Their choices were dire; to remain — if they could — and suffer hunger, disease and random violence, or to leave and run the gauntlet of the militias and roaming bands of bandits who inhabited the refugee routes out of the annexed territories. Polish authorities were ‘encouraging Germans to leave of their own free will’, which meant making conditions so intolerable for them that they would sign over everything they had and head for the new border. Any doubts as to where the new border lay were dispelled when the ‘transfers’ began. Potsdam had foreseen ‘humane and orderly transfers’ of Germans across the Oder-Neisse Rivers, but in practice many of the transfers resembled the ‘camp-bound death trains’ of the Nazi era. Refugees were often packed like sardines into train carriages, unable to move or sit, forced to stand for days and defecate where they stood. The weak were crushed, suffocated, passed out and were trampled underfoot. Women driven insane from watching their children starve to death went berserk, lashing out at other captives; there appeared to be no end to the torment that the women of Germany’s eastern territories had to endure. The train columns were themselves open to attacks from marauding groups of bandits; when the trains came to a stop, the bandits lay in wait to rip open the carriage doors and beat, rape and rob the occupants. The trains would take days to reach their collection points along the newly created border, such as those at the railway yards at Stettin in Pomerania or Forst in Silesia, where the refugees and the dead were unloaded. The Poles then marched the survivors to holding pens and forced them to strip naked, after which they were abused and ‘relieved’ of their remaining possessions; they were then forced to sign a book to say that their valuables and cash had been ‘lawfully deposited’ with the Polish authorities.(27) This process was usually repeated one final time when they actually came to cross the border, just to ensure that they had absolutely nothing of any value left on them. Crossing the new frontier into what was left of Germany did not mean freedom or an end to their suffering; the refugees were now crossing into the Russian zone of occupation, where Red Army soldiers lay in wait to lavish their attentions upon the women. German towns did not welcome the refugees either, but told them to move on; these towns could neither feed, nor provide for their own citizens, let alone a never-ending stream of starving newcomers. So the refugees kept heading west, towards the British and American zones.
An American eyewitness report of one of these trains that had left Polish-administered Germany with 1,000 refugees aboard arriving in Berlin, gives a vivid picture of the conditions in which these ‘transfers’ were taking place. It states:
Nine hundred and nine men, women and children dragged themselves and their luggage from the Russian railway train at the Leherte station today, after eleven days travelling in boxcars from Poland. Red Army soldiers lifted ninety-one corpses from the train, while relatives shrieked and sobbed as their bodies were piled in American lend-lease trucks and driven off for interment in a pit near a concentration camp. The refugee train was like a macabre Noah’s Ark. Every car was jammed with Germans… The families carry all their earthly belongings in sacks, bags and tin trunks… Nursing infants suffer the most, as their mothers are unable to feed them, and frequently go insane as they watch their offspring slowly die before their eyes. Today, four screaming, violently insane mothers were bound with rope to prevent them from clawing other passengers. ‘Many women try to carry off their dead babies with them,’ a Russian railway official said. ‘We search the bundles whenever we discover a weeping woman, to make sure she is not carrying an infant corpse with her.’(28)
Donald Mackenzie, New York Daily News correspondent in Berlin, also reported on the fate of the German exodus, stating:
