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

by R. M. Douglas

  After our last meeting you again went to the front line battling for your life. Our life struggle only began after the surrender. Look, I never wrote to you about it, for the need, the hunger and despair cannot be described or told about. But today I have to tell you something. I had to battle for the child, for my mother and myself. I was known as the wife of a Reichsdeutscher. That may be sufficient to you to explain my situation. Four times I was separated from Bärbel to be displaced to Siberia with many others; four times a man was able to save me from the fate in store for me. When my child was dying and there was no doctor to help, I broke down. I tried to follow my child. But I was prevented and the struggle went on. From the first hour of my distress a man helped me, treating me always as a mother and the wife of another man. But now, after almost three years, he took his reward.

  I can’t offer any oaths in this letter, because I feel void and dead. But just as honest as our mutual life has been, may these last lines be. I have no guilt to confess. I have no tears to shed. I have only this belief that the Lord will help you to trust my words. After a short pain you will find happiness again. For me there will be bleak despair and the hope that the Lord won’t leave me and will call me to Him in my dark hour, uniting me with my child. Trusting upon His help I take farewell from you, and my life. I cannot write any more. I can only beg you, please, believe me, I am without blame.

  Farewell, Hans.

  Johannes Kostka appealed to U.S. officials to ask the Polish government to give priority to the expulsion of his wife—who had become pregnant as a result of her rape—before she carried out her intention of killing herself.1 Because the United States concerned itself only with expulsions from Czechoslovakia and Hungary, the letter was passed on to the British embassy in Warsaw, with a request for further action. Four months later, the embassy replied to the Foreign Office in London about the matter. Johannes Kostka, it acknowledged, was undoubtedly in a “most trying predicament.” Nevertheless,

  any representations we might make to the Polish Government on behalf of a German subject only provide the authorities here with material to use in propaganda against us. In addition, if these representations have any effect at all, it is one of making the situation more difficult for the person in Poland who is concerned.

  Moreover, it is firmly held by the Polish authorities that the deportation of Germans is solely an internal Polish matter in which we have no right to interfere. Unless therefore you feel very strongly about this case, we propose that it should be dropped.

  The Foreign Office did not; and consequently it was.2

  The Kostka case encapsulates the official Western response to the manifest failure of the expulsion project to live up to the “orderly and humane” standards stipulated by the Potsdam Agreement. As in almost every other instance in which the question of ameliorating the sufferings of the expellees arose, the first and overriding consideration was the national interests of the Western powers. The second was a fatalistic prediction that any such action was bound either to fail or to have a positively harmful effect—usually, as in this case, advanced in the teeth both of logic and of the facts of the situation. Lastly, although the expulsions were taking place in accordance with the expressed policy of the Anglo-Americans and required their willing participation and collaboration, the Western democracies disavowed any responsibility for the suffering that resulted, which was, they asserted, entirely the concern of the expelling states or of the Germans themselves.

  Against this governmental consensus, those individuals and nongovernmental organizations that sought, if not to put an end to the transfer of the Germans, at least to mitigate its ill effects, could make little headway. The greatest obstacle in their path was the victorious Allies’ insistence that the Volksdeutsche be excluded from any form of international protection or assistance. This did more than simply deny food, clothing, and accommodation to them. So long as the rule prevailed, there existed no organization that was authorized to make representations either to the expelling states or to the Allied military governments in Germany on their behalf. As a result, humanitarian bodies like the Red Cross could be—and in practice frequently were—barred from extending even the minimal amounts of assistance they were in a position to provide. Nor was there any agency, national or international, to which Volksdeutsche subjected to inhumane treatment might appeal. Paradoxically, the women and children who made up most of the expellee population occupied a legal status far lower than that of members of the SS, who, as former servicemen of the German armed forces, were protected by the Geneva Convention. Because of this, advocates for the expellees could do little more than try to raise public awareness. While they enjoyed limited success in this regard, it was never enough to make a difference to the way in which the transfers were conducted. This is in itself a remarkable fact. Although the expulsions and their consequences neither could be, nor were, hidden from sight, few Europeans outside the countries immediately concerned, and fewer Americans, noticed that they were taking place. With the exception of the foothold obtained for the Red Cross in Czechoslovakia by Richard Stokes’s revelations of October 1946, none of the expelling or receiving governments was at any time compelled by the pressure of public opinion to abandon or modify a policy on which it had previously decided. Outside the communist world, there is probably no undertaking in modern history on a comparable scale in which those who carried it out were able to do so with such a degree of freedom from external scrutiny.

