ccc Of those German minorities left in Eastern Europe after the war, a steady stream would continue to head to the West right up to the 1990s.
ccci The communities of the east were purposefully scattered and broken up. The Allied leadership had no intention of seeing closed groups of Prussians, Silesians or Sudeten Germans reconstituted in the west. It was no different in the Soviet sector, which took in nearly 4 million refugees, where any association formal or informal was banned outright. Sudeten Germans who had been transported to Thüringen tried to meet up on trips to the Leipzig Zoo, or other busy public places. Once they were discovered meeting there, they moved on to Halle. They were desperate to find out what had happened to neighbours, friends and, in many tragic circumstances, family members. Families were often separated in the chaotic circumstances of the great treks west, parents separated from children during blizzards, air attacks, at embarkation ports or in the crush at the railway stations trying to get their children on to the last train out. On the other side of the world, in Brazil, I found out quite by accident that my friend’s wife’s grandmother was German and had come to Brazil in the 1950s. I asked if she would see me. I was told she never talked about the past. She lost two of her four children in the chaos of the mass expulsions; she had tried for years to find out what had happened to them. No trace of them was ever found. She embarked on a voyage to a New World but remained a reclusive figure, haunted by the ghosts of her past.
Postscript: A Personal Journey Through a Kingdom of Ghosts
I felt it of value to document a personal history of my journeys through some of Germany’s former regions, including accounts of my meetings with members of the few German minorities who have clung on in the east, and those who were expelled. A little of the history of East Prussia, Silesia, the Sudetenland and the Elsass (Alsace) is charted, as are the attempts of the expellees to commemorate their ancient German regions, along with their dead. The debate about the establishment of a Centre Against Ethnic Cleansing in Berlin is examined, and in conclusion there is a brief outline of the current state of affairs in the former German territories in Europe that are not covered in the main part of the book, along with an exploration of the positive and less positive developments in the ‘New Europe’.
EAST PRUSSIA: A RURAL IDYLL LOST
Beyond East Prussia’s eastern borders lay the vast open expanses of the East; Western civilisation ended here. The countryside was dotted with beautiful medieval towns, Hanseatic ports, majestic castles and fortresses dating back to the days of the crusading Teutonic Knights, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it was Germany’s Avalon, a mystical place akin to the legends of England’s King Arthur, and a place for which generations of Germans had grown to hold a special affection in their hearts.
The region that was once East Prussia had, time and time again, found itself at the fulcrum of history. The year 1410 heralded the demise of the Order of Teutonic Knights and the rise of the Polish Commonwealth. By this time, following 200 years of relentless activity along the Baltic, the Order of Teutonic Knights and the merchants of the Hanse had founded over 1,400 new villages and farmsteads, fifty-five new towns, forty-eight crusader castles and over a hundred stately homes in the region.(1) During the sixteenth century East Prussia became a bastion of the Protestant Reformation. In 1675, the Great Northern War saw the Great Elector and ruler of Prussia sweep out across the frozen Baltic from Königsberg to defeat the Poles and Swedes and begin Prussia’s rise. In the eighteenth century, Königsberg was the city in which the Hohenzollerns first became kings and saw the nation rise to great power status in Europe. A humiliated Frederick Wilhelm III fled to Memel in East Prussia, following the defeat of the Prussian army at the hands of Napoleon in 1806, and it was in the forests and marshes of East Prussia where Field Marshal Hindenburg stopped the Russian advance in its tracks at the start of the First World War. In June 1941, East Prussia was the staging post for Hitler’s invasion of Russia, where many of the 3 million Wehrmacht soldiers marshalled for the start of Operation Barbarossa, and it was at Hitler’s forward headquarters at Rastenburg that Lieutentant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg made the last attempt by the German resistance to assassinate Hitler. In its death throes, East Prussia would bear witness to the genocidal rage of the Red Army against its civilian population before being eradicated from the map of Europe. East Prussia — its landscapes dotted with tree-lined roads, open plains, hundreds of lakes, forests and marshes, and a stunning coastline, with Europe’s largest offshore dunes — held some of Europe’s last unspoiled wildernesses. Today there are two UNESCO Natural World Heritage Sites along this very coastline.
