Officially classed as ‘autochthones’, Upper Silesians were given the chance to ‘opt’ for Poland. There were advantages to this: Irene Zelder’s aunts in Ratibor told her ‘they had “opted” for Poland in order to live, because it was the only way to obtain ration cards’.80 There were disadvantages too: if you opted for Poland you could not ‘go to the Reich’. Many Germans were stuck in Poland and therefore unable to join their families. This was the case with Hans-Günther Nieusela’s two sisters, who were not able to leave until 1955.81 One Upper Silesian who was not given this choice was Carl Ulitzka, the ‘King of Upper Silesia’, who had spent much of the war in Dachau. He was expelled by the Poles, because in 1919 he had led the resistance to Polish annexation in the wake of Versailles. The Miliz took brutal revenge on anyone suspected of having stymied their attempts to annex Upper Silesia in 1919.82
Opting for Poland did not necessarily protect you from Russians. As in rump-Germany, the most dangerous run for a woman was the journey to the pump to fetch water. The Russians lay in wait, hiding in the shadows ready to pounce. Irene Zelder had a disagreeable experience with one soon after her return to Ratibor, but managed to get home and lock the door after abandoning her pail in the street. The Russian hammered on the door with his rifle butt shouting, ‘Wodka! Panienka!’, but he eventually gave up when no one complied.83 The acute time for rapes was the two months from mid-March to mid-May 1945. Girls were generally safer in the villages than in the towns, where typhus also raged and carried off significant numbers of Germans.84
Neisse - ‘the Silesian Rome’ - was 80 per cent destroyed in the shelling. When the Russians arrived they robbed the city’s many churches and, according to a priest, raped nuns as many as fifty times. The expulsions began in the middle of June, but some of the citizens were locked up in a grim fortress constructed in the time of Frederick the Great.85 Neisse’s fort was one of the six concentration camps operated by the Poles in Silesia. The others were in Breslau (Kletschkau Prison), Glatz, Lamsdorf, Trebnitz and Wünschelburg. Lamsdorf (now called Łambinowice) between Oppeln and Neisse was the most notorious of the camps. Heinz Esser, who acted as an unofficial camp doctor, called it an ‘extermination camp’. There were 6,488 violent deaths, 828 of them children. Many of those who were not beaten died from disease, starvation or cold, or from a combination of the three. The priest who left the account related that the ‘commandant’ was a youth of eighteen. His years were evidently the only tender thing about him.86 Esser does not provide any indication of the man’s age, but gives his name as Cesaro Gimborski,bm and added that he was assisted by about fifty members of the Miliz. The most brutal of these was the sixteen-year-old executioner’s assistant Jusek who murdered ‘to order’, until he too was brutally killed by his peers.87
The ferocity of the guards might be explained by their schooling - some, at least, had recently been released from German camps. Their methods were certainly reminiscent of Dachau or Buchenwald.88 There were ‘morning exercises’ during which many of the older, half-starved inmates predictably collapsed. Men were beaten to death for trifles: a teacher for wearing spectacles, a mayor because he was tall and therefore might have qualified for the SS. Men and women were stripped naked and forced to perform sadistic acts on one another or eat excrement; girls had to press burning banknotes between their legs. There were many small children in the camp. Some of these were later taken away and given to Polish foster parents.89
There was virtually no food. Esser says they were given three or four potatoes a day, a total of 200 to 250 calories. He recalled one day, 8 June 1946, when the figure soared to 530 calories, because there were so few inmates in the camp.90 Ursula Pechtel from Hindenburg in Upper Silesia drew a short straw and was packed off to Auschwitz. She worked in the factory of the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, dismantling the machines for the Russians. They were savagely beaten by the guards and at night the women were sent up as entertainment for the officers. Max Marek had been in Neu-Schönau camp near Zittau before he too was sent to Jawiszowice work camp near Auschwitz. This was named Jawischowitz by the Nazis: it was one of the Auschwitz satellites built in 1942, in this case to serve the mines at Brzeszcze.91
In Beuthen there were rare reports of kindnesses on the part of the conquerors. The Russians would give the children food, and even rides in their lorries. There was the usual black-comic spectacle of Russians learning to ride bicycles and falling off, then taking it out on the inanimate machine. One Russian in Beuthen expressed his bewilderment at the Germans going to war: ‘Why you war? In Germany all there. In your country you can rob from a house more than a whole village in ours.’92
In Eastern Pomerania Libussa von Krockow was at first unaware of the incursion of the Poles. She became conscious of them only when she applied to the Russian commandant to move into the gardener’s cottage on the family estate after the Schloss had been burned to the ground. The commandant had told her to apply to the Polish ‘mayor’. The only Poles she had noticed up to then were prisoners of war or forced labourers working on the farms. Now the farms were being turned over to them, so that servant had become master, and master servant. Ermland was on the old ‘West’ Prussian border and there had always been more Poles. The Germans were Catholics who spoke some Polish. They hoped to be able to cling to their homes by keeping their heads down.
