Nor was the French the only government to do so. As postwar labor shortages, especially in key industries, began to bite, other countries cast an acquisitive eye on what seemed to be an especially valuable pool of skilled workers. The Swedish government submitted an informal request for two thousand Sudetendeutsche in the summer of 1947, helpfully specifying that those desired should be well-qualified persons in engineering, ironworks, glassmaking, the textile industry, and match manufacturing, as well as trained cattlemen. They were to be aged between twenty and forty-five, and to be politically uncompromised.53 Norway asked the U.S. zonal authorities to supply 150 plate workers, instrument mechanics, toolmakers, and spinners.54 Industrialists in Britain demanded “Sudeten single women” from the same source “in order to obtain additional labour for our undermanned industries, chiefly textiles.”55 Even in the faraway southern United States, ethnic Germans were actively recruited as a low-wage substitute for Southern black farm laborers who had migrated to the cities of the north and west during the Second World War.56
To long-standing opponents of the expulsions, news that the countries that had carried them out intended to solve the social and economic problems they had created by reseeding German minority settlements outside the country’s borders seemed little more than a sick joke. Anne McCormick castigated the Bidault proposal, pointing out that France, which to that point had offered no humanitarian objections to what had been a “horrifying operation in wholesale human dumping,” now was declaring “in effect, that the surgical operation that made millions of human beings homeless in the name of peace now threatens the peace of France.”57 German leaders expressed their staunch hostility to the idea. That the country should now be deprived of the relatively few skilled workers among the expellee population it had received, leaving it only with the unproductive and unemployable to support from its own meager resources, was so obviously contrary to German economic interests that it could not be entertained.58
In the event, surprisingly few Germans, both native-born and expellee, left the country when the Allied ban on emigration was finally lifted in 1949. By then, signs of economic recovery at home meant that the “push” factors that might have caused them to do so were less exigent. The expellee population, among whom women with family ties were a majority, was among the demographic cohort that in nearly all countries and historical eras has been least drawn to emigration. Having already weathered one traumatic displacement to a new and unfamiliar land, moreover, it is understandable that few expellees were keen immediately to face another. For these and other reasons, a remarkably low number of Germans—only 780,000, or less than 2 percent of the population—left the country to live abroad between 1945 and 1961. The proportion of expellees among them was less than half.59
That the Allied countries were perfectly willing to accept them, however, indicates that a sea change in perceptions of the Volksdeutsche had occurred by the end of the 1940s. A great part of the change was the result of the Cold War, which had seen the Soviet Union replace Nazi Germany as the leading symbol of political depravity. A revealing example of the new narrative that was to take the place of the old was the speech made by John Gibson, head of the U.S. Displaced Persons Commission, to the first group of 500 Volksdeutsch immigrants to the United States upon their arrival in October 1951. “Those dates that many of you have told me about—the day your family was ordered to get out of your home, and your homeland—the day an arrest was made—the day that a long term in a prison camp began—the day that you realized that you were no longer free, but the oppressed victims of a Godless dictatorship. These are the dates that this day will erase.”60 In Western discourses, the very term “expellee” would henceforth disappear; ethnic Germans would instead be elevated to the status of “political refugees”—the victims of communism rather than Allied policy. It was a subterfuge with which for the moment most of them were happy to go along, being obviously preferable to that of “fifth columnist” or “Hitler’s first converts.” By the end of the twentieth century, though, many of them as they approached the end of their lives would feel less comfortable sustaining this polite fiction. Following the collapse of communism, they would become increasingly assertive in shaping their own narratives, and in seeking—or if necessary demanding—their acknowledgment by others.