  Part of the blindness, it is true, was conscious and willful. Since 1943, when it became increasingly clear that an Allied victory was probable if not certain, a great deal of attention had been devoted in the West to the question of German collective guilt for Nazism and its crimes. By the end of the war, the debate had largely been settled. Opinion polls in Britain showed that large majorities recognized no difference between “ordinary Germans” and “Nazis”; similar surveys in the United States found that Americans thought that Germany was not being treated sufficiently harshly; and a poll in France revealed that 59 percent of respondents favored the expulsion of at least some Germans.3 While many Westerners may not have subscribed to the Polish and Czechoslovak argument that the Volksdeutsche were even more guilty than the people of the “old Reich” by virtue of having added treachery to barbarity, they nonetheless broadly shared Hubert Ripka’s belief that “Nazism has been only a modern form and a culminating point of brutal pan-Germanism, with which the minds and hearts of the German people have been thoroughly imbued.”4 And some carried that perception so far forward as to argue that it was appropriate even that children pay the price for Nazi misdeeds. When the London-based National Peace Council issued a call in September 1945 for Britons to accept reduced food rations so that expellee women and children might be fed, a correspondent to the Daily Herald condemned those among his countrymen who still harbored “tender feelings towards this race of murderous white savages.” A letter signed by sixty war workers was still more outspoken, demanding that the German people be starved as a matter of policy as were “the men, women and children of Greece and Russia during the Nazi occupation …”5 Even some officers attached to Allied Military Government in Germany, like Goronwy Rees, held that mass deaths among expellees were, if not a positive Allied war aim, at any rate a matter of no great significance when set against the overriding objective of avoiding giving unnecessary offence to the Soviet Union:

  It is inevitable that millions of Germans must die in the coming winter. It is inevitable that millions of the nomads who wander aimlessly in all directions across Germany should find no resting place but the grave…. These facts could only be altered, if at all, by a universal effort of philanthropy which would reverse the result of the war….

  The real danger of Germany at the moment is not that millions of Germans must starve, freeze and die during the winter; it is that out of their misery the Germans should create an opportunity for destroying the unity of the Allies who defeated them.6

  Views
like these, while far from unusual, were still not in the majority. If Westerners considered that all Germans, with the possible exception of children below the age of reason, shared at least some measure of responsibility for the war and deserved punishment for it, they did not agree that any and all forms of punishment were justified. Though a London Daily Express report argued that the “wild expulsions” were having a salutary effect, teaching the Volksdeutsche that “war does not pay,” the rash of stories appearing in the newspapers in the late summer of 1945 on the state in which expellees were arriving in Berlin provoked a short-lived but sharp response in Britain. A protest to Ernest Bevin from the Coventry branch of the Peace Pledge Union, denouncing the expulsions as “absolute stupidity,” was described by the Foreign Office as “one of innumerable letters we receive on this question”; by the end of September so many were arriving that Jack Troutbeck drafted a form response to be sent to all future correspondents.7 Two deputations—the first, organized by George Bell, Anglican bishop of Chichester, representing the Christian churches, and the second a cross-party group headed by Sir William Beveridge—visited Clement Attlee in September and October to ask that all possible steps be taken to relieve the expellees and, at the least, to suspend further evictions during the coming winter. Though the prime minister initially dealt somewhat brusquely with the clergymen, suggesting that those affected by the transfers were “paying the penalty” for their part in the war and asserting that “the particular problem of German refugees from Eastern Europe was not one for which the Government was in any way responsible,” the markedly more emollient tone of his response to the second group, to whom he “expressed great sympathy with the objects of the deputation,” showed that British policymakers realized there was a risk of the question becoming a cause célèbre.8

  For a brief period, it seemed that it might indeed do so. The shambles into which the “wild expulsions” were descending caused those opinion formers who had already expressed their opposition to the scheme to remind the public that they had told them so. That these gruesome stories were emerging from central Europe at the same time that the trials of the surviving war criminals were opening at Nuremberg added to public disquiet. In a letter to the Times, the philosopher Bertrand Russell drew attention to the fact that one of the charges leveled against the Nazi defendants was their involvement in “deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population.”

  In eastern Europe now mass deportations are being carried out by our allies on an unprecedented scale…. This is not done as an act of war, but as part of a deliberate policy of “peace.”

  … Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace? Is it more humane to turn out old women and children to die at a distance than to asphyxiate Jews in gas chambers? Can those responsible for the deaths of those who die after expulsion be regarded as less guilty because they do not see or hear the agonies of their victims? Are the future laws of war to justify the killing of enemy nationals after enemy resistance has ceased?9

