Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

by Anne Applebaum

  In the end, they became objects of special interest not because of anything they’d done but because the secret police got hold of a written summary of their wartime resistance activities. Then they were watched even more carefully, as Szent-Miklósy described:

  In the early fall [of 1946] my neighbor sublet the room adjacent to my living room to the Military Political section. From there they bored a hole through the wall and placed a microphone. As the hole lay behind my heavy Dutch colonial couch, the receiver did not pick up the voices in the room very clearly. Then my telephone was adapted to transmit the voices, and another microphone was placed in the front hall where, on a Biedermeier sofa, sat our neighbor’s teenage daughter with her suitor, an MPS [military police] agent disguised as a university student.82

  Szent-Miklósy was arrested in December 1946. He was taken to the secret police headquarters on Andrássy Street, where he was tortured. He was made to stand with his forehead angled against the wall and his arms outstretched for hours, and forced to shout, “I am the murderer of my wife and my mother,” both of whom, he had been told, were also under arrest. He was put on trial, along with a large group of coconspirators. All were accused of agitating to overthrow “the democratic state” and jailed for ten years. During the trial Szent-Miklósy “confessed,” at great length, to crimes he had never committed. His arrest was a kind of preemptive strike, typical of that time: he and his circle hadn’t actually done anything of any significance—but the authorities feared they might.

  A similarly preemptive strike against the independent-minded clergy followed soon after. The chief victim of that round was a charismatic and energetic Franciscan monk, Father Szaléz Kiss. Father Kiss ran a large and successful Christian youth group called Kedim, in and around the town of Gyöngyös, just fifty miles east of Budapest. Over the course of 1945, the new Hungarian secret police began to take a special interest in Gyöngyös because the communists had done particularly badly there in the elections of that year, and because the peasant-based Smallholders’ Party had done particularly well.

  Their Soviet mentors became even more interested when, beginning in September 1945, unknown gunmen murdered several Red Army soldiers stationed in the region. Under pressure to do something, the new Hungarian secret police launched one of their first big investigations. They arrested and detained some sixty people, including high-school-aged members of Kedim, and interrogated them all at great length. Their goal was to establish an elaborate spiderweb of connections: between Kedim and the Smallholders’ Party, between the Smallholders’ Party and the “Anglo-Saxon powers,” between the U.S. embassy and Father Kiss, and between Father Kiss and the young men who allegedly murdered the Russian soldiers. Put together, these links were said to expose a “fascist terror conspiracy group” that was, at least in the imagination of the secret policemen, attempting to bring back the old regime.

  The record of those interrogations, neatly preserved in a Budapest archive, does not make easy reading. One of the central suspects, a young law student named Jószef Antal, first denied everything. Later, he made a long and garbled confession, probably after having been tortured. Antal, who was described by a friend as having “participated in the resistance against the German occupation,” was a crucial link in the spiderweb, since he worked in the local Smallholders’ Party headquarters and was at the same time an acquaintance of Father Kiss. In his rambling statement, he recalled a conversation with a Smallholder politician about the “coming war” between Russia and the Anglo-Saxon powers, and gave the impression that he had already started organizing for this “armed conflict” in collaboration with Father Kiss. There are allusions to some guns and grenades being held at the Smallholders’ Party offices, as well as to a weapons store “in a castle” known to Father Kiss.83

  Immediately afterward, Antal retracted this confession. But an equally garbled statement was also obtained from Otto Kizmann, a seventeen-year-old Kedim member who confessed to having assassinated a Russian soldier. Kizmann, who was also probably tortured, went much further. He said that Father Kiss had “showed us the business cards of influential persons who would bring us weapons,” that the priest had “told us to get weapons for ourselves until the foreign shipments arrive,” and that he had declared that “killing a Russian was not a sin.” Similarly wild tales were also extracted from a friend of Kizmann’s, László Bodnár, also aged seventeen, who claimed Father Kiss had promised he would help them escape Hungary by airplane.84

  Father Kiss himself did not confess to any of these unlikely crimes. On the contrary, he told his interrogators: “I did everything I could to convince the young people to hide their weapons, and not to commit murder, because this was the most hideous crime.” He had, he said, once met a representative of the U.S. embassy, a man who had given him some American newspapers. He had never received, and never sought to receive, any American weapons. He was condemned to death anyway, as were Kizmann, Bodnár, and a sixteen-year-old boy. The sentences were carried out in December 1946. Other members of the “conspiracy” went to jail or, in a few cases, to prison camps in the Soviet Union.

