Carrying in the early days the heaviest burden of all as both a zone of resettlement and a zone of transit—between 2 million and 2.5 million transferred people had arrived in the summer of 1945 alone—it was not surprising that eastern Germany should have seen the appearance of the first purely German organization for expellee assimilation. The Central Agency for German Resettlers was launched in September 1945 to oversee the reception and registration of expellees; their distribution between the various Länder (states) of the Soviet zone; their accommodation and reequipment; and their integration and assimilation into east German society. The Central Agency received its orders from and reported to the Soviet military authorities, a chain of command that at least had the merit of being short and easily understood. In the Western zones, the administrative apparatus of expellee resettlement that began to evolve in late 1945 and 1946 was more complicated. Most of the day-to-day tasks were carried out by German local government officials at municipal and county (Kreis) level. Their activities were supervised by “refugee commissions” in the U.S. zone, and “zonal advisory councils” in the British, some of whose members were to be expellees themselves, subject to the overriding direction of the occupying power. From 1946 on, though, Land governments assumed a greater role in the administration of their respective states, and some, beginning with Bavaria, appointed commissioners for expellee and refugee affairs—again on the basis of higher policy directives laid down by the Allied military government concerned. The Anglo-American model, which reflected the importance the Western Allies attached to ensuring that postwar Germany emerged with a decentralized form of government, thus involved a great deal of overlapping spheres of responsibility, with the inevitable confusion and frustration that followed from such a system. What it lacked in efficiency, though, it made up for by bringing a much broader cross-section of German administrative talent to bear on the problems at hand, mitigating to some extent the deficiencies inherent in a regime of government from the top down.
In any event, as already noted, notwithstanding their structural differences the zonal authorities wound up pursuing surprisingly similar policies in dealing with the expellee crisis. Of the challenges they had to face, two short-term and two long-term ones stood out. The immediate priorities were to disperse the incomers between the Länder, and somehow find accommodation for them all. Once this had been achieved the more difficult task of integrating them into the German economy, and bridging the gap between expellees and indigenes, would need to be addressed. In fact, these objectives proved to be complementary, inasmuch as the manner in which the first pair of aims was dealt with would have a major impact on the success, or otherwise, of the second.
Overcoming the housing crisis was by far the most urgent task—inasmuch as food supplies could be imported but houses could not, an even more challenging one than dealing with the problem of rationing. With the equivalent of the population of a medium-sized town arriving in Germany every day during 1945 and 1946, the authorities had no choice but to squeeze as many bodies as could possibly be accommodated into every possible space. There was little enough of this. In Düsseldorf, one of the most heavily bombed cities, 93 percent of houses and apartments were uninhabitable at the end of the war. Throughout the country, before the expulsions had begun, “ten Germans were living where only four had lived in 1939 even though some of the cellars and shelters in use hardly deserved the title of housing.”22 One of the very few Allied decisions taken at four-power level, the ACC’s Housing Law of March 1946, authorized the requisitioning of surplus dwelling space, even down to the level of vacant rooms in individual houses, to accommodate expellees. Because most undamaged dwellings were in isolated country districts, that was where around 85 percent of the new arrivals were sent.23 Almost overnight, consequently, rural overpopulation soared to astronomical levels. The small village of Bakede west of Hildesheim, with a normal population of seven hundred, had four hundred additional expellees billeted upon it in April 1946.24 At Flensburg on the German-Danish border, the Landrat was accommodating seventeen expellees in his own house. “Another farmer has given a roof to 70 people, while there are many instances where others have put all their cattle into one byre so that the remaining building can be used by the homeless.”25
The housing problem was unequally distributed among the three zones in which expellees were admitted. Overall, the Western zones which contained the highest concentration of urban centers and were easiest to reach by Allied bombers were in the worst straits. In 1950, even after five years of reconstruction, the population density per unit of housing stock was twice as high as before the war.26 Hardest hit of all was the British zone. In July 1946 the rural Land of Schleswig-Holstein, whose population had increased by two-thirds due to the influx of expellees, had to be declared a “black” area incapable of absorbing any more newcomers; the Ruhr and Hamburg would soon be placed in the same category. In contrast the Soviet zone, with the exception of large cities like Berlin and Dresden, had come through the war with much less damage; the principal difficulty was that inasmuch as eastern Germany was a predominantly rural region, the quantity of housing was relatively small to begin with. The fact that so many people, both expellees and natives, continuously removed themselves via the “green frontier” from the Soviet to the Western zones, on the other hand, provided a safety valve, however insufficient, that was denied to the hard-pressed British and U.S. authorities.27
