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The post-WWII expulsion of over 10,000,000 ethnic German civilians from Eastern Europe as the Allies look on.
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)

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This article analyses the backgrounds and political motivations for the consistent decision of the governments of Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic to ignore the experience of the German expellees and the concomitant deaths of millions, as well as the question of financial restitution and commemorative monuments, in the interests of maintaining placid diplomatic relations. Because of this phenomenon, one of the largest forced population displacements and the starvation of over 2,200,000 civilian refugees has been consigned to being largely unknown in collective consciousness, academic historiography, and historical memory.

For thorough scholarly and fair research into the history and legacy of the millions of ethnic Germans civilians expelled from Eastern Europe, see the Institute for Research of Expelled Germans, where this article was originally published.

A controversial and recurring question that often stubbornly reemerges in Europe is the question of how to, or whether or not to, commemorate the over 10,000,000 German civilians subjected to forced movement, compulsory labour, property seizure, and even internecine murder with the support of the governments of especially Poland, the Soviet Union, and the former Czechoslovakia. Standard historiographical and cultural dogma, which understandably places total responsibility for the war in the hands of the Germans or the German state, makes it unpopular to assert that many ethnic German civilians could have been innocent victims of belligerent Allied expulsion and displacement at the same time. Without in any way denying the horrendous brutality committed by Germany during the war, no nation has officially recognised or commemorated the fact that civilians of diverse political ideologies were targeted as far away as the mountains of Romania and the plains of Russia solely because of their ethnic identity, despite the fact that their ancestors had often not seen Germany for centuries or had any personal affiliation with Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.

Whilst over 700,000 ethnic German settlers in the Soviet Union were forcibly shipped on trains to Kazakhstan for compulsory labour internment, the expelled Germans in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia were largely force marched en masse to the Allied occupied zones of Germany. Poland had lost as much as 20% of its population due to the Nazi and Soviet invasions, and therefore Poles were hardly concerned of the well-being of the large German minority that was inaccurately portrayed as inherently pro-Nazi and anti-Polish. Following their expulsion, the western German expellees long enjoyed an auspicious political bond with the West German government via expellee rights organisations. The regimes of Konrad Adenauer (1949-63), Kurt Kiesinger (1966-69), and Willy Brandt (1969-74) implicitly promised support for the human rights and property restitution of the Germans who were forced from their homes. As a result, West Germany instated the Law of Return (Rückkehrgesetz), which continues to allow displaced ethnic German communities to attain citisenship and limited subsidy in Germany. This injunction is still in effect today, although it has been all but phased out due to a preference for Polish and Turkish immigrant labour. Expellees and German human rights groups actively seised this opportunity and established a variety of state-sponsored representative organisations, including the Silesian Homeland Federation, the All-German Council, the Sudeten German Homeland Association, the League of Expellees and Deprived of Rights, and most significantly the Federation of Expellees. Expellee organisations were selectively used by German governments to cement solidarity, to secure a firm public mandate, and to promote the Hallstein Doctrine, a foreign policy whereby West Germany annotated itself as the sole representative organ of collective German interests regardless of the two-state division from 1949-1990. Expellee associations enjoyed direct and indirect state subsidy (Ahonen 2004, 109), with especially close support from the conservative CSU/CDU party and less so from the Social Democrats. The FDP Centrists hosted official forums for expellee associations, giving them major influence on German politics to the point that it was said that “nothing happens behind the backs of expellees” (Ahonen 2004, 176).