  Other critics pointed out that the doctrine of “collective responsibility” cut both ways. The publisher Victor Gollancz, himself of Jewish heritage, argued that “if every German was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country and not of a fascist one with no free Press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively” for what was being done to German women and children in Britain’s name.10 During the following two months, Gollancz organized several successful protest meetings, the largest of which overflowed the Albert Hall.11 Inspired by Bishops Bell of Canterbury and Garbett of York, a convocation of the Church of England unanimously denounced the expulsions as “a violation of the principles of humanity that the Allies are pledged to uphold.”12 Almost as quickly as it had arisen, however, the wave of popular concern dissipated. The hastily thrown-together organization Save Europe Now, launched by Gollancz in September 1945, made a serious tactical error by appealing to Britons to signify their agreement to a voluntary reduction in food rations so that expellees and other starving Europeans could be fed. Although about sixty thousand people, many of them connected to religious or peace groups, did so, the idea proved generally unpopular.13 After six years of wartime privation, the British people were highly resistant to any suggestion that their standards of living be cut further, especially to benefit former enemies.14 Air Chief Marshal Philip Joubert de la Ferté, writing in the Observer, probably expressed the mood of his compatriots a great deal more accurately than did Save Europe Now. “I would sooner that my children, brought up in freedom and goodwill towards men, should enjoy full vigour than the Germans, who may be using their strength to make war on the world again in another generation.”15 Save Europe Now also quickly succumbed to “mission creep,” turning its attention away from the problem of malnourished expellees to questions ranging from the provision of books and newspapers in Germany to the early release of prisoners of war in Allied custody. Lastly, the announcement at the end of November 1945 that “wild expulsions” would give way to “organized” ones encouraged the belief that the expellees’ problems were being effectively addressed. Despite participants’ good intentions, then, Save Europe Now and similar groups did more to assuage the moral discomfort of Britons than the physical distress of the Volksdeutsche. In Matthew Frank’s pardonably cynical, but nonetheless accurate, summation, “The expulsions and the German refugee crisis allowed the British to hold a mirror up to themselves and, on the whole, the British liked what they saw.”16

  By no means, moreover, was the perception that the expulsions were being conducted in an inhumane manner universally shared. Between the wars, the Czechoslovak government had invested heavily in spin-doctoring and overseas news management, in which it had enjoyed much success. The hub of this effort was the Third Section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which directed a massive and well-funded foreign information and propaganda service. In addition to cultivating relations with dignitaries and opinion formers from abroad, the Third Section “served as the government’s semiofficial publishing house, crafting newspapers, pamphlets, and other publicity materials in all the major European languages.”17 It controlled the Geneva-based Central European Radio network. It directed, from behind the scenes, the Orbis publishing empire, which not only flooded the European market with disguised “pro-Czechoslovak propaganda texts of all kinds,” down to the level of tourist guidebooks, but also kept in print works by friendly foreign writers like Robert Seton-Watson and Lewis Namier that otherwise would have been commercially unviable. It subsidized no fewer than twenty-six French newspapers, radio stations, and press agencies; bankrolled friendly British writers; and secured favorable coverage by buying advertising in international periodicals. And it carried out research for, suggested story ideas to, and paid the traveling expenses of the large number of foreign journalists and authors who came to visit the only post-Versailles state to retain a parliamentary system. During Edvard Beneš’s tenure as foreign minister the Third Section justifiably claimed that it “had had a hand in almost every book published outside Czechoslovakia on Czech topics …”18 Hugely expensive though this effort was for a small and only partly developed country, the money was well spent. Between the wars, Czechoslovakia’s cultural diplomacy program was by far the most successful and sophisticated in Europe. It was largely due to its efforts that the image of Czechoslovakia as a model Western-style democracy persisted so long—even after the government, following the passage in 1933 of an Enabling Act, increasingly sidelined Parliament by ruling via emergency decrees in a manner in some respects reminiscent of the latter days of the Weimar Republic.

  After the war, ex-members of the Third Section resumed the task of forging an image of Czechoslovakia that reflected what Westerners wanted to see in it, and in themselves. This objective was assisted by the fact that in Britain especially, a
great many influential media figures were deeply ashamed of the manner in which their country had sold Czechoslovakia down the river in 1938. With ordinary Britons anxious to project their own inglorious record at that time onto a despised class of upper-crust appeasers, “Munich” had become as dirty a word in London as in Prague. Czechoslovakia’s obvious postwar orientation toward the USSR, seemingly matched by the election of a democratic socialist government in Britain, also won the country many new friends in left-wing circles. Even though the restored Beneš government was no longer able to cultivate and entertain foreign journalists on as lavish a scale as in the past, the pro-Czechoslovak bias in the British press was as marked, during the crucial years of 1945–46, as it had been before the war.

  Officials in Prague, nonetheless, left as little as possible to chance. Detailed dossiers were compiled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the political intelligence section of the Ministry of the Interior on leading Western journalists, noting their political and ideological backgrounds and associations, and their prior attitudes to Czechoslovak policy. Jon Kimche, correspondent for the Reuters news agency, was described as “competent,” but not known for his favorable coverage of the Czechoslovak Republic. Michael Foot, former editor of the London Evening Standard and now a Labour Party MP, was said to be responsible for the uncomfortably close attention paid by the Daily Herald, the Labour-affiliated newspaper, to the seamier side of Czechoslovak affairs. “There have been warnings,” an appreciation of his career recorded, “about Foot’s activities in connection with Jaksch.”19