In the windswept courtyard of the Stettiner Bahnhof, a cohort of German refugees, part of the twelve to nineteen million dispossessed in East Prussia and Silesia, sat in groups under a driving rain and told the story of their miserable pilgrimage, during which more than twenty-five per cent died by the roadside and the remainder were so starved they scarcely had strength to walk. Filthy, emaciated, and carrying their few remaining possessions wrapped in bits of cloth, they shrank away crouching when one approached them in the railway terminal, expecting to be beaten or robbed or worse… A nurse from Stettin, a young, good looking blonde, told how her father had been stabbed to death by Russian soldiers who, after raping her mother and sister, tried to break into her room. She escaped and hid in a haystack with four other women for four days… On the train to Berlin she was pillaged once by Russian troops and twice by Poles… women who resisted were shot dead, she said, and on one occasion she saw a guard take an infant by the legs and crush its skull against a post because the child cried while the guard was raping its mother. An old peasant woman from Silesia said… victims were robbed of everything they had, even their shoes. Infants were robbed of their swaddling clothes so that they froze to death. All the healthy girls and women, even those sixty-five years of age were raped in the train and then robbed.(29)
The Anglo-American zones were so overwhelmed by the sheer numbers and appalling state of these refugees that they closed their zones in December 1946 for six months, protesting at the manner in which these ‘transfers’ were taking place and the strain they were putting on their areas of occupation. This only prolonged the suffering of those trapped in the Soviet sector.(30) Whilst these lackey Polish Soviet militias were enforcing their genocide against the Germans, their Polish compatriots were being treated to the same inhumanity in Poland’s former eastern territories, in which less than half the original pre-war Polish population was left alive, before being ethnically cleansed from their homes.(31) The Poles lost 170,000 square kilometres of territory in the east, which had held a quarter of her population. In compensation they were to receive 104,000 square kilometres of German territory that contained a Polish minority of 1 per cent. Even Churchill’s estimates of the relative size of the Polish and German population transfers proved to be wildly optimistic, in all over 9.5 million surviving Germans either fled or were driven out of her eastern territories to make way for between 1.2 to 1.5 million Poles.(32) The majority of those who came to the ‘golden (German) west’ were not refugees from the former Polish east. Over 2 million flooded in from central Poland and the former General Government of Poland. The ‘Alaska Express’ trains soon began arriving in the annexed territories to take advantage of the gold rush. Officially the German civilians were supposed to ‘sign over’ all their property and possessions to the Polish state, but these carpet baggers, known by the Poles as Szabrownicy (plunderers/bandits) intended to put as much property as possible to ‘good use’ before the state could appropriate it, and there were plenty of rich treasures to be had.cclvii(33)
In the political and economic vacuum created by the expulsions, the criminal element thrived. Even minority Poles in Upper Silesia feared ‘their own’ Polish militias. The period after the war was a period with no law or government. No one could demand their rights in a territory that had become a legal no-man’s-land, and it would take years to bring the ‘regained territories’ under the control of Warsaw.(34) From mid 1947 the ‘transfer’ of the remaining Germans from the east generally became more orderly, in line with the provisional provisions envisaged at Potsdam. Officially, the final transfer of German inhabitants out of the regions annexed by Poland concluded in 1951, when the last Germans were removed from Stettin (Szczecin) and Swinemünde (Świnoujście), but Germans continued to trickle across the new border right up to 1990. To this day the Polish government continues to refuse to recognise the wild expulsion of the Germans from 1945–47 as ethnic cleansing. It continues to use the term ‘forced migration’. There is a world of difference between ‘ethnic cleansing’, where people leave everything behind for fear of being raped, murdered or worked to death and ‘forced migration’, which can be enforced through lack of work, poverty or environmental degradation. No amount of verbal acrobatics can obscure the fact that over 2 million German civilians from her eastern territories died; th
is cannot be attributed to a ‘migration’. The two are not remotely comparable, and this euphemism not only falls short of the truth, but is also symptomatic of the state of denial that most Polish politicians continue to inhabit.
