Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  The consequences of removing entire populations, who had built and enriched the development, expansion and culture of these towns over generations, and who were keenly acquainted with the land, its soils, rivers and seasons, was devastating. The new inhabitants came into an alien land, with no knowledge or appreciation of what they encountered, and above all with no attachment to it. The Communists made a bad situation worse by talking of the architecture of oppression and occupation; as a result, much of the region’s architectural heritage was either torn down, or left to rot, in particular the ancient castles, palaces and stately homes owned by the ‘fascist’ Junker class. The regions from the Egerland in the western Czech Republic, through Silesia and on to the eastern Baltic coast are littered with the remnants of a glorious past; one that can never be revived. The cost of restoring buildings that have been abandoned for three generations, even those that survived the initial onslaught of drunken barbarism, is too immense to contemplate; the few exceptions that have been restored give us an aching glimpse of how rich these regions once were; and in the few instances where former owners have been offered their estates back, they have more often than not declined, being in no financial state to take on such a huge monetary burden.cclix

  The alien surroundings were not valued as cultural heritage, but torn down. Bricks and roof tiles were loaded up and sent off for the rebuilding of Warsaw.(44) Villagers in Upper Silesia still jokingly say ‘give us back our roof tiles’, a comment which reflects the region’s struggle with Warsaw to regain its stolen cultural heritage. The war, and then communism, destroyed a great cultural treasure chest of humanity.

  POSTSCRIPT TO HOW POLAND’S MODERN FRONTIERS CAME INTO BEING

  The Federal Government of West Germany did not formally recognise the Oder-Neisse border with Poland until 1990. The primary objective of German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was to swiftly and uncategorically recognise the border changes, gaining the immediate support for unification from Germany’s former enemies and thereby attempting to stop East Germany’s population from haemorrhaging to the West. When Kohl mentioned the open question of the border, he was swiftly informed that to gain Allied agreement to German unification, Germany had to accept the Oder-Neisse line. Not a single word of protest was registered from the German government at the loss of a further 25 per cent of its territory. East Prussia, Silesia, most of Pomerania and parts of Brandenburg and Saxony were given up for short-term political expediency; one that failed nonetheless, as population flows from the poor communist east to the rich capitalist western part of Germany continue to this day. No mention was made of the ethnic cleansing that accompanied Poland’s 300–600 kilometre shift west, or of Czechoslovakia’s annexing the German Sudetenland. No commitment was given by the Poles to accept that a German minority still existed in Poland, nor was there an act of parliament to protect it; that did not come for another fifteen years. There was no mention of the cultural and historic loss to the German nation. No questions were raised as to the Allies’ false assumption that Prussia and Nazism were synonymous, or the fact that, as a result of this mistaken link, modern Germany lost the state that founded it. In addition to the most valuable land grab in European history, no questions were raised about the greatest cultural robbery of all time either, nor of the massive outstanding list of Germany’s cultural treasures, beutekunst, many of which had been stored in Germany’s eastern territories to avoid the bombing.cclx There was no mention of the need to resolve the open problems and questions, or the need for a truth and reconciliation commission that might one day allow Polish and German school children to read common history books based on the facts, rather than ‘politically correct’ platitudes, many of which date back to the Communist era.cclxi

  The German government made a thoroughly undemocratic and unilateral decision. No government has the right, over and above the heads of its citizens, to forgo their rights to their land, properties and businesses. Those rights are guaranteed under international law via the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 prohibiting collective punishment. UN Resolution 194, passed in 1948 in relation to the Palestinians following the creation of the state of Israel, also expressly laid down the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.(45) This right to return, and the right to remain was reinforced by resolution 24/1994 adopted by the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities on 26th August 1994.(46) Even if in practice today, the right to return would see very few German survivors wishing to take up that right; what cannot, and should not, be allowed to perpetuate itself is that there is one set of international rules for the citizens of every nation on earth, and another for Germans. German refugees were not asked whether they wanted to return; their associations were not consulted by the German government or invited to discussions; no referendum was held; no conditions were attached to Poland’s or the Czech Republic’s accession talks to join the European Union, which Germany or Austria could easily have blocked, as admitting a new member to the EU club requires unanimity on the part of its existing members. What more could the Germans have feared to lose? Good neighbourly relations? Better treatment of the German minority, which the Polish government continued to deny even existed? The legacy of the Communists’ revisionist history, of the ‘regained territories’, lives on in the history books that school children in Poland and the Czech Republic read today. The madrassas of hate for all things German in these countries are alive and well, and will remain so, as long as German politicians and academics continue to pull their heads in, and hope that their politically correct stances will be rewarded, and that they might be regarded as ‘Good Germans’; for all too many, as Steven Soderbergh’s 2006 film, The Good German, shows — that unfortunately remains a contradiction in terms.

