Postmortem Report

by Tomislav Sunic

  Indeed, even today, one can hardly encounter pictorial or plastic representations of embracing couples in China, Cuba, or in North Korea. The sculptures of Venus or nymphs made by Breker or Thorak display nothing provocative or pornographic; they never trigger sexual fantasies or erotic dreams, as is perhaps the case with the stupendous naked beauties painted by the Italian artist Amadeo Modigliani. Upon the faces of the sculptures representing nude women made by German artists, one comes across an enigmatic and aristocratic smile and a deep sense of the tragic, which reflect, symbolically, the pessimism of a whole nation in search of its geopolitical identity. No trace can be found of female coquetry or flirtatiousness, such as one encounters among the nudes painted by the French realist, Gustave Courbet, by the impressionist Edouard Manet, or by Paul Cézanne, the post-impressionist.

  The German painting of that time represents a chapter apart. Contrary to widespread ideas, “kitsch” was never part of art in National Socialist Germany, and against “kitsch” in the arts the German National Socialist authorities adopted repressive measures resembling those invoked against the alleged degenerate art. As far as the painting of that time is concerned, Germany suffered a considerable regression in the quality of its pictorial production. The early school of expressionism was abandoned and even severely repressed by the authorities. Expressionism, compared to impressionism of the French source, is paradoxically the typical feature of the German character and temperament, just as it is of other Germanic peoples (Flemmings, Scandinavians).

  Yet German artists of the expressionist school did not obtain the regime’s green light to exhibit their works. Schools of thought that had emerged from such cultural circles as Die Brücke or Neue Sachligkeit, and that, at the beginning of the twentieth century had produced some of Europe’s great masters, were assailed by the National Socialist censorship. German painters, who, between 1933 and 1945, gained considerable reputation were neo-classicist self-portraitists and landscape painters who avoided pathetic and exaggerated compositions, and attempted to rid artistic work of every trace of the influence of Cubism and abstract art. Overall, one can sense in their paintings the revival of the taste for primitive art and a return to the Flemish masters of the fifteenth century.

  Certain parallels can again be drawn with the paintings known as “socialist-realist” in the Soviet Union and other communist countries. However, even here the difference is obvious. Whereas one can see on the paintings of Soviet artists the peasants and workmen adorned with their perpetual grins, and in the background a factory under construction, on the German paintings of that time seldom can one see signs of industrialization. Traces of the asphalt, chimneys spewing fumes, or factories in full gear — such as one can observe among “socialists-realist” painters (and in their titanic and apocalyptic form among the futuristic artists in fascistic Italy!), very rarely appear in the German paintings of that period.

  Just as one can draw a comparison between German sculptors and Soviet sculptors, one can also notice a difference between figurative art under Communism and figurative art under National Socialism. In the art galleries of the Third Reich the scenes of handsome rural nymphs abound (Amadeus Dier, Johannes Beutner, Sepp Hilz, etc). These pastoral beauties, which can be observed on oil paintings, exhale family harmony, and seem to anticipate a well-deserved rest after a hard day’s work in the cornfields. Also worth mentioning is the artist and wood engraver, Ernst von Dombrowski, whose scenes of country life and young children playing, still win great praise from critics.

  In conclusion, one can state that the German sculpture of that time, proclaims, at least as a rule, a message of racial and promethean hygiene, while the paintings of that time reveal a distinct and populist (völkisch) tendency that can hardly be misconstrued for any ideological or political speculation.

  The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War in Yugoslavia, 1945–1953

  From the European and American media, one can often get the impression that World War II needs to be periodically resurrected to give credibility to financial demands of one specific ethnic group, at the expense of others. The civilian deaths of the war’s losing side are, for the most part, glossed over. Standard historiography of World War II is routinely based on a sharp and polemical distinction between the “ugly” fascists who lost, and the “good” anti-fascists who won, and few scholars are willing to inquire into the gray ambiguity in between. Even as the events of that war become more distant in time, they seemingly become more politically useful and timely as myths.