  The “Father Kiss conspiracy,” like the arrest of Gisela Gneist in Germany or the sixteen Home Army leaders in Poland, was a harbinger of what was to come. The investigation into it was clearly inspired by the Soviet military authorities, as many later investigations would be. As was common in Soviet investigations, links were drawn between different organizations—Kedim, the Smallholders’ Party, the church, the U.S. embassy—based on chance encounters, distant acquaintanceship, or the imagination of investigators. The shadow of “fascism” was cast over everyone caught in the net. The victims were mostly people in their teens and twenties, an age group that would remain of enormous interest to secret policemen across the bloc in years to come.

  In the spring of 1946, at the time of the sentencing, the case also received massive publicity. On May 4, the Hungarian communist party’s newspaper, Szabad Nép, published a photograph of Father Kiss in handcuffs, under the headline “Fascist Conspirators Confessed and Pleaded Guilty of Murders.” An editorial alongside was entitled, simply, “Hang Them.”85 The case was also reported in the noncommunist press, but with greater care. At first, Kis Újság (Little Gazette), the newspaper of the Smallholders’ Party, at that time the largest party in the Hungarian parliament, simply published the official police press release. The following day, it reported the words of the Smallholder leader and Hungarian prime minister, Ferenc Nagy, who declared that “if the information published in the official police communiqués proves even partly true then we demand the strictest investigation and the harshest punishment for the guilty.”86 A few days later, he referred to the incident less ambivalently, as a “fascist conspiracy.” Not for many years did anyone publicly suggest that the story might not have any truth to it at all.

  Other cases followed, each accompanied by equally lurid propaganda, and each supported by equally ambiguous evidence. Internments came in consecutive waves, from 1945 onward, without a break. First came the “war criminals,” fascists, and anyone presumed to be a fascist; then military and civilian personnel from the Horthy regime; then members of legal political parties, especially the Smallholders; then social democrats; then communist party members themselves. Although the definition of an “enemy of the state” changed over time, the mechanisms to deal with these enemies were put in place right at the very beginning.87

  Theoretically, in 1946 Hungary was—like Czechoslovakia or eastern Germany at the same time—a democracy. The government was run by the majority Smallholders’ Party, who were not communists. They ruled in coalition with communists, social democrats, and others. But the Hungarian communist party, not the Hungarian state, controlled the security organs, just as the Czechoslovak communist party controlled the Czech security organs, the German communist party would control the East German security organs, and the Polish communist party controlled the Polish security organs. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, their cont
rol over the secret police gave minority communist parties an outsized influence over political events. Through the selective use of terror, they could send clear messages to their opponents, and to the general public, about what kinds of behavior and what kinds of people were no longer acceptable in the new regime.

  Chapter 6

  ETHNIC CLEANSING

  The Bolshevik party is a model of the genuine international working-class party. From the day it was created it has fought nationalism in every form.

