When Liesabeth was released, she was issued with a passport with the Russified name ‘Maria Albertowa Klimajte’. She returned to East Prussia in the hope of finding a family member alive, having no idea that all the last remaining Germans had been transported out over ten years before. She discovered some time later that her sister Christel had starved to death in the hunger winter of 1947. Her brother, Manfred, had been transported out to live with his father, who had been released from a prisoner of war camp. The Russian authorities simply told her that if any of her family had survived they might be in Germany, but more importantly that East Prussia was a restricted zone and as she had no papers she had to get out. She returned to Siberia and eventually found work. In 1975 she discovered, through the Red Cross in Moscow, that it was possible to find out the whereabouts of any surviving family members. She was amazed when she found out her brother and father survived. The Soviet Union finally allowed her to leave in the autumn of 1976, by which time she had a nine-year-old daughter of her own, although by now she had forgotten most of her German. Arriving at the train station in Germany she recalls, ‘I stood on the platform with my daughter’s hand in mine. Suddenly I heard “Liesabeth!” That was my real name, a name I had not heard called in many years. When I turned around and saw a tall man, I knew it was Manfred. I momentarily forgot my daughter and ran, I threw my arms around him; we were both shaking.’(54) Still, there was no happy end to Liesabeth’s endless tragedy. She regained her German, but found her fellow citizens had no understanding of her fate. She felt like a fish out of water and was unable to adjust to what for her seemed a strange environment, no matter how much her family tried to make her feel at home. Germany was now totally alien to her, the familiar surroundings of her East Prussia homeland having long since vanished. After a little over a year, much to the dismay of her family, she returned to Russia. Her story is one of millions of people whose suffering did not end in 1945 and whose lives were broken, not once but over and over again; not because they were Nazis but simply because they were Germans.
END GAME
Among all this murder and death, mass suicide became an epidemic in the Eastern territories. Pharmacists were handing out poison like it was aspirin. The actions of the invaders convinced many that Goebbel’s nightmarish propaganda scenarios of what would happen if the invasion of ‘barbarian hordes from the east’ succeeded, had indeed become a gruesome reality, and that Germans faced no future other than slavery, torture and death. As representatives of the Western Allies finally approached Berlin they were amazed and disgusted at the sight of thousands of bodies floating in the lakes around Berlin; most of these were women who had drowned themselves after being gang-raped by members of the Red Army.
By the time of the post-war Potsdam Conference in June 1945, Stalin was attempting to present the new facts on the ground in Eastern Europe with soothing assurances to Churchill and Truman, telling them that, ‘All the Germans had flown.’ But estimates show that only half of the approximately 12 million Germans living in Germany’s eastern territiories east of the Oder-Neisse attempted that journey; 2 million having died at the hands of the Red Army and vengeful Poles, and the rest remained behind to await their fate.
In an observation made at Potsdam on 29th June 1945 a member of the American delegation stated:
German prisoners in Russian hands are estimated to number four to five million. When Breslau and Berlin surrendered the long grey green columns of prisoners were marched east downcast and fearful… towards huge depots near Leningrad, Moscow, Minsk, Stalingrad, Kiev, Kharkov and Sevastopol. All fit men had to march some twenty-two miles a day. Those physically handicapped went in handcarts or carts pulled by spare beasts… They will be made to rebuild the Russian towns and villages, which they destroyed. They will not return home until the work is completed.