  German military and civilian losses during and especially after World War II are still shrouded by a veil of silence, at least in the mass media, even though an impressive body of scholarly literature exists on that topic. The reasons for this silence, due in large part to academic negligence, are deep rooted and deserve further scholarly inquiry. Why, for instance, are German civilian losses, and particularly the staggering number of postwar losses among ethnic Germans, dealt with so sketchily, if at all, in school history courses? The mass media — television, newspapers, film and magazines — rarely, if ever, look at the fate of the millions of German civilians in central and Eastern Europe during and following World War II.1

  The treatment of civilian ethnic Germans — or Volksdeutsche — in Yugoslavia may be regarded as a classic case of “ethnic cleansing” on a grand scale.2 A close look at these mass killings presents a myriad of historical and legal problems, especially when considering modern international law, including The Hague War Crimes Tribunal that has been dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Balkan wars of 1991–1995. Yet the plight of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans during and after World War II should be of no lesser concern to historians, not least because an understanding of this chapter of history throws a significant light on the violent breakup of Communist Yugoslavia 45 years later. A better understanding of the fate of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans should encourage skepticism of just how fairly and justly international law is applied in practice. Why are the sufferings and victimhood of some nations or ethnic groups ignored, while the sufferings of other nations and groups receive fulsome and sympathetic attention from the media and politicians?

  At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, more than one and a half million ethnic Germans were living in southeastern Europe, that is, in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania. Because they lived mostly near and along the Danube River, these people were popularly known “Danube Swabians” or Donauschwaben. Most were descendants of settlers who came to this fertile region in the 17th and 18th centuries following the liberation of Hungary from Turkish rule.

  For centuries, the Holy Roman Empire and then the Habsburg Empire struggled against Turkish rule in the Balkans, and resisted the “Islamization” of Europe. In this struggle the Danube Germans were viewed as a rampart of Western civilization, and were held in high esteem in the Austrian (and later, Austro-Hungarian) empire for their agricultural productivity and military prowess. Both the Holy Roman and Habsburg empires were multicultural and multinational entities, in which diverse ethnic groups lived for centuries in relative harmony.

  After the end of World War I, in 1918, which brought the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire, and the imposed Versailles Treaty of 1919, the juridical status of the Donauschwaben Germans was in flux. When the National Socialist regime was established in Germany in 1933, the Donauschwaben were among the more than twelve million ethnic Germans who lived in central and Eastern Europe outside the borders of the German Reich. Many of these people were brought into the Reich with the incorporation of Austria in 1938, of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and of portions of Poland in late 1939. The “German question”, that is, the struggle for self-determination of ethnic Germans outside the borders of the German Reich, was a major factor leading to the outbreak of World War II. Even after 1939, more than three million ethnic Germans remained outside the borders of the expanded Reich, notably in Romania, Y
ugoslavia, Hungary, and the Soviet Union.

  In the first Yugoslavia — a monarchical state created in 1919 largely as a result of efforts of the victorious Allied powers — most of the country’s ethnic Germans were concentrated in eastern Croatia and northern Serbia (notably in the Vojvodina region), with some German towns and villages in Slovenia. Other ethnic Germans lived in western Romania and south-eastern Hungary.

  This first multiethnic Yugoslav state of 1919–1941 had a population of some 14 million people of diverse cultures and religions. On the eve of World War II it included nearly six million Serbs, about three million Croats, more than a million Slovenes, some two million Bosnian Muslims and ethnic Albanians, approximately half a million ethnic Germans, and another half million ethnic Hungarians. Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in April 1941, accelerated by a rapid German military advance, approximately 200,000 ethnic Germans became citizens of the newly established Independent State of Croatia, a country whose military and civil authorities remained loyally allied with Third Reich Germany until the final week of the war in Europe.3 Most of the remaining ethnic Germans of former Yugoslavia — approximately 300,000 in the Vojvodina region — came under the jurisdiction of Hungary, which during the war incorporated the region. (After 1945, this region was reattached to the Serbian portion of Yugoslavia.)

