Germany's Eastern Neighbours: Problems Relating to the Oder-Neisse Line and the Czech Frontier Regions 0267541147, 9780267541140

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G E R M A N Y ’S E A S T E R N N E I G H B O U R S

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939 (I-M.T. Nuremberg, xxxvii. 546-56 (079-L)). •Noël, p. S64. The Jungdeutschepartei was founded soon after Hitler came to power in opposition to the non-Nazi Rat der Deutschen in Poland. •See below and also the Ukrainian demands above. •Noël, p. 300.

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Germans were being driven out of Poland en masse.1 As the winter wore on indignant students in Warsaw began to demonstrate for the cession of Danzig and East Prussia to Poland. Grazyriski had already spoken publicly of support for ‘our brothers of Opole’,2 the Polish name for Oppeln and a symbol for unredeemed Poland in Silesia. T he gain of Czechoslovak Teschen in October 1938 had added to Polish Silesia but had simultaneously increased the German minor­ ity in Poland and the area of Polish-German conflict.3 On 27 March 1939 a systematic campaign began in the German press against the allegedly atrocious behaviour of the Poles towards their Germans:4 the lack of German diplo­ matic protests suggested, however, that the German authori­ ties did not believe in the claims of the Nazi newspapers. Indeed the British and American press indicated that the most characteristic incidents at this time involved little beyond pulling off the white stockings which, as in Czecho­ slovakia, had been adopted by the Volksdeutsche in Poland as a badge of aggressive germanism. In the second half of August the Anal phase began: in a telegram to Kennard on 18 August H alifax remarked that ‘it is the minority ques­ tion which is now being worked up in ominous fashion’ 5— in the place of Danzig. It had become inevitable that Germans should be dismissed from jobs which involved the military security of Poland’s frontiers, and that self-avowed Nazis should get into trouble— Kennard telegraphed on 19 August that the ‘Polish Government have been much impressed by evidence obtained on the occasion of recent arrests amongst German minority in Upper Silesia of serious subversive activities and espionage on their part’.* T he minority was by now in full operation as H itler’s fifth column. No doubt Polish police methods, especially at such a time, were far from 1A certain number of enthusiastic young Nazis left for Germany in order to declare their sympathies more openly: some other Germans left for Germany because they wanted to be there if war were to break out. •Noël, p. *64. *ibid. p. 300. Refers to German complaints about the ‘degermanization’ of Teschen. 4A semi-official statement was handed out to foreign correspondents in Berlin on that day with special reference to the persecution of Germans in Bydgoszcz (Bromberg). 'Woodward and Butler, vii. no. 58. *ibid. no. 74.

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gentle, and no doubt innocent people suffered for the guilty; on the other hand the Volksdeutsche had a way of shooting first.1 On 25 August, the day upon which H itler had at first intended to invade Poland, the French Ambassador reported the German News Agency claim of a ‘blood-bath’ at Bielsko;2 the Nazi press also announced a massacre of Germans at Lódz and alleged that Polish courts were punishing Volksdeutsche with castration. No satisfactory evidence has ever come to light to justify these allegations, which H itler inflated into the massacre of hundreds of thousands.3 On the contrary western observers were agreeably surprised to find that the Poles did not lose their heads, and every investigation showed that the assertions of the German press were either invented or wildly exaggerated. On 30 August the German wireless announced that thirty Germans had been murdered at Poznali: it turned out that fifteen had been arrested in that province because a store of arms had been found on the farm at Sierakowa of the local leader of the Jungdeutschepartei.4 Evidence has since come to hand of how the Gestapo were in fact using members of this party to help prepare the German attack upon Poland; it is notorious that some of them were disguised in Polish uniforms to create last-moment incidents. Meanwhile the Gestapo found time to persecute the Poles in Germany— who were not reported to have behaved improperly— with characteristic thoroughness. Once the German military attack against Poland had been launched it was inevitable that the Poles and the Germans >Many r»*** of this came to light. For one example, sec ibid. no. 4ft. * Livre Jaune Français, no. 235. •See Hitler’s letter to Chamberlain dated 23 August 1939, which speaks of ’eine Welle furchtbaren Terrors gegen die i£ Millionen zählende deutsche Bevölkerung, die in Polen lebt’ (Woodward and Butler, vii. no. 208). ln his letter to Daladier on 27 August he spoke of i£ million Germans in the territories which Germany had ceded to Poland. In fact it has been seen above that the German minority in Poland at this time numbered roughly three-quarters of a million, of whom only about 55 per cent, lived in the territories ceded by Germany to Poland in 1919. 4News Chronicle, 30 August 1939. For some of many similar incidents see Livre Jaune Français, no. 301 (Noël to Paris, 30 August 1939). There was also the case of the German, Kaletta, of the district of Katowice, who was announced by the Völkische Beobachter to have been vilely murdered by the Poles and his wife and child lynched: the correspondent of the Manchester Guardian found all three perfectly well though Kaletta was in prison on account of pro-Nazi activity (Manchester Guardian, 21 August 1939).

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of Poland, whether soldiers or civilians, should fall upon one another, each believing thereby to serve a national cause. ‘Dans le Corridor le matin du premier Septembre, une bande commandée par un pasteur allemand attaquait les soldats polonais.’ 1* There were savage conflicts particularly in the towns which were important centres of both Polish and of German life. T he Nazi propagandists invented a Polish massacre of Germans on 3 September in one of these towns, Bydgoszcz or Bromberg; they called it the Blood Bath of Bromberg, and the German press mounted a photograph of Chamberlain, whom they declared to be responsible, so that he appeared to be standing gloating over his victims. T he truth about Bydgoszcz seems, however, more likely to be con­ tained in an account published in London in the following summer by an English woman who lived in Bydgoszcz through the first few months of the German conquest.3 Speak­ ing of 1 September she wrote: Evidendy large quantities of arms, rifles and machine guns had been smuggled across the frontier and concealed in the town or its environs, for from this day on the Germans in large numbers began sniping from the windows of German houses and flats, and continued.it day and night till the entry of the German forces.. . . Opposite a Red Cross Station which I three times visited was a German house, and the inhabitants fired on the station con­ tinually, though the Red Cross flag was displayed, when the stretcher-bearers were bringing in casualties. On September ist, two Germans, father and son, were shot in our street, as they were in possession of hand grenades, and when challenged by soldiers ran away, firing at their pursuers. The soldiers shot them. . . . The so-called ‘Bloody Sunday* of September 3rd has, of course, been the theme of much German propaganda . . . a detachment of Polish artillery drove quietly through the main street past this house,3 evidently in retreat. . . . They were followed soon after . . . by a battery which had covered their retreat. . . . As they passed a German house on the opposite side there was a burst of firing from the windows; the officer gave the order to halt, turned the gun upon the house and fired, whereupon the sniping 1Noël, p. 491. 1 ‘Poland under Occupation’ , Nineteenth Century, June 1940. 'T h e house of an acquaintance of the writer of the article.

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ceased and the battery continued on its way. After this the civilian guards arrested all Germans whom they found with arms in their possession and they were shot out of hand. T he German army, this witness records, entered Bydgoszcz on Tuesday, 5 September. From this time on life was a nightmare of horror. The Germans started the campaign of falsehood about the Polish atrocities on the so-called ‘Bloody Sunday’, and almost the first victims of this campaign were some twenty little Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the market-place against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. . . . After giving further examples the witness continues: The shooting was still going on when I left the town. At the beginning it was done by the soldiers, afterwards the Gestapo and the S.S. took it over and exceeded the troops in cruelty. When the soldiers first entered the town their minds were in­ flamed against the Poles by the stories of horrible atrocities which the Poles had committed on the Germans, and in revenge they themselves acted with the most appalling savagery. Stories were spread of how hundreds of mutilated German corpses had been found in the forest, with eyes put out and tongues torn out, and photographs of the victims were shown to foreign newspaper correspondents. It was quite true that hundreds of such corpses were found, but they were of Poles, great numbers being of women and children who had fled from the town when the Germans approached and were hunted and machine-gunned by German airmen who had followed them. . . . There were corpses of Germans who had also fled, but the number was small, and they would, like the Poles, be targets for the ’planes. It was also observed that the names of these people were printed at intervals six or eight times in the lists of victims, but were each time reckoned as fresh victims, in order to lengthen the list. After the Germans were in occupation the Wehrmacht court-martialled and executed some 3,000 Poles as a punish­ ment. In 1940 the German Foreign Office issued a book called

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Die Polnischen Greueltaten an den Volksdeutschen in Polen based on the evidence provided by the German military courts at Bydgoszcz and Poznali. Incidents which occurred before 1 September were confused with those following the German invasion; by juggling in this fashion it was found possible to accuse the Poles of having murdered 12,857 Volks­ deutsche by 1 February 1940 and of having caused 45,000 to disappear. T his propagandistic publication is furnished with a wealth of horrible photographs which may represent victims of the Poles but may equally well portray victims of the Gestapo. T he belief that 12,500 members of the German minority in Poland were murdered by the Poles is one which, unfortunately, has taken root in Germany although there is, in fact, no way of establishing its truth and every reason to regard it as greatly exaggerated.1 It seems true to say that the Polish ‘crimes’ against the German minority which H itler gave as the urgent reason for his immediate attack, in so far as they occurred at all, for the greater part took place after the German invasion which they were said to have justified. It remains to record two things. In the first place H itler’s sixteen-point proposal which he summarily produced on the eve of war to serve as propaganda suggested a plebiscite only in Pomorze— the ‘Corridor’— not in Poznania, although he had always railed against the Treaty of Versailles from A to Z. In the second place the Poles allowed the Italian Fascist official news agency (the Stefani) to announce on 29 August 1959 that Poland would be willing to treat the question of minorities by means of a progressive exchange with Germany, made gradually so as to avoid any violent measures. 1 In the introduction to Dokumentation, I/ i. 124 E, it is stated that the Germans in Poland on the outbreak of war became ‘Das Opfer furchtbarer Ausschreitungen, die Tausenden vor allem in Bromberg, das Leben kosteten', but no evidence is adduced.

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6 GERMANS AND CZECHS fundamentally the conflict was the same one the Czech-German differed from the Polish-German problem in certain ways. For one thing when Charles IV of Bohemia was Holy Roman Emperor in the fourteenth century Prague had been regarded with some justice as the heart of Germany. In those days differences of race and dialect were smoothed over by a common allegiance to Empire and Papacy in terms of the Latin language. The cleavage between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia seemed no more serious than that between Normans and Saxons must have seemed in England two centuries earlier. But the two kinds of Bohemians never did amalgamate— instead each felt the country to be really theirs alone. When most of Poznania became Polish in 1920 the Germans there felt outraged because they were to become outsiders in what they had regarded for something more than a century as their country, but when Bohemia became the heart of the new Czechoslovak state the Sudeten Germans felt themselves more grossly wronged because many of their forefathers had been in the land for six or seven centuries.1 In other ways the relation between the Germans and the Czechs was a different one from that between the Germans and the Poles. T he Poles were dashing and slovenly, with a native tradition of aristocracy; the Czech nobility, however, had been destroyed in the seventeenth century, and the Czech nation which emerged in the nineteenth was so stubbornly industrious that its members became the petty officials par excellence of Habsburg Austria. When the Sudeten Germans complained that the German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia were being inundated with Czech officials they forgot that this was only the intensification of a pre-war tendency. T he treat­ ment of the Germans in the first Czechoslovak Republic was characterized in this way for it was irritatingly bureaucratic, A

lth ough

»For a study of the Czech-German question up to the end of 1937 sec Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans.

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but neither brutal nor contrary to the laws— the Poles were more careless, sometimes more lawless, but less pettifogging. Geographically, too, there was a difference. T he Poles were sandwiched awkwardly between the Germans and the Russians, both of whom they hated and feared. But the Czechs were encircled, with no coastal outlet, by the Germans of Austria and Germany— except for the Slovak and Ruthenian frontiers of the first Czechoslovak Republic which marched with those of hostile Hungary and of Poland, and the Teschen area of Silesia where the Czechs themselves were entangled with Germans and Poles: of the loyalty of Slovakia and Ruthenia the Czechs could seldom feel sure. T he Poles feared their big Ukrainian minority: nevertheless there were nearly 25 million Poles without the $ million Polish Jews, or three and a half times the 7 million Czechs who were little more than double the number of Sudeten Germans, or, with the Slovaks, about three times as many. Finally the inherited tendency of the Czechs to be on the defensive against the German aggression they feared was sharpened by the position of the main Sudeten German groupings along the mountain­ ous frontiers of Bohemia. On 5 November 1957 H itler announced to his military chiefs in secret session that he intended to seize Czecho­ slovakia and Austria as soon as a good opportunity presented itself.1 Exactly a fortnight later the Sudeten German Party leader, Henlein, felt himself ‘obliged to have a comprehen­ sive survey prepared of a number of political questions in Czechoslovakia which have become vital’, in a secret report for the Führer.3 Here it was stated that The Sudeten German Party has by its work of political educa­ tion and organization exorcized the danger of any ‘Czechoslovakizing’ of the Sudeten Germans, that is of treating them in accordance with the Swiss model [Verschweizerung], and has imbued the racial group and their sphere of life with National Socialist principles. . . . The Sudeten German Party must camouflage its profession of National Socialism as an ideology of life and as a political prin­ ciple. . . The apparent lack of unity of the Sudeten German 'See the Hossbach Memorandum, I.M .T . Nuremberg, xxv. 402-13. * D. Ger. F.P. ii. no. 23.

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Party is intensified by the circumstance that at heart it desires nothing more ardently than the incorporation of Sudeten German territory, nay of the whole Bohemian, Moravian, and Silesian1* area, within the Reich. . . .3 For another nine months, however, the public opinion of the world generally accepted German and Sudeten German propaganda against the Czechs: this credulity appeared to culminate in the Runciman mission which reached Prague in August 1938. Soon after the triumphant Nazi annexation of Austria in March, the Sudeten German Party, which nonNazi Sudeten Germans had now hastened to join in the hopes of escaping the Nazi black list, held a congress at Carlsbad. Here eight demands * were put forward which threw off the disguise previously referred to on 19 November; they cul­ minated in the last point which claimed T u ll freedom to profess German nationality and the German Weltan­ schauung. Had this not been unequivocal in itself Henlein made it clear that it meant unmodified National Socialism, i.e. concealed or open war against political liberty and democracy, and in favour of the German domination of cen­ tral and eastern Europe by direct or indirect means. This was frank defiance of Prague and the western world. No sovereign state could accept the claims of a community which was vowed to its destruction to exist within it. It is necessary also to state that no serious evidence has ever been produced of anything approaching to atrocities practised by the Czechs in those days upon the Sudeten Germans,4 who, it is clear, were deliberately provocative. Hitler, nevertheless, chose to declaim about ‘these tortured creatures' at the Nazi Party congress on 12 September;s it was the threat coupled 1Silesia in (his connexion means formerly Austrian Silesia which the Czechs had joined to Moravia for administrative purposes. *D. Ger. F.P. ii. 57. •See R .I.I.A ., Survey, 1938, ii. 95. This, with voi. iii, gives the history of Czechoslovakia from the beginning of 1938 to March 1939. •See Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, pp. 266-7, for the famous Teplitz incident. See also Henderson for developments in 1938. Remarkably fairminded, informative reports were made by the British consul in Libérée (Reichenberg) at that time, Mr. P. Pares (see Woodward and Butler, i. nos. 366 and 414). •See Hitler’s speech at Nuremberg, 12 September 1938 (Hitler's Speeches,

ii. 1487-99).

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with these words which brought Chamberlain to Germany. A German invasion of Czechoslovakia was then postponed by the Four Power Conference at Munich which professed to cut away the German-speaking districts of Bohemia and Moravia and add them to Germany.1 T he Munich Agreement embittered the Czechs to a degree which it is essential to understand. Materially they were deprived of a large part of their industrial resources by a Great Power which had no need of them and thereby added to its own industrial top-heaviness.3 Thus they were not only impoverished but robbed of the economic means of standing on their own feet. Strategically their state was emasculated by the removal of its most heavily fortified frontier districts. T h e moral shock to the Czechs was the greatest of all. In the first place the Munich Agreement was based upon anti-Czech data such as the Austrian census figures of 1910 when people were forced to enter themselves as German if German were their Umgangsprache in the factory or office where they worked. In the second the Commissions which traced the new frontiers allowed the Germans to find any number of excuses for taking more than the Agreement justified. W hile over 2,800,000 Sudeten Germans became H itler’s subjects, 725,500 Czechs were forced to do the same with no minority safeguards.3 At the same time at least 400,000 Germans remained on Czech and Slovak territory, nearly half of them in Slovakia. T heir biggest communities were in Brno (60,000) and Prague (50,000). Fairly soon it became clear that it was a vital part of H itler’s plan, not to effect an ethnic tidy-up,4 but to keep strong groups of Germans in key positions of this kind, and to invest them with the privileges of a superior caste such as the Carlsbad demands had foreshadowed— this •See Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, on the difficulties caused by mixed areas and by the fact that the Germans lived in scattered fringes and patches. ‘ Wiskemann, ‘Czechs and Germans after Munich*, Foreign Affairs, January »939•O f these 100,000 were actually expelled, according to Luia, p. 13. •In January 1939 when Hitler received Beck and Csâky he complained that only Hungary’s equivocal attitude in September 1938 had induced him to adopt an ethnical solution. All along, he said, he would have preferred the territorial one which he was later to impose on his neighbours in March. (See D. Ger. F.P. v. nos. 119, 27a.)

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became the pattern of H itler’s Europe during the war. Article 7 of the Munich Agreement declared There will be a right of option into and out of the transferred territories, the option to be exercised within six months from the date of this agreement. A German-Czechoslovak commission shall determine the details of the option, consider ways of facilitating the transfer of population and setde questions of principle arising out of the said transfer.1 But this remained inoperative until in the following March it became obsolete. Meanwhile Jews and Socialists caught in the territory ceded to Germany mostly vanished into concen­ tration camps. It should be added that virtually all Czechs and some Bohemian and Moravian Germans felt an emotional attach­ ment to the traditional frontiers of Bohemia and Moravia, which, except for the inroads of Frederick the Great, had remained unchanged for a thousand years. If the ‘Corridor’ was an emotional affront to the Germans because it broke through a frontier scarcely 150 years old, how much more must the Czechs have been wounded by the Munich Agree­ ment? T he surrender of 29 September 1958 was imposed by the Western Powers upon the Czechs because, as it seemed to the latter, they had observed their obligations to the German minority seriously enough to allow its members liberty to arm world opinion against them— no other minority in inter-war Europe had such freedom.3 T he final bitterness of the situation was created by the Polish ultimatum which demanded Czechoslovak Teschen and the loss of another 120,000 Czechs, and by the guarantee of their new frontiers offered in an Annex to the Munich Agreement by Britain and France. This guarantee was used as an important induce­ ment to the Czechs to accept their losses without resistance, but no attempt was made to implement it when H itler swept the new frontiers away less than six months later. T he events of the autumn of 1958 thus induced a profound indignation in the Czech people against the Western Powers in whom they had believed since the first world war, an indignation which 1 British & Foreign State Papers, 1938, a d ii., p. 438. «The Germans maintained that the Sudeten Germans made themselves powerful because there were over 3 million of them.

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only grew with the events of March and September 1939. At a time when the Germans had forced Prague to abandon its friendly relations with Moscow based upon the Treaty of 1935, the Czech people believed that the Russians would have helped them to resist, and indeed that the U.S.S.R. was their only friend. T he strength of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia in 1945 and the following years was due in considerable part to this belief.1 As H itler had intended all along, the Munich Agreement was used as a stepping-stone to the German occupation of Prague on 15 March 1939. One excuse he made was that the Czechs had failed to submit abjectly enough to German dictation,2 though when the Germans were ready to march they were annoyed to find the Czechs of Prague impossible to provoke into active hostility— the Czechs of Brno were a little less imperturbable.2 When Hâcha visited H itler in Berlin in the night from 14-15 March he was brusquely informed that preparations for the seizure of Prague were complete.

7

T H E GERMAN O C C U P A T I O N OF POLAND AND BOHE MI A O n 1 September 1939, without any declaration of war, H itler launched his carefully prepared attack upon Poland to ‘restore order’ there. German documents, we have seen, show that the reasons given for this invasion were pretexts for the launching of a National Socialist ‘crusade’ intended to achieve a first stage in the fulfilment of H itler’s life-long aim, the acquisition 1 No tangible evidence has ever been produced to prove that the U.S.S.R. would in fact have supported Czechoslovakia, had she then resisted, though Communist propaganda loves to claim that Russia fully intended to do so. *See D. Ger. F.P. iv. no. 158 for Hitler’s complaints to the pro-German Czech Foreign Minister Chvalkovsky on s i January 1939. •See ibid. nos. 195, 197.

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of Lebensraum in eastern Europe. This ‘living-space’ was to be space for Germans: for the ‘inferior’ Slavonic races it would provide expulsion or death except for a small ‘élite’ which would be allowed to become germanized. That H itler in­ tended to cany out these schemes to the letter had never been believed outside Germany until the autumn of 1939; indeed many Germans failed to understand the total ruthless­ ness of their Führer until after his death. T he military collapse of Poland was rapid; it was hastened by the Russian occupation of Eastern Poland which began on 17 September. Eleven days later a second secret under­ standing between Berlin and Moscow gave the Russians a free hand in Lithuania in exchange for the Lublin area which they relinquished to the Wehrmacht. In his speech to the Reichstag on 6 October 1939 Hitler spoke of the need for a ‘rearrangement of ethnographical relations’ in eastern Europe, and, wasting no more time in realizing his long-cherished projects, on the very next day he appointed Heinrich Himmler, head of the S.S. and the Secret State Police, as Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstums. Where hitherto tentative questions had been put as to some painless way of exchanging individuals who were misfits in a world which had come to identify state with language or with ethnical frontiers, H itler now plunged into large-scale operations to be supervised by the chief of his terroristic police force and paramilitary formations. For Himmler’s new task was to bring about a gigantic and remorseless shuffle of populations, to which the Nazis referred as a re-settlement or Umsiedlung. T he transfer to Germany of Volksdeutsche, unless they were required outside the Reich for purposes of political strategy as in Prague and Brno, was now to be carried out on a big scale: in this same month of October 1939 the agreement of the previous July over the South Tyrolese was confirmed with Italy; further, the new understanding with the Russians that the Volksdeutsche of the Baltic States or any other region in Russian control should be sent to Germany had to be implemented. It cost the Nazi leaders nothing, after all the lamentations of the German press if ever a Polish Volksdeutscher or a Sudeten German had been disturbed in the home of his ancestors by the wicked

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Poles or Czechs, to uproot German settlements which were really many centuries old. But Himmler’s new function involved more. The unfortunate Volksdeutsche were in most cases not to live in the Fatherland for which the propagandists had claimed that they yearned so profoundly; they were to be the pioneers in settling the new Lebensraum in the east, and in conquered Poland to start with. German military government of Poland west of the demar­ cation line decided with Russia on 28 September lasted only until 26 October: by a decree which was dated 8 October western Poland was then incorporated in the Reich. Pomorze and Danzig became the Reichsgau Danzig-Westpreussen. East Prussia, ruled by the fanatical Gauleiter Koch, was ex­ tended so as to contain about 1 million more inhabitants, nearly all Polish. Poznania with Lódz became the Reichsgau Wartheland and Silesia was reunited and extended to include most of Czech Silesia and other portions of territory which had belonged to Austria and Russia before 1918. These annexations roughly corresponded with the frontiers which extreme pan-Germans had claimed for Germany before 1914: the appointment of Greiser and Forster,1 two notorious Danzig Nazis, who had made themselves obnoxious to the Poles long before 1939, as Gauleiter respectively of the Wartheland and Danzig-Westpreussen, was not without significance. By a decree of 12 October 1939 the rest of Poland west of the frontier now established with the U.S.S.R., that is approximately the former voivodeships of Lódz, Kielce, and Lublin With the towns of Cracow and Warsaw, was named ‘Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete’. This curious title, more Swiss than Reich-German, was said to derive from the Russian Gubernia under the Tsars and to be intended as a warning of de-polonization. Hans Frank, a still better-known figure in the Nazi hierarchy and the ex­ ponent of the Nazi conception of justice, became its governor and established his headquarters in Cracow, a major reason for this choice being the wholesale destruction of Warsaw by 1 Albert Forster was an intransigent Nazi who was on Du terms with Hitler although this was rare with the Führer and Forster was a very much younger man. Greiser had made himself particularly unpleasant at Geneva.

E

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the Luftwaffe in September and the Nazi decision that the damaged part of the city was to be left in ruins. Between an announcement by Forster in Bydgoszcz on 26 November 1939, and a statement by Frank on 10 February 1940, all Poles and Jews were expelled from former Polish territory now annexed to Germany and deported to the ‘Generalgouverne­ ment’ at short notice, and taking with them at most what they could carry; transport was mostly in overcrowded goods trucks and the season was winter.1 In the areas annexed to the Reich germanization was immediate and unhesitating; no remnants of Polish life were tolerated and people of mixed descent, if allowed to remain, must become Germans and Nazis at that: here economic development was pushed ahead, most of all in what was at that time the remote security of Upper Silesia. The ‘Generalgouvernement’, on the other hand, was condemned to economic decay: on 19 October 1939 Goring issued a directive decreeing that enterprises there ‘which are not absolutely essential for the maintenance at a low level of the bare existence of the inhabitants must be transferred to Germany’.2 In other words the now terribly overcrowded Polish population was to rot in the last area in which the Germans and Russians were willing to allow it to exist. T he original differentiation made by the re­ sponsible German leaders between Poles and Jews seems to have been that the Poles, provided they remained pas­ sively obedient, were to die out,® while the Jews were to be murdered.4 In that same week of Hitler’s Reichstag speech, of Himm­ ler’s new assignment of authority and the decrees regarding the disposal of Polish territory, the German leaders in Prague 1 ‘Generally the people were aroused at a a.m., given twenty minutes to clothe themselves and their children, and then turned out, only partially dad, into the bitter cold. They had to go to the nearest square or park and there they waited under armed escort until the number of families, “ generally 400,“ had joined them, probably by about 6 a.m. They were then packed either into unheated cattle trucks or into open country wagons and were driven for hours across country’ (Nineteenth Century, June 1940, p. 663). Later, reference is made to a case where half an hour’s notice was given, and it is recorded that many people died of cold in the cattle trucks. *Hitler's Europe, p. 196. •See ibid. p. 556, n. 1. •W hen the Poles were forced to surrender after the Warsaw rising in 1944 they too were gassed. See Mikolajczyk, p. 100.

