The response was a firestorm of criticism in both Poland and the Czech Republic directed against the project, Steinbach herself, and the German government. The philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who as a child had been forcibly displaced and terrorized by German soldiers after the invasion of Poland in 1939, noted acidly that in his country’s wartime experience “robbery and deportation were not things that were worthy of commemoration; they were merely the prelude to the occupation.”39 Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto rising in 1943, denounced the Center as a “nationalist and chauvinist” initiative that represented little more than “a thinly disguised return to the idea of Drang nach Osten.”40 Wprost, a Warsaw newsweekly, featured on its cover a photomontage depicting a uniformed and jackbooted Steinbach, wearing a swastika armband, straddling a submissive Chancellor Schröder.41 The reverberations of the controversy continued to echo in the years that followed, especially after the conciliatory Polish president, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who had once been guest of honor at a German expellees’ meeting in the town of Elblag, was succeeded in 2005 by the populist and moderately Germanophobe Lech Kaczyński.42 In his election campaign, Kaczyński promised to seek reparations in the amount of €54 billion from Germany in respect of Poland’s wartime losses; two years later the president’s party, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) sponsored a parliamentary resolution asserting that “Responsibility [for the war] must be borne by the entire German people, the great majority of which supported Hitlerism and accepted Hitler’s rule.”43 In Germany itself, Micha Brumlik of the University of Frankfurt pronounced that supporters of the Center Against Expulsions were guilty of “a deliberate historical naïveté that assumes that in the year 1943 and thereafter, proper postwar planning based on human rights would in fact have been possible.”44
In recent years, the volume of rhetoric over the expulsions has begun to stabilize somewhat, albeit at its current elevated level of hostility and mutual suspicion. The government of Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, which ascended to power in 2005 initially in a coalition arrangement with Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats, expressed some support for the Center Against Expulsions project. Born in East Germany where reference to the events of the immediate postwar years had indeed been a taboo subject, Merkel was sympathetic to the argument of expellees that their voices had gone unheard for too long. The coalition’s manifesto, as a result, declared the two parties’ desire to see a “visible sign” of some kind in commemoration of the expulsions appear in Berlin. At the same time, Merkel insisted that the kind of memorial at which the Center aimed was acceptable to her only in circumstances in which “not only German expellees and refugees but others too, of course Polish expellees also, can commemorate their suffering and when one thing in particular is clear: there is to be no re-interpretation of history by Germany.”45 At the end of 2008, the government agreed that the project should be publicly funded and placed under the oversight of the German Historical Museum Foundation—in all likelihood to ensure that Germany’s international reputation, which would be implicated in the undertaking in any event, should not be exposed to the risk of injudicious comments or actions by the expellee groups. The Center, it was decided, would be located at the site of the former Anhalter railway station in east-central Berlin, a point of arrival for many thousands of expellees from Poland in 1945.
If there has been one positive result from the polemics of recent years, it has been that the expellees themselves are no longer “viewed by the rest of German society as backward-looking, even crypto-Fascist.”46 There are welcome signs that the expulsions, once regarded as a question of interest only to the Right, may cease to become a political football between the parties. A number of prominent figures on the German left, including Peter Glotz, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and Helga Hirsch, were outspoken supporters of the Center Against Expulsions, while leading politicians like Otto Schily of the Social Democrats and Antje Vollmar of the Greens have acknowledged that they and their fellow Germans who had “looked away from the crimes of the expulsions” out of discomfort or a sense that the scale of German wartime atrocities made them unmentionable by comparison had failed to do justice either to the expellees themselves or to history.47 The retirement from active politics in September 2010 of Erika Steinbach—a polarizing figure, if one without whom the Center Against Expulsions would probably never have come into being—may mark the point at which the question of how this episode is to be remembered ceases primarily to be a political one, and begins to be taken up seriously, as it should, by historians and scholars.