The region’s capital city, Königsberg, was famous for its coffee houses and bookshops, was home to one of Germany’s largest publishing houses, and was also famous for an array of specialties including Königsberg marzipan and Klöpse (dumplings), Danziger Goldwasser (a spirit with actual gold leaf in it), Mohnkuchen (poppyseed cake), Christmas specialties made of almonds, sugar and rosewater, along with Schwermersche Baumkuchen (layer cake), Süßsauer Kürbis-Würfe (sweet and sour cubes), Pilkaller Schnaps, the Ostmark Beer brewery and Tilsiter cheese. The region was Europe’s capital of the amber industry, having once held a monopoly from the Catholic Church for making amber rosary beads. It held one of the greatest areas of biodiversity in Europe in terms of bird life and bees, as well as larger mammals like elk, wolves, deer, bear and wild boar, which naturally made it a favourite resort for hunting, not least with Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose favourite hunting lodge in all of Germany was at Rominten. The region was once also famed for its unique breed of horses, the Trakehner, which were tough and fast with tremendous endurance; they helped the German team to three gold medals and one silver medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.(2) However, the breed became near extinct as a result of the exodus. The sandy beaches of East Prussia were a popular attraction and held some of Germany’s most popular beach resorts before the war, including Cranz, Nidden, Neukuhren and Rauschen, where the likes of Thomas Mann had holiday homes.(3)
The people of East Prussia had their own distinctive dialect and were said to be particularly superstitious. During its long history, East Prussia bore and played host to Germany’s great and good. For example, Martin Luther’s daughter, Margarethe von Kuenheim, became a preacher’s wife at Mühlhausen (Gwardejskoe). Königsberg Castle was one of the official residences of the Kings of Prussia, and Prussian monarchs had been crowned there since 1701. Richard Wagner got married at the church in Tragheim in the suburbs of Königsberg in 1836. The region produced its fair share of poets and authors, including Ernst Theodor Amadeus (E.T.A.) Hoffmann, one of the great storytellers, and a Renaissance man who was also a gifted painter and composer, alongside other important artistic and cultural figures such as Ernst Wiechert, Agnes Miegel and Hermann Sudermann.
East Prussia made a significant contribution to the world of science and discovery, giving birth to Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, the astronomer who mapped out the fundament and 75,000 of its stars; the founder of modern mathematics, David Hilbert, whose work guided none other than Albert Einstein; Erich von Drygalski, one of the founders of polar research; the renowned physicist and chemist, Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, who established the Kirchhoff rules on the flow of electricity, and who was the founder of spectral analysis; Adolf Lipmann, the important biochemist who received the Nobel Prize for his endeavours in 1953; and Eduard von Simson, a leading figure of the 1848 revolution at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. Even in the realm of politics, East Prussia could boast two significant figures who railed against the rise of fascism: Otto Braun, the leader of the Prussian Social Democrats during the Weimar Republic; and Carl Goerdeler, a member of the July plot against Hitler, who was subsequently executed by the Nazis. Many of these luminaries, including Johann Gottfried Herder, whose works influenced the likes of Goethe and Schiller, had studied at the Albertina University in Königsberg, one of Germany’s greatest old universities.(4)
But by far the
most famous son of East Prussia, and the Albertina University, was one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age: Immanuel Kant.cccii Kant was born in Königsberg in 1724 and was acknowledged as the town’s greatest glory; his funeral in 1804 was attended by people from all over Germany. He influenced all who came after him, not least Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. These living legends of East Prussia’s history and their contribution to the treasury of humanity live on, even if many Germans today cannot point to where East Prussia once stood on a map.(5) The fate of Immanuel Kant’s grave, however, speaks volumes about the nihilistic emotions generated by war. The Soviets, not unlike the Maoists during the Cultural Revolution, or Al-Qaeda (with regard to the destruction of the great Buddha statue in Afghanistan), systematically destroyed all traces and vestiges of German culture in East Prussia, and nothing symbolises the total collapse of German culture in the east, in the aftermath of the Second World War, more graphically than the demolition of the heart of old Königsberg, and the desecration of Immanuel Kant’s grave. In 1924, Kant’s remains had been moved to a special new place of remembrance in a neo-Classical portico attached to the city’s cathedral.