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considered what they would do with the Czechs. They thought of deporting them all, but Hitler decided in the end to let the Germans absorb about half of them, while the intellectual classes and indeed all those who resisted germanization were to be destroyed without mercy.1 The students' demonstrations in Prague shortly afterwards provided the occasion for the closing of all the Czech universities and technical High Schools; gradually the secondary and even elementary schools were germanized or suppressed.2 In the ‘Generalgouverne­ ment’ the same treatment was administered rather more rapidly and drastically. T he professors of the Polish universi­ ties, as the potential guardians of the nation’s quality, were the object of savage persecution,9 and all education in Polish was brought to an end. Young people of both sexes were sent to Germany either ‘to refresh German blood’ or, as it was feared, to be made sterile.4 At the same time the most corrupt instincts of those young Poles who remained in Poland were deliberately encouraged.5 T he Polish nation was largely saved by the shortage of labour which began to become acute in the extended Reich in the summer of 1940. Frank threw himself into the impress­ ing of Polish slave labour and was able to report in December 1942 that the ‘Generalgouvernement’ had supplied over 940,000 workers for Germany.* If these people were to work they could not be completely starved. Moreover, if they were sent to Germany they were less cut off from normal life. Frank even expressed anxiety lest so many non-German workers might not cause a ‘retrogression of germanism’ in the Reich. All the more, he declared, ‘everything revealing itself as a Polish power of leadership must be destroyed again and again with ruthless energy. This does not have to be shouted abroad, it will happen silently.’ 1 With the German attack upon the U.S.S.R. the value of the Polish population as war material 1J .M .T . N u rem b erg , xxvi. 375-7 (86a-PS). •Luia, p. 13, n. a. * Himmler later boasted that the German police *had to have the toughness . . . to shoot thousands of leading Poles’ (see I . M . T . N u rem b erg , xxiv. 104 (1918-PS)). 4N in e te e n th C en tu ry , June 1940, p. 66a. ‘ Karski, p. 839. •Frank’s diary for 14 December 194a ( I .M .T . N u rem b erg , xxix. 565). •Frank’s diary for 18 March 194a ( I .M .T . N u rem b erg , xxix. 508 (at 33-PS)).

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slightly increased, and after Stalingrad Lammers’s memoran­ dum of 12 April 1945 attached some slight importance to the inhabitants of the ‘Generalgouvernement’ who were still to exist solely for the German war effort; they might now be recruited as soldiers to fight against Bolshevism.1 In the early stages of the war the Czechs were required, not wholesale, but as skilled workers in the Reich. During the first half of 1942, however, conditions in the Protectorate swiftly deteriorated in spite of its industrial importance. T he deterioration was part of an inevitable process speeded up by Heydrich as Deputy-Protector and then by his assassination at the end of May. T he Minister of Labour was already a German, and on 2 February 1943 all Czech men between 16 and 65 and women between 17 and 45, together with some categories of schoolchildren under 16, were called up for war work for or in the Reich.2 It is estimated that 1,140,000 Czechs were sent to Germany during the war, of whom 700,000 were im­ prisoned in concentration camps where they also had to work.3 Meanwhile Himmler was busily carrying out his new tasks. T he Volksdeutsche evacuated from the Baltic States in October 1939 were sent to settle in former Polish territory:4 later there followed them Volksdeutsche from Russia and Russian-occupied Poland and in 1940 others from Bukovina and Bessarabia. T h e main area for the settlement of these people was the Wartheland, but also Danzig-Westpreussen and Upper Silesia. After the German armies had advanced into Russia the Polish territory incorporated in the Reich was increased by attaching Bialystok to East Prussia, while eastern Galicia was added to the ‘Generalgouvernement’. From this time onwards groups of Volksdeutsche were liable to be settled not merely in the newly extended Reich and ‘Generalgouvernement’, but farther still to the east. When F ra n k 's diary for 18 March 194a (l . M . T . N u rem b erg , xxix. 338 ff. (asoo-PS)). * H itle r ’ s E u r o p e , p. 594. * R eco n stru ctio n o f D evastated A reas, p. 117. * ‘Now the empty dwellings are being filled with Baltic Germans, and other intruders, whose conduct in many cases is in no way better than that of the **V o lk sd eu tsch e ” [here used to mean only those in Poland]. One doctor turned out the wife of a Polish doctor, with her two little children, into the street with nothing but a paper parcel in her hand’ (‘Poland under Occupa­ tion', N in e te e n th C en tu ry , June 1940, p. 665).

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59

Himmler visited Frank in Cracow in March 1942 he was full of 'the first thing to be done’: 'to establish a strong settlement [of Germans] along the San and the Bug so as to encircle the alien parts of Poland’.1 But while the unfortunate Volks­ deutsche, about 800,000 of them,2 had been effectively ex­ pelled from their traditional homes their resettlement was by no means happily achieved: in any case from 1943 to 1945 they had constantly to be moved back from east to west with the Germans’ gradual military defeat and retreat on the Ostfront. Many of them spent much demoralizing time waiting about in camps either before or after a journey to Russia.3 Towards the end of the war considerable numbers of them had arrived in the territories between the PolishGerman frontiers of 1939 and the Oder-Neisse line; together with large numbers of German officials, technicians, and refugees from the air war they went to swell the German population expelled by the Poles in 1945 and subsequently, greatly complicating attempts to calculate the numbers and the casualties involved. In Bohemia and Moravia about 150,000 hectares of land were taken from Czechs and Jews and given to Sudeten Germans and Volksdeutsche from the east between the Munich Agreement and July 1939/ But the Protectorate was not marked down by Himmler for large-scale resettlement. It has been seen that the Volksdeutsche were strategically required in Prague and Brno, although a few were moved from the smaller enclaves. In March 1943 it was stated that 5,000 German families had actually been brought into the Protectorate.5 Himmler’s second task as Commissioner for fortifying Deutschtum ( = Germanness) was to germanize, which should have affected the Czechs more than the Poles since 50 per cent, of the Czechs were marked down for this 1 Hitler's Europe, p. 559. especially notes 4 and 5. »See Dokumentation, I/ i. » E, n. 1. Only about half this number had been resettled by January 1944. • A Nazi organization called the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle was responsible for looking after displaced Volksdeutsche. T he extreme case of mismanage­ ment seems to have been that of the Lithuanian Germans who never reached any destination but went to ‘rack and ruin’ in resettlement camps (see l.M .T . Nuremberg, xxvi. 284 (1520-PS)). 4Lula, p. 13. * By Karl Hermann Frank, quoted in ibid. p. 16 n.

6o

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treatment. But here the difference in temperament and circumstance interfered with the Nazis' intentions and in Danzig-Westpreussen, for instance, Forster was ordered to germanize at top speed.1 The results were certainly considered disappointing but not so negative as in the Protectorate. The Czechs had not been subjected to a shattering military defeat, and their tradition of resistance to germanization was more passive than that of the Poles: it was difficult, even with the help of concentration camps, to germanize a people which was self-trained to pretend to be too stupid to understand German. Heydrich and Karl Hermann Frank seem to have been engaged in trying to break the Czech spirit and in countering sabotage in the foundries and the mines of the Protectorate rather than in germanizing half its inhabitants: it suited them to retain a Czech shadow government, and this, too, impeded the germanizing process. The Poles, on the other hand, had been left without any political fiction of the kind to temper the treatment they received. Their tradition of resistance was romantic and uncompromising, and their German masters hit back with unashamed savagery. In the Protectorate Neurath announced executions legalistically, but Frank on one occasion early in 1940 remarked 'If I wished to order that one should hang up posters about every seven Poles shot, there would not be enough forests in Poland with which to make the paper for these posters.’ 2 Yet in spite of wholesale executions, torture, starvation, expulsion, the Poles with remarkable rapidity con­ structed a clandestine state and army; they even risked the penalties and organized secret classes for many of their children to be given schooling in Polish. The secret Polish state established an efficient courier service with the Polish Government in E xile.3 All these activities involved fearful losses on a scale which a smaller nation like that of the Czechs could ill afford to risk. And it created an unspeakably merci­ less conflict between the Germans and the Poles in which there were innocent victims on both sides— for there were certainly Germans who had never wished them ill who were struck down by the vengeance of the Poles. It is essential in this study to indicate, if only briefly, what 1 Hitler's Europe, p. 90.

al.M .T . Nuremberg, xxii. 54*.

*See Karski.

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61

took place between the Germans and the Poles or Czechs during the period of the second world war if the events which followed hard upon it are to be understood at all. It has been seen that the Poles and Czechs were horribly insulted and maltreated as part of a deliberate policy for which they were bound to hold the German nation responsible— the Hakatisten had been angels by comparison with the Nazis. Since the defeat and destruction of the Nazi régime the Germans, with very few exceptions, have disclaimed not only all responsibility, but all knowledge of what was done in their name to the Western (and other) Slav peoples. The psychology of these disclaimers is perhaps not difficult to understand; it is, however, a serious obstacle in the path both of the historian and of those who genuinely seek Slav-German reconciliation. For to the Poles and Czechs the German books dedicated to these matters since 1945 seem to be the rankest hypocrisy. Relatively few Germans, perhaps, had experience of life in the Protectorate between 1939 and 1945, but the average Ger­ man soldier passed through Poland more than once on his way to the Ostfront, and men on leave spoke with pride or with shame of what they knew either as participants or wit­ nesses.1 Yet since the war books pour from German academic institutions in condemnation of the expulsion of Germans by the Poles and Czechs between 1945 and 1947 as if no expulsions had occurred in the preceding years. So ostrich­ like do German writers on these subjects contrive to be that they search for precedents for mass expulsion in Russian Tsarist history.2 As for the fact that the Germans were hated all over the world by 1945, most German authors write with incredulity about this— to them— shocking fact and are there­ fore unable to gauge its influence. 1They did so even in public places like trains. •See Wagner, p. 93, n. 4.

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8 GENESI S OF T H E

ODSUN

F or the Czechs or Czechoslovaks 1*there was never any doubt between the Munich Agreement in 1938 and the end of the war in 1945 that they aimed at the restoration of the first Czechoslovak Republic as established by T . G. Masaryk and BeneS in 1919. Thus continuity was their watchword during the war. The inter-war régime had on the whole been popular so that the majority of the Czechs wished to see it reinstated, but reinvigorated by a new programme of social reform made more urgent by the course of the war. As for the question of frontiers, it seemed to the Czechs to have been eloquently demonstrated to the world in the winter of 1938-9 that with­ out the traditional frontiers of Bohemia and Moravia it was impossible to safeguard the independence of their country. This independence had previously been corroded from with­ in, and from within the old frontiers, therefore, it was planned to bring about the expulsion of persons likely to conspire against the Czechoslovak state. It has been suggested above3 that the idea of the removal of some of the Sudeten German population had involuntarily entered the minds of people who had observed Sudeten German activities in 1937 and 1938. The Czechs themselves considered that any plan of the kind could only become operative following a war, and BeneS and Ripka had a first serious discussion of the practical possi­ bilities of such a move in December 19383 because both of them regarded war as inevitable from the time of the Munich Agreement. Sharing their exile in London were certain small groups of anti-Nazi Sudeten Germans, who, like the Czech leaders, 1 There were, of course, many Slovaks who disliked the inter-war régime, because they rejected the 'Czechoslovak* conception. ‘ During the war BeneS prepared plans for frontier compromises for the hypothetical case of incomplete victory or of a truce; these plans allowed for the cession of the Egerland, up to the river Eger, to Germany in the very worst case. Such plans, however, should not be interpreted as in any sense part of the programme of BeneS. ‘ According to Ripka, in a letter to the author.

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63

had fled after the German occupation of the Sudeten German areas in October of that year. Among these people the out­ standing personality was the Socialist leader, Wenzel Jaksch, although not all the Sudeten German exiles were willing to follow him. Jaksch, who had never been without the strongly racial feelings of the typical Sudeten German,1 was opposed to the Munich settlement only because it had been agreed in reply to threats from Hitler and because it had pushed Germany’s frontiers far into the Czech interior of Bohemia. O f the principle of the administrative separation of the predominantly German from the predominantly Czech areas he approved, for he was indifferent to the inevitable con­ sequence, i.e. the annulment of the political independence of the Czechs. Indeed if Germany after the war were to be a democratic state he was ready, as the Austrian Socialists had been in 1918-19, to welcome an Anschluss with a Socialist Grossdeutschland which would embrace Austrians and Sudeten Germans alike. If the Sudeten Germans desired this, it would, in the view of Jaksch, be their democratic right to realize their wish, taking the only defensible border regions of Czechoslovakia with them. In the summer of 1939 he worked out a scheme for the federation of Greater Germany with central Europe,3 which, as its non-German critics pointed out, would once again subject the non-German nations in the Danubian area to German domination in a new form. In 1939 Jaksch, in common with various Social-Democrats from Germany proper who had taken refuge in London, indulged in the belief of a Socialist revolution in Germany and consequently a short war. Thus they did not realize that events were to make the Germans so execrated that no one would wish to co-operate with them for a considerable time. It is interesting that Jaksch on this occasion offered a con­ cession such as he later condemned to the relentless geography of Bohemia. For he referred to the task of a Definitive Bereinigung der offenen Grenzfragen durch Aus­ balancierung der Konsequenzen des Selbsbestimmungsrechtes aHe was often to be seen with Otto Strasser after the latter had fled from Nazi Germany to Prague. * Referred to in BeneS, Memoirs, p. 214. Jaksch. first got into touch with Bene) in London in August 1939 (see ibid. p. 213).

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mit Verkehrspolitischen Bedürfnissen und Wirtschaftlichen Notwendigkeiten. Als technische Hilfsmittel können hierbei [he suggested], ein organisierter Bevölkerungsaustausch und reziproke Minderheitenschutzabkommen, in Betracht bezogen werden.1 After the outbreak of the war Jaksch and his followers drew up a programme in which they stated that the Sudeten Ger­ mans could only negotiate with the Czechs on an inter-state basis:2 the Sudeten Germans were to have their own head of state3 and to claim all Germans living in Czechoslovakia as their citizens. This programme was never published though it was circulated among those interested:4 it filled the Czechs with suspicion and anxiety. On 10 March 1940 the Sudeten German Socialists in Britain defined their aims publicly and more cautiously. They now claimed membership, with the Czechs, of a Euro­ pean federation, but as a fully recognized nationality with a regional parliament and government of their own.5 This contradicted the Czechs’ conception of the continuity of their pre-Munich state,* except for the disagreeable continuity of Henlein’s claims which Jaksch seemed now to be raising again. They felt all the more indignant with Jaksch and his friends because, as they pointed out, Jaksch could speak for at most 30 per cent.7 of the Sudeten Germans unless he wished to speak for the Henleinists. T he Czechs were irritated, too, because the Jaksch group made conditions before they would work with the Czechs, while other Sudeten German oppo­ nents of the Nazis offered BeneS their unconditional support. While Jaksch, who thought in terms of re-educating the big Henleinist majority, felt a Sudeten German loyalty only, BeneS and his colleagues were anxious to slur over racial *The text of this scheme was circulated in mimeographed form. * ‘auf Grund des Vertrages zweier staatlicher Gebilde’. * ‘eigenes Oberhaupt’. 4 And has been shown to the present writer. 'Jaksch, pi 13. See also D e r Soziald em okrat (London), a April 1940. 4Jaksch openly denied this continuity; see his introduction to a pamphlet by Egon Schwelb, Z u r A n er k e n n u n g d er T sch ech oslow ak isch en R e p e r u n g in E n g la n d , published in London in August 1940. 7This percentage was mentioned, though in the last elections in Czecho­ slovakia before the war (in 1935) the German Social Democrats had polled considerably less.

GENESIS OP THE ‘ ODSUN*

65

differences; in their eyes people were either loyal unprivileged citizens of their Republic or not. In October 1941 when he wished to make a friendly gesture to Moscow after Germany had attacked Russia, BeneS accepted the Communists’ nomina­ tion of a Sudeten German Communist, Karl Kreibich, who made no conditions, to the Czechoslovak State Council. This angered Jaksch and his friends since they were, by agreement with the Czechs, not represented on the Council;1 after the war they indeed claimed that the appointment of Kreibich was the beginning of BeneS’s crime of a ’sell-out’ to Moscow. Already, in spite of conciliatory words and the common interest which BeneS and Jaksch genuinely felt in the fight against Hitler, the Czech and Sudeten German exiles were caught in a vicious circle. ’You make conditions because you don’t wish to commit yourselves loyally to our state’, the Czechs complained. ’We must make conditions’, the Sudeten Germans replied, ’because you do not make clear what you intend to do with us.’ In fact both of them felt, after Munich, that they could never again be the citizens of the same unitary state.2 As the war passed this became more apparent. T he question remained: was Czechoslovakia again to be reduced in extent and— the corollary— become a dependency, or were the Sudeten Germans to leave Czechoslovakia? The third possibility, that the Germans who wished to live in the Czechoslovak state should cease to lead distinct lives and should send their children to Czechoslovak schools as if they had been immigrants in the United States was accepted by a mere handful of Sudeten Germans, isolated individuals. Already in September, before the Kreibich incident, BeneS had published an article in the Nineteenth Century and After in which he said ‘I accept the principle of the transfer of populations. . . . If the problem is carefully considered . . . . the transfer can be made amicably under decent human con­ ditions, under international control and with international support.’ 2 Thus, during the winter of 1941-2 the Czechs in London made little secret of their plan for the expulsion or 1 And, not being so, their followers were enrolled in the British instead of the Czechoslovak army if they wished to become soldiers. aThis was not a new sentiment on either side (see Wiskemann, Czechs and Germans, p. 79). • ‘The New Order in Europe', Nineteenth Century, September 1941, p. 154.

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transfer— the Czech word Odsun was used— of the majority of the Sudeten Germans from the future Czechoslovakia. This was the period of Heydrich’s reign of terror in Prague which culminated in the murder of Heydrich by Czechs sent in by air from London in May and the total destruction by the Nazis of Lidice and Lezâky on 10 June. Feeling against Germans, whether they came from Bohemia or elsewhere, inevitably increased, and did so particularly among the Czechs. Later Jaksch complained bitterly that BeneS was de­ ceived by some of his intelligence staff with false evidence of Czech feeling in the Protectorate against the sort of public pronouncements which Jaksch and his friends had made,1* but there was enough genuine evidence for any falsification to make little difference. By now BeneS could not have brought the Sudeten German Socialists into his Council of State. They for their part declared in June 1942 that the plan for a transfer of population contradicted the theory of the continuity of the Czechoslovak state according to which it claimed the allegiance of the democratic Sudeten Germans3 — the argument seemed weak in view of the previous Sudeten German repudiation of this very continuity. Jaksch himself now condemned any transfer of population as indiscriminate retaliation and declared that it would unleash civil war along the language frontiers of Bohemia and Moravia— he spoke of the deep roots in their homes of the Sudeten German people.3 T o the Czech leaders it seemed equally clear that without a degree of expulsion the kind of civil war they had seen in 1938 was bound to recur in a more terrible shape.4 They had already intimated clearly to the British Government that they could not subscribe to the Atlantic Charter without qualifica­ tions which were then accepted. On 5 August 1942 Parliament at last annulled the Munich Agreement.3 At this same time, Mr. Nichols, who had been appointed British Minister to 1 Jaksch, pp. 65-7. aibid. p. a6. ■ ibid. p. >4. ‘Bevölkerungstransfer wäre undiskriminierte Vergeltung, und das bedeutet. . . die Zerstörung jeder Basis demokratischer Zusammenarbeit für eine Generation.’ BeneS replied to Jaksch and his party in a letter dated 10 January 1943 (see BeneS, Memoirs, p. 3x0). ■ BeneS, Memoirs, p. aai. ■ For the difficulties preceding the annulment see Lockhart, pp. 60. 71 tec.

GENESIS OF THE *ODSUN*

67

the Czechoslovak Government in Exile, informed the latter that at the time of the final solution of our minority problems after the victorious end of the war the British Government did not intend to oppose the principle of transfer of the minority popu­ lation from Czechoslovakia in an endeavour to make Czecho­ slovakia as homogeneous a country as possible from the stand­ point of nationality.1 In the following months BeneS began negotiations with the Russians who seem to have raised no objections to the Odsun idea though it was not until June 1943 that they specifically agreed to it. At the time Bene§ was visiting Washington, whence he reported, on 7 June that, He [Roosevelt] agrees to the transfer of the minority popula­ tions from Eastern Prussia, Transylvania and Czechoslovakia. / asked again expressly whether the United States would agree to the transfer of our Germans. He declared plainly that they would. I repeated that Great Britain and the Soviets had already given us their views to the same effect.2 During 1942 BeneS had attempted to convey to Jaksch and his friends his conception of the partial expulsion of the Sudeten Germans as a stage in essential social change. For the Czechs the element of traditional social privilege in the nationalistic claims of the Sudeten Germans was something they neither forgot nor forgave. But Jaksch felt more German than Marxist, and refused to accept this way out for the German Socialists. By the beginning of 1943 the breach be­ tween the two men and their political friends was complete. It led to two unfortunate results: on the one hand the Czechs, both in London and at home, felt that Jaksch’s prevarica­ tions had damaged their cause so that in 1945 many Sudeten German Socialists were maltreated as the friends of Jaksch although theoretically they should have been protected as anti-Nazis: on the other hand the nationalism of Jaksch and •BeneS, Memoirs, p. «06. •ibid. p. 195. It is not apparent on what grounds Dr. Turnwald accuses BeneS of deceiving Roosevelt over this matter (see Turnwald, p. xviii) as there seems to have been no need to use deceit. Nor does there appear any intention to do so beyond the normal methods of diplomacy in timing.

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the majority of the Sudeten German Socialists was intensified, and later tended to stimulate the chauvinistic tendency of post-war Socialism under Schumacher’s leadership in Western Germany. What seems difficult to explain is that, in a booklet which came out in 1949, Jaksch published as his opinion that the Sudeten Germans were expelled only because the plot of 20 July 1944 against Hitler failed and because the war lasted as long as it did.1 The Polish Government in Exile was anxious to safeguard against a recrudescence of German pugnacity by the con­ struction of a central and east European federation of which Poland and Czechoslovakia would be the leading members:2 their close collaboration would then provide for the efficient working of the Silesian industrial triangle without the danger of its military exploitation by Germany. The first public declaration in favour of the closer political and economic association of Poland with Czechoslovakia had been made as early as 11 November 1940.3 From his contrasting point of view Jaksch had planned a central European federation in which the Germans would participate and in which the minority problem would for this reason melt away. In an interview with an American journalist on 18 February 1943 4 BeneS pointed out that the question of minorities was intimately connected with that of federation. He expressed the opinion that federal plans had failed in the past on account of the minority quarrels bequeathed to central Europe by the peace settlement of 1919. Hence he rejected the ideas of Jaksch and hoped to tidy up the ethnographical map by transfers as an essential preliminary to federation itself. T he small nations, he considered, should be informed of the frontiers within which they would be able to operate after the war. ‘We must then have a two or three year armistice period’, he concluded, ‘and the final form of things can eventually be settled at the peace conference.’ In view of the indictment of BeneS formulated by Dr. Turnwald and other Sudeten Germans who hold the President personally responsible for the uglier side of the Odsun, it is of interest to record two further formulations made by BeneS. 1Jaksch, p. s i n. «ibid. ii. 997.

*See below, p. 71.

* Hoi born, i. 45s.

GENESIS OF THE cODSUN’

69

In a lecture at the University of Manchester on 5 December 1942, he referred to ‘the possibility of certain population transfers’, adding frankly enough ‘Transfers are a painful operation. They involve many secondary injustices.’ 1 Further, in 1944 BeneS worked out a ten-point scheme according to which the Germans were to be expelled from Czechoslovakia. He now envisaged that the whole operation should take five years as part of a general five-year plan for the adjustment of the Republic to post-war conditions. T he property of Nazi Germans was to be confiscated by the Czechoslovak state and entered as part payment of German reparation to the Czechs. According to point 3 no district of Czechoslovakia was to be less than 67 per cent. Slav in population; the Germans who remained would have, at most, elementary schools.3 It will later be seen that a combination of popular exasperation, Com­ munist incitement, and Allied policy prevented the adoption of the slow and systematic expulsion envisaged by BeneS. A last point needs to be made. It was mostly presumed in the English-speaking countries that the Poles and Czechs would not need to fear the democratic Germany of the future. But this was not what the experience of Germany’s Slav neighbours had led them to feel.s Weimar Germany had been uncompromisingly anti-Polish and irredentist towards the east. And, if this had absorbed the attention of the Cabinets in Berlin so that relations with Prague were undisturbed, the chief reason probably was that Weimar Germany was still dominated by Prussia: a Germany more western and southern in its interests might equally well take up the old Austrian quarrel between Germans and Czechs in Bohemia: the example of the democrat Jaksch suggested that this would lose none of its flavour by being distilled into democratic terms. Both Poles and Czechs, after all, were unlikely to for­ get that the German democrats of 1848 had been more in­ transigent nationalistically— if not so ruthless— as Bismarck. This knowledge goes far to explain the behaviour of both the Poles and the Czechs at the end of the second world war. 1 ibid. i. 446. •I am indebted to the BeneS Institute in London for providing me with the text of this plan. •See an account of Polish war aims by M. Seyda (privately circulated) p. 10.

