Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War

by R. M. Douglas

  Beyond these deliberate abuses of power, much of the difficulty stemmed from the fact that the legal situation relating to Volksdeutsch property in Poland was anarchic from the outset, with nearly a dozen ambiguous and sometimes mutually contradictory decrees on the subject having been issued by Warsaw between 1944 and 1948. Under the decree of May 6, 1945, only those members of the third and fourth categories of the Volksliste who had “voluntarily” identified themselves as German during the war were to suffer confiscation. In practice, it had proven impossible for hard-pressed Resettlement Officers on the ground to make such distinctions, and almost all “Germans,” regardless of category, had been expropriated during the first months of peace. Eastern repatriates and settlers from the central provinces were assigned most of these properties, and although they usually lacked legal title to them, so many had invested time and money in them since taking possession that to move these people out again in favor of the “rehabilitated” owners would have been both disruptive and highly unpopular.

  On no fewer than three separate occasions the government attempted to rectify this potentially explosive situation. An October 30, 1945 amendment of the resettlement law provided that “rehabilitated” persons whose land had been confiscated and reassigned were entitled to compensation in kind elsewhere.86 For many reasons, not least a shortage of suitable properties, this proposed resolution of the difficulty was found to be impracticable, as was a similar measure contained in the land reform legislation of the following month. Finally a decree of June 1946 attempted to cut the Gordian knot by repealing all previous statutes. It too, though, had two fatal flaws. It only applied to confiscations that had been carried out according to the earlier laws in force, and was silent about those accomplished entirely without color of law. It was also so poorly drafted that it did not make clear whether persons appearing in any category of the Volksliste were now still subject to confiscation—leading to the paradox that unquestioned “Germans” or even “Nazis” who had already been deported might still have a legal claim to their property.87

  As an official of the legal department of the Liquidation Office in łódź pointed out, even when the law spoke clearly, it was not being applied by the courts themselves. Despite the government’s insistence that the invidious category of “provisional Polishness” be eliminated, public opinion and judges alike often continued to view signatories of the Volksliste, coerced or not, as people who had failed to remain true to Poland during the time of the nation’s greatest need. That they should be placed on the same legal standing as those who had suffered persecution at the Nazis’ hands for refusing to betray their Polishness, even under pressure, was unacceptable to them.88 The chief of the Polish Repatriation Mission in the British zone spoke for many when he asserted in his official capacity that these persons “were in principle all German collaborationists of various degrees,” and must be treated as such. Partly as a result, whereas by July 31, 1946, no fewer than 223,331 rehabilitation applications had been received by the courts, only a third had been resolved a year later. The number entitled to submit petitions who had not done so was still greater. In consequence, as the łódź Liquidation Office accurately put it, an atmosphere of “chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous” prevailed on the ground, while the courts were routinely handing down judgments relating to the expropriation of property that would not stand up to legal scrutiny.89

  Though the non-Potsdam countries of expulsion had fewer structural problems with which to contend, the number of deported Volksdeutsche being considerably fewer than in Czechoslovakia or Poland, there is evidence to show that the general picture of a poorly managed colonization process holds good in those districts also. An officer of the Allied Military Mission who toured the Romanian countryside around Braşov, Făgăraş, and Sibiu from which the German population had been deported found “large areas of valuable agricultural land… just lying idle. Glasshouses producing tomatoes, lettuces and other crops were likewise in a state of abandonment and in some cases would need quite a fair amount of capital to renew and repair the damages caused by the winter frosts.”90 His impression was confirmed by a Reuters journalist who interviewed the ethnic Romanians of the region in 1946. “[A]ll said that they sympathized with the Saxons [Volksdeutsche] and were sorry that they had their land property confiscated under agrarian reform, since this land had been given to gypsies to purchase support for the Government, and the gipsies were very lazy and left the land uncultivated.”91 Similarly in Yugoslavia, the minister for colonization, Sreten Vukosavljević, revealed at the end of 1945 that the resettlement program in the Vojvodina had not gone to plan. The terms under which 390,000 hectares of confiscated German lands had been offered to Yugoslav citizens were highly unattractive, with a family of five being entitled to a plot of a mere two hectares in size. Recipients were obliged to wait twenty years before they could sell the holdings. It was hardly surprising, then, that of the forty-five thousand families scheduled for resettlement in the Vojvodina, with the largest proportion coming from Bosnia-Herzegovina, only five thousand had arrived by the end of 1945. Even these were “not accustomed to intensive farming…. There will therefore be in the first years after colonisation a definite falling off in production.”92 This turned out to be a considerable understatement. By 1950, a state of rebellion existed in the Vojvodina, as the 230,000 peasants, most of them Serbs, who had been settled on former German farms often violently resisted the exactions of a Yugoslav state that had come to regard them as “kulaks” and “saboteurs.”93