11
THE RESETTLEMENT
The attention of historians is naturally drawn to the most dramatic events and critical turning points of the past. Because of this, it is all too easy to overlook the importance of what G. M. Trevelyan describes as those turning points at which “history failed to turn”—moments when a development that might be expected to happen did not, after all, take place.1 Among these unnoticed near misses of history, the successful resettlement and assimilation of more than twelve million German expellees, up to a tenth of whom did not even speak German, is a particular case in point. According to all rational considerations, the depositing of this vast, impoverished, and traumatized population upon a blitzed country that did not want them and in which no preparations had been made to receive them was a recipe for disaster. In 1919 the Allies had fastened a harsh peace treaty upon Germany at Versailles; the result, fourteen years and an economic depression later, was the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. From every measurable standpoint, the situation in 1945 boded far worse. Germany had lost nearly twice as much of her land area as in 1919, and was no longer able to feed herself. The postwar population of this truncated and divided country, paradoxically, was larger than in 1939, the influx of expellees more than making up for any wartime losses. Economic life was at a virtual standstill, and the ill-advised Allied policy of dismantling all German industry above a certain level for fear that it might be used for possible future war production meant that even the few viable sources of employment that existed were often willfully destroyed.2 The housing shortage was so critical that some military government officials in the winter of 1945 were basing their assumptions upon the outbreak of an epidemic among the expellees the massive death toll from which would reduce the population to manageable numbers, and without which they could hardly imagine where the newcomers were to be accommodated. As for the new arrivals themselves, relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid and lacking any stake in the status quo, it seemed inconceivable that they would not become the mainstay of some new radical or revanchist movement, of either the extreme Left or the extreme Right, dedicated to obtaining revenge for their recent sufferings and regaining their lost homelands. Almost miraculously, this did not come to pass. Within an incredibly few years, the expellees had become effectively—if not quite completely—integrated into the larger society in both West and East Germany. This should not, though, be seen as any kind of retrospective vindication of Allied policy. Even with the benefit of hindsight their actions appear reckless to an astonishing degree. That Germany and Europe have not suffered the worst consequences that might be expected to proceed from them is due above all to the industry and good sense of many Germans themselves—accompanied by the kind of luck that comes along, at most, once in a lifetime.
In the same way that the Allies had made no plans of any kind during the war to accomplish the removal of the expellees to Germany, they displayed a similar insouciance when questions arose as to how they were to be accommodated and integrated upon arrival. Insofar as anything in the nature of a definite policy existed, it was summed up in the popular maxim, “Make the Germans do it.”3 According to this principle, it was the role of Allied military government “to control German affairs by indirect rule: i.e. they issue instructions to local German authorities and supervise their execution, but wherever possible refrain from taking actual executive action themselves.”4 In itself this was not an unsound notion. But it ran up against two countervailing trends. The first was that the Allies were simultaneously purging the ranks of those Germans who would be directed to “do it,” seeking to remove those who were tainted with Nazism from the exercise of all public functions. In the course
of a clumsily executed denazification effort, the Anglo-Americans arguably got the worst of both worlds. The weeding-out process was neither rigorous enough to punish all seriously compromised Nazis, nor light-handed enough to leave in office a core of administrators who, whatever their political records, were at least efficient. (The Soviets and their local German assistants, less fastidious—or with fewer illusions—than their Western counterparts generally followed the latter policy, quickly rebranding mid-ranking Nazis who were prepared to serve their new masters obediently as “anti-fascists.”)5 The second problem with making the Germans responsible for carrying out Allied requirements was that they were given no tools with which to do so. As one British administrator, attempting to explain the rationale behind such a seemingly counterproductive stance, put it, “when nearly all the world is suffering from acute shortages of goods … it is difficult to arrange, or to defend, that Germany should come anything but last.”6 The human cost of this understandable but, in the long run, arguably self-defeating policy was quickly evident. By August 1945 the daily death rate in Berlin had risen from a prewar level of 150 to 4,000, although its population was now significantly smaller. In the U. S. sector of the city, of every twenty infants born in the summer of 1945, only one would survive.7 Two months later, the extent of hunger in the city was such that women could be seen “straining the waste water from the kitchen sink of a house where there was an Allied mess, to save from the drain small scraps of grease which could be used again in their own homes.”8
