After the Reich (35 page)

Another Fräulein von Thadden together with a young Seckendorff girl brought Käthe von Normann news of the fate of other local Junkers. The von der Marwitzes from Rütznow, famous from the time of Frederick the Great, had seen their manor burned to the ground, and the father shot in Greifenberg. Frau von der Marwitz had been put to work with the cows, and was in a pitiful state, weighing under thirty-five kilos. The Blanckenburgs had a similar tale to tell. Property no longer had any real meaning. Lehndorff was not upset to find shirts embellished with his relatives’ monograms on the bellies of his patients. When he treated the Polish commandant he sent him home on a horse with a valuable package that included money, white bread, eggs, stockings and a shirt bearing his uncle’s initials.
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The women, children and the few remaining men assembled at the sound of a bell at 6 a.m., seven days a week. For their labours they were given a little skimmed milk and 250 grams of corn a head (150 grams for non-workers and children) to make bread. This was far less than the Berliners, but then there were no Westerners around to monitor what was going on, and no propaganda war to win. There was no meat, butter, curds or vegetables to be had, but this was the country, and diets could be supplemented by the odd wild boar or stag, fish from the many lakes and wild mushrooms. Lehndorff even found some morels.
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Working for the Poles

The Polish Miliz also materialised - a cross between a militia and a police force. It was variously reported to be made up of young boys of nineteen or twenty who had been in the German ‘work service’, KZler or partisans.
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Their desire for revenge made them even more ferocious than the Russians.
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They took over the job of rounding up Germans from the Russians. Women and children were herded towards Germany, while any remaining men were put to work.
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The shops in Käthe’s local town of Glowitz were now also in Polish hands, and accepted złotys, not marks. The inhabitants of the villages began to form the impression that they were living in an inverted version of the Nazi General Gouvernement. Even in October, inhabitants of Eastern Pomerania had no idea whether their ‘zone’ was German or Polish.

Faith was deep-rooted in the old Prussian East, particularly among the Pomeranian and East Prussian gentry, where there was a tradition of Pietism exemplified in the journals of Graf Lehndorff. Käthe von Normann’s diary reveals a profoundly religious woman who gathers her children around her in daily prayer and sings hymns with them. Every night their missing father is remembered in their orisons. Apart from marauding Russians, hunger and the strains imposed by forced labour, the Normanns seemed to suffer most from lack of shoes. What they had formerly possessed had been taken by the Russians, and the children’s feet were growing. Two pairs of stockings replaced shoes, but they were torn and filthy and no protection against the pelting rain of a Pomeranian spring.

Many of the Poles who settled on German land were refugees themselves, driven from their homes east of the Bug, which was now to become Soviet territory. In May offices were recreated in Breslau to find housing for the expellees. On 6 July, eleven days before the conference opened in Potsdam, the first 800 Germans were expelled from the city.
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For the time being the Germans cleared rubble, buried bodies and cleared mines. The Soviet authorities had little consideration for the Poles, even those who had been slave labourers under the Nazis. Some were packed off to the mines at Waldenburg.
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The Potsdam Conference that summer proved an acute disappointment for the Germans marooned east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. The Western Allies turned a blind eye to the Poles as they reshaped their domain. At first the Germans welcomed the news that the Poles were to be their masters - ‘that, instead of the “Godless” Russians, from now on the Catholic Poles had taken over the regime’.
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The level of ‘Polonisation’ came as a shock to every German. In the cities German ‘antifa’ groups emerged to help in the work of denazification only to discover that the Poles wanted them out too.
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New names had to be found. Henceforth Breslau was ‘Wrocław’ - like ‘Gdansk’ a name so obscure it was new even to the most fanatical Polish nationalists. On 15 May the bishop of Katowice, Stanisław Abramski, visited the priests of the Breslau Cathedral Chapter to tell them that Poland would brook no racial minorities.
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‘Breslau and Stettin are to become thoroughly Polish; Lvov with its university is coming to Breslau; Wilna with its university is moving to Stettin.’
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Each of Breslau’s fine, red-brick medieval churches was to be invested with the traditions of a church in Lvov. In all four and a half million ethnic Poles were to be resettled in this way. On 12 August 1945 the Polish primate Cardinal Hlond arrived to break the news to the German Catholic clergy that they were not welcome either. When Father Helmut Richter received a pastoral letter on 11 October 1945, half of it was in Polish, a language he couldn’t read. Latin would have been a more obvious choice. Father Joachim Konrad delivered the last German sermon in the Elisabethkirche on 30 June 1946, closing the German chapter in the history of Breslau. The Catholic hierarchy (both in Poland and in the Vatican) behaved in a particularly craven way - the Church had forgotten about universality.
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In Danzig, too, the German clergy were told to leave as early as July 1945. Masses were celebrated in Latin, so inside the churches there was no apparent persecution for the time being. The bishop was, however, informed that all Germans had to leave Danzig as the Polish Miliz went from street to street clearing the last Germans out of their houses. The bishop objected that this meant Reich Germans, not Danziger. He was put in his place: it meant the Danziger as well.
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The monks in the Benedictine monastery of Grüssau fared no better. The massive baroque building had been a favourite stopover for Frederick the Great during the Seven Years War. In 1810 the monks had been cleared out, but a religious community from Prague had settled in the buildings after the Czech government had dissolved the abbeys in their new state in 1919. The Nazis had thrown them out in their turn and they had taken refuge in a nearby nunnery. Now it was the Poles’ turn to expel them. Because they were ‘Germans’, only one monk was allowed to remain - he was from the South Tyrol.
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At the end of 1945 there were still 300,000 Germans in Breslau. They outnumbered the incoming Poles by five to one. Nine months later the position was reversed. By March 1947 the Germans comprised less than 10 per cent of the population. Because all Silesian roads led to Breslau, there was little hope of avoiding the city of rubble, and the arrival of more forlorn Germans was seen as a further pretext for plunder.
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While the politicians bargained their city away in Potsdam, Germans were dying at a rate of 300 to 400 a day. Some of these were suicides, but we learn that the number would have been significantly higher had the Germans had access to cooking gas. A few months after the city fell infant mortality had reached 90 per cent. The Russians and the Poles had made it clear they were not in a position to feed the Germans, but a little was dished out all the same - German rations amounted to half to a third of that given to the others. The złoty’s exchange rate with the Reichsmark began at parity, then was pegged at two marks. Exchange remained at best capricious. By the summer the Poles were operating a black market in the city, and Germans could trade their last articles of clothing for food. A good dress, for example, could yield between one and a half and two kilos of butter.
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The Germans had to make way for the Poles as they arrived. For those children who possessed good health there were exciting times to be had among the ruins. Twelve-year-old Friedhelm Mondwurf, for example, would sing songs for the Russian soldiers and then beg for food. His parents were appalled when he came home with a sack full of
klebba
- black rye bread - but they could see the advantages. The boy also went out to the old allotment, which had been mined, and pulled the fruit from the family trees, although the area was littered with dead soldiers.
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Again the old contempt for the Poles materialised. The priest in Alterode near Breslau expressed the view that ‘The Pole is with few exceptions completely subject to the demon drink.’
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When Ukrainian and Galician Poles came to Gleiwitz and kicked the Germans out of their comfortable homes, Hans-Günther Nieusela commented that they preferred houses with bathrooms: ‘in these places they like to keep their goats and poultry’.
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As the Poles came in, Germans were evicted and resettled in the cellars of ruined houses in what were ghettos in all but name. Typhus and diphtheria raged, killing many children. Medicine to deal with the epidemic was made prohibitively expensive to the Germans. Father Helmut Richter reported that a Polish doctor (who was actually no more than a nurse) was injecting typhus cases with carbolic. When asked why, she said it was because they were going to die anyhow.
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Rural Silesia

