Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War
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On the whole, though, the authorities in Prague had few grounds for complaint. Ralph Parker, the London Times’s correspondent there in the summer of 1945, was a former Foreign Office specialist on Czechoslovak affairs and a crypto-Communist who would later take up a position as Moscow bureau chief of the Daily Worker.20 In a letter to the Times editor, Robin Barrington-Ward, in July 1945, he emphasized the importance of Britain not appearing “unsympathetic to national aspirations” in Central Europe by standing in the way of expulsions, and hoped that at Potsdam the Big Three would put their weight behind the project.21 Parker’s successor, Godfrey Lias, had written a hagiographical biography of Beneš in 1940 and would later translate the president’s memoirs for an English-speaking readership. Maurice Hindus, the Prague-based New York Herald Tribune correspondent, also had a record of adulatory pro-Czechoslovak publications, including a book hailing the country as a “citadel of humanitarianism” that was virtually a compendium of Third Section talking points.22 Some journalists, like George Bilainkin of the London Daily Mail, thought it their duty when writing of the expulsions to go beyond friendly reportage to frank advocacy. In an interview with Beneš in November 1945, Bilainkin asked the president what “I can do to help you most …” Beneš asked him to “make people understand” the imperative need for the removal of the Germans. Bilainkin promised to do so, considering it “the least debt I owe to Czechoslovakia, longest martyr in modern history.”23
The willing cooperation of foreign assets like these was instrumental in the Czechoslovak government’s efforts to deflect international attention from the more disturbing aspects of the expulsions. After Eric Gedye’s exposé of conditions in Hagibor camp appeared, for example, Tom Williamson, a British Labour MP and member of the party’s National Executive Committee, visited Prague ten days later and delivered a public speech assuring his hosts that “the comments of the British press should not be taken too seriously and that the British Labour Party was convinced of the necessity for transfer of the Germans.” Senator Claude Pepper (Democrat of Florida), also passing through Czechoslovakia, expressed himself in similar terms at a press conference shortly afterward.24 A Potemkin tour was quickly arranged for Sheila Grant Duff, wartime head of the BBC’s Czech section, an intimate of Hubert Ripka’s, and author of a best-selling and highly sympathetic Penguin Special book on the Munich crisis, so that she could contradict Gedye’s charges in the New Statesman and other publications on the basis of what she represented to readers as first-hand information.25 George Bilainkin had already been taken to one of the same showcase camps at Liberec, where he found “pleasant cut flowers” in the room of one of the internees, and admired the “splendid soup” and “new and tasty” bread provided to them.26 Guy Bettany, Reuters’ special correspondent in Prague, inaccurately reassured his readers that “Representatives of the International Red Cross are now given the fullest facilities to inspect [the camps] and to make suggestions, and in the main they have been satisfied with what they have seen.”27 Dennis Bardens of the Sunday Dispatch, formerly a liaison officer to the Czechoslovak government in exile in London, was also roped into the exculpation campaign and duly supplied a clean bill of health to the camps he was shown.28 Even those journalists who were less heavily invested in defending the Beneš government from any criticism habitually “accentuated the positive and wanted to give the Czechs … the benefit of the doubt. When criticism was levelled, care was taken to exonerate central government of any responsibility and lay the blame on local, invariably Communist, authorities.”29
The Czechoslovak media, contrariwise, was virtually unanimous in perceiving the malign influence of Germans, and above all that of Wenzel Jaksch, in every adverse comment that appeared in the foreign press. As Evžen Klingler rhetorically inquired in Svobodné noviny, the country’s leading journal of opinion:
What does the average reader in Britain know of the fact that the foreign political editor of the “most English of journals,” as the Manchester Guardian is frequently called, is a journalist of German origin? … How is the average Englishman to ascertain that most of the foreign political articles in the Observer are written by a journalist of German-Polish origin? How can he verify the fact that the Tribune is supplied with reports from people in the entourage of Wenzel Jaksch?30
