“If the conscience of men ever again becomes sensitive, these expulsions will be remembered to the undying shame of all who committed or connived them… The Germans were expelled, not just with an absence of over-nice consideration, but with the very maximum of brutality.” (Our Threatened Values – Victor Gollancz (1946)
I came across this ugly story while researching the sad fate of the City of Königsberg. It is perhaps the largest documented case of ethnic cleansing on record, and one of the most disturbing events of recent European history. This concerns the Potsdam Agreement on policy for the occupation and reconstruction of Germany. The agreement was reached at the Potsdam Conference between July 17 and August 2, 1945. The participants were the top leaders of the Soviet Union, the U.S.A and the UK, Josef Stalin, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill. The ministers of foreign affairs of those states were also present.
The agreement was by no means a secret. But given the amount of coverage it received and its subsequent nearly silent treatment in western history books would suggest that it may as well have been a covert agreement between these world leaders.
In short, the US and England gave in to the Soviet dictator Stalin’s demands to control most of eastern Europe. The borders of Germany and Poland and the Soviet Union were redrawn further west to allow Stalin to keep the part of Poland he had already annexed earlier under the secret Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Hitler in 1939. As well, the entire ethnic German population east of the Oder-Neisse line would be expelled.
In real numbers, this meant that approximately 2 million Poles would be forced to abandon their homes and lands and resettle behind the redrawn Polish/Soviet Union border (the Curzon Line) to the West. Then, a staggering number of approximately 13 million Germans would be repatriated to the remaining German territory west of the Neisse river!
The plan was to allow for the orderly and humane repatriation of Germans from their former homelands where their families had lived and worked as far back as the 13th century.
This didn’t quite work out that way, as around 5 million people were forced to flee almost immediately. The Soviet red army advanced into East Prussia in the manner of a vicious barbaric horde bent on raping, killing and – in general – ransacking everything in their path. It was revenge time – perhaps as many as a million dead Soviet fighters in Stalingrad alone – and a particularly good time if you were a sex-starved soldier-slave of a brutal communist regime. Rape, in particular, was the highlight on the pillager’s menu. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then a young captain in the Red Army, described the entry of his regiment into East Prussia in January 1945 as follows: “For three weeks the war had been going on inside Germany, and all of us knew very well that if the girls were German they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction”.
The remaining 8 million Germans were forced to repatriate in an “orderly and humane” fashion, but – to repeat an earlier comment – that is not what happened. Roughly 1,2 million did not survive the unassisted trek west across their now former homelands and through Polish territory to the relative safety of Allied-occupied German territory on the other side of the Neisse river. The survivors – typically not the very old or the very young, and mostly ordinary farm or small town folk who had done nothing more than toil ceaselessly for a living from dawn to dusk their entire lives – told of months and weeks of incredible suffering. They were habitually beaten, robbed of the few possessions they carried with them, the women raped repeatedly. Thousands of expellees committed suicide, not able to withstand the absolute barbarity inflicted on them any longer.
No “Welcome Home”
It is one of Germany’s greatest founding myths that this mass of homeless wanderers was received with unprecedented solidarity. The truth, however, is that they were long viewed as outsiders, forced to keep to themselves and insultingly referred to as “Polacks” and “riff-raff.” In some rural areas, it would take decades for the displaced ethnic Germans to no longer be treated as “newcomers.” Even then, the roots of xenophobia were the same as those that guest workers and asylum-seekers would later experience: a fear of strangers mixed with concerns about prosperity and loss of tradition. There was even a touch of envy. Expellees were, after all, eligible for government assistance, which they often used in the most visible of ways: to buy their own homes.(From an article in Der Spiegel, August 18, 2015)
There are some who will say that Germany and its people got their just rewards in return for the incredible evil inflicted by its Nazi leadership. They had caused the death of countless millions of innocent people across the European continent. But, surely, it has and will always be wrong to kill or otherwise destroy the livelihood and homes of innocent people simple because of where they live or who they are governed by. The great 20th century humanitarian Albert Schweitzer, in his speech accepting the Noble Peace Prize in Oslo in 1954, said:
”The most grievous violation of the right based on historical evolution and of any human right in general is to deprive populations of the right to occupy the country where they live by compelling them to settle elsewhere. The fact that the victorious powers decided at the end of WWII to impose this fate on hundreds of thousands of human beings and, what is more, in a most cruel manner, show how little they were aware of the challenge facing them, namely, to re-establish prosperity and, as far as possible, the rule of law”.
The bitter irony is that Hitler started the expulsion syndrome! The following quote is from a lecture by Dr. Alfred de Zayas, a US lawyer and a leading expert in the field of human rights and international law, at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh in 1988:
“After subjugating Poland, he expelled over 1 million Poles from western Poland, from the areas that were annexed by the Reich, and pushed them off into so-called General-government Poland, and he also expelled over 100,000 French from Alsace-Lorraine into Vichy France. And this was a matter that curiously enough was condemned by the Allies during the war, and at the time of the Nuremberg Trials, this expulsion that Hitler carried out for the purpose of “Lebensraum” — pushing out one ethnic group in order to settle the area with your own — was declared to be a war crime, and a crime against humanity.
Not only in the London Agreement, that was the basis of the Nuremberg Trials, but throughout the trials, and the hearings, and the proceedings, it was constantly brought up, and a number of the German leaders were actually convicted of committing these specific crimes, war crimes and crimes against humanity on the basis of these mass expulsions. So that it is a particular anomaly that the Allies themselves got involved in a policy of expulsion of a far greater extent than the one that had been carried out under the Nazis.”
The incredible hardship endured by German refugees during their forced expulsion did not go unnoticed, and reports started to appear in the British media about their ordeal. This prompted the well know philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) to write a scathing letter to the Times of London about the expulsion process:
Mass Deportations
To the editor of the Times
Sir, – In your leading article of October 19 you refer to the third count of the indictment of German war criminals, which deals with an immense array of charges of murder and raping, including mass deportations and the murder of hostages and the fourth count, which includes crimes against humanity such as the attempt to exterminate the Jews. In Eastern Europe now mass deportations are being carried out by our allies on an unprecedented scale, and an apparently deliberate attempt is being made to exterminate many millions of Germans, not by gas but by depriving them of their homes and of food, leaving them to die by slow and agonized starvation. This is not done as an act of war, but as part of a deliberate policy of peace.
Is it possible for the British nation, with its tradition of humanity, to watch these trials without shame while, in the words of a British officer now in Berlin, we acquiesce in the preparation (by our allies) of these very injustices against which we have so recently fought? Are mass deportations crimes when carried out by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace? Is it more human to turn out old women and children to die at a distance than to asphyxiate Jews in gas chambers? Can those responsible for the deaths of those who die after expulsion be regarded as less guilty because they do not see or hear the agonies of their victims? Do the future laws of war justify the killing of enemy nationals after enemy resistance has ceased?
These are questions discussed far more in England now than the past sins of the Nazis. It was decreed by the Potsdam agreement that expulsions of Germans should be carried out in a humane and orderly manner. And it is well known, both through published accounts and through letters received in the numerous British families which have relatives or friends in the armies of occupation, that this proviso has not been observed by our Russian and Polish allies. It is right that expression should be given to the immense public indignation that has resulted, and that our allies should know that British friendship may well be completely alienated by the continuation of this policy.
I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
Russel
Trinity College, Cambridge, Oct. 19.