Adenauer’s second front against the Bloc was to steal its clothes in foreign policy. This did not necessarily represent political posturing on his part, or at any rate not an excessive amount of it. With the exception of the Communists, Germans across the spectrum resented the territorial losses the country had incurred in 1945 and, though they were not prepared to disrupt the peace of Europe on that account, supported the restoration of Germany’s 1937 frontiers. Adenauer shared these views at least to some degree, though the unwonted trenchancy with which he expressed them in public probably indicated that he was not unmindful of how sentiments of this kind would be received by the Expellees’ Bloc’s natural constituency. That its verdict on his performance was generally favorable was demonstrated by the federal elections of 1953. The Christian Democrats and their coalition partners won more than 45 percent of the vote, far surpassing the Social Democratic opposition. The Bloc fell away to less than 6 percent, gaining less support from expellees than the victorious Christian Democrats had done, and making no inroads at all among the settled community. “The election,” Michael Hughes observes, “was widely seen as a referendum on Adenauer and his policies—and to the degree it was, Adenauer won.” Quickly capitalizing on his victory, the chancellor reached out to the deflated Expellees’ Bloc, offering Waldemar Kraft and his deputy, Theodor Oberländer, seats in his Cabinet and thereby “tying the party to Adenauer’s policies.”66 Two years later, Kraft and Oberländer would abandon their own party for the Christian Democrats, effectively sealing its fate as a political movement.
Konrad Adenauer and his successors have attracted much criticism for the “opportunistic” and “manipulative” stance they took in the 1950s on the expellee question, and in particular their currying favor with the Landsmannschaften by cold-shouldering proposals to improve relations with Germany’s eastern neighbors. Although the Christian Democratic leadership neither expected nor, arguably, wanted the reacquisition of the lost territories, compensation from the expelling states for the German property confiscated in 1945, or a “right of return” for expellees from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere, they continued to advocate this unattainable program and to foster harmful illusions among the West German electorate for the sake of political advantage. They insisted that the Munich Pact of 1938 remained valid regardless of the way in which such a position was bound to be regarded abroad. “For far too long,” in Pertti Ahonen’s view, “the country’s political élites indulged in tactical opportunism, telling expellees and other nationalistic audiences what they wanted to hear, with scant regard for existing realities or possible long-term consequences.”67
There is something to be said for this interpretation, although its proponents arguably overstate the degree of room for maneuver West Germany’s leaders possessed in both domestic and foreign policy during these years. Without doubt Adenauer habitually spoke out of both sides of his mouth when addressing the expellees—who, since the mid-1950s, have remained among the Christian Democrats’ most stalwart supporters—and the larger German public. Few of the Landmannschaften’s aspirations were achievable under any imaginable circumstances in the 1950s, and are no more so today. The frequency with which those organizations elevated to leadership positions a variety of unlovely personalities with checkered wartime pasts, and the chancellor’s willingness to embrace them nonetheless, raises legitimate questions about his judgment and prudence. And his emphasis upon, and exploitation of, the expellee question has frequently been juxtaposed with his more muted acknowledgments of the barbarities for which Nazi Germany was responsible, in the absence of which the expulsions themselves would almost certainly never have taken place.
