Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War
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Both in the western and the eastern zones, the new arrivals were frequently confronted with the reality of a “cold homeland.” For the settled community, already struggling to survive, the arrival of so many newcomers whose claims to Germanness often seemed to them highly questionable was regarded as too great a burden to bear. The practice of compulsory billeting of expellees did nothing to foster sympathy on the part of the indigenous population, and a rough-and-ready index of the state of relations between the communities could be found in the intensity of resistance to the practice. A Military Government officer remarked that the settled community in the British zone did not hesitate to ignore its legal requirement to accommodate the new arrivals from the east. “At the best they get the minimum prescribed by law and at the worst they have to accept accommodation which is scarcely fit for cattle.”46 Throughout the whole of Germany, cases of residents openly defying the Housing Law were notorious. Frequently they were abetted in doing so by local German administrators who realized all too well that the settled community possessed votes, whereas expellees typically did not. The case of the Bürgermeister of Nieder-Weisel in Hesse who confined thirty-five expellees to two rooms for a two-week period rather than disperse them among the townspeople was far from unusual.47 An additional problem was the tendency of those property owners who did comply with the law to treat expellees billeted upon them as unwanted guests or interlopers, who might be denied permission to use bathrooms or kitchens or to enter and leave the premises except at specified times. It is probably true to say that authorities in the western zones were more active in repressing these abuses than their eastern counterparts, and sometimes found creative means of doing so. In 1947, for example, a Frankfurt baker, Wilhelm Rapp, was sentenced along with his wife and two daughters to spend four weeks living in a transit camp as punishment for discriminating against expellees billeted upon them.48 The failure to compel the settled community in the Soviet zone to live up to its responsibilities, however, probably owed as much to bureaucratic inefficiencies as to a lackadaisical attitude on the part of the authorities. In Brandenburg alone, an inspection to determine the amount of space available to accommodate expellees had been carried out in only 25,000 of the Land’s 600,000 dwellings by 1948.49
The Allies’ policy was not only to induce the native-born to accept the expellees as fully equal members of the German nation, but to convince expellees themselves that they were “‘here to stay’ and that irredentist agitation would only work against the interests of a future democratic Germany.”50 Each of these propositions proved to be a hard sell. In both eastern and western Germany, expellees from the Recovered Territories were often referred to derisively as Wasserpolen (“watered-down Poles”), “Russians,” Rucksackdeutsche (“backpack Germans”), and “forty-kilo gypsies” (a reference to the amount of possessions they had supposedly brought with them—though in fact it was usually much less).51 An American opinion poll in Baden-Württemberg in November 1946 found that only half of the settled community regarded expellees as fellow citizens; the same proportion believed that they would one day go home. More surprisingly, almost as many expellees—some 40 percent—disavowed German identity, describing themselves as Czechoslovaks, Hungarians, or members of other nationalities. Approximately the same number complained that the indigenous population “considered them as human beings of inferior value, as foreigners or as beggars.”52 In some parts of the country, Allied military governors considered that the expellees were looked upon with “hatred”; and that they, for their part, “consider[ed] the natives and not the occupation power their oppressors.”53 Austrians sometimes responded to the strangers in their midst with even greater hostility, although many differentiated between their Sudetendeutsch neighbors and the more culturally alien Volksdeutsche from Yugoslavia and Romania. Landesrat Oberzaucher of Styria, for example, informed the British authorities in 1947 that the typical citizen of his Land was unable to understand why “he draws a starvation ration, just because to a large extent the available food is consumed by the numerous foreigners.”54 Ironically, some members of the settled communities in both countries, particularly the less-educated cohorts, concurred with the assessment of the Czechoslovak and Polish governments in blaming the expellees for having “started the war” and brought misery and ruin on the Reich. The decline in mutual understanding was starkly illustrated by a pair of nationwide surveys carried out in Germany in March 1946 and September 1947. On the earlier date, 7 percent of expellees expressed dissatisfaction with the way they had been treated by the indigenous population. On the later, 45 percent did so.55
But relations were by no means everywhere so hostile. Sometimes, indigenes and expellees could be drawn together by their mutual disdain for still more despised out-groups, like Polish displaced persons.56 Others had relatives already living in Germany or Austria who could assist them, or at the least ease the culture shock of starting their lives anew in an unfamiliar environment. And even when relations between the two communities were most strained, a majority of Germans—albeit a bare majority, in which the educated middle class and former Nazi Party members were disproportionately represented—acknowledged a responsibility to assist the newcomers in their hour of need.