Latching onto the growing atmosphere of human rights consciousness, expellee groups and supportive proponents argued that Heimatsrecht – the right for the vanquished Volga German, Baltic German, Sudeten German, and Prussian/Silesian German communities to live safely without being forcibly expelled for the actions of the German state – is a basic human right. In the same context, Native American peoples, Ashkenazim Jews, and native Xhosa and Zulu tribes of South Africa were getting ever-increasing recognition for their tragic displacement and removal from their homelands (a denial of Heimatsrecht). Vague promises by the West German governments to eventually settle the expellee indemnity question and the eastern territories accelerated hopes for compensation and commemoration. Expellees, with government sponsorship, consistently asserted the eventual need for direct property restitution from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the other governments that organised the expulsions, rather than mere sociopolitical representation in Germany. Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic (CDU) government considered the former German lands beyond the Oder-Neisse Line (Prussia and Silesia), and thus the stolen property of over 5 million expelled Germans there, as still belonging to Germany (Ahonen 2004, 110). The forfeiture of nearly 30% of German land in 1945 by Allied dictate did not mean that all of the German civilians there – Fascists, Nazis, democrats, Communists, socialists – would be removed from their homes and go without restitution by the responsible governments. The succeeding Chancellor Kiesinger reaffirmed West Germany’s commitment to defending the rights of expellees to petition the German and Polish governments for financial or property indemnity. Chancellor Brandt's government categorically denied the notion that Germany should cede its eastern marches in Prussia (and thus German citisens' property) as a result of Hitler's war. The German expellees were not members of SS killing squads murdering Jews and Poles, but mere civilians targeted simply because of their ethnicity. The relationship between expellees and the German governments vis-a-vis the question of eventual restitution was so strong that it was even criticised by the Eisenhower government for irredentist implications that may have destabilised East-West relations during the Cold War (Ahonen 2004, 114).

The Potsdam Conference casually included the geographic demarcation of the new Polish state. Concomitant was the removal of the Germans who had lived in Prussia for centuries.

After World War II, the Potsdam Conference, largely by Soviet dictate and in only partial fulfillment of the Allies' promises at independence to Poland ("the Western Betrayal"), Prussia, Pommerania, East Prussa, Silesia, and Sudetenland were taken from Germany and given to independent Poland and Czechoslovakia. The German majorities living in the region were expelled en masse, some identified by compulsory white armbands. It must be remembered that these regions also had huge Masurian and Polish populations (see our ethnic map of Poland). (map from 20min.ch).

The recent controversy and lack of government support for expellee commemoration is indeed a drastic reversal of the half-century of promises and sponsorship that the expellees enjoyed prior to the appearance of post-Communist Poland on the Western political stage. Poland has spent the last 20 years since the anti-Communist revolution of Lech Wałęsa trying to forge positive economic and political relations with Western Europe, and thus with its strongest economy Germany.Expellee issues have become the greatest obstacle to the two countries' post-Cold War common prosperity (Lutomski 2004, 452). Prior to German reunification in 1990, positive relations with the Poland and the Czechs were hardly as significant as they are today since Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are now developed economies in the European Union. As a result, fearing that commemorating or demanding apology from Poland and the Czech Republic for their forced removal of one of the 20th century's largest refugee communities would hinder a positive relationship, the history of over two million dead ethnic German civilians has been completely hidden altogether. Ironically, the liberal human rights platform of the European Union should be attributing tremendous attention to what was one of the most severe human rights transgression and largest death toll of post-war European history. Oddly, at the same time, commemoration for other tragedies committed by Germans are increasing consistently, such as the Holocaust and the Herero genocide in German Southwest Africa (Namibia) (see our Genocide Table). This exemplifies the main obstacle to the commemoration of German expellees: Germans are proscribed (rightfully) for perpetration of genocide, but it is seldom perceived that civilians of German identity can also be victims of ethnic cleansings. So too, whilst the United States has spent the last 70 years apologising for the excesses caused by the atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, the Poles and Czechs have claimed that the German civilians 'earned' their mistreatment due to their inaccurate universal complicity in Hitler's criminal actions.

German reunification and the fall of the Soviet Union forever changed European foreign policy and relations. With the East-West antagonism at an end, and with West Germany no longer using the expellees as a tool to ensure their hegemony over East Germany, expellee interests for restitution quickly collapsed behind the need for peaceful coexistence and auspicious trade. At the same time, reunified Germany abandoned their previous support for displaced Germans and even asked Russia to re-establish an autonomous region for expelled Germans in Russia so they would not emigrate to Germany (Tagliabue).

