not have time to supervise Germans. They were too busy trying to control the influx of settlers.”34
Although potential settlers were easier to come by in Czechoslovakia than in Poland, recruiting the right kind of colonist was another matter. The government’s expectation that a significant number of emigrants would return from abroad was to be disappointed. By the time the state formally invited expatriate Czechs and Slovaks to return home, on July 31, 1945, most of the best properties had already been officially or unofficially appropriated by others. A central office to oversee the settlement of repatriants was not opened until 1947. As a result, the number of reemigrants remained low. The largest contingent—almost 72,000—came from Hungary, with more than 35,000 from Volhynia in western Ukraine and 21,000 from Romania also arriving. A considerable proportion had been born abroad; many of those from Hungary spoke neither Czech nor Slovak, and were resented by the native-born population as foreigners and interlopers who were intensifying the competition for confiscated property. While more than Kĉs 570 million was spent on Czech-language classes, providing moving grants, and setting up social programs for the incomers, the effort proved a failure. Before long, numbers of the repatriants, complaining of discrimination, were applying to be allowed to return to their countries of origin.35
More success was achieved in inducing Czech and Slovak residents of the Sudetenland who had fled to the interior upon the advent of the Nazis in 1938 to return to their ancestral homes. In most cases, these “old settlers” simply came back on their own initiative. Some municipalities also engaged in expulsion as a tool of social engineering, petitioning the authorities to give priority to the removal of their Sudetendeutsche “mainly in order to make towns more attractive to potential settlers, who did not wish to have German neighbors.”36 Indeed, indicating just how far the notion of expulsion as a cure-all for social problems had permeated the national consciousness, the Rýmařov Local National Committee demanded in September 1946 that “unreliable inhabitants, hoodlums, gamblers, notorious alcoholics, and gypsies” be expelled alongside the Germans.37 But state functionaries as well as the local population in the Czech lands complained no less loudly about the influx of “undesirable” elements among the colonists. Class and generational differences underlay some of these antagonisms: as Andreas Wiedemann confirms, the perception that settlers in the borderlands were disproportionately young and working-class was, on the whole, accurate.38 The number of those who came to seek a new life in the “cleansed” areas was nonetheless impressive. By 1950, one in four of the entire Czech population had moved to the borderlands, although the rate of return migration was also high.39
Notwithstanding the departure of the Germans, ethnic tensions, ironically, remained much in evidence. Philip Nichols reported at the end of 1946 that of the considerable number of Slovaks who had come to try their luck in the Sudetenland, “a fair proportion of these colonists had not proved good settlers and have, after looting a certain amount of property, returned to their original homes.”40 Roma families also arrived, giving rise to much local chauvinism. After the Prague government failed to persuade the Allies to agree to an expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s ethnic Hungarian population along with the Germans, plans were set in train to move 250,000 of them in a forced internal migration to the northern borderlands. In the end, only 42,000 were transferred, most of whom decamped to their homes in southern Slovakia as soon as they were permitted to do so.
In Poland as well as Czechoslovakia, some efforts were made at the local level to police the migration process and weed out unsuitable or unwanted colonists. An especially robust stance was taken by the Polish resettlement authorities at Miastko, where “work-shy” colonists were permitted to take ten kilograms of personal effects with them and were then frog-marched by the militia to the nearest railway station, to be returned whence they came.41 The Czech police in the northern Bohemian town of Rychnov dealt likewise with newly arrived Roma from Slovakia, who were suspected of having come to trade with Germans or to steal rather than settle down as genuine migrants.42 Nevertheless, the perception in both countries that the borderlands were being used as a dumping ground for social or ethnic undesirables did little to encourage would-be colonists from the interior to follow in their wake.
Two obstacles above all stood in the way of an orderly colonization process in all three of the Potsdam countries: the locust cloud of “gold diggers,” “gleaners,” or “prospectors” who descended on the cleared areas, either to seize the most desirable houses and businesses or simply to loot vacated premises and carry the goods away for use or resale; and the presence of the Red Army. Of the two, the first seemed initially to be the greater menace. In Hungary the government was “considerably disturbed at the possibility of any vacated Swabian properties remaining uninhabited for even twenty-four hours because of the likelihood of looting.”43 While Budapest’s task was made somewhat easier by the relatively small scale of the population transfer, in both Poland and Czechoslovakia the central governments lost control of the process of redistributing confiscated German properties
from the very outset, and never fully regained it.