All the same, most expellees had immense difficulties in reconciling themselves to their fate. A sensitive psychological profile drawn up by OMGUS in February 1947 warned that the typical deportee remained unreconciled to
the prospects of living the rest of his life in a foreign community where the natives are unfriendly and resentful, whose habits are strange, and where everything already belongs to someone else.
The expellee is ready to listen to all reports and rumors of opportunities of going “home,” and he will sign any and all petitions placed in front of him by unscrupulous provocateurs to bring this about. He will send chain letters to all his friends as long as he can delude himself with the idea that there is a chance for return. As he looks about himself, it appears to him that he alone lost most in the war since the native Germans, who were not expelled, retained their homes, land and cattle. The expellee will have to own things in his new country before he can be expected to take an interest in it, or develop a sense of “belonging.”57
Opinion polls confirmed this intense sense of longing for “home.” In spite of the ill-treatment that so many had suffered, 85 percent of expellees questioned in the U.S. zone in September 1947 said that they would return to their places of origin if given the opportunity.58 Although some observers wryly noted that the expellees’ nostalgic evocations of their happy former lives in Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia contrasted dramatically with how these same people had depicted their status as members of “oppressed” minorities in the 1930s, both the scale and the consistency of this response in repeated surveys caused great concern to Allied officials, who saw in it the potential for the rise of a new “revisionist” movement, feeding upon expellees’ social and economic marginalization and sense of grievance. This population, a senior U.S. official warned in April 1949, constituted “the most overtly nationalistic faction in post war Germany.”59 Unless their integration could be quickly accomplished, a dangerous situation was likely to arise.
Initially, the occupation forces in all three zones clamped down vigorously on any hint of political mobilization by expellees as such, in contrast to participation in the activities of the legal political parties. While some U.S. officials saw no objection to expellee organizations, considering them “no different from a farmers’ party looking after the interests of farmers,” General Lucius Clay in June 1946 specifically forbade any such formations. To allow them, he declared, would be the equivalent of suggesting that “each large group of migrants would have been justified in forming political parties. Nothing could have been more injurious to their cause—or to democracy.”60 The British had already taken similar action the previous month. By 1947–48, however, both the British and the U.S. military governments tacitly accepted the emergence of expellee he
ritage preservation and friendly societies, the so-called Homeland Societies or Landsmannschaften. In truth, the distinction between “nonpolitical” and “political” activity was sometimes wafer-thin, and eventually came to be regarded as more trouble than it was worth to try to preserve. After the foundation of the German Federal Republic in May 1949, Konrad Adenauer’s government quickly yielded to the inevitable, permitting expellees to form political movements on terms of equality with the other legally recognized parties. By January 1950, the Expellees’ and Disenfranchised People’s Bloc (Block der Heimatvertreibenen und Entrechteten) had been launched with Waldemar Kraft, a former SS captain with a dubious wartime record, as its leader.
The emergence of the expellee lobby as a political force was both a vital element of their integration and a moment of considerable danger for the infant Federal Republic. Nothing was to be gained by trying to repress expellee political mobilization, other than to drive it further to the margins of German society. On the other hand, the possibility of a compact bloc embracing up to a quarter of the electorate, embittered by its recent experiences, and eager to reverse the territorial changes of the postwar years, exercising undue influence within a new and untested democratic regime gave obvious cause for concern.
That the expellees did not become a disruptive element was due to three factors: the moderation of most of their leaders, the growth of the economy, and the surefootedness of Germany’s first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Contrary to expectations, expellees were not drawn in disproportionate numbers to radical movements. Because most laid the blame for their exile upon the communist regimes governing their homelands, the chances of any substantial number gravitating toward the extreme Left which, in Germany and elsewhere, continued to defend the transfers as an act of political wisdom were always fairly small. But with the exception of a noisy lunatic fringe, expellees largely avoided drifting into the ranks of the “revisionist” Right also. Conscious of the need to reassure fellow Germans as well as international public opinion of their good intentions, the Landsmannschaften at a gathering at Stuttgart in August 1950—the fifth anniversary of the Potsdam Conference—adopted a “Charter of the German Expellees.” This disavowed “all thought of revenge and retaliation” and called for the promotion of European unity as the only permanent solution to the continent’s minority problems. While asserting that “the right to one’s homeland is a God-given fundamental right,” the charter set out an immediate program consisting entirely of measures to ameliorate expellees’ conditions of life within German society. These included equal rights in law and in fact with the settled community; the integration of professional groupings; and a “just and sensible distribution of the burdens of the last war among the whole German people.”61