Käthe von Normann found the Poles more sympathetic. Their military units had actually fought alongside the Russians near the town of Plathe, and Polish officers had kept her informed of what was going on in the Russian camp. The Poles rounded up the last of the men - anyone who had enjoyed a smidgen of authority in the old days, and any nobles who had been missed by the Russians. In the case of Jesko von Puttkamer, he was taken to Stolp and thrown into the former Gestapo prison, with ten or twenty to a cell, just two beds and virtually no food. His stepdaughter had to walk thirty kilometres to bring him an occasional crust of bread until he was transferred to Danzig, out of her reach.
Food, never plentiful, dwindled to nothing. People survived by scrumping and theft. Potatoes, introduced to Pomerania by Frederick the Great, became the delicacy. Frau von Normann had to provide milk, butter and eggs for the mayor and garrison; anything remaining was for the Germans. Generally, however, there was next to nothing left over. Even so, with her little butter, milk, eggs and corn, she was well off compared to urban Germans. In the autumn the pitiful amounts of milk given out to nursing mothers were stopped. Germans who broke the law by trying to sell goods were put in the stocks. Poles were incited to spit on them, but generally merely voided their rheum on the ground.
Treks
Silesia was to be made free of Germans and that meant gathering up what you could carry and heading west. On 5 October 1945 intelligence reached General Clay of the plight of the German refugees from east of the Oder-Neisse and the Sudetenland. The figure of 9,000,000 he felt was conservative, it was probably more like ten. Of these he assumed that 65-70 per cent had already been deported. Of these, three-fifths had settled in Saxony, a sixth in Brandenburg and a sixth in Mecklenburg. ‘Undoubtedly a large number of refugees have already died of starvation, exposure and disease.’ Many were ‘deported by force . . . others fled from fear’. They all converged on Berlin, where there were around forty-five camps. The numbers knocking on the doors of the old capital amounted to between five and six hundred thousand a month. Over 40 per cent of these were children, ‘many of them without parents’.93
From 20 February 1946 the British demanded (and the Poles agreed) that the deportees be placed at assembly points and that trains and ships be laid on to collect them at fixed times. The size and weight of the luggage was to be predetermined. They were to be permitted to bring food for the journey and money. The Poles had to provide disinfectant. Seriously ill Germans or pregnant women could not be moved. In the case of the latter they had to remain if within six weeks of their confinement. If one member of the family fell ill, all of them had to remain behind until he or she got bet
ter. It was very high minded, and quite ineffectual. At the end of December 1946, the junior minister responsible for German and Austrian affairs, John Hynd, had to admit to the House of Commons that twenty trains had recently arrived in Berlin without heating. On one of them twenty corpses were found and 160 people suffering from frostbite.94
It was time to leave, but the decision to make the trek west was not an easy one. You risked losing all your possessions, further physical abuse and death. The worst danger was for small children, who often died en route. As early as the third week of March 1945, Käthe von Normann had seen one trek come to grief when they were shot at by the Russians and forced to return to the village. In May even those Germans who had made considerable progress towards to the west were returned to the villages they came from. Frau von Normann received a new family at Whitsun, who stole her little remaining soap. She wondered if she too could return to her manor house. She was eventually sent back to Barkow, but only after she had been denounced to the militia by one of her fellow Germans. She never discovered her crime. In Barkow she had the advantage of being among her own people, and the two Polish estate workers who now had the job of running the place looked after her and the children.
