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Orderly and Humane: German Expulsions After World War Two

Bionic Mosquito

Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, by R.M. Douglas

From the introduction:

Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer – and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples – in human history. With the assistance of the British, Soviet, and U.S. governments, millions of German-speaking civilians living in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the parts of eastern Germany assigned to Poland were driven out of their homes and deposited amid the ruins of the Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. Millions more, who had fled the advancing Red Army in the final months of the war, were prevented from returning to their places of origin, and became lifelong exiles….altogether, the expulsion operation permanently displaced at least 12 million people, and perhaps as many as 14 million. Most of these were women and children under the age of sixteen….estimates of 500,000 deaths at the lower end of the spectrum, and as many as 1.5 million at the higher, are consistent with the evidence as it exists at present.

In this book, Douglas compiles – apparently for the first time in English – a thorough study of one of the least discussed tragedies of the Second World War, and certainly of the immediate post-war period – that of the forced expulsion of Germans from their homelands throughout central Europe.

On the most optimistic interpretation…the expulsions were an immense man-made catastrophe….

That this tragedy remains relatively unknown, even in the highest academic circles, is given evidence by the following anecdote provided by the author:

It is, then, entirely understandable why so many of my splendid and learned colleagues on the Colgate faculty should have expressed their confusion to me after reading in the newspapers in October 2009 that the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, had demanded that the other members of the European Union legally indemnify his country against compensation claims by ethnic German expellees, as the price of his country’s ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. None had been aware that anything had occurred after the war in respect of which the Czech Republic might require to be indemnified.
Douglas gives some reasons why he believes that this episode has received so little attention:

For Germans, it invites debate about the war-time record of ethnic German minorities living in the subject countries.
For the citizens of expelling countries, it draws unwanted attention and casts a doubtful light on carefully crafted war-related narratives.
For citizens of the U.S. and Britain, it draws light to the complicity of their leaders in one of the largest episodes of human rights abuse in history.

Douglas does not add in this context, but elsewhere sheds light on, another possible reason for the relative silence. It is not considered appropriate to show any sympathy toward Germans as regards the Second World War, and especially if it might be juxtaposed to the Holocaust – therefore even the study of such episodes might result in unwanted professional risks. This conclusion is suggested given his need to apologize in advance for the possibility that he might be accused of holding such a position:

It is appropriate at the outset to state explicitly that no legitimate comparison can be drawn between the postwar expulsions and the appalling record of German offenses against the Jews and other innocent victims between 1939 and 1945. The extent of Nazi criminality and barbarity in central and eastern Europe is on a scale and of a degree that is almost impossible to overstate.

Douglas begins this book by with a focus on the Munich Conference of 1938, and the actions taken thereafter by Edvard Beneš. When reading this, I wondered about the relevance of Munich to this narrative – these expulsions took place seven years and more after the conference: what is the possible connection? As Douglas will demonstrate, the expulsions were not devised at the last moment, in the chaos of the last days of Berlin, but had been discussed and contemplated by many of the actors – including in the U.S. and Britain –almost from the beginning of the war.

The result of the Munich Conference, as is well-known, was the Nazi annexation of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland, the portion of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany and populated primarily by ethnic Germans.

The Sudetenland issue dates to the end of the First World War, and it represents one of the many failures of the Paris Peace Conference after that war:

The German deputies of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the Imperial Council (Reichsrat) referred to the Fourteen Points of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the right proposed therein to self-determination, and attempted to negotiate the union of the German-speaking territories with the new Republic of German Austria, which itself aimed at joining Weimar Germany.

However Sudetenland remained in a newly created Czechoslovakia, a multi-ethnic state of several nations: Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenians.

At the Paris Conference (technically Versailles dealt with Germany), Beneš lobbied long and hard to keep these ethnically German territories within Czech territory. Many diplomats from the West at the conference expressed reservations even at that time, yet Beneš was successful – even more than many of his countrymen had dared to imagine. Unfortunately, his victory sowed the seed of opportunity for confrontation:

Adolf Hitler had never ceased to highlight the incompatibility of territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles with the aims for which the Allies had professed to fight the Great War. The existence of Czechoslovakia in its current form, he insisted, was unanswerable proof of the victors’ hypocrisy.

Douglas sheds some light (for me at least) regarding Munich. While the term “Munich” as regarding the 1938 conference is today used as a term of derision, at the time it was hailed in all quarters of the West – not only for averting war, but also for correcting one of the well-recognized wrongs committed in Paris nineteen years earlier:

…as the London Times put it, the transfer of territory to Germany had been “both necessary and fundamentally just.”

Édouard Daladier, the prime minister, did not believe that most French citizens would understand why, as the law professor and commentator Joseph Barthélemy put it, there must be a general European war “to maintain three million Germans under Czech sovereignty.”

As for Great Britain, “appeasers” and anti-appeasers” alike agreed that the Sudeten Germans’ claim to determine their own allegiance was justified….Even Winston Churchill told Hubert Ripka, one of Benes’s closest associates, in the summer of 1938 that if he had been prime minister he would have acted as Neville Chamberlain had done….

Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, declared in the House of Lords that even if negotiations at Munich had broken down and a war had resulted, “no body of statesmen drawing the boundaries of a new Czechoslovakia would have redrawn them as they were left by the Treaty of Versailles.”

Gallup polls revealed popular majorities in Britain and France, and a still larger one in the United States, in favor of the Munich Pact.