When the Western Allies discovered the scale of the deportations of German civilians as well as military personnel, along with the wholesale dismantling of entire factories, which were being shipped East, Britain and the US protested. The Russians then produced a proclamation, signed by General Eisenhower a year earlier, ‘requiring that German authorities must carry out any measure of restitution, reinstatement, restoration, reparations, reconstruction, relief or rehabilitation as the Allied representatives might prescribe, to accomplish which the Germans must… provide such transportation, plant equipment and materials of all kinds, labour, personnel, specialists and other services for use in Germany or elsewhere as the Allied representatives may direct.’ Since the document did not require four power agreement, it allowed the Russians to act unilaterally. Upon seeing this, the Western Allies had no choice but to withdraw their protest.(55)
Robert Murphy, the political adviser to the American Military Government in Berlin, was horrified as he witnessed the stream of human misery fleeing west. On 12th October 1945 he wrote:
In the Lehrter railway station in Berlin alone our medical authorities state an average of ten have been dying daily from exhaustion, malnutrition and illness. In viewing the distress and despair of these wretches, in smelling the odour of their filthy condition, the mind reverts instantly to Dachau or Buchenwald. Here is retribution on a large scale, but practiced not on the Parteibonzen (Nazi Party bosses), but on women and children, the poor and infirm… Knowledge that they are victims of a harsh political decision carried out with the utmost ruthlessness and disregard for the humanities does not cushion the effect. The mind reverts to mass deportations, which horrified the world and brought upon the Nazis the odium that they so deserved. Those mass deportations engineered by the Nazis provided part of the moral basis on which we waged war and which gave strength to our cause. Now the situation is reversed. We find ourselves in the invidious position of being partners in this German enterprise and as partners inevitably sharing the responsibility… It would be most unfortunate were the record to indicate that we are participants to methods we have so often condemned in other instances.(56)
The Potsdam Conference stated, ‘It is not the intention of the Allies to… enslave the Germans,’ but their new masters in the East, the Poles, the Czechs and Russians clearly had other ideas.
HOW POLAND’S MODERN FRONTIERS CAME INTO BEING
Allied aims were not clear or united as to what should become of post-war Germany. The Atlantic Charterccxlii signed in December 1941 simply stated that, ‘The undersigned seek no territorial enlargements. Territorial changes can only follow from the free will of the peoples.’
After three visits to the US in 1942, the Polish Prime Minister in exile, General Sikorski, finally got a provisional agreement from the Americans that Poland should receive most of East Prussia, part of Eastern Pomerania and Upper Silesia. The remaining German territory east of the Oder-Neisse (Germany’s modern day eastern border) was to become a Polish occupation zone, much as the rest of Germany was going to be divided into occupation zones by the Russians, Brits and Americans (the French were only given a zone at the very last minute and primarily for reasons of spreading the financial burden of occupation). So, although the Poles would get territorial compensation, much of Pomeraniaccxliii and most of Silesia, which contained the bulk of the German populations east of the Oder-Neisse, would be a Polish zone of occupation no more. For a while Sikorski not only went along with this agreement, but also persuaded the exiled Polish government in London that it was acceptable.
To those who wanted more, he responded:
Those who demand the Oder-Neisse as our future Western border, are highly detrimental, in that making fantastical territorial demands, which would include the whole of Lower Silesia, with its fanatically anti-Polish population, would then put more than nine million Germans within Poland and expelling this number of people is simply not practicable… furthermore setting such unlimited territorial claims discredits the Poles in the eyes of the Anglo-Saxons as a people with an insatiable lust for conquest.(1)
While the exiled Polish government concluded in agreement on 7th Oc