In 1950, his sarcophagus was broken into by Russian vandals looking for gold rings, or teeth. His bones were scattered and the sarcophagus was left empty. His legacy, and that of the city which had survived so many wars, was of no interest to its new occupants. The city had been absorbed into the Soviet Union and renamed after one of Stalin’s leading political henchmen, Kalinin, and is now to be found on the map as Kaliningrad. All that remains of Kant’s legacy in the city of his birth is a bronze plaque on the wall of the old cathedral, which stands above the remains of a now grey and desolate landscape — a tribute to the ruins of Soviet realism and not even a shadow of its former self. The plaque has a quote from one of the philosopher’s greatest works, the Critique of Practical Reason, which reads, ‘Two things fill the heart with ever renewed and increasing awe and reverence, the more often and the more steadily we meditate upon them: the starry firmament above and the moral law within.’(6) Standing at his final resting place today, which once looked out across the beautiful medieval city of Königsberg, it is now simply impossible to envision a great mind viewing this concrete wilderness and being inspired to anything other than desolate silence.
The Red Army’s soldiers had been indoctrinated with the idea that Prussia, and especially East Prussia, was the lair of the ‘Junker Fascists’, who needed to be mercilessly rooted out. Furthermore, Roosevelt, Churchill and other leading Anglo-American politicians were convinced that Prussian militarism and Nazism were synonymous, and that East Prussia was the well of the Prussian officer corps. As Christopher Clark states, ‘It would be difficult to overestimate the hold this scenario of power lust, servility and political archaism held over the imaginations of the policy makers most concerned with Germany’s post-war fate. In a speech in December 1939, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, observed that, ‘Hitler is not so unique as all that. He is merely the latest expression of the Prussian spirit of military domination,’ a view widely shared in the British and American media and establishment.’
Long before the war ended, leading Allied politicians decided that Prussia was the source of all evil in Germany and must be eliminated. In the summer of 1943, in a paper presented to the British Cabinet by Clement Attlee, who was Deputy Prime Minister to Churchill’s coalition government at the time, it was argued that ‘the real aggressive element’ in German society was the Prussian Junker class, and the chief danger lay in the possibility that this class, which had allied itself with the masters of heavy industry in Westphalia, might depose the Nazi leadership and present itself to the Allies as a successor government prepared to settle peace terms. He argued that the error of 1918 had been to allow these elements to remain a bulwark against Bolshevism and urged that this should not happen again. Only the ‘liquidation of the Junkers as a class’, according to Attlee, would ‘eradicate the Prussian virus’.(8)
The Russians did the dirty work of ‘eradicating the Prussian virus’ and the ancient province of East Prussia, with its 750-year history, was carved out of existence and divided up between Russia, Poland and Lithuania — so as to sow salt into earth, a Carthaginian peace from which East Prussia could never re-emerge.ccciii
In 1945, the US diplomat and later historian, George Kennan, wrote:
I… flew low, in an American plane, over the entire province (of East Prussia) shortly after Potsdam, and the sight was that of a totally ruined and deserted country… The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience… scarcely a man, woman or child of the indigenous population was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces; and one cannot believe that they all succeeded in fleeing to the West.ccciv (9)
FORGOTTEN SILESIA
Long before the destruction of Silesia, one of its former inhabitants wrote of the ‘frontier spirit’ Germans in the region felt when looking east: ‘You could feel you were taking a step from central Europe into the east, the land between Europe and the expansive steppe of Asia. This was the horizon that defined the region.’(1) This was a land marked by the movements and migrations of European history,cccv with a capital city, Breslau, that in its sixteenth century heyday, rivalled Prague, Vienna and Krakau as one of Europe’s great cultural and economic centres. Breslau had also been at the crossroads of some of the key turning points of European history. In 1241, the Bavarian Duke Heinrich held off Mongolian invaders here at the gates of Central Europe; in 1813, Silesia and Silesian regiments, under General Blücher, played a key role in the Prussian rising against the Napoleonic occupation; and from 1942 it was home to the Kreisau circle, named after Helmuth James von Moltke’s estate, where members of the anti-Nazi resistance met to plot Hitler’s assassination.(3)
