As in Czechoslovakia, then, an even greater challenge than recruiting settlers to the Recovered Territories was inducing them to remain. While Warsaw’s preferred agricultural “pioneer” was from east of the Bug, because he knew how to farm and usually brought equipment and stock, “he, however, is not always as glad to come as the Government is to have him. At Kalisz Nowy [Kalisz Pomorski], according to our communist informant, there were eight railway carriages full of new settlers who had sent one of their number to spy out the land and on hearing his report had staged a sit-down strike. A farmer from Tarnopol asked if we would take him with us ‘anywhere back in Poland.’”60 As another exhausted settler told Leonard Holliday, he and his fellow repatriates had “had enough of sleeping by their horses, gun in hand.”61 In many cases, colonists were so short of food that they were obliged to eat their seed grain to enable them to survive the first winter in their new homes.62 The small size of the holdings allocated to them—typically between seven and fifteen hectares, depending on the quality of the land—also provided little margin for error, at least in the first difficult years. It was no wonder, then, that in the village of Grodków in Silesia, the town clerk confessed to Holliday that the hungry settlers “had to be prevented by force from returning to the east.”63
Conditions faced by the eastern repatriates were indeed pitiable, especially when the hardship they had already undergone before arriving in their new “homes” is borne in mind. Hundreds of thousands had experiences similar to those of Michał Sobków, who was forced by the Soviets to leave his farm at Koropiec in eastern Galicia in 1945. Upon being displaced, he and his family had waited for two months in a tent city at Pyszkowice for transport to the Recovered Territories. At last they were ordered to move at two hours’ notice, cramming themselves and their farm animals into the wagons before the train abruptly departed. When it did, half the wagons were left behind. Sobków and his family had practically no supplies for the journey; the animals started dying from lack of food and water; and people too died and were buried beside the railway line. After a hellish journey lasting more than a month, the Sobków family was set down at Brochów near Wrocław, only to find that previous arrivals had already helped themselves to all the ex-German properties worth having.64
The predictable result was disillusionment and anger at the misleading picture being painted by government ministries of life in the new western lands. A visiting British journalist remarked upon the profusion of posters bearing the legend “Come to Poland’s New Paradise” blanketing the walls of towns in the central provinces. “‘Make your fortune in the West,’ say the newspapers. ‘Land and Work for All,’ proclaims the radio, in broadcast after broadcast.”65 Radio Lublin depicted an especially rosy scene, advising would-be colonists in June 1945 that “All farms in western Pomerania are in good order; there are good buildings and enough equipment, great stores of potatoes and corn. The possibilities for settlement in towns are also good; there are still a number of empty furnished flats, as well as a number of workshops.”66 With no less assurance, Trybuna Związkowca promised settlers that in the Recovered Territories “Safety conditions are the very best.”67
The reality for most was very different. Ambassador Cavendish-Bentinck reported the experience of an acquaintance from Poznań who had traveled with his niece to Szczecin in August 1945 to try their luck. “The prospects seemed alluring—the Government propaganda promised unheard of opportunities for every kind of prospective settler. The overcrowded train with the steps and roofs of the cars covered by adventurous immigrants proved the faith of the Polish public in these promises.” The pair found, however, that about 70 percent of the town was “a mass of ruins” thanks to RAF bombing, and that the Red Army had already commandeered most of the surviving houses. A virtual state of war was going on between bands of Soviet soldiers, often under the influence of drink, who preyed indiscriminately on the civilian population, the Polish police and militia, and each other. After two days the would-be settlers returned home. “The train was overcrowded by returning disgusted ‘prospectors’ and no words were strong enough to express their opinion of the Russian ‘goldatesca’ and the ‘Powers that Be’ in Poland at present who tolerate this state of things and take their orders from Moscow.”68 Robin Hankey and Michael Winch, too, found that most of the repatriates to whom they spoke in Lower Silesia “were very discontented … complain[ing] that they were frequently robbed by the Russians and some said they would give anything to go anywhere else if they knew where to go.”69 Paradoxically, in the urban parts of the Recovered Territories the crime rate actually rose sharply after the first mad scramble for German property had concluded. The explanation for this phenomenon offered by the British vice consul in Szczecin was that “empty houses and [the] promise of loot attracted a considerable number of adventurers who for a time made a very lucrative existence disposing of their ill-gotten goods in Warsaw and other towns or even selling them to bona fide settlers …” Once the supply of easy pickings from German sources ran out, however, this artificially swollen criminal population had had to revert to a life of conventional felony, and the number of killings, muggings, and burglaries skyrocketed as a result.70
