I agree that the conditions which you describe are horrifying. I should have been much more deeply moved if I had not myself been to the extermination camps at Maidanek and Oswiecim [Auschwitz] and satisfied myself by the evidence available that the Poles are telling the truth when they allege that about 6,000,000 Jews and Poles were exterminated like flies by the Germans. Having seen myself 800,000 pairs of shoes of people who had been murdered (including the shoes of tiny children of two and three) … I cannot work up much sympathy for the poor Germans, much as I condemn the way they were treated.1
In the immediate postwar era, such a response was typical. What is remarkable is that in the more than sixty years that have passed since the expulsion of the ethnic Germans concluded, it largely remains so. In both popular and scholarly treatments of this episode in European history, the Holocaust has generally provided the context for discussions of the expulsion—or even for deciding, as in Hankey’s case, whether it ought to be discussed at all. As a result, it occupies a unique position in contemporary historical and ethical discourse. Among the examples of mass human rights violations of modern times, in no other case has the argument been advanced that acknowledging the fact of its occurrence should be discouraged for fear that doing so might tend to diminish the horror that properly ought to be felt in respect of a still greater crime.
Most certainly, the connection between the expulsions and the Holocaust, as well as to the Hitler regime’s numerous other atrocities, is both inescapable and appropriate. To try to separate them would be to run the risk of creating a decontextualized narrative of victimization, in which the suffering of Germans comes to overshadow the still greater sufferings Germans inflicted upon others. But if that is where the discussion must begin, it is far from clear that it must also end there. What Hankey failed to see, like many others since, is that a frame of reference that measures acts of violence and injustice against the supreme atrocity of our time and assesses the former as being unworthy of notice in comparison with the latter makes such violations more rather than less likely to be repeated. Quite apart from the question of what acknowledgment is due to the expellees’ painful history, moreover, it makes impossible any discussion of the actions and motivations of the perpetrators, implicitly denying their own full humanity by configuring them as morally and ethically incompetent persons who were incapable of assuming responsibility for their actions. Lastly, it evades the uncomfortable but necessary questions that arise for our own times when we are confronted with the disturbing reality of the starved and beaten men, brutalized women, and terrified children that are necessary components of the psychologically satisfying notions of Old Testament justice, visited upon “enemy” populations, to which we remain instinctively attracted.
How these matters are to be talked about without silencing or rendering invisible any of the protagonists is a problem of great difficulty and sensitivity, and one that few people on either side of the debate addressed or even acknowledged in the half-century following the war. For a brief moment in the late 1990s, it seemed as though it might indeed be overcome. Since then, attitudes have hardened once again, and the current discourse on the question in the spheres of politics and the media has degenerated into a dialogue of the deaf. It is doubtful, however, whether attempts to come to grips with the matter may be safely abandoned for an indefinite time. Forced population transfers are very far from being a thing of the past, and there is a growing number of influential voices who see in them the wave of the future. Whatever may be thought of that prospect, gaining the clearest possible perspective on the most important experiment ever carried out in this field is in any case a matter of considerable importance.
As we have seen, while the transfers were under way a propaganda campaign of considerable scale, if not sophistication, was waged by the expelling countries and their advocates abroad and was countered, though largely ineffectively, by isolated figures in the Western media and in nongovernmental organizations. Once the operation had been completed, however, the urgency of the exchanges diminished. In the United States and Britain, supporters and opponents of the expulsions alike came by the early 1950s to accept them as irreversible faits accomplis. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist government of Klement Gottwald sensibly adopted a policy of inviting as little international attention to the subject as possible, a policy continued by his Stalinist successor, Antonín Novotný. In East Germany, discussion of the expulsions was consigned to the same capacious Orwellian memory hole that accommodated all other aspects of the past the regime found inconvenient. When in 1961 the playwright Heiner Müller, for example, attempted to stage a performance of his The Resettler Woman, or Life in the Countryside (Die Umsiedlerin oder das Leben auf dem Lande), a tongue-in-cheek depiction of the travails of a pregnant expellee assigned a small farm in the bungled land redistribution scheme of 1945, he and his entire cast were arrested after the opening night. Müller was lucky merely to be expelled from the Writers’ Union; his director, B. K. Tragelehn, did not escape so lightly, being “sent to an open-face coal mine for two years to learn about the working class through manual labor.”2
The West German and Polish states, in contrast, took a considerably more activist and almost wholly destructive stance. In 1952, three years after the establishment of the Federal Ministry for Expellees, Refugees, and War Victims, the Bonn government commissioned the noted University of Cologne historian Theodor Schieder—himself born in East Prussia—to compile a scholarly history of the expulsions, as part of its preelection outreach effort to the Landsmannschaften. The appointment was one of those displays of tone-deafness for which the new ministry would later become noted, for the selection of Schieder as lead author could hardly have been a less felicitous choice. Although a talented historian, he had been one of a group of NSDAP members actively engaged in Ostforschung, or “Eastern research,” during the late 1930s. In this capacity he had collaborated on a research project begun just after the conquest of Poland to “work on the historical preconditions for ‘large-scale [German] settlement policy in the eastern territories.’”3 Schieder’s findings were incorporated into the Generalplan Ost, the Nazis’ chilling genocidal blueprint for the clearance and resettlement of the conquered lands.4 Though his part in the drafting of this scheme did not become publicly known until after his death in 1984, that a man who had volunteered his talents to the planning of the ethnic cleansing of Poland should only a few years later be overseeing the production of a history that would be perceived as—and in fact was—an indictment of the very policies in which, on a still more ruthless scale, he himself had been actively involved in devising was, to say the very least, deeply unfortunate.
