ccxcvi In a secret document released from the Czech archives on 22nd May 2001, the details of a meeting held between the leader of the exiled government of the Poles, General Sikorski, and the exiled leader of the Czechs, Edvard Beneš, which took place on 26th to 27th January 1941 are summarised in a letter sent by Sikorski to Beneš dated 17th February 1941. This letter details their plans to work together to expropriate and ethnically cleanse their countries of all German minorities. They sought to establish a coordinating committee to plan these expulsions and even talked of creating a Czech-Polish Confederation to protect these gains. Both states contained substantial minorities to the point where Czechoslovakia had not been a national state but a state of nationalities. The wording of the letter was clear in its intention to create Slavic ‘national states’ free of national minorities. Sikorski specifically espouses the criminal accusation of the ‘collective responsibility’ of all Germans and not just their leadership, to facilitate this land grab and mass appropriation of their assets.(10)
ccxcvii Sven Linqvist in his book, A History of Bombing, makes the argument that the Allies could have given the Nazis a quid pro quo. ‘Stop killing the Jews and we will stop area bombing your cities and killing your civilians.’ Thereby, as he states, once and for all ending the moral debate about the area bombing campaign. Had the German people been given that choice and had the Nazi leadership refused to end the Holocaust, the Allies would have at least presented the Germans with a ray of hope and the motivation of self-interest and preservation for rising up against the regime. The Allies also could have bombed the marshalling yards and train transports to the concentration camps or bombed the camps themselves in an attempt to save lives. They chose not to, despite calls from Jewish organisations to do precisely that.(11)
ccxcviii Stalin, by some estimates (see appendix), had already murdered more Soviet civilians by 1941 than the Nazi regime would kill throughout the entirety of the war. Stalin’s purges, extermination of the Ukrainian Kulak farmers, forced resettlement of ethnic communities and the Gulags cost tens of millions of lives. For more details see the statistics at the end of the figures on the Second World War.
ccxcix The costs to Germany in terms of the losses of both world wars are detailed in this book, but the German efforts at restitution, which in financial terms have amounted to over DM 100 billion to Israel and the victims of the Holocaust should be added.(16) This figure was agreed to by the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenaur, in the early 1950s and represented a colossal sum at the time. In the 1960s schools visits to concentration camps became compulsory for most secondary school children to see at first hand the evils of the Nazi regime as part of their history studies. The Holocaust remains at the centre of all German history classes and no debate about German history, in the news or on television, is not first prefixed by the crimes committed by Nazi Germany. Compensation claims have come from many quarters in the decades after the war and been paid to slave workers from all over Europe who were press-ganged into working for German industry during the war. Beyond individuals seeking restitution some would argue Germany’s sense of guilt has ensured that she continue to carry the overwhelming financial burden of the European Union (she remains by far the largest net contributor paying near 60 per cent of the EU’s net contributions, a sum in excess of $163 billion up to 1998). The German Chancellor Gerhardt Schröder suggested a line should be drawn under further claims against the German state three generations after the war to howls of protest from the left of his party. The flow of claims for compensation against Germany continues however, now even from nations that were former allies and partners in crime with Nazi Germany. The most recent claims in 2008 have come from the Italian civil courts. This writ however does not run the other way and continues to be a one-way street, as German civilians continue to be disparaged by their own government and blocked at every turn when they attempt to exercise their legal rights to compensation. The European Court in Strasbourg continues to make politically inbued statements and performs legal acrobatics to avoid any claims by Germans being made that would upset the delicate relations between EU states.(17)
Epilogue
What would Bismarck make of his old estate if he came back in search of his wife’s former grave at Varzin? A Pomeranian Junker would search in vain for his home and the graves of his ancestors. As one former East Prussian refugee put it:
People here in Germany miss the point of reunification completely. They say now once again Germany is united. This is not correct. There can be no historical Germany without Prussia. We have a single large country now where for fifty years we had two. This may be the Germany of the future, but it is not the Germany I grew up with and still remember best. What makes Germany happy today makes me very sad.(1)
West Germans like to believe that the integration of 8.5 million refugeesccc (over 4 million also went to East Germany and Austria) who arrived in their zone was an unmitigated success. It remains a largely unrecognised achievement of the Federal Republic of Germany that they were able to avert the feared radicalisation of millions of dispossessed and embittered civilian refugees eking out a meagre existence in refugee camps with one all-consuming desire, namely to return home. If one thinks of the ceaseless strife in the Middle East as a result of 2 million dispossessed Palestinian refugees, who were expelled during the same period, vegetating in refugee camps on the borders of modern day Israel, the potential for unrest becomes all too clear. However, the reality of the refugees’ reception in the West, and the hard road they had to travel to achieve integration, was anything but the rosy image that was presented for decades in the West German media. The majority of the refugees were shocked, not only at the lack of sympathy for their plight, but also by the outright hostility they encountered from their fellow Germans. The ‘expellees’ were treated as pariahs. Ignorance had them labelled as Nazis, Polacks, Gypsies, Slavs, but above all as additional mouths to feed — an unwanted additional drain on already stretched resources. Cities and towns across western Germany put up signs to say they were full and could not accept any more new arrivals, telling the refugees that they must move on. When they could find a place to stop, the refugees assembled in town squares desperate for someone to take them in. These assembly points often resembled the slave markets of the ‘New World’, where local farmers often picked strong looking young boys or girls who could work as farm hands, with no care for keeping families together.(2) One Eastern refugee stated, with a heavy sense of irony, that, ‘It is not the successful integration that should be celebrated in the West, but the ability of their Western hosts and the Allied leadership to bury the refugees’ past.’ccci (3)