Acknowledging the truth of all these criticisms, it is still difficult to see even with the benefit of hindsight how Adenauer could have dealt with the challenge confronting him in a significantly different way. Simply to dismiss the concerns and aspirations of so large a proportion of the electorate was politically unrealistic; nor would the other parties have been slow to take advantage had he done so. It is sometimes forgotten that leaders of competing groups were little more scrupulous in arousing expellees’ expectations: Willy Brandt of the moderate-left Social Democratic Party, for example, hasted to reassure them in 1961 that “Silesia remains, in our consciousness, German land” (Schlesien bleibt in unserem Bewusstsein deutsches Land).68 To be sure, the successful defusing of the expellee crisis depended on luck to an even greater degree than skill. Adenauer came to the chancellorship at a moment when the relationship between expellees and indigenes was perhaps at its lowest ebb. The currency reform that saw the launch of the Deutschmark in 1948, at a highly unfavorable 1:10 exchange rate with the Reichsmark, hit the new arrivals hardest of all. Unlike the settled community they possessed few noncash assets, and the reform effectively wiped out whatever meager savings they had made and returned them once again to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. By the end of 1949, the unemployment rate among expellees was twice as high as among the native population; nearly one in three of the recent arrivals was jobless. Less than a month before the establishment of the Federal Republic, an American official warned that in his own view as well as that of the three German refugee commissioners in the U.S. zone, “the situation today is at least as adverse as it was in 1946.”69
Probably the most important factor in rescuing the country from this deeply unpromising scenario was the revival of the German economy. From mid-1950 unemployment took a decisive turn downward, until by mid-decade it had virtually been eliminated. West Germany began a long export-driven boom at a pace that is unlikely ever to be repeated by any major developed economy, while the willingness of the expellees themselves to accept modestly paying jobs helped to ease inflationary pressures. The establishment of this virtuous economic cycle not only made expensive social programs like the Lastenausgleich law affordable, but progressively liberated the Bonn government from having to make hard choices about whether expellees or indigenes should receive the benefit of limited state resources—choices that in a system based on majority rule would almost inevitably have been made in only one way.
West Germany could not, however, either have foreseen or counted on the indefinite continuance of an unprecedented economic expansion. In the event of a sustained downturn such as had occurred in 1923 or 1929, all the dangers associated with the presence of an unassimilated and freshly disillusioned mass of eight million expellees would have presented themselves again with renewed force. Adenauer could not exclude such a possibility, and had to use every lever of influence he possessed to try to insulate his untested republic against its effects. Inasmuch as the surest way to create a self-fulfilling prophesy of a radicalized and alienated minority would have been to treat the expellees and their chosen representatives with suspicion and reserve, or to attempt to make them disavow their unacceptable opinions before being accepted into the German body politic, the chancellor had little choice but to pursue the policies he did. As Ahonen rightly acknowledges, “the oft-stated claim that expellee integration ranks immediately behind the closely related phenomenon of the economic miracle in West Germany’s list of triumphs rings substantially true. The Federal Republic has reason to be proud of its record in this area, especially in view of the many potential hazards that had loomed along the way.”70
What is, perhaps, more surprising is that East Germany too achieved a rough-and-ready resolution of its expellee problem, albeit by very different means. Of course the obstacles and risks it confronted were of a different nature. The East German government had unlimited instruments of coercion at its disposal. Behind the regime, should it show signs of failing, stood the Soviet Union. There was, then, little danger of the expellees becoming a threat to the survival of the state. As a predominantly agrarian region, moreover, the East faced a food situation that was less critical in the immediate postwar era than elsewhere in Germany. Lastly, the economic underperformance of the East at least had the negative merit that the average gap in the standar
d of living between newcomers and indigenes was less pronounced and, in principle, more easily bridged than in the Federal Republic.
Nevertheless, the Soviet authorities, the Central Agency for Resettlers, and, after 1949, the East Berlin government could not rely upon force alone to achieve their objectives. The chief difficulty they faced was that expellees were little more welcome in the East than the West. A series of “resettler weeks” in 1948, in which the indigenous community was pressured to make charitable donations of clothing and household goods to the newcomers, yielded embarrassingly low results in many areas. In Thuringia, for example, the philanthropic impulses of the local population with respect to the expellees produced only 110 pairs of shoes, 132 cooking pots, and 10 large stoves.71 Nor could the authorities proceed to more robust methods, in light of the unpopularity of the regime. In the summer of 1947, for example, the Saxony Land government expressed the view that “a compulsory requisition [of goods for redistribution to expellees] is not possible. We cannot risk aggravating the mood of the people.”72 In the end, the Soviet military authorities were driven to provide welfare payments out of state funds. A resettlement grant of three hundred Reichsmarks per adult and a hundred Reichsmarks for each child was provided for new arrivals in October 1946. Even though the intent behind this subvention was partly to boost the performance of the Communist-dominated Socialist Unity Party in the elections of that year, the grant anticipated any similar policy in the Western zones. The Soviets also displayed a surprising degree of flexibility in working with church-based welfare organizations and with the Red Cross, encouraging the latter to concentrate its activities on expellee children in particular.73 Marshals Zhukov and Sokolovsky proved especially cooperative in this regard.