But if repatriates and colonists from the central provinces had every reason for disillusionment, the ethnic Polish population of the Recovered Territories who had remained there throughout the war felt no less hard done by. An official of the Resettlement Committee in Bydgoszcz discovered as much when he toured the area in July and August 1945. As soon as the Wehrmacht had withdrawn, the Polish cultivators and agricultural laborers of the vicinity had rushed to seize German farms for themselves. Only 25 percent of the land, however, had been allocated by the ministry for locals, the remaining 75 percent being reserved to accommodate settlers from the lost eastern territories and from Central Poland. The indigenes bitterly resented the presence of these newcomers, considering that the labor they themselves had been required to perform on the farms by the Germans during the war gave them a prior claim. Adopting the slogan “Pomerania for the Pomeranians,” they refused to make way for the colonists. To make matters worse, the squatters were “devastating” the holdings, selling off livestock and allowing agricultural machinery to break down through neglect. A similar situation prevailed in the town of Bydgoszcz itself, where would-be colonists to whom houses, businesses, and workshops had been assigned turned up only to find local residents already firmly established.71 While the law undoubtedly favored the official settlers from outside the region, it was far from clear that they possessed a better moral claim.
Occasionally, Poles found the Red Army standing in the way of their efforts to dispossess the original German owners, either because some Soviets made no secret of their Polonophobia or because the Germans were performing useful services for them. In January 1946, the newly appointed minister for the Recovered Territories, Władysław Gomułka, protested to Marshal Zhukov, the local Soviet military commander Konstantin Rokossovsky, and the ambassador to Warsaw Viktor Lebedev, over the undisguised pro-Germanism of some senior Red Army officers and suggested that private billeting of Red Army soldiers in the Recovered Territories be prohibited to prevent their “fraternization with the Germans and favoring them as against the Polish population.”72 There was undoubtedly some basis for such complaints,73 though cases of this kind were probably not as frequent as is often alleged. In many more instances, Germans had been driven out of their homes by low-ranking Polish officials, “but after a short time they could always come back and then found that though their homes had been looted they could still fix them up after a fashion.” As a result, the Germans had become adept at concealing their valuables in the expectation of being able to return for them later. This, though, exposed them to great danger, with predatory elements not hesitating to use torture to force them to reveal the whereabouts of their possessions. After a resident of Lower Silesia was arrested by the Polish secret police in February 1946, for example, he was “beaten by four Poles wi
th rubber truncheons until I gave way and revealed some of the secret hiding places of my cousin’s chemist shop.”74 Those who did not have hidden property to disclose sometimes lost their lives under such interrogations.
Because of the level of uncertainty, insecurity, and material hardship, and the skyrocketing prices—the cost of living in the Recovered Territories was more than twice as high as in central Poland, a differential for which the payment by the state of a “Western bonus” to wage earners did not come close to compensating—the rate of return migration was high. By early 1946, one in four new residents of Wrocław had returned home or moved on to a different location where life might be easier. But others remained, determined to stick it out. By no means were all the newcomers carpet-baggers in search of a quick killing. In the same way that millions of Soviet citizens had flocked to half-built cities east of the Urals during the period of the first Five Year Plan in the late 1920s, filled with enthusiasm at the prospect of “building socialism” in their lifetimes, many Poles were excited by the possibilities for adventure and innovation that life in a pioneer society offered. One of them was Jakub Egit, a Jewish activist from Galicia who had served in the Red Army during the war and nearly all of whose family had been exterminated by the Germans in Belzec. After being coopted onto the Central Committee of Polish Jews in the summer of 1945, Egit traveled to Lower Silesia with the idea of setting up a Yiddish-speaking yishuv, or Jewish settlement, for concentration camp survivors and their families using confiscated German property. His eye fell on the town of Dzierżoniów (Reichenbach) where, with a view to poetic justice, a local ordinance stipulated that “a German meeting a Jew on the sidewalk must step aside.”75 In the end, though, Egit’s experimental community, which had promising beginnings, was suppressed as a Zionist deviation by the Communist authorities and he himself was forced to flee to Canada.