As the population pressure rose to extreme levels, resettlement authorities adopted more creative—or desperate—solutions. Although they possessed neither natural light nor, in many cases, even the most rudimentary sanitary facilities, air raid bunkers became a favorite option. Seven hundred and fifty expellees occupied one such facility in Hanover; 945 more were in others at Frankfurt am Main; and another 644 in Höchst. Even these, however, soon became unavailable, as Allied theater commanders insisted that they be blown up because of their potential for use in war.28 At the suggestion of Walter Mann, State Commissioner for Refugees in Greater Hesse, part of Adolf Hitler’s complex at Berchtesgaden was used to provide housing for Sudetendeutsche.29 Despite expedients like these, though, there proved to be no alternative to accommodating expellees for long periods of time in a variety of camps. By the end of 1945, the Central Agency for Resettlers in eastern Germany was overseeing 625 camps of various kinds—former concentration camps, Labor Front barracks, and abandoned POW facilities—with a total population of more than 480,000.30 The number of camps in the Western zones ran into the thousands.31
Authorities in all three zones were exceedingly reluctant to pursue this course. Initially, it had been hoped to maintain the newcomers in reception camps for a few days or at most, where a disease risk was thought to exist and a period of quarantine was indicated, for two or three weeks. Longer stays risked permanently segregating and ghettoizing the expellee population, whereas military government in all three zones was “anxious to do everything possible to get the Germans to accept persons coming from the East as their own people, and not to regard them as foreigners foisted upon them.”32 A great deal of official concern was expressed about the demoralizing effects of extended sojourns in camp environments, which the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung feared would lead to the appearance of a pathological sociological subtype, Homo barackensis: “Homo barackensis has taught humankind in the twentieth century a dreadful truth: progress, humanity, and self-esteem exist only in the context of an unbroken world. When law and order disintegrate, the camp arises—that most gruesome and cruel expression of human capabilities—and with it rises a breeding ground of nihilism.”33
Unquestionably many examples could be found of expellees who had become deeply demoralized as a result of prolonged stays in isolated camps, where they appeared to have been forgotten by the world. Frau Klug, a resident of Burlagsberg camp some forty miles north of Osnabrück who had been rehoused there in 1945 after fleeing the Recovered Territories, provided a description of the downward spiral that occurred i
n the course of her seven years’ residence there that was true of many other such establishments. In the beginning she had been very pleased to receive any kind of accommodation at all, but the community atmosphere in the camp, positive at the outset, quickly took a turn for the worse.
At first the barracks stood right in the wood, thus receiving valuable protection from the surrounding trees, but owing to the need for fuel especially in 1946/47 many trees were cut down, thus leaving the barracks standing in an open sandy plain, exposed to wind and bad weather. The drabness of the barracks was also thus exposed, as the buildings were very ramshackle with additional bits of iron and board tacked on here and there…. Soon … the community spirit crumbled away and the individual inhabitant lived his own life.
After the currency reform the financial situation became worse and worse, as unemployment increased (at present about 90 percent of the able-bodied men get unemployment pay). When husbands and sons returned from war imprisonment the problem of living space became a catastrophe….
Most of the barracks are in a very bad condition, as the Löningen Municipality had not made any repairs except the roofs having been tarred. All kinds of misery together with an uncertain future made the people grow bitter, as they did not see an end, and so much had been promised but nothing done.34
Conditions in innumerable other camps were equally grim. The records of the occupying authorities and humanitarian bodies like the CICR, the Catholic Caritas organization, the Protestant Evangelisches Hilfswerke and the American Friends Service Committee are replete with descriptions of overcrowded, un-heated, disease-ridden, and even roofless facilities in which expellees languished for months or years. Phrases like “reminiscent of a London tube station in the early days of the Blitz”; “dwellings some of which make the impression as if the devil himself had created them”; and “more miserable than the worst POW camps we have ever come across” frequently appear in inspection reports.35 In Bavaria, the transit camps (Dulags) were “still surrounded by walls and/or barbed wire, and refugees who were caught outside without passes were forcibly returned by the police, so that it was difficult not to conceive of the Dulags as detention centres.”36
But despite fears that camp life was breeding an entire generation of unemployables and sociopaths, concerns of this kind turned out to be overdrawn. Demoralization and despair turned out to be a function not of camp residence as such, but of lengthy stays in remote establishments like Burlagsberg where there were no prospects of employment or self-improvement. In more centrally located facilities, the problem with which the authorities frequently had to deal was not apathy and fatalism on the part of camp populations, but militancy and anger. The former Dachau concentration camp, for example, which was converted to a temporary housing facility for about two thousand Sudetendeutsche in 1948, soon became a hotbed of expellee activism. In August 1948, inspired by the example of protesters at Dachau, seventy-two thousand Bavarian camp dwellers began a seven-day hunger strike for better food and conditions. It was not until 1953, however, that a residents’ building cooperative managed to construct enough dwelling units to enable most of the original camp cohort to leave. Their places were taken by more recent arrivals from Czechoslovakia, the remnants of the German minority allowed to stay in 1948 by the Prague government, so the final closure of Dachau as an ethnic German housing facility took place only in 1965.