Nonetheless, the Soviets had no intention of allowing the “resettler” question (the term “expellee” was deemed politically incorrect in the East, as implying undue harshness on the part of the removing governments) to hang over their occupation zone indefinitely. The focus instead was on completing the task of resettlement and assimilation—or at any rate declaring it completed—within a measurable period. Accordingly, great emphasis was placed on moving expellees out of, and then closing, the camps, a task that was largely completed by 1950. Some statistical sleight of hand was necessary to achieve this impressive result; in some places “camps” were officially redesignated “apartment complexes” for the purpose of fulfilling the plan.74 But the East’s record was nonetheless significant, when it is considered that West Germany still had a camp population of 324,000 in 1951 and that the last facility was not finally closed until twenty years later.
The concept of “burden-sharing” gained little purchase in East Germany. As Philipp Ther notes, the perception that the expellees had constituted a Nazi “fifth column,” vigorously promoted by the “socialist fraternal countries,” implied that they were no more deserving of assistance—and arguably less so—than the settled population. “A Lastenausgleich [law] as in the West was therefore impossible for ideological reasons.”75 Accordingly, the Soviet military authorities decided to kill two birds with one stone by tying expellee resettlement to land redistribution. Because most expellees in East Germany, like their counterparts in the West, had already been placed in the countryside—in Brandenburg, nearly 55 percent of the new arrivals were living in settlements of less than two thousand inhabitants in December 1947—this solution had the further advantage that no substantial internal redistribution of the four-million-strong expellee population would be required.76 Agricultural estates of more than a hundred hectares and those belonging to “war criminals” were broken up and expellees settled on the new smallholdings in numbers out of proportion to their share of the population. By the conclusion of the program, some 567,000 hectares of land were in expellee hands.77
The results, though, generally bore out the prognostications of those British officials who had successfully diverted Ernest Bevin from pursuing a similar will-o’-the-wisp in 1944. The land reform program was an expensive failure. “Even at the end of 1946, three-quarters of the Neubauern (new farmers) had to work without horses … and only one third of the land reform farmers owned a cow. Only one farmstead in four was equipped with a plough, one in five with iron harrows and only one in fourteen with reapers and threshing machines.”78 Those who received livestock and equipment, moreover, tended to be members of the indigenous population, who profited from their superior connections in the rural communities to those overseeing the redistribution, while “resettlers” were largely overlooked. Lastly, exorbitant and unrealistic state requisitions and quotas, which forced the new farmers to turn over even their seed grain and sowing potatoes to the government, made it impossible for many to generate the minimum required for bare survival. As a result, living standards for the Neubauern were, as state inspectors reported in 1950, “almost unimaginably low,” while the cost of the program, which by 1953 had reached the alarming figure of 900 million marks, was described by Heinrich Rau, the Minister of Planning, as “a bottomless pit.”79 Rather than acknowledge the failure of the experiment and, as West Germany progressively did, recall the expellees from their initial billets in the countryside to the cities and towns as jobs and houses became available for them, the Soviet military authorities doubled down on their losing investment and announced a large-scale rural housing program in 1947. With practically the entire housing budget of the east going into building farmsteads that the resettlers were rapidly abandoning, reconstruction of war-damaged cities was virtually halted. As one Neubauer recorded, “The despair and anger among the settlers know no bounds…. Whole groups of settlers leave the settlements at night and have fled to the West …”80 Not until 1950 was this costly scheme discontinued, with very little to show for it.