This was the environment into which, not counting the displaced Germans from the east who were already present in the country, the Allies proposed to inject another 7–8 million human beings. To judge from their subsequent actions, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they had not even prepared themselves psychologically, far less administratively, for the consequences of the decisions they had taken more than two years previously. At all events, within weeks of V-E Day Allied military administrators were overwhelmed by the tidal wave of humanity bearing down upon them from the east and south. For the moment, all they could do was to lodge the new arrivals for a night or two anywhere they could be accommodated, and to force the remainder to move on to another place where they might become somebody else’s problem. By September, forty-five makeshift reception camps had been set up in Berlin, employing ex-Wehrmacht barracks, schools, and any other building not already being used for other purposes. A typical establishment from this period was the Kruppstrasse camp in the Tiergarten district. A former barracks, all of whose buildings were damaged, this contained 400 bunks but had a population of 3,000 expellees; an overflow of 600 slept “amongst the rubble in the damaged stables.” Mothers, children, and the elderly made up more than 80 percent of the inhabitants. Most had arrived on foot from the Stettiner or Lehrter railway stations after their deportation from the Recovered Territories; a quarter were suffering from dysentery. They received a single daily meal of 200 grams of bread and 750 milliliters of soup. After being allowed to spend a night at the camp, they were evicted so that another 3,000 incomers could take their place.9
The number seeking admission to the camps greatly exceeded the spaces available. In an effort to induce expellees to bypass Berlin, a policy decision was taken to offer only “the minimum facilities short of inducing disease” and, after October 1, 1945, to withhold ration cards to all new arrivals into the city. All this accomplished, however, was to decant the overflow onto the streets.10 Thousands never left the station at which they had arrived, sleeping on the platforms or in freight wagons standing in sidings, for weeks or months at a stretch. Others set up improvised tent villages in city parks or woods on the outskirts. As the weather turned colder, many began to die of hypothermia, and the sight of corpses of persons who had spent their last night in doorways, streets, and ditches became an unexceptional early morning spectacle during the first peacetime winter in Germany.
From the morbid but understandable point of view of some Allied officials, however, the number of dead was, if anything, not quite up to expectations. As the Economist remarked in November 1945, “There is perhaps a trifle too much fatalism in the forecasts, now so often made, that ‘masses of Germans will die by the roadsides in the winter.’”11 While it would certainly not be correct to say that military governors were positively hoping for a widespread famine or pandemic, the popular belief that the course of nature would solve at least some of the problems of resettlement as soon as the cold weather set in did induce in some quarters a modicum of complacency, in the face of the fresh challenges the “organized expulsions” of the following year could be expected to bring. In the event, though, the winter of 1945 was much milder than normal, and what Hector McNeil had feared might “prove … a catastrophe which has not been paralleled in centuries” failed to materialize.12
The realization, though, that expellees would not after all die off in the numbers that had been predicted led the occupation authorities bitterly to regret their political masters’ mistake in failing to set up a Transfer Commission in Germany with executive powers. Part of the reason for the lack of urgency in trying to create suitable administrative machinery, even at this late hour, to cope with the numbers who would soon arrive was the refusal on the part of the Allied governments to provide their officials on the ground—most of them mid-ranking military officers with no experience of civil administration—with the most rudimentary information as to the nature and scale of the task before them. Colonel John Fye, responsible for liaising between the U.S. military authorities and the Czechoslovaks, recalled that “As late as November 1945 none of the details” of the four-power deal concerning the timing and scope of expulsions had been revealed to his military superiors in Plzeň. “Word came that such an agreement had been made. That was all.”13 Not until January 1946 were the contents of the report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on the Transfer of German Populations of 1944 divulged to the heads of the British Military Government in Germany. Had they seen it earlier, an irate official pointed out, it might have been possible to have had some of its recommendations implemented in the ACC agreement of November 20, 1945. But “at this stage there is no prospect whatever of our obtaining quadripartite agreement to the acceptance of the report or its recommendations.” To attempt to do so would only cause the expelling countries to conclude that the Allies intended to go back on their word, and to resume “wild” expulsions in response.14
