Orderly and Humane – The Expulsion of the Germans

Orderly and Humane – The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War is a book by R.M. Douglas, a history professor at Colgate University, the liberal arts university that challenges students to be enlightened thinkers.

The book was published in 2012 by Yale University Press (New Heaven & London). Douglas received the award from the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe. Also, The Atlantic named it one of the Books of the Year 2012.

Highlights of the book

More than 12 million German-speaking civilians in Europe were driven from their homes in the wake of WWII, yet barely anyone noticed or remembers

Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies authorized and helped to carry out the forced relocation of German speakers from their homes across central and southern Europe to Germany. The numbers were almost unimaginable—between 12,000,000 and 14,000,000 civilians, most of them women and children—and the losses horrifying—at least 500,000 people, and perhaps many more, died while detained in former concentration camps, while locked in trains en route, or after arriving in Germany exhausted, malnourished, and homeless. This book is the first in any language to tell the full story of this immense man-made catastrophe.

The most thorough study available of the largest expulsion of a people in human history and by far the most horrific instance in post-war Europe of what is now called ethnic cleansing. – Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic

Foreword by CEA

Some still relativize or ignore the facts about massive abuses of human rights. Even if one would justify the “orderly and humane” transfer of Germans, many of whom were and would be much luckier anywhere in the West than in the Communist Soviet and Yugoslav sphere, unprecise “justifications” usually undermine the complete reality. Many Germans and other people were subject to massive abuses of their fundamental God-given rights – life, liberty and property (in the philosophical sense of John Locke).

Moreover, facts are easily and undermined by trying to justify the reasons for collective guilt against Germans, instead of a proportionate and rational approach. Such exaggeration goes far beyond the real scope of political and societal guilt for Nazism (or any other totalitarianism, including Communism), not to mention the liberal principles of individual responsibility. Therefore, such imprecise generalizations justify the nature of Communism, practically connected with ethnic nationalism, which supported a massive inability to distinguish good and bad guys in a particular ethnic or religious group. This book is focused on innocent civilians, including children, who lived in their homes across Central and Eastern Europe long before the communists arrived – as the predecessors of today’s Russian regime.

Daniel Hinšt, Board member of the Centre for Public Policy and Economic Analysis (CEA), provides a paraphrased overview of key messages from this book and some additional notes and comments in brackets. This is also significant in the context of the 80th anniversary of the expulsion of Germans.

CEA’s vision is to bring the light of freedom and encourage fact-based policymaking. Accordingly, CEA stands for values of individual liberty and fundamental natural rights, including religious and economic freedom. The facts from this book testify the nature of Communism, which is against The Soul of Liberty and values of Christianity – including in Yugoslavia.

Key messages

Nationalism without minority rights

• Beneš promised Allies that Czechoslovakia would become a multinational state, with minority rights of Sudetendeutsche safeguarded by the law based on Swiss principles, proportionate representation, and with German as the second language.
• Tomaš Masaryk, a son of a Czech-German mother who grew up speaking German more fluently than Czech, referred to Sudetendeutsche as colonists and immigrants.
• Physical attacks on Sudetendeutsche and their symbols and institutions were far from uncommon (since 1918).
• Czech nationalists tried to eliminate German culture, especially by driving down the number of registered Germans in each district below 20 percent, the critical threshold for formal recognition of a minority under Czechoslovak law.
• Thousands who professed to be Germans on the 1921 census were subject to fines, imprisonment and interrogations.
• Ethnic manipulation occurred on an even larger scale in the 1930 census.
• Tomaš Masaryk was dedicated to diminishing Czechoslovak chauvinism and German separatism.
• Franz Spina, a Sudeten German parliamentarian who served twice as a Czechoslovak minister, talked about close connections (between Czechs and Germans), forming different strands of the same carpet.
• In a 1942 article for Foreign Affairs, Beneš declared that minorities are a real horn of nations, especially in Central Europe, and if they are German minorities.
• Sometimes, German schools were closed by the (Czechoslovak First Republic) state for admitting children of the wrong ethnicity to prevent the Germanization of children.
• The Warsaw government targeted Germans who sent children to private German schools.