By then, however, the authorities were ready to declare victory and move on. The Central Agency for Resettlers was dissolved in July 1948 and responsibility for its functions transferred to a small and low-profile section of the Ministry of the Interior. From that point on, even the term “resettler” (Umsiedler) became almost as taboo as “expellee” had become: all were to be equal citizens of the new German Democratic Republic, without distinction. This shift was reflected in both domestic and foreign policy. At home, the government cracked down hard on unofficial expellee associations of however innocuous a character; as Philipp Ther observes, “[i]n concrete terms, this meant that even complaints about problems of integration could lead to police investigations.”81 Where external affairs were concerned, if Western expellees’ sensibilities arguably were excessively pandered to by the Bonn government, those of their Eastern counterparts were completely ignored. In a Soviet-brokered shotgun marriage, the Communist governments of Poland and East Germany concluded the Treaty of Görlitz in July 1950 that recognized the Oder-Neisse line as the permanent frontier between the two countries. This was a crushing psychological blow to Eastern expellees, many of whom had opted for or chosen to remain in the Soviet zone in the hope that they might soon be able to return to their homes. “Some,” Ian Connor notes, “lived so close to the border that they could actually see the house they had been forced to leave behind.”82
As a final sop to the resettlers before they were sent out to fend for themselves in East German society, the state passed the significantly named Law for the Further Improvement of the Situation of Former Resettlers, under heavy pressure from Soviet military governors, in the autumn of 1950. This provided interest-free loans of up to a thousand marks for the purchase of household goods; credits on the same terms for building purposes; and modest scholarship assistance for “re-settler” children. Once again the East Germans’ ambitions outran their capabilities. Furniture and houseware manufacturers were unable to keep up with the enormous expansion of demand for their products, and in any event neither the central nor Land governments possessed the funds available to provide loans to all applicants. Thus, while the German Democratic Republic devoted a much higher proportion of its scanty resources to rese
ttlement activities than the Federal Republic, the results were far more modest and, just as importantly, caused deep disappointment to the intended beneficiaries.
Nonetheless, by the mid-1950s the worst of the problems associated with expellee resettlement had been overcome in both Germanies. It is true that in the East the ruling party’s principal strategy for doing so after 1948 was “to gloss over the integration problem and solve it through denial,”83 but until the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 those who remained dissatisfied with this method had the option of voting with their feet and moving, this time as a welcomed “refugee,” to the West. More than 830,000 would ultimately do so.84 In the Federal Republic, the achievement of full employment and the arrival of a newer and more socially marginal cohort yet, the “guest workers” from Turkey and the Mediterranean, proved to be important agents of integration. Certainly the effects of having arrived with nothing and being compelled to start one’s life again were not to be overcome easily; numerous studies have shown that not only expellees alone, but even children of expellees, continue to be overrepresented in the ranks of those afflicted by social deprivation. As Marita Krauss points out, moreover, even within the two Germanies no less than between them, there was no uniform pattern of readjustment, so that it is more correct to speak of “integrations,” to greater or lesser degrees and of distinct kinds, rather than a single process.85 But fears of sectional antagonism, juvenile delinquency, and political radicalism were not borne out by experience, and for all the errors and omissions of which both the Allied and German authorities were guilty, the conventional wisdom that the integration efforts were generally successful has proven resistant to even the most determined revisionist assault.
This does not mean, though, that all tensions were resolved. The expulsions remained a profoundly traumatic and divisive episode in a society that had already undergone too many of them since the beginning of the twentieth century. Both at home and abroad they were processed psychologically by means of the same convenient mechanisms—denial, myth-making, decontextualization, rationalization—with which other uncomfortable aspects of the German past were customarily treated. With the fall of communism, the reunification of the country, and the forced confrontation with its eastern and southern neighbors as a result of the expansion of the European Union, however, these strategies began to lose their ability to surround the unresolved issues of the 1940s with a cocoon of comfortable evasion. How and why the “buried history” of the expulsions came to haunt a Germany and a Europe that seemed to all appearances to have transcended, if not actually confronted, their violent pasts is the subject of the final chapters of this book.
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