As Hans Rothfels—a figure who himself exemplifies the complexity and paradoxicality of the expulsions—put it more than half a century ago, the only context in which the history of this era can be told is “in its horrifying totality.” A distinguished historian of Jewish antecedents, Rothfels was forced to flee Germany for his life after his arrest during Kristallnacht in 1938; fifteen years later, when he returned from exile, he was to lend his talents to the Dokumentation der Vertreibung project. The many commentators, both at home and abroad, who fear that the Center Against Expulsions project might easily degenerate into an exercise in German self-pity or a display of decontextualized atrocity stories have valid concerns that ought not to be dismissed. There are no logical or moral grounds for privileging the history of the postwar expulsions over that of the as yet uncommemorated massive expulsions by Germans of Poles and other Untermenschen during the war, far less over the memory of the millions of Jews, Soviets, and others who lost their lives in the course of Germany’s demented wartime killing sprees. Rather, the focus of any historical or commemorative treatment of the expulsions, as with the other and greater tragedies of the era, must remain squarely on the human person, which both in 1939–45 and 1945–47 was reduced to an abstract category rather than recognized as an all too vulnerable individual. As Stefan Wolff rightly says, this is “a debate that should essentially be about reconciliation and forgiveness.”48 The closer the debate approaches that ideal, and the more energetically it works to oppose “a culture built around mutual recrimination and one-sided interpretations of the past,” the more likely it is to do justice to all those who, during and after the war, were treated by the governments exercising control over them not as persons “born free and equal in dignity and rights,” but merely as instruments, representatives, or proxies of the collectivities to which they were declared to belong.49
CONCLUSION
Late in 1947, as the organized expulsions of Germans were coming to an end, the Allied Control Council—Germany’s temporary four-power government—invited its Prisoners of War and Displaced Persons Directorate to undertake a study of “the whole question of the transfers of population into Germany,” for the purpose of determining how these might better be managed in the future. The response of the U.S. officials who had administered the transfers was not long in coming. On the basis of their experience gained in organizing, supervising, and dealing with the impact of mass expulsions,
we recommend that the Control Council declare its opposition to all future compulsory population transfers, particularly the forcible removal of persons from places which have been their homes for generations, and that the Control Council refuse, in the future, to accept into Germany any persons so transferred, excepting only repatriated German prisoners of war and persons who were formerly domiciled in Germany.
In formulating this recommendation … we have considered the moral and humanitarian aspect of the injustices done to masses of people when an element of a population is forcibly uprooted from long-established homes, has its property expropriated without redress, and is superimposed upon another population already suffering from hunger, insufficient shelter, lack of productive employment and want of social, medical and educational institutions. We have considered that any course of action other than that recommended above would be to invite just condemnation on grounds of economic, social and religious injustices to the persons being transfe
rred, to the present population of Germany and to the populations of nations surrounding Germany.1
Their British counterparts had already arrived at a similar conclusion. If any future changes should be made to Germany’s frontiers at a peace conference, they declared, a rule should be laid down that “Any territories which may be taken over from Germany … [must be] taken over with the whole population living there at the present time.”2 For the Anglo-Americans, then, enthusiasm for the potentialities of forcible transfer of peoples did not survive its encounter with reality. As the U.S. authorities discovered, this had not lived up to its billing as a quick, clean, and final method of dealing with minority problems. Rather, it turned out that “a tremendous economic and social burden ha[d] been transferred” along with the people, and a job that the expelling governments had finished “is really just beginning for us.”3
Subsequent scholarship has borne out the Western Allies’ rueful postwar verdict. While the supposed benefits of mass expulsions remained nebulous, the costs were all too apparent. On the most conservative of estimates, hundreds of thousands of expellees—most of whom, if they conformed to the demographic profile of the transferred population as a whole, were women and children—had lost their lives. Millions more were reduced to penury, without the assets they had lost necessarily enriching those who had taken possession of them. The economies of entire regions were disrupted, and two-thirds of a century later the damage done has not yet been repaired. The legacy of bitterness, recrimination, and mutual suspicion between Germany and her neighbors to the east and south has lasted as long, and shows no signs of diminishing in the immediate future.
In light of these facts, it seems extraordinary that the expulsions can still today find scholarly defenders prepared to assert that however inhumane they proved to be, they were nonetheless justified by their results. Three arguments are commonly advanced. In the first, hatred of the Volksdeutsche by their non-German neighbors is claimed to have reached such a pitch by 1945 that a radical separation was unavoidable if their wholesale massacre was to be prevented. In the second, their removal is credited with having prevented further European conflicts. And in the third, the ethnic Germans are said to have been properly deported as a just act of punishment for their atrocious conduct prior to and during the war. None of these stands up well in the face of detailed examination.