Klingler’s choice of examples of closet pan-Germans reverting to type was particularly infelicitous, inasmuch as the first, Frederick Voigt of the Guardian, had been probably the most outspoken anti-Nazi and antiappeasement member of the European press corps during the 1930s; while the second, Sebastian Haffner of the Observer, had fled Germany not only because of his vocal opposition to Hitler but because his marriage to his Jewish wife rendered him liable to a lengthy prison sentence under the Nuremberg Laws.31 Such niceties, however, were lost on furious Czechoslovak proponents of the expulsions, who continued to attribute all foreign criticism to “Jacksch and others who nowadays promote Sudeten autonomy and the amalgamation of what was formerly called the Sudetenland with Bavaria.”32
Poland’s amateurish attempts at news management were far less successful. Few members of the postwar government were known to Western journalists; almost none, with the exception of Stanisław Mikołajczyk, had any prior relationships with them. Rather than attempt to cultivate the foreign press, then, Polish political and media figures contented themselves either with abusing it for failing to appreciate the necessity of treating the Germans harshly or with fabricating stories intended to show that no harsh treatment was occurring. In the first category was an article in Dziennik polski, organ of the London Poles, that paradoxically offered a Marxist analysis of British criticism of the “wild expulsions” from the Recovered Territories. “England’s future German customers, future consumers of English goods, have in the light of prospective high profits already become as it were England’s favorites. How, otherwise, are English press statements deploring the wrongs suffered by the Germans at the hands of the Poles to be interpreted?”33 In the second category was a pair of interviews purporting to have been given to Polish journalists by members of the British liaison teams at Kaławsk and Szczecin, who had allegedly said that “movement of expellees could not be better organized … health of expellees is excellent and conditions of movement humane … expellees leave Poland contented” and that reports in the British press to the contrary were “a downright lie.” Both of these statements were disavowed by their supposed authors.34
Arguably, no very sophisticated information management apparatus was necessary, in view of the general indifference of public opinion to the question. In the United States, the efforts of human rights activists and their supporters in the press had even less impact than Save Europe Now in Britain. In many respects, the history of the two campaigns ran along similar paths. As in Britain, concern about the expulsions arose as a result of press coverage from Germany, especially the first-person reportage of Anne O’Hare McCormick in the New York Times. The leading female foreign correspondent of the day, McCormick had been the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1937. After the war, she returned to Europe where she made the reconstruction of the continent her major theme. Some of her harshest criticisms of the Allies’ record in this area were reserved for the expulsion program which, in her view, was a contradiction of the ideals for which the war had been fought. “The scale of this resettlement,” she wrote in October 1946, “and the conditions in which it takes place are without precedent in history. No one seeing its horrors first-hand can doubt that it is a crime against humanity for which history will exact a terrible retribution.”35 Her colleague, the syndicated columnist Dorothy Thompson (who was herself married to a Czech national) went one step further. In collaboration with a broadcaster of internationalist and Republican leanings, Christopher Emmet, together with other leading public intellectuals from both the left and right wings of American politics like John Dewey, Sidney Hook, A. Philip Randolph, Norman Thomas, and Oswald Garrison Villard, she assisted in the foun
dation of a Committee Against Mass Expulsions (CAME) based in New York. The committee attempted to arouse public opinion in the United States by holding meetings and publishing pamphlets based largely on eyewitness testimonies by Western journalists and military officers that described, with a good deal of accuracy, the human consequences of the clearances of Czechoslovakia and Poland. Ten thousand copies of the first pamphlet, The Land of the Dead, were sold in 1947. Free samples of the second, Men Without the Rights of Man, were provided the following year to all members of Congress and of the British House of Commons, the libraries of all universities and colleges in the United States and Canada, and the editorial writers of fifteen hundred newspapers.36 “By pursuing the will-of-the-wisp of racially pure European States,” it argued, “we only aggravate the nationalisms which have bred Europe’s wars in the past.”37 Moreover, the lesson of the expulsion pointed inescapably to the fact that mass population transfers could not be accomplished without massive abuse of human rights, something for which the Allies as well as the expelling countries bore a full share of responsibility.