The Puttkamer-Krockows determined to go to the provincial capital, Stolp, to find out whether there was a legal means of escape. They walked the ten kilometres in a morning. The sign announcing the town had been crossed out, as it had already been awarded a Polish name: Słupsk. At first sight, not much had changed on the Bismarckplatz, except that the Iron Chancellor had been knocked off his pedestal and beheaded. Inside the old city, however, it was a scene of desolation: rubble lay all around and the Gothic cathedral had been gutted. There had been no bombing. The Russians had wrecked Stolp. They found a man in authority. To go to the ‘Reich’ they needed permission from their Polish mayor and an attestation that there were no known charges against them. They could pack one suitcase only and take provisions for three days. It was a while before permission was granted. Another winter was to be spent in the new Poland. The nights were long, there was no light, but then there were no books to read. They amused themselves by remembering epics, but they stayed clear of Prussian patriotic poetry - celebrating victories such as the Battle of Sedan was meaningless now.
News came in curious echoes, which might have had a bearing on the truth had anyone known how to interpret it. In Barkow on 27 May 1945 they heard stories that the Allies had fallen out, and that American troops had landed in Stettin and Danzig. The inevitable fall-out between the Allies was still as eagerly desired in Pomerania as it had been by Goebbels in Berlin in the last days of the war. On 12 March 1946 Lehndorff heard that the Russians were in a warlike mood. Stalin had made a critical speech against Britain.95 A month later new rumours circulated through the Polish police which gave a more accurate picture of their fate. The towns of Greifenberg and Plathe were to be evacuated, and Cammin had already been cleared of Germans. The Greifenberger were indeed expelled with just 15 kilos of kit, and left for days to forage in the Cammin woods before they were rounded up again.
The Silesian expulsions were now in full swing. As the bishop of Katowice had put it, ‘The sooner they leave of their own free will, the better it will be for them.’96 Except that free will played little part in the process. Officially Silesia was to be ‘German-free’ by June 1946. In reality the Poles wanted to hang on to industrious artisans for a little longer yet.97 Streams of civilians were forced from their homes at gunpoint from the ancient German towns of Görlitz, Glogau, Sagan and Liegnitz late that spring. Every form of locomotion was brought into service: prams were a popular way of transporting a few bare necessities. One witness saw a cart being drawn by six children, with a pregnant woman pushing from behind. The destination was the Lusatian Neisse, which formed the new de facto border. The town of Forst served as an assembly point for crossings. Here they were held back until the Poles could rob them of the little they still possessed.98 The authorities in Görlitz on the German side were desperate to keep them out of the town, as they had no food for their own people, something which exacerbated the misery of the expellees. Meanwhile Polish border guards combed the columns for young girls, who were to be retained, ostensibly to help bring in the harvest. While the Germans waited at the river, they left messages on trees, indicating to friends and family which way they were heading, and who they had lost.99
Grünberg in Lower Silesia suffered because of the amount of alcohol in the town. Not only had it been the centre of Silesia’s small vineyard area, but the Nazis had made it their repository for wine - still and sparkling - and cognac, which they had shipped in from Hamburg, Bremen, the Rhine and the Mosel. The brutality inspired by the contents of the cellars led whole families to commit suicide. One priest estimated that a quarter of the population died in this way. The Poles came on 12 May 1945. On 24 June the remaining population was informed that they had six hours to pack their bags.100 In June and July that year a total of 405,401 Germans were expelled. The last official expulsions occurred in 1950 when 1,329 Germans were thrown out of Swinemünde.101