  —Educational pamphlet, published in Moscow, 1950

  I came back to my native village for the first time in 1965. Once I had known every path there, every crooked tree. For the first few minutes, I didn’t know what I was looking at. Tears filled my eyes, for a long time I couldn’t say a word. They had plowed up our beautiful Nietreba and planted a forest …

  —Ivan Bishko, a Ukrainian deported from his village in 19461

  ONE OF THE myths that the international communist movement propagated about itself was the myth of its own indifference to national and ethnic distinctions. Communists were internationalists by definition, “soldiers in a single international army” with no national divisions between them. Raphael Samuel, son of a militant British communist and later a party member himself, once described the communism of his childhood as “universalist”:

  Though allowing for the existence of national peculiarities (we only half believed in them), we thought of the transition from capitalism to socialism as being “identical” in content everywhere. Communism, like medieval Christendom, was one and indivisible, an international fellowship of faith …2

  In reality, there was no wartime leader so keen to manipulate and encourage national conflict as Stalin—with the exception, of course, of Hitler himself. Lenin appointed Stalin “Commissar of Nationalities” in 1917, and the future Generalissimo acquired an expertise and interest in the issue that he never lost. From the 1930s onward he directed waves of terror against minority ethnic groups living in the USSR, among them Poles, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Volga Germans, and, in the final years before his death, Jews. Following the Nazi invasion in 1941, he also drew heavily on Russian national and nationalist symbols—traditional army uniforms, the Orthodox church—to inspire “internationalist” Soviet citizens to fight the Germans. He understood the political uses of nationalism very well: emotional calls for the defense of the motherland inspired the soldiers of the Red Army far more than any Marxist, internationalist language could ever have done.

  Ethnic conflict was also written into the agreement signed by the three Allied leaders at Potsdam in July 1945. A later generation of European leaders would react with horror at the notion of “ethnic cleansing.” But Stalin, Truman, and Attlee positively encouraged the mass transfer of populations. Their Potsdam agreement blandly called for the “transfer to Germany of German populations … remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary,” a sentence that affected millions of people.3 By agreeing to move Poland’s border with the USSR to the west, they also tacitly accepted that there would be transfers of millions of Poles to Poland from Ukraine, and millions of Ukrainians to Ukraine from Poland. Although transfers of Hungarians from Czechoslovakia and Slovaks from Hungary did not appear in the Potsdam agreements, nobody in the international community objected very much when they took place. For its part, the Soviet Union had already presided over the mass deportation of some 70,000 ethnic Germans from Romania to the USSR in January 1945, six months before the Potsdam treaty was signed.4

  The only additional provision made at Potsdam was that “any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.” But by the time the treaty was signed, these “orderly and humane” population transfers had already degenerated into chaotic and cruel mass movements of people. Ethnic conflict—deep, bitter, violent ethnic conflict, between many different kinds of groups in many countries—was Hitler’s true legacy in Eastern Europe, so much so that any discussion of the expulsions of Germans from western Poland, the Sudetenland, Hungary, and Romania after 1945 has to begin by recalling what had happened in the previous five years. To repeat: the object of the German occupation of Poland had been to destroy Polish civilization, to turn the Poles into an illiterate workforce, to eliminate the Polish educated class. Poles had been deported from historically Polish cities such as Poznań and Łódź, as well as from Gdynia, the new port city that the Polish state had constructed in the 1920s. They had been replaced by German colonists, had become second-class citizens, had in some places lost the right to speak Polish in the street or to send their children to Polish schools. Thousands wound up working either as slave laborers in Germany or as prisoners in one of the dozens of slave labor camps the Germans constructed for that purpose on Polish territory.

  The occupation of the Czech lands was milder, though also deeply degrading. Throughout the country, historical monuments and statues had been removed, local leaders murdered, the very notion of nationhood mocked. The German occupation of Hungary at the end of the war was shorter, though also very cruel. Even the earlier periods of uneasy Hungarian-German and Romanian-German collaboration were humiliating for those populations, since collaboration with the Germans had so quickly evolved into domination by the Germans. Everywhere, the Holocaust left a terrible legacy of guilt and hatred, among Jews and non-Jews alike.