CAME was opposed, however, by the staunchly Germanophobic Society for the Prevention of World War III, headed by the novelist Rex Stout and including Eleanor Roosevelt, the CBS broadcaster William Shirer (future author of the bestselling Rise and Fall of the Third Reich), and Senator Harley Kilgore (Democrat of West Virginia) among its collaborators.38 The committee also came under the fire of the American Friends of Czechoslovakia, of which Beneš himself was honorary chairman and which could boast an even more impressive retinue of well-connected members, among them Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, and James T. Shotwell, State Department adviser and president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This body launched a fierce counterattack against CAME’s revelations, insisting that during the first phase of expulsions from Czechoslovakia “most of those … driven out of the country were members of the Gestapo, S.S., Reich officials or Reich refugees.”39 Though the Friends of Czechoslovakia never succeeded in discrediting CAME’s claims, the dispute between the rival groups soon began to take on the appearance of a private fight about a faraway land about which most Americans knew nothing. But the principal factor stultifying CAME’s propaganda campaign was that it did not begin to hit its stride until the organized expulsions had already been largely completed. In consequence, inasmuch as the committee did not advocate that the expellees be allowed to return home, it remained unclear precisely what it wanted policymakers to do.
The publicity given by leading media figures like Anne McCormick and Dorothy Thompson and pressure groups like CAME to the abuses associated with the expulsions did at least have the effect of causing politicians and others who had been outspoken in their support of population transfers to begin to distance themselves from their own records. Winston Churchill, whose political antennae were more sensitive than most, was among the first to recognize that being identified as one of the authors of mass population transfers was unlikely to enhance his reputation before the bar of history. In a Commons speech of August 1945, he indulged in a typically Churchillian display of crocodile tears over the consequences of his own policy.
I am particularly concerned, at this moment, with the reports reaching us of the conditions under which the expulsion and exodus of Germans from the new Poland are being carried out. Between 8,000,000 and 9,000,000 persons dwelt in those regions before the war…. Sparse and guarded accounts of what has happened and is happening have filtered through, but it is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain. I should welcome any statement which the Prime Minister can make which would relieve or at least inform us upon this very anxious and grievous matter.40
Remarkably, with the exception of the MP-journalist Michael Foot, no one publicly challenged this exercise in self-exculpation.41 But the perceived need to ensure that the Western democracies would not be held responsible for the actions they had taken underlay a still more extraordinary and self-serving exercise by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1949 and 1950. Sponsored by the House Judiciary Committee, a subcommittee headed by Rep. Francis E. Walter (Democrat of Pennsylvania) conducted a three-week fact-finding tour in Germany and Austria in September 1949, with the mission of demonstrating “the fallacy of the theory of American coresponsibility for the uprooting of German expellees and refugees.” The subcommittee duly arrived at this ingenious conclusion by persuading itself that “a very large proportion of the Germans had already been expelled from Eastern Europe” before the Potsdam Conference; that “a large and spontaneous exodus of German nationals” had reduced their numbers further, and that so far as the remainder was concerned, the United States had “agreed to the wording of article XIII [of the Potsdam Agreement] solely because it wanted (1) to make more orderly and humane the inevitable expulsion of those Germans who still remained in eastern Europe, and (2) to open occupied Germany to those who were faced with deportation to remote sub-Arctic territories of Soviet Russia, an equivalent to annihilation. The records of the Potsdam Conference make these facts plain.”42 Specious and transparent though the Walter subcommittee’s claims were, they nonetheless signaled a change in attitudes toward the expellees. Previously they had typically been regarded as the sole authors of their own misfortunes. Even a source as far removed from the scene as the Mercury of Hobart in Tasmania had applauded their expulsion as just punishment for their having constituted themselves as “traitors within the gates” and “a vast cohesive fifth column” that had waited patiently throughout the 1930s for orders from Berlin to betray their respective countries to the Hitlerite invaders.43 Partly for that reason, expellees had been explicitly ruled ineligible for aid from any international humanitarian body, including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency and the International