Polish officials often argued that a serious impediment to the colonization of the Recovered Territories was the Western Allies’ refusal to confirm that the “provisional administration” of the area that had been assigned to Warsaw by the Potsdam Conference was indeed a permanent and irrevocable fact. Until settlers were given a firm assurance that they would never be required to leave by a decision of the great powers, they would not be willing to take the risk of starting a new life in the borderlands. Certainly the United States was not above seeking to stir up uncertainty about the future of the Recovered Territories for its own purposes. In a speech at Stuttgart in September 1946, Secretary of State James Byrnes caused a brief sensation by reminding his audience that the Potsdam Conference had not given de jure approval of the transfer of “Silesia and other eastern German areas” to Poland, and that “the extent of the area to be ceded to Poland must be determined when the final [peace] settlement is agreed upon.” The address was seized upon by Polish Communists as evidence that the West planned to restore Germany to its prewar boundaries as part of an anti-Soviet scheme, and gave a glimmer of hope to expellees that they might after all be able to return home. In reality, the speech had been no more than a political maneuver on Byrnes’s part. He was under no illusions that the Recovered Territories would ever be vacated by either the Poles or the Soviets. His intention was rather to force the Soviet Union publicly to defend the existing boundary between Poland and Germany so as to take the wind out of the sails of the German Communist Party in the forthcoming elections in the Soviet occupation zone. The speech had the desired effect, eliciting a public declaration from Molotov that like the other powers at Potsdam, the USSR fully endorsed the population transfers and had “never envisaged any revision of this decision in the future.” Though the Soviet foreign minister was rarely in a position to give lectures on morality to anyone, there was nonetheless some force behind his charge that Byrnes, by causing anxiety to the colonists and fruitlessly raising the hopes of the expellees, was guilty of “cruelty … both towards the Poles and the Germans themselves.”76 The Stuttgart address was, in Cavendish-Bentinck’s words, “a godsend to the Polish Ministry of Propaganda,” and was made the pretext for a nationwide campaign of officially inspired “spontaneous” demonstrations, many of which, tellingly, targeted the premises of Stanisław Mikołajczyk’s Polish Peasant Party.77 Among the colonists themselves, however, Byrnes’s comments were seen for what they were. Francis Bourdillon of the Foreign Office Research Department, who was touring the Recovered Territories when the speech was made, found that the settlers were largely ignoring it. Their general belief, he reported, was that “‘the Russians will not agree to change the frontiers, the Allies will never use force to turn us out, and we shall not yield to anything else.’”78
The single largest problem confronting the Polish authorities was what to do about the 2 million ethnic Polish residents of the former Incorporated Eastern Territories who had signed the Volksliste during the war, and thus rendered themselves liable to expulsion to the very country that had terrorized and exploited many of them. The basic rule, according to an ordinance of May 6, 1945, “on the exclusion of hostile elements from the Polish national community,” was that Volksdeutsche possessing Polish citizenship before the war and those whose names appeared under any category of the Volksliste were to be deprived of Polish nationality and forfeit their property rights. Because so many persons of Polish ethnicity had signed the Volksliste under duress, however, to apply this regulation rigorously would have led to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles who had already suffered grievously at the Germans’ hands. There was also the vexed problem of the so-called “autochthon” population—German speakers of Slav descent, most of them Masurians or Kashubians—many of whom preferred to go to Germany with their co-linguists but who were regarded by the government as “Germanized” Poles who needed to be “rehabilitated” for the nation. The law thus provided two paths by which signatories of the Volksliste might now regularize their situation.