Every Silesian town went through the same process with more or less the same degree of savagery. In the Catholic areas of Upper Silesia the churches and their ministers were an obvious target. In Preussisch-Kramen Poles broke into the church and prised open the tabernacle. The dove above the altar was shot down and the saints decapitated. In June 1948 they deported the priest, but the villagers evidently looked Polish enough, and were allowed to remain for now.
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In Ritterswalde near Neisse the priest was shot, but not killed, at the altar of his church. Sixteen other Silesian priests were killed.
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Klosterbruck in Kreis Oppeln is a particularly well-documented case. The Russians arrived on 21 January 1945. The priests and local nuns had taken refuge in the convent chapel together with a young woman and her child. The usual rape and pillage went on in the streets outside. Any woman who refused to lie down was shot. The priest whose account we have was contemptuous of the Russian conquerors. ‘Go back to Russia,’ he wrote, ‘and sit outside your wattle and daub cottage, chew sunflower seeds and you will become amiable again.’
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Some were not so bad: a Muslim officer, ‘a good chap’, brought them a bucket full of soup and some sugar after they had slaughtered the hogs; but then a crazed older officer took a nun behind the altar and tried to rape her. He was interrupted by a younger officer who seized the man and had some soldiers throw him out like a bag of flour. A guard was posted at the door to the chapel. On Ash Wednesday that year the girls paid particular attention to the practice of smearing themselves with ash. They wanted to make themselves look old and ugly.

This did not help the nuns, who had now become the object of Russian attentions again. At the beginning of Lent four of them were taken off and raped. The Poles arrived on 14 March and banned the use of German. ‘Satan is back!’ wrote the priest. ‘The new Satan seems almost more dangerous. He claims to be Catholic and keeps talking about Czestochowa.’
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Three days later all the nuns who had been spared were raped, including one of eighty. For some of them the new experience was coupled with a further unpleasantness: venereal disease. The Russians now proudly claimed there were no more virgins in Klosterbruck. The plight of the nuns was particularly galling in that the new Polish doctors refused to treat Germans. Some of their torments came to an end when they were expelled on 25 May.
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Ukrainian Poles arrived in the wake of the Miliz. They had been driven out by the Russians. The priest thought them ‘good people’. Upper Silesia was considered a special case because the population was mixed German and Polish and almost entirely Catholic. For Poles it was an article of faith that they were all Poles, and in many cases only pretending to be German. It was an evident reversal of the Nazi policy, which had stressed the ‘Germanity’ of Upper Silesia at the expense of the Poles.
Wasserpölnisch
- the local patois - had been banned since the 1930s. In consequence the children no longer understood it.
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It was useful to know Polish after the population was banned from speaking German. As Ursula Pechtel reported, ‘A single German word would have been sufficient to have us thrown into a Polish extermination camp.’
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In Schönkirch near Oppeln, in the more German part of Upper Silesia, the Russians spent all day calling for ‘wodka’, ‘cebula’ (onions), ‘ogorki’ (gherkins) and ‘panienka’ (girls). They had no apparent preference, as long as whichever one it was came ‘dawaj, dawaj’ (quickly). The locals cunningly set to work distilling vodka. With one to two bottles they could buy back a stolen cow; with two to three, a horse. Of course they were promptly stolen again.
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In Hindenburg, the Poles arrived bringing along the old name, ‘Zaborze’, for the town, and proceeded to strip it of anything the Russians had left. Their zeal exceeded even that of their patrons. Many of the Germans pretended to be Poles in order to hang on to their property. In some towns like Schönwald, the expulsions took place in three waves: at the end of October 1945, in June 1946 and in May 1947.
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