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In justice to Edvard BeneS it should be observed that at a time when anti-German sentiment was at its maximum in the world he protested against the conception of an eternal Slav-German antipathy.1

9

B I R T H OF T H E ODE R - NE I S S E LI NE I t has been seen that the Versailles frontiers between Poland and Germany had satisfied no one. Of course there were irresponsible Poles who talked of 'returning to the Elbe’— in German literature on the subject all such chauvinistic utterances are given disproportionate prominence just as Poles tend to quote exclusively from German extremists. (It is worth observing that the Nazis are the only example in modern history which readily springs to the mind of extremists whose aims and the rate at which these aims were to be achieved were not diminished by responsible office.) The collapse of Poland swept away the Colonels’ régime. T he Polish leaders, who escaped to France and later to Britain, were more serious and more representative people. They chose General Sikorski to be their new Premier, a man not without the élan of his nation but yet one whose judgement was generally sober. Though far from being militaristic in outlook Sikorski was a soldier and Poland’s military, as well as her political, leader. At first, therefore, he thought only of Poland’s contribution to Germany’s defeat, not of frontiers in the future. Soon, however, it became necessary in his deal­ ings with the British and American Governments to give some practical shape to Polish war aims. From the time of Germany’s attack upon the U.S.S.R. in June 1941 and the necessity for the Poles and Russians to be somehow reconciled it was best to say as little as possible about Poland’s frontier to the east; since Russia was determined to keep the line of the Bug, to which the Poles would never agree, there was for 1 BeneS, Ovahy o Slovanstvt, p. 214.

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the time being nothing to be said. But in contemplating their western frontiers Sikorski and his colleagues were actuated above all by the desire to prevent German aggression in the future. In order to achieve this aim they hoped (1) to straighten and shorten the Polish-German frontier. (2) T o removè the whole of the Upper Silesian industrial triangle from German control; this involved a strong position for Poland at the mouth of the Oder which river links Upper Silesia with the sea. (3) T o establish Polish-Czechoslovak co-operation in some form of central European federation. When Sikorski visited Roosevelt in December 1942 he re­ corded these aims in two memoranda which were formally handed to Sumner Welles.1 In the first he spoke of creating ‘political, economic and other conditions which would facilitate the implementation of a constructive plan for the federation of the central Euro­ pean countries’. The Oder [he continued] with the Stettin estuary and its tribu­ taries down to the Czech frontier constitutes for Poland a natural line of security against Germany because to the east of this line there lie the Prussian bases for attack against Poland, viz. East Prussia, the Silesian wedge and Prussian Pomerania. This implied a frontier very much like the present OderNeisse line, which gives the Poles and the Czechs a long com­ mon frontier unknown to them before— the western Neisse as the Polish frontier is a welcome abbreviation of, in par­ ticular, the German-Czech frontier and puts an end to the German encirclement of the Czechs. As a matter of fact Sikorski had previously spoken to his friends of a PolishGerman frontier which should of course give Poland an ample stretch of coast, but he had thought of Köslin or Kolberg as on the line he would wish to draw.3 Thus the talk of Stettin *1 am indebted for this information to the General Sikorski Historical Institute in London where the two memoranda described in my text are preserved— their text has not yet been released for publication. See also an article by Bregman in the Dziennik Polski of g December 195s not quite correctly translated by Wagner, pp. 26-7. *T he Polish leaders early pressed for a truer realization than in 191g of Poland’s 'free access to the sea’. See Raczynski’s speech at the Inter-Allied Meeting on «4 September 1941, in Holbora, i. 46a. F

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in this first memorandum may simply be a statement of maximum terms. T he second memorandum dealt mainly with the military occupation of east German territory at the end of the war. It laid down as essential the occupation by Polish, or Polish and Czechoslovak, troops of the territory stretching to the Oder and western Neisse,1 together with the bridgeheads on the left banks of those rivers (the analogy of the occupation of the Rhineland was drawn); within these terms was included, it seems, not only Stettin but also the island of Rügen. There is no evidence that the question of what was to happen to the Germans whose homes lay in territory to be annexed by Poland was brought up on this last visit of Sikorski to Washington except that his second memorandum insisted upon a guarantee of what the Poles called freedom of pro­ cedure in the execution of the terms imposed upon Germany. Judging by The Time for Decision, which must have been written soon after his visit, Sikorski’s aims made little im­ pression on Sumner Welles who there wrote in terms of a cession of merely East Prussia and Danzig to Poland,3 with West Prussia going to Germany. According to Ciechanowski, the Polish Ambassador to Washington, Roosevelt himself was evasive to Sikorski on the traditional grounds that he could not discuss territorial issues during the war, and he talked, as if he were obsessed, about France.3 The year 1943 was an extraordinarily critical one, and for no nation more so than for Poland. On 13 April the German wireless announced the discovery of the mass graves at Katyn which accounted for thousands, though not all, of the Polish officers and men for whom the Polish authorities had been searching in Russia since Hitler had obliged the Poles and Russians to make common cause. Within three days Moscow had thrown the responsibility for Katyn upon the Germans, »It is interesting that the Poles and Czechs got as far as military consulta­ tion in 194s. Sosnkowski actually asked the Czechoslovak General Staff its wishes with regard to Silesia (information provided by General M. Kukiel). This showed progress by comparison with Sikorski’s intransigence when he visited BeneS in January 1941 (see Lockhart, p. 111). • Welles intended the cession of West Prussia to Germany at the same time (see Welles, p. 354). • Ciechanowski, p. 13s.

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and at the end of April Molotov broke off diplomatic rela­ tions with the Poles ostensibly because they demanded a Red Cross Inquiry. The patient work of Sikorski in building up some sort of collaboration with the U.S.S.R. was with one blow destroyed, and an alarming rift introduced into the Grand Alliance against Germany. The BeneS Government took the Kremlin’s part so that the tender blossom of PolishCzech co-operation was nipped in the bud. In July Sikorski himself, the only person capable of repairing the damage, was killed when his plane crashed, many people wondered how accidentally. His successor as Polish Prime Minister was Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, an excellent person with, however, nothing like Sikorski’s prestige for he was a party politician without military standing. Meanwhile the German defeat at Stalingrad had brought plans for the organization of the world after the war into the arena of practical politics. T he two major problems in Europe were closely related, those of the future of Poland and of Germany. Both questions were critical for the British: as their representatives frequently pointed out, the British had gone to war with Germany because Hitler had attacked Poland in 1939. If the Versailles frontiers had provided the German excuse and facilitated the German attack, then the Versailles frontiers must be revised in Poland’s favour. It seemed doubly important in 1943 to establish a state which was large enough and strong enough to hold its own between Germany, still alarmingly powerful, and the U.S.S.R. which was rapidly becoming so. At the same time the new Poland, it was hoped, should enjoy western liberty without ruffling Russian sus­ ceptibilities. T he British and Americans already, it appears, accepted the Polish claim to East Prussia and Danzig and to German Upper Silesia. For this claim could conveniently be reconciled with their plans for the future of Germany. On the one hand it meant that Prussia would be broken up, which was regarded as essential by Churchill; on the other this in itself would facilitate the division of Germany into smaller states as the Americans desired. There was certainly no doubt in any of their minds that East Prussia with Danzig must go to Poland, and this raised, particularly for the Americans, the question of what was to happen to the

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Germans of Königsberg and Danzig. In March 1943, three months after Sikorski had been in Washington, Eden visited Roosevelt: in the course of their conversations the President remarked to him that some arrangement should be made ‘to move the Prussians out of East Prussia the same way the Greeks were moved out of Turkey after the last war.’ 1 It is evident that Sumner Welles was much concerned with the matter of this transfer.2 A ll along the British had felt that the Curzon line pro­ vided a better Russo-Polish frontier than the Riga Treaty of 1921 which extended Poland so much farther to the east and made so many Ukrainians into Poles: thus the RibbentropMolotov line had not been held in London— nor for that matter in Washington— to be flagrantly unjust from an ethnical point of view. With the Katyn breach Russia was bound to become more difficult to handle with regard to the frontiers of Poland. It was clear, however, that the thing to propose to the Kremlin was acceptance of something like the Curzon line in exchange for the extension of Poland at Germany’s expense which Sikorski had put forward. This project killed several birds with one stone, since Stalin was certain to insist upon the line of the Bug, while it seemed essential to weaken Germany, especially on her more fluid east. Already on 6 October Churchill had written to Eden ‘I think we should do everything in our power to persuade the Poles to agree with the Russians about their eastern frontier, in return for gains in East Prussia and Silesia.’ 3 When the Big Three met at Teheran at the end of November 1943 this was one of the most critical themes of their con­ ference. T he first plenary meeting of the representatives of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the U.S.S.R. took place at the Soviet Embassy at Teheran at 4 p.m. on Sunday, 28 November 1943. In the evening Roosevelt entertained to dinner in Teheran Churchill and Stalin together with their closest collaborators. After dinner Churchill, Stalin, and Eden discussed ’what was to happen after the war was won’. After 1 Sherwood, ii. 708. It was in June of the same year that the President agreed to the idea of removing Germans from Czechoslovakia. * Welles, pp. 354-5. * Churchill, v. 58g.

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considering how Germany could be prevented from becoming too strong in the future, they came to speak of Poland. 'Per­ sonally’, writes Churchill, 'I thought Poland might move west­ wards, like soldiers taking two steps "left close". If Poland trod on some German toes that could not be helped, but there must be a strong Poland.’ A little later Eden remarked that he had been much struck by Stalin’s statement that afternoon that the Poles could go as far west as the Oder. He saw hope in that and was much encouraged. Stalin asked whether we thought he was going to swallow Poland up. Eden said he did not know how much the Russians were going to eat. How much would they leave undigested? Stalin said the Russians did not want anything belonging to other people, although they might have a bite at Germany. Eden said that what Poland lost in the east, she might gain in the west, Stalin replied that possibly she might, but he did not know.1 There is as yet no exact record available of what was said in the afternoon, but Hopkins noted that Stalin spoke of the extension of Poland to the Oder;2 in the evening Eden seemed to be pressing the Oder frontier upon a doubtful Stalin. On Wednesday, 1 December, after much discussion of the future frontiers and condition of both Poland and Germany, Churchill put forward the following formula: It is thought in principle that the home of the Polish State and nation should be between the so-called Curzon Line and the line of the Oder, including for Poland East Prussia (as defined) and Oppeln; but the actual tracing of the frontier line requires careful study, and possibly disentanglement of population at some points. Stalin then put forward his claim to the warm-water port of Königsberg. 'If he got this he would be ready enough to agree to my formula about Poland. I asked what about Lvov. Stalin said he would accept the Curzon Line.’ 3 1 Churchill, v. 319-40. * According to Hopkins, at the first session at Teheran on the afternoon of 48 November ‘Stalin said that Poland should extend to the Oder and that the Russians would help the Poles to establish their frontier thus far west, but he was not specific about Poland’s eastern frontier’ (Sherwood, ii. 776). •Churchill, v. 356-7. I.ater Stalin of course insisted upon the Curzon Line plus Lwów.

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The most astonishing thing about these conversations at Teheran is the uncertainty of the Prime Minister’s con­ ception of the map of eastern Europe. Any school atlas would have shown him that there were two Neisse rivers of which fact Sikorski must also have made him aware.1 Yet he writes in a footnote that on 1 December ‘No ques­ tion as to whether it should be the eastern or western Neisse had yet arisen’, and, a little further on, states that the two Neisse rivers flow together to form the Oder, which is not true. Further ‘the line of the Oder, including for Poland East Prussia (as defined) and Oppeln’ is a confusing phrase since if the administrative district of Oppeln is meant (or what was German Upper Silesia between the wars) it stretched well to the west of the Oder on which the city of Oppeln lay: ‘East Prussia (as defined)’ presumably meant in this context East Prussia with Danzig. Or did it mean without Königsberg? At all events the result of the Teheran Conference with regard to the frontiers of Poland and Germany was that the Big Three committed themselves to work for the Curzon line. Provided he got this and Königsberg Stalin favoured ‘the line of the Oder’ as the frontier in principle between Poland and Germany, questions like ‘the Oppeln district’, a term which might well have been related with the eastern Neisse, being left for future definition.2 The matter of the expulsion of the Germans from the new Poland got no farther than ‘disentanglement of population at some points’. It is impossible not to suppose that the ambitions of Stalin and Molotov were encouraged by the geographical imprecision of the British leaders. And it was with them that the Russians were chiefly concerned since the Americans, although Roose­ velt was in general acquiescent, objected to the planning of frontiers during the war. T he only Government which was wholly unwilling to accept the Curzon line was the Polish Government in Exile »It is interesting that so well-informed a man as Chester Wilmot speaks only of th e Neisse river in his Struggle fo r E u ro p e (195s). •See Churchill, v. 351: 'I asked whether Molotov would object to the Poles getting the Oppeln district. He said, he did not think so.’ The conception was in origin a Polish one, and meant that part of Upper Silesia which had remained with Germany as a result of the plebiscite of 1990.

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in London. It is intelligible that the sons of a nation which has twice been wiped off the face of the map since the end of the eighteenth century should fanatically resist any terri­ torial concession, and it has been said that the city of Lwów was as much a symbol of their civilization for the Poles as Vienna might be for the Germans.1 Mikolajczyk and the genuinely democratic Peasant Party were as intransigent as any other Poles: they would not consider so much as the loss of Vilna which General Zeligowski had seized from Lithuania in October 1920. After his return from Teheran Churchill saw Mikolajczyk on 20 January 1944. The Teheran conversa­ tions had been kept strictly secret but he made very clear that the British Government desired Poland to be strong, independent, and free from the Curzon line to the Oder. Poles and Ukrainians or White Russians could be trans­ ferred across the Curzon line as they wished, he explained to Mikolajczyk, and ‘In the West the Germans, about seven million of them living in that area between the GermanPolish border and the Oder, will be transported into Germany proper.* If Mikolajczyk is accurate in his version of this statement the Prime Minister must by now have informed himself of the size of the population between the old PolishGerman frontiers and the line of the Oder and the eastern Neisse, though 6 million would have been nearer the pre­ war figure. It is noteworthy that he did not then flinch from the idea of transferring this huge number of people in addition to the Poles and Ukrainians. Indeed this proviso was repeated as the fourth point in a five-point programme * which, if the Poles would accept it, Churchill intended to press upon Moscow. A reconciliation between the U.S.S.R. and the London Poles had become imperative since the Red Army had crossed the old Polish eastern frontier of 1939 on 4 January 1944; 4 it was advancing westwards, sending before 1 Wagner, p. 59. * Mikolajczyk, p. 56. •Ciechanowski, p. s6g, gives point four as 'A ll the German population within Poland’s new boundaries to be removed from Poland.’ 4A week later, on 11 January 1944, a Tass communiqué made the first public reference to an extension of Poland to the west as follows: "The western borders of Poland must be extended by the inclusion in Poland of' Polish lands taken away earlier by Germany. First of all it is necessary unite the Polish people in its State, which will thus acquire the necessary outlet to the Baltic Sea’ (The Times, 11 January 1944).

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it the only Poles who did accept the Curzon line, the Polish Communists. The intransigence of the exiled Poles was shared by the secret Polish state in Poland whose Home Army the Soviet commanders insisted upon treating as their enemy. On 22 February 1944 Churchill made a memorable speech in the House of Commons in which he revealed no more about the conversations on Poland at Teheran than that he had agreed with Stalin ‘upon the need for Poland to obtain compensation at the expense of Germany both in the North and in the West’. He also— he had just returned from Casa­ blanca— stated that 'unconditional surrender* did not mean ‘that the German people will be enslaved or destroyed’ but added that there would be ‘no question of the Atlantic Charter applying to Germany as a matter of right and barring territorial transferences or adjustments in enemy countries’.1 Early in June 1944 Mikolajczyk at last succeeded in visiting Roosevelt who, at their second interview on 12 June, asked his view of the suggestion that Poland should be given Silesia, East Prussia, and the German coast up to Stettin. According to Ciechanowski Mikolajczyk on this occasion expressed un­ qualified approval of receiving Silesia as largely Polish in population but also, as the Poles had always urged, ‘to pre­ vent Germany from preparing future wars’ with the help of Silesian industry. On the other hand, Mikolajczyk said, he was definitely opposed to any exaggerated expansion of Poland westward, as this would burden Poland with a large German minority. Moreover, ex­ perience had taught the Poles that the British and American people quickly forgot what Germany really stood for and were only too ready to become sympathetic to Germany after defeating her.2 This interesting statement suggests that Mikolajczyk was opposed to the transfer of Germans which had by now been mentioned so often by the Americans and the British. But in the Polish Plan of 30 August 1944 made by his Cabinet in conjunction with the Home Army in Poland it was stated that ‘All Germans will be removed from the territories incor­ re.

Deb. voi. 397, coll. 698-9.

• Ciechanowski, p. 306,

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porated into Poland in the North and the West by mutual Soviet-Polish co-operation.’ 1 On l August 1944, with the Soviet armies a few miles distant and at the instigation of the Russian wireless, the Polish underground army in Warsaw rose against the German occupation. A few days earlier the Soviet Government had made an agreement based on recognition of the Curzon line with the Polish Communists who were about to establish their National Committee at Lublin.2 In spite of desperate appeals to them the Russian commanders refused to push forward to help the Warsaw insurgents because, as it was widely believed, they wished the Polish democrats to be destroyed to make way for the Polish Communists. The British and American air force could help a little, but very little. At last on 2 October after a magnificent but hopeless struggle General Bor-Komorowski surrendered to the Germans who proceeded to massacre many of their Polish prisoners in their stationary or their mobile gas chambers.2 Mikolajczyk had seen Stalin on 3 August appealing in vain to him on behalf of Warsaw: with their feelings still more exacerbated Mikolajczyk, together with his Foreign Minister Römer, Professor Grabski, and a Polish Home Army general were summoned to Moscow ten days after the surrender of Warsaw. On 13 October they conferred with Stalin, Molotov, Churchill, and Eden, with Harriman as observer for the United States. The Poles were told that the Curzon line had been agreed upon in principle at Teheran:4 there was a scene between Churchill and Mikolajczyk who still refused to yield. After Churchill’s speech in the House of Commons on 27 October 1944, when he complained that if only the Polish Government had accepted the Curzon line at the beginning of the year there need never have been a Lublin Committee, 1 Mikolajczyk, pp. 10s, 330. According to this Plan the Poles still wished, as Sikorski had, to take part in the occupation of Germany, especially of her eastern territories adjacent to the future western boundaries of Poland. * Osóbka-Morawski, one of the Polish Communist leaders, was the first publicly to claim the present Oder-Neisse line in an interview published in the Manchester Guardian on 30 August 1944. ’ Mikolajczyk, p. 100; Bor-Komorowski, The Secret Army (London, Gollancz, 1950). ’ Roosevelt made this fairly plain to Mikolajczyk on 7 June 1944, making Churchill responsible (see Ciechanowski, p. «93).

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Mikolajczyk addressed a fresh series of questions to him. T o these Sir Alexander Cadogan replied in a letter addressed to Römer on 2 November. Dear Monsieur Römer, I duly reported to the Prime Minister the conversation which I had with your Excellency and the Polish Ambassador on October 3ist, in the course of which you put to me three questions for the consideration of His Majesty’s Government. 2. The Prime Minister, after consultation with the Cabinet, has now directed me to give you the following replies. 3. You asked in the first place whether, even in the event of the United States Government finding themselves unable to agree to the changes in the western frontier of Poland foreshadowed in the recent conversations in Moscow, His Majesty’s Government would still advocate these changes at the Peace Settlement. The answer of His Majesty’s Government to this question is in the affirmative. 4. Secondly you enquired whether His Majesty’s Government were definitely in favour of advancing the Polish frontier up to the line of the Oder, to include the port of Stettin. The answer is that His Majesty’s Government do consider that Poland should have the right to extend her territory to this extent. 5. Finally you enquired whether His Majesty’s Government would guarantee the independence and integrity of the new Poland. To this the answer is that His Majesty’s Government are prepared to give such a guarantee jointly with the Soviet Govern­ ment. If the United States Government could see their way to join also, that would plainly be of the greatest advantage, though His Majesty’s Government would not make this a condition of their own guarantee in conjunction with that of the Soviet Government. This Anglo-Soviet guarantee would, in the view of His Majesty’s Government, remain valid until effectively merged in the general guarantee which it is hoped may be afforded by the projected World Organization. 6. With regard to what you said in regard to anticipated diffi­ culties in the way of negotiations in Moscow for a reformation of the Polish Government, the Prime Minister observes that the success of these negotiations must depend on a solution of the frontier question. It is impossible to ignore the possibility that agreement might be reached on the frontier question and that it might nevertheless prove impossible to reach agreement on the other matter. That would, of course, be most unfortunate, but the Polish Government would be in a much better position if

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negotiations broke down on this point, on which they would have the support of His Majesty’s Government and probably of the United States Government, than on the frontier question. Yours sincerely, A l e x a n d e r C a d o g a n .1

Here was ’the line of the Oder’, except for Stettin, as vague as ever, without either Neisse; nor is any reference made to the German population. After his re-election as President, Roosevelt returned to the theme, writing to Mikolajczyk on 17 November to state that if the Polish, Soviet, and British Governments reached agreement on the future frontiers of Poland, ’including the proposed compensation for Poland from Germany’, the United States Government would offer no objection. He added that If the Polish Government and people desire in connection with the new frontiers of the Polish State to bring about the transfer to and from the territory of Poland of national minorities, the United States Government will raise no objection and as far as practicable will facilitate such transfer.2 In spite of the British and American assurances he had obtained the unhappy Mikolajczyk could not carry his Cabinet with him in accepting the compromise over the Curzon line which he himself was at heart unwilling to make; he resigned, therefore, on 24 November 1944. Grabski3 and the other Polish Ministers were greatly shaken by having learnt at the Moscow meeting in October to what extent their fate had been decided over their heads at Teheran. They and their colleagues chose as their new Minister-President a strongly anti-Russian Socialist leader named Arciszewski who had only recently arrived in London from Poland. In an interview published in the Sunday Times on 17 December 1944, the new Polish Premier, after protesting against the threatened loss to Russia of East Poland, turned to the frontier in the west and said We have put forward our claims against Germany and 1Poland, Germany and European Peace, pp. 105-6. *Quoted in Mikolajczyk, pp. 116-17. •It is interesting that Grabski on this occasion was nevertheless very much impressed by Stalin and half inclined to accept his lead.

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demanded the incorporation into Poland of East Prussia, Upper Silesia and parts of Pomerania.. . . But we do not want to expand our frontier in the west to include 8 to 10 million Germans. We do not want, that is, either Breslau or Stettin. We claim just our ethnical and historic Polish territories which are under German domination. Arciszewski’s interview was made in reply to Churchill's speech in the House of Commons two days earlier in which he had said If Poland concedes Lvov and the surrounding regions in the South, on the line known as Curzon Line A . . . she will gain in the North the whole of East Prussia West and South of the fortress of Koenigsberg, including the great city and port of Danzig. . . . This will be hers instead of the threatened and artificial Corridor . . . and Poland will stretch broadly along the Baltic on a front of over 200 miles. The Poles are free, so far as Russia and Great Britain are concerned, to extend their territory, at the expense of Germany to the West. . . . I cannot believe that such an offer should be rejected by Poland. It would, of course, have to be accompanied by the disentanglement of populations in the East and in the North. The transference of several millions of people would have to be effected from the East to the West or North, as well as the expulsion of the Germans— because that is what is proposed: the total expulsion of the Germans— from the area to be acquired by Poland in the West and the North. For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satis­ factory and lasting . . . I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large trans­ ferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before.1 That Arciszewski found it possible to ignore the whole possi­ bility of removing Germans from the future Poland seems, after this speech, difficult to comprehend. Thus the year 1945, which began with Moscow's recogni­ tion of the Lublin Committee as* the Polish Government, opened in some confusion over the problem of Poland’s western frontiers. According to Stettinius,2when he met Eden at Malta in January on the way to Yalta the latter remarked 1 H.C. Deb. voi. 406, col. 1483. ■ Stettinius, p. 67. Stettinius's account of Yalta seems unjust to Churchill.

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that he thought ‘the proper western boundary of Poland should recognize the cession to Poland of East Prussia, Silesia and a coastal sector of Pomerania. He pointed out that this would include eight million Germans and would be all that the Poles could swallow.' The Americans acquiesced, adding a hope that 'the necessary transfers of population would not be carried out in too precipitate a fashion’.1 It is clear that Eden's attitude to the frontier question was a different one in face of a Communist Polish régime. T he Big Three conferred together— for the last time in the persons of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin— at Yalta in the Crimea from 4 to 11 February 1945. T he western Allies were newly at a disadvantage since they had scarcely recov­ ered from Hitler’s offensive in the Ardennes, and were anxious to obtain Russian help against Japan, whereas the Russian armies had swept forward so that by February roughly all eastern Europe except for Bohemia, Moravia, and 1 cf. Eden to Churchill, 1 February 1945: *7. There remains the territorial problem. As regards Poland’s eastern frontier, H.M.G. have already agreed with the Russians and announced publicly that this should be the Curzon Line, giving Lwow to the U.S.S.R. T h e Americans may however still wish to press the Russians to leave Lwow to Poland. As regards Poland’s western frontier, we and the Americans agreed that Poland should certainly have East Prussia south and west of Königsberg, Danzig, the eastern tip of Pomerania and the whole of Upper Silesia. The Lublin Poles, no doubt with Soviet approval, are however also claiming not only the Oder line frontier, including Stettin and Breslau, but also the western Neisse frontier. ‘8. T he cessions upon which we and the Americans are agreed would involve the transfer of some a£ million Germans. The Oder frontier, without Breslau and Stettin would involve a further a£ millions. The western Neisse frontier with Breslau and Stettin would involve an additional 3} millions making 8 millions in all. ‘9. We were prepared last October in Moscow to let M. Mikolajczyk’s Government have any territories they chose to claim up to the Oder, but this was conditional upon agreement then being reached between him and the Russians and there was no question of our agreeing to the western Neisse frontier. I also think that we should keep our position fluid as regards the Oder line frontier, and take the line that H.M.G. cannot be considered as having accepted any definite line for the western frontier of Poland, since we need not make the same concessions to the Lublin Poles which we were prepared to make to M. Mikolajczyk in order to obtain a solution of the Polish problem. Even the Oder line frontier would severely tax the Polish capacity for absorption and would increase the formidable difficulties involved in the transfer of millions of Germans. We agreed with the Americans that in any event these transfers should be gradual and not precipitate’ (Con­ ferences at Malta and Yalta, pt. ii, galley 457).

