Death of a Nation

by Stephen R A'Barrow

  In response to Stalin’s claims that the region east of the Oder-Neisse was free of Germans, Churchill replied, ‘We are not of the opinion that this territory is Polish land.’ Truman further stated that, ‘Poland does not have the right to claim this part of Germany as its own.’ He also offered that the American administration could be of assistance in reintroducing a German administration into the areas of Silesia and Pomerania. He later wrote, ‘Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused.’(9) Meanwhile, in Silesia alone, 3 million of its 5 million-strong German population who remained were slowly starving to death. Churchill feared that his joke about Poland being ‘stuffed with so much German meat it might choke to death’ appeared to be becoming a potentially destabilising reality. At the round table meeting of the Big Three at Potsdam near Berlin, Churchill was unequivocal. He said:

  Now Poland is claiming far more than it has had to give up in the East… When three or four million Poles east of the Curzon Line have to be resettled, so one could have resettled three or four million Germans in the West, so that they would have made room for the incoming Poles. The now proposed resettlement of over eight million Germans is a thing which I cannot support.(10)

  At this point Churchill had to return to Britain to take part in the British election in July 1945 which only strengthened Stalin’s hand; Clement Attlee, whose Labour Party won a landslide election over Churchill’s Conservative Party, was hopelessly out of his depth. Nevertheless, both Attlee and Truman refused to accept the formal definitive westward movement of Poland’s frontier as far west as the Oder-Neisse.

  After the war, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, stated:

  … the arrangements reached were not those we wanted, particularly about the Oder-Neisse line. Churchill and I left, we were emphatic that we could not agree to those arrangements and I know that Bevin, whom I talked to about this at Buckingham Palace when we exchanged offices, was conscious of how we must stand up against that situation. But in the event, partly caused by our delay in being away, we weren’t able to hold out against that and the arrangements at Potsdam were not those we wanted in respect, particularly, of the Oder-Neisse line.ccliii (11)

  The West was at a distinct disadvantage. Churchill had just lost the election and Roosevelt was dead, replaced by a steely, if somewhat inexperienced, Truman. Stalin could survey his conquests and continue to enjoy revenge served cold while he chuckled at the West’s disarray. He was the only surviving member of the ‘Big Three’ and he stood head and shoulders above Truman and Attlee in terms of his experience, and in his determination and ability to carve out a new political reality for Central and Eastern Europe.

  After the conclusion of the Potsdam Conference Churchill, as opposition leader, spoke of a ‘tragedy of immeasurable nature’. The Western Allies clung to the outline agreements they made at Yalta, and to the notion that they would get their way at the final peace conference. Potsdam simply stated that, ‘The former German territories east of the Oder (not the Neisse) river should, until the final conclusion of the peace conference, “come under the administration of the Polish State”.’ The same applied to the occupation of northern East Prussia by the Russians. There was no mention of southern East Prussia becoming part of the Polish state. The Allies also ‘agreed’ that any remaining German minorities left in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were to be ‘transferred’ to Germany, and it has been argued that this gave the Poles and Czechs the green light to completely ethnically cleanse the territories they acquired of all Germans. However, the Potsdam ‘agreements’ had no legal standing whatsoever, as unlike the terms reached at the end of previous conflicts such as those negotiated at Westphalia, Vienna and Versailles, the Potsdam Accords did not achieve international endorsement in the form of an internationally and legally-recognised treaty.

  In relation to Versailles, but particularly Potsdam and the post-Second World War ‘settlement,’ a dangerous precedent was set where the prosecutor also became the judge. It is a moral failing in the West that so many historians have attempted to unreservedly legitimise the worst case of vae victis in the modern age. If justice had been the point then the post-war hearings should have been held in the Hague, whose courts had created the existing laws which governed war in 1899 and 1907, with judges from neutral countries overseeing proceedings. That way more German military and political figures would have faced charges from a broader spectrum of society, as would and should have members of the Allied leadership. However, there was a key reason that the Allies did not want to hold trials in a city which had passed conventions 45-56 which limited the rights of occupying powers. These conventions included:

  Article 46: Private property cannot be confiscated.

  Article 47: Pillage is formally forbidden.

  Article 50: No general penalty, pecuniary or otherwise, shall be inflicted upon the population on account of acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible.

  Article 56: The property of municipalities, that of institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences, even when state property, shall be treated as private property. All seizure of, destruction or wilful damage done to institutions of this character, historic monuments, works of art and science, is forbidden, and should be made subject of legal proceedings.

  The Allies accepted no limits upon their occupation, expropriation and dismemberment of Germany. The greatest hypocrisy, however, remains that the Nuremberg trials declared mass deportations of civilian populations both a war crime and a crime against humanity, whilst at the same time presiding over the largest mass deportation of civilian populations in European history; one that would continue well after hostilities had ended and did not formally come to a close until the summer of 1951. Allied nations, having waged a bitter and all-consuming total war, were in no mood to have their crimes scrutinised then or now. They gave themselves a general amnesty and focused squarely on putting Germany front and centre. Everyone else’s crimes were to be swept under the carpet, wilfully ignored and hopefully forgotten with the passage of time.