The idea of an “equalization of burdens” had already become a mantra among the expellee community, after the Allied authorities directed West Germany’s leaders to address the problem in 1948. It received valuable international support early in 1951 from a high-level commission of the Economic Cooperation Administration, the supervisory body of the Marshall Plan, consisting mainly of prominent U.S. and West German academics, including the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The commission’s report, presented to Adenauer in March 1951, described the problem of the expellees as “basically the problem of Germany herself,” and recommended an ambitious program of public spending, costing about DM 12.5 billion ($3 billion), to provide houses, job training, and public works for them over the following six years. This would involve a quadrupling of existing federal expenditure, which would be paid for by borrowing and with receipts from an Equalization of Burdens (Lastenausgleich) tax.62
While all three of the Federal Republic’s major parties had already committed themselves to radical economic measures to deal with the expellees’ social and economic problems, Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democratic Union did most to place the issue at the forefront of its program. A crotchety, autocratic, and sometimes devious politician who had served as mayor of Cologne on the ticket of the Catholic Center Party until dismissed by the Nazis in 1933, Adenauer possessed a more finely tuned (though by no means infallible) sense of what was politically feasible than his rivals. He was particularly impressed by what appeared to be a decisive breakthrough by Kraft’s Expellees’ Bloc in July 1950, when it won nearly a quarter of the seats in the Schleswig-Holstein Land elections and followed it up with solid showings in Bavaria and Lower Saxony some months later. In fact there was less to this success than met the eye—in none of the three Länder did the Bloc’s vote even match the expellees’ proportion of the local population—but to Adenauer, who had been chancellor for little more than a year, it underscored the necessity of defusing the threat it posed to the Federal Republic’s political future, and not incidentally his own.
Fortunately for him and for Germany, the expellee movement had many points of vulnerability. Its political wing was arguably less important than the Landsmannschaften, of which there were twenty with a combined membership of about 1.3 million in the mid-1950s.63 Based as they were upon geographical groupings, however, they differed on numerous points. The East Prussian Landsmannschaft, for example, had relatively little in common with its Balkan counterpart, the Homeland Society of Germans from Yugoslavia. The Expellees’ Bloc itself was a fractious and argumentative body that never garnered the support of more than a minority of the people it supposedly represented and was prone to splits, mostly on its right. It also included prominent members who were even less savory than its leader Kraft, among them people like Wilhelm Stuckart, the co-author of the Nuremberg Laws who could count himself lucky not to have been hanged for his part in the infamous Wannsee Conference of 1942. Lastly, although expellees were the most marginalized section of the postwar German population, they were by no means the only one seeking the state’s attention. Those who had been rendered homeless by Allied bombing (the Ausgebombt), disabled war veterans, and other groups with well-organized lobbies all had claims to the government’s attention and largesse, and were not willing to play second fiddle to the Bloc.
For as wily a political practitioner as was Adenauer, then, there was much to work upon. His strategy for neutralizing the Expellees’ Bloc was simple but effective: to coopt its leaders and persuade its voters that he and the Christian Democrats represented their interests more effectively than their own sectional party could do. The first step was to see the Lastenausgleich and other expellee-friendly laws through Parliament before the next federal elections, thereby depriving the Bloc of its most potent cause. This law, adopted in August 1952, created an off-budget fund financed by a 50 percent levy on all capital assets declared by German taxpayers during the “base year” of 1948. Draconian as that appeared, so many exemptions were provided that the tax burden on the settled community was considerably lighter than expected. The levy was not taken up instantly, but could be paid by those affected by it over a thirty-year span. Moreover, as Aidan Crawley observes, “the fact that in the base year the value of property was at its lowest meant that, with the sudden boom in incomes and values due to the [economic] recovery, most people could pay their installments without difficulty.”64 The Lastenausgleich was thus a more modest and a longer-lived program than the one envisaged by the Economic Cooperation Administration’s report, costing a relatively affordable DM 1.5 billion per annum—or a little over 5 percent of all federal, Land, and municipal tax revenues—though eventually, by the time the last payment was made in 2001, DM 145 billion would be disbursed under the scheme.65 Expellees, and other Germans who had suffered material losses as a result of the war, were eligible to receive compensation from the state on a sliding scale, with 100 percent of the smallest claims being allowed and 6.5 percent of the largest. Expellees could also apply for housing loans and assistance with job training. This measure was followed by an Expellee Law in May 1953, which, as recommended by the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Victims established four years previously, safeguarded
the right of the remaining ethnic German minorities outside the country’s borders to immigrate to the Federal Republic without unnecessary complications. Lastly, a Refugee Pension Law, passed in the nick of time before the 1953 elections, provided that expellees and refugees would be eligible for social insurance on the same basis as if they had always lived and worked in the Federal Republic.