tober 1942 they still hoped they could get Stalin to relent and allow Poland to keep part of her eastern territories which the Soviet Union had occupied and which Stalin insisted on keeping.ccxliv The London Poles were particularly anxious that Stalin should relent on the future of the cities of Lwów (Lemberg) and Wilna (Vilnius), which lay east of the line Stalin had drawn. Churchill supported the Poles’ claims for Lwów, but neither Churchill nor Roosevelt was ready or willing to risk a split with Stalin at that time. Churchill tried to sweeten the bitter pill by informing the Polish war hero, General Anders,ccxlv that, ‘… the (German) regions you will gain in the west will be far better than the Pripet marshes.’ccxlvi(3)
Stanisław Mikołajczyk succeeded General Sikorski as the exiled Polish Prime Minister after Sikorski’s death in an air crash. In a letter to Roosevelt, Mikołajczyk expressed his concerns that the expulsion of over 5 million Germans to make way for 5 million Poles (still playing down the actual number of Germans and upping the actual number of Poles) from the territories annexed by Stalin would risk another conflict with Germany in the future, and if they agreed to the Soviet proposal this would make them dependent on the Soviet Union for protection. Churchill attempted to persuade the Polish Prime Minister that his government in exile really had no other choice.ccxlvii Mikołajczyk could not convince his Cabinet and had to stand down. His successor, Tomasz Arciszewski, refused to recognise the border Stalin was insisting on as Poland’s eastern frontier. He also stated he did not wish to see a massive movement of Poland’s borders to include 10 million Germans, saying, ‘We want the annexation of East Prussia, Upper Silesia and a part of Pomerania… We neither want Breslau nor Stettin. We are demanding our ethnically and historically Polish territories.’ccxlviii(5)
The emerging tragedy was that neither the Poles nor the Germans were to have any say in their future frontiers; their borders and the fate of their citizens rested in the hands of one man, and Stalin was immovable. His rationale to both Sikorski and the Czechoslovak leader, Beneš (the Czechs were also to lose their pre-war eastern territory of Ruthenia to the Soviet Union)ccxlix was that only the armies of the Soviet Union could protect their independence from the revival of a revanchist Germany in the future. Stalin’s will was gospel and thoroughly prepared in advance. Imperial Russia’s borders would be re-established and their humiliation, wrought at the hands first of Poland and then of Germany, would be expunged. The Slavic nations would be compensated by German land, property and businesses, but the nations of Eastern Europe would become Soviet satellites. No one could tell Stalin otherwise, and no Allied nation was willing to enforce their own deep misgivings.
For Stalin, this was personal. As Politcomissar during the Polish-Russian War of 1920–1921, he had given orders that countermanded and undermined the authority and direction of Marshal Mikhail Nikolayevich Tukhachevsky and the old Marshal held Stalin responsible for the ensuing catastrophe. Stalin had an old blemish on his reputation from a time when he was still beholden to Lenin. He was one to hold grudges and now history had given him the perfect opportunity to humiliate the Poles for their treatment of Russia.(6) He had already settled old scores with the military during his show trial purges of the 1930s.
In late November 1943 at the first Big Three meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at the Soviet Embassy in Tehran, Stalin insisted that the Soviet Union keep the territory it had gained under the Molotov-Ribbentrop (Hitler-Stalin) pact. Poland was to be compensated by German territory, the precise extent of which was to be finalised later. It was also agreed, in principle, that Germans in these territories were to be ‘transferred’. The new Polish-Soviet border in the east was to be the Curzon Line, named after Lord Curzon, the former British Foreign Minister. Lord Curzon had made the suggestion at the Inter-Allied Conference in 1920, based upon the fact that beyond this line Poles only made up the majority of the population in Lemberg (Lwów) and Vilnius (Wilna, which it had been intended would become part of Lithuania despite its majority Polish population); in the countryside and the region as a whole Ukrainians were by far the largest community. But the Polish victory made Curzon’s suggestions academic, and Poland’s land grab proceeded apace, following the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21.