COMPARISONS IN ETHNIC CLEANSING
Many Polish and German politicians still equate one exercise in ethnic cleansing with another. Poles claim they lost more than they gained, and the Polish parliament has even made calls for the German government to pay reparations to Poland (in addition to the substantive territorial gains Poland made at Germany’s expense). The Germans play down their loss as a consequence of the war in the hope of normalising relations with their Polish neighbours, whilst the Poles play up their loss, so as to safeguard and sanitise the manner of their gain. That does not create a sound basis for future reconciliation and leaves their respective audiences largely ignorant of the facts. Much was made of Poland’s meagre acquisition and the warravaged nature of swathes of the annexed German territories. While this was true of parts, if not all, of southern East Prussia and tracts of Pomerania and Eastern Brandenburg, where the fighting had been at its most ferocious, much of Silesia had remained unscathed by the war. Prosperous towns such as Glatz (Klodzko), Reichenbach (Dzierzoniów), Waldenburg (Walbrzych), Schweidnitz (Swidnica), Hirschberg (Jelenia Góra) and much of the region running along the Czech border were left intact. More importantly the hugely valuable industrial areas in Upper Silesia, which produced more coal and iron ore than all of France, had not been destroyed.(36)
The Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, told his Polish colleagues that the areas they were gaining at Germany’s expense were at least ten times more economically valuable than those they were losing in the east. Churchill told the London Poles much the same.(37) Poland’s loss was not so much economic but cultural. The eastern territories had been home to the great landed estates of the Polish aristocracy and were where many of its grandest castles and country estates lay; it had been the birthplace of many of its greatest writers and poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki; Lwów and Wilna were the largest Polish cities after Krakow and Warsaw, and dreams of a grand and expansive Jagiellon Polish Empire to the east — to remind Poles of the nation’s glory days during the sixteenth to eighteenth century — had to be abandoned. The ancient Piast past of a Polish Empire in the west, dating back to a time before the Norman Conquest, would have to be ‘rediscovered’ by nationalist historians of the Communist era.
Germany’s loss was a massive economic blow and meant the severing of the cultural and historical link to Prussia, as if amputating Prussia from Germany would somehow free her soul from the spirit of militarism and National Socialism, to which Roosevelt and Churchill believed her to be so irredeemably wed. Stalin got what he wanted: the Germans and Poles at one another’s throats — potentially for eternity — and off his back; both their eastern ambitions thwarted. To that end, both nations shared a common fate at the hands of their ‘liberator’. However, in relation to the way the ‘transfers’ were carried out and the balance sheet of losses and gains, there are marked differences in the Polish and German experiences. Polish refugees, who survived the horrors of Soviet occupation and the murderous rampages by Ukrainian militias, were able to bring their livestock and more of their belongings than their German counterparts. Film reels of the time show the eastern Polish refugees arriving with furniture, travelling with their traditional cooking stoves and one family even arriving with a piano. When they arrived, they were able to go ‘house hunting’ and take over fully furnished homes. In his excellent account Die Fremde Stadt Breslau 1945, of how German Breslau would be ‘transformed’ into Polish Wrocław, Gregor Thum has unearthed some tremendous accounts of families arriving into homes with food on the table and stoves warm to the touch. One such account from a Polish refugee from eastern Poland arriving in Silesia paints a surreal picture of loss, discovery and wanton destruction:
I arrived in Liegnitz (Legnica)… a rich city emptied of its population. Clean to the point of appearing recently polished… The city lay open… you could take an apartment, a villa or a house, abandoned by a doctor, a banker or a general. One could also set a house on fire… This abundance of wealth, from which one could take as much as one pleased but which literally had the value of diamonds in a desert, made many people lose their reason… Even I, who came from a family of doctors, lost my natural equilibrium at seeing centuries of such accumulated wealth — what then would the poor peasants from the backwaters and the mud huts, who in their lifetimes had known little less than backbreaking toil and pitiful earnings make of all this… Out of the top floor windows they (Soviet soldiers) threw all manner of precious items into the street below for their amusement: Crystal vases, fine crockery, sculptures. Everything shattered as it hit the asphalt. Everything they could lay their hands on, chairs, sofas, everything, flew out of the windows…(38)
Decades after the fact, Thum quotes the Polish writer, Stanislaw Nowicki, who wrote of his newly acquired home in Breslau, confessing:
I lived in a German house, in which generations of German children had been born, and the older generations had blessed. I slept in a German bed, looked upon German paintings on the walls, bathed in a German bathtub, ate from German bowls and plates, played with German swords, wrote with a German quill pen and ink, leafed through German books… Even when I came to take my school shirt from its hanger, I saw the inscription ‘Steuernagel’ gleaming back at me. That was the name of the doctor, who had previously lived in my apartment. He had done nothing bad towards me… and I lived in the middle of his worldly possessions… Sometimes I was gripped by anxiety and shouted: Jesus and Mary! We are living in the midst of stolen things.(39)
Eventually the Polish Ossolineum library from Lwów (Lemberg) was transported to Wrocław (Breslau), along with the statue of the Lwów poet Aleksander Hrabiego Fredro. Comparatively, the German university library of Breslau, a city that had produced among the largest number of Nobel Prize winners of any city in Germany, was pulped, and the public statues to its cultural icons were melted down. The Germans arrived in the west to bombed-out ruins, lived in the open, or if they were lucky, in Nissen huts, and were fortunate to arrive wearing a pair of shoes and the clothes on their backs. Many Germans held on in the east believing against all the visible signs that their plight could not be permanent, whilst some Poles believed they could get still more and push Poland’s borders even farther west, as far as the Elbe river, incorporating Berlin, Rostock and Dresden. Thankfully, the idea of making Berlin a Polish city was truly a morsel too great to swallow, and whilst Poland’s borders had to wait forty-five years to be formalised, they would go no further west.
