After the Reich (32 page)

The Hungarians began to expel their Swabians on 1 November 1946. The Germans were spread throughout the country and at first no one thought of them as suspicious. Many were dragged off to Russia to work in Siberia, along with Hungarian men - the Russians could not so easily tell the difference. Then the minister president Béla Miklos decided that the Germans would be sacrificed in the interests of better treatment for Hungary. He would distance himself from his former German ally. A wide-ranging land reform was instituted and Germans were interned, as the Russians themselves had suggested in the spring of 1945.
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In May 1945 the authorities in Hungary identified between 200,000 and 250,000 Germans they wanted to expel. They were to be allowed up to 100 kilos of luggage. The Americans had allotted them an area near Württemberg. The process continued until August 1946 when the Hungarians began to lose interest and some Germans came out of hiding.
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Not all had been banished by any means.
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The terrible winter led Clay to suspend the process until the spring. Already 168,000 had settled in the American Zone. The usual reports came in of their miserable state. According to the American journalist James K. Pollack, they too had been robbed down to their wedding rings and arrived wearing all the clothes they possessed.
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The number of refugees in the American Zone was becoming a problem. Clay wanted to send some back across the Oder-Neisse, but that was impossible. For six months of 1946 he had suspended the reception of ethnic Germans into the American Zone because he did not feel the expulsions complied with Potsdam’s call for a ‘humane and orderly’ resettlement. This was a double-edged sword, as it prolonged the misery of the poor souls trapped in the east.
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Romania was also ready to evict its 600-year-old German community (there had been 745,421 German Romanian nationals in 1930). Border changes at the so-called Adjudication of Vienna had shifted some of them on to Hungary, but there were still over half a million Germans, mostly in the Banat and the Siebenbürgen. In one town, Braşov or Kronstadt on the western side of the Carpathians, they formed a slender majority. Hitler had already launched his plans to move them to the Reich, a scheme that had its echoes in the policies of the Federal Republic after the war. The Romanians were less harsh to their Germans than other central European countries were, although they were briefly interned; they were well treated on the whole.
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There were also major expulsions from Yugoslavia, where there were more than half a million Germans in the census of 1921. Many of these were in Krain, which contained the German-speaking pocket of Gottschee. The 35,000 Gottscheer had already fallen victim to Hitler’s alliance with Mussolini, as the western half of Slovenia had been annexed by Italy in 1941. In the winter of 1941 to 1942 they had been resettled in Lower Styria and in Carinthia in an instance of ‘ethnic rationalisation’. Those Germans who remained behind in 1945 were pushed into camps such as Gakavo, Kruševlje and Jarek (the latter took in most of the Batschka Germans), while Rudolfsgnad and Molidorf were reserved principally for Germans from the Yugoslav Banat. In Rudolfsgnad nearly two-thirds of the 30,000 or so inmates died of typhus. About 6,000 more died in Jarek.
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Czechs continue to deny that any wrong was committed against the German Bohemians after the war, but they have a word -
odsun
, ‘spiriting away’ - which is used to describe the ridding of their land of Germans at the time. There was no exchange but expulsion ‘without ifs or buts’.
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It is described not as an act of revenge, but as an ‘historic necessity’. There were a few voices raised against the process at the time; notably two Catholic papers
Obzory
and
Lidové Listy
and the journalist Helena Kozeluhová, who was eventually required to emigrate.
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Then came the communists, and with a brief hiatus for the Prague Spring there was an official silence about the matter. Some exiles from communism did mention it, however. One of these was the former minister Jaroslav Stránský, the uncle of one of the Prague torturers, who had fled to London. Blame was laid at the feet of the communists.
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5

Home to the Reich! Recovered Territories in the Prussian East

The recommendation that the expulsion of the German-speaking people from Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Rumania - about twelve million in all - and their resettlement in the overcrowded ruins of Western Germany should proceed in an ‘orderly and humane’ fashion was somewhat reminiscent of the request of the Holy Inquisition that its victims should be put to death ‘as gently as possible and without bloodshed’.

Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, Harmondsworth 1987, 812

I
f the expulsions from Czechoslovakia and the banishment of German communities from other areas of east-central Europe involved transferring huge numbers of people, they were a drop in the ocean compared to the deportations from
within
Germany’s pre-1937 borders. For hundreds of years Germans had lived east of the River Oder, sometimes in regions such as Pomerania, East Prussia and Lower Silesia, where the population was almost exclusively Teutonic, or in areas of mixed population such as Great Poland, West Prussia and Upper Silesia. At Yalta the decision was made to award these regions to Poland, with the exception of East Prussia, which was divided up between the Russians and the Poles. The inhabitants faced an uncertain fate: banishment by death march. It was the end of an ancient civilisation - of hardy peasants, of German merchants and academics in their own quarters and universities, of German nobles maintaining their culture in Slavic lands.
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Apologetic German historians are keen to point out that the Nazis had provided their own precedent for the terrible deportations that followed Germany’s defeat. Europe’s Jews had been ‘transferred’ to the so-called General Gouvernement (the puppet state set up by the Germans in Poland) or the Baltic States, where they were liquidated. In two instances of Hitler’s pragmatism, the German-speaking population of the Baltic States had been encouraged to come ‘home to the Reich’ to allow Stalin a free hand, and the South Tyrolean and Gottschee Germans in Slovenia were also transferred to allow Mussolini to consolidate his territory. Poland was to be partly Germanised, above all in the Warthe and in Danzig-West Prussia. Over a million Poles were resettled.
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The Nazis aimed for the ‘creation of a racially, spiritually, nationally and politically unified German population’. All those elements that could not be Germanised had to ‘be ruthlessly swept away’. This was the nasty idiom of the Treaty of Versailles, which championed nation states. The idea had gained a doubtful respectability in the Bulgarian-Turkish exchange of populations of 1913. Churchill expressed his approval in the House of Commons in December 1944, saying that the expulsion of the Germans was a satisfying and lasting means for ensuring peace.
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The San Francisco Conference at the end of 1944 made it clear that German expellees were exempted from international aid. No one was to be allowed to interfere.
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The post-First World War regimes of the new east-central Europe had all longed for racial purity, and to some degree persecuted their minorities.
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Whole villages had been emptied of Germans in West Prussia in the wake of Versailles. Possibly because half of East Prussia was now Soviet property, no effort was made to keep any of the Germans alive. There are striking similarities between the way the population of East Prussia was handled and the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks in the early 1930s. The rations received by East Prussians did not contain enough calories to sustain life. They were notably smaller than the already pitiful amounts of food doled out to Berliners.
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The East Prussian ordeal was to last until 1948, when trains brought the last bedraggled remnants of the population into Berlin. Most would try to forget what they had suffered in the intervening years - not just the brutality and rape, but also the plagues, disease and vermin that had been their daily lot. Deprived of soap, they were as much the victims of lice as of their Soviet conquerors, and lice brought typhus. As no water was available, the Königsberger drank from infected wells and bomb craters and fed on sparrows and mice when they could, or on discarded potato peelings and trash from Russian kitchens; boiled ox bones and cattle pelts, glue and the carrion of dead and buried animals.

Graf Lehndorff woke up in Soviet captivity on his thirty-fifth birthday, 13 April 1945. One of his fellow prisoners around the potato pot had a piece of bacon that she shared with him. Despite the freezing cold of an East Prussian spring this proved the calm before the storm. He spoke to a Polish interpreter who had lived in Königsberg for two years and had made a decent living. He informed Lehndorff that he would be sent to Moscow or Odessa to work in a Russian hospital.
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The kid-gloves approach was discarded within hours. Lehndorff learned that he had been classified as ‘dangerous’. The women were taken off to be raped and the men piled on top of one another in a hollow in the ground. It was bitterly cold and there was still a good deal of snow about. ‘Cold is much worse than hunger, in your wet things, you try as much as possible not to move.’ The one consolation in the spectacle of burning buildings all around him was that it aroused the thought of heat. The animals had all been driven away or killed. The only ones that remained were a few half-mad dogs.
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The men were brought to their feet and together with the women were marched along the road to Rauschen. In better days it had been a seaside resort popular with people from Königsberg. Hans Lehndorff took advantage of the lackadaisical Russian guards and fled into the woods. Once he had shaken off his pursuers he sat down and enjoyed a moment of reflection. Less than a year before he had met his cousin Heinrich Lehndorff, who had tried to convince him to join the opposition to Hitler. Graf Heinrich Lehndorff had been arrested after the July Plot, but like Hans, had slipped away from his guards - in this case the Gestapo - and gone on the run. He was ultimately betrayed, however, and hanged with the others in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin.
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Hans Lehndorff was also caught. He was put in a barn with a number of old people, women and children. They were the remnants of the population from the villages within a twenty-kilometre radius. Their shoes were worn through, their clothes in shreds, and they were covered in filth. Many of the younger children had already died, but there was no time to mourn - Lehndorff thought that that might be years in coming. Meanwhile they looked after their surviving offspring as best they could. The women were still prey to the Russians, who took them away from their children and raped them in a house by the roadside. The Germans were moved along. On the road to Rauschen, Lehndorff met a woman pushing an old, blind man in a wheelbarrow. He didn’t like the Russians in Rauschen; he wanted to go to Königsberg. Lehndorff didn’t have the heart to tell him it was worse there.
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It was 20 April - the Führer’s fifty-sixth and final birthday. Pillau had yet to fall and was being subjected to a heavy artillery bombardment. Lehndorff was taken to Rauschen. The prisoners were quartered in a motor-repair workshop and taken off for interrogation. On the 21st the Russians told Lehndorff to ‘Go home!’ He was not fooled: it would be only a matter of time before they picked him up again. Where was home anyway? He went to Palmnicken with a fifteen-year-old boy called Helmut. The next day he was arrested again.

Lehndorff was taken to Rothenstein camp, a former barracks which had come through the war unscathed. He was put in a hall containing some 3,000 other souls. He learned that the daily ration consisted of a cup of groats and a slice of bread. There was no water. There were no latrines. His neighbour made a little space for him and gave him two coffee beans. To his relief someone recognised him and he was fetched and taken to the doctors’ compound where he was looked after by the sister. She cleared up the mystery of the lavatorial arrangements: it was the space between two barracks blocks. Dysentery had broken out and many of the prisoners collapsed and died as they squatted in the alley. Once again Lehndorff permitted himself a reflection: ‘to have lived one’s life and to croak in this place, literally in the shit!’
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The dead were taken away and laid out before the guard post. When the Russians began to worry that they too might catch the infection that had killed the prisoners, they earmarked an area of the camp for the sick. On the first night of the new arrangements, thirty-six people died. One was found dead sitting on a bucket. The other prisoners descended on the dead to strip them of their clothes, so it was difficult to establish their identity.
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On the day that Hitler took his own life, Lehndorff delivered a camp inmate of twins: ‘Life goes on, as it is so aptly said.’ Both children later died of hypothermia.
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