  Over seventy years have passed in which three generations of Poles and Czechs have grown up in, or lived in, the former German eastern homelands. The Charta of the Bund der Vertriebenen (The German Expellees Association) has categorically stated, since 1958, that it does not wish to perpetrate a new injustice by calling for their expulsion, nor does it call for a revision of the existing borders; but this does not mean that they are saying, or should be expected to say, that the expulsion of the German populations from Germany’s former eastern territories after the war was a historically or morally just decision. Seventy-plus years of ownership, born of brutal expropriation and genocide do not expunge seven hundred years of history and the rights of the offspring of thirty-five generations, no matter how much one cares to rewrite history. It is all too easy and all the more unjust for those not affected by the Vertriebung (expulsions) to call upon those who were, not only to forgive, but also to forget. When over-zealous politicians of the Sejm in Warsaw call for the German government to pay them reparations on top of the territory they annexed from Germany, they should bear in mind that the border revisions are a gift that keeps on giving. They are a never-ending reparations cheque that keeps being cashed year in and year out. The land produces harvests, the mines produce ore, businesses keep on churning out more products, and the value of the land, properties and cultural treasures continues to rise. One German historian has put the cost at a staggering and simply unimaginable 18 trillion Euros. Better to have let the Poles and Czechs occupy the land for fifty years and extract their reparations than to have given them an eternal blank cheque, especially when that has only led to calls for more. Germany’s eastern neighours have become adept at exploiting the post-war collective guilt mentality that has taken hold in Germany. A mentality born of the amnesia of what has already been taken and the cost inflicted in the taking of it. The fact that they got away with it encourages the likes of Russia’s President Putin to go on taking more. During the 2014 crisis over Russia’s military takeover and land grab of Crimea, one UN official stated unequivocally that ‘Borders are not suggestions.’

  Those members of German parliament who cheered the vote in the Reichstag to accept Germany’s post-war eastern frontier
without question,cclxii without referring to those affected, without at least seeking acknowledgement of the German history of these territories, and the recording of the fate of their inhabitants in Polish and Czech history books, should be ashamed of themselves. Their betrayal of the memory, the suffering, and the death of millions of their fellow citizens would, in any other nation, have been regarded as nothing short of a national disgrace. Victor Gollancz’s much-quoted statement about the result of these border changes was as true then as it is today. He stated, ‘If the conscience of men ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all those who committed or connived at them…’ The ‘conscience of men’ has still not become sensitive; it has simply become selective.(48)

  MISSING AND FORGOTTEN

  As Germany imploded, and millions of refugees were driven west, many of the civilians who had been trapped behind the advancing Russian lines were rounded up. Stalin had persuaded the Allies to agree that ‘living reparations’cclxiii in the form of German slave workers, would be shipped back to the Soviet Union to rebuild the destruction caused by the German invasion during the war; vast swathes of Byelorussia, Ukraine and Western Russia lay in ruins. Initially German POWs were marched east, but they were soon followed by all manner of German civilians, along with German minorities from Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia.cclxiv Russian figures vary (their record keeping was somewhere between atrocious and totally worthless), but they have never admitted to deporting any more than 350,000 German civilians to the Soviet Union, of which they admit that roughly 62,000 died. The International Red Cross estimates that over 800,000 German civilians were transported to Soviet Gulags, which were strewn across the most desolate reaches of the Soviet Union.(1) The death toll of German civilian slave labourers was even higher, as a percentage, than that of the captured POWs.cclxv

  In the west they were simply assumed dead. Their homelands had been swept clear of native inhabitants, who had been thrown to the wind and were dispersed all across what was left of Germany. Finding relatives and missing family members went on for years with town halls being plastered with photos and requests for information about missing family members. For those who had fled, or had been ethnically cleansed from their homelands, it was doubly difficult to establish who was dead, imprisoned or deported, or who may have made it out; news from their former eastern homelands was hard to come by.

  From January 1945, the Soviets had been rounding up German civilians, particularly from East Prussia and along the Baltic coast, but then later also from Silesia, Brandenburg and Pomerania, cramming them into internment camps in huge numbers; using schools, prisons and former concentration camps. They were often forced into rooms with standing room only, where sanitary conditions were non-existent. They were then interrogated, which nearly always involved raping the women. The NKVD interrogators, who were often men, and sometimes women, were ostensibly looking for anyone who had been members of the Nazi Party, Hitler Youth, or its female youth equivalent, the BDM. Besides that, another favourite group targeted for torture and capital punishment were landowners, in particular Junkers who, for the Soviets, were synonymous with ‘Prussian Nazis’ and who the NKVD units attempted to totally exterminate. One survey shows that of 9,000 Junkers, 1,500 were killed fighting the war, fifty-eight were killed after the July plot against Hitler, 1,500 were killed in ‘other circumstances’ in 1945, 500 died in detention camps and 500 committed suicide, with only 15 per cent surviving to make it out to the west.(5) In reality, the NKVD units were not particularly interested in the truth about an individual’s past, their task was to ship as many slaves as possible east to work in the Gulags. The internment camps that were used for these interrogations have been described as the ‘waiting rooms to hell’.(6) At night, the pitiful screams of women rang out, to the backdrop of shots from execution squads echoing around the courtyards. Survivors were then transported as slave labourers to Siberia or other outposts of the Soviet Empire.

