Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (43 page)

Although this declaration managed to slow the transfer of Germans, it signally failed to bring it to a halt. The Poles especially refused to stop expelling Germans from Silesia and Szczecin.
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Furthermore, in its recognition that the expulsions would ‘have to be undertaken’, the Potsdam declaration provided all the countries involved with an official endorsement for their actions – if not immediately, then at least in the very near future. As a consequence, the expulsion of Germans from across Europe would not be confined to a spontaneous but temporary phenomenon that might fizzle out over time. It now had the potential to become an official, permanent and total removal of German men, women and children from every other corner of Europe. It was for this reason that Anne O‘Hare McCormick of the
New York Times
called it ‘the most inhuman decision ever made by governments dedicated to the defence of human rights’.
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The Human Reality of the Expulsions

On Sunday, 1 July 1945, at around half past five in the evening, the Polish army came to the village of Machuswerder in Pomerania and told the people that they had thirty minutes to gather their things and leave. Almost the entire population of this village was German, and since most of the men had long since been lost to the war, it consisted mainly of women, children and old people. Bewildered and afraid, the villagers began to gather up their valuables, family photos, clothes, shoes and any other essential items they could fit into their bags and handcarts. They gathered outside their houses, and on the road that ran through the village. Then, under the supervision of the Poles, they began to walk in the direction of the new Polish/German border sixty kilometres away.

Amongst them was a farmer’s wife and mother of three named Anna Kientopf. Later, in a sworn deposition for the German government, she described the ordeal that she and the rest of her village had to endure.
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The journey, she said, lasted six days, and passed through a blasted landscape still covered in the detritus of war, and the remains of previous treks to the border by other refugees. They came across their first dead body just beyond Landsberg – a woman, who was blue in the face and whose body was swollen with decay. Thereafter, corpses became a common sight. In a forest they passed through they could see the dead bodies of both animals and human beings, whose heads and feet were poking through the earth of their shallow graves. Occasionally members of her own trek succumbed to exhaustion. Some, including her own daughter Annelore, became sick from drinking contaminated water from troughs and wells along the way; others succumbed to starvation:

Most of the people of the trek lived solely from what they found in the fields or ate unripe fruit on the side of the road. We had very little bread. The result was that many people got ill. Small children under one year of age almost all died on the trek. There was no milk, and even if the mothers made them a thick meal soup, the journey was too long for them. Then the changes in the weather, first a scorching sun, and then showers of cold rain, which were fatal. Every day we got a bit further, sometimes we did 9 kilometres, on one day perhaps only three, then 20 or more … I often saw people lying at the side of the highway, blue in the face, and struggling for breath, and others who had collapsed from fatigue, and never got onto their feet again.

They spent the nights in bombed-out houses or in barns, but since these tended to be filthy Anna herself preferred to remain in the open air. Sleeping away from where the others were congregated also saved her from the depredations of some of the Poles, who used the cover of darkness to come and rob the refugees. She often heard shots in the night, as those who tried to defend their possessions were dealt with by their assailants.

The precariousness of her situation was brought home to her one day when she and her party were stopped by a group of armed men,

… and a terrible scene was enacted before our eyes, and touched us most deeply. Four Polish soldiers tried to separate a young girl from her parents, who clung in desperation to her. The Poles struck the parents with their rifle-butts, particularly the man. He staggered, and they pushed him across the road down the embankment. He fell down, and one of the Poles took his machine pistol, and fired a series of shots. For a moment there was a deathly silence, and then the screams of the 2 women pierced the air. They rushed to the dying man, and the four Poles disappeared in the forest.

Anna Kientopf suspected that the men had intended to rape the young girl, though it is possible that they merely wanted to conscript her into some form of forced labour. Of course, this does not mean that she would not have been raped in any case, as happened to hundreds, perhaps thousands of others. Many of those who gave their stories to the German Ministry for Expellees, Refugees and War Victims in the late 1940s and early 1950s attest to having been sexually assaulted in similar circumstances, often repeatedly. They were effectively kidnapped during their trek to the border in order to be put to work on farms or in local factories – but once they no longer had their families around them they became easy targets for the soldiers or foremen who were responsible for them.

It was probably one such round-up for forced labour that Anna Kientopf witnessed when she arrived at Tamsel, although she had no idea about this at the time:

We had to pass through a lane of Polish soldiers, and people were taken out of the column. These had to drop out, and go to the farms on the highway with their carts, and all that they had with them. No-one knew what this meant, but everyone expected something bad. The people refused to obey. Often it was single individuals, particularly young girls, who were kept back. The mothers clung to the girls and wept. Then the soldiers tried to drag them away by force and, as this did not succeed, they began to strike the poor terrified people with rifle-butts and riding whips. One could hear the screams of those who were whipped, far away. I shall never forget it in my life.