Germany has become Poland's primary economic partner. The reunified Germany formally acknowledged the boundaries demarcated by the Allies, and thus confirmed Prussia, Silesia, and Pommerania as Polish legal territory after its over 5 million ethnic German settlers were forcibly purged. The former Sudetenland is now fully Czech territory. A major problem that causes German politicians to be reluctant to raise the issue of commemoration is its tacit associations with expansionism. In other words, many are afraid to emphasise that German civilians were forced out of Prussia and the Sudetenland because it may be interpreted as a call for Germany to re-annex these territories that now have almost no Germans. All calls for commemoration and restitution consistently re-ignite inter-cultural conflicts between Germans and Poles and cause political concerns (Lukowsky and Zuwadzki 2004, 328). With this in mind, the governments have distanced themselves from the issue altogether. Unfortunately, German politicians have failed so far to assert that it is crucial in our age of human rights to at least commemorate the death of over 2,200,000 civilians, regardless of which nation is to blame or any fears of nationalistic, revisionist, or expansionist perversions. So too, many of the expellee groups and their supporters are connected with Nazi, far-right, and Holocaust-denying organisations that understandably worry the German government. Jewish groups, who because of the Holocaust tragedy understandably have great influence in German politics, are among the greatest opponents of German expellee restitution because of this reason and because they fear that it will assuage Germans of blame for war-time atrocities against the Jews and other peoples. Some Jews argue that even considering the deaths of 'a small number' of ethnic German civilians notable is an insult to the Jews (see article), even though over 2,200,000 died after being forced out of their homes in a similar, although far less extensive way than the Jews themselves, as both were specifically targeted because of their ethnicities. The Czechs and Poles have a similar argument, forgetting that the expelled and starved Germans were not SS killing squads, but civilian settlers who had lived there peacefully for centuries or longer. Regardless of which nation or government is at fault and regardless of the undeniable atrocities committed by the Third Reich, over 10,000,000 expelled Germans have been unjustly forgotten altogether.

These political problems notwithstanding, with Poland and the Czech Republic as new constituents of the European Union, both nations are now accountable for human rights transgressions via the Strassburg-based EU human rights tribunal. Nationalistic Russia, not part of the European Union, has shown no interest in apologising for their removal of over 700,000 Germans and Tatars and the death of over 40% of them on trains to Kazakhstan (Burleigh 2001, 496). Instead, Vladimir Putin is encouraging Germans to return to alleviate the demographic dearth of Russian children (Phalnikar 2007). The Prussian Trust, founded in 2001, has become at the center of international political controversy due to their submission of thirteen lawsuits against the Polish government via this international court calling for Poland to return the stolen property, with fifty more planned in the immediate future (Staff Writer, 2006). The Polish government has vociferously refused all recognition of German restitution claims for a variety of factors. Firstly, Poland as a poor nation would be severely disabled by the estimated €19,000,000,000 that would be lost in restitution cases to German citisens (Lutomski 2004, 458). Second, Poles argue that they have no responsibility for expelling German civilians, and that such a process was undertaken by the occupying Soviet authorities and the Allies after the Potsdam Conference (Fotyga 2006). Instead, Polish interests were focused on the more than 2 million Poles forcibly resettled from eastern Poland into western Poland by the Soviets just like the Germans were (Blacksell and Born 2002). Poland argues that any retrospective debate and 'finger-pointing' between Germany and Poland over the expulsion question are counterproductive, damaging the mutually-beneficial economic relationship that the two nations have enjoyed the end of the Cold War. Other scholars are critical of this claim to Polish innocence, calling it a war crime (De Zayas 2004). Polish First Secretary Władysław Gomułka and the Polish government officially sponsored the expulsion and the return of Prussian lands to their original homeland (Poland), saying 'we must expel all the Germans because countries are built on national lines and not on multinational ones'. Ethnic Germans were even forced to wear white armbands to expedite the expulsions and further exclude them from society on ethnic grounds, and were subsequently committed to forced labour by Poles, not only the Red Army (Burleigh 2001, 800).