Refugee Organization.44 Even the International Committee of the Red Cross as a matter of policy “refrained from expressing their opinion regarding the actual decision of expulsion, since this was a political question for which Governments concerned are solely responsible,” and from the end of 1946 decided to withdraw altogether from relief activities aimed at civilians.45 Thereafter, the CICR had confined itself to raising the question of conditions for expellees with the governments to which its delegations were attached, and to distributing resources confided to it by others. Only three small states that had been neutral during the war—Switzerland, Ireland, and Sweden—did not exclude Volksdeutsche from the relief funds they donated to the CICR to assist the continent’s needy. Valuable though their assistance had been, even more from the psychological than the physical standpoint, it did not come close to meeting the need: in 1949, the World Council of Churches noted that religious charities in Germany itself had provided more material aid to the expellees than all other agencies, domestic and foreign, put together.46
So far as the Christian churches were concerned, indeed, small-scale assistance supplied out of existing funds was all they were prepared to give. To mount a larger appeal to benefit the Volksdeutsche would have required at the least a public announcement on their behalf, and this was something that none of them was prepared to make. Although the majority of expellees were Catholic in religion, the Vatican conspicuously refrained from taking a stand against the mass deportations. That Pope Pius XII strenuously opposed them, in theory and in practice, is not in question. In a private meeting with a trio of U.S. congressmen, the pontiff said that “the plight of millions who now must answer to the hideous appellation of ‘expellee’ was no longer simply a matter for humiliation and regret” and that he was “doggedly determined to see this giant specter of human dereliction forever banished from the conscience of mankind.”47 The pope was also greatly distressed by the way in which wartime antagonisms had divided the institutional Church in the postwar years. According to Michael Phayer, “When Pius learned that Cardinal Hlond banned the use of German after the war in liturgical services in
Poland where Volksdeutsch Catholics still lived, he wept.”48 But personal anguish was not matched by public advocacy—except by the elliptical means of the Holy See’s appointment of apostolic administrators rather than bishops for the Recovered Territories until June 1972.49 While the Catholic Church has been justly criticized for the modesty of its response to the persecution of the Jews during the war, it took no more active a stance in support of the expellees afterwards. It may well be that the two were connected, and that the Church hesitated in the postwar years to expose itself to criticism that it was more solicitous of the German people than of those who had experienced near-annihilation at their hands. But although individual priests and bishops, in the United States and central Europe, vigorously condemned mass expulsions as inconsistent with the laws of God, the Holy See never did so. Nor, it is only fair to note, did the governing body of any other Christian denomination.
By the late 1940s, policymakers and commentators—among them General Lucius Clay, Sir Brian Robertson, and Congressman Walter’s subcommittee—were coming to the conclusion that the expellee problem was insoluble except by large-scale German emigration.50 The French government, in particular, feared the consequences of having a larger German population than in prewar years concentrated in a country that in land area was nearly a quarter less. From the perspective of Paris, it was only a matter of time before fresh demands for Lebensraum disrupted the peace of Europe. Notwithstanding the intensity and longevity of the Franco-German antagonism, then, Georges Bidault’s postwar government began exploring the possibility of admitting a significant number of ethnic German expellees as immigrants, both to replace French wartime losses and to encourage other countries to open their doors also. As early as October 1945, the French ambassador in Prague began to indicate his government’s interest in accepting up to half a million Sudetendeutsche within metropolitan France itself or in the French colonies. Paris, he said, “had found that the Germans were easily assimilated and made good citizens. In this respect they were better potential French citizens than were either the Poles or the Italians.”51 At the Conference of Foreign Ministers meeting in March 1947, Bidault formally stated his readiness to begin ethnic German immigration. So marked, indeed, was the French government’s preference for Volksdeutsch immigrants specifically that it spurned energetic British efforts to persuade it to accept the largely Polish occupants of Allied displaced persons camps in exchange. The Poles, it advised London, “should remain in Germany to add a peaceful Slavonic leaven to the Teutonic strain, while Germans should emigrate to France in order to become Gallicised and civilised.”52