  Waltraud Unrau from Pomerania recalls being marched 30 to 40 kilometres a day without food or water. Those who fell by the wayside were beaten, and if they failed to get up, they were shot. When they finally reached the internment camp they were raped again and again. She stated, ‘I am certain everyone was raped, if someone says she wasn’t I simply wouldn’t believe her. We struggled and fought but they were stronger than we were. It was unbearable, you had to disconnect otherwise it was impossible. You never come to terms with it.’(7) Many of the girls were only fifteen or sixteen years of age. Ursula Goldau was from East Prussia; her father had been a local politician in the German People’s Party who had resigned his seat in protest at the Nazis’ seizure of power; he was anything but a member of the Nazi Party or a party sympathiser. As she was being marched to one camp, she saw a group of men being marched in the opposite direction. Among them was a tall, pale and drawn-looking man, and as they drew closer she suddenly recognised the man as her father. Their eyes met and she only had time to ask, ‘Are you okay?’ to which he replied, ‘Yes.’ It was the last time she saw him and she only discovered his fate years later. He was taken for interrogation at Stolzenhagen (Stołczyn) and after the hearing he was escorted from the room by a uniformed soldier. He had his eyes torn out and died three days later from the bleeding. Ursula was marched 200 kilometres to Zichenau (Ciechanów). She recalls, ‘How many died on the way there no one knows… The deaths were never registered; it was exactly the same with those who died in prison… Not only the victims of the death marches remained uncounted.’(8)

  Stalin’s orders, numbers 7161 and 7467 of 16th December 1944, had envisioned every able-bodied man aged between seventeen and forty-five, and every able-bodied female aged between eighteen and thirty to be transported, but in the event, children as young as seven ended up in the transports. Those unfortunate enough to leave in midwinter, in temperatures of minus 40 degrees centigrade, on journeys that took up to a month, suffered the highest mortality rates. Lavrentiy Beria, the Soviet equivalent of the ‘Angel of Death’, Stalin’s personal henchman responsible for the death of millions, issued an order than can only be described as a sick joke, namely that the those to be deported should ‘pack winter and summer clothing, spare shoes, at least two sets of underwear, bedding, plates and cutlery and bring enough food for a fifteen day journey!’(9) The conditions of the marches and the internment camps made that utterly impossible. Those who died on the death marches were not registered; those who died of rape, torture, malnutrition, disease and firing squads in the internment camps were not registered; those shipped in locked freight carriages to Siberia, who died of starvation, exposure or dysentery were not registered; those who died being worked to death, or of exposure or typhus in the Gulags were not registered. It is, and will remain, impossible to know how many died.

  Not even German communists were spared. Manfred Peters, who was deported to Siberia at the age of sixteen, found out later that his father, a communist and anti-Nazi, had died at the end of 1945 in the Narvik camp near Danzig. Six weeks after being taken captive in Danzig, Manfred Peters found himself in a camp near Kimpersai, a small town in the steppe of Kazakhstan. The camp, which had 2,400 inmates, 1,500 men and 900 women and children, was massively overcrowded, but the NKVD had a solution; they knew, from their experience with their own Soviet citizens before the war, how many were likely to survive and what size the camp needed to be. German civilians died in their droves until there were 500 hardy survivors left alive; the camp was just big enough for that number.(10) The greatest fear for the captives was disease; typhus outbreaks were common and victims were quarantined. A young seven-year-old, Christal Krause, recalls seeing a huge fire at the camp. She ran to wake and tell the adults, but they were too exhausted to care and went back to sleep to spare their energy for the next day. What she saw was the typhus barrack burning down; its windows and doors had been boarded-up and nailed shut, petrol had been poured over the roof, and the hut had been set alight; because there were n
o medicines to treat the victims.

  Survivors had to endure the horrendous conditions of the camps, until the Soviets signed the protocol of the Geneva Convention, for the protection of civilians in wartime, in August 1949. After four years of living in hell, the survivors began to be released. Those who had been taken from their homes east of the new Oder-Neisse border were not allowed to return. Those who were sent to the Soviet occupation zone in central Germany were not allowed to speak of their ordeal until after the fall of the Berlin Wall; the official line was that there had been ‘no ethnic cleansing nor deportations to Siberia, only orderly population transfers’. Even those lucky enough to arrive in the western zones of Germany were often met with incredulity when they described their fate and indifference at the fact that they were yet another mouth to feed in an as yet still ruined and hungry remnant of the former Reich. They say time is a great healer but Christel Krause says such traumas reach deep into your subconscious. She explains, ‘The older I get, the more I think back to those terrible years in Siberia. I was only just seven. The time in the camp broke me. It destroyed my soul and destroyed me as a person. Later in life I was simply incapable of doing anything. I could not talk about myself, I just couldn’t… there was just this terrible emptiness.’(11)