The Czechs, too, either argue that the expulsions were done by the Red Army and that any commemoration would make Germans appear as victims, not perpetrators, of war and genocide. This claim to innocence hides the Beneš Decrees, an injunction in Czech law (that is still in effect today, although not at all enforced) whereby Hungarian and German minorities were to be forced out, those remaining would be second-class citizens, and Czechs who committed physical crimes against these civilians or seised their property would not be prosecuted under law. President Edvard Beneš consciously planned to expel all but 800,000 of the 3,000,000 Germans in Czechoslovakia despite their residence in that region for as long as 1,000 years (Burleigh 2001, 799). The Czechs and Slovaks themselves were indeed complicit, attacking civilians in mobs, and, in some cases, spraying Swastikas on their bodies before executing young civilians in batches of more than 40 at a time despite their diverse political ideologies (Wheeler). Soldiers and volunteers forced civilians out of their homes without food or water and beat or even shot them when they resisted (Jenkins 2004). German and Hungarian property was seised entirely and given to Czechs and Slovaks as legally mandated by the Beneš Decrees of Czechoslovak law.

In 2009, as the Czech Republic began to question the revamped constitution of the European Union under Eurosceptic President Vaclav Klaus, the Czech government has openly expressed great concern over the future of the restitution question for displaced Germans and Hungarians. Klaus noted his concern that the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights would become a potential basis for a torrent of lawsuits by expelled German families against the Czech government that would have crippling diplomatic and fiscal consequences. He argued that the EU-wide charter should include an exemption for the Czech Beneš Decrees, which gave legal justification to the confiscation of German property and orchestrated their removal (Zachovalova, Time). Former President Vaclav Havel argued that Klaus' recalcitrant position was 'dangerous' for the Czech nation's relations to the European Union (Ibid.).

The most recent Polish government under the nationalist Kaczynski brothers views the German petitions for restitution as the reappearance of German nationalist belligerence and anti-Polish discrimination. The Polish foreign ministry directly referred to the German restitution petitions of the Prussian Trust as “an attempt at reversing moral responsibility for the effects of the World War II...Legal claims against Poland can disturb the Polish-German dialogue and in a long-term perspective damage the relations between the two states” (Fotyga 2006). The Prussian Trust argues that it is not attempting to divert blame from Germany, but believes that civilians should not be punished for Nazi actions solely because of their ethnicity (Moulson 2008). The German Gerhard Schröder government, a major proponent of propitious relations with Poland rather than expellee interests, argued that the property restitution issue was directly against German interests. Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, expresses similar foreign policy sentiment, even going so far as to argue that the German government should pay for the damages instead of Poland (Lutomski 2004, 459). Both the Schröder and Angela Merkel governments reaffirmed their refusal to allow any international petitions for restitution, although they cannot legally deny individual citisens the right to petition (Staff Writer, 2006). Further, the international EU human rights court has rejected the Prussian Trust's lawsuits thus far, citing officially that they lacked jurisdiction because of the event's occurrence before the court's inception (Moulson 2008). Gerhard Schröder emphasised this potential crisis in 2000 before an audience of angry German expellees, arguing that 'the federal government will not encumber its relations with these countries with political and legal questions that come from the past' and that the former German territories in the east are of German heritage, but not German nationality (Staff 2000). Yet again, politicians have been unable to acknowledge the simple need to commemorate this gross human rights crime without raising the separate issues of national responsibility or fears of German nationalist expansionism.