Nonetheless, planning lapses alone cannot explain the lack of cooperation, or even of basic exchanges of information, between the authorities responsible for resettlement in the Allied occupation zones. The indifferent attitude of the French, whose occupation zone in southwest Germany had suffered the least war damage of all and was arguably best placed to accommodate newcomers, is perhaps most easily understood. The government in Paris disapproved of the entire idea of mass expulsions, less on humanitarian grounds than because of its anxiety that the introduction of millions of Germans into a truncated country that could not feed them would give rise on France’s western border to the same situation—an overcrowded Germany seeking Lebensraum for its surplus people—as had contributed to the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. Although the French had undertaken in the ACC agreement of November 1945 to accept 150,000 Germans temporarily resident in Austria into their zone, they quickly reneged on this commitment. Claiming that they understood this obligation to be to admit up to 150,000 German citizens from the old Reich, rather than Volksdeutsche, from Austria, the French accepted into their zone everyone who fell into this category—a mere 4,500—and then promptly closed their doors, declaring their quota as having been fulfilled. As relations between East and West began to sour, it is also, perhaps, not very surprising that few exchanges on expellee problems took place between the Soviet and Anglo-American authorities. But British and American officials also did not communicate with each other on expellee matters, and continued this isolationist stance even after the two countries decided to combine their respective oc
cupation zones into a single entity, facetiously named “Bizonia,” in January 1947. Not until the following December, nearly a year after the founding of the Bizone, did the British and U.S. expulsion staffs confer for the first time. It is clear from the minutes of subsequent meetings that not only had the two steered clear of any kind of cooperation until then, but that each possessed astonishingly little knowledge of what was transpiring in the other’s zone, and what policies and procedures existed there.15 It appears, then, that the military governors guarded their independence jealously, possibly out of concern that interzonal exchanges and discussions might lead to unwelcome public scrutiny of their individual resettlement practices.
Still, it is remarkable how closely the methods evolved independently by the three occupying authorities soon came to develop along parallel lines. Though the Soviets had not worked out a defined policy of indirect rule like the other occupying powers, they too were forced to “make the Germans do it” by the sheer magnitude of the avalanche of humanity that descended upon them from the north, east, and south in the summer of 1945. Chaos abounded in the Soviet zone to an extent that was unmatched even in the devastated West. In sheer despair at the number of people with whom they had to deal, Philipp Ther recalls, “the authorities in Saxony had several thousand refugees put on rafts, leaving them to drift down the Elbe …”16 According to the town Oberbürgermeister, Frankfurt an der Oder, one of the principal entry points for incomers from the Recovered Territories, recorded some twelve thousand hunger-related deaths between V-E Day and December 1, 1945.17 At the Kaisersteinbruch reception camp in Austria, which like Germany had similarly been divided into four occupation zones, the Soviet authorities ran out of food for the more than five thousand Sudetendeutsch inmates in October and evicted them all, telling them to make their own way to Vienna on foot and fend for themselves there.18 When a radio broadcast in the Soviet zone the following month announced that all Germans who had ever lived in the Western zones had to leave the state of Brandenburg by November 5 to make room for expellees, vast columns of “homeless, starved old people, children, and Wehrmacht cripples” began filing toward the British zone. Within twenty-four hours of the broadcast, British newspapers reported that “along the 70-mile stretch of road between Weimar and the tripartite frontier junction at Friedland at least half a million people are estimated to be lying in the highways, paths and in ditches.”19 Vociferous Anglo-American protests caused the Soviets to rescind this order, which they blamed on a “translator’s error,” though some suspicious Westerners remained unconvinced that it was not a deliberate stratagem aimed at influencing the negotiations on the ACC agreement, then in progress, by showing what would happen if the Soviet authorities should ever decide to become uncooperative.20 The fact that this directive had been preceded by a similarly short-lived one issued by the Saxony authorities at the end of August, requiring 4 million expellees to leave the state within forty-eight hours, suggests, however, that local officials and commanders, overwhelmed by the impossible task confronting them, were simply trying anything that might relieve the pressure upon them and had neither time nor thought to devote to the consequences.21
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 45