Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (44 page)

But these raids on the part of the Poles were nothing compared to the sufferings we endured as regards hunger and cold. For three weeks we lived in the trucks, and the icy wind, the rain and the snow came through the chinks. The nights were dreadful and seemed endless. There was hardly enough room for us to stand, let alone sit down or lie down … Every morning at dawn the doors of the trucks were unlocked by the Polish guards and the dead who had not survived the night were carried out. Their number increased alarmingly from day to day. Sometimes there were as many as ten.
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Owing to the appalling weather and the lack of facilities for refugees on the other side of the border, the Soviets did their best to deny entry to trainloads of Germans – but Poles, who were keen to keep up the process of ‘repatriation’, carried on deporting them anyway. Another expellee tells how his group was made to get out of the train near the border and walk the rest of the way into the Russian zone. Along the way they had their suitcases and shoes stolen. ‘When we arrived at Forst at three o’clock in the afternoon … the Russians refused to let us enter the town and tried to make us turn back. It was not until eight o‘clock in the evening that they finally allowed us to seek shelter from the cold.’
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The cruelty of refusing to allow German refugees to cross the border, and denying them shelter when they got there, is perhaps more understandable when one takes into account the fact that the Soviet zone along this stretch of the border was already saturated with refugees. One Silesian factory owner, who spent the summer of 1945 travelling back and forth across the River Neisse in an attempt to salvage something of his property, came across notices fixed to the telegraph poles outside Görlitz warning of a local blockade. The authorities here had banned the entry of refugees in order to prevent conditions from degenerating beyond their control. ‘There is a famine in Görlitz,’ the notice read. ‘All local attempts to solve the problem of the refugees have failed. All persons returning home and all refugees are herewith advised to make for places where the food problem is not acute. If you disregard this warning you will probably starve to death.’

According to notes he made at the time, the situation was just as bad all the way along the river. Refugees had crossed the border in the hope that their suffering would end:

But now that they have at last reached the Neisse their hopes are dashed to the ground. There is no one who can help them. There is no one who can tell them where to find refuge or who can provide them with a temporary shelter. They are left to their own fate, and are driven on pitilessly from place to place like lepers.
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Some refugees managed to make it deeper into Germany, but wherever they went they were greeted by similarly desperate conditions. In the summer of 1945 Lieutenant Colonel William Byford-Jones witnessed a trainload of refugees arriving from the east. ‘The train was a mixture of cattle and goods trucks, all of which were so packed that people lay on the tops, clung to the sides or hung on the bumpers. Children were tied by ropes to ventilator cocks, heating pipes, and iron fittings.’ As the train came to a halt, they were not welcomed. The platforms were already packed with refugees that had arrived earlier, and who had nowhere to go. According to Byford-Jones the crowds were so dense that a full minute elapsed before anyone was able to disembark from the train.

The people who had arrived days before pressed back to make room, and looked on in silence. Soon the platform was filled with cries of disillusionment as the newcomers learned how they had been deceived, or had deceived themselves. They stood in groups, clutching or sitting on their belongings. Their hair was matted. They were filthy, covered with soot and grime. Children had running sores, and scratched themselves continually, and with seeming pleasure. Old men, unshaven, red-eyed, looked like drug addicts, who neither felt, nor heard, nor saw. It is certain that if one half of these people had been asked why they had come to swell the ranks of the army of the dispossessed of Berlin, they would not have been able to say.
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After witnessing dozens of similar scenes in stations across Germany, British and American observers began to urge their respective governments to do something about it. The American Political Adviser for Germany, Robert Murphy, wrote to the State Department recommending that America ‘should make its attitude as expressed at Potsdam unmistakably clear’ to the Polish and Czech governments. ‘The mind reverts to other recent mass deportations which horrified the world,’ he wrote. ‘Those mass deportations engineered by the Nazis provided part of the moral basis on which we waged war and which gave strength to our cause … It would be most unfortunate were the record to indicate that we are
particeps
to methods we have often condemned in other instances.’
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The State Department did indeed instruct their diplomatic staff to express American displeasure to the Poles, but both the American and the British ambassadors in Warsaw resisted such calls because they did not want to come across as ‘pro-German’. At the time they were under attack from the Communists, who were making considerable gains by branding the western governments as ‘fascists’. Cruel as it may seem, British and American diplomatic staff did not want to increase that perception by championing the cause of German refugees – particularly since they believed that any complaints were unlikely to be heeded.
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More effective was the dispatch of British medical teams to Szczecin early in 1946 to supervise train arrangements and prevent sick people and unaccompanied children from getting on the trains in the first place. When the temperature dropped at the end of the year, the western military authorities also managed to convince the Czech and Polish governments to cancel some train movements. In this way they prevented a repetition of some of the worst instances of exposure that had happened the previous winter. The International Committee of the Red Cross also had some success with postponing deportations when conditions dropped below an acceptable level in January 1947.
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But the situation in general only really improved because, with the passage of time, more efficient systems evolved on both sides of the border. Proper transit camps and refugee camps were built, train lines repaired and heating installed in train carriages. The Poles became better at transporting large numbers of people in shorter periods of time and the Soviets, British and Americans became better at receiving and dispersing them once they arrived at the other end.