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Slovakia was in their hands. In the circumstances, Stettinius considers that Roosevelt and Churchill gave surprisingly little away. Poland was still the thorniest question,1 and both President and Prime Minister made the long-term mistake of concerning themselves more with the constitution of its future government than with its future extent: they also hoped for too much from their plan for world organization. Stalin did agree in the end to the ‘reorganization’ of the Polish Government, not a mere addition from outside to Bierut’s 2* colleagues of the Lublin Committee to whom Moscow had now offered recognition. As for the Polish-German frontier Churchill had by now, it appears, had time to study the map and discover the difference between the eastern or Glatzer Neisse and the western or Görlitzer or Lausitzer Neisse: he had informed himself that some 3 million Germans lived in the area between them 9 and he had become aware of feeling in Britain against the transference of vast numbers of people. On 6 February Stalin, after an ambiguous reference to Mikolajczyk,4*at last specified that it was the western Neisse which he wished to take as the continuation southwards of Poland’s western frontier along the Oder. On 7 February Churchill remarked that it would be a great pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion. I was conscious of a large body of opinion in Great Britain which was frankly shocked at the idea of moving millions of people by force. . . . If Poland took East Prussia and Silesia as far as the Oder that alone would mean moving six million Germans back to Germany. It might be managed, subject to the moral question, which I would have to settle with my own people. Stalin observed that there were no Germans in these areas, as they had all run away. I replied that the question was whether there was room for them in what was left of Germany. . . . I was not afraid of the problem of transferring populations, so long as it was propor1 'Poland,’ writes Churchill, 'was discussed at no fewer than seven out of the eight plenary meetings of the Yalta Conference, and the British Tecord contains an interchange on this topic of nearly 8,000 words between Stalin, Roosevelt and myself’ (Churchill, vi. 319). 1 Boleslaw Bierut, President of the Lublin Committee. * Byrnes, p. 30. 4Churchill, vi. 323.

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donate to what the Poles could manage and to what could be put into Germany. But it was a matter which required study, not as a question of principle, but of the numbers which would have to be handled.1 On the following day Churchill put forward as the official Anglo-American proposal that Poland should include Danzig, East Prussia without Königsberg, the administrative district of Oppeln, and ‘the lands desired by Poland to the east of the line of the Oder’. The Germans were to be repatriated and the Poles in Germany the same. Both the British and the Americans refused to agree to Stalin’s proposal that the line of the Oder should be continued southwards along the western Neisse for which, Roosevelt objected, ‘there would appear to be little justification.’ 2 The western Allies therefore pre­ ferred not to define Poland’s frontiers on the west, more particularly because by 10 February a telegram had arrived from the British War Cabinet ‘which strongly deprecated any reference to a frontier as far west as the Western Neisse because the problem of moving the population was too big to manage’.2 In the end the three Heads of Government agreed on the Curzon line with minor rectifications in favour, of Poland. They recognize [it was stated] that Poland must receive sub­ stantial accessions of territory in the north and west. They feel that the opinion of the new Polish Provisional Government of National Unity should be sought in due course on the extent of these accessions and that the final delimitation of the western frontier of Poland should thereafter await the Peace Conference.4 On 5 February, however, the Polish Communist authorities had announced that the administration of the country up to the Oder and western Neisse had been taken over by them. Ön 13 February the London Poles protested against the Yalta decisions as equivalent to Poland’s fifth partition, this time by her Allies.8 1 Churchill, vi. 347. 'In these general discussions/ Churchill adds, 'maps were not used and the distinction between the Eastern and Western Neisse did not emerge as clearly as it should have done.' *ibid. p. 319. Churchill adds that this had always been his view. * ibid. p. 337. * ibid. p. 339; see also Stettinius. • Marxian, pp. 28-99.

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On 27 February the Prime Minister reported to Parliament on Yalta. He referred to the ‘far more fruitful and developed land in the West, from which a very large portion of the German population has already departed’, which the Poles were to exchange for the Pripet Marshes. We need not fear [he continued] that the task of holding these new lines will be too heavy for Poland. . . . We intend to take steps far more drastic and effective than those which followed the last war . . . so as to render all offensive action by Germany utterly impossible for generations to come.1 As for the feeling in Britain against the expulsion of Ger­ mans from what was still eastern Germany, it is difficult to discover signs of any widespread indignation. In the Commons Mr. Strauss, Mr. Pickthorn, and Mr. R. R. Stokes made inter­ esting objections and in the Lords Lord Noel-Buxton, who had always been as highminded as he was isolated in his views, protested.2 But the general feeling was that German fifth columns could never be tolerated again, and that a not excessive rearrangement or rather concentration of the Germans, whose own national authorities had taught them mobility, was only to be expected.

10 F L I G H T AND E XP U L S I ON FROM POLAND AND EAS TERN GERMANY A t Yalta Stalin belittled the problem of the Germans who lived in the territories which the Russians or Poles were to annex by saying that the Germans had fled before the Soviet armies. T he British were disturbed by their inability to in­ form themselves as to the accuracy of this assertion; it turned out, however, to contain almost exactly half the truth. Until the summer of 1944 the eastern provinces of Germany had 1 H.C. Deb. voi. 408, col. 1278. «There was an interesting debate in the House of Lords on 8 March 1945.

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been sheltered from the war. The Ostfront, of which soldiers told such grim tales, was for a long time far away in Russia, and, as the air raids threatened Berlin more and more alarm­ ingly, fresh evacuees from there and from elsewhere were added to the already swollen German population in the east. It is reckoned that by the end of the winter 1943-4 some 825,000 evacuees from bombed towns had arrived in East Prussia, eastern Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg, and Silesia, more than half of them being sheltered in Silesia.1 Together with the German officials and technicians, and the Volks­ deutsche who had been brought into these districts, it may be assumed that the German population here had been in­ creased by about as much again, that is by about 1,650,000, since 1939. T he natural increase of the population in the war years was probably very little more than the losses in the field — these two may, in fact, be considered roughly to have can­ celled one another out. In western Germany, which was somehow more exposed to world opinion if only via Switzerland, there was perhaps more scepticism over the Endsieg, at least during the second half of the war. But the east Germans, with relatively few exceptions, believed Goebbels when he told them that Hitler was bound to win, and were as startled to find their victory in doubt as the generation before them had been all over Germany in 1918. Moreover the east German population was not merely taken by surprise; it was terrified, in part because Goebbels had been filling the air with the menace of Russian savagery which one must destroy in order not to be horribly destroyed by it. T he Germans were terrified, also, because many of them knew— their soldier husbands or sons had told them— that the S.S. and sometimes the Wehrmacht had treated the Russians, both prisoners and civilian population, with deliberate and studied cruelty and contempt, and with the long-term intention of exterminating the Slav races or reducing them to helotry. Although, with the help of Com­ munist policy, the Germans have stilled their sense of guilt with remarkable success since the war, in 1944 and 1945 that uneasy sentiment helped to drive numbers of them to flight rather than to fece the retribution of the Russians. 1Dokumentation, I/ i. 5 E. G

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T he Russian offensive launched on 22 June 1944 brought the Soviet troops, within the next two or three months, from the Dnieper to the Vistula and right up to the frontiers of East Prussia: the population of the district of Memel was ordered to leave there on 4 August. A fortnight later this order was reversed and the people brought back until 7 October, when, too late for many of them to get away, a second evacua­ tion order came: the Russians attacked the town of Memel on 9 October and it was shortly in their hands.1*After this the Russians pushed forward into East Prussia, where, after their former sense of security, many people were suddenly panic-stricken: indeed, by the end of the year about half a million people had moved away from East Prussia towards the west.8 It was clear already that a tremendous German disaster was imminent, apart from the actual military collapse and apart from any future revision of frontiers. A major cause was the stubborn refusal of H itler to face defeat and the consequent attitude of his representatives, the Gauleiter, who refused to prepare for evacuation in time because this would spell a confession of National Socialist failure.9 Tim e and other resources were wasted in mobilizing the militarily value­ less Volkssturm and in building an Ostwall about which it was said in East Prussia that the Russians would only have needed three hours to pass it, first two and a half hours to laugh over it and then half an hour to destroy it.4*By waiting too long the civilian population, when at last told to move, became entangled with the retreating German troops. Since the Volkssturm often called away the last elderly man in the family the women were left to fend for themselves and their children; mostly they had had Poles or Russians to work for them, who now disappeared in an easterly direction. These suddenly liberated slaves, as they may fairly be designated, occasionally helped their German employers; more often they 1 Dokumentation, I/ i. 1. It is estimated that 30,000 Memellanders fell into Russian hands (p. 14 E). aibid. p. 16 E. •N ot only H itler and the Party wished to fight to the last in the east; many others, who were in favour of surrender in the west, wished to do so in order to escape a Russian conquest. In fact the Ardennes offensive in December 1944 disappointed their hopes. *Dokumentation, I/ i. 1.

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were vowed to revenge the humiliation of their race, and re­ turned with the invading armies to plunder or persecute the defeated Herrenvolk with the help of the personal infor­ mation which had come their way. Many of the Poles enrolled themselves in the new Polish m ilitia which followed in the wake of the Soviet troops as precursor of the new Polish state. This m ilitia became notorious for its cruelty: its members often took a fiendish delight in inflicting the self-same deprivations and humiliations upon the Germans as those inflicted during the war by the Germans upon the Poles and Jews.1 This behaviour from people mostly of humble origin and little education was comprehensible: in many places it created a veritable inferno in which Germans were indis­ criminately subjected to the fearful retribution which H ider and his supporters had provoked. It should be added that with some 5 or 6 million foreign labourers working as slave labour in Germany in 1944, those who reflected upon what was likely to occur upon Germany’s defeat often envisaged Spartakist risings all over what was then the Reich, with massacres from end to end of the country should the Allied occupation be delayed.2 As it was, the long-considered expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia, the two countries where their fifth columns had been so efficacious, provided the two occasions for wholesale revenge: it did so all the more because it occurred in eastern Europe under the military domination of the Russians who had also been insulted and maltreated by the German invader, and also made no secret of their desire for reprisals after the enormous suffering inflicted upon them since June 1941. It is difficult to estimate to what extent l W hen the Polish courier, Jan Karski, was received by Roosevelt on *8 July 1943, he said what was obvious to many people at the time— 'I would rather be frank with you, Mr. President. Nothing on earth w ill stop the Poles from taking some kind of revenge on the Germans after the Nazi collapse. There w ill be some terrorism, probably short-lived, but it w ill be unavoid­ able. And I think this w ill be a sort of encouragement for all the Germans in Poland to go west, to Germany proper, where they belong (Ciechanowski, p. 185). *1 use Spartakist here in its original sense. A few big landowners in east Germany, with a sense of responsibility towards their dependants, and a sense of reality about the outcome of the war, began to prepare the evacuation of their own people to western Germany as early as 1943: in the west it was at least far more probable that the situation would be kept under control.

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the ideology of Communism intensified the ruthlessness of the Slavs towards the Germans in 1945. But it has been seen that for half a century before the first Great War the Germans had been the capitalist employers of Slavs in factory or farm, and since then had themselves done all they could to preserve and then restore their social domination, so that to brand them as fascist exploiters of the oppressed only added an adjective to the conception which already existed in many simple Slav minds. Without making any attempt to write the military history of the last winter of the second world war, it is necessary to note that after October 1944 the next big Russian offensive began on 12 January 1945; by the end of the month most of East Prussia in the north, eastern Brandenburg,1 and, in the south, Silesia were lost to the Germans. Oppeln fell on 26 January and by 10 February the industrial triangle, which H itler had insisted should be worked and defended unconquerably, was abandoned to the Soviet troops. No wonder that Stalin felt confident at Yalta in the second week of February. At long last, after repeating many times that the Russians would never reach Silesia, Hanke, the Nazi district leader for Lower Silesia, on 20 January ordered the evacuation of part of Silesia. No preparations had been made though refugees from the Warthegau and the 'Generalgouvernement’ had been streaming through Silesia for days. On 20 January, therefore, the exodus of the civilians from Breslau began to be improvised. T he normal population of the city had been over 600,000 but it is estimated that nearly 700,000 people now began to try to leave.9 A t the same time one of the coldest spells in a mercilessly cold east European winter set in.3 T he women and children set off from Breslau, owing to the general confusion and breakdown, mostly on foot, and a number died on their way from exposure and fatigue. So hopeless did the prospect seem that many of these refugees soon preferred to go back to Breslau; by the time that city was encircled by the Russians on 16 February it again con­ * Dokumentation, I / i, 18 E. East Brandenburg, that is Brandenburg east of the Oder, was wholly occupied by the Russians by a February 1945. *Kaps, p. 51; Eng. ed. p. 45. *T he cold spell lasted six or seven weeks.

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tained some 200,000 civilians.1 Breslau held out in isolation until 6 May. T he disastrous confusion at Memel and Breslau provides two examples taken at random from the history of eastern Germany that winter. It needs to be added that although those parts of Germany had been relatively protected and the population still had surprising material reserves, five and a half years of war had worn down powers of resistance and the transport system was in something like a state of decay. It is scarcely necessary to insist that in blinding snow storms and with frozen roads in a hopelessly slippery condition, intersecting streams of refugees with horse and hand-carts crammed with possessions made wretchedly slow progress. After earlier evacuations and recent air raids, accommodation was very hard to come by at night. Sometimes a stream of returning refugees who had failed to find refuge made con­ fusion worse confounded. And inevitably the Russian tanks would often overtake the people on the roads and cut them off. It would probably be fair to add that many Germans lack that individual resourcefulness which sees the British through disasters like Dunkirk. Certainly before the Russians had had time to do more than arrive there had been, accord­ ing to German sources, many casualties among the east German population. These casualties were caused only by evacuation necessitated by defeat, though such evacuation brought Silesian refugees for instance to the neighbourhood of Dresden at the time of the Allied air raid of 13-14 February which took so heavy a toll. German authorities seem never­ theless to reckon these casualties due to evacuation in with the casualties later caused by expulsion. During March 1945 the Russian armies poured over Pomerania and late in the month took Danzig and Gdynia, thus cutting off the retreat of the refugees who had streamed to the coast in order to get away by sea: not long before about half a million people had been massed in and around Danzig of whom over half were able to escape. By the end of March nearly all eastern Germany was in Russian hands. T he Germans continued to hold a strip of territory along the Bohemian-Silesian frontier, and this encouraged a stream of 1Dokumentation, I / i, 54 E.

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Silesian refugees into what was still the undisturbed and geographically protected Gau Sudetenland. It is reckoned that about 5 million German refugees— the majority Silesian — left eastern Germany in the evacuation movement of the last winter of the war.1 Thus when Stalin told Churchill at Yalta that the Germans had all run away, in fact by the end of the next month just about half of them had done so, but they had done so with no intention of leaving eastern Germany for ever. T he Russian armies arrived in eastern Germany late in January and in February 1945 in a state of excited demoral­ ization, and the impression was made until April that their commanders had decided to give the soldiers their head for a time. Whether there was a deliberate intention to terrorize the Germans and drive them to flight it does not seem possible to ascertain. Undoubtedly the early impact of the Soviet troops upon the German population which remained was shocking in the most literal sense. For in the early days the Russian soldiers were deliberately destructive and often burnt things down, as it seemed for the fun of it: a considerable portion of the beautiful city of Danzig was fired in this way. There was much plundering, not systematic as that done by the Germans earlier in the war had often been, but desultory. T he Russian soldiers w ill always be remembered for their watch-hunger all over eastern Europe. They also drank up any alcohol they found. And, more often drunk than not, they fell upon the German women who were violated whole­ sale. German men, of whom there were in fact very few to be found, were often arrested and beaten up if any connexion with the National Socialist Party could be traced: here, as later in the American and perhaps less in the British zone of occupation, many small officials were victimized who had * Dokumentation, I / i, *$-*4 E. It was rare for half the inhabitants o f a town to be left, but Neisse. for instance, was exceptionally empty when the Russians arrived with only a.000 people out of a normal populaton o f 40,000. A higher proportion of the country population stayed at home. For further information on this subject see Sasse, p. 63, n. 1, who quotes from Freies Deutschland of 4. 18. and «4 April 1945. T his organ of the German officers organized by the Soviet authorities published the figures of the German population in Licgnitz. Landsberg, fee. at the time— very roughly the 50 per cent, estimate is confirmed by the Freies Deutschland estimates of which the Russians must have been informed.

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joined the Party as a matter of routine because if they did not they would be destitute. A certain number of people who resisted the victors, or annoyed them in some other way, were simply shot. After the first violent incursion much of the German population was impressed— as the Russians and Poles had been impressed by the Germans— to work very hard with little food and no pay; their work consisted in clearing up after the battle and doing the odd jobs which all armies create. From the end of March discipline was gradually, if rather sporadically, restored in the Russian armies occupying what had been eastern Germany. A ll along things had been a little better in the towns where the inhabitants were less exposed than in the villages. And then the Russian soldier had his redeeming features and could often be tamed because he loved children.1 From now on certain main lines of action were followed by the Russian authorities. In the first place the big landed estates were confiscated and fairly rapidly transformed into Russian state farms upon which Germans were engaged to work. Some of these state farms had been Prussian state farms before; occasionally they remained as Russian state property in Poland until 1950 or 1951. A t the same time certain stretches of poorer land, of which in east Germany there had always been a good many, were cordoned off for military use— sometimes it was land which had been reserved for German army purposes in the same way. Königs­ berg itself was regarded primarily as a naval base, though in 1946 it and the region around it became the civilian Oblast Kaliningrad.3 Apart from these administrative changes, the Soviet soldiers were no longer allowed to set fire to things; on the contrary they were employed in removing to Russia as much industrial plant as they could find except from Upper Silesia. Another constant element in Soviet policy was the drive to acquire German slave labour to rebuild Russia— in his conversations with Churchill and Roosevelt Stalin indicated »See reports in Raps and elsewhere. * After this Russian civilians crowded into the town, and those Ger­ mans who had not been removed for forced labour were pushed into the suburbs so that the German character of the city disappeared. See below, p. 5 per cent, skilled, «5 per cent, semi-skilled, 25 per cent, unskilled, and 25 per cent, farmers in any given year (information from Bundesministerium für Vertriebene). * Wirtschaft und Statistik, September 1954, p< 441.

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From 1950 onwards any normal worker with some train­ ing who had arrived somewhere in Western Germany within reach of a factory could find employment in the now expand­ ing metal and machine and chemical industries. T he immi­ grants were at a certain disadvantage because those among them who had been trained in heavy industry were relatively few. Germany beyond the Oder and the Neisse had been predominantly agricultural. Further, the Upper Silesian miners and foundry workers had mostly been Polish-speaking and had stayed behind, while it was the German foremen and engineers from there, if they had survived the war, who were now in Western Germany.1 Similarly the German miners had mostly been kept back in Czechoslovakia, and, although the Sudeten German districts had been highly industrialized, they had specialized in textiles and other light industry. Consequently it was important for the immi­ grants to acquire technical training in the work which was in demand, and the authorities provided large num­ bers of training institutions; the courses were made free for people who were without employment, and were offered at a very low charge to people in work who wished to train for something different. It is not surprising to find that the proportion of immigrants who attended these courses was high.2 Training of this kind or retraining— the Germans called it Umschulung— led to a steady increase in employment, bringing with it, however, a frequent depression of status. It was one of the economic trends of the century, particularly after 1945, that people all over the world tended to find themselves driven to sacrifice their social independence, or a less mechanical occupation, or both, in order to earn their way. Among any group of exiles this trend is bound to be accelerated, though for the German immigrants into Western Germany, since they did not suffer the linguistic and other •This was the case with the employees of a big pre-war heavy industry concern such as that of the Schaffgotsches in Upper Silesia, which has been refounded in Western Germany. It now owns lignite but no hard-coal mines. •See Appendices to Sonne Report, p. 11, where it was estimated that some 100,000 refugees were in need, of retraining. In 1954, however, the proportion of immigrant Lehrlinge seemed to diminish for no obvious reason. See and Bundestag, 44th session, p. 3075, where Dr. Oberländer referred to this fact.

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disadvantages of foreigners, the acceleration was rather less than it might otherwise have been. On the other hand among the East and Sudeten Germans a high proportion, calculated as 36*4 per cent.,1 had enjoyed economic independence before the war. T he authorities at home and the directors of American policy were nearly always sympathetic towards expelled Germans who were struggling to maintain their status. In­ deed large numbers of loans were advanced to the East German and Sudeten German immigrants in order to help them maintain or establish an independent livelihood. A report on progress of the Marshall Plan records that the 75-5 million D.M. referred to above as released from E.C.A. invest­ ment programmes in 1951 and 1952 provided credits varying between 5,000 and 100,000 D.M. to 2,050 business people; further, by the end of 1952 Marshall aid in the shape of 287-3 million D.M. had been granted in loans to 77,700 such people to enable them to set up business or to continue to pursue an independent profession.3 Perhaps the most remarkable achievement on the part of the exiles themselves was the establishment, with the help of the loans allowed them, of small industrial concerns in which they nearly always em­ ployed people from their own place of origin. Quite a number of Silesian and Sudeten German firms managed to re-establish themselves and to engage most of their former employees. One hears, for instance, of a Silesian textile estab­ lishment now at work on Lake Constance in that corner of Germany which is farthest from the north-east. Light industry and small concerns were of course easier to start up quickly, but they were also more vulnerable when it came to the re­ form of the currency. Once Western Germany had recovered from that shock, however, the number of new and often small concerns organized by German immigrants of different kinds multiplied astonishingly. T he eastern and Sudeten Germans thereby made a notable contribution on the one hand to the expansion of the West German textile industry and on the other to the industrialization of south-west Germany, of Bavaria, and then, once they had arrived there, of BadenWürttemberg whose industry has developed very quickly in 1 Progress of the Marshall Plan, p. 109.

1 ibid.

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the last few years. Indigenous firms occasionally but rarely made difficulties for refugee entrepreneurs1 who were, how­ ever, preferred when possible in the distribution of official orders. In May 1953 clause 74 of the Bundesuertriebenengesetz laid down that such preference was due to firms at least half of whose capital belonged to Vertriebene or Zugewunderte.2 T he most exciting and deservedly famous of the industries newly founded by exiles in Western Germany is not one which could be bolstered up by the placing of orders by the authorities, for it is that of the glass buttons of Neu Gablonz.3 Near Reichenberg (Libérée) in Bohemia, lying on the upper reaches of the western Neisse itself, a German township called Gablonz, or Jablonec in Czech, had long been the centre for a glass home industry producing glass buttons, beads, and buckles. In some of the villages to the south Czech glassmakers competed with the German villages around the town; this helps to explain that Gablonz, since long before 1914, had been a centre of aggressive German nationalism directed against the Czechs. A group of German glassworkers from the Gablonz region was transferred in 1946 to an old Bavarian city called Kaufbeuren half-way between Munich and Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance. In a thick pine forest nearby the Americans had discovered a huge munition factory built underground. After blowing up a third of it they let the rest for a small sum to five families consisting of seventeen people from Gablonz who established themselves here in September 1946. These people set up four tiny con­ cerns employing altogether twenty-two workers, i.e. several people outside the five families. At first the whole thing seemed utter madness, what with the difficulty of getting into Kaufbeuren to gather together a little food and then back. But the people from Gablonz persisted, and more and 1 Sonne Report, Appendices, p. 8. *The text of this clause is as follows: ‘Bei der Vergabe von öffentlichen Aufträgen sind Vertriebene und Sowjetzonenflüchtlinge unbeschadet von Regelungen für notleidende Gebiete bevorzugt zu bërücksichtigen. Ent­ sprechendes gilt für Unternehmen, an deren Vertriebene und Sowjetzonen­ flüchtlinge mit mindestens der Hälfte des Kapitals beteiligt sind, sofern die Beteiligung für mindestens 6 Monate sichergestellt ist.’ •See Balon.

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more people from the Gablonz region turned up, who first helped to clear a patch in the forest and to build huts, and then in their turn proceeded to make glass goods. By the time of the reform of the currency there was a whole settlement of 352 families— 1,150 persons— and there were 156 con­ cerns employing 1,470 people. Altogether in Kaufbeuren and another district, Marktoberdorf, where Sudeten glassworkers had settled, there were now 5,892 of them at work. Currency reform, however, seemed to have sealed the doom of Neugablonz; it was something like the crisis in old Gablonz in the slump period of the early 1930’s when no one could be persuaded to buy such superfluous objects as glass buttons or beads. Then, magically as it seemed, in the autumn of 1949 American buyers showed interest, and by the end of the year they had ordered wares from Neugablonz to the value of $39,452. From this time onwards there has been no turning back and the new settlement has attracted an everincreasing number of Sudeten German workers. By the middle of 1951 there were 855 families established in the pine forest near Kaufbeuren, and 3,400 people working mainly in the glass home industry; during that year the latter exported to the value of over $5 million. Neugablonz had thus become a factor of importance for the Bavarian economy, and the government of Bavaria decided to spend 2 million D.M. on building a new glass factory there, while the town of Kaufbeuren provided the building for a primary school. Swiss donors paid for a Catholic and Old Catholic church to be built, while American money paid for a Lutheran church. Production and exports have in­ creased steadily; in 1953 exports were worth over $10 million and in 1954 still more than this. A new township of 7,200 inhabitants has sprung up with streets named after the old ones in Bohemia, but with a particularly smart cinema of the newest kind. Kaufbeuren itself is swollen with Sudeten Germans who work in Neugablonz. There are, in fact, some 9,000 skilled Sudeten Germans at work there now, some in concerns which produce metal jewellery. In all 180 firms deal with the export trade of Neugablonz, which has cut out the products of old Gablonz throughout the non-Communist world. Indeed anyone who remembers the plight of the little

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home industries round Gablonz in Czech, or before that, in Austrian times, when any depression of world trade reduced the glassworkers to penury, is bound to reflect upon the advantages of the new, much more favourable site with better communications. He will also be reminded of the strange advantage enjoyed by so much of German industry, which having been destroyed in the air war, has now started afresh with new instruments and modem plant. T he establishment of many new concerns has been facili­ tated in the general view by the vigour and determination of the East Germans and Sudeten Germans.1 Though some West Germans reject it, it is a widely accepted opinion that these other Germans, who have often come from a harder climate and a poorer soil and from more backward conditions, are more industrious and more modest in their requirements than are the Bavarians or Rhinelanders. Certainly in Eastern Germany labour was in a weaker position than in the great industrial areas of Western Germany. In addition to this most of the immigrants, precisely because they had to begin again from nothing worked 'all out' with desperate determina­ tion whenever they had the chance. T he Silesian on Lake Constance is only one example of an exiled employer who knew that his people would work as long hours as he chose. Often one finds a new suburban settlement where the refugee inhabitants have built their houses in their spare time although they were working full time all day.3 T he better ^age and sex structure of the immigrant population also helps to explain the astonishing vigour it has shown. As the years have passed intermarriage, instead of being almost taboo, has increased between West Germans and immigrants, partly because the latter, unless elderly, quickly tend to feel settled in the west, but also because the westerners have come to consider a Silesian or East Prussian husband or wife as a gauge of industry and Tüchtigkeit. Before 1950 the immigrants were often obliged super­ ficially to accept a humbler station than that which they regarded as their due; this made them unwilling to marry ‘ See Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge, Kriegsgefangene, p. 3s and passim. ‘ The first example which comes to my mind is in a suburb of Wiesbaden built by Sudeten Germans.