  Economic disruption would undoubtedly prove to be the leading consequence of the expulsions, in both the short and long terms. The governments of the expelling countries had faced this situation with their eyes open, and insisted that a temporary interruption of normal economic activity was a price worth paying. In one of many speeches by Czechoslovak leaders insisting that no loss of production would ever divert the government from its course, Interior Minister Václav Nosek declared in July 1946 that if appeals for exemptions of skilled German workers were granted, “any material advantages that might result from such a course would be neutralized by the cost of the security measures that would be necessary.”94 A frustrated manager at the Poldina chemical works, however, drew attention to the real-world consequences of this policy when he pointed out that his factory “had 9,000 workmen waiting to start but they were held up because the firm could not find replacements for 270 German … chemists who had been ejected.”95 In the countryside, too, by the summer of 1946 it had proven necessary to import 6,000 Bulgarian agricultural workers to Bohemia to relieve labor shortages brought about by the deportation of Germans. Similar examples could be cited almost ad infinitum, in Poland as well as Czechoslovakia. Although, according to official Polish figures which were themselves likely to err considerably on the side of optimism, around 4 million colonists had been settled in the Recovered Territories by the end of 1946, industrial production was at a virtual standstill in large part because of the transfer of vital workers. Only 7,000 people were at work in the chemical industry, compared to 180,000 before the war; just five of the fifty-four cotton mills were in operation; and the mechanical engineering sector was in even worse straits.96

  In each of the expelling countries, governments, residents, and ecclesiastical authorities struggled mightily to eradicate all indications that Germans had ever been present. As Edvard Beneš urged his compatriots, “We must de-Germanize our republic … names, regions, towns, customs—everything that can possibly be de-Germanized must go.”97 Place names were changed overnight, often by direct translation into the new language (e.g., the substitution of “Zielona Góra” for “Grünberg”); statues and memorials demolished; and fanciful local histories composed that airbrushed into oblivion centuries of German presence.98 “In Wrocław the government had special teams that roved for years painting over and chiseling out German inscriptions. Derelict German cemeteries were converted into parks, and headstones were used to line ditches and sewers.�
��99 The most ambitious—and unrealistic—attempt to accomplish this objective was an order by Commandant Srević of the Banat military region in Yugoslavia that all German signs on buildings be removed within twelve hours, on pain of the immediate execution of the German occupants.100 Nor was this a passing phase. As late as 1989, applications for visitors’ visas to Poland from Germans born in the Recovered Territories were routinely rejected if the applicant used the former German place name when stating his or her place of birth.101 The de-Germanization effort extended not only to penalizing the use of the German language, but to putting pressure on residents to abandon German-sounding personal names. The success of the campaign, however, was mixed. Cultural and sometimes physical clashes ensued between settler Poles and many of the indigenes of the Recovered Territories, who had absorbed over the years a high degree of Germanization. New place names could also be rejected by the local population, who sometimes “boycotted new names and even broke road signs that identified the new name…. For them, place name changes on the lands in which they had been living were never the processes of re-Polonisation, but rather Polonisation against their will.”102

  Consigning evidence of German settlements to George Orwell’s “memory hole” was one thing; putting self-sustaining communities in their place entirely another. Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse argue that the repatriates from eastern Poland who came to settle in the Recovered Territories never succeeded in achieving the second of these objectives.

  [U]ntil 1970 at least, they believed their Silesian sojourn to be temporary…. They drank excessively. They let drains and heating systems collapse, then suffered in their damp rooms from high rates of rheumatism. They watched in indifference as heaps of discarded farm machinery rusted away in their leaking barns…. Whenever possible, they told their children to leave for central Poland. Objectively speaking, their fate was just as tragic as that of the German expellees, whose land and property they had so reluctantly inherited. It can only be summarised by the terms apathy, alcoholism and alienation.103

  While this bleak picture might have been truer of the first generation of settlers than of their descendants, indices of social deprivation and distress remained stubbornly high in the colonized borderlands of all the expelling countries. Despite the vigorous efforts of the Czechoslovak government, alcoholism took a heavy toll of the rural colonists in the Sudetenland.104 Unbalanced migration patterns—in particular, a reluctance on the part of middle-class professionals to take up residence in the cleared regions—left communities lacking vital amenities and social services. In the district surrounding the western Bohemian town of Tachov, for example, there was only a single doctor for seventeen thousand inhabitants in the early 1950s. A persistent shortage of schoolteachers proved an especially intractable problem, and, together with the lack of cultural infrastructure such as cinemas and libraries, was one of the factors that drove settlers from the rural areas back into the cities. By the mid-1950s this had become a definite pattern; despite energetic state efforts to counter rural depopulation it would continue until the end of the twentieth century. In 1985, the population of the Czech borderlands, natural increase notwithstanding, still had not recovered to the levels recorded in 1930, far less 1945.105