  The plight of the ethnic Germans became dire during the final months of World War II, and especially after the founding of the second Yugoslavia, a multiethnic Communist state headed by Marshal Josip Broz Tito. In late October 1944, Tito’s guerilla forces, aided by the advancing Soviets and lavishly assisted by Western air supplies, took control of Belgrade, the Serb capital that also served as the capital of Yugoslavia. One of the first legal acts of the new regime was the decree of November 21, 1944, on “The decision regarding the transfer of the enemy’s property into the property of the state.” It declared citizens of German origin as “enemies of the people”, and stripped them of civic rights. The decree also ordered the government confiscation of all property, without compensation, of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans.4 An additional law, promulgated in Belgrade on February 6, 1945, canceled the Yugoslav citizenship of the country’s ethnic Germans.5

  By late 1944 — when Communist forces had seized control of the eastern Balkans, that is, of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Macedonia — the German-allied state of Croatia still held firm. However, in early 1945, German troops, together with Croatian troops and civilians, began retreating toward southern Austria. During the war’s final months, the majority of Yugoslavia’s ethnic German civilians also joined this great trek. The refugees’ fears of torture and death at Communist hands were well founded, given the horrific treatment by Soviet forces of Germans and others in East Prussia and other parts of Eastern Europe. By the end of the war in May 1945, German authorities had evacuated 220,000 ethnic Germans from Yugoslavia to Germany and Austria. Yet many remained in their war-ravaged ancestral homelands, most likely awaiting a miracle.

  After the end of fighting in Europe on May 8, 1945, more than 200,000 ethnic Germans who had remained behind in Yugoslavia effectively became captives of the new Communist regime. Some 63,635 Yugoslav ethnic German civilians (women, men and children) perished under Communist rule between 1945 and 1950 — that is, some 18 percent of the ethnic German civilian population still remaining in the new Yugoslavia. Most died as a result of exhaustion as slave laborers, in “ethnic cleansing”, or from disease and malnutrition.6 Much of the credit for the widely praised “economic miracle” of Titoist Yugoslavia, it should be noted, must go to the tens of thousands of German slave laborers who, during the late 1940s, helped to build the impoverished country.

  Property of ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia confiscated in the aftermath of World War II amounted to 97,490 small businesses, factories, shops, farms, and diverse trades. The confiscated real estate and farmland of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans came to 637,939 hectares (or about one million acres), and became state-owned property. According to a 1982 calculation, the value of the property confiscated from ethnic Germans in Yugoslavia amounted to 15 billion German marks, or about seven billion U.S. dollars. Taking inflation into account, this would today correspond to 12 billion U.S. dollars. From 1948 to 1985, more than 87,000 ethnic Germans who were still residing in Yugoslavia moved to Germany and automatically became German citizens.7

  All this constitutes a “final solution of the German question” in Yugoslavia.

  Numerous survivors have provided detailed and graphic accounts of the grim fate of the ethnic German civilians, particularly women and children, who were held in Communist Yugoslav captivity. One noteworthy witness is the late Father Wendelin Gruber, who served as a chaplain and spiritual leader to many fellow captives.8 These numerous survivor accounts of torture and death inflicted on German civilians and captured soldiers by Yugoslav authorities add to the chronicle of Communist oppression worldwide.9

  Of the one and a half million ethnic Germans who lived in the Danube basin in 1939–1941, some 93,000 served during World War II in the armed forces of Hungary, Croatia and Romania — Axis countries that were allied with Germany — or in the regular German armed forces. The ethnic Germans of Hungary, Croatia, and Romania who served in the military formations of those countries remained citizens of those respective states.10

  In addition, many ethnic Germans of the Danubian region served in the “Prinz Eugen” Waffen S.S. division, which totaled some 10,000 men throughout its existence during the war. (This formation was named in honor of Prince Eugene of Savoy, who had won great victories against Turkish forces in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.)11 Enlisting in the “Prinz Eugen” division automatically conferred German citizenship on the recruit.