The “inevitability” thesis is the one most often propounded, probably because it avoids difficult questions about the morality or wisdom of the operation by explaining it as the product of a unique historical situation which can only be judged on its own terms. “It is hard to imagine, in 1945,” the historian Włodzimierz Borodziej has recently opined, “any realistic alternatives to the displacement of the Germans.”4 Why this should have been so was stated baldly by Edward Taborsky, Beneš’s legal counselor and later Czechoslovak ambassador to Sweden, in a letter to the Times in 1944. The Czechoslovak and Polish peoples, he declared, “simply will not tolerate any longer the presence of any large German minority in their states.” For these people to remain would expose them to “extermination” and at best to a period of “prolonged oppression. Thus even on ethical grounds it is better—for the German minorities themselves—to accept the method of the transfer.”5 Beneš himself offered the same justification when he warned a Times journalist in March 1945 that “The alternative [to expulsions] would not be humane. It would be a pity if we were penalized for being civilized.”6 The reasoning behind this argument is, to say the least, curious. When, to look no further for an example, Muslims were being driven out of northern and eastern Bosnia in 1992 because of the local Serb majority’s resolve no longer to abide their presence, few non-Serb voices could be found to suggest that the operation was defensible on both practical and moral grounds because it would at least prevent their physical annihilation. Michael Ignatieff, who observed a later invocation of the “inevitability thesis” by all sides during the Yugoslav civil wars, explains that its seductiveness and popularity derives precisely from its function as “a moral vocabulary of self-exoneration.” Because of the greater crimes of the other side, ethical questions do not arise and “all action is compelled by tragic necessity…. Because the other side started it first. Because the other side are beasts and understand no language but violence and reprisal. And so on. Everyone in a nationalist war speaks in the language of fate, compulsion, and moral abdication.”7
The claim that no power on earth could have compelled the majority populations to acquiesce in the continued presence in their midst of the ethnic Germans has been asserted by its proponents as though it were a self-evident proposition, carrying conviction by mere assertion. This is remarkable inasmuch as the weight of the evidence that exists points in the opposite direction. Contrary to overheated wartime predictions that a bloodbath would ensue in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere the moment the tables were turned, the aftermath of V-E Day witnessed practically no spontaneous violence against Germans at all. The only noteworthy exception, the hunting of Germans through the streets of Prague on May 10, 1945, took place in the exceptional context of a bloody popular rising of which the killings of civilians were essentially a continuation. Even these soon came to an end. Only two significant episodes in which the initiative for violence against the Germans came from below occurred thereafter: the Brno “death march” a full three weeks later, and the Ústí nad Labem massacre a month after that. Both occurred, moreover, in circumstances in which soldiers and police not only took no action to preserve law and order, but themselves joined forces with and assisted those who undermined them. While massive violence and terror were part and parcel of the expulsions, they were overwhelmingly the work of agents of the state, acting under orders. Indeed, there is much more documentary evidence, especially in Czechoslovakia, of policemen and soldiers complaining about ordinary citizens’ failure to perceive the importance of proceeding ruthlessly and decisively against the Germans than of the need to restrain them. That so little spontaneous violence took place, even after the Czechoslovak people had been exposed to months of radio broadcasts from government ministers in London some of which are uncomfortably reminiscent of the transmissions of Radio Mille Collines in Rwanda half a century later, suggests that central Europeans’ powers of self-control were rather greater than they are normally credited with possessing. Furthermore, by 1947, in both Czechoslovakia and Poland, the respective governments moved from an expulsionist to an assimilationist solution for their remaining German minorities, even to the point of forbidding them to leave and fastening local citizenship upon them—in many cases against their will.8 There is nothing to suggest that these elements of the German population differed from their expelled counterparts in terms of their wartime records; in most cases, the only criterion cited for permitting (or compelling) them to remain was their usefulness to the postwar Czechoslovak or Polish economies. Yet their continued presence failed to generate violence or even significant protest from their immediate neighbors, once again indicating that much of this “uncontrollable” popular hatred on the part of majority populations was in practice more easily contained than is usually alleged.
In addition, the subsequent histories of these countries hardly leads to the conclusion that they had suddenly become ungovernable or unmanageable. In each of them, an unrepresentative and unpopular communist régime was quickly established in the late 1940s without provoking any violent response at all. The notion that central Europeans would not under any circumstances tolerate the presence of Germans but could easily be brought to acquiesce in the elimination of their national sovereignty, the eradication of their human rights and civil liberties, the extinction of their claim to the inviolability of their persons and properties, and their subjection to a quasi-totalitarian foreign overlordship, if true, raises urgent problems of interpretation of the extraordinary workings of these societies that historians have not even begun to address, far less resolve.
The frequently reiterated assertion that t
he clearance of German populations from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary has in some way prevented the outbreak of World War III is a proposition so obviously false as hardly to deserve rebuttal. What made for peace in Europe was a lengthy occupation of Germany by both superpowers, which in itself offers a complete explanation of why, so long as it continued, no danger was to be apprehended from that quarter. The successful rehabilitation of the German political system, the inculcation of democratic habits and instincts among the people, and the binding together of postwar Germany within a larger European union are nearly as important factors in the transformation that has taken place in the character of European nationstate interactions since 1945. In these circumstances, the continuing presence of significant ethnic German minorities in Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Russia has not threatened the peace of the continent. There is no reason to suppose that if others had remained in their ancestral homelands a greater menace was to be apprehended.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 54