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into the ‘native’ circles with which they came into contact and unable to marry into those to which they felt that they belonged. On the part of the West Germans there was a certain apprehension as to what these uprooted people might come to. But by 1950 such doubts were being resolved. Dr. Valentin Müller has collected interesting evidence of how immigrant parents in Lower Saxony have struggled to provide for their children’s further education,1 and all the evidence has shown that, contrary to expectation, juvenile delinquency has been less rather than more among the immigrants. Since 1950, at all events, intermarriage between ’natives’ and immigrants has increased fairly steadily.3 Fur­ ther, the birth-rate of the immigrant population has remained higher than that of the natives.3 Families in the Rhineland, like their French neighbours, had often kept down the num­ ber of their children partly to avoid a further division of their very small farms.4 But if, one fine day, a daughter of theirs married a man from Silesia she now became likely to be made the mother of four children rather than two. Statistics, it is true, tell a less dramatic story than that con­ veyed by the personal impressions one gains or the common talk which one hears. According to Dr. Oberländer’s speech in the big debate in the Bundestag on 23 September 1954 on the integration of the refugees,5 only 5 per cent, of the total number of entrepreneurs in Western Germany were Vertriebene although the latter (without the Zugewanderte) formed just over 17 per cent, of the whole population at the time. A ll the Sudeten German efforts had not yet made more difference than this. As for unemployment, although it had at first been the fate of so many exiles, the percentage of unemployed German immigrants has declined fairly steadily since the birth of the Federal Republic. It is, of course, necessary to compare the 1 In Durchbruch zu neuem Denken, pp. 58 ff. * In 1950 so-6 per cent, of all marriages in the Federal Republic were intermarriages between natives and immigrants; in 1951, ss-i; in 195s, s s -3. •In 1953 the birth-rate per 1,000 for Vertriebene was 17-8; for Zugewan­ derte, 19-6; for the Federal Republic as a whole, 15*5. N.B. A child counts as a refugee if its father was a refugee and as ‘native* if its father was a ‘native’ . 4 See below, p. 167. •See and Bundestag, 44th session, p. 1073. Actually 7 per cent, is the figure usually given in this context.

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figures of unemployed Einheimische and Vertriebene at the same time of year, although the number of unemployed Vertriebene has sometimes diminished at a period of seasonal increase, e.g. in January 1954. But if we consider the best time of year, that is 30 September, in 1954, we shall find that only 25*4 per cent, of all the unemployed in the Federal Republic were Vertriebene whereas five years earlier the percentage was 35*5 and one year earlier it was 28 per cent. More than half the unemployment on 30 September 1954 — 428,837 out of 822,500 people— was reckoned to be struc­ tural, while 178,005 were considered not really fit for work.1 O f the structurally impeded mass of unemployed, a high proportion is accounted for by exiles who are still marooned in villages in Schleswig-Holstein or in camps. There is every reason to suppose that, as dwellings are completed, structural unemployment w ill continue to decline, and, with it, the still disproportionate share of unemployment among the East and Sudeten Germans. In fact by the autumn of 1954 there was already a shortage of metal-workers and also of domestic servants. Tw o years earlier, Dr. Reinhold Nimptsch, a specialist on housing and labour questions and one of the economists who had con­ tributed to the Sonne Report, had insisted that Western Germany would be seriously short of skilled labour by the time she had raised and equipped the new divisions she was to contribute to the defence of the west.9 In the autumn of 1954 employers were thinking in terms of this equipment, and there was talk of importing at least seasonal labour from Italy. In the debate in the Bundestag on 23 September the spokesmen of the Vertriebene protested against a facile assumption that their integration was as near completion as the nascent labour shortage would seem to suggest. There was, indeed, a misleading contradiction and a half-concealed 11= nicht oder kaum noch Arbeitsverwendbar’ . It should be noted that the Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung, no. 4, p. 35g, considers that these figures slightly underestimate structural employment and slightly overestimate the number of unemployable people. The figures themselves derive from the Amtliche Nachrichten der Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsvermittlung und Arbeits­ losenversicherung, no. 11, »5 November 1954. * M itteilung des Wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Instituts der Gewerkschaften (Bund Verlag, Cologne), no. 10. October 195t.

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conflict between the condition of industry and the problems of those who were trying to resettle the refugees who were still in the camps. An excellent article by Kurt Döring, dated Hanover, 9 February, and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 10 February 1955, throws light upon the paradox (and the conflicts) involved in the integration of the expelled Germans into the West German economy. It describes how in 1954, as part of an attempt on the part of the Lower Saxon authorities to resettle unemployed Vertriebene within the Land itself, about 1,800 of them were recommended by the local authorities to the new Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg. T he 1,800 had been living mostly in camps in the Kreise of Uelzen and Lüneburg, regions officially known as the 'economic deficit areas’ 1 of Lower Saxony, where at the end of 1954 there were still 27,000 Unemployed but employable male Vertriebene. Of the 1,800 the Volkswagen factory took on roughly half, who thereupon expected to find themselves housed in Wolfsburg. But accommodation in this town, which is still mostly under construction, was not yet available, and the Volkswagen factory, which is able to pay well, would have taken labour from elsewhere if these men had not been ready to begin work at once. Consequently they were dumped in an old munition factory in a pine forest (again) half an hour’s drive from Wolfsburg (buses provided) for six months until the flats there should be ready. Although they had been warned, most of them were bitterly disappointed. Though they earned quite well, about 100 marks a week, they grumbled over everything in the improvised camp in the munition factory, in particular that they had tb pay rent to live there; yet this was indispensable, for the Lower Saxon authorities had had to pay nearly 500,000 D.M. to make the camp habitable.2 In the course of 1955 it w ill no doubt all work itself out, for the Wolfsburg Volkswagen factory intends to take on 1,600 resettled workers in all, and their flats in the town w ill be ready by then. Difficulties about these flats are also to be expected, for men who have lived in camps for 1 Wirtschaftliche Passivräume. *Camp inmates are always charged a small sum for rent if they are earning at all.

INTEGRATION UNDER THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC

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years resent paying a fair proportion of their earnings in rent, and miss the odd occupations which are possible in camp, such as improvised gardening or the keeping of an animal. T h e provision of labour for the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg was the first Lower Saxon attempt at internal resettlement, that is resettlement within the same Land. Internal resetdement [writes Herr Döring] is no easy matter. If in theory the idea of providing work where there are most unemployed refugees seems best, in practice such attempts are often more costly. For a long dme now the unemployed have been moved to the place where there is work. . . . Lower Saxony made its first attempt [at internal resettlement] rather more than two years ago in the Osnabrück area when a steel foundry there needed hands. But the temporary set-back in steel-production robbed that attempt of its efficacy. . . . This year [1955] another 500 refugees are to be moved to industrial and commercial centres; in their case, too, temporary accommodation will be necessary.1 These are problems familiar to any student of large-scale unemployment and of possible remedies. Western Germany has, however, had to face intense unemployment among large masses of uprooted and indignant or exasperated people. Even today, when labour is short in the metal industry, and when the revival of military service is likely to make it still shorter, the problem of the Vertriebene left in the camps, who are, as Jaksch said in the Bundestag debate, obliged to admire the miracle of German recovery through barrack windows, is both tragic and critical. Herr Döring’s article touched upon the troubles which arise when men who have lived in camps for five years are brought back to normal life by degrees. But for the camp-dwellers over 45— and even if many of them are escaping as younger relatives acquire work and a flat, their number inevitably tends to grow year by year— there is very little hope of ever finding work; by now they have probably lost their skill as well as their inclination to live a normal life or even in some cases to live at all.2 1 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 10 February 1955. *The Bavarian authorities have collected significant statistics about the suicide rate among the immigrants; it continued to rise slightly from 1949 to

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On 23 September 1954 Dr. Oberländer estimated the num­ ber of all kinds of refugees, including bombed-out people and foreigners living 'permanently*1 in camps at about 290,000— no exact or differentiated figures were likely to be available before spring 1955. By the end of the year he hoped to have moved some 30,000 people in Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, and Bavaria away from the worst camps. During 1955 he hoped that 10,000 new dwellings would accommodate 40,000 more; thus by the beginning of 1956 there seem likely still to be over 200,000 'chronic* campdwellers.2 This problem of the camps and their inhabitants is closely associated with that social group among the Vertriebene which is most difficult for Western Germany to absorb, the social group of the peasant farmers, many of whom have lived in camps more or less since their arrival. Among those expelled from East Germany and the Sudeten German districts the rural population formed a relatively high pro­ portion: Eastern Germany had been largely agricultural in character, and the Czechs, while keeping back the German miners, had been particularly anxious to expel all German holders of land in their country. It was relatively easy to find work straight away for the, roughly, 450,000 agricultural labourers who arrived, and, of course, for farmers who were willing to be taken on as such. It happened from time to time that a farmer from the east married a farmer's widow or daughter in the west. It has been seen that as time went on it became more respectable for a 'native* woman to marry an immigrant; it was also advantageous since he received special credits. Another possibility for the exiled farmers was created by the agrarian reform which was partially instigated by the Occupying Powers, particularly the British;9 in 195* (indusive) in spite of the general economic improvement: further, it was higher in the country than in towns which always provide more possibility of finding work. See Nahm, p. 9. 1 Permanently, as opposed to the inmates of the so-called Durchgangslager in which those arriving from the Soviet zone are placed for purposes of registration, even if work for them can be made immediately available. • * j September 1954, and Bundestag, 44th session, p. *075. • British Military Government made 150 hectares the upper limit for landed estates in Schleswig-Holstein (see Piettre, pp. 345 ff.). Each Land introduced its own land reform but they all agreed on the 100 hectares upper limit.

INTEGRATION UNDER THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC

167

accordance with this, estates were limited to 100 hectares, land in excess of this being expropriated against compensa­ tion. Up to the beginning of 1954 this law, which since 10 August 1949 had been carried out in conjunction with the Flüchtlingssiedlungsgesetz of that date, had made available about 366,000 hectares of cultivable land, of which 127,562 hectares— little over a third— went to farmer refugees.1 Apart from the resistance with which land reform was sometimes met, its effect was bound to be insignificant. For Western Germany was a country of small peasant holdings and few large estates at all comparable with those which formerly existed east of the Elbe. And just as the peasant farmers from the east were the least adaptable immigrants, the peasant farmers in the west were the most inflexible of the Westerners. Many of their holdings, small though they were, still consisted of scattered strips. It is estimated that at the end of 1953 some 16 million acres of farm land were in need of consolidation into larger holdings: in Bavaria, indeed, about 75 per cent, of the land still requires consolida­ tion.2 Since the Federal and Land Governments (except the few in which the Social Democrats had something to say) were ostentatiously ‘liberal’ in economic policy, it was con­ sidered impossible to exercise any coercion, and the business of Flurbereinigung, or the concentration of farm holdings, could only be arranged, with a little persuasion, by common consent. When a village was, after many delays, induced to agree to be rationalized in this way, it was sometimes possible to win an extra holding or so for a farmer exile. Yet, since the villagers regarded the reorganization of their land with deep suspicion and were always ready to suppose that it would leave them worse off, it was a very tricky business to bring in farmers from outside. As in so many other countries the farmers had a way of exerting influence out of proportion with their numbers or wealth, influence which seemed to count double in terms of political or local government votes. Since no year passed without elections in some Land or other, 1 Statement by Oberländer in Deutschland im Wiederaufbau, which came out at the end of 1954. In May 1953 the Flüchtlingssiedlungsgesetz, like all ad hoc legislation of this kind, was incorporated in the Bundesvertriebenengesetz. ‘ Information received from British High Commission authorities.

M

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the politicians at almost any time were anxious not to lose the farmers’ vote by pressing too hard against the instinctive defences of the western peasantry. In addition to the land gained by the limitation of big estates (other than those needed for technical reasons) and the rationalization of small ones, there was a little waste land which could be brought under cultivation; there were also a few great open spaces like the Lüneburger Heide which had served for military purposes, like Salisbury Plain, but which it was bound to be extremely expensive to convert into agricultural land. Further, there were regions such as the ’Red Zone’ in Rhineland-Palatinate (which had suffered exceptionally from damage during the war) and neglected areas near the frontier of the Soviet zone, both of which could be more intensively worked; in these latter areas a high proportion of Vertriebene had, of course, settled at the beginning.1 From these various sources a few more farms might in time be scraped together. Thus the resettlement of the refugee farmers proved a formidable business. By 1 January 1954, out of the roughly 294.000 exiled farmer families, only 52,732— involving some 210.000 persons— had been settled on 292,128 hectares2 of land; of these 52,732, 28,506 had received newly available land (Neusiedlungen), 13,605 had acquired farms on a long lease, and 10,621 farms had been bought. During 1954 it was planned to settle another 16,381 peasant-farmer families in one way or another on approximately 92,000 hectares, and in 1955 about 24,000 more. T he average cost of each such settle­ ment was reckoned to be about 30,000 D.M. Up to 1 January 1954 the Federal and Land Governments had together spent 766*7 million D.M. on the settlement of immigrants on the land, 457*4 million D.M. being provided by the Federal Government partly from the funds made available through the Lastenausgleich.s 1 Oberländer to and Bundestag, 44th session, »$ September 1954, p. «075. ‘ This figure was stated by Dr. Oberländer in Deutschland im Wiederaufbau which statistically covers the third quarter of 1954. A larger area is sometimes claimed. On the other hand a Socialist refugee deputy, Merten, objected to Dr. Oberländer’s claims in the debate on S3 September 1954 that ten times as much land had been lost for building purposes, streets, or Allied military use. Merten also stated that 300,000 people left the land every year, 85 per cent, of them being refugees. ‘ These figures occur in the same statement.

THE QUESTION OF THE GERMAN FOOD SUPPLY

l6g

The political leaders of the Vertriebene complain that the Government’s programme thus provides only for the settle­ ment on the land of some 90,000 families by the end of 1955, that is— if all goes well— of less than a third of the exiled peasant farmers. T he rest have either become farm labourers or have gone into the towns, or else they are rotting in some camp. Moreover, more than 40 per cent.1 of the newly acquired forms are under 2 hectares in area and therefore not viable, compelling the former to earn in other ways.3 Even so, in view of the obstacles, the number of peasant refugees who have been settled on the land in Western Germany, if less sensational than the number of easterners absorbed into industry,9 is not unimpressive. They have brought with them, in addition to their natural diligence, certain valuable breeding skills which were more highly specialized in the old eastern Germany, especially in East Prussia.

l8 T H E Q U E S T I O N OF TH E GERMAN FOOD SUPPLY the Germans first realized that they were to be deprived of their territories east of the Oder-Neisse line at least for a time, apart from any other consideration the thing seemed unbearable in terms of their food supply alone. In 1913, they insisted, with a population of 67 million, there had W

hen

1This, again, is Dr. Oberländer’s figure; his critics regard it as too low. * These very small farms are usually referred to as Nebenerwerbsstellen or bäuerliche Aufbaustellen. In the Bundestag on 23 September 1954 Dr. Ober­ länder stated that 60 to 65 per cent, of the refugees’ settlements (Flüchtlingssieldlungsstellen) achieved between 1 July 1953 and 30 June 1954 must be regarded as such. In the 1954 settlement programme about 80 per cent, of the new settlements and about 5s per cent, of the farms bought by, or let to, refugees were likely to be on the same small scale. See Bundestag report for that day, p. 2077. 'I t has, incidentally, been impossible to obtain up-to-date statistics as to the number of East and Sudeten German refugees absorbed into industry. T he last compilations were based on the census of 1950; the next are to be available in die autumn of 193$.

17 0

GERM ANY*S EASTERN NEIGHBOURS

been 52 hectares of cultivable land to every 100 inhabitants and the country had been 80 per cent, self-sufficient. In 1922 with 62 million there had been 46 hectares1* of cultivable land per 100 inhabitants and self-sufficiency had been reduced to 75 per cent, rising to 85 per cent, in 1938.* Now for over 68 million in the four occupied zones there were 30 hectares of cultivable land per 100 inhabitants and self-sufficiency would be reduced to 60 per cent. It was thus impossible, they urged, for the German economy to be viable without the eastern territories. T he same thought seems to have been uppermost in many British and American minds when the war was over; it has been seen that the waning of Churchill’s enthusiasm during 1945 for a Polish frontier on the Oder was considerably affected by the question of how the Germans were to be fed; In the abnormal years immediately following the war the Occupying Powers were much harassed as to ways and means of providing food for the native and refugee population in their zones. T he problem, we know, was most acute for the British who were responsible for the half-dead industrial regions of Rhineland and Ruhr and for the exiles from the east who were crowded into the comfortless countryside of SchleswigHolstein and Lower Saxony: in Britain itself food was in short supply at the time. It has already been stated8 that, certainly after the com­ petition of Russian and American corn became intense in the last decade of the nineteenth century, East German agriculture had been in considerable difficulty; it had become heavily indebted and dependent upon generous state sub­ sidies. Although the specialized breeding of cattle and horses had developed to very high levels in East Prussia, although East Germany’s fodder and manure and its cultivation of seeds— especially of seed potatoes to which the Silesian climate was favourable *— were important factors in German 1Some German sources say 46, others 41. •This figure is variously given as 83 or 85 by statisticians, see Economic Bulletin for Europe, vol. I, no. 3, p. 41 which uses the 85 figure. It should be noted that 1938 was a peak year for Germany, though not elsewhere. See Piettre, p. «8: ‘Choisir pour indice de référence internationale l ’année 1938, c’est prendre pour base en Allemagne un sommet, ailleurs une depression.’ • See above, pp. 14, 17. * Seraphim, Oder und Neisse, p. 54.

THE QUESTION OF THE GERMAN FOOD SUPPLY

171

farming as a whole, East German agriculture1 has at no period in this century been a very great asset to Germany except in mercantilist terms. It is certain that the eastern provinces with their predominantly agricultural character helped Germany to depend less upon imported food; they did so, however, without satisfying many special needs which could not be satisfied, quite apart from imports, by the rest of the country. In 19362*Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line, with 14 per cent, of the whole country’s population and nearly 25 per cent, of its territory, had contributed 23 per cent.2 of German agricultural production, nearly all of which appears to have been consumed within the then Germany. T he areas now separated from Germany then exported to what is now Western Germany (with the Saar) and the German Demo­ cratic Republic well over half the meat, sugar, butter, and cheese which they produced,4 but they consumed a high proportion of their own production of potatoes and coarse grains. It should also be observed that Western Germany, the territory now comprising the Federal Republic, plus the Saar, in spite of its predominantly industrial character, contributed 51 per cent, of the whole country’s agricultural production.5 Indeed a study of inter-regional trade in pre-war Germany reveals Western Germany as more self-sufficient than is popularly supposed and the ‘Separated Areas’ as rather more dependent upon Western Germany than Western Germany upon them.6 If this was essentially the case with 1 The forests in the territories east of Oder and Ncisse were extensive, but again the rest of Germany was not poor in forests. •T h e year 1936 is taken because after this the German economy was increasingly geared for war. Even in 1936 the German economy was beginning to be affected by Hitler’s military preparations. •Sec Economic Bulletin for Europe, vol. I, no. 3, p. 25. According to Seraphim, ‘betrug der Stärkewert der ostdeutschen Bodenproduktion 24*3% des Wertes der gesamtdeutschen Bodenerzeugung’ (Wirtschaft Ostdeutsch­ lands, p. ss). 4 Less than five-eighths, two-thirds, and five-eighths respectively (see Economic Bulletin for Europe, vol. I, no. 3, p. 30). The Saar is here included in Western Germany in pre-war, but not in post-war, statistics. •ibid. p. 25. •T h e cost to these areas of their separation from Germany will be dealt with in a later chapter. ’Separated Areas’ is the term used by the E.C.E.

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regard to industry1 and not agriculture, the position in 1936 is nevertheless shown to have been very much the same after H itler was in power as that over which Professor Volz had lamented.2 T he export of East German agricultural products to Western Germany was not particularly fostered;3 in other words Eastern Germany was still neglected from a mercantilist point of view, although its value to Germany was great only in mercantilist terms. T he distances alone from East Prussia and farthest Pomerania to Western or southern Germany were so great that the Eastern Germans were obliged to depress their costs of production proportionately,4 one reason for low wages and emigration to the west. It should be added that, among the eastern provinces, Silesia, and especially Lower Silesia on the left bank of the Oder, was by far the best off both with regard to its position, its climate, and the fertility of its soil; it needs really to be placed in a separate category. It is true that East German agriculture had, in the view of many people, one important economic advantage, especially from the point of view of the growing of corn. T his lay in the big estates which made better units of production than the small scattered farms of the south and the west.5 But the intimate association of the owners of the big estates with a Bismarckian order of things created greater political tension than the extra production was worth. For it was this tension which broke Brüning and the Weimar Republic and finally induced the big landowners and the Army, united in the person of Hindenburg, to nominate H itler as Chancellor of the Reich. Even supposing that the lost eastern provinces had been more prolific and less preoccupying, the conception of national self-sufficiency, once the post-war food shortages were ended, seemed to have become obsolete. Western Germany rapidly developed a surprising capacity for local production,4 and «East German farm produce not unnaturally found its best market in Berlin which contained a population nearly half as big as that of the now separated areas at that time. *The question of industry beyond the Oder and Neisse will also be dealt with below. See ch. *3. I* See above, p. 35. «Seraphim, Oder und Neisse, p. 49. *See ibid. pp. 48-49. * Economic Bulletin for Europe, vol. I. no. 3, p. 45.

THE QUESTION OF THE GERMAN FOOD SUPPLY

173

Dr. Seraphim’s pronouncement that it was Utopian to suppose that a more highly industrialized Germany could live with­ out the territories incorporated by Poland was already out of date by the time it was published in 1949.1 T he evolution of Federal Germany's food supply, after the West German economy began its recovery in 1949, has certainly been unexpectedly satisfactory. In spite of the predominance of small farms and the frequency of their ‘parcellization’, the productivity of the soil, naturally higher than that of the lost territories in the east, has been increased to an astonishing extent. T he reform of the currency reduced the indebtedness and increased the profits of farmers, and, in addition to this, long-term credit was provided for agri­ culture, partly from E.R.P. counterpart funds, at favourable rates of interest. This has induced, for example, an increase of the numbers of tractors in use from roughly 103,000 early in 1950 to 300,000 in the middle of 1954.* A steep but steady increase in West German crop yields, which are now among the highest in Europe, is held to be due most of all to a very great use of fertilizers.* T he Government has done every­ thing possible to encourage their distribution by the manipu­ lation of prices and the subsidizing of certain types. Further, excellent advice has been made available to farmers. But while the production of grain crops has become more intense, it accounted for only about 12-13 per cent, of the total receipts of farmers in 1953-4, while dairy-products, eggs, and pigs accounted for roughly 50 per cent. Here the activities of the integrated refugees, working away on their Nebenerwerbsstellen, may be regarded as a contributory factor. Thus the pattern of the German food supply has shifted slightly since the war. Potatoes, sugar, and milk are ’ Seraphim, Oder und Neisse, p. 55. Dr. Seraphim, very naturally, took the dismantling of industry too seriously, but that was not his chief consideration. ■ Information received from British High Commission authorities, according to which, by the end of 195*, the volume of E.R.P. counterpart funds which had been diverted to West German agriculture was about 340 million D.M. ■ The increase in crop yields may also be attributable in part to the influence of immigrant farmers from the east who had to learn intensive methods in order to produce what they needed in poorer soil and altogether more difficult conditions more cheaply.

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plentiful and fats no longer present a serious problem. More butter is being produced— there was even an exceptional moment in 1954 when a little butter was available for export — and the consumption of margarine has gone up sharply while the rising pig population is also increasing the supply of edible fats. Home meat supplies are fair, with plenty of pork and a shortage— though not a very grave one— of beef. There is also a new demand for fruit, especially southern fruit, which can only be supplied from abroad. As prosperity has increased, people have spent a good deal more on food, that is to say that high prices have not deterred them; with more eggs and cheese available and a relatively greater increase in the cost of meat than of other foods, the Germans in 1954 were eating a little less meat than before the war but more cheese and eggs. Instead of the pre-war fat gap, the most serious gap in the internal West German food supply today is in corn grains, and, in particular, in wheat. This is perhaps the logical, though not necessarily unfortunate, result of the loss of the predominantly agricultural and corn-growing territories now incorporated in Poland.1 Their former German inhabitants now in the west, in so far as they have avoided industrializa­ tion themselves, are producing milk, butter, and eggs on tiny farms instead of growing com on medium or large ones. But many of the East German peasants have of course been drawn into West German industry. And to feed the new, more thickly populated and more intensely industrialized Federal Republic of today the Germans depend upon considerable grain imports to be paid for with their ever-growing industrial exports. In 1954 they imported wheat from the United States, Canada, Argentina, and France, and from Argentina also barley, oats, maize, and a smaller quantity of rye, as is shown in the following table. Actually the West German authori­ ties paid out relatively few dollars for food because much of their food-buying was done ‘through E.P.U. or bilateral off­ set account countries’.2 For the future they are planning, 1 Though, in fact, those territories formerly supplied the rest of Germany rather with meat, butter, sugar, and cheese. * M o n th ly R e p o r t of the Bank deutscher Länder, Frankfurt, January 1955. p. 41. T he whole of the article entitled ’The Supply of Farm Products in »954-5’ »» very useful.