Ultimately Poland lost a swathe of territory that she had conquered by war and to which she had no internationally-accepted legitimate claim. Having lost the war against Germany and after seeing all resistance movements crushed, and finally being occupied again by the Soviet Union, Poland was still to be compensated by an as yet not fully specified amount of German territory, large parts of which however the exiled Polish government in London did not want. Meanwhile Stalin’s Polish exiles, supported by the NKVD, were preparing for government and setting their own agenda, which did not include the London Poles. Stalin’s puppet Lublin-based Polish government-in-waiting established their movement for the national liberation of Poland in that city on 22nd July 1944 proclaiming, ‘The hour of revenge on the Germans has come.’(7)
On 26th July, a secret protocol was signed between Lublin and Moscow in which it was agreed that in exchange for Poland’s eastern territories, the Polish border would move as far west as the Oder-Neisse rivers in compensation, and all Germans would be expelled from Poland’s newly annexed western territories. Churchill and Roosevelt had no idea, and by the time of the final Big Three meeting at Yalta in February 1945, Russia was in control of most of what had been Poland before the war, along with the bulk of Eastern Europe, and was busy carving new realities out on the ground. Churchill was already beginning to see the Soviet Union as being at least as great a menace as Nazi Germany, and did not want to see Soviet power and influence extended exponentially into Central and Eastern Europe. One of his worst nightmares was beginning to unfold: the likelihood that Soviet Russia would get a foothold on the Baltic and come to dominate the Baltic Sea, and thus have direct access to the North Sea and the Channel. An age-old part of British foreign policy was that Russia should never achieve this objective. The fear this provoked in Churchill had British forces scrambling to secure not just much of northern Germany, but Denmark, to ensure that even if the Soviet fleet controlled the Baltic, they would effectively continue to be bottled up in it by the British fleet.ccl
At the Yalta meeting, Stalin further refined his territorial objectives, but did not let Churchill and Roosevelt know about his secret plan to give his Polish government-in-waiting all of Germany’s territories, right up to the Oder-Neisse.ccli He saved that piece of information for after the war. What he wanted for Russia from the Yalta meeting was the northern half of East Prussia adjoining the Baltic Sea. East Prussia was not only to be permanently severed from Germany, it was also going to be divided, the north going to Russia and the south to Poland, primarily so that the Soviet navy could use Königsberg (modern day Kaliningrad) as their forward base of operations on the Baltic Sea. Officially Stalin kept up the charade that Poland would only receive southern East Prussia, Danzig, the north-eastern part of Pomerania, as well as Upper Silesia. In early 1945 all the talk was still of the Oder being Germany’s eastern border. The two Neisse rivers options (the eastern Glatzer Neisse and the western Lausitzer Neisse) were not under discussion, and the further push to include another 5 million Germans was not on the cards, even as late as February 1945. The British were happy to agree to this. Stalin proffered that in reality Poland had a right to the area as far as the Oder and western Neisse rivers, to which Roosevelt replied that if they went that far, the British crown might want to claim back its right to the United States, knowing full well that this region had been part of the German Empire for nearly 300 years before the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth. No final decision was reached at Yalta as to where the borders should be, but it was clear that neither the British nor the Americans were going to accept a push as far as the western Neisse line, which eventually became Poland’s modern western border.(8)
The Allies were also growing concerned as to whether Stalin would meet his assurances to hold free
elections in the countries the Red Army had overrun. Roosevelt was prepared to go along with ‘Uncle Joe’s’ assurances, but Churchill was less convinced. Poland’s independence had been the reason Britain had gone to war and risked everything, virtually bankrupting herself in the process. Replacing Nazi tyranny for a Soviet one was not at all what Churchill had had in mind. The war between the London Poles with their AK forces and the Soviet puppet Lublin government, supported by the Red Army and the NKVD, began before the war with Germany was even over. The AK had to go back into hiding to take on the Soviet-backed Polish militia and the Red Army combined.
The Red Army captured Berlin in another act of bloody sacrifice — with 80,000 men dead and 280,000 injured — and stood on the banks of the Elbe in the heart of Germany. Nazism had been crushed and Germany and much of Europe lay in ruins. Stalin had put the entire German Eastern Provinces east of the Oder-Neisse under the administration of his Polish stooges, without clearing this with his Western Allies. What had been agreed upon to date in terms of the post-war occupation of Germany, that an Allied Control Council was to have administered Germany as a whole, at least to begin with, was thus thrown into disarray. The Poles were supposed to have a smaller occupation zone of their own up to the Oder-Neisse. This zone was meant to contribute its share to the feeding of Germany’s population (the Polish zone had been Germany’s grain basket before the war). Each and every Allied zone of occupation was to help supply and support the other. Prompted by Stalin, the Poles had now simply annexed most of eastern Germany, which wrecked the limited plans that existed for the administration of Germany as one cohesive unit. In addition, it also meant the Germans were going to starve, as even prior to the war they had relied on a quarter of their food imports from abroad. With their main agricultural area now annexed to Poland, food shortages soon took on the proportions of a major famine.cclii
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