It was all the more so inasmuch as the work his team produced between 1954 and 1961, the eight-volume Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa, was not wholly without historical merit. Some of Germany’s most talented young historians, including Martin Brozsat, Hans Mommsen, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler were employed on the project, which was based on the first-person interviews and testimonies collected from eleven thousand expellees from across central Europe. Only seven hundred of these were quoted in the final version, the editors having excluded what they regarded as hostile, unreliable, or biased testimonies. The introductory essays were also, at least for the time, methodologically sophisticated, laying stress on the structural factors underlying the expulsions. Nonetheless, the value of the enterprise was vitiated by a number of shortcomings, of which the morally compromised wartime career of its lead author may not have been the most important. The story it told was not so much factually inaccurate as highly partial, tending to convey a misleading impression by selection and omission. Like the concealment of Schieder’s own past, Nazism’s black record in the countries of expulsion during the war featured hardly at all. The expulsions were shown through a heavily anticommunist filter, exaggerating the degree to which Soviet initiative and Marxist ideology served as motivating forces in the countries involved. The precise
nature of Volksdeutsch interactions with the majority populations during the war was elided or ignored altogether. Jews featured as walk-on characters, if they featured at all. Some of the young editors no doubt were themselves unaware of these deficiencies. But for all the horrifying detail the Dokumentation provided of the cruelties with which the expulsions were often accomplished, the general accuracy of which there is no reason to doubt, the final result was more a propagandistic exercise than a work of disinterested scholarship.
Within Germany this may not have mattered greatly. The Dokumentation was little read at home; sales, as Robert Moeller says, were “dismal.”5 Outside the country, however, the appearance of the work raised the temperature greatly. A condensed version in English was published which, although probably not garnering a significantly larger international readership, was perceived as an attempt to generate foreign support for an actively revisionist German foreign policy. The Polish government responded with a quasi-scholarly counteroffensive of its own. Under the auspices of the Poznań-based Western Press Agency (Zachodnia Agencja Prasowa), an avalanche of books and pamphlets in several European languages was released from the mid-1950s onward aimed at discrediting the claims of the Dokumentation and similar works; denying that the expulsions from the Recovered Territories had been carried out inhumanely (or, in some versions, that they had even been carried out at all, as opposed to a decision en masse by the German population “of their own accord to flee to the West”); and seeking to show that any questioning of the rightness of the Potsdam Agreement by German commentators was part of a millennium-long Drang nach Osten, commencing with the Teutonic Knights and continuing to the present day, that Nazism’s defeat had merely temporarily interrupted.6 It is doubtful whether this polemical literature on what was euphemistically styled the German “repatriation,” which was far more successful in poking holes in the Dokumentation’s dubious statistical calculations of the number of expellees who had lost their lives during the course of the operation than in providing a convincing defense of the Polish government’s record, found many more readers than Schieder’s weighty tomes had done.7 But if they managed to persuade only their respective authors, these dueling histories foreshadowed the rhetorical strategies that would be resorted to by both sides when the question of the expulsions reached a higher level of visibility in the 1990s.
During the 1950s, expulsion-related themes figured commonly, though not prominently, in West German popular culture. In particular the so-called Heimatfilm genre offered a means of simultaneously acknowledging and eliding the traumata of the recent past. No less than a fifth of all German cinematic productions in the 1950s, Heide Fehrenbach points out, were Heimatfilme.8 While by no means all of them featured or even referred to the “lost Heimat” to the east and south, the symbol of the “homeland” provided a safe, shared terrain on which “Germans” of all varieties, including those most recently arrived, could give expression to their sense of identity and of patriotism without raising taboo political topics.9 In that respect, the Heimatfilm was far more significant for what it omitted than for what was shown. Quasi-documentary scenes of “wild” expulsions, life in a Polish or Czechoslovak internment camp, travel in a crowded goods wagon, rapes, and robberies figured nowhere in these productions. Nor, typically, did expellees who had not been German citizens in 1937. The preferred hero or heroine of the expellee-themed Heimatfilm was a native of the old Reich from East Prussia or Pomerania who had fled the advancing Red Army in 1945; while Sudetendeutsche were occasionally favored with minor supporting roles, Volksdeutsche from Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, or the Baltic states were conspicuous by their absence. So too was the war itself. Rather, the films romanticized and celebrated the process by which refugees from the lost eastern territories, while haunted by their traumatic past, found happiness, love, and material success by reconnecting with the enduring German values of work, community, and attachment to place—albeit a different one from their place of birth.