THE QUESTION OF THE GERMAN FOOD SUPPLY

175

IMPORTS OF CORN, JANUARY-DECEMBER 19 5 4

(000 m etr.

(1000 m etr.

tons)

tons)

W heat

Total . . . o f which from B ulgaria. France . Rumania Sweden . Turkey . Hungary. U .S .S .R .. . Tunisia . Syria U .S.A . . . Canada . Argentina Australia

• 40-3 • 3805 . 61-6 . 242*1 . 277*0 48*2 • 48-5 i '5 . 100*7 • 776-9 . 623*8 • 594*8 . 161*8

R ye

Total . . o f which from Netherlands. Sweden . Turkey . . U .S .S .R .. . Algeria . U .S.A . . . Canada . Argentina Denmark France . .

• 176*5 . . •

1*0 8*5 27*6 57*9

1*6

9*9

2*8 62*6 i*i 3*5

B arley

•

•

#

# # #

#

00 o P ow szech n e, 4 January 1949. »Not highly developed (see Seraphim, W irtscha ft O std eu tsch la n d s, p. 39). »According to Seraphim, W irtscha ft O std eu tsch la n d s, p. 36, between the wars Upper Silesia produced about 75 per cent, of Germany’s zinc and about 40 per cent, of her lead. »The largest near Czestochowa, but some being also near Kielce. * Rochlin, p. 75.

THE INDUSTRIAL ASPECT: ( l )

POLAND

241

of the latter being in the region of Klodzko (Glatz). A ll such concerns, having been German, fell into the hands of the new Polish state. Finally the most revolutionary geographical change which gave Poland nearly 500 kilometres of coast,1 instead of the ‘Corridor’ (140 kilometres of coast) with the one port of Gdynia which the Poles had so eagerly built, gave her also the two big ports of Gdarisk and Szczecin. Since the Treaty of Versailles the Free City of Danzig had been united with Poland in a customs and diplomatic union which had given the Polish representative there a special position. But Szczecin was, one might say, pure gain, providing a cheap route for Polish coal to Sweden and for Swedish ore to Silesia up the Oder. T his great river, which flows from Upper Silesia to Szczecin, was a more useful waterway, in better condition,2 than the Vistula, and it was important to the Poles that the port as well as the river should be in their control; just as the Yugoslavs insisted that Trieste was far more important to them than to Italy, the Poles pointed out that Germany had furthered the commerce of Hamburg and Bremen rather than that of Stettin.3 A t the end of the war, however, the gain of Szczecin with Swinoujscie (Swinemünde), was something hypothetical, for the Germans destroyed the port as completely as they could — out of 156 cranes of all kinds, 153 were wrecked;4 the de­ struction of wharves, bridges, railways was on much the same scale. A t Gdaiisk, and Gdynia too, the destruction, thanks to Allied air raids and the final military operations, was very great. At the end of the war the Polish ports were rather projects to be planned than useful possessions. A Three-Year Plan was accepted by the Polish Provisional Assembly on 21 September 1946 and came into operation in the following January. Although, it has been seen, it was essentially a recovery plan, it was intended also to prepare the long hoped-for industrialization of Poland: this prepara­ tion, moreover, logically involved the development of heavy industry at the expense, for the time being, of the consumer 1Though practically less than this since the coast was exceedingly jagged. 'I t needed to be deepened. 'Jordan, pp. 88 ff. 4 Malcuzyriski, p. 34.

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goods produced by agriculture and light industry. Coal­ mining was given priority over other industries because Poland’s coal resources must be rapidly brought into play, not only to provide the power basis for the rest of industry but also in order to be exported and thereby revive foreign trade. German-Polish controversy rages around the contribution of the formerly German territories to the industrial recovery and development of post-war Poland. German writers love to compare the inter-war or even war-time production and technical level of these lost regions with their miserable per­ formance immediately after the war; they seem to attribute their plight in that period not so much to overwhelming destruction, but rather to the inherent incompetence of the primitive Poles and the cutting of former or ’natural’ com­ munications with the rest of Germany and with the factories from which east German industry had formerly obtained its spare parts.1 Poles, on the other hand, are full of the new opportunities and the great industrial role which their country offers to territories which played an insignificant part within Germany; Polish statisticians like to compare the dead period after the war with the final achievements of the ThreeYear Plan. For on the whole, the period of the first plan— and the year 1948 in particular— was a good one for Poland. Com­ munism was still diluted with more liberal notions, the country was still free to develop its trade with Scandinavia and the west, and there was much genuine enthusiasm for reconstruction and the full exploitation of its new possi­ bilities. Indeed, officially the Three-Year Plan was said to have been fulfilled in two years and ten months, that is by November 1949, though some foreign observers accepted this claim with reserve.2 ’O f the total investments made by the state, the western territories received 26 per cent, in 1946, about 32 per cent, in 1947, and about 38 per cent, in 1948’; their share ’in the 1 Seraphim, W irtschaft O std eu tsch la n d s, p. 93. *L a P o lo g n e , p. 43. E.C.E. considered Poland’s industrial targets to have been ‘substantially surpassed’ (see E co n o m ic Survey o f E u r o p e sin ce th e W ar, pp. * 3-* 4).

THE INDUSTRIAL ASPECT! ( i )

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243

total production of socialized industry amounted to 20*7 per cent, in 1949/ 1 T his share in fact included a third of the hard coal, nearly all the lignite, and over half the coke produced by Poland in that year. T he former Linke-Hoffmann works of Breslau had been reconstructed by the state as the Pafawag concern of Wroclaw, and this no doubt made the chief con­ tribution to the production by the western territories of 68 per cent, of Poland's coal trucks in 1949. Several other characteristic products of Lower Silesia stood high upon the list, such as wireless sets, paper, and bricks.3 Great efforts were also made to reconstruct Szczecin which, with Swinoujscie, handled a mere 884,000 tons in 1947, but 4,860,000 tons in 1949.3 Gdansk and Gdynia, which were formed into one com­ plementary unit, actually handled three times as much ton­ nage as Szczecin in 1949 in spite of the destruction to which they too had been subject. T he elaboration of the Six-Year Plan, drafted in 1949, was such that even its chief objectives were not formulated as legislation until the decree of 21 July 1950, nearly seven months after the plan had come into operation: at the time of writing this plan still had eight months to run. T he SixYear Plan, according to which between 20 and 25 per cent, of the national product was to be invested,4 had a number of interwoven ambitions. Taking for granted the socialization of industry which was all but complete9 it aimed at increasing the industrial production of Poland by some 150 per cent, by the end of 1955, through the modernization of the mines and ports and the construction of new power stations and steel mills: it was, of course, clear that most of these new con­ glomerations comprised long-term investments which would bear relatively little fruit within the short period of six years. T he naturally high birth-rate * together with the mechaniza­ tion of agriculture were expected to solve the problem of l G ospodarka P la n ow a , no. 6, 1951. p. 5. Cf. Seraphim who says «5-4 per cent, without naming his source (W irtsch a ft O std eu tsch la n d s, p. 7$). * ibid. p. 5, where it is stated that the voivodeship of Wroclaw contributed nearly 13 per cent, of the industrial production of the whole country. •ibid . p. 5. * E co n o m ic Survey o f E u r o p e sin ce th e W ar, p. :■■■ -

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advantages would be disseminated through the world. T h e supersession of coal and its products by nuclear energy is, according to the experts, unlikely to make itself felt at all decisively during the present century: until then, therefore, the organization of the resources of Upper Silesia w ill be a matter of importance to human society.

26 T H E NEW M I N O R I T I E S : (1) GERMANS IN POLAND A b o u t the Germans who were left behind in Czechoslovakia

and the new Poland, it should be said at the outset of this chapter that it is impossible to make exact statements. Official claims by Czech and Polish authorities have been tendentious all along, and those made by the Landsmannschaften, when they had come into existence, were equally so. T h e most intelligent and fortunate foreign journalist could only gain some local impression, while the individual Germans who have arrived in Western Germany periodically because they have escaped, or been helped by the Red Cross to rejoin their families, have on the whole been able to speak only of their own experience, limited as it was by the restrictions of a police state. Moreover, such Germans, if they have not been afraid to speak,1 have tended to exaggerate German sufferings. T he state of affairs has been further obscured by those more or less bilingual Germans in the West Slav countries who preferred to conceal their German nationality at least until the early 1950’s. Some of the most reliable information has come through German Catholic or Protestant Church repre­ sentatives who have somehow kept in touch with what remained of their former congregations. Once people in W est Germany were able to send parcels to Poland, a surprisingly frank correspondence sprang up in the letters of thanks; here »They were mostly forbidden by the Polish authorities to spread evil reports abroad.

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again there was an obscurity, for there can be little doubt that many Wasser-Polacken made a great deal of their German loyalties in order to qualify for gift parcels. U ntil at least 1950 the Germans in Poland remained un­ affected by the end of the Gomólka period during which they had not been recognized as citizens though some of them received their pensions.1 It has been seen that many were in labour camps, and many worked on state or co-operative farms often directly under the Russians. A German girl, who came to Western Germany in 1952, had worked on a collective farm in the Slawno (Schlawe) district of the voivodeship of Koszalin. T his farm was only handed over by the Russians to the Poles in 1951 ; 3 it was then organized as one of a group of sixteen interconnected co-operative farms which shipped grain for export from Derlowo (Rügenwalde). On this par­ ticular farm the 60 or 70 workers were all Germans3 over whom there was a German Communist bailiff or manager; the Polish director, who was a good deal more popular than the manager, lived in a villa near by. After the war a certain number of Germans were sent east­ wards into central Poland, textile workers, for instance, into the Lódz area where the German minority had been strong for many years. T he Polish authorities took pains to scatter the German communities except in the Walbrzych mining region. Pockets of Germans seem, however, to have remained as industrial workers in Katowice and as railwaymen still in state service in Bytom, the former frontier junction/ There were others who scraped together a living by doing odd jobs as carters or as porters at the stations. Although many Ger­ mans stayed in the neighbourhood of W roclaw5 few seem to have remained in the city itself, where one mostly heard Polish spoken with the accent of Lwów. But in any case 1 According to various witnesses. In this period the Germans had special papers with which to legitim ate themselves— except for those in Poznari, Lódz, Sec., they had of course never been Polish citizens. aTw o German girls who arrived in Communist Germany in 195a from a state farm at Modlikowice near Jelenia Gòra (Hirschbeig) in Lower Silesia said that this, too, was in Russian hands for five years. • T h e s e p e o p le w ere a llo w e d a g a rd e n a n d a fie ld to w o rk o n th e ir o w n .

4 Reported by someone who left there at the beginning of 1953. •In 1954 it was officially stated that there were 80,000 Germans in, and in the neighbourhood of, Wroclaw, presumably the voivodeship.

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German was not heard in the streets, where a Polish police­ man was likely to remonstrate. T h e totalitarian triumph of Communism in eastern Europe gradually transformed the status of the remnants of germanism in the Slav countries: between 1950 and 1954 great changes were effected. In the first place one should perhaps speak of the ideological revolution superimposed by Moscow. T his was evident in all branches of learning and education, and in none more strikingly than in the study and formula­ tion of history. T h e Polish school of historians was eminent. W ithin it until after 1950 there were two articulate schools of thought. On the one hand there were the Polish historians who came from former Congress Poland for whom Russia was the arch-enemy. They tended to emphasize the historical role of the Jagiellon dynasty and the mission of Poland, in conjunction with Lithuania, to civilize the Ukraine, keeping Muscovite savagery at bay. On the other hand the Polish historians from formerly Austrian or Prussian Poland saw the national enemy in Germany; to them the role of the medieval Piast kings, whose realms had stretched to the Oder, was the more important. T o them the loss of eastern Poland was less grievous, for they were the enthusiasts for the re­ covery of the territories east of the Oder: in other words, the early days of Polish resurgence after H itler emphasized the significance which they had attached to Polish history. Both schools of thought were united in regarding Polish civilization as essentially Roman Catholic and western. It was clearly unacceptable to the Russian Communists and especially to Stalin that young Poles should in future be imbued with thè traditional notions of Polish history which were clearly unshaken when the Polish historians assembled in congress in Wroclaw in the autumn of 1948. In July 1950 a. historical congress held in the same place undertook the Marxist revision of the accepted theories of Polish history and it was laid down that Polish enmity to Germany was based upon the brutal exploitation of the Polish proletariat by German Junkers and industrialists. But the Russians were not satisfied.1 They summoned a Marxist group of Polish *Ludat, pp. s6-*8; see also Elizabeth Valkenier, ‘Soviet Impact on Polish Post­ war Historiography, 1946-50’ , Journal of Central European Affairs, January

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historians to Moscow in October and provided them with the /scientific* interpretation of the history of Poland. They taught them that their resistance to the Germans had always been noble because it had been the resistance of an eastern people to western imperialists— Catholicism, it was implied, was something forced upon the Poles by the German con­ queror. When, however, the Polish chiefs had led expeditions against the Russians or Ukrainians, these had been the marauding aggression of a feudal class against other eastern peoples, the very ones to whom the Poles owed their own people’s civilization.1 A congress held at Otwock from 28 December 1951 to 8 January 1952, which a strong contingent of Russian historians attended, forced the Polish historians as a whole to accept the official Stalinist approach as expressed in these theories. A further conference in Wroclaw in the summer of 1953 was devoted to the history of Silesia. It did not add any novelty beyond the denigration of Korfanty as a capitalist tool and the conclusion that, since Silesia had become the industrial heart of a Poland striving after social­ ism, its former separatism (as embodied in Korfanty) was dead.2 One moral to be drawn from the new interpretation was that the Polish people had no quarrel with German workers, either those living in Poland or those beyond the Oder in the German Democratic Republic. Meanwhile the Government of the latter, in spite of strongly adverse sentiment on the part of the East Ger­ man population, had accepted the Oder-Neisse frontier at Zgorzelec on 6 July 1950. In the following December Presi­ dent Pieck paid an official visit to Warsaw. This was followed by the proclamation of March 1951 as a month of PolishGerman friendship and a return visit on 22 April by Bierut to Berlin— the official visits always involved inspections of factories and much mass parading. Apart from these cere­ monies it seemed fairly clear that the heads of state discussed how they were to carry out their orders from Moscow, which were based on two principles, viz. that German sentiment ‘ In 1951 a Polish-Soviet Institute was founded for the study of Polish history in relation to that o f Russia (see article in Glos Szczeciriski, 25 October *

953-

*Kwartalnik Historyczny, voi. ix, no. 4, p. 385.

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as a whole was a main interest of Soviet diplomacy and that since Germans everywhere tended to be industrious and skilled, all those in eastern Europe must be encouraged to work harder still in the economic interests of the Communist world. T h e next step in Poland was to reverse the ban upon the use of German in Poland, except in the voivodeships of Opole and Olsztyn, where, it was claimed, no Germans lived, so that to change the status quo would have been superfluous. T h e attitude of the authorities seemed, however, to betray the fear that the Upper Silesians and Masurians were less loyal to Poland than Polish patriots liked to assume; on the other hand the ban on German really affected the Polish­ speaking Upper Silesians and Masurians very little, whatever their sympathies. In fact after 1951 it does not seem to have been enforced at all strictly among the elder people, and the young people tended to find common interests in new mechanical gadgets, not caring in which language they dis­ cussed them.1 Elsewhere, for instance in Lower Silesia, Germans began to find conditions made normal. A German woman, daughter of a Walbrzych miner, was employed as a book-keeper in a state-owned shoe factory in Kamiennagóra (Landeshut) from 1949 until 1953; she was perfectly satisfied and only went away because all her relations were in Germany. From about 1950 onwards notices might be seen in German, among other languages, in some mines of the Walbrzych region; it was estimated by Church authorities a little later than this that there were about 13,000 German Protestants and about 7,000 German Catholics in this area.3 In the Kirchliche Ostnachrichten published by the Protestant Church in Berlin one observes that where a German church had to be abandoned in one place for lack of a pastor, from this time on there was quite as much chance of a disused German church being reopened, often with the help of a Polish pastor or priest. On the other hand the head of the Kirchendienst Ost announced regretfully that there were no *A young mechanic, who had lived as a Pole for many years in Mragowo (S en sbu rg) in the voivodeship of Olsztyn until August 1953, spoke in this

sense when he readied Western Germany. * Kirchliche Ostnachrichten, 18 December 1953, pp. a and 9. It is not likely that there was any great change here between 1950 and 1953.

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German pastors left in the lost German territories in A pril 1954 1 In 1951 a Communist weekly newspaper in German called the Arbeiterstimme made its appearance in Wroclaw. A t about the same time elementary schools for Germans began to open here and there, especially in Lower Silesia. These were mostly small primary schools with four classes and one teacher, but they were German schools, i.e. schools where teaching was nearly always by Germans in German, probably using textbooks from Soviet Germany. W ithin a few years some of these schools also provided evening classes for young people who had had no schooling in the years between 1945 and 1951. W hen in the autumn of 1954 a conference of teachers in the German schools was held in Wroclaw it was announced that there were 65 such schools in that voivodeship (of which about 40 per cent, were evening schools); in the whole country there were by then 160 German schools at which 230 German teachers taught. These German teachers were trained and supervised by Communist specialists; in the German evening schools many Poles taught. T he object of publishing the Arbeiterstimme and of open­ ing the German schools was certainly to conciliate the German working people and also to implement, in recognizing all over again the existence of a German minority, the nationalities policy of Lenin. In the U.S.S.R. the non-Russian nationalities had their press and their schools. T his was the Soviet concep­ tion of cultural autonomy which was in fact solely linguistic. T h e non-Russian press and schools were used to strengthen the political and economic hold of the central administration, and a similar course was now to be followed in Poland. In the spirit which had been imposed upon the historians the German-language press and schools were to teach the Germans in Poland to be good Communists; by forcing the Poles to accept these things they, too, were to be educated in the latest type of Marxism or Leninism or both. T h e Arbeiterstimme is a study in itself. Its contributors appear to be a handful of German Communists of long 1 Probst Kruska, speaking at Fulda, reported in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 5 A pril 1954.

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standing, who struggle obsequiously to pay sufficient homage to Russian achievement. Mother Russia is indeed the source of all inspiration and the goddess of peace, and even the key words in a crossword puzzle, or whatever it is, must be Russian names unpleasing to Poles and Germans alike. T h e Arbeiterstimme does not mock the authorities so saucily as the Polish press proper which tilts at bureaucrats and in­ efficiency unblushingly.1 But here, too, the reader discovers a gentle outburst in verse about the shirts one buys being too short.9 There are also many indications that the Germans in Poland fail to join in the various Communist activities, and are discontented and hostile.9 In addition to a weekly newspaper and schools, the Germans in Poland have recently been provided with the translations of books until then available only in Polish. Theatrical efforts are being made, too, resulting, for instance, in a performance in German by Germans of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in Szczecin: the audience is said to have con­ sisted of 100 people.4 Various Kulturabende have been organized especially during a week of ’progressive German culture in Poland’ in the autumn of 1954, and one may read in the Arbeiterstimme of parties at the German schools at which the children danced and sang. One reads also of the participation of parents’ committees in the provision of books,9 and of how deplorable it is that the parents find more to say to the teachers, not when they meet officially, but after­ wards on the way home.4 Meetings with visitors from Soviet Germany are also recorded. W hat seems very strange and speaks volumes iii itself is that this paper, intended to win a German following, uses only Polish place-names in the course of its German text. T o anyone familiar with the place-name feuds in eastern Europe, where each town or village in nationally disputed territory has a distinct, often perfectly different, name in each of the languages involved, it w ill be clear that the Germans 1 Since the death of Stalin. • Arbeiterstimme, so November 1954. •See article headed ‘Etwas zum Nachdenken’ by Paul W estphal of Legnica (Liegnitz) in the Arbeiterstimme of 6 November 1954. 4 Arbeiterstimme, 9 A pril 1955. * A t the German school at Swidnica (Schweidnitz), see ibid. *ibid. so November 1954.

THE NEW MINORITIES: (l)_ GERMANS IN POLAND 277

of Walbrzych w ill only be irritated by finding Walbrzych used consistently instead of W aldenburg— only the best Party members w ill not be repelled. As for Szczecin, Germans can­ not pronounce it; they did not even know until after the war that these were the Polish translations or that the Polish for Breslau was Wroclaw. These cities are the three which figure most promintly in the Arbeiterstimme. Soon after the establishment of the Arbeiterstimme young Germans living in Poland began to find that they had become Polish citizens to the extent of being called up to do military service which lasted at least two years: in order to avoid this some of them made renewed efforts to escape from the country. T h e only recognized way of leaving it was on the basis of family reunion, the desirability of which the Polish authorities recognized. If relatives in Communist Germany asked for Germans in Poland to join them, after a long period of waiting, permission was generally obtained; only at the beginning of 1955 did the Polish Government allow some Germans to travel from Poland directly to Western Germany. A striking change took place towards the end of 1954. Late in October the Arbeiterstimme began to wax enthusiastic over the decision of the Polish Government to allow all inhabitants and working citizens of the Polish People’s Republic, unless they had a foreign passport or had been deprived of their citizenship by penal action, to vote in the elections to the national councils to be held on 5 December. T h e ’extended’ right to vote for these local government bodies was said to show that Poland was becoming ever more democratic. In the first two November issues of the Arbeiterstimme1 the nomina­ tion of three German candidates was announced, the miner, Paul Baumgarten, for the town of Walbrzych and a miner and a schoolmaster for Walbrzych province. T h e miner, Heinrich Hoffmann, came from a peasant family which had lived near Olsztyn; in 1920 at the age of 16 he had gone to Westphalia and dien became a miner in Essen. He returned to Poland in 1948, and, working in the Victoria mine at Walbrzych, he has won various bronze and golden decorations. T he teacher, a younger man called W alter Berger, was a miner’s son from Boguszów (Gottesberg) near Walbrzych. He trained to teach *6 and 13 November 1954.

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at Neisse, now Nysa, during the war, worked as a miner for a time, and then in 1950 was put in charge of one of the first German schools to be opened in Communist Poland precisely in his native Boguszów. Berger attended and also addressed the congress for German teachers held at Wroclaw in the autumn of 1954, when he declared it to be the duty of their teachers to educate the German children in Poland in the spirit of socialism, and to make them understand the ancient Polish character of the western territories.1 T he election pro­ grammes promised much building at Wroclaw and Szczecin. T he campaigning for these local elections provided an oppor­ tunity for German grumblers to be admonished that their new right to vote destroyed their last excuse.3 It also revealed anxiety among the Germans with regard to the retention of their national identity.3 In addition to those in Lower Silesia German candidates were put forward in Upper Silesia and eastern Pomerania.4 Presumably the candidates who were nominated were, according to Communist and former Nazi practice, elected.

T H E NEW M I N O R I T I E S : (2) GERMANS IN C Z E CHOS L OVAKI A from the hotly-disputed ’autochthonous* Masurians and Upper Silesians, the Germans who remained in Czecho­ slovakia formed a higher proportion of the population than those who remained in Poland. T h e chief Sudeten German A

part

* Quoted in Informationsdienst des Göttinger Arbeitskreises, s6 May 1955, p. 5. In the Arbeiterstimme o f 9 A pril 1955 Berger’s school was seen to have done well in an inter-school competition in music and dancing. * Arbeiterstimme, »0 November 1954. ■ The same issue of the Arbeiterstimme reports a meeting at Boguszów where this question was brought up. T h e editors then repeated em phatically •that 'the participation of the German population in the elections to the national councils w ill in no way affect the question of the nationality of the German population— which should go without saying— but w ill also not affect the question o f their citizenship' (Staatszugehörigkeit). * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 December 1954.

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communities after the Odsun were to be found around the lignite mines of the Chomutov-Most-Duchcov (KomotauBriix-D ux) area, and in the smaller coal mines around Trutnov: some textile workers managed to remain in the Sluknov-Rumburk-Varnsdorf (Schluckenau-RumburgWarnsdorf) promontory— as it were— in northern Bohemia. There were groups also in Osti, Libérée, and in Karlovy Vary and the north-west region which includes the lignite mines of Falknov, a big German centre. Lastly a number of Sudeten Germans were set to work on state and co-operative farms. But in the immediately post-war days their existence as citizens was not recognized. Czechoslovakia was to be a purely Slav state which would make concessions to sister nations, with notices in Polish in the Ostrava-TëSin region, or even, in Slovakia, in Ruthenian. But Germans and Magyars, if they chose to stay, were expected to adapt themselves by learning Czech or Slovak.1 T he small group of Carpathian Germans, as the Germans there had been called, had been expelled from Slovakia, but the Slovaks, as ever, had vented their wrath rather upon the Hungarians. T h e national spirit of the Czechs, their traditional attitudes and beliefe, were different from those of the Poles; indeed the two West Slav nations had little in common except their inherited conflict with the Germans. U ntil 1948 the Czechs had never suffered from Russian oppression, and they had a partially russophil and pan-Slav ideological tradition. W hile formally Catholic, they had a Protestant approach to life; consequently they had none of that fiery Polish Catholicism which scornÎEully rejected the Orthodoxy of the old Russian world as Asiatic. T he Czechs, on the other hand, had many western links and more understanding for western political forms than the other east Europeans. Hence from the time of the birth of the first Czechoslovak Republic, Thomas Masaryk and BeneS had conceived their national mission to be that of reconciling the east with the west, by contrast with the Polish sense of defending the west from oriental infection. Even so the Czechoslovak historians after 1945 found it difficult enough to accept the new Muscovite interpretation and to identify their own history with that of the Russian 1 There are only very slight differences between these two languages. T

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people. It was all very well to throw overboard the point of view of Pekaf who had modified the anti-German theories of Palackÿ, but it was quite another thing to condemn the period of the first Republic out of hand. It was not, indeed, until 1952 that the Czechoslovak professors of history sub­ mitted to their fate at a congress at Brno in February: a new historical institute was founded, and in December the historians accepted the views which the U.S.S.R. dictated to them.1*For the general public, after the fearful and harddying déception of Munich, the theory that Russia had been the Czechs’ only friend had a considerable potency, and may have it still. It was not only in the academic world of Czechoslovakia that orthodox Communism was slow to conquer. In the spring of 1949 the Czechoslovak Communist Party, hitherto notorious for its anti-German extremism, announced a reversal of policy.3 But even a formal reconciliation with the East German Communists was delayed for another two and a half years. Indeed, it was nearly a year after his visit to Warsaw that Pieck arrived in Prague in October 1951, and it was not until March 1952 that Gottwald was entertained by the Pankow régime in Berlin. As a matter of fact German workers were invited to join the May Day celebrations in Czechoslovakia in 1951 and a weekly German newspaper called Aufbau und Frieden, published by the central trade union organization in Prague, had begun to appear several months before Pieck’s visit. By 1953 it had become bi-weekly, but in spite of pious hopes it has not hitherto succeeded in appearing more frequently: by 1953 it had, however, managed to flank itself with two publications for children, Das rote Halstuch for the younger ones and Freundschaft for those aged between eleven and fourteen. Aufbau und Frieden has one great advantage over the Wroclaw Arbeiterstimme, for its contributors include one or two old veterans of the great days of German Social Democracy in the last years of the Habsburg Empire and the 1 Ludat, p. ss.. • See article entitled ‘Nèmci v. Komunistickém Öeskoslovensku’ by M irek Valenta in Tribuna R oinik, September-October 1954, p. 6 (published in Leyden).