Ironically, in deciding to restore Polish citizenship to those who had lost it under previous decrees, the government found itself following in the footsteps of Nazi nationality policy. Just as during the war the criteria for inclusion of ethnic Poles on the Volksliste had become so permissive as in many cases to be meaningless, so the authorities in Warsaw, for the same reason, felt obliged to ensure that verification committees did not depopulate the new western lands still further by inquiring too meticulously into Volksliste signatories’ wartime records.79 Once the “rehabilitation” process had been put in place, therefore, the criteria laid down for recovery of Polish nationality were few and easily satisfied. Under the “administrative rehabilitation” procedure, those who had “a fixed abode in the Recovered Territories before 1st January, 1945,” had never been Nazi Party members, stood no higher than Category III in the Volksliste, and were willing to make a formal declaration of loyalty to the state before a “verification commission” would normally qualify for restoration of their nationality, initially in the form of a temporary citizenship certificate valid for six months that might in due course be made permanent. Category II Volksdeutsche who could not satisfy these requirements but “for other deserving reasons can be considered for Polish citizenship” could instead obtain “judicial rehabilitation” by proving to the satisfaction of a court that they had acted under duress in subscribing to the Volksliste and had never voluntarily renounced their Polish national identity. As for the Masurians and other “autochthons,” the great majority were not given a choice, but were compelled to take out Polish nationality. (Once emigration became a possibility in the mid-1950s, however, virtually the whole of the Masurian population would decamp to West Germany.)80
The State Repatriation Office (PUR) generally encouraged a permissive interpretation of these policies. At Miastko in Pomerania, Pawel Grzeszczak, the local resettlement officer, reported that the slogan guiding verification decisions in the region was “Not a drop of Polish blood beyond the Oder.”81 The peripatetic Leonard Holliday on one of his visits to Upper Silesia also found that the verifi
cation commissions there had been told that persons who spoke Polish and had not voluntarily joined German associations were entitled to stay. Even for the minority whose applications were rejected, a second avenue of appeal remained. “Twice I was told that those who fail to pass this test (some of whom were, in fact, pro-Polish) appeal to the Russian authorities who, in a number of cases, have reinstalled them in their houses or farms, driving out the new settlers placed there by the Polish Repatriation Commission.”82
When it came to returning the property of the “rehabilitates,” though, a different attitude normally prevailed. In theory, this should have been held in trust by the PUR or the State Liquidation Office until verification procedures had been concluded. Only in a minority of cases, however, did this happen. Verification commissions lacked guidance as to the criteria to be employed or the means of enforcing their decisions, and while the process was under way, the property had in innumerable cases been “redistributed” or simply stolen while the owner languished in an internment camp for “Germans.” Quite apart from the fate of the German expellees, therefore, this regulation left masses of ethnic Poles vulnerable to the whims of local authorities or the depredations of predatory neighbors. The commandant of the Złotów camp, for example, routinely ignored the findings of the local verification commission, keeping “rehabilitated” Poles behind barbed wire while he helped himself to the contents of their houses.83 Verification commissions were themselves well placed to profit from their official functions, either by taking bribes from applicants to ensure a favorable verdict—in Poznań, a filing fee of 6,000 zlotys ($110) was demanded of persons seeking to submit a declaration of loyalty—or by denying justified claims so as to enable members to take over the applicants’ property.84 Mirosław Dybowski, a verification inspector in Gdańsk Voivodeship, reported on the “scandalous proceedings” of the commission there, which had turned down every one of the thirty-seven applications it heard on a single day. Not coincidentally, the farms and goods of the rejected applicants were soon in the hands of the commission’s cronies in the local branch of the UB. In one especially egregious case revealed by Dybowski, a UB employee named Słysk had taken a shine to the farm owned by a neighboring family, the Regenbrechts, who qualified for verification. Although the family’s wartime record was unimpeachable, Słysk had arranged for the father to be imprisoned in the UB lockup in Kwidzyn and the mother and her three children to be sent to a forced labor camp. He then entered into possession of the farm. When Dybowski uncovered one episode of this kind too many, his investigations were abruptly terminated by an official of the County Office for the Rural Areas who notified him that he would be permitted to carry out no further inspections in Kwidzyn.85
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 41