This was all that the Big Three had requested at Potsdam – a pause, so that the authorities on both sides would be able to organize themselves efficiently. Most of the tragedies occurred because that pause was not observed. In their impatience to be rid of their German minorities, the Poles and Czechs who conducted the expulsions were simply not interested in the consequences of their actions. As a result, an unknown number of German refugees – but certainly many, many thousands – died needlessly in some of the most squalid conditions imaginable.
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‘Home’ to the Reich

The statistics associated with the expulsion of the Germans between 1945 and 1949 defy imagination. By far the greatest number of them came from the lands east of the Oder and Neisse that had been incorporated into the new Poland – almost 7 million, according to the German government figures. Almost another 3 million were removed from Czechoslovakia, and more than 1.8 million from other lands, making a total of 11,730,000 refugees altogether.
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Each of the different zones of Germany coped with this massive influx of people in its own way. Probably the worst prepared was the Soviet zone, whose towns and cities were amongst the most comprehensively destroyed by the war, and which was in the process of being stripped of everything of value for Soviet war reparations. A flood of refugees arrived in the aftermath of the war, mostly from the new Poland, but also from Czechoslovakia. By the end of November 1945 there were already a million of them trying to scratch a living here, disoriented and virtually destitute. During four years from the end of the war at least 3.2 million refugees settled in the zone, and possibly as many as 4.3 million. A further 3 million or so paused there temporarily before moving on to other parts of Germany.
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The British zone, which bordered none of the deporting countries, had a little more time to prepare. In the autumn and winter of 1945 the British organized an operation to take in millions more refugees, code-named Operation Swallow. Between February 1946 and October 1947 eight trains plied their way back and forth between Szczecin and Lübeck, each composed of covered freight wagons with a total capacity of 2,000 people. Other trains took refugees from Kaławska to Mariental, Alversdorf and Friedland; and from April 1946, refugees were also transported to Lübeck by sea. In this way some 6,000 ‘eastern’ Germans were transported into the British zone almost every single day for a full year and a half.
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By the end of the decade more than 4.25 million new people had settled here.

Further south, the Americans continued to receive refugees from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia – more than 3.5 million of them in total. The authorities there struggled to cope, and hundreds of thousands were still languishing in refugee camps at the start of the 1950s. According to General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor in West Germany, the influx of refugees increased the population of the British and American zones of West Germany by over 23 per cent. In East Germany, according to its first president, Wilhelm Pieck, the increase in population was as much as 25 per cent.
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The effect this had on all parts of Germany (with the exception of the French zone, which received relatively few refugees) was verging on the catastrophic. Most of the cities had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombing during the war, and the country’s shattered infrastructure simply could not cope. Even after their arrival refugees continued to die in their thousands because they were unable to find the shelter, the medical aid or the food to sustain them after their westward odyssey.

For those who were least able to find work or integrate themselves into German society – mostly the sick, the elderly, or widowed women with children – several years in refugee camps was all they could look forward to. Conditions in these camps were sometimes not much better than finding shelter in ruined buildings. A report on the camp at Dingolfing by the Bavarian Red Cross, for example, described a high number of invalids and people with tuberculosis living in overcrowded conditions. They had no proper shoes, clothing or bedding. In another camp in Sperlhammer cardboard had to be pasted to the walls of the barracks as protection against the water that leaked through.
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Worse than this, however, were the social and psychological problems experienced by the refugees. People from the east or the Sudetenland were sometimes regarded as foreigners by other Germans, and tensions often rose up between them. As General Clay wrote in 1950,

Separated from Germany through many generations, the expellee even spoke in a different tongue. He no longer shared common customs and traditions nor did he think of Germany as home. He could not persuade himself that he was forever exiled; his eyes and thoughts and hopes turned homeward.
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According to one man deported from Hungary, it was difficult for his fellow expellees to forge a new life for themselves, ‘Not only because they had lost their homelands and practically all their material possessions, but also they had lost their identity.’
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The social democrat Hermann Brill described the refugees he saw as suffering from a deep state of shock. ‘They have fully lost the ground from under them. That which is taken for granted by us, a sense of security from life experience, a certain personal feeling for their individual freedom and human worth, that is all gone.’
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In July 1946, a Soviet report on politics in Leipzig described the refugees as still ‘deeply depressed’ and ‘the most indifferent to politics of any group of the Leipzig population’. Unable to adjust to their new circumstances, they did little but dream of returning to their ancient homelands across the border.
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Total Expulsion

The right to return was the one thing that these Germans would be denied. Their expulsion was designed from the outset to be permanent, and with this in mind ever stricter border controls were set up: Germans would be allowed to leave, but they would not be allowed to come back.

Furthermore, their deportation was only the first stage of a much larger operation: after they were gone, attempts were also made to erase all traces of their existence. Even before the Germans had been driven out of Poland and Czechoslovakia, towns, villages and streets were being renamed. In the case of villages that had never had Polish or Czech names before, new ones were invented for them. German monuments were torn down and new Czech or Polish ones erected in their place. Swastikas were taken down everywhere, although their shadow could still be seen on many walls for years to come. The speaking of the German language was banned, and the few Germans who were allowed to stay (by renouncing their German nationality) were advised to speak Polish or Czech even in private.
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