Lastly, the suggestion that the ethnic Germans were, as presumed fifth columnists before the war or eager Nazi collaborators during it, especially if not uniquely deserving of punishment is no easier to sustain. As we have seen, a rule specifying a minority nationality’s unconditional duty of loyalty to a state to which it has been unwillingly attached that can be depended upon to vindicate the Czech or Slovak nation’s stance in 1918 and to condemn that of the Sudetendeutsche twenty years later is difficult to formulate. As for their wartime record, evidence is scanty that it was any worse than, or different from, that of the German people as a whole. Unquestionably that is quite bad enough, and I should not wish to be interpreted as contending otherwise. But even if all Germans, ethnic or Reich citizens, were equally guilty, not all Germans were equally severely punished. Why the Volksdeutsche, who if the worst that can be said about them is true came late to Nazism, should have been imprisoned, expropriated, and deported when the people of the country that originated Nazism and exported it abroad by the most brutal means suffered none of these things is hard to square with notions of strict and impartial justice.
More to the point, it conveniently elides the wartime record of the majority populations, which itself did not always bear close examination. Many Slovaks, for example, bore little less responsibility for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Conference than did the Sudeten Germans. For most of the Second World War, Slovakia was a German client state; Slovak troops took part in the invasion of Poland alongside their German allies in September 1939, and of the Soviet Union in June 1941. With only a single dissenting voice in the Slovak parliament, the great majority of the country’s Jewish population was expelled to German-controlled territory, from which only a comparative handful returned alive. Yet few Slovaks were punished after the war for these offenses, and none expelled. Besides, at a more mundane level the postwar meaning of “collaboration” was highly variable, with the same actions—or inactions—attracting either official toleration or condign penalties based on one’s ethnicity. During the Great War of 1914–18, J. R. Sanborn points out, some of the inhabitants of central and southeastern Europe “held affinities for one occupying force or another … but most people wisely tried to keep their heads down, to stay out of danger when they could, and, when all else failed, to run away. Nothing got you on the end of a rope faster than taking sides in a fluid war with an uncertain outcome.”9 In the Second World War also, this inglorious but time-tested formula for survival was the most popular strategy practiced by ethnic Germans, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and most other peoples who were given the opportunity to do so by their Nazi overlords, or, in eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, their scarcely less vicious Stalinist counterparts.10 (Tragically, it was an option denied to Jews, Sinti, and Roma.) For only the Germans, though, was it adjudged a “passive war crime” at the end of the conflict.
That such a thing may indeed exist—or at the least, that silence in the face of evil confers a degree of moral culpability—is a suggestion not readily to be dismissed. Christianity is by no means the only creed to speak of “sins of omission” as decisions that must in the end be answered for. But as Victor Gollancz, Dorothy Buxton, and others pointed out, this is a doctrine that cuts both ways. The responsibility of Nazi-era Germans for the actions of their government must not be ignored or forgotten. But between 1945 and 1947, and in some places still later, central Europeans saw their German neighbors—almost all of whom were noncombatants, more than half of whom were female, and many of whom were children—made to wear identifying badges that marked them out for maltreatment; arbitrarily detained in camps and prisons; beaten, raped, or killed with official acquiescence; denied food, medical treatment, and other normal amenities of existence; despoiled; and, in the end, deported. Those who witnessed these scenes had seen them before in the recent past, and knew what they meant. Yet it cannot be said that they were vociferous in their condemnation of such actions, even though they ran few personal risks in doing so. In some parts of Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1945, to be sure, it was an offense, punishable by a fine of up to Kĉs 5,000 ($100) or imprisonment for up to two weeks, to intervene on behalf of Germans.11 But this was not a very draconian punishment, nor was it in force in most places and at most times. No concentration camps awaited those very few Czechoslovaks, like Přemsyl Pitter, who found the scenes with which they were confronted on a daily basis incompatible with their consciences. In the event, though, the threat of public condemnation or social ostracism was more than sufficient to persuade doubters to keep their qualms and scruples to themselves.