  Of the 26,000 ethnic Danubian ethnic Germans serving in various military formations who lost their lives, half perished after the end of the war in Yugoslav camps. Particularly high were the losses of the “Prinz Eugen” division, most of whom surrendered after May 8, 1945. Some 1,700 of these prisoners were killed in the village of Brezice near the Croat-Slovenian border, while the remaining half was worked to death in Yugoslav zinc mines near the town of Bor, in Serbia.12

  In addition to the “ethnic cleansing” of Danube German civilians and soldiers, some 70,000 Germans who had served in regular Wehrmacht forces perished in Yugoslav captivity. Most of these died as a result of reprisals, or as slave laborers in mines, road construction, shipyards, and so forth. These were mostly troops of “Army Group E” who had surrendered to British military authorities in southern Austria at the time of the armistice of May 8, 1945. British authorities turned over about 150,000 of these German prisoners of war to Communist Yugoslav partisans under pretext of later repatriation to Germany.

  Most of these former regular Wehrmacht troops perished in post-war Yugoslavia in three stages: During the first stage more than 7,000 captured German troops died in Communist-organized “atonement marches” (Sühnemärsche) stretching 800 miles from the southern border of Austria to the northern border of Greece. During the second phase, in late summer 1945, many German soldiers in captivity were summarily executed or thrown alive into large karst pits along the Dalmatian coast of Croatia. In the third stage, 1945–1955, an additional 50,000 perished as forced laborers due to malnutrition and exhaustion.13

  The total number of German losses in Yugoslav captivity after the end of the war — including ethnic “Danube German” civilians and soldiers, as well as “Reich” Germans — may therefore be conservatively estimated at 120,000 killed, starved, worked to death, or missing.

  What is the importance of these figures? What lessons can be drawn in assessing these post-war German losses?

  It is important to stress that the plight of German civilians in the Balkans is only a small portion of the Allied topography of death. Seven to eight million Germans — both military personnel and civilians — died during and after World War II. Half of those perished during the final
months of the war, or after Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 8, 1945. German casualties, both civilian and military, were arguably higher in “peace” than in “war”.

  In the months before and after the end of World War II, ethnic Germans were killed, tortured and dispossessed throughout eastern and central Europe, notably in Silesia, East Prussia, Pomerania, the Sudetenland, and the “Wartheland” region. Altogether 12–15 million Germans fled or were driven from their homes in what is perhaps the greatest “ethnic cleansing” in history. Of this number, more than two million were killed or otherwise lost their lives.14

  The grim events in post-war Yugoslavia are rarely dealt with in the media of the countries that emerged on the ruins of Communist Yugoslavia, even though, remarkably, there is today greater freedom of expression and historical research there than in such western European countries as Germany and France. The elites of Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia, largely made up of former Communists, seem to share a common interest in repressing their sometimes murky and criminal past with regard to the postwar treatment of German civilians.

  The breakup of Yugoslavia in 1990–91, the events leading to it, and the war and atrocities that followed, can only be understood within a larger historical framework. As already noted, “ethnic cleansing” is nothing new. Even if one regards the former Serb-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milošević and the other defendants being tried by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as wicked criminals, their crimes are trivial compared to those of Communist Yugoslavia’s founder, Josip Broz Tito. Tito carried out “ethnic cleansing” and mass killings on a far greater scale, against Croats, Germans, and Serbs, and with the sanction of the British and American governments. His rule in Yugoslavia (1945–1980), which coincided with the “Cold War” era, was generally supported by the Western powers, which regarded his regime as a factor of stability in this often-unstable region of Europe.15