In a pair of trenchant and highly praised critical analyses of such expressions of German mentalities as the Heimatfilme, the Schieder instant histories, the glorification of the surviving prisoners of war who returned from Soviet captivity in the mid-1950s, and the much-read first-person accounts of harrowing expellee ordeals like the Königsberg surgeon Hans von Lehndorff’s Ostpreussisches Tagebuch, Robert Moeller has argued that the attention paid in West Germany to the plight of expellees during the first postwar decade represented above all the articulation of a “rhetoric of victimization” whose purpose was to craft a “usable past” for a country “peopled with innocents …”10 A paradoxical element of this self-serving narrative was Germans’ insistence that discussion of the expulsions had been a taboo even as the constant reiteration of German suffering caused them to be “incorporated into the founding myths of the Federal Republic …”11 Other historians have challenged, or at least qualified, this interpretation. Though insisting that “German violence was the cause … for violence against Germans,” Frank Biess has pointed out that “narratives of victimization constituted a problematic basis for the reconstruction of male subjectivities and for postwar reconstruction at large.”12 Lacking as they did the possibility of “redemptive resolution,” these accounts of “feminized suffering” provided few opportunities for the articulation of a new, shared collective identity—the more so inasmuch as the very Germanness of the incomers from the east and south was so often questioned by indigenes of both postwar Germanies.13 Svenja Goltermann, too, points out that the recency of the trauma which most Germans had experienced—few, in the 1940s, had not been exposed, whether as soldiers, expellees, or civilians under Allied bombing, to death and the personal risk of dying in particularly unpleasant forms—must be taken into account when drawing conclusions about the nature of German society in the 1950s from what its culture did not say.14 Human psychology does not easily or quickly process profoundly disturbing events; when it does so, it characteristically assigns much greater weight to one’s own sufferings than to those of others. While this should not be taken as an excuse for the reluctance of so many Germans to assess critically their individual responsibility for the apocalyptic violence their country had inflicted upon its neighbors, it remains the case that few if any societies have responded to disasters, even (or especially) of their own making, with the kind of immediate self-questioning that Germany’s victims, as well as historians today, for entirely understandable reasons would wish to have seen.
Whether kitsch productions like the Heimatfilme will bear the weight of interpretation Moeller and others rest upon them, however, there is no question that with the arrival to adulthood in the 1960s of the first generation of Germans to have no personal involvement in the war, the public mood with respect to expellees became distinctly less sympathetic. Even as the war of words between the Bonn and Warsaw governments—and their historian proxies—diminished in intensity in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a result of Willy Brandt’s pursuit of Ostpolitik with Germany’s eastern neighbors and the Federal Republic’s de facto recognition of the country’s postwar boundaries, discussion of Germans’ experience of human rights abuses in the immediate postwar period became more difficult at home. The 1960s generation, increasingly prone to regard its immediate predecessor as “accessories to Nazism,” began to ask pointed and highly personalized questions about not just political but moral responsibility for the crimes for which Germans were responsible, and in which the Holocaust for the first time came to assume precedence. The result was a decade-long struggle between what Stefan Berger has called a “victims’ discourse” (emphasizing German suffering) and a “perpetrators’ discourse” (emphasizing German guilt). It was one that shifted decisively in the latter’s favor during the 1970s and 1980s, as historians and intellectuals drawn from this postwar generation “began to investigate ordinary Germans and their everyday support for an inhumane and criminal regime.”15 If the discussion of expulsions was not, as Moeller argues, taboo in the 19
50s, certainly twenty years later society in the two Germanies was much less willing to engage in it, or even to listen to it. At best, as Rainer Schulze has perceptively observed, it was “assumed and almost expected that in the course of their successful settling into postwar Germany the refugees and expellees would lose, or ‘shed,’ not only their old collective identities and mentalities, but also the specific experiences and individual memories they had brought with them from the east and would thus become like the natives.”16 If they did so, some aspects of their history might be acknowledged by the public and the state. But this did not mean that society was interested in or ready to listen to those parts of their story that disrupted the national narrative, especially as the formation of the “Grand Coalition” between the CDU and the Social Democrats in 1966 led to a marked shift in Bonn’s policy vis-à-vis Germany’s eastern neighbors. An early portent of the changing mood was the coalition’s decision in 1967 to abandon publication of a new edition of the Dokumentation der Vertreibung and to cancel the public release of thousands of new testimonies held at the Federal Archives in Koblenz, so as not to prejudice the possibility of warmer relations with Warsaw and Prague.17 According to Eric Langenbacher, this marked the beginning of a wider cultural, as well as political, separation between “progressive” forces in West Germany and the expellee population.
The Social Democrats and Left abandoned and soon demonized expellee groups, the price to be paid for reconciliation and normalization with Eastern Europe…. The [Brandt] government disbanded the expellee ministry, cut funding for expellee activities, and refused to publish a report in 1974 on crimes committed against Germans in the course of the expulsion. The SPD newspaper opined that publication “would only help the Nazis here.” Henceforth, leftists equated expellees with revanchist, radical-right, neo-Nazis.18
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