If this was true of Poles or Czechs, who had at all events the recent memory of German occupation, in all its cruelty and terror, with which to draw comparisons, it was still more true of the Western Allies, whose legal and moral responsibility for what occurred has far too often gone overlooked. One of the most disturbing aspects of the expulsions is how little those Britons and Americans directly involved in their oversight were disturbed by them. The Anglo-Russian journalist Stefan Schimanski, who took second place to no one in his condemnation of Germany and indeed of Germans during the war, was one of the few to go to see for himself the squalid reality of Operation Swallow in progress in the British zone during the spring of 1946. After witnessing the conditions in which the Polish authorities had transported the expellees of the first Swallow train to arrive at Pöppendorf, he recalled, “when I sat in the officers’ mess at the camp I could not quite grasp all that had happened. I knew that no S.S. could have outdone such a performance … ‘What I cannot understand,’ I said to the officers sitting at the table, ‘is who would have lost if another two carriages had been added to the trains. Or a couple of hundred people taken off the train? Who would have gained one way or the other?’”12 A few weeks later, Schimanski came across a British soldier “supervising the evacuation of expellees at Travemünde [who] said it was the ‘beastliest job’ he had ever been asked to do.”13 Such a reaction was exceptional. More typical was the response of Lieutenant Colonel Growse, head of the British Liaison Team at Kalawsk, who upon being relieved in May 1946 wrote of the fond memories he and his soldiers had of the part they had played in the operation. “We shall look back on it as an intensely interesting experience.”14 The thought that they might have taken part in anything morally compromising, far less monstrous, never crossed his mind. The same was not quite true of the chief expulsion officer of the U.S. Army in Czechoslovakia, Colonel John Fye, who wrote that the operation in which he had taken part “could not avoid being cruel in many respects” and drew in “innocent people who had never raised so much as a word of protest against the Czechoslovak people.” Women and children, he testified, were routinely “thrown into assembly camps, many of which were little better than the ex-German concentration camps.”15 Yet these stirrings of unease did not prevent Fye from accepting a decoration from the Prague government for his valuable services “in expelling Germans from Czechoslovakia.”16 In the end he, and other bureaucrats and technocrats involved in planning and executing the operation, took refuge in a form of the “instrumental reason” described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno—coincidentally, at the very moment the expulsions were at their height.17
The moral and ethical questions raised by the population transfers are exceptionally complex and difficult, and it is not possible to deal with them exhaustively here. But it is clear that many among the Allied leaderships and peoples derived a degree of vicarious satisfaction from the anguish the expellees were undergoing. They also regarded the deliberately cruel way in which the expulsions were often conducted as not only forgivable but cathartic for the expelling societies themselves—of which Major Denis Healey’s lip-smacking anticipation at the 1945 Labour Party Conference of the ordeals the Germans were soon to endure was a typical expression. There is no doubt, as David Curp has said, that the spectacle of “the Herrenvolk themselves (or at least their women, children and elderly) being driven from their homes in
misery provided a certain grim satisfaction for many Poles who had endured years of racially motivated contempt (punctuated by terror and grief) from their Nazi occupiers.”18 But grievously as these societies had been physically and psychically wounded by their experience of Nazi occupation, the suggestion that they could recover their collective self-esteem only by way of a display of their own capacity for violence and injustice is both psychologically unsound and ethically bankrupt.
If the theory of cathartic cruelty does not hold water logically or morally, still less does it do so legally. Arguably the most objectionable of the legislative instruments handed down at the time of the expulsions was Czechoslovakia’s Law No. 115 of 1946, which retroactively legalized “just reprisals for actions of the [German] occupation forces and their accomplices … even when such acts may otherwise be punishable by law.” This statute remains in force to the present day; its effect is to block investigation, far less prosecution or punishment, of any of the thousands of murders, tortures, and rapes perpetrated against Germans prior to October 28, 1945. Disturbingly, the Frowein opinion of 2002, while conceding in unusually frank language that Law No. 115 was “a blatant violation of the guaranty of human rights, the rule of law and the obligation of the state to protect all individuals on its territory against violence,” went on to argue on the basis of the “cathartic cruelty” principle that whether or not it was repealed, the immunity it offered perpetrators should continue in effect. “It should of course be added immediately,” the Frowein opinion said, “that this legislation was adopted after a long period of harsh occupation during which many civilians had been brutally murdered or injured.” Most of the German perpetrators had escaped justice for their part in these crimes. Nobody, for example, had ever been prosecuted for the Lidice massacre. To be sure, if one of those responsible were to be identified today, it would be appropriate to prosecute him even at this late date. The Frowein opinion, however, doubted that “people who have committed crimes more than 50 years ago should now stand trial after they have had the confidence throughout their life that they could not be prosecuted for such crimes.” Again, it emphasized that what made the two situations different was that abuses directed against Germans “were actions in reaction to what had happened to the Czechoslovak population by Germans between 1938 and 1945. Although most of the victims were innocent it cannot be overlooked that the violence committed against Germans at that time was in particular a reaction to what had happened during German occupation.”19
This, however, cannot be correct. In the first place, without in any way understating the immensely traumatic effect of the German occupation, it is far from self-evident that the violent, abusive, and even sadistic behavior of so many Czechoslovaks—and citizens of any of the other expelling states—toward defenseless civilians from 1945 onward was indeed an expression of a completely extraneous impulse that could neither be resisted nor controlled. In the second, the proposition that culpability for gross human rights abuses is reduced or eliminated by the perpetrators’ prior experience of victimization would open almost all such episodes to similar pleas in mitigation. The Nazis themselves, indeed, routinely claimed that their atrocities were justified acts of retaliation for previous injuries they had suffered at the hands of their enemies: the continuation of the Allied blockade after the Great War, which had resulted in many civilian deaths; discrimination or persecution of German minorities in neighboring countries between the wars; and so forth. These arguments have rightly been dismissed as self-serving rationalizations. Lastly, to suggest that some grave offenses under international law ought not to be investigated or prosecuted because of one’s sympathy for the perpetrators and/or lack of sympathy for the victims is to embark along a very dangerous path. To do so can only lead to a two-tier system of justice, in which crimes against those with whom we identify are sternly punished and similar offenses against those with whom we do not are excused, minimized, or ignored. Such a practice is not in fact a system of justice at all, but its negation.