The court historians seem to have done a thorough job of burying this part of the story.

Beneš, after Munich, departed for the United States. In May 1939, Beneš was able to privately meet with Roosevelt. What he heard from the president certainly must have been a welcome view: as far as the U.S. Administration was concerned, “Munich does not exist.” Separately, the other members of “the Big Three” indicated that they no longer felt bound by the terms of Munich.

Beginning in September 1941, Beneš felt confident enough about his position that he began floating trial balloons regarding the possibility of large population transfers after the war. “Germans, good and bad, European-minded and Nazi-minded, must learn…that war does not pay.” There was “no way other than the way of suffering of educating a social and political community and there never was any other way.”

As he had no significant push-back from the Allies regarding these statements, Beneš felt safe to go further. In a January 1942 article, he declared:

“National minorities…are always – and in Central Europe especially – a real thorn in the side of individual nations. This is especially true if they are German minorities.” Before speaking of minority rights, it was necessary to “define the rights of majorities and the obligations of minorities.”

He questioned, in light of wartime experiences, whether it was necessary or desirable for minorities to continue in existence. Then he used Hitler’s actions to justify the massive population transfers that would be required throughout Central Europe if his visions were to become reality:

Hitler himself has transferred German minorities from the Baltic and from Bessarabia. Germany, therefore, cannot a priori regard it as an injury to her if other states adopt the same methods with regard to German minorities….It will be necessary after this war to carry out a transfer of populations on a very much larger scale than after the last war.

Hitler did it, so it must be OK.

This discussion was not occurring solely in the mind of the man acting as the Czechoslovak leader in exile. Eden learned that Stalin was also considering such transfers as early as December 1941 regarding the Germans from lands that would be given to Poland after the war. The British Foreign Office, in 1942, suggested that large-scale transfers were “a feasible method of dealing with the European minorities problem.”

It is interesting that these discussions were occurring even as early as 1939 – and certainly before United States official entry into the war. From this time until the war’s conclusion, the leaders of the Allied powers met on several occasions. Their underlings met daily. Was there any push-back by the U.S. or Great Britain against Russia on this issue? Anything that suggests that the two Anglo leaders considered such massive population transfers as a horrendous and certain to be calamitous undertaking? While they had some leverage over Stalin, did they at least try to utilize this leverage on behalf of the minorities in question? Douglas offers no evidence to this effect, and instead offers much evidence to the contrary – willing partners were present in both England and the U.S.

Poland eventually followed in the tracks first laid by Czechoslovakia. Certainly at the beginning of the war, Poland’s focus was to regain all territories lost. As it became clear that the Russians would keep what was taken in the east, Poland looked to the west and inevitably to the expulsion of Germans in East Prussia.

Rumors began to circulate that the British government was now falling in to support such forced expulsions. The Sudeten German leader in exile, Wenzel Jaksch, decided the best course was to remain dignified and consistent in his positions in support of his community. The line he had to walk was too thin – on the one hand, to not give the slightest hint that he was a support to the Nazis, on the other to properly place his claims for recognition of national Germans in Czechoslovakia.

The line was so thin that it need not have existed. Once the war began, the position of Central-European Germans outside of Germany was tenuous at best. To stay neutral only gave the appearance of giving aid to the other side. Overt acts of what is called patriotism in America would be necessary to even give some hope of being allowed to remain in their homes after the war. Yet this would require taking the fight against their national brothers.

That the line was so thin and that the fate of these Central European Germans was virtually sealed before the war began does not explain the robustness by which the Allies approvingly discussed the issue of forced transfers. The comments range from the casual (as if the entire task was equivalent to moving a few families from one city to the neighboring city) to the callous:

Herbert Hoover…called for consideration of what he described as “the heroic remedy of transfer of population” as a means of preventing future European conflict.”

Sumner Welles [recent collaborator with FDR on foreign affairs]…was coming around to the idea that “we should avail ourselves of this moment of world upheaval to effect transfers of population where these are necessary to prevent new conflicts, and thus enable peoples to live under the government they desire, free from racial discriminations.”

…the Oxford historian, A.J.P. Taylor declared that the Czechoslovak state could only be resurrected using the same “ruthlessness” and inflicting “as much suffering” as the Germans had employed in destroying it.

In the House of Lords, Robert Vansittart [second cousin of Lawrence of Arabia]…applauded Stalin’s robust indifference to questions of guilt or innocence, when driving the Soviet Union’s German-speaking population from their homes in 1941, as a model for the Allies to follow. “He was a thousand times right; five hundred thousand times right….I say these [deportees] were not Hitlerite Germans. They had a quarter of a century’s training in the doctrines of Communism….Nevertheless they were held to be Germans and unreliable.”

Even Lord Robert Cecil [cousin of Arthur Balfour], president of the League of Nations Union and an impassioned defender of the rights of minorities between the wars, now agreed that the Sudetendeutsche at least would “have to be removed,” and that their fate should be of no concern to anyone but the Czechoslovak government.

These are not words of concern for those to face the forced relocation to come. These are not words that demonstrate a concern to separate the guilty from the innocent. These are words that demonstrate, in some cases, a pleasure in the pain that will be inflicted – loss of property, loss of dignity, loss of life. These are words that justify the coming actions using Hitler as the yardstick of acceptable behavior...

Read more:
http://lewrockwell.com/rep3/german-expulsions-after-ww2.html