Territorial questions and transfer

• Beneš was willing to give up small tracts of Sudetendeutsche territory to Germany for suitable compensation elsewhere.
• The idea of territorial acquisition in the west was less important, and they reacted cautiously to Czechoslovak suggestions in 1939-40 concerning the expulsion of German minorities.
• Based on the Potsdam Agreement, the three governments (US, UK and USSR) recognized the transfer of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary – the transfer should be in an orderly and humane manner (not the one that happened, together with massive human rights abuses).
• The United States agreed to Article XIII (of the Potsdam Agreement) solely because it wanted to make the inevitable expulsion orderly and humane (since Americans were practically realistic about what would happen).
• The Potsdam Agreement (however) said nothing about Volksdeutsche from Yugoslavia and other countries. Yugoslavia had neither asked nor received allied permission to expel Volksdeutsche.
• The Soviet absorption of Baltic states in 1940 led to another exodus of remaining Germans.

Camps and forced labor

• In January 1945, (Soviet) General Vinogradov required the Romanian government to round up all German males between 18 and 45 and females between 18 and 30 for transportation as forced laborers in the USSR.
• Sudetendeutsche prisoners of both sexes were liable to compulsory labor. Dozens, if not hundreds of camps were established in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and Hungary.
• Many ex-Nazi camps were retained for the detention of Germans.
• In the Czech lands, Sudeten German businessmen, professionals and craftsmen, whose services were considered unnecessary, were subject to internment.
• The Tito regime provided for the internment of Yugoslav Volksdeutsche. The existence of 96 Yugoslav camps was known to the Red Cross in 1947.
• Twenty thousand internees from Baranya (which southeastern part became a part of Yugoslavia after WWII) were reported by American diplomats in 1945.
• The worst were camps in Yugoslavia; the largest camp took the form of the entire village, with death rate as a result of malnutrition, infections, beatings and overcrowding. Several camps were dissolved, Filopovo, Sekić and Bački Jarak, because of excessive mortality. According to British intelligence officers, inmates could buy their way out using human trafficking, which would pay off camp authorities.
• The British ambassador in Yugoslavia pointed out that all those in concentration camps cannot be guilty of crimes, particularly children. In 1946, he protested the indiscriminate starvation and annihilation as an offence to humanity. In London, too, naming and shaming Yugoslavs found some support, although no immediate action was taken.
• Children ten years of age or above were used for forced labor in Yugoslavia. The Red Cross could obtain no further information about their fate when they were taken out by the authorities. Physical violence was compounded by psychological.
• The Polish Committee of National Liberation ordered in 1944 to place all Volksdeutsche above the age of 13 in camps for forced labor.
• Polish authorities took the opportunity to rid themselves of an unproductive element of the German population and retain employable males for compulsory labor.
• Regulations exempting pregnant women, the disabled, young and old were ignored.
• Notable elements of camps were sexual assault and humiliation suffered by females, including nightly parties. At Potulice, one of the largest Polish camps, sexual humiliation became an institutional practice by the end of 1945.
• There were a number of children’s camps.
• In Gliwice, Poland, a boy from the Netherlands was arrested for detention due to his blond hair and eyes.
• Swiss nationals were detained after being overheard speaking German.
• In Czechoslovakia and Poland, hundreds of rallies were held by political parties demanding the removal of Germans.
• Walter Menzel, head of CICR (Red Cross) in Prague, warned Jan Masaryk in 1946 that keeping silent would be against his conscience. Menzel leaked information to the British ambassador about conditions in camps in Slovakia.
• Christopher Mayhew, the British minister of state at the Foreign Office, upbraided Czechoslovakia at the UN in 1949 for maintaining concentration camps for Sudetendeutsche.
• A few camps, like Jaworzno, continued operating in the 1950s.
• Except in the rarest circumstances, government officials, guards and commandants of camps never faced trial.
• In 1994, the Red Army in Hungary announced the conscription of all Volksdeutsche males aged between 17 and 45 and females between 18 and 30 for forced labor.
• Johanna Janisch, a mother of three, was suffering from gonorrhea as a result of rape by Red Army soldiers.
• In Yugoslavia and Romania, all removals were “wild expulsions” as the Allies never accepted their minorities into Austria and Germany.