  When the Potsdam Protocol mentioned Germany, it referred to the area within her borders in 1937, before the war and Hitler’s annexations began; final ‘delimitation’ccliv on Germany’s international borders, reparations and so forth were to be left to a later Versailles-style peace conference. In practice, however, the notion of another big conference quickly receded into the background. The Cold War overtook events and after the Soviet blockade and the Anglo-American airlift of Berlin, the idea of a final conference was permanently shelved. No final decisions were taken until June 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe at the ‘Two Plus Four’ talks between the two post-war German satellites, and the four Allies: Russia, the United States, Great Britain and France. By then Stalin’s legacy had been embedded for over two generations and what was left to discuss were just the de facto realities, which he had willed.

  In his biography of the Second World War, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘For the future peace of Europe (the shift of Poland’s border as far as the western river Neisse) there was a wrong beside which Alsace-Lorraine and the Danzig Corridor were trifles. One day the Germans would want their territory back, and the Poles will not be able to stop them.’(14) However, none of the Western Allies ever again stepped up to the plate to argue for what was agreed at Yalta, let alone for re-establishing Germany’s borders of 1937. As early as March 1946 the Allies appeared to accept de facto realities when the Allied Control Commission of Germany announced, ‘Germany consists of the existing German territory between the Oder-Neisse line and its Western borders.’ There were still American Foreign Ministers who were willing, as late as 1947, to state that the United States did not accept the Anschluß of southern East Prussia, Danzig and Lower Silesia to Poland, but they had missed their only real opportunity to affect the futu
re of millions at Potsdam, when the Soviets were desperate for the extension of billions of dollars in credits and wanted the maximum out of the western sectors occupied by the Allies in terms of reparations. Post-Potsdam, the issue of final borders was little more than a Cold War bargaining chip; everyone knew that to enforce their will over what had been agreed to at Yalta would have meant a hot war with the Soviet Union, an option that went out of the window once the Soviets also became a nuclear power in 1948.cclv

  NOW IT’S YOUR TURN: POLISH ADMINISTRATION OF FORMER GERMAN TERRITORIES

  The Polish authorities were acting in a legal vacuum. Stalin had installed his puppet Lublin Polish administration in Warsaw, which had minimal popular support among the Polish population. The Western Allies ostensibly continued to support the exiled pre-war Polish government in London until August 1945. The ‘wild expulsions’ of the German population began before the war had ended, and prior to the Potsdam Conference of the Allied leaders. These expulsions had no legal basis whatsoever, the Western Allies were not even aware of the secret agreement reached between Stalin and his Polish regime in waiting.(15) The Russians lost no time in deporting at least 800,000 German civilians, mainly from East Prussia and Silesia to Siberia. These included not only every remaining man aged between sixteen and sixty that they could lay their hands on, but also many women and children. Reports from the time described German communities in the East totally devoid of men. Those that did not hide disappeared.cclvi (16) Countless German women were also rounded-up and made to work in the brothels of the officers of the Red Army; all of which continued long after the war had ended.(17)

  The first law the Polish ‘authorities’ promulgated was the ‘exclusion of elements hostile to the Polish nation’. By this they meant expropriation and removal of all Germans whether in Poland proper or the territories they hoped to acquire. Polish militias quickly began to intern those who they deemed to be Nazis in over 500 camps across Poland, many of which were former Nazi concentration camps and prisons. The leading Nazis were long gone, so the main inmates of these camps were German civilians, mostly women and children. Families were separated; children and the old were put into separate areas or separate camps, such as those at Potulitz (Potulice near Bromberg/Bydgoszcz). The highest death tolls were of the youngest and the oldest, exacerbated by the fact that those who could not work received little or no rations. The clothes that German prisoners were made to wear at the Polish camps were initially all marked with swastikas; they later received armbands marked with an ‘N’ for Niemiec (Germans); the Polish authorities saw both marks as being entirely synonymous. Laws were passed between March and May 1945 confiscating all property of Germans who had fled, as well as of those who remained. The Polish Zloty was introduced as the new currency in all these regions. Eastern Germany had effectively been annexed long before the Potsdam Conference even began.