The notion that either of the German satellite states that emerged in 1949 was truly independent is also a farce. The post-war German opposition leader of the SPD, Kurt Schumacher, a West Prussian from the town of Kulm (Chetmno), who had spent nine years and nine months in Nazi concentration camps, mostly at Dachau, and who was the embodiment of everything that made the Allied notion of German ‘collective guilt’ both repulsive and mindless, called his Christian Democratic opponent, Konrad Adenauer ‘the Chancellor of the Allies’. Schumacher’s Socialists only came second to the Christian Democrats by the very narrow margin of 2 per cent in the first West German election in 1949. Had there been all-German elections (including Central and Eastern Germany), the SPD would mostly likely have won, as their support base was stronger there. Instead Schumacher became a vocal leader of the opposition in the West German parliament. He believed the Socialist SPD was the only political party that had not been tainted by collaboration with either the Nazis or the Communists. He further felt that the greatest failing of the SPD in the Weimar era had been not to embrace, whole-heartedly, the national cause but to leave this as the exclusive preserve of the nationalists and conservatives. He championed forming a united Germany within the old borders of 1937, and was vehemently opposed to Adenauer’s headlong plunge — backed by the Western Allies — into the integration a
nd submersion of the western part of Germany into any and all Western institutions, which he saw as cementing the division of Germany. He stated, ‘Even as terrible as the crimes of German Nazism were against the world, the German people cannot, and must not, give up their right to a national, complete and unified state. For the working masses, the idea and the reality of the German Reich are not only a national political goal but also a matter of class political reality.’(4)
Schumacher died on 20th August 1952, a premature death in part due to the ravages he had undergone during his years spent in Nazi concentration camps. Had he lived, and had he ever become German Chancellor, the Western Allies would have faced a very different proposition to Adenauer and would have found their new satellite a lot less malleable. Unlike Adenauer, who only paid lip service to the idea, Schumacher would have fought tooth and nail for the unification of Germany (along the lines that Austria received in 1955). While hundreds of thousands of Germans packed the route of his funeral, the Western Allies breathed a collective sigh of relief at his passing.
Adenauer’s brief was to tie West Germany as tightly to the Western Alliance as possible, no matter that joining NATO, the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community — ‘stoking the furnaces of war’) and then the European Community slammed one door shut after the other on the possibility of a united Germany. The Allies knew they had the right man in power to steer Germany along the path of least resistance, and more often than not Adenauer had to dance to their tune. Although he initially stated that Germans would never again bear arms, when the Cold War escalated, the Americans told him to re-arm and Germany re-armed. He had to ask the US President for permission to open diplomatic relations on behalf of West Germany with the Russians before he gained the release of Germany’s remaining captives, giving the Russians what they wanted in return — namely the establishment of formal diplomatic relations with West Germany and the de facto recognition of Germany’s permanent division.
Walter Ulbricht and the clique that took over the Soviet zone, which became the erroneously-titled German ‘Democratic’ Republic (East Germany), had been groomed for their task by Stalin during the war. Every leadership of every state the Soviets occupied after the war remained their puppets until the end. They were all united by an oppressive tyranny that would allow no deviation from the line dictated in Moscow. At the first sign of any independent spirit in the east, such as the riots in Berlin in June 1953 that were directed against the Soviet occupation forces following Stalin’s death, Russian tanks quickly appeared to remind the Germans that they were not masters of their own destiny.
In the 1970s, Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik was hailed as brave and unique but could never have taken place without the Western Allies’ consent, dovetailing as it did into the era of détente. The threat of Russian force hung over any and all demonstrations of independent will, and kept the lid on Germany and Eastern Europe until the arrival of Gorbachev and his policies of glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring), which opened the way to the re-emergence of half the continent of Europe from under the heel of Soviet colonisation and occupation.
The Germany that re-emerged after the fall of the wall in 1989, stripped of her Prussian heart, was a very different Germany and it remains to be seen whether a new Germany, with a healthy sense of patriotism, will re-emerge on anything other than the football pitch. The initial euphoria of the fall of the wall soon subsided into mutual recriminations between ‘Ossies’ (Easterners) and ‘Wessies’ (Westerners). The ‘walls in the mind’ have been far harder to fell than the one of concrete and barbed wire; these barriers are the product of half a century of occupation that created an utterly artificial divide between East and West Germans, a divide that had no historical precedent, but which will take generations to heal.
