Iron Curtain (25 page)

The actual expulsions of the Germans, when they began a few months later, weren’t much better organized. The Czechs speak of the spring of 1945 as the time of “wild” expulsions, a word that doesn’t quite capture the depth of emotion surrounding these mass evictions. The prewar Czechoslovak president,
Edvard Beneš, had advocated the deportation of ethnic Germans from his country ever since fleeing into exile in
London in 1938. For seven years he had traveled to Moscow, London, and
Washington trying to sell the idea. He had encouraged the deportation of Germans from Hungary too (in part so as to make way for the Hungarians he also hoped to expel from his own country). But despite these high-level discussions and advance preparations—and notwithstanding the “orderly and humane” instruction about to be issued from the Potsdam palace—the first wave of expulsions from the
Sudetenland took place in a maelstrom of fury, vengeance, nationalism, and popular rage.

In a radio address in
Brno on May 12, 1945, just after the Nazi surrender, Beneš declared that the Germans had ceased to behave like humans during the war, and as a nation “must pay for all this with a great and severe punishment … We must liquidate the German problem definitively.” Following that statement, Czechs rioted in the center of Brno, demanding German collaborators be turned over to the police. A few days later, the newly formed Brno National Committee forcibly evicted more than 20,000 men, women, and children from their homes and forced them to start marching toward the
Austrian border on foot, with whatever possessions they could carry.
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Hundreds died before their arrival. According to Czech statistics, 5,558 Germans committed suicide in 1946 alone.
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At about the same time, spontaneous expulsions also began in western Poland, near
Poznań, sparked by a housing shortage as well as by a desire for revenge. There were many Germans still living in the region, Poles were returning home in increasing numbers, buildings were in ruins. In
Wielkopolskie, the region around Poznań, the first local administrators to appear
on the scene were communist secret police officers. They selected German deportees, put them on trucks, and sent them to hastily organized transit camps, where they stayed until transport could be arranged to Germany. This wasn’t the moment for finer feelings. Polish soldiers and security police were instructed to celebrate “the expulsion of German filth from Polish lands … Every officer, every soldier should be aware of the fact that today he fulfills a historic mission, for which generations have been waiting.”
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In this early period, when feelings were still raw, local populations often took their revenge by implementing the same kinds of laws and restrictions that Germans had imposed on them. In the summer of 1945, the Czechs forced Germans to wear white armbands marked with the letter “N”—for
Nemec
, which means “German” in Czech—painted swastikas on their backs, and forbade them to sit on park benches, walk on pavements, or enter cinemas and restaurants.
¹⁵
In Budapest, it happened that crowds of Jewish survivors attacked and beat former fascist officials on their way to or from war crimes trials, in a couple of cases nearly lynching them.
¹⁶

Poles made the Germans do forced
labor—as they had themselves done forced labor during the Nazi occupation—sometimes in former Nazi
concentration camps. In some cases, former prisoners now ruled over former guards, and they beat and tortured them just as they had been beaten and tortured themselves. As one Polish historian writes, the postwar use of these wartime camps, though shocking to us now, made sense at the time: they were intact in a period when little else was. Indeed, they often served multiple uses in quick succession.
¹⁷
More than 11,000 prisoners—mostly Poles, and some Soviet prisoners, including hundreds of children—were living in a small Nazi labor camp in the village of
Potulice, near
Bydgoszcz, for example, until January 1945. Immediately after liberation, the camp was occupied by Russian soldiers, who made use of the barracks as well as what was left of the leather in the tannery where prisoners had worked during the war to repair boots. A few weeks after that, the camp’s first postwar Polish commander,
Eugeniusz Wasilewski, found several Soviet soldiers still in residence when he took possession of the property in February. He asked them to make way for the Germans and the Nazi collaborators—among them the former German guards and commanders of the Potulice camp—whom he had just arrested.

Wasilewski, a prewar member of the merchant marine—and, apparently, an unenthusiastic member of the communist party—then ran the camp
until July. Most of his employees were former prisoners, and many of them were seeking revenge. By all accounts Wasilewski tried to prevent the most egregious forms of mistreatment at Potulice, and one former prisoner turned guard complained that he was too lenient: “In my time things were worse.” But the camp grew from 181 prisoners to 3,387 during the seven months he was in command and conditions inevitably deteriorated.
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A typhus epidemic broke out after Wasilewski left in November, and in the following years the camp employees were accused of fraud, neglect, and alcoholism.
¹⁹
Over the five years of the camp’s existence, nearly 3,000 Germans died there of hunger and disease.

Though there are no archival records of such abuse at Potulice, former guards and prisoners have also described, in interviews and memoirs, scenes of torture and abuse there and in other camps for German deportees. Germans were starved and beaten, they had excrement poured on their heads, their gold teeth removed by force, their hair set on fire. They were forced to repeat “I am a German swine,” and made to exhume the bodies of recently murdered Polish and Soviet prisoners. The commandant of the prison at
Gliwice,
Lola Potok—a Jewish woman who had survived Auschwitz but lost most of her family, including her mother, her siblings, and an infant son—interrogated Germans about their Nazi affiliations, whipping them both when they confessed and when they didn’t, on the grounds that if they didn’t admit to collaboration they were lying. By her own account, she “recovered” after several months, regained her composure, and began to treat the Germans like human beings. This was not because she forgave them but because, she said, she didn’t want to become like them.
²⁰

Over time, the expulsions of Germans from Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and eventually Hungarians from Czechoslovakia as well—did become more orderly. The Czechoslovak president issued the
Beneš Decrees, which gave a legal veneer to what had been spontaneous expulsions. These decrees authorized the seizure of German and Hungarian property in Czechoslovakia; the eviction of German and Hungarian residents; the resettlement of Czechs and Slovaks on German and Hungarian land; and the removal of Czechoslovak citizenship from Germans and Hungarians. As these decrees attained the status of law, transports became more regular, food was provided, expellees were allowed to take furniture and clothing. Commissions were created to deal with knotty questions of property or identity. The latter problem was especially acute in the
ethnically mixed regions of Poland,
where “Polonized” Germans with Polish wives often wanted to stay in the country, as did a number of small ethnic groups such as the Kaszubians and Mazurians, whose members had been considered “German” by the Nazis.