Silesia had been home to Celts, as well as the Germanic Silingen tribe (a branch of the Vandals) before becoming part of Piast Poland from the late tenth to the early fourteenth centuries, and before a steady stream of Germans from across the Holy Roman Empire settled there from the late twelfth century onwards. Silesia became part of the Holy Roman Empire under the Luxemburg Bohemians in 1335, before in turn passing to the Austrian Habsburgs from 1526–1740. From 1740, it then became part of Prussia and subsequently Germany until 1945, when much of this ancient land was incorporated into post-war Poland. Silesia was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s richest province. Silesia made Prussia great and the furnaces of her industry helped make Germany a European super-power. Today she is Poland’s most valuable province but she remains a shadow of her former self. Silesia was hard fought over by Germans and Russians,cccvi but the Germans of today appear largely to have forgotten that Silesia was ever an integral part of Germany.
A member of the German minority, Alois Kokot, mayor of the Upper Silesian town of Groß Döbern (Dobrzen Wielki) in modern day Poland said:
We had a different fate from those in (what remained of) Germany, we had to live with the consequences of the war. We were forgotten. We were Germans that no longer existed. Officially it was always stated that only Poles live in Silesia. Today I am the Mayor here. I was born German. I was forced to become a Pole against my will. I no longer want to judge all that. As Mayor I carry responsibility for the future of Poles and Germans in this community, not for the past.(4)
The suffering of the German community that remained in Poland after the war is virtually unknown, both in Poland and in Germany. The Russians gave the inhabitants of Upper Silesia a ‘Crusader’s choice’; as Joachim Kobina recalls, ‘When the Russians came, a soldier approached my grandfather and asked; “Are you a German or a Pole? If a German I’ll shoot you on the spot!” He answered; “Yes I am a Pole, Sir, indeed I am a Pole.”’ Joachim’s grandfather and his family remained on their farm in Silesia, but as ‘Poles’.(5)
The Polish authorities expelled the entire German population of Lower Silesia. The Erlebnisgernation still
say, with just a little more than a hint of irony: ‘They even expelled all the German shepherd dogs!’ However, in Upper Silesia they came up with the Polish Option. There were over a million Germans, mostly centred in Upper Silesia, who had been given the Polish Option,cccvii which was to give up their German citizenship and become Polish citizens. From that point on, as pseudo-Poles, they ceased to be of interest to the German authorities, and the Poles did not recognise them as a German minority. The Polish Option was granted to those individuals who had Slavic-sounding names, or who spoke the ancient upper Silesian dialect, which was a mishmash of Moravian, Polish and German, or because they had vital skills useful to the authorities. There were simply not enough Poles to fill the gaps left by the expulsion of over 9.5 million Germans, and as Upper Silesia was the most important economic jewel in the crown in Poland’s acquisitions,cccviii it was necessary to keep an essential workforce there and overlook its German origins. In fact, the idea that there was a large ‘ur-Polish’ (Poles who in the view of the Polish authorities had over centuries been Germanised) community in the region played into the historical fiction of the ‘regained territories’. Those that took the Polish Option had to abandon their language, their culture and their heritage; they had to pretend to be something they were not and endure the estrangement of their children and grandchildren, many of whom grew up to speak only Polish and were never told of their German Silesian heritage.
One German historian summarised the fate of the German community in post-war Upper Silesia by saying:
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