Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (37 page)

The first phase of panic and flight in the face of the advancing Red Army occurred between the autumn of 1944 and the Potsdam Conference in July 1945. Hundreds of thousands of Germans fled East Prussia by land and sea; later they were followed by others from Silesia and Pomerania. Mass rapes and massacres at the hands of the Red Army created a widespread atmosphere of terror. “The Russians entered every shelter, cellar and basement, and under menaces, demanded and took watches, rings and other valuables,” ran a report from Danzig in early 1945. “Nearly all the women were raped—among the victims were old women of sixty and seventy-five and girls of fifteen or even twelve. Many were raped ten, twenty or thirty times.” Those who did not flee were thrown into labour or detention camps and deprived of their possessions. Many were forced to wear marks of identification—first large painted swastikas on their clothes, then badges. In these ways, the German population was collectively paid back for the racial humiliation which Nazi policies had inflicted earlier upon the
Untermenschen
.
¹¹

In Czechoslovakia, following liberation, hatred of the Germans was widespread, especially as many seemed unrepentant and “sullen and dangerous.” President Beneš had already won Allied support for his plans to expel the “disloyal” among them, but expediency rather than justice turned out to be the motive for what followed. In Brno, for instance, on 30 May 1945, young National Guards expelled the town’s entire German population, roughly 25,000 people, and herded them towards the Austrian border. Discriminatory measures such as being banned from public transport, or being made to wear “badges of defeat,” added pressure on those that remained. By July 1945, several million Germans had fled or been expelled from their homes and driven into camps or herded across the border. In part, this was an act
of revenge by the east Europeans for their sufferings of the previous six years; but we should not ignore the fact that running parallel with this popular anger was a more carefully thought-out official policy by the new authorities in the region. “We must expel all the Germans,” the Polish communist Gomulka emphasized, “because countries are built on national lines and not on multinational ones.”
¹²

At Potsdam, the nature of this policy became clearer. The Allies accepted the principle of the mass expulsion of millions of Germans, including not just
Volksdeutsche
but also those who were citizens of the pre-war Reich, now living under Soviet or Polish occupation. The Allies’ primary concern was to control the flow of refugees so that they could be received properly in Germany itself. Thus a temporary suspension of the transfers was agreed. In fact, the expulsions continued, especially from the former Reich territories now administered by Poland. Only during the winter of 1945–6 were more “orderly transfers” arranged; but by then the temperature had dropped and many died in the cattle cars which brought the refugees westwards. In all, some twelve to thirteen million Germans were “transferred,” by far the largest such population movement in European history. The numbers who died en route must have been at least in the hundreds of thousands; some sources put the final tally as high as two million.

The disappearance through expulsion or killing of east Europe’s Germans and Jews formed part of a still vaster process of demographic turbulence and instability in the wake of the war. More than seven million refugees from other ethnic groups (mostly Poles, Czechs and Slovaks, Ukrainians and Baits) were evicted from their homes and resettled. The result was the virtual elimination of many minorities in eastern Europe—falling from 32 per cent to 3 per cent of the population in Poland, 33 per cent to 15 per cent in Czechoslovakia, from 28 per cent to 12 per cent in Romania. The German
Volk
was now more closely aligned with the boundaries of the (divided) German state; so, too, the Ukrainians. War, violence and massive social dislocation turned Versailles’s dreams of national homogeneity into realities.
¹³

A total of close to ninety million people were either killed or displaced in Europe between the years 1939 and 1948. Adding together
military and civilian casualties, POWs and civilians forced to move whether permanently or temporarily from their homes during and after the war, we find that these groups amounted to no less than half the total population in extreme cases such as Germany or Poland, but even to one person in five in the case of comparatively less afflicted countries like France. In Poland’s Western Territories well over half the population by 1950 comprised recent settlers and migrants from other regions. Here were, in embryo, the origins of the “new reality of an integrated national community being formed in the crucible of socialist change,” which Polish sociologists analysed in the post-war period.
¹⁴

We cannot hope to understand the subsequent course of European history without attending to this enormous upheaval and trying to ascertain its social and political consequences. The years of Nazi occupation, followed by the chaos of the immediate post-war period, had sundered human ties, destroyed homes and communities and in many cases uprooted the very foundations of society. The thousands of ruined buildings, mined roads and devastated economies were the most visible legacy of these years; but alongside the physical destruction were more intangible wounds which lasted well after the work of reconstruction had been completed. Changing moral and mental perspectives changed individual behaviour, and thence society and politics.

One of the most obvious of these changing values was the erosion of respect for property rights. Put simply, across much of central and eastern Europe a lot of people ended up living in other people’s homes and enjoying their goods. Much of the Germans’ property, as had that of their victims before them, passed abruptly into the hands of new owners. The expulsions—not unlike the earlier deportations of the Jews—provoked a “lust for booty” on the part of onlookers. “The German peasant had scarcely left his farm and house and been taken off to the station by the police, when robbery and plunder were in full swing,” recalled an ethnic German from Hungary. “Former have-nots were stealing by day and night. A rabble would arrive from the town in lorries and plunder everything that came to view and that they could lay their hands on. There were bandits too among the
police.” Just as there had been, of course, a few years earlier among the German police battalions and Waffen-SS units stationed in. eastern Europe.
¹⁵