Most confusing were the cases of people who had declared themselves during the war to be Volksdeutsche, of German origin, a category specially invented for the Germanic but not necessarily German inhabitants of Nazi-occupied Europe. The Volksdeutsche were Romanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, or others with German-sounding surnames and perhaps German family roots. They weren’t necessarily able to speak German and most had never been to Germany. When the Nazis asked them to sign Volksdeutsche lists they might have done so out of ethnic pride, but were just as likely to have done so out of fear, or simply a desire for better treatment. Some had been intimidated. In Poland one commission decided in November 1946 to “rehabilitate” the Volksdeutsche and allow them to become “Polish” again, but only if they could prove that they had signed the Volksdeutsche list under duress, and only if they had behaved “in a manner befitting their Polish origin” during the war. Even so the security police sometimes authorized roundups of Volksdeutsche and forced them to work in labor camps alongside actual Germans.
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In Hungary, where many people had German-sounding surnames, the only institution which actually knew who had signed the Volksdeutsche list was the Census Bureau, and at first its director refused to give it up. Even after a visit from the Hungarian secret police in April 1945, the Census Bureau’s employees resisted: never before had the bureau given data away, not for criminal investigations, not during the war, not even when the German occupation government in 1944 had tried to find out the identity of Jews. The bureau finally relented after ten of its employees were arrested by the secret police—and when it was made to understand that the local Soviet authorities were involved in these arrests and would happily carry out more.
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By the time it was finished, the resettling of the German populations of Eastern Europe was an extraordinary mass movement, probably unequaled in European history. By the end of 1947, some 7.6 million “Germans”—including ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsche, and recent settlers—had left Poland, through transfer or escape. About 400,000 of them died on the way back to Germany, from hunger, or disease, or because they were caught in the crossfire of the advancing front.
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Another 2.5 million had left Czechoslovakia and a further 200,000 were expelled from Hungary.
²⁴
German populations were
also
deported, or left voluntarily, from Ukraine, the Baltic States, Romania, and Yugoslavia. In all, some 12 million Germans left Eastern Europe in the postwar period and resettled in both East and West Germany.

Once they’d made the trek across the border,
German refugees received scant welcome. Almost everywhere they went in either the eastern or western occupation zones of Germany, they immediately formed an underclass. They spoke eastern dialects, had different manners and habits, and of course had no possessions or capital of any kind. In 1945, there had been no time to prepare any facilities for them, and many wound up wandering aimlessly in search of food. Epidemics of typhus and dysentery swept through the expellee population and spread to others. So bad was this problem in the Soviet zone that the authorities appealed to local leaders directly to at least keep the expellees in one place, and to “prevent people from wandering farther.” Representatives of the British and American zones also appealed for the expulsions to stop or at least slow down.
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In retrospect, blame for the initial chaos and the thousands of deaths has often been laid on the governments that expelled the Germans. But responsibility ought to be shared more widely. Of course, the expulsions would never have happened without the war, without the German invasion of the region, and without Germany’s brutal mistreatment of the Eastern European population. The numbers were also high because so many German “colonists” had moved to the region during the war, and, indeed, many Germans targeted for expulsion in 1945 did not have families and roots in the region at all. Among those expelled from Poland were ethnic Germans—sometimes from Germany, sometimes from other parts of Europe—who had been moved into Polish or Jewish homes and farms, following the murder or eviction of the owners. German officers or German businessmen and their families, many of whom had taken advantage of the privileges available to them in Nazi-occupied Europe, were also forced to leave. They had no moral claim to Polish land or property at all, though some later considered themselves “expellees” and therefore “victims” anyway.
Erika Steinbach, a German politician who later became leader of the Bund der Vertriebenen, the powerful and vocal expellees’ organization, was the daughter of a low-ranking German corporal, originally from
Hesse, who happened to have been stationed in the Polish town of
Rumia during the war. Her family had been “expelled”—or rather they fled—because they were occupiers, and indeed they headed back home to Hesse, which is where Steinbach grew up.
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The expulsion policy also had the hearty approval of all of the Western Allies, who had thought about it a great deal even before the Potsdam Conference. In 1944, Churchill had told the House of Commons that the “expulsion [of the Germans] is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting” to achieve future peace. Roosevelt also approved of the
ethnic cleansing policy, and cited the 1921–22 population exchanges between Turkey and Greece as a precedent.
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But the expulsions also had the full support of the Soviet Union. In a private, wartime conversation, Stalin had advised the Czechoslovak leadership to “throw them [the Sudeten Germans] out. Now they will learn themselves what it means to rule over someone else.” He also advised the Poles to “create such conditions for the Germans that they want to escape themselves.”
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More importantly, Polish, Czechoslovak, Romanian, and Hungarian policemen who organized the deportation of Germans were all working with Soviet encouragement, in territories technically under the control of the Red Army. Stalin knew that both the Poles and the Czechoslovaks had talked of expelling Germans before the war’s end, and had already assisted the Romanians. But the decision to redraw Poland’s borders, replacing the
eastern territories occupied by the Soviet Union with formerly German lands in the west, meant that the Poles had no choice but to go through with the expulsions, and on a much vaster scale than anyone could have imagined: in the end, the expulsion of the Germans was only possible with Soviet help.