There are many contemporary examples of the fractured relationship Germans still have with their nation. In an article written for The Times entitled ‘Unfinished business — a Final Resting Place for the War Dead No One Wants to Remember’, Roger Boyes covers another taboo subject: namely the German War Graves Commission’s attempts to locate and bury not only bodies of German soldiers of the Second World War, but also bodies of civilians who were victims of ethnic cleansing that have been discovered in mass graves in places such as Aussig (Usti nad Lebem) in the former German Sudeten region of the Czech Republic. He writes:
German war dead have been airbrushed out of history by the Germans themselves… There is no equivalent to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or the Cenotaph in London. Instead villages put up small monuments to those who died ‘in war and dictatorship, 1914 to 1945’, and sometimes the names of locals are etched into the side. But more often than not the families do not know where their relatives died or where they now lie.(5)
Mass graves are continually being uncovered across Germany’s former Eastern territories and across the Sudetenland. Two thousand bodies, mainly women and children, were found in the former Teutonic Order’s fortress town of Marienburg (Malbork) in East Prussia in October 2008, and reburied in the border town of Stettin (Szczecin) in August 2009. Five and a half thousand were laid to rest in the Czech border town of Eger (Cheb) in September 2010, with 145 sites containing mass graves having been discovered in the former German Sudetenland to date and many more yet to be precisely located. Another mass grave containing the remains of over 700 bodies was discovered in Lese (Liescha) in Slovenia in 2010, with an estimated further 500 such graves across the former Yugoslavia. These graves invariably contain murdered civilians, women and children, who were often murdered alongside men in uniform. At this point it is also worth pausing to remember that the majority of the 5.3 million German soldiers who were killed in the war were conscripts. Whether they were good men or bad, heroes or criminals, Boyes is absolutely right: no one wants to remember them.
In 1985 a group of extremists set fire to and destroyed a cross in the Harz Mountains that had been erected by the German refugees to commemorate their lost relatives and homelands. The base of the cross had contained an urn filled with earth from a cemetery in Pomerania. It had been inaugurated in June 1950 in the presence of 20,000 refugees and the then Mayor of Berlin, Ernst Reuter.(6) In 2008, the University of Potsdam held a four-part debate about the ‘History of German Settlement in Central and Eastern Europe’. One of the invited guest speakers was Erika Steinbach, a Christian Democrat politician, and former spokesperson of the Christian Democrats on human rights and humanitarian aid. A member of the board of the cultural Goethe Institut and the national broadcasting corporation, the ZDF, she was also the President of the BDV, the Central Association for the Expellees. Left-wing radicals prevented her from speaking. Other than a small article in the Welt am Sonntag by Thomas Schmid, no one complained about the infringement of her right to free speech, or the rights of the people she represented.(7) The radical left in Germany still wants the victims to shut up and is regularly prepared to use the intimidation tactics of the SA to try and ensure they do.
An article by Judy Dempsey that appeared in the International Herald Tribune encapsulated the deep-seated malaise in post-war Germany. Entitled ‘Russia Sends Windows Back to German Church’, it describes a rare example of the Russian authorities returning cultural artifacts looted during the war. Although the 20-metre (65-feet) high medieval stained glass windows depicting scenes from the Old Testament were initially removed from the Marienkirche for safe keeping before the Red Army arrived, they were subsequently found and transported to Leningrad (St Petersburg). What should have been an occasion for celebration was put into a different context by the journalist when she reported:
This drab Eastern German city… was almost completely destroyed in the last days of World War II… [but the return of the windows has] failed to generate any real pride in the city’s cultural and religious heritage. On a recent visit to the church, the glorious stained glass windows were hardly visible. Besides the absence of lighting, it was impossible to appreciate
the proportions, the color and the powerful images; a makeshift stage was blocking the view of the windows. The rest of the church was being turned into a Christmas market. Patzel, the Mayor, said the number of parishioners, 5,600 from a population of 61,000, is dwindling and besides it would cost enormous sums of money to restore the Marienkirche to its former glory. In a city with high unemployment and hit hard by reunification when much of the old state-run enterprises were closed, there are other priorities… ‘It should mean so much to the people of Frankfurt an der Oder to have these windows on display again’ one of the restorers said. ‘It should encourage a sense of pride and identity.’(8)
A beautiful medieval town on the banks of the river Oder, with its once famous university which hosted the likes of Alexander von Humboldt, Frankfurt an der Oder is now a sad grey monument to communist realism. It is one of the cities that was cut in half after the war when the victors arbitrarily decided to make a river the new dividing line between Germany and Poland. In some ways, it comes as no surprise that the return of these cultural artifacts to a concrete and desolate wilderness has not generated much interest in a nation that has forgotten the ties that bind and concreted over much of its history. During a radio show in 2009, discussing the forthcoming commemoration of the sixty-year anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic of (West) Germany and twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall, statistics showed that 50 per cent of West Germans had still not visited the former German ‘Democratic’ Republic (East Germany) and less than 10 per cent had crossed the Oder-Neisse to visit what had been eastern Germany before the war. While surveys show over 75 per cent of Americans, Poles and Irish as being ‘very proud’ of their country, in Germany this figure is only 17 per cent.(9)
Death of a Nation Page 78