In this context, attempts by commentators like Elazar Barkan to assign German expellees to what he describes as “the category of less deserving victims, or even undeserving victims” have particularly troubling ramifications.20 Claims especially by Sudetendeutsch expellees for public acknowledgment of their past trauma are in his view “part of a long term effort in Germany to gain parity through suffering, by decontextualising and ahistoricising the victims.”21 To prevent such an outcome from occurring, Barkan raises the possibility of treating “undeserving victims” as groups “whose suffering must be accepted as part of the historical process,” and in respect of whose ill-treatment “the obligation of amends or of reparation” ought not to apply.22 A compelling argument can undoubtedly be made that attempts at this remove in history to reverse the consequences of the expulsions and expropriations would only have the effect of adding new injustices to old ones. And there is every justification for continuing watchfulness to ensure that the history of the expulsions shall not be exploited, now or at any time in the future, for the purpose of minimizing or obscuring the far more horrific atrocities for which Germany in the 1940s bears sole responsibility. But Barkan offers no indication of how his definition of the category of “undeserving victim,” who according to this formulation may be abused or killed on the basis of their shared nationality or ethnicity with evildoers without incurring “the obligation of amends or of reparation,” is to be reconciled with any meaningful conception of human rights. Even less clear is the means by which this putative two-tiered concept of human worth is to be confined safely to the sphere of the historical past, and not made the basis for equally invidious distinctions between peoples in the present.
That these are not purely academic questions but ones with continuing relevance for our own time is demonstrated by the recent revival of interest in mass population transfers, and the postwar expulsions in particular, as providing a way out of intractable minority problems. The most widely read expression of this school of thought is a 1996 manifesto by a Boston University political scientist, Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, that seeks to prove that whether we like it or not, mass expulsions do provide a permanent solution, particularly in situations where everything else has failed and “‘the grim necessity of a population transfer,’ in Beneš’s words, is the only remaining option.” And indeed, for Bell-Fialkoff the removal of Germans from Czechoslovakia stands as the preeminent example of both the practicability and the effectiveness of this method of solving international or intranational disputes: “It goes without saying that the transfer has to be conducted in a humane, well-organized manner, like the transfer of Germans from Czechoslovakia by the Allies in 1945–47.”23
Unsurprisingly, the bibliography of Bell-Fialkoff’s book contains not a single title in the Czech or German languages; his total neglect of these sources no doubt accounts for his ability to sustain this remarkable characterization of what occurred in the Czechoslovak borderlands after the war. But he is far from alone in seeing this episode as providing a model to be followed by others. The Czech prime minister, Miloš Zeman, did so in 2002 when he commended the deportation of the Sudetendeutsche to the attention of the Israeli government in its approach to the problem of the West Bank and Gaza.24 Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli deputy premier, is already on record as supporting a somewhat milder version of this program, in which Israeli Arabs are to be stripped of their citizenship and transferred to the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority against their will in the interest of what is professed to be the greater good. Elsewhere, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has argued the political residue of the former Yugoslavia can only be stabilized by “drawing new borders and transferring populations.” The UN, backed by the United States, he contends, should compulsorily relocate about a million Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats to create “ethnically homogeneous states” in the Balkans. “Wouldn’t it make better sense,” he asked, “to move populations peacefully rather than at the end of a rifle
barrel?”25 In a similar vein, James Nickel of the University of Miami has attempted to introduce a distinction between “genocidal ethnic cleansing” on the one hand, and forced population transfers that are “motivated by a sincere desire for a stable peace” on the other. The latter, he suggests, can be regarded as “providing the outline of an exception clause in an international norm prohibiting ethnic cleansing,” and, notwithstanding the “coercion or force involved,” should be considered acceptable “if there were a compelling purpose and no major human rights violations or other major moral obstacles were present.”26 Chaim Kaufmann, Bruce Clark, Daniel Byman, and Michael Mann are other prominent scholars who argue for the continuing relevance of mass expulsions to international conflict resolution, often—as in Kaufmann’s case—by sedulously avoiding any mention, far less consideration, of their disastrous record in postwar central Europe.27 From the other side of the aisle, Stephen Ryan has subjected these proposals for “utopian engineering” to a searching critique. “Far from being a way of avoiding violence, it is difficult not to see ‘preventive resettlement’ as a violent act in its own right.” Nor is it obvious, he cogently observes, that forced population transfers conducted by an international authority must necessarily be more humane or effective than those carried out by individual states.28
As the episodes examined in this book show, however, the weightiest objection to population transfers as an instrument of international policy is more fundamental yet. In a nutshell, expulsions are not practicable unless they are carried out quickly; and if they are carried out quickly, they cannot be carried out humanely. Even under the best conditions imaginable, as the British Inter-Departmental Committee report made clear in 1944, mass expulsions are second only to wars in the dislocation, economic upheaval, and social unrest that they produce. Conducting them according to “orderly and humane” criteria is immensely costly and requires many years, if not decades, to accomplish. Once they have been completed, they must be continuously policed for an even longer period to ensure that the displaced population does not seek to return.
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War Page 55