It is not too much to say that “gold digging” permeated the whole of Czechoslovak and Polish society, from the very bottom to the highest echelons. After returning to Prague from his wartime exile in London, for example, Herbert Ripka, newly appointed as minister for foreign trade, helped himself to “a large 17-room villa that had originally belonged to German owners who had been deported.” (The building is today the Venezuelan Embassy.) The minister “soon outfitted the house with top-quality furniture” obtained from the same source.44 For some eager pioneers, however, “gold digging” was no more than a continuation of a pattern of profiteering established during the Holocaust. As the Economist disdainfully noted in July 1946, in central Europe “a new Lumpenbourgeoisie has grown up mushroom-like during the war by looting the property first of murdered Jews and then of expelled Germans.”45
“Gold digging” even extended to the Christian churches, which enthusiastically embraced the opportunity both to acquire property and to eliminate the local influence of competing sects. Since the nineteenth century at least, Protestantism had been elevated by Czech nationalists as constituting almost as strong a marker of true national identity as was Catholicism in Poland—paradoxically, in a country in which Catholics outnumbered Protestants by about five to one—and “patriotic” clergymen in both countries gave strong practical and theological backing to their governments’ efforts to remove those perceived as alien in both religion and race. As Władysław Bartoszewski, the future Polish foreign minister, has recalled, “the Catholic Church took a major part in the Polonization of the Oder-Neisse region. It immediately sent hundreds of priests to the former German territories. The new settlers, almost all of whom were Catholics, said to themselves: The pastor is already there, after all, so everything must somehow be in order.”46 Glos Katolicki, the principal Wielkopolska Catholic paper, “openly supported the régime’s ethnic cleansing of Poland, and rejoiced that it would result in an ethnoreligious cleansing as well …”47 Of some 3,020 Protestant churches in the Recovered Territories, 2,895 had been transferred to Catholic administration by 1948. Karol Milik, the temporary apostolic administrator who assumed episcopal functions over part of Lower Silesia after the removal of the German bishop there, denied to a visiting British diplomat that any mistreatment of Germans had taken place in the course of the expulsions and accused some of his own German priests of building up “a resistance organization under the skirts of the Church” while awaiting their deportation.48 Anti-German sentiment in Church circles was not monolithic, and the British Embassy noted one case in which the Catholic diocese of Wrocław “lodged a strong protest against… manifestations of intolerance” toward Lutheran clergy. A Catholic priest who “refused to celebrate Mass in a Protestant church taken over by the Poles which had been assigned to him” was himself punished by being expelled. By and large, however, the Polish Catholic Church welcomed the removal both of Protestant clergymen and of its own ethnic German priests and religious and lent every assistance to the secular authorities in carrying that agenda out, while vigorously pressing its claims to the temporalities of the dispossessed Protestant sects.49
A mirror image of this situation existed in Czechoslovakia where the Catholic clergy, as Emilia Hrabovec says, “dared not risk any sort of open confrontation” with the state for fear of “losing its considerable assets to nationalization … or the perilous consequences of being labelled regressive and unpatriotic by an increasingly leftist and radicalized society.”50 There was indeed a genuine basis for these anxieties. In the land of Jan Hus the departure of the predominantly Catholic Sudetendeutsche was widely hailed by Protestant clergymen in particular as an expression of God’s providential design. The Evangelical theologian František Bednář argued in a published defense of the expulsions that the Sudetendeutsche had, in effect, been afflicted with a double dose of original sin. Their conduct during the period of Nazi occupation “was but the culmination and manifestation of what had been in their hearts for centuries,” standing as they did “wholly and consciously for lies, violence, inhumanity and brutality.” Their removal was thus, in the view of the Czechoslovak Protestant churches, “with all due respect for Christianity,” a practical and moral imperative. “The continued presence of the German population in Czechoslovakia would in the future have endangered the spiritual state of the nation.”51 This expression of the divine will, needless to say, dovetailed nicely with the temporal aspirations of Czech ecclesiastics. Because the German Lutheran Church had “no longer any legal existence,” its property was taken over by the Protestant Church of Czech Brethren. A visiting Scottish divine, however, noted disapprovingly