The conflict over property return and the documentation of German expellees has been reinvigorated by new historiographic arguments. In 2000, plans by the Federation of [German] Expellees and CDU politician Erika Steinbach to establish a “Center Against Expulsion” in Berlin erupted an earthquake that trembled German-Polish inter-cultural and political sentiments. The Polish public and political circles almost universally rejected the notion, fearing that it would divert blame for the war away from Germans and onto Poles and Soviets, calling it a “Center Against Reconciliation.” Poles see any German acknowledgment of the center as proof of their lack of affection for the Polish nation (Hawley 2005). Prevalent anti-German hatred and suspicions have been revitalised (Lutomski 2004, 450). Historical revisionism, it was feared, would manipulate history and fuel nationalist and anti-Polish tendencies feelings dormant in German culture. To counterbalance Polish concerns for a biased German historical interpretation on the subject, Polish foreign minister Bartoszewski even argued that if the center were constructed in Berlin, Poland should plan their own equivalent in Warsaw that would emphasise consistent German oppression of Poles even dating back to the 18th-century Polish Partitions (Lutomski 2004, 455). Others argued that the center should be located in Breslau (today in Poland instead of Germany), allowing German and Polish historians to work together for a fair and shared condemnation of population displacements altogether. Others, like the Copernicus Group and “Memory and Solidarity,” have sought to address the expellee question on the international or even EU-wide level with Poland, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czechs, and Austria. Again sensing the horrendous backlash of expellee politics on Polish-German affairs, the German government has distanced itself from the Center Against Expulsion entirely. Schröder's government fervently opposed the center. Angela Merkel has responded to the expellee and historical commemoration issue by assuring the Polish government that the center will be strictly a condemnation of general human expulsion and displacement, rather than any finger-pointing (Staff Writer, 2008). She has since approved the project officially. The burial of the issue has been deemed a 'good solution for Poland and Germany' by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. German foreign minister Joschka Fischer strongly eschewed building any commemoration to expelled German civilians, saying that we should not be prisoners of history (Kroeger 2003). Ironically, only days later, he proceeded to sponsor the construction of even more memorials to Germany's past atrocities against the Jews and Namibians, still leaving Germans as prisoners of that past at taxpayer expense. In 2007, Bavarian minister Edmund Stoiber insisted that the Czechs are required under the human rights spirit of the European Union to acknowledge the murder and expulsion of their German civilian population, sparking marked anger by Czech politicians (Staff 2007). 2008 saw the first significant case of Czechs returning property to a German family that was confiscated upon their expulsion under the Beneš Decrees (Staff, 2008). The debate took almost 50 years for the Walderobe family alone and was subject to tremendous scrutiny because of arguments of that family's close affiliation with the pro-Nazi Sudeten German party of Konrad Henlein.

Despite these understandable desires of the Czech and Polish governments to avoid opening up a multi-billion dollar restitution crisis that would mangle their economies, politicians have still failed to acknowledge that one of the largest death tolls and forced expulsions of the 20th century must be commemorated and honored regardless of any blame, revisionism, or fears of apologetically defending the atrocities of Hitler's Third Reich. As a result of these fears, even the fact that these deaths and expulsions occurred at all is almost entirely unknown. The deaths of over 2,200,000 civilians from hunger and displacement, targeted simply because of their ethnicity, is a crisis of historcal memory that has been sadly forgotten.

________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.

BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:

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Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Hill and Wang, 2001.

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Hawley, Charles. 2005. “Lingering Fears: Is the World Ready for German Victimhood?” http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,383263,00.html (accessed 29 July, 2009).

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Lutomski, Pawel. “The Debate about a Center against Expulsions: An Unexpected Crisis in German-Polish Relations?” German Studies Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (2004): 449-468.

Moulson, Geir. 2008. “Court rejects Germans' property restitution claims.” http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/10/09/europe/EU-Germany-Poland.php (accessed 29 July, 2009).

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Tagliabue, John. "Bonn Urges Russia to Restore Land for its Ethnic Germans." New York Times, 11 January, 1992.

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Zachovalova, Katerina. "Czech Republic's EU holdout has public support." Time. http://time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1931664,00.html?xid=yahoo-feat?artId=1931664?contType=article?chn=world (accessed 23 Octobre, 2009).