The main task for the Polish authorities now was to erase all trace of their newly annexed regions’ German heritage, and to rewrite their history. Cohorts of ‘historians’ were engaged in one of the greatest rewrites of history known to man.(40) According to one typical historian of the day, writing about the history of the ‘regained territories’, and specifically of the capital of Silesia, in the medieval period, he wrote, ‘One has to remember that this entire Polish settlement was built or administered by Polish hands. There were few aliens, and those were the known groups of Wallonians and some Jews, who had their own cemetery. From Germany, apart from the merchants, there were but a few settlers.’(41) The Holy Roman Empire and Germany barely received a mention in relation to the history of the annexed territories, the Prussians were demonised as the ‘evil empire’, and Germans, if they were mentioned at all, were all just ‘colonists and occupiers’. An enormous task was undertaken to remove every German street sign and building inscription, signage in public and private buildings, instruction manuals, public records, and records in churches and cemeteries, including the grave stones. An unprecedented effort was made to obliterate all traces of the German history, culture and heritage of the euphemistically entitled ‘regained territories’.(42) German cemeteries were turned into public parks; the gravestones wer
e given to masons, or used on public works projects, such as building a new tribune at the sports stadium in Breslau (Wrocław) — an action reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s destruction of Jewish cemeteries. German books were burned and German newspapers banned. The use of the German language was strictly prohibited upon pain of being interned in one of the camps, which was simply a postponed death sentence for many that ended up there.
Any Germans who the Poles determined had a drop or two of Polish blood, were given the ‘Polish Option’,cclviii which was also given to those who had Slavic sounding names or some claim to Slavic heritage. Those who took the Polish Option and were allowed to remain slowly had to begin to learn Polish from their youngest children, which they learned at their new kindergartens and schools. Increasingly their fate resembled that of American Indian children who were taken to be ‘Americanised’ at the fort schools and who returned to their parents unable to speak the ‘language of their hearts’. Young children grew up learning Polish but could not speak German, whilst their parents could barely get by in Polish. Such estrangement is almost unimaginable for those who have not lived through it.
During the debate about what Poland’s future borders should be, the Polish war hero, General Anders, had said, with some prescience, ‘Poland should not claim what it can not economically administrate.’ The consequence of dispossessing so many Germans and replacing them with so few Poles had devastating consequences for the fabric of the infrastructure, housing and cultural heritage of the areas they acquired; much of the annexed territories simply rotted. The fear of a revanchist Germany, backed by its ‘Imperialist Anglo-American Allies’, was kept alive by Cold War Communist propaganda. An expression was coined that the Poles waited with their suitcases packed ready to head back east, ‘just in case’ the Germans came back. The Polish writer Zdzisław Mach aptly described the situation in his study of Poland’s annexed western territories, Unwanted Towns, which case-studied the Lower Silesian town of Liebental (Lubomierz). He documents the effects of neglect and disconnection on over two generations of Poles, who lived in this German town with ‘suitcases packed’, ready to leave at a moment’s notice, and to whom the history, culture, and architecture of the town was not only alien, but also a matter of indifference. Even factoring in the negative effects of communism in the east, Mach compared the pitiful state of the towns in the annexed territories with those in the Polish heartlands, and stated that there was no comparison to the dilapidated state of the towns of Lower Silesia; criminal, considering the perfect state they were in at the end of the war.(43)
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