the pressure exerted by “unscrupulous people in other churches” who were advancing their own claims to a share-out of the wealth. Even in this sphere, he remarked, the lure of easy money was becoming “a moral temptation, and the scramble for German property has been not unlike a Californian gold rush, or the distribution of the spoils which followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.”52 In the long run, though, mainstream Christian churches in both countries would have cause to regret the uprooting of long-settled communities with their vibrant religious traditions and practices. These proved to be far easier to destroy than to recreate. Especially in Czechoslovakia, religious observance among the settlers was much less visible than had been the case with the displaced populations; in the years to come, shrines and monuments were often valued by their new parishioners chiefly as convenient sources of building materials.53
At a more profane level, a Radio Warsaw broadcast alerted listeners in September 1945 to the spread of an alarming new “social disease.” Why, the announcer inquired rhetorically, was it so difficult for honest Polish citizens to find a seat in any westbound train? At first glance, the reason seemed obvious. The trains were crowded with colonists on their way to build a new life in the Recovered Territories. Each of these pioneers had been provided with a free travel pass and a state-sponsored grant to meet immediate expenses until they could provide for themselves. The same honest citizens, however, were bemused to observe that the settlers, to all appearances, were bringing practically no possessions with them on their westward journey. Their surprise was still greater when they saw “the same trains coming back packed ten times worse, not only with passengers but with bundles, suitcases, parcels, rucksacks, typewriters, sewing machines, wireless sets, etc.” The explanation was obvious: “The ‘settlers’ are coming back as ‘gleaners’ loaded with all kinds of goods, acquired more or less illegally.”
The first journey was profitable; let’s try it again! When one locality is denuded by the “settlers” they go to another one: from Silesia to Pomerania, from Pomerania to Masuria, and from there back to Silesia…. Some people would say that the gleaners are filling our needs in clothing, linen and other commodities; that the impoverished inhabitants of Warsaw also want to sleep on pillows, cover themselves with blankets, and have a clean shirt and a decent suit. The Germans have looted the whole of Poland, so Poland should profit in getting these things at reasonable prices…. All this is true; but why cannot social organizations or trade unions do this work and divide them among the people? …
Meantime the professional gleaners are (1) stealing from the State by traveling free; (2) overcrowding the trains; (3) causing false statistics in the settlement movement to the West, because the most expert statistician could not guess which are the real and which are the false settlers; (4) denuding the area so completely that the real settlers find emptiness. It is a disease, an epidemic, and as such must be combated with vigor.54
That bona fide colonists were being cut out by “gold diggers” and “wild reset-tlers” who helped themselves to houses, farms, and moveable property without legal authority was undoubtedly true. Bolesław Drobner, the city president of Wrocław, estimated that 60 percent of the newcomers who appeared there in 1945 came for the express purpose of looting; the proportion in Szczecin and other large
towns may have been on a similar scale.55 Civic leaders made frequent complaints to the government in Warsaw over its failure adequately to screen would-be colonists, including a formal protest “after a train pulled in from Cracow carrying a huge consignment of Cracovian ‘undesirables’—convicts, speculators, and habitual alcoholics.”56
The predations of the Red Army, however, probably drove more genuine settlers away than even the most rapacious of “gold diggers.” Innumerable reports testified that Soviet troops invariably adhered to “the principle that all that remained when the Germans withdrew is their ‘war booty,’ machinery and livestock, crops, factory equipment etc.”57 Even “such primitive articles as axes, harrows, scythes etc. have been taken off to Russia.”58 Ironically, the “wild expulsions” of the summer of 1945 had played into their hands: there being no potential settlers to take their places, all that the clearance of the German population achieved, as the Gorzów branch of the State Repatriation Office in Wielkopolska ruefully noted in retrospect, was to result in “all moveable German property in Gorzów becoming booty for Soviet soldiers,” as well as leaving the harvest of East Brandenburg to rot in the fields.59 Likewise, a disillusioned local branch secretary of the Communist Party complained that as soon as incoming Poles succeeded in licking an ex-German farm into shape the Red Army would turn up and expropriate it.