While the stench of death and brutality pervaded the German regions east of the Oder, one old German was allowed to live unmolested in his home. The new Soviet-Polish masters in Silesia showed a remarkable reluctance to expel the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, who had lived in a palatial villa on the Wiesenstein in the small village of Agnetendorf in the Riesengebirge since 1902. The Riesengebirgebn had been ‘Germany’s air-raid shelter’ and the Foreign Ministry had been evacuated to a ski-resort in the mountains. The old man was counting his days surrounded by the works of art he had collected over the years: the bust of Goethe by David d’Angers had pride of place in the Paradise Hall with its murals by Johannes Avenarius.bo Hauptmann ambled about wearing a frockcoat with his order Pour le Mérite in his lapel.102 He had been in Dresden on Valentine’s Day and had been badly knocked about by the blasts from the bombing. Months later he had still not recovered. 103
Hauptmann’s amanuensis, the writer Gerhart Pohl, went to see the Soviet commander in nearby Hirschberg. The streets were festooned with posters repeating Stalin’s comforting words: ‘Hitlers come and go . . .’ Pohl explained that Hauptmann was living in his old house up in the mountains. The officer expressed surprise: ‘Hauptmann, the author of The Weavers?’ The first collected edition of Hauptmann’s works in Russian had been published as early as 1902. As a Russian major told Pohl (with a degree of hyperbole for all that): ‘Every schoolchild in the Soviet Union knows the writer of The Weavers.’ Visits by literary-minded Soviet officers began soon after. Hauptmann dealt with them patiently and flattered them with his admiration for Tolstoy and Gorky.104
A Polish professor came to see him from the Ministry of Art and Culture in Warsaw. He was Galician, and spoke German fluently with an Austrian accent (Galicia had been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918). He told Hauptmann, ‘Germany’s fate is hard, but not entirely undeserved. Think about the horrors perpetrated against my people. These are undeniable facts . . .’ The professor returned to his ministry to arrange for Hauptmann’s protection. The papers arrived on 7 August, five days after the break-up of the Potsdam Conference.105
For a while Hauptmann’s presence rallied the inhabitants of the nearby artists’ colony of Schreiberhau, where the Germans continued to live by selling off their possessions to the Poles. Ruth Storm sold her foalskin coat for 500 złotys and managed to procure two kilos of bacon, a pound of butter and a smoked sausage. She supposed that they were left in peace because Hauptmann received visits from foreign journalists.106 It was a brief respite. One day in the street Pohl recognised an old man in a dressing gown as one of his former teachers. It was Eugen Kühnemann, the biographer of Schiller. He had been robbed of all he owned and turned out of his house.107
Hauptmann continued to live on the Wiesenstein with his Polish protection papers. No one was allowed to enter Haus Wiesenstein or its grounds on pain o
f punishment. That didn’t always stop them. Some heavily armed Russian soldiers explained that they meant no harm: ‘Wir nicht machen bum-bum . . . Nicht machen zapzerap, bloss mal gucken. Du erlauben bitte?’ (We no make bang bang . . . no do stealing, just have a look. You permit please?).108 Some bogus journalists forced their way in on one occasion and ran about the place pocketing small objects. ‘Suddenly they stood in the Biedermeyer Room . . . before the old man . . . “Come closer, gentlemen! Your youth cheers my ancient heart. You wanted to visit my house at an unusual hour. You have had your wishes come true. How might I help you now?”’ Pohl sought clarification of Hauptmann’s position in the midst of all this harassment, and like many other Silesians he wanted to know what the future held for them. He decided to pay a call on Johannes R. Becher in Berlin. The future East German minister of culture chainsmoked nervously, while Pohl tried to pin him down. He mentioned the Potsdam agreement: that Silesia was under Polish administration until the peace treaty. Did that mean it would return to Germany? ‘Mann, verlassen Sie sich darauf nicht!’ (I shouldn’t put your faith in that, old man!).109
Becher consented to visit Hauptmann on the Wiesenstein. He wanted to win him over for his Cultural Alliance and Germany’s literary renewal. It was not easy to get there. There were no trains, and he and his Russian friend Grigori Weiss had to set out in two cars followed by a lorry containing food and benzene. It took two days to reach Agnetendorf. Hauptmann told the poet, ‘I am an old man, I have no more ambitions, but the fate of Germany concerns us all.’110 He nonetheless pledged his support: ‘I will go along with you . . . That is my national duty. Together with my people I shall dedicate all my last strength to the business of Germany’s national renewal.’111
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