Polish soldiers also came to us with riding whips in their hands. With flushed faces, they ordered us to get out of the column, and to go to the farms. Else and Hilde Mittag began to weep. I said: ‘Come, it is no use resisting. They will beat us to death. We will try to escape afterwards.’ Russians were standing there looking on cynically. In our desperation we begged them for help. They shrugged their shoulders and indicated to us that the Poles were the masters. Just as everything already seemed to be hopeless, I saw a senior Polish officer. I pointed to my 3 children, and asked what I could do, as I had three children. I can no longer remember all that I said in my desperation, but he answered: ‘Go to the highway.’ We got hold of our cart and got away as quickly as we could …

Anna and her children finally arrived at Küstrin (or what was now called Kostrzyn Odrza
ski) on 6 July. They tried to cross the Oder, but the border guards refused to let them onto the bridge and sent them away. In desperation they headed southwards in the direction of Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. That night a terrible thunderstorm broke. They spent the night beside the river, without shelter, with nothing to eat or drink, and no guarantee that after their long trek they would be allowed to cross over into Germany after all.

In the end, Anna Kientopf was fairly lucky. Despite being robbed repeatedly – the last time by the Russian border guards on the bridge where they were finally allowed to cross – she made it over the border relatively quickly, and relatively unscathed. Many of those who were driven out of their villages were more actively prevented from crossing the border: alarmed by the massive overcrowding in their zone of Germany, the Russian guards had been instructed not to let any more refugees cross the river. One witness speaks of being expelled on 25 June 1945 and escorted towards the border by Polish guards, only to have those Polish guards disarmed later by Soviet troops, and told to return the expellees to their village. The following week he had to go through exactly the same process again. Thousands of German civilians were forced to march backwards and forwards throughout the border areas, ‘driven on like cattle’, because nobody was willing or able to offer them sanctuary.
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The vast majority of eyewitness accounts stress the absolute lawlessness that surrounded them as they travelled: ‘Every day Germans came to me in tears and told me that the Poles had robbed them of all their possessions’; ‘The Poles behaved like vandals … looting, ransacking, raping’; ‘The Poles robbed us of anything they found in our possession, swore at us, spat in our faces, and flogged and beat us’; ‘We were molested and robbed by the rabble again and again’.
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Such criminal behaviour was compounded by an official policy of confiscating anything of value that the Germans tried to take with them. According to rules drawn up by the Polish government, Germans were not allowed to take more than 500 Reichsmarks out of the country, and no other currency at all.
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No concessions were to be made for those who were actively pro-Polish, or who had opposed the Nazis during the war. Anti-fascists and German Jews were treated exactly the same as any other Germans – they were to be defined by their ‘Germanness’, not their war record or political outlook.
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In the beginning the expulsions were spontaneous, extremely disorganized, and often conducted simply to clear villages in order to make them easier to loot. Communities were force-marched towards the borders because other forms of transport were not available. It was not until later in 1945 and into 1946 that an element of proper state organization was introduced, and transport by train could finally be arranged.

To be fair, the Polish authorities were not only aware of what was going on, but deeply concerned by it – at least in some quarters. In an attempt to make the transfer more ‘orderly and humane’, the government drew up a list of rules at the beginning of 1946. It was stated, for example, that unaccompanied children, the elderly and the sick should be deported only during the summer months, on trains that contained medical supplies. Heavily pregnant women should not be allowed to travel until after they had safely given birth. German-speaking medical staff should accompany every transport, and adequate food and water must be provided. For a basic (if inadequate) measure of security, each train would be protected by ten Polish guards.
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In a further agreement between the Polish authorities and the British army, a provisional timetable was drawn up, and it was again agreed that only healthy people who were capable of enduring the arduous journey would be allowed to travel.
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This was in response to the dozens of international press reports the previous summer revealing that orphanages and hospitals in East Prussia had been emptied straight onto trains without adequate supplies or medical facilities.
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However, while such blatant abuses were curbed, it proved impossible to enforce the new rules fully. Germans keen to leave the country would do their best to conceal sickness, infirmity and pregnancy in order to get themselves onto the transports. Some Polish repatriation officials, meanwhile, were complicit in letting them go. Not only were these officials hopelessly overstretched, but the Polish establishment as a whole had a vested interest in keeping hold of the young and the fit for work in Poland: the elderly and the sick were the first to be deported, because these were the people nobody had any use for. As a consequence, the National Committee for Repatriation often complained to local officials that the repatriation rules were not being followed.
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From the German point of view, conditions on the trains were appalling in the extreme. A German priest who witnessed the arrival of the expellees at the border described what he saw:

The people, men, women, and children all mixed together, were tightly packed in the railway cars, these cattle wagons themselves being locked from the outside. For days on end, the people were transported like this, and in Görlitz the wagons were opened for the first time. I have seen with my own eyes that out of one wagon alone ten corpses were taken and thrown into coffins which had been kept on hand. I noted further that several persons had become deranged … The people were covered in excrement, which led me to believe that they were squeezed together so tightly that there was no longer any possibility for them to relieve themselves at a designated place.
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Deportees were told to carry four days’ worth of food with them, but sometimes their trains would be stopped in sidings for days or even weeks while they waited for clearance to pass into the Soviet zone of Germany. One refugee from Neisse, who was deported at the depth of winter at the beginning of 1946, claimed that his train was halted near the border for three weeks. After his food ran out he was reduced to bartering his belongings with local villagers for something to eat. Every day Polish militiamen entered the trucks to rob his fellow travellers of their valuables. Sometimes it was only their money and wristwatches that were taken; other times it was their shoes and boots, or even the food they had only recently managed to obtain.