  Postwar tensions were worse in regions where local German ethnic populations had helped the Nazis maintain power. The Nazi party had secretly funded the fascist Sudeten German Party, which won 85 percent of the German ethnic vote in the Czech elections of 1938. The grateful Sudeten Germans had greeted their new Nazi rulers enthusiastically after the division of the country under the Munich agreement later that year, a fact much resented by the local Czechs.5 Some of the German inhabitants of the Polish city of Bydgoszcz—about a fifth of the prewar population—actively assisted the Nazis in their 1939 slaughter of the town’s leading citizens, including priests, teachers, and even Boy Scouts. That didn’t make them popular after the war either.6

  As a result of this recent history, the Eastern European desire for revenge against the German populations in their midst was understandable, perhaps even justifiable. But it was not always just. Not all Germans had been Nazis, and not all of them had turned on their neighbors. Many of them had lived peacefully beside Czechs or Hungarians, and had been good citizens of Czechoslovakia and Hungary for centuries. Others, such as the inhabitants of Lower Silesia and East Prussia—territories that were an undisputed part of prewar Germany and now belonged to Poland—lived in towns and villages that had been part of German states for centuries.

  For many individuals, the loss of their homes, furniture, livestock, and family heirlooms was a tragedy from which they would never recover. Yet the ethnic Germans were not treated as individuals. They were treated as Germans. Gerhard Gruschka, a young Silesian who had refused to join the Hitler Youth because it interfered with his duties as an altar boy, was kept in a labor camp near Katowice where he was forced, by Polish commanders, to sing the Horst Wessel song while they jeered.7 Ethnic Germans in Hungary who had been made to join the Wehrmacht against their will at the end of the war received the same arbitrary expulsion orders as those who had voluntarily joined the SS in 1943.8 Herta Kuhrig, the daughter of a German communist in the Sudetenland, was expelled from her home along with the daughters of German fascists.9 No distinctions were made between outright collaborators and committed antifascists, some of whom had suffered discrimination alongside the local population.

  Knowing how much they were hated, the first Germans left Eastern Europe in a hurry, long before expulsions began. There was nothing organized about this mass movement of millions of people, many of whom ran from their homes in a panic, only to find themselves immediately engulfed by battle or overwhelmed by cold and hunger. Tens of thousands tried to escape across the Baltic Sea, only to drown when their ships were sunk by Allied planes. The 100,000 Germans living in the city of Łódź—most of
them recent colonists—began to scramble out of the city on foot and on horseback on the morning of January 16, 1945, across roads and fields covered in snow. Many were caught in the Soviet bombardment of the city that began the same day.10 A few days later, Countess Marion Dönhoff began preparing to leave her family’s ancient estate in East Prussia. Most of her neighbors had not yet left: they had been waiting for a Nazi order for evacuation, which never came. As the Red Army approached with unexpected speed, the East Prussians began throwing possessions onto carts and pouring into the streets of Preußisch Holland (now Pasłęk), as Dönhoff remembered: “The town looked like a jammed turntable. The wagons had driven in from two sides and clogged up the whole thing and now there was no way to go either forward or backward.” She herself packed only “a saddlebag with toiletries, bandage material, and my old Spanish crucifix.” She ate a last meal, got up, left the food and dishes on the table, and went out of the house. She did not bother to lock the door behind her. She never went back.11

  The actual expulsions of the Germans, when they began a few months later, weren’t much better organized. The Czechs speak of the spring of 1945 as the time of “wild” expulsions, a word that doesn’t quite capture the depth of emotion surrounding these mass evictions. The prewar Czechoslovak president, Edvard Beneš, had advocated the deportation of ethnic Germans from his country ever since fleeing into exile in London in 1938. For seven years he had traveled to Moscow, London, and Washington trying to sell the idea. He had encouraged the deportation of Germans from Hungary too (in part so as to make way for the Hungarians he also hoped to expel from his own country). But despite these high-level discussions and advance preparations—and notwithstanding the “orderly and humane” instruction about to be issued from the Potsdam palace—the first wave of expulsions from the Sudetenland took place in a maelstrom of fury, vengeance, nationalism, and popular rage.