But the same picture was not to be seen everywhere. Meryn McLaren notes that the better refugee camps played an important transitional role in the task of expellee integration: “they gave residents the chance to get used to their situation, and accept that there was no going back, in a supportive and self-contained environment where they could form relationships and assert their cultural identity away from the hostility of the locals.”37 Elsewhere, as at Nuremberg, communal bonds among camp dwellers grew so strong that residents actively resisted efforts to move them into permanent accommodation, leading one official to advise that “police force might be necessary to remove them.”38 This was especially the case if paid work was available for a reasonable proportion of the camp population. Notwithstanding any other deficiencies that might exist the results were usually plain to see even in the physical appearance of the premises. Treffling, a facility west of Klagenfurt in Austria accommodating three thousand Volksdeutsche many of whom obtained employment as agricultural laborers with local farmers, impressed a British inspector by the “superior cleanliness and organisation in this camp, for which the inmates are themselves mainly responsible.”39 Even in less well-run places, the availability of jobs proved the key to keeping the amount of time that needed to be spent in insalubrious surroundings as brief as possible.
Matching expellees with employment, however, was an uphill struggle. The paramount necessity between 1945 and 1947 of sending fresh arrivals wherever accommodation could be found for them left the majority stranded in isolated parts of the countryside, where there was no possible use for their skills. This bore especially heavily on the Sudetendeutsche, who had made their living disproportionately in industry. Some expellees tried to set up their own businesses in their new locations. The most celebrated example were the glass blowers and jewelry workers of Jablonec nad Nisou (Gablonz) who, after being expelled to the Bavarian municipality of Kaufbeuren, founded a new town—Neu-Gablonz—on its outskirts, restarting production in a disused munitions factory. By 1947 nearly a thousand Gablonzers had reestablished themselves in their traditional occupations, and the products of their industry were contributing to West Germany’s export earnings. Despite the attention showered on the Neu-Gablonz experiment, though, this was not a pattern that could be easily replicated elsewhere. Communities had been widely dispersed in the course of the expulsions; few Sudetendeutsche possessed skills that could be put to commercial use with quite such ease; and start-up capital was usually unavailable to people whose collateral consisted largely of the clothes they were wearing. Hence even those Gablonzers who wound up in Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia rather than Bavaria ran into “enormous difficulties” in restarting their enterprises.40
Where expellees could find work at all, it tended to be lowly paid if not positively exploitative. This was especially the case in Austria where, in contrast to Germany, Volksdeutsche had no legal right to remain. In theory, after responsibility for administering camps for expellees was turned over by the Allied powers to Vienna in 1948, all or most of the Volksdeutsche ought to have received permanent resident status. Many, however, did not because of their inability to find an Austrian sponsor who would guarantee that they would not become a public charge. Obliged to renew their residence permit at three- or six-monthly intervals, they were frequently exploited by predatory landlords and employers.41 A British administrator in the Austrian Land of Carinthia complained to the Austrian Chamber of Agriculture in 1947 of local farmers’ practice of taking Volksdeutsch laborers on for the busy summer period only to dismiss them without notice as soon as the harvest was completed. Expellees were “drawn from the camps and returned to stock when their services are no longer required.”42 The director of an expellees’ welfare organization described their employment conditions two years later as analogous to those of “a feudal serf.”43 Not until 1952 did the Austrian Federation of Trade Unions lift labor restrictions on Volksdeutsche, enabling them to be hired on terms of equality with Austrian workers in all fields other than the medical profession.
Expellee workers in Germany did not face the same legal obstacles, but neither did they enjoy complete freedom of action. Under the occupation statutes, they could be compelled to fill particular vacancies in the labor market. Some unscrupulous labor offices fell into the habit of descending upon expulsion trains as they arrived at transit camps and dragooning the more productive-looking passengers into hard-to-fill occupations. Thus at Helmstedt in the spring of 1946, the Arbeitsamt “selects all the able-bodied men from each convoy as it arrives, separates them from their families and directs them into local industry. Those no
t fit for work, together with the women & children, are left by the camp for the reception Kreise.”44 A slightly different variation on the same theme was practiced by the Land authorities in Bavaria who, their counterparts in Württemberg and Greater Hesse protested, practiced a policy of selective admission. Whenever an unauthorized expulsion train from the Sudetenland appeared at the Bebra crossing point, they alleged, the Bavarians admitted it if it carried a high proportion of young adults but invariably turned back those consisting of women and children only. The result was that these Länder were saddled with the unemployables, while Bavaria was able to put the productive element immediately to work.45 In the Soviet zone, the authorities attempted to overcome the effects of randomly assigning agricultural workers to cities, and white-collar workers to the countryside, by engaging in compulsory intrazonal transfers. On the sole occasion that this was tried, however, the protests of expellees who had already been forcibly displaced once and were unwilling to tolerate another such upheaval were so fierce that the experiment was abandoned as soon as it had begun.
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