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first decade after Versailles. O f these Kurt Babel is the editor of Aufbau und Frieden, but the most notable is Karl Kreibich, one source of friction between BeneS and Jaksch in London, and subsequently Czechoslovak Ambassador in Moscow in 1950 until he was retired at the end of 1951. Kreibich knows his Sudeten Germans and must know his Moscow; his articles are a good deal more readable than the hack-work turned out by younger party functionaries or employees. He also knows the strength of the old Social Democrat tradition in Bohemia, which was so racialistic that German and Czech Socialists were usually organized separately. Aufbau und Frieden is perhaps the best single source of information about the Germans who live in Czechoslovakia today and the conditions of their life: if its adjectives are often hyperbolical, its figures arc probably exact, and its negative implications are eloquent. Aufbau und Frieden has several times published complaints about the obstinate persistence of the Social Democrat tradition1 and the susceptibility of the Germans living in the Czechoslovak Republic to wireless propaganda from the west.2 T he Communist definition of the racial status quo is presented by Kreibich and the others as assuming the necessity for the expulsion of the mass of ‘reactionary’ Sudeten Germans after the war. That operation once performed, and the Czechoslovak Government having been purged of its own Czech ‘reactionaries’ in 1948, the remaining Germans could then be welcomed back into the socialist community. Like the tamed Czech historians, but perhaps less unwillingly, Kreibich and his colleagues con­ demned BeneS for his submission against Russia’s w ill at the time of Munich,2 just as they reproached him for not welcoming the Communist dictatorship ten years later. T o Sudeten German ears these attacks upon the man whom they had so often heard abused for other reasons were less un­ welcome than they were to the Czechs. Many references have been made in Aufbau und Frieden to traces of surviving chauvinism in the Czechs who persist, it is pointed out, in their belief that Deutscher bleibt deutscher and dislike the 1 Aufbau und Frieden, 6 October 1953. p. 5. ■ ibid. 5 June 195s, p. 10. ■ They also denounced Churchill as a munichois (sic).

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idea of a German press.1 Friction over place-names is obvious, but, in spite of its anxiety to attract German readers, only very gradually during 1954 did Aufbau und Frieden bring itself to print the German name of a place in brackets after the Czech; only Prague has all along appeared as Prag and not as Praha. A conference held in Prague in October 1953 on the strategy and tactics of Aufbau und Frieden caused Com­ munist representatives of the Germans all over the country to assemble and make reports. Friedel May from Tachov (Tachau) in west Bohemia spoke of no more than isolated Germans there mostly working on state farms, others followed him in speaking of the difficulty of reaching the Germans who were scattered (verstreut) across the regions which the speakers represented.2 T h e delegate from Libérée spoke of every seventh ‘citizen’ in the Kreis (or province) and every fifth in the Bezirk (or district) as a reader of Aufbau und Frieden.* In Rumburk in the province of Libérée it was stated at the same time that over 700 ‘citizens’ of German nationality were at work.4 Margarete Sieber from Varnsdorf nearby referred to 30 Germans among the 100 women workers in the Elite factory where she was employed; they had been kept there because they worked well.5 Statements in a later issue indicate a considerable demand for German books in Jablonec (Gablonz).* In addition to the lignite regions (Rudé Privo spoke of 3,500 Germans who were Czechoslovak citizens in Most in 1954), there was increasing mention of the German miners in the Trutnov area. Aufbau und Frieden of 28 January 1955 published a photograph of a group of Germans from a mine in t acléf (Schatzlar), very near what is now the Polish frontier, who had been resting in a nursing home at Luhacovice in the previous autum n;7 under the photograph there was a little homily about the excellent work of these men, who, together with their Czech colleagues had helped * Aufbau und Frieden, 9 October 1953, p. 6. •e.g. Krumlov (Krumau) in south Bohemia. »Aufbau und Frieden, 6 October 1953, p. 6. See below for the significance of 'citizen’ . • ibid. 9 October 1953, p. 5. ‘ ibid. p. 3. •ibid . >8 January 1955, p. a, where it is claimed that the local library has plenty of German books, including new ones. Tp. 4.

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to fulfil the Plan and had the same right to rest in the national spas.1* So early as September 1953 96 German trade union officials are reported to have met in Karlovy Vary.3 Aufbau und Frieden has also referred increasingly to the Germans of Osti where, according to G. Hiinigen in January 1955, 357 Ger­ mans became trade union members, 130 new readers of Auf­ bau und Frieden were found, 75 fresh contributors to Die Sowjet Frau, and 11 subscribers to an illustrated^ paper pub­ lished in Soviet Germany.9 By contrast with the Usti incident in July 1945» the emphasis is interesting. Lastly the old ultra German Egerland, according to Rudé Prdvo, still counts 1,500 Germans in and around Cheb.4*There are also some Germans in the AS corner, for Aufbau und Frieden referred to some young German singers from there at a German gathering in October 1953 and 50 Germans from AS were reported at much the same time to belong to the Communist Youth organization.9 In the published discussions of how Aufbau und Frieden can be made more attractive, one often reads that it should appear daily and should contain more to interest women. But the most persistent German complaint which penetrates such debates is about the absence of German schools. Unlike those of Poland, the Czechoslovak authorities have not hitherto opened any schools specifically for the German­ speaking population; they have only allowed a gradual increase in the number of German lessons— for the first few years there were none— provided in the Czechoslovak schools. A woman delegate at Prague in October 1953 lamented the fact that Sudeten German children could seldom write German letters to their relatives in Germany. A typical protest came from the German Communist representative of 1 Along with quips at the expense o f the Czechs, there were also references to German ‘separatism’ which presumed that Germans worked better than Czechs (see Aufbau und Frieden, a October 195a, p. 3). ‘ ibid, as September 1953, p. 11. * ibid, as January 1955, p. 4. Valenta refers to 40 per cent, of the popula­ tion of Üsti as German in 1953 (in Tribuna R olnik, September-October, »954* P- 6). 4 as December 1954. 'V alen ta, Tribuna R olnik, September-October 1954, p. 7.

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î&cléit Rudolf Linhard, who complained that for the last two years German lessons had been promised there but not provided. Although nearly half the inhabitants of our small town in the hills are German, and although it is known that we have a considerable number of Bestarbeiter and that our German workers are industrious and reliable and do not absent them­ selves, we get no satisfaction in this matter.1 Discontent has also been expressed over the lack of technical instruction in German. During December 1954 it became known in Western Germany that one or two German lessons a week were provided in no more than sixty-five Czechoslovak schools.3 T he training college for teachers in Prague makes some efforts to fill the vacuum in the higher education of Germans in Czechoslovakia by including various German courses,3 while writers in Aufbau und Frieden claim that they, too, strive to make amends for the lack of German public education, and Freundschaft publishes a good deal of educa­ tional matter.4 By contrast with Poland there would seem to be much more theatrical production in German often by visitors from Berlin or Leipzig to Czechoslovakia, and par­ ticularly in Prague: numerous social and musical evenings are arranged on a small scale locally. T he official publishing house Knfha (The Book), brings out German translations from Russian and Czech, and its own editions of ‘progressive’ German authors. Finally, there are periodical broadcasts from Prague in German. In the autumn of 1952 Aufbau und Frieden began to urge the Germans living in Czechoslovakia to try to gain recogni­ tion as Czechoslovak citizens, and on 24 April in the following year the Czechoslovak Chamber decreed that, after their loyal co-operation in fulfilling the Five-Year Plan (not then com­ pleted), the Germans living in the Republic should have their Czechoslovak citizenship restored to them. It appears that 1Aufbau und Frieden, 13 October 1953. There are references elsewhere, e.g. in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, to the achievements of the German miners in the Trutnov coalfields. • Süddeutsche Zeitung, 7 December 1954. * Valenta, p. 7; see also Aufbau und Frieden, 6 October 1953, p. 5. 4 Aufbau und Frieden has published a good deal of linguistic instruction aimed chiefly, however, at the teaching of Czech and Russian to the Germans.

m in o r it ie s :

(2) G e r m a n s in Cz e c h o s l o v a k i a

285

some 200,000 were registered as citizens forthwith.1*T his was followed during the course of 1953 by the calling up of the younger German men for two or more years of military service. One thing was certain: many of the Sudeten German miners were particularly efficient and they often won prizes in the industrial competitions. In the country’s mining crisis it thus became increasingly important to conciliate these people, and it was observed that when Miners’ Day was celebrated in September 1953 there were notices everywhere in German as well as in Czech.3 In the following spring, for the first time German candidates were nominated for the elections to the local national councils in May. As in Poland over six months later, the people nominated were old Com­ munist stalwarts whose names had become familiar to the readers of Aufbau und Frieden. Erwin Appelt who worked in the Toko textile concern in Libérée was elected, and also Kurt Uhlke, delegate of the German-speaking miners at Jâchymov:3 there were several other ‘successful’ German candidates. In November 1954 the Czechoslovak National Assembly was re-elected, and for the first time since 1939 three Sudeten Germans appeared in it. T heir chairman, or Sprecher , was Rudolf Müller, a glass-worker from Jablonec; the other two were Josef Pötzl, a fiddle-maker from A l, who had however been put forward by the textile concerns called Ohara and T esta4* respectively, and Johann Jungbauer, a miner from near Teplice.8 It should here be added that during 1954 a number of pro­ minent Sudeten Germans, such as Dr. Gustav Peters, were transported to Germany, after having served sentences of im­ prisonment.* A t the same time the Czechoslovak authorities 1 Valente, Tribuna R olnik, September-October 1954, p. 6. For decree depriv­ ing the Germans of Czechoslovak citizenship see above, p. 101. T h e situation differed from that in Poland because the Germans in the Polish western territories, unlike those in Poznari and Lódz, never had been German citizens. *N eue Zürcher Zeitung, 14 November 1953. Valente, p. 7, refers to the publication o f notices in both languages by the Amati concern in Kraslicc (Graslitz), a small town in the Erzgebirge. Others were asked to follow his example. *Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 10 June 1954. 4ibid, a November 1954. ‘ ibid. 13 November 1954. 4T he Sudeten Germans claimed that in May 1955 there were still 8,000 Germans imprisoned in Czechoslovakia (see Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 3 June 1955). T he figure would appear to be considerably exaggerated.

286

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m a n y ’s

eastern

n e ig h b o u r s

began to invite Sudeten German workers living in Com ­ munist Germany to return to the Czechoslovak Republic, though not to their former homes. These people were offered houses, credits, and other advantages, and during the year 85 families were reported to have accepted the offers made to them,1 involving perhaps about 300 individuals. T here was thus no notable increase in the German population. It should be noted that there were certainly a number of Germans in the country who, for one reason or another, were not registered as its citizens, in spite of the law of April 1953. In this curious fashion the Communism which nationalistic Germans denounce as their worst enemy came to their rescue against the linguistic nationalism of the two West Slav nations: the Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia, like the Poles and Czechoslovaks, were compelled by the Russians to be Communists, but they were at least allowed to profess the Marxist faith in their own language. It has been seen that on the whole, and particularly with regard to the land, the Poles had resisted Communist pressure more successfully than the Czechs, thanks to their numbers and traditions, the latter enabling them to organize themselves first and foremost through their Catholicism. But yet the Poles had had to accept German schools which the Czechs had evidently been able to resist; there is no obvious explanation of this dis­ crepancy. One thing seems certain, that Polish and Czechoslovak feeling, in spite of the indignation felt against Russian Com­ munism, is still strongly anti-German; it is a political feeling not necessarily expressed against individuals. It is significant that whereas the Poles avoid the employment of German dockers at Szczecin,3 Czechoslovak tugs on the Oder are as evident as Polish ones: this expresses a real amelioration in Czech-Polish relations.3 And so long as the Russians seem to the Poles and Czechs to guarantee their post-war frontiers, it seems likely that Russia w ill dominate them psychologically. Increasingly in the last few years the U.S.S.R. has tried also 1Rudé Fréno, 85 December 1954. ■ See A. Duquet in Le Monde, 14 A pril 1954. ■ According to an official Polish broadcast on 9 June 1955 the first Czecho­ slovak liner had run into the Czechoslovak dock at Szczecin a few days before: it was served, not by Polish, but by Czechoslovak, dockers.

THE OBLAST KALININGRAD

287

to play the patron to German national hopes, and in doing so has aroused West Slav suspicion. Throughout the last decade Russia as the protector of the Czechs and Poles has, however, remained a more convincing conception than Russia, the Germans' friend: it would be rash to guess to what extent this situation may be modified in the next ten years.

28 T H E OBLAST K A L I N I N G R A D , OR RUSSIAN EAST PRUSSIA is one territory which was German until 1944 where, if any of them remain there, the Germans are in no way recog­ nized: this is the northern sector of former East Prussia which contained the city of Königsberg. It was at Königsberg that the first King of Prussia was crowned and the city had become a symbol of all that was best in the Prussian tradition. At Teheran Stalin first showed interest in Königsberg as a warmwater port, and at Potsdam the western Powers agreed to the annexation of the Königsberg area by the U.S.S.R. On 23 March 1939 H itler had arbitrarily annexed from Lithuania the autonomous Memel Territory which had formed the north-eastern corner of East Prussia before the first Great W ar1 and which he restored to this administrative status; in 1939 this meant the addition to the East Prussian population of about 145,000 German or Lithuanian-speaking Memellanders. W hen Germans refer to the East Prussian population of 1939 as 2,630,000 they are including the inhabitants of the Memel Territory which the Russians in 1944 reincorporated in Lithuania itself, a Soviet Republic since 1939. In that portion of East Prussia which the Russians themselves annexed there had lived 1,149,605 people in 1939, whereas the southern sector which went to Poland had at T

here

*For the history of the Memel question between the wars see Morrow, pp. 41g ff.

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that time had 1,338,517 inhabitants. It is of interest to the historian that the frontier which the Russians happened to draw across East Prussia vaguely resembled part of the old frontier between East Prussia and Polish Warmia before 1772. T h e evidence available with regard to the fate of the Königsberg region since 1945 is slender. T h e Russian authori­ ties incorporated it into the Russian Federal Socialist Soviet Republic as the Oblast or province of Kaliningrad. T h e few adult Germans who had not fled were mostly driven out of their homes into camps and were set to do forced labour for two or three years. Many of them were transferred to other parts of the U.S.S.R., but it was with the labour of those who remained that the more catastrophic effects of the war in this region were overcome. Soviet institutions and economic organization were immediately introduced— there was no need here to be liberal for a preliminary three years— and not only Königsberg was renamed. Indeed the whole area was completely russianized, T ilsit becoming Sovetsk and Pillau Baltisk. Since Kaliningrad with Baltisk was at once made into an important base for the Soviet navy,1 Russian soldiers and sailors filled the city, and military discipline and strict security measures were enforced. T h e Russians did not, however, neglect the education of the German children who remained. Although they had every intention of expelling them within a short period even this brief chance of indoctrination was not to be missed. In the summer of 1946 they collected together some German Com­ munists and a few other Germans whom they considered eligible— former teachers who had not belonged to the National Socialist Party— and gave them a few months’ Marxist teacher training. Then, in the autumn of that year, two German schools were opened in the city of Kaliningrad, and four in the country for the children of those working on the state and collective farms. A German teacher who worked in one of these schools noted that there was always a Russian in charge of each school with a German Communist *For a moderate German view of Russian naval activities from Lübeck to Finland in 1955 see W olfram Daniel, ‘Die Ostsee als Magnet’ , Deutsche Rundschau, June 1955.

THE OBLAST KALININGRAD

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to advise him. T h e German teachers were not allowed to teach history, but were themselves given instruction in MarxismLeninism. There were not enough professional teachers left even for the six schools; to fill the gaps in their ranks the children of several German Communists were hastily but very unsatisfactorily trained. T h e non-Communist Germans were not ill-treated by the Russians with whom some of them got on well, but the German Communists seemed to make constant trouble by denunciation of their non-Communist fellows. T h e four schools in the country were only intended to provide four classes, but the two city schools were supposed to offer education from six to sixteen. In fact few children over ten appeared because they were foraging for food. T he German population, except for a small number of teachers and another handful of highly skilled workers,1 had no work and no food and often nowhere to live. It consisted almost exclusively of old people and children. O f these even the elderly were often set to work on state farms and in any case it was the children who could beg most successfully. What the children mostly did was to hide in any train they found which was going to Lithuania— the Russians looked the other way and the Lithuanian peasants took them in for a day or so and then sent them home with food. Some of the adult German population, following the children's example, slipped across the Lithuanian frontier and settled there for a time.3 In December 1947 the first of the German schools in Kaliningrad was closed; late in February 1948 came the turn of the second. In the course of 1948 the Germans were all transferred from the Oblast Kaliningrad to the Soviet zone of Germany, even those who had migrated to Lithuania being fetched by the Russians for this purpose. Only a handful of German Communists and engineers stayed behind. Meanwhile, in addition to soldiers and sailors, a hetero­ geneous population from different parts of the Soviet Union was gradually drafted into the Oblast so that by 1947, and still more completely by 1948, German labour could be 1T he Russians seem to have brought in their own engineers. ‘ T he whole of this account of the schools and the begging children was provided by a German woman, who taught at Königsbeig University until the end of the war and then in a German school in Kaliningrad from 1946 to 1948: she eventually reached Germany late in 1953.

2go

Ge r m a n y ' s e a s t e r n n e i g h b o u r s

dispensed with and the Germans expelled. Since then it has been even more difficult to get information about this area, the more so since the Polish-Russian frontier here is sealed, it appears, even more rigorously than other frontiers in the Communist world. A t intervals, nevertheless, individual G er­ mans, who had been detained to serve some sentence, have arrived in Berlin or even Western Germany to bring a little news; indeed, during 1954 the Russians allowed one or two of them, who somehow possessed enough money, to buy a rail­ way ticket and to travel to Germany with unusual normality. T he journey from Kaliningrad to Frankfurt-on-the-Oder cost 233 roubles.1* T he re-population of the Russian portion of former East Prussia can be roughly measured by the official statements published about the Russian elections. On 18 December 1950 Pravda announced that the Oblast Kaliningrad would be represented in the new Supreme Soviet by five deputies indicating a population of about 750,000,3 of whom about three-fifths— since three of the five deputies would represent the city— appeared to live in or near Kaliningrad itself. Four years later, when the next elections were held on 27 February >955» the Oblast had six representatives suggesting that the population had increased to about 900,000, or about 250,000 less than in 1939. A ll the deputies on both occasions had Russian names and are presumed to have been Russians. In 1955 the distribution of deputies* seats appeared to have changed completely: inner Kaliningrad and Cherniakhovsk (Insterburg) were each represented by a woman, the other constituencies being outer Kaliningrad, Baltisk, Sovetsk, and the district of Gusev (Gumbinnen).9 Official statements on these points were made as if no Germans existed there, and, indeed, according to stray German travellers, it seems that those who still did have been declared to be stateless persons. Although a writer in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of 9 January 1954 quotes a habitual German claim that there were still 3,000 Germans in the Oblast Kaliningrad, a third of them living in the city, late in 1954 the same newspaper 1 Europäische Osten, no. s, November 1954, p. iso. 'Since each deputy represents approximately 150,000 inhabitants. • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 March 1955.

THE OBLAST KALININGRAD

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reported newly arrived travellers from there as stating that there were scarcely above twenty Germans in what was formerly the city of Königsberg. As for the economic and ‘cultural’ life of the area, even official statements are lacking except for an Economic Geography of the U.S.S.R. published in 19501 and a volume of the Soviet Encyclopaedia published in 1953, which covered a period ending in 1951.3 According to the latter source, the Oblast Kaliningrad in 1951 boasted 60 state farms, 152 col­ lective farms, and 30 tractor stations;9 of the state farms 44, and of the collective farms 76, and all 30 tractor stations, were said to be electrified. T h e Soviet Encyclopaedia claimed that only one-third of the population was employed on the land and two-thirds in industry and trades. Most of the industries which worked in German times were said to be busy, including that East Prussian speciality, the production of amber. Over nine-tenths of industry is in the hands of the state. Further it is claimed that, whereas this was an im­ porting region in the German era, today it exports more than it imports. W hile long lists of schools and libraries are published, it is stated, on the other hand, that only 1,000 flats are fitted with gas in the whole city of Kaliningrad, and such German accounts as there are speak of a decaying agriculture.4 Towards the end of 1954 a number of frontier correc­ tions were undertaken along the Soviet-Polish frontier which runs across former East Prussia; they were all made to the advantage of the Russians.5 These facts provide a mere sketch which none the less makes a very clear impression. W ithin the extended territory of the Russian Federal Republic there is no room for a German minority; the few German Communists of whom one heard in connexion with the German schools must have become Russian citizens. T he Communist insistence upon German rights in Czechoslovakia and Poland is revealed as 1See Christian Science Monitor, 16 January 1951. •See Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9 January 1954. •T h is figure is also used by Seraphim for the end of 1948 in Wirtschaft Ostdeutschlands, p. 84. See alio Christ und W elt, 1 September 1949. 4 Europäische Osten, November 1954. • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 November 1954.

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solely a matter of tactics or, possibly, in the long run, of political strategy. T h e position in Russian East Prussia needs to be em­ phasized because of the injury it has caused to Poland. U ntil late in the war it was generally supposed that the whole of East Prussia would go to the Poles. In the west and in G er­ many it is often forgotten that Poland was unexpectedly deprived of this slice of territory with the ports it contained. If at Potsdam the United States and the United Kingdom objected to Poland’s extension to the western Neisse they agreed with something like alacrity to the Russian annexation of Königsberg; this they promised to support at the final peace conference, although they made no offer of the kind w ith regard to the territories annexed by Poland.