  Other commentators found that the true impact upon their respective societies became evident only decades after the expulsion operation had been completed. Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s vice premier, later ruefully observed to Milovan Djilas that in expelling the Volksdeutsche, Yugoslavia had deprived itself of “our most productive inhabitants.”106 Czechoslovakia too never made good the economic ground lost in the second half of the 1940s. Although the proceeds of the confiscation and redistribution of German property were supposed to have been applied to a “Fund of National Renewal” of Kĉs 80 billion, a figure that was a small fraction of its true value; only Kĉs 34 billion was ever realized by the Czechoslovak state.107 The author Petr Příhoda, a prolific commentator on public affairs, has argued that beyond this squandering and misappropriation of resources, the expulsions did permanent damage to Czechoslovakia that cannot be measured in monetary terms alone.108 The attempt to replace organic communities that had evolved over centuries with successors constructed at breakneck speed, and with mobile and fluctuating populations that were heavily dependent on the largesse of a Communist state, hollowed out Czechoslovak society and gravely weakened its political immune system. Nor was the harm confined to the borderlands. The departure of so many people from the central districts to the periphery in such a short time also established unnatural patterns of internal migration which sapped the vitality of the areas abandoned by the settlers no less than the regions into which they were arriving. While not attributing quite so many deleterious consequences to the expulsions, in comparison with the decades of Communist mismanagement that followed them, Eagle Glassheim points out in a study of the northern districts of the former Sudetenland that from the moment the expulsions were first set in train, “central officials never stopped thinking of north Bohemia as a laboratory.”109 The transfer of the Germans, he argues, thus became a template for—and catalyst of—the kind of ill-conceived experiments in top-down Communist utopia building that wreaked havoc upon Czechoslovakia and the other countries in the region during the four decades that followed.

  However these long-term ramifications are assessed, it remains the case that the districts that were cleared of Germans in the 1940s cannot be considered advertisements for the positive impact of population transfers. Part of the reason for this was the respective governments’ anxiety to declare by fiat that their full integration had already occurred, and prematurely to discontinue the assistance provided by central government. A grandiose Exhibition of the Recovered Territories was held in Wrocław at the end of July 1948 to proclaim “the total integration of the Western and Northern Territories with the rest of the country.”110 Four months later, the government resolved to dissolve the Ministry for the Recovered Territories, on the ground that the need for such an organization no longer existed, and to downgrade the PUR, which was placed under the authority of the Ministry of Public Administration. As one parliamentarian crowed in January 1949, “the problem of the Recovered Territories as a distinct question in People’s Poland has ceased to exist.”111 The reality was far different. Though by 1950 some 5 million hectares of former German land in the Recovered Territories had been distributed to 700,000 families and the region had once again become self-sufficient in food, a drift of settlers away from the countryside soon commenced and was accelerated by the government’s increasingly coercive agricultural collectivization program.112 Because only 5 percent of the landholders of ex-German farms ever received full legal titles to their properties, hundreds of thousands of settlers in the Recovered Territories found themselves the victim of a state-sponsored bait-and-switch scheme after just a few years’ residence in the area.113 The majority of the areas of western Poland from which the Germans were removed remain to the present day among the most sparsely settled and economically backward areas of the country. In the cities, for many years, as noted above, a “western bonus” had to be paid to Polish workers to induce them to face the rigors of life in the borderlands. Similar efforts to entice certain categories of residents to parts of the former Sudetenland would continue until the end of the 1980s. In the Czech lands, as Caitlin Murdock points out, even after the fall of Communism “the legacies of postwar and Communist-era population and economic policies continued to set the borderlands apart, earning them an international reputation for poverty and industrial decay, rather than recognition as distinctly Czech national space.”114

  Thus while the postwar resettlements unquestionably provided opportunities for upward social mobility to some, especially those who were already well connected, for most people the promises of a rich share of the former German bounty never materialized. Instead, the material proceeds of the expulsions would in the long run benefit those who came to take the expellees’ place little more than th
ose who had been forced to depart.

  10

  THE INTERNATIONAL REACTION

  Johannes Kostka, a German prisoner of war in a British camp in Egypt, wrote to the U.S. Office of Military Government in Frankfurt at the end of 1947 to express his anxiety about his young wife Gertrud, a resident of the southwestern Polish town of Bielsko-Biała (Bielitz). Born in 1921, Gertrud Kostka had barely missed becoming a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although the region was largely inhabited by German speakers, it had been turned over to Poland after the Great War. The question of timing would prove critical in her case. After the invasion of Poland in 1939, instead of being categorized as Austrian she was placed in the second class of the Volksliste, for undisputed though politically indifferent Germans; her husband, an engineer from the “old Reich,” was called up for military service shortly afterwards. Their daughter Barbara (“Bärbel”) was born in October 1944, but died the following spring, like hundreds of thousands of others, in the chaos surrounding the Red Army’s advance across Poland. After nearly four years of separation, Johannes Kostka finally received a letter from his wife, which he forwarded to the U.S. authorities.