Places changed their identity and composition. Towns reverted from their German to their Polish, Czech or Hungarian names. Across eastern Europe, synagogues, mosques, Lutheran and Uniate churches were bulldozed, or converted to secular use, becoming barns, stables, warehouses or, later on, cinemas. Those houses which were not rendered unsafe by the wholesale looting stood vacant until new owners moved in. Owing largely to the initial plundering of unoccupied buildings, many areas of settlement remained deserted for many years. The town of Glogau, for example, met a fate shared by others in Silesia: its pre-war population of 33,500 had shrunk to some 5,000 by the early 1960s. “To all intents and purposes Glogau no longer exists,” reported a visitor in 1960. “Here a grotesque looking ruin, there a deep hole, then a hillock overgrown with sparse grass.” Even in 1966 the population of the city of Wroclaw was only 477,000—only three quarters the 1939 size of its former incarnation, Breslau.
¹⁶

In Poland, because there were often too few settlers to replace the expelled Germans and Uniates, the local authorities advertised for newcomers. We read for example, from a 1953 brochure entitled “Moving to New Farms,” how an early settler was told that “in the county of Rzeszów, in the district of Sanok, you’ll find land in abundance, houses and barns; and if you think it sounds too good to be true, anyone can check it out with his own eyes and the railway will cost him nothing.” Sanok lay in a formerly Greek Catholic area, depopulated since the population transfers of 1945 and the anti-partisan sweeps of 1947.
¹⁷

The role of officials in directing this violent exchange of property made its mark on popular attitudes towards authority. Nazi rule had already left many people with the feeling that force was all that mattered. Now they saw, and indeed participated in, the forceful expulsion and looting of fellow-villagers or townspeople under the eyes of the new political authorities. Partisans, policemen and the courts all partook of the opportunities. This experience confirmed a widespread
growing cynicism about politics which fed apathy and conformity and undermined efforts to challenge the holders of power.

For the new authorities and their Soviet backers, no small part of the rationale for the expulsions was to purchase political popularity and, more pertinently, to expand the level of political dependency. By distributing Jewish possessions to their non-Jewish neighbours, the Nazis had created a web of complicity that weakened resistance; after 1945, the expulsion of the Germans allowed Communist officials to follow a similar strategy. Thus considerations of social justice and national security were often a cover for more practical concerns. The new settlers were beholden to the regime for their new station in life; uncertain of the validity of their legal claims to their new homes, anxious for protection against those families who tried to get their property back, they were from the outset a dependent class.
¹⁸

FAMILY AND MORALITY

Derrick Sington, one of the very first British soldiers to enter Belsen, had noted how “in the summer of 1945, after the terror of starvation and the gas chamber had been lifted, the thoughts of those thousands of survivors, healthy enough to reflect and hope, turned to the wives or sisters, parents or children, who had been snatched from them months and even years before.” They sent letters, and relatives started turning up. The British initially sent a car through the camp with a loudspeaker calling out lists of sought-for people; then they began to compile a central registry.
¹⁹

Wartime and post-war displacement broke up innumerable families across the continent. By 1947 there were some 50,000 orphans in Czechoslovakia. In Yugoslavia the estimate was closer to 280,000 and at least 10,000 children had survived the war hiding in the woods in conditions of complete destitution. In Holland, some 60,000 children required help, including those of imprisoned collaborators; in Bucharest there were 30,000 homeless. UNRRA was caring for some 50,000 unaccompanied children in Germany alone, many of whom had forgotten who they were or where they came from.
²⁰

Tracing services were quickly set up by the Red Cross, national
governments and UNRRA. The Central Tracing Bureau employed interviewers and researchers in twenty countries, while the US Central Location Index eventually contained more than one million entries. For years afterwards, national radio and press services carried long lists of missing persons. But the number of individuals reunited with relatives was always outweighed by the number of those still untraced. UNRRA, for example, in its first year was able to solve only about one sixth of its cases. As late as July 1948, over 4,000 children being cared for by the UN as displaced persons were still unidentified.
²¹

Studies of war orphans revealed a range of traumas which many had suffered as a result of their experiences. The children were depressed, unduly serious for their age and highly nervous. They seemed cynical, despondent and distrustful of authority. To many it seemed that the war had produced a generation of anti-idealists. “We have to realize,” one young Czech woman told an English friend, “that the occupation produced cowards as well as heroes. During the years when young people were growing up, morals were inverted; evil was often shown to be more profitable than good and lies more profitable than truth. Those who grew used to whispering cannot speak out naturally now; they either shout or whisper … It is not easy to expel fear from the hearts of the people of the Continent.”
²²

Orphaned children were suspicious of signs of affection and prone to violence, often dangerous. Their “emancipation from the rule of moral law” might manifest itself in crime, in sudden, uncontrollable rages or in brutality towards younger or weaker children. But their casual attitude towards violence also revealed itself in play. English nurses were astounded at the strange behaviour of a group of Jewish children who had survived the camps. Living in a self-contained world which excluded all outsiders, they appeared to expect no assistance or support from grown-ups. If a child went missing from the group, the others would say, quite matter-of-factly: “Oh, he is dead.”
²³

Many such patterns of behaviour were eventually overcome by sustained attention and love. There were relatively few psychoses, as a result of wartime experiences, among either children or adults observed; the majority of problems—such as the sexual difficulties experienced by many former partisans as a result of the enforced
abstinence of the war years—seem to have disappeared with time. In the longer term, it seems that the psychological impact of wartime suffering upon survivors and their children depended heavily upon the interpretation that could be placed upon that suffering—Holocaust survivors (who found it hard to heroize their experiences) and former political prisoners (for whom this was easier) thus found themselves in different situations. In the short term, such differences were less apparent and one can see how the emotional attitudes reported in wartime survivors underlay some broader social and political responses among the population at large.
²⁴