2 9

CONCLUSION future of what are today the western territories of Poland and the Czech frontier regions depends upon the strength and the policy of the U.S.S.R. If these two factors remain more or less what they have been since 1945, then the possibilities of change are ruled out. If Russia decides, as she always may, that the Germans are more important to her than the Western Slav nations, then she may offer to the Germans to take what they wish from both Poland and Czechoslovakia. A new Russo-German rapprochement would be the most alarming possibility for the western world: it is difficult to envisage because one cannot envisage its economic structure. T he year 1955, however, has revealed what seems to be a benign and yielding Russia, which might be w illing to withdraw her direct power, either because she feels Asia to be more important to her than Europe, or because she is dis­ mayed by unresolved economic problems, or for some other reason. If she were w illing to allow Poland and CzechoT

he

CONCLUSION

293 Slovakia the independence of T ito ’s Yugoslavia, an entirely new situation would arise. It is impossible to foresee what kind of régime would emerge in either country, but a strongly nationalistic wind would probably blow and one which caused peasant banners to unfurl. Post-war industrialization could scarcely be undone, but the pace could be slackened as Com­ munist coercion of the peasantry was relaxed. Indeed there is no reason to suppose that the Polish and Czechoslovak régimes which emerged could not gradually ameliorate the neglect of the land which has left Pomerania, southern East Prussia, and the Czech frontier regions under-populated. Enough has been said in preceding chapters to make clear that moderate Germans are aware that, in the circumstances of today, Western Germany is assured of its food supply and is tending to be short of man-power: if Soviet Germany is reunited with the Federal Republic— this again depends upon Moscow— this state of affairs w ill but be emphasized. Yet in the ambience of the Landsmannschaften, of chauvin­ ism, or of emotional, romantic nationalism— whichever one chooses to call it— to gain even the frontiers of 1937 would not be considered enough; a demand for those of 1914, which history condemned long ago, is im plicit in all the utterances of that near-Nazi world. W ith Berlin restored as the capital of Germany, and with— as seems probable— Silesian and East Prussian regiments in the new German army, the situation would be at least as explosive as it is today and perhaps a good deal more so. Tw o practical questions arise: first, what, if any, frontier adjustments should be made? second, what form of inter­ national co-operation could be devised to smooth over antagonisms and solve social questions. On the first question, the least justified post-war annexation of territory was that of the district of Königsberg by the U.S.S.R., but geography and policy make it the most difficult to undo. Many people would advocate a cession of territory by the Poles to the Germans in Pomerania so that the frontier ran near Köslin or Kolberg, as General Sikorski originally planned. But it is difficult to imagine that the Poles would ever agree to abandon Stettin and the mouth of the Oder; in refusing to do so they would, moreover, be supported by

294

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the Czechs. East Brandenburg incidentally, which was purely German— without so much as a Cashubian— before 1945, is seldom discussed in this context, presumably because it is too poor to be interesting. It has been seen that Upper Silesia would give the Germans unnecessarily dangerous power. As for Lower Silesia, now that the Germans have been expelled (except for the Waldenburg area where they comprise a small minority), there is much more to be said for the western than the eastern Neisse as a frontier, the more since it relieves the Czechs of that overwhelming German encirclement— the real thing, not a phrase— which made them pugnacious and un­ yielding in the past. On the other hand they themselves have often thought of giving up their Egerland to the Germans, a change in favour of which there would appear to be every­ thing to be said. W ith regard to the principle of ceding territory to the Germans it should perhaps be recalled that territorial gains in the past have seemed to fortify the worst elements in that nation, while weakening those groups with a genuine feeling of human responsibility. Further, if one considers the recent record of the German minorities in eastern Europe, it is difficult to wish them back there. On the second question, of what form of international co­ operation could be devised to smooth over antagonisms and solve social questions, the Poles and Czechs in exile, together with their Hungarian friends and some others, would like to see an East European Federation which would control the industrial triangle of Upper Silesia. Most of them would wish to exclude the Germans, though not the Austrians, from this. Many Germans, on the other hand, would like to constitute a new Habsburg Empire to contain all the Germans— not only those of Austria— as well as the Western Slavs and the Magyars. On a smaller scale some Germans envisage some kind of control of former Eastern Germany by the United Nations, or alternatively, a joint German-Polish 'condo­ minium’ there: the idea of a German-Czech 'condominium’ for the Czech frontier regions has also been entertained. But no technically workable scheme has been proposed, and it is hard to contemplate the working of any such plans, one difficulty being that the Germans eager to participate in the

CONCLUSION

295

administration of eastern Europe would almost certainly be Germans of the intransigent type. It has already been suggested that it would be essential, in order to smooth away the old German-Slav antagonism, to level up standards of living. This would indeed mean that the industrialization of eastern Europe should be pushed forward more efficaciously than the doctrines of Communism or the experience of Russians has allowed. In the eyes of many Germans the phenomenal economic performance of Western Germany in the last five years calls clearly for German economic leadership in eastern Europe. And yet nothing might do greater harm to German-Slav relationships than for Poles and Czechs to feel that, no sooner are they free of the Communist yoke than they must go into German economic harness. It would call for exquisite tact for this impression to be avoided: the very same German who worked very well with the French or Italian or Benelux representa­ tives in the West might find it traditionally too difficult to keep his manners as good in the East. If, however, West Euro­ pean Union should ripen satisfactorily one might then begin to entertain hope for an east European union which included German representatives.

u

SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY A llie d R eport on R efugees in the W estern Zones o f Germany prepared by a T rip a rtite S ta tistica l W orking P arty, com pleted 5 M arch 1949Aubin, H., ed. D er deutsche O sten und das A bendland. Munich, 1953. Balon, Erich. A ltgablon z-N eu ga blon z. Munich, 1953. BeneS, E. M em oirs o f D r . E dvard B en ei, fro m M un ich to N ew W ar and N ew V ictory, trans, by Godfrey Lias. London, Allen & Unwin, 1954. ----- Ûvahy 0 Slovanstid, hlaxm l probUm y Slovanske p o litik y . London, 1944. Bülow, Fürst. D enkw ürdigkeiten. Berlin, Ullstein, 1930. Eng. ed. Prince Bülow, M em oirs. London, Putnam, 1932. Byrnes, J. F. Speaking F ra n kly. New York and London, 1947. Churchill, Winston S. T h e Second W orld W ar. 6 vols. London, Cassell,

1948-54. Ciechanowski, Jan. D efea t in V ictory. New York, Doubleday, 1947. C zechoslovakia. Prague, Orbis, 1947. Czechoslovakia, Ministerstvo informali. BudovatelskJ program Gottw aldopy vlddy. Prague, 1946.

D ocum ents on Germ an Foreign P o lity , 19 18 -4 5 , fro m the A rchives o f the Germ an Foreign M in istry , published jointly by the British Foreign Office and

the U.S. Dept, of State. Series D (1937-45). 8 vols. Washington, U.S.G.P.O., and London, H.M.S.O., 1949-54. E tu yclop id ie polonaise. 5 vols. Fribouig, 1916-19. ‘L’Evolution économique de la Tchéchoslovaquie’, N otes e t É tudes documen­ taires, no. 1426. Paris, 1951. France, Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques. L a P ologne: mémento économ ique. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1954-

■ - Ministère des Affaires Etrangères.

L e L iv re Ja u n e F rançais; docum ents diplom atiques, 19 3 8 -3 9 . P ièces relatives aux évènem ents et aux négociations qu i ont précédé Couverture des h o stilités entre P A llem agne d 'u n p a rt, la P ologne, la Grande Bretagne et la France d 'a u tre p a rt. Paris, Imprimerie Nationale,

*939 -

Frumkin, G. P opulation Changes in Europe since 1939; a Study o f . . .

Changes . . . during and since W orld W ar I I as Show nbythe B alance Sheets o fT w en ty -fou r European C ountries. New York, Kelly; London, Allen & Unwin, 1951. Germany, Federal Republic of, Bundesministerium für Vertriebene. D oku­ m entation der Vertreibung der deutschen aus O stm itteleuropa. [Bonn], 1953. ------ Vertriebene, F lü ch tlin g e,* K riegsgefangene, H eim atlose A usländer, 19 4 9 -19 5 8 , B erich t. Bonn, 1953. ----- Bundesministerium für den Marshallplan. T w elfth , F in a l R eport on the Progress o f the M a rsh a ll P la n fo r the period u n til Ju n e 30th 19 5a . Bonn,

1953-

----- Press- und Informationsamt. D eutschland im

W iederaufbau.

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Göttinger Arbeitskreis. D okum ente der M en sch lich keit. 1950. Henderson, Alexander. E yew itness in C zechoslovakia. London, Harrap, 1939. Hoetzsch, Otto. O steuropa und deutscher O sten: Ideine Sch eißen zu ihrer G eschuhte. Königsberg, 1934. Holbora, Louise W., ed. W ar or Peace A h n s o f the U n ited N a tio n s. 2 vols. Boston, World Peace Foundation, 1943-8. Instytut Zachodni. D oln y S lç sk . Poznaó, 1948. International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg. T r ia l o f the M a jo r W ar C rim inals before the In ternational M ilita ry T rib u n a l, N urem berg, 1945—19 16 . Proceedings and D ocum ents in E vidence. 42 vols. Nuremberg, 1946-9. Jaksch, Wenzel. Benesch w ar gew arnt. Munich, 1949. Jordan, Z. O d er-N eisse U n e, a Study o f the P o litic a l, Econom ic and European Significance o f P ola n d ’s W estern F ron tier, prepared by Z~ Jordan on the basis o f the research o f a Study Group set up by the P o lish Freedom M ovem ent, ’ Independence and Dem ocracy*. London, 1952. Kaeckenbeeck, G. T h e International E xperim ent o f U pper S ilesia ; a Study o f the W orking o f the U pper S ilesia n Settlem ent, 19 2 9 -19 3 7 . London, R.I.I.A.,

I94a*

^

Kaps, Johannes. D ie Tragödie Schlesien s. Munich, 1952-3. Karaki, J. Story o f a Secret S ta te. London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1945. Kiesewetter, Bruno. D ie W irtsch a ß der Tschechoslow akei se it 19 4 5 . Berlin, Duncker & Humblot for Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung, 1954 -

Kurth, K. O., compiler. H andbuch der P resu der H eim atvertriebenen. Kitzingen, Holzner-Verlag für Göttinger Arbeitskreis, [1953]. LauSman, Bohumil. K do by l vinen? (Who was guilty?). Vienna, 1953. Leahy, W. I W as T here. London, 1950. Lemberg, Eugen. V ölker und Volksgruppen im E x il. Munich, Pressverein Volksbote, 1953. Lockhart, R. H. B. Com es the R eckoning. London, Putnam, 1947. Ludat, Herbert. D er europäische O sten in A bendländischer und sow jetischer Sich t. Cologne, Müller, 1954. Lu2a, R. O dsun. Vienna, 1953. Malcuzynski, Karol. A n der Friedensgrenze. Warsaw, 1953. ------A t the P ea u F ron tier. Warsaw, Ksiqzka i Wiedza, 1953. Marzian, Herbert. Z e itta fe l und D okum ente zu r O d er-N eisse-U n ie, 19 3 9 -19 5 2 /5 3 . Kitzingen, Holzner-Verlag, 1953. Mikolajczyk, Stanislaw. T h e P attem o f Soviet D om ination. London, Sampson Low, 1948. Morrow, Ian F. D. T h e P ea u Settlem ent in the G erm an-Polish Borderlands. London, R.I.I.A., 1936. Müller, Dr. Valentin. D urchbruch z» neuem D enken. Munich, Ackermanngemeinde, 1953. ----- H eim atvertriebene Ju gen d. K i t z i n g e n , Holzner-Verlag, 1954. Nahm, P. F. D ie so zia len w irtschaftlichen und p olitischen W irkungen der Ver­ treibung auj d ie Gem einde der B u n d esrep u blik. . . Mannheim, Institut zur Förderung öffentliche Angelegenheiten, 1954. Noël, Léon. L ’ agression allem ande contre la Pologne. Paris, Flammarion, 1946. Piettre, André. U économ ie allem ande contem poraine: A llem agne occidentale 19 4 5 -5 2 . Paris, M. Th. Génin, 1952. Polish Embassy, London. P ola n d , Germany and European P e a u ; O fficia l D ocu­ m ents, 19 4 4 -8 . London [1948].

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Raschhofer, Hermann. D ie Sudeten F rage. Munich, Isar Verlag, 1953. Rauschning, Hermann. D ie Entdeutschung W estpreussens und P olen s. Berlin, Hobbing, 1930. Rochlin, R. P. D ie W irtschaft P olen s von 1945 b is 19 5 2 . Berlin, Duncker & Humblot for Deutsches Institut fur Wirtschaftsforschung, Institut für Konjunkturforschung [1953]. Rose, W. J. T h e D ram a o f U pper S ile sia . London, Williams & Norgate, 1936. Rothfels, Hans. B ism arck und der O sten. Leipzig, J. C. Hinrichs’sche Buch­ handlung, 1934. ------ Ostraum Preussentum und R eichsgedanke. Leipzig, J. G. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1935. Royal Institute of International Affairs. Survey o f International A ffa irs, 1938 . vol. 2: T h e C risis over C zechoslovakia, by R. F. D. Laffan. London, 1951. Sasse, Heinz Günther. D ie O stdeutsche F roge a u f den K onferenzen von Teheran b is Potsdam . Tübingen, 1954. Seraphim, Peter-Heinz. Industriekom binat O berschlesien, das R uhrgebiet des O stens, das grossoberschlesische Industriegebiet unter sow jetischen Führung.

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— Economic Co-operation Administration, Technical Assistance Commis­ sion on the Integration of the Refugees in the German Republic. T h e Integration o f R efugees into Germ an l i f e [Som e R eport]. Washington, National Planning Association, 1951. Also Appendices.

3OO

SE L E C T IV E B IB L IO G R A P H Y

V olz, W ilhelm. D ie O stdeutsche W irtsch a ß. Berlin-Leipzig, 1930. ----- £uws Jahrtausende O berschlesien ig a 6 , in acht K arten dargestellt. Breslau, Kommissionsverlag, Grass, Barth (W. Friedrich), 1920. W agner, W olfgang. D ie E ntstehung der O d er-N eisse-L im e. Stuttgart, BrentanoVerlag for Johann Gottfried Herder Forschungsrat, 1953. W alters, F. P. A H istory o f the League o f N a tio n s. 2 vols. London, O xford University Press for R .I.I.A ., 1952. Welles, Sumner. T h e T im e fo r D ecision . New York, Harper, 1944. Wiskemann, Elizabeth. C zechs and Germ ans. London, Oxford U niversity Press, 1938. ------U ndeclared W ar. London, Constable, 1939. A rticles, P eriod icals , and N ew spapers

M . Dziewanowski. ‘Communist Poland and the Catholic Church*, P roblem s o f Com m unism , Sept.-O ct. 1954. Elizabeth Valkenier. ‘Soviet Impact on Polish Post-War Historiography 1946-50’, Jou rn a l o f C entral European A ffa irs , Jan. 1952. Aachener N achrichten, 1948, Hans Deicheimann (Professor Schubarth), Königsberg D iary (Ich Sah Königsberg Sterben); A rbeiterstim m e (W roclaw); A u fb a u und Frieden (Prague); Bank Deutscher Länder, M on thly R eport (Frankfurt-am-Main) ; A m tliche N achrichten der B undesanstaltfu r A rbeitsverm itt­ lung und Arbeitslosenversicherung, no. 11, 25 November 1954; C h rist und W elt; Czechoslovak Econom ic B u lletin ; D eutsche R undschau; D zien m k P o lsk i; E astern Q uarterly; D er E uropäische O sten; Informationsdienst des G öttinger A rb eits­ kreises; Gospodarka P lanow a; H andelsblatt (Düsseldorf); K irch lich e O stnachrichten (Berlin); K w artaln ik H istoryczny (Polska Akademia Nauk); M itteilu n g des W irtschaftsw issenschaftlichen In stitu ts der G ew erkschaften (Bund Verlag, Cologne) ; N ineteenth Century 280. many, 172 n.; Free University of, Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Flücht­ linge, 180. 188, 205 n. Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Wahrung su­ Beuthen (Bytom), 24,30,239,240,271. detendeutscher Interessen, 190. Beveridge, Lord, n o , 155, 156. Ardszewski, 81, 82. Bevin, E., n o , 136 ff., 218. AI (Asch), 128, 283, 285. Bialystok, 58, 244. Atlantic Charter, 2, 66, 78, 113, 210 n. Bidault, G ., 135. Aubin, Prof. H., 187, 189. Bielsko, 44. A ufbau und Frieden, 280-5. Bierut, B., 84, 108, 109, 112, 225 n., 227 n., 248, 273. Augsburg, Peace of, 200.

302

IN D E X

Bismarck, Klaus von, 205. Bismarck, Otto von, 12,13,25,69,200; and Poland, 3, io, 11, ig, 37, 261. Block der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (B.H.E.), 192-5* 205 n., 206. Bobrek steel mills, 266. Bobrowski, C ., 263 n. Bodenbach, see Podmokly. Boguszöw (Gottesberg), 277, 278. Böhm, Prof. Max, 188. Bohmann, Alfred, 130 n. Bohumin (Oderberg), 253. Boleslawiec (Bunzlau), 247. Bonn, University of, 188, 189. Bor-Komorowaki, Gen., 79. Brandenburg, 1, 2, 8, 16 n.; eastern (NeumarlO, 17, 87, 90, 98, 136, 240, 294. Bremen, 155, 241. Breslau, 22,82,83 n., 108,243; Catholic centre, 23; evacuation of (1945), 9091; University of Lwów transferred to, 97; University of, 185, 187, 189; see also Wroclaw. British zone, 136; Germans transferred to, 107, 114-18; German refugees in, 140-9, 179; Poles repatriated, 137 n. Bmo, 51,53 ,5 4 ,5 9 ,10 5 ,12 8 , 250,280. Bromberg, see Bydgoszcz. Brüx, see Most. Bückeburg express, 117. Bug, river, 59, 70, 74, 216, 263. Büfow, Prince, 13, 19, 20. Bund der Vertriebenen Deutschen (B.V.D .), 183. Bundesvertriebenèngesetz, 150, 159, 167 n. Bundesvertriebenenministerium, 141 n., 184, 190, 194, 196, 200. Bydgoszcz (Bromberg), 43 n., 44-47,56. Byrnes, J. F., 109, n o , 134. Bytom, see Beuthen. Cadogan Letter, 80-81, n o f., 137 f. Calonder, Felix, 29, 30, 33. Camps for refugees, 147, 163 ff., 178. Canada, 156, 174, 227 n. Captivi, 12, 13. Carlsbad demands, 42, 50, 51; see also Karlovy Vary. Carroll, Lt.-Col. F. L., 115. Cashubians, 96, 221 n., 294. Catherine the Great, 3. Cement industry: in Opole, 247, 265; in Cz., 251. Census, German: (Oct. 1946), 142, 145/.; Federal Republic (1950), 169 n. Chamberlain, Neville, 44 n., 45, 51, 191.

Charles IV , Emperor, 48. Charles V I, Emperor, 23. Charles X II, of Sweden, 23. Charter o f German Exiles (1950), 181-2, 195. Cheb, su Eger. Chemical industry, 265-7; Poland, 245, 247 f., 265, 267; Cz., 251 f., 258, 265. Chemiakhovsk (Insterburg), 290. China: Polish carrying trade with, 248; labour from, 259. Chomutov (Komotau), 27g. C h ris tlic h -D e m o k ra tis c h e Union (C.D .U .), 195 f. Churches: Roman Catholic, in Poland, 139-40, 272 ff., 279; — and agrarian reform, 221; Protestant, in Poland, 274; see also under Refugees. Churchill, W ., n o , 170, 210, 238, 281 n.; and Prussia, 73; at Teheran, 74-76; and Mikolajczyk, 77, 79; and Atlantic Charter, 78, r 13; at Yalta, 83-86, 92; and Stalin, 93; at Pots­ dam, 107-9; at Fulton, 133-4. Ciechanowski, Jan, 72, 78. Cieszyn, su Teschen. Coal: Upper Silesia, 24, 131, 138, 237 ff., 260-4, 268-70; W albrzych, 119, 839, 271; Ruhr, 152, 238; Polish, 240 ff., 245-8, 250; C z., 255, 258, 260, 263. Coke, 239, 243, 247, 262-4. Collective farms, su under Agriculture and State farms. Comecon, 264. Communism, Communists, go, 180, 207, 268, 272, 280, 286. Cleavage with W . Powers, 138-9. Cz.: (1945-8), 53,10 1-3,105 n., 106, 127, >34, 252; (Feb. 1948), 123, 228,230,254,256,263,281; Com­ munist régime, 113, 232, 234 f.; in Slovakia, 258. German Communists: C z., 65,280-5; W. Germany, 149; Poland, 271, 275; Kaliningrad, 288 f., 291. Poland, 78 f., 140, 2 11, 213, 219-24, 225 n., 248. Youth organizations, 225, 234, 283. Condominium, German-Polish or German-Czech, 206 f., 259, 268, 294. Constance, Lake (Bodensee), 158 c, 161. Control Council (Allied), i n , r is ff., 124, 147. Cooperatives, agricultural: Poland, 222, 224; C z., 229 f., 231-5, 271. Copernicus, 186. Copper, Polish, 245, 247 f.

303

IN D E X

Cracow (Kraków), 8 n., 9, 26, 55, 59, 212 n., 216, 223, 238, 244, 262. Csàky, Count, 41, 51 n. Currency reform: W . Germany, 148, 15*» *§8» 160, 173» *84; Cz., 258. Curzon line, 6, 39, 74 ff., 81, 83 n., 85, 94, 135, 210. Czechoslovakia: Government— in Exile, 6 7;— Provisional, 100 f., 251; Na­ tional Committees, 102 f.; National Guard, 103, 105; elections— (1946), 127, 134, 252; — (*954). 285; FiveYear Plan (1949-53), 230, 232 f., 254 f., 257 f., 283; Two-Year Plan (1947-8), 232, 252 ff., 257 n.; popu­ lation and birth-rate, 233, 235 f., 253 f., 257 n.; — war losses, 130, 228; national councils, 285; s u also BeneS; Prague; Protectorate; Ruthenia; Slovakia; and under Agrarian reform; Poland; and other headings. Czestochowa, 262, 265.

Engineering, machine production, 267; Poland, 245, 247 f., 264; Cz., 258. Erhard, Dr. L., 176 f. Ermeland, s u Warmia. E.R.P., see Marshall aid. Essen, 152, 277. European Coal and Steel Community, 269. Falknov (Falkenau), 251, 255, 279. Fallow land and waste: Poland, 218, 222, 226 f.; C z., 232-5. Farmers, German refugee, see under Refugees. Federal Republic, boundaries of, 1-2; establishment of, 149-50; rearma­ ment, 163, 165, 209 n.; s u also Adenauer; Agrarian reform; Refu­ gees; and other headings. Federation, central and E. European,

68.

Fierlinger, Z., 127, 131 n., 132. Five-Year Plans in E. Europe (195660), 235, 268. Dabrowa, 238, 261 f. Danzig (Gdaflsk), i n , 185-7, 209n.; FU um ingssiedlm gsgesetz, 150, 167. Versailles settlement, 3, 15, 34-35, Flurbereinigung, 107; s u also Agrarian reform. 2^1; events in (1938-9), 40-43; peace aims (1942-5), 72-74, 82, 85; burn­ Forced or slave labour, 57-58, 88-89, ing of, 92; Polish voivodeship of, 94, 9 3 ff-» 99» *05» ” 5» 12 m ., 122 f., 215,221; Cashubians in, 96; German 254, 288. population, 121; Gen. Anders’s view, Forster, Albert, 55, 60. France, 20, 135-0; food imports from, 135; Port of, 241, 243, 240. Danzig-Westpreussen, 55, 58, 60. *74» 176. D. D .R ., s u German Democratic Re­ Frank, Hans, 55, 57, 59, 60. Frank, K . H., 60. public. Frankfurt/Main, 9, 150, 198. Deutsche Jugend des Ostens (D .J.O.), Frankfurt/Oder, 137, 290. 205. Frankfurter Zeitung, 262, 268. Deutsche Reichspartei, 149. Frederick the Great, 1,8 , 19, 22 ff., 52. Dmowski, R ., 37. Frederick William III of Prussia, 9, 24. Dolansky, 253, 257 n. Freikorps, 27, 29. Döring, Kurt, 164 f. French zone, 140, 147. Dresden, 91. Freundschaft, 280, 284. Driberg, T ., 137 f. Drought: Poland, 222; C z., 230. Fürsorge, 151. Duchcov (Dux), 231, 279. Gablonz, ms Jablonec. D ’uril, 230. Galicia, 3, 9, 11 n., 40, 94; s u also Dwory, 264. Poland, Southern. Dychów, 247. Gas, 239, 254. de GauUe, C., 135. East Prussia, s u Königsberg. GdaAsk, su Danzig. Ebert, F., 30. E. C .A ., 151, 155, 158. Gdynia, 36, 41, 241, 243, 249. ‘Generalgouvernement, 55-58,90,262. Eden, À ., 79, 110; at Teheran, 74 f.; at German Democratic Republic: boun­ M alta, 82 f.; at Yalta, 108. daries, 1-2; founded, 220; and Com­ Eger, Egerland, 62 n., 128, 199, 283, munist economic bloc, 248 f., 265-9; 294. relations— with Poland, 249, 273, Elbe, river, 1, 70,104. 280; — with Cz., 280; see also O derElectric power, 267; Poland, 237, 240, Neisse Line; Silesia, Upper; Soviet 245, 247 f., 264 f.; C z., 251, 253, zone. 257 f-

304

IN D E X

German Knights, 3, 6, 8, 15, 33, 186. German minorities: outside Germany, 3» 5* 6» 34» *55» 201, 294; inter-war Poland, 19-22, Si-34, 39. 4 * r > 47» 96» 121, 271; post-war Poland, n o 19, 270-8; Slovakia, 232; post-war C z., 278-87. Germanization, 54; Poles, 26, 55-56, 60; Czechs, 57, 59-60, 123. Germany: Economic situation in E. between wars, 35, 36. Food supply, 169-79. Frontiers, 1-2, 209; set also O derNeisse line. Poland: Upper Silesia Convention (1922), 29 ff., 33 n., 34, 150; non­ aggression pact (1934), 33, 30, 42; Minorities Convention (1937), 34; attack on (1939), 44-47, 73; occu­ pation, 53-61; partition of (1939), 54» $5 . retreat from, 88-91; Polish reprisals, 89-90, 94 ff. See also Federal Republic; German Democratic Republic; Nazism. Gesamtdeutsche Block, see Block der Heimatvertriebenen. Gesamtvertretung aller Ostvertriebenen, 180. Glass industry: Gz., 126-8, 159, 251, 256; W. Germany, 159-61. Glatz (Kladzko, Klodzko), 23, 131 f., 241. Gleiwitz (Gliwice), 24, 239. Gniezno (Gnesen), 23. Goebbels, J ., 87, 194. Gomólka, W ., 212 n., 220 f., 263, 271. Göring, H., 56. Görlitz (Zgorzelec), 97 f., 249, 273. Gorzöw, see Landsberg. Gottesberg, see Boguszów. Göttingen, University of, 186-7, I&8. Göttinger Arbeitskreis, 186, 188, 190, 267. Gottwald, K ., 127, 230 n., 280. Gottwald sted works, 255. Grabski, Prof., 79, 81. Grazydski, 21, 32, 43. Great Britain, see United Kingdom. Greiser, A ., 55. Grenzmark, 15. Grossdeutsehland, 5, 6, 63. Grotewohl, Otto, 118. Grünberg, see Zielona Gòra. Gusev (Gumbinnen), 290. Habsburgs, Habsburg Monarchy, 3, 16 n., 22, 48, 182, 250, 257 n., 260, 274,294. Hakanstent 13,19» 61.

Halifax, Lord, 43. Hamburg, 155, 180, 241; University; 189. Hanover, 141,164. Hansemann, F. von, 13. Harriman, A ., 79. Hauptmann, Gerhart, 186. Heimatrecht, 183. Heimatvertriebene Jugend, 187. Helman, B., 129. Henckel von Donnersmarck family, 25. Henlein, Konrad, 49 f., 64, 126, 189 n. Henry I, Duke of Lower Silesia, 22. Herder, J. G., 186; — Institute, 187-8, 189, 190, 267. Hesse (Hessen), German immigrants in, 142-3, 147-8, 153, 195, 198. Heydebreck, su Kedzierzyn. Heydrich, R ., 58, 60, 66, 99. Himmler, H., 6, 35,55-59,97,99,192. Hindenburg, see Zabrze. Historians: Congresses (Wroclaw), 272; — (Otwock), 278; — (Brno), 280; Polish, 272 f.; Polish-Soviet Institute, 273; Russian, 273; Czechoslovak, 280. Hitler, A .: prepares war against Poland, 40, 47; and M emd Territory, 42, 287; secret military conference (Nov. *937)» 49 ; «“ d Czechs, 50-53; and Slavs, 54-57, 120; Ardennes offen­ sive, 83, 87-90; transfer o f Volks­ deutsche, 143. Hlond, Archbishop, 139. Hofer, Gen., 29. Hoffmann, Prof. F., 186, 188. Hoffmann, Heinrich, 277. Hohenzollern Empire, 1,3 , 