  After seeing the devastation of German towns and cities west of the Oder, over a million of those who had fled west now filtered back. Poland lost no time in incorporating them into the slave labour market along with the others who had remained behind. Ironically they needed German specialists and engineers to keep things running in the intervening period. Much to the Poles’ chagrin, the language of communication in many instances had to remain German, as manuals for the equipment needed to run systems such as transport, water and electricity had been written in the language of the people who had built them. Polish colonists now began arriving from all over central Poland to take possession of what the Germans had been forced to leave behind. House hunting became a popular new pastime, irrespective of whether the German inhabitants had vacated the property or not.(19)

  In Breslau, those who had remained and fought so bitterly to save German Breslau took the full brute force of the pent-up revenge and hatred of both Soviet forces and the Polish militias. One witness report from July 1945 states, ‘Already three to four hundred people die in Breslau every day… Now the same methods of extermination are applied to us as we applied to other peoples, only that… the Russians and the Poles do not murder senselessly as did our Waffen SS and Gestapo. But if one considers the intention, it amounts to the same thing.’(20) Germans received no medicines and Polish doctors refused to treat them. Everywhere in the annexed territories the local population received either starvation rations or no rations at all, dramatically weakening their ability to fight off disease. Typhus quickly emerged in these conditions of devastation and deprivation, scything through the population and taking many of the youngest first. Child mortality rates in Breslau soon reached 90 per cent.(21)

  In the view of many German civilian witnesses, the Polish Communist Militia (the MO) was even more murderous than the Russians, and Silesians who had already been interned in the former concentration camps at Lambsdorf (Lambinowice), Schwientochlowitz (Swietochlowice) and Trebnitz (Trzebnica), had the worst of it. One such internee reports, ‘They locked me in the cellar for six weeks… the stench from the bucket was overpowering… The militia guards, most of them youths, took a special delight in tormenting their poor prisoners either beating or kicking them or setting the dogs at them…’(22) The most infamous Polish internment camps were the Kletschkau Prison in Breslau, along with those at Glatz (Klodzko), Trebnitz (Trzebnica) and Wünschelburg (Radkow); but all the old German concentration camps were put to use. The most infamous death camp used by the Poles was Lambsdorf. A German doctor who had been interned there called it an ‘extermination camp’; he recorded 6,488 deaths, including 828 children, who either died violent deaths or who succumbed to malnutrition and disease.(23) Lambsdorf had a bloody history; it had been a Nazi internment camp used for Soviet prisoners of war where many of them were worked to death. The Soviets used testimony from this camp at Nuremberg, as an example of Nazi German war crimes and crimes against humanity. It proved far more difficult to bring anyone to book for the crimes that were committed there against German civilians after the war. Polish authorities put the commandant of Lambsdorf, Czesław Gęborski, on trial during the Communist era but the charges were eventually dropped and he went on to gain preferment within the Communist regime. After the Wende (the turning point following the fall of the Berlin wall), Polish authorities put him on trial again in 2000 but he died before a verdict could be given.

  Polish historians have admitted to the existence of as many as 500 camps, in which up to 250,000 Nazi criminals were interned, of which 60,000–80,000 died. This would have amounted to only 500 people per camp, which is a highly unlikely number, as the camps were filled to bursting point. However, as with Theresienstadt in Bohemia, these camps were not filled with Nazi war criminals (most of whom had fled), they were primarily filled with women, children and the elderly. The Poles’ own figures indicated that nearly two-thirds were women, nearly a third were children, and the rest were old men.(24) The Polish death camp at Zgoda had an even higher ratio of deaths than Lambsdorf. Its young commandant, Salomon Morel, a Polish Jew who had survived the Nazi camps, was put on trial by the Polish authorities, but he immigrated to Israel. The Israeli authorities refused to extradite him, as Israel has a statute of limitations of ten years for crimes committed by Israeli citizens!

  The Polish militias apparently delighted in the murderous bedlam in the cities they had come to colonise, believing it would speed the demise or departure of the hated Germans. An eyewitness account recalls:

  Behind the main station (in Breslau) was a veritable inferno. Numerous gangs of marauders lived in the ruined buildings in this quarter, and not a night passed without houses in the vicinity being raided or some German being shot. One of the inhabitants of St Henry’s parish was stabbed in the neck with a bayonet in broad daylight in his own garden, whilst his son was beaten to death with the butt end of a rifle… Night after night cries for help resounded through the streets… The inhabitants who were in fear of being raided made a terrific din by beating pan lids together in the hope of driving the marauders away… Marauders broke into St Dorothy’s ce
metery… and actually removed gold teeth from the dead.(25)

  Eastern Poles, who had experienced hellish ethnic cleansing at the hands of Ukrainian militias and the NKVD, arrived in Breslau to look for new homes. The dispossessed from the East were not the only ones who came to Breslau to find houses; there was also a deluge of Poles from the interior of Poland proper. If the Germans were lucky they were allowed to share their house or farm with the Poles for a while; if not, they were either killed — if they refused to leave, or the militias would arrive giving them half an hour to pack one bag each and leave; although they were usually plundered on their doorstep of anything valuable they had sought to take with them. Germans living in their ancient homelands were uncertain as to their future and as to whether they were still in Germany or in Poland; the Potsdam Accords had simply said that the territories of Silesia, Pomerania and southern East Prussia were to be put under Polish administration until a final peace treaty. From the way the Germans were being treated, they soon came to feel they were ‘living in an inverted version of the Nazi General Government of Poland’.(26)