Economic socialism and deprivation

• Sudetenland was vital to Czechoslovakia’s economy.
• A land reform program benefited Slovak and Czech farmers at the expense of German counterparts.
• Beneš promised national and social revolution by measures against German wealth.
• Beneš described removing Sudetendeutsche as a way of economic socialization. He told Molotov that Germans were rich, and the transfer of their property would mean Czechization and a large social upheaval.
• Česke Budejovice, under the German name Budweis, gained a worldwide reputation for Budweiser beer.
• The governments of expelling countries insisted that temporary interruptions of economic activities were a price worth paying.
• Civil authorities protested against expulsions due to the economic impact.
• Edvard Kardelj, Tito’s vice premier, told Milovan Đilas that expelling the Volksdeutsche from Yugoslavia deprived the most productive inhabitants.
• The appeal to Labor (party in the UK) for population transfers was about socialist engineering, overturning socio-economic status quo, breaking power of capitalist interests and transition to a planned economy.

Against the religious liberty

• The dominance of the Catholic Church over the Polish educational system led to tensions with Volksdeutsche, the majority of whom were Protestants.
• Of some 3,020 Protestant churches (in Poland), 2,895 had been transferred to Catholic by 1948. However, anti-German sentiment in the Church was not monolithic since the Catholic diocese of Wroclaw protested intolerance toward Lutheran clergy.
• The first Volksdeutsche arrived in the United States in 1951 and were elevated to the status of political refugees as victims of Communism and Godless dictatorship.
• In 1949, the World Council of Churches noted that religious charities in Germany provided more aid to the expellees than all other agencies together.
• At the gathering in Stuttgart in 1950, a Charter of the German Expellees was adopted. It called for European unity as the only solution and proclaimed the right to a homeland a God-given fundamental right.

Repressive institutions

• The new regimes in central and eastern Europe were not trying to distinguish between innocent and culpable Germans.
• Germans were forced out of their homes with little or no notice. They lacked shelter and food, and their survival depended on begging or stealing.
• Children were separated from their parents.
• Attempts of concerned citizens to ameliorate conditions for children were unsuccessful.
• Beneš (Czechoslovak president) urged to de-Germanize the republic (of Czechoslovakia), names, towns, regions, customs. Statutes and memorials were demolished.
• In Yugoslavia, all German signs on buildings were removed within twelve hours.
• De-Germanization penalized the use of the German language and put pressure to abandon German-sounding personal names.
• The local population could reject new names of places.
• The transfer of Germans became a template for experiments in top-down Communist utopia.

Western reactions and changes

• Members of the US delegation at the Potsdam Conference recommended that Washington make a formal statement to Allied Control Commissions and expel governments that they are not a part of terrible and inhumane things. Accordingly, the State Department prepared a message to the Polish government.
• American commanders became uneasy about Czechoslovakia’s methods to get rid of Sudetendeutsche, like Major General Ernie Harmon, headquartered in Plzen, who advised the US ambassador that the American army could not take part in this.
• The international system of safeguarding minorities became a fundamental part of the postwar reconstruction of Europe (due to such abuses of human rights).
• In 1949, for the first time, civilians were protected by the Fourth Geneva Convention.
• In the European Parliament, there were opinions from legal scholars on the possible incompatibility of Beneš decrees with the EU law (since Beneš’s legacy preaches the fundamental principles of property rights).
• In Poland, the ideological freeze on open discussion about German expulsion lasted until 1989 (when Communism collapsed).
• In its 1990 resolution, the Hungarian parliament described the expulsion of Volksdeutsche as an unjust action.
• Vaclav Havel, the first post-communist president (of Czechoslovakia and a liberal), critically evaluated how Germans were treated. However, Miloš Zeman (socialist) escalated tensions with statements about Sudetendeutsche as traitors and a fifth column.