After the Reich

by Giles MacDonogh

  The expulsions did not cover all Germans. Some were left to rot in Czech prisons. Alfred Latzel’s father-in-law, for example, was sentenced to eighteen years by a People’s Court in Troppau, to be served in Mürau bei Hohenstadt, a medieval castle once the most dreaded prison in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the war it had been used to house Czechs and Polish prisoners suffering from TB. The death rate had been alarmingly high. Other Germans were retained after 1946 to work in the mines or forests. The People’s Courts were painfully reminiscent of their namesakes in Nazi Germany: justice was summary, death sentences ten a penny, life imprisonment was an option, otherwise the culprit received five or ten years in the mines. Max Griehsel had worked at the main office of the DAF, the Nazi forced-labour organisation. He received a five-year sentence. The trial was over in ten minutes.99

  The Sudeten communists, who had never supported Henlein and who had suffered under the Nazis, fared no better. Like the new Poland, Czechoslovakia would not suffer minorities (except Slovaks). About 10,000 of them were expelled. It was a rare example of a deportation that followed the rules laid down at Potsdam. It was orderly and relatively humane.100 Less so were the first organised shipments of non-communist Germans in the summer of 1946: pictures show some of the 586,000 Bohemian Germans packed in box cars like sardines.101

  The behaviour of the Czechs and Hungarians created more frustrations for Lucius Clay. He was worried about the definition of ‘German’ in February 1947, especially as a number of pure Czechs were seeking refuge in the West to escape from the communist shadow that had been cast over their country. The expulsions were suspended for a time. When the Soviet-inspired communist coup took place in 1948, many Czechs followed the path of the Germans across the border. They became refugees in their turn. As Clay was quick to point out, they were ‘not loved in Germany’ as a result of the expulsions.102 From Hungary came ‘Swabians’, a development which perplexed him.be

  The process was revived on 1 September 1947 at a rate of twenty trains arriving from Czechoslovakia every month.103 At the end of the official expulsions the Americans asserted that they had received 1,445,049 Czech Germans to settle in their zone, of whom 53,187 were anti-fascists; the Russians had accommodated 786,485, including 42,987 anti-fascists. The rest came in dribs and drabs, as many were still held to work in the mines. In 1950 the Czechs admitted to having 165,117 German-speakers, but the figure was probably somewhere between 210,000 and 250,000. The expulsions had caused an economic crisis in Czechoslovakia. Despite the pickings for the Czechs, whole villages remained empty and the fields around lay fallow for want of labour.104 It is thought that 240,000 Germans, German Bohemians and Moravians died at the hands of the Czechs.105

  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 1945.106

  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.bf Not all had been banished by any means.107 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.108 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.109

  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.110

  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.111 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’.112 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.113 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.114

  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

  If 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 nobl
es maintaining their culture in Slavic lands.bg

  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.1

  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.2 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.3

  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.bh 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.4

  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.5 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.6

  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.7

  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.8

  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!’9

  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.10 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.11

  The Russians were weeding out the Nazis by means of interrogation. The big fish had either fled via Pillau or had committed suicide; what remained was decidedly small fry. Confessions were beaten out of the men, and many died. Those Pgs that survived were taken to holding camps in Gumbinnen or Insterburg before being marched off to the Soviet Union. Someone informed Lehndorff that there were a number of Old Masters being kept in a damp room in the camp, which would be ruined if no one did anything about them. Lehndorff was unsympathetic: ‘Let them be used for temporary window-panes, or find some useful end in an oven.’ He was more impressed by the bravery of the women: ‘It is always astonishing what man will put up with.’ That day he heard that the war was over.12

  A daily grind set in at Rothenstein camp. Lehndorff was the doctor once again, a man you needed. If you are wise you don’t kill the doctor. A Russian woman came to him for treatment. She had also been raped, and now she had VD. In gratitude she brought him food - margarine for the potato soup. One woman he treated - known onl
y as Wanda - had been raped 128 times. They brought in an old man who was so covered in lice that he looked like an ant-heap. He turned out to be the local railway director. He died an hour later.13

  At the beginning of June, Lehndorff had a surprise visit from Doktora. She was still working at the German hospital and nurtured plans to get her friend out of Rothenstein to work alongside her once more. There were a thousand Germans being treated in the former Finance Department in Königsberg. The Nervenklinik had been turned over to those suffering from plague. When typhus broke out the victims were taken to the hospitals in the Yorckstrasse and the Elisabeth Krankenhaus. There were 2,000 cases lying two to a bed, four in the case of children.14

  Doktora brought him wheaten biscuits. Three days later she was back with Lehndorff’s rucksack filled with his things. They included a pistol with fifty bullets. This was carefully hidden. After that she came almost daily.15 The commandant allowed him out one day, and he went foraging looking for medicine. ‘The city is really fantastic. The eye no longer attempts to reconstruct it, but rather allows itself to be overpowered, drawn in by the entirely transformed landscape.’ He found the red-rimmed glasses in which he had drunk his last glass of Martell cognac. As the Russian car took him back to the camp he spotted Doktora on the city walls, picking flowers to take to him.16

  In the middle of June Lehndorff was released through Doktora’s intervention and was allowed to work with her in the German hospital. The Finance Department was one of the few undamaged buildings in the city. There was food of sorts - a grey pea soup, typical of East Prussia.17 The summer was slightly better, when grasses and dandelions could be gathered by the roadside, rye grains could be filched from the fields and mussels from the overgrown city pond. The idyll did not last long. Once again it is difficult to avoid the impression that the Russians were hoping that the Germans would die, to rid themselves of the responsibility of feeding and repatriating them, although a little fat was made available for children. Lehndorff’s German hospital was turfed out of the Finance Department. They had twenty-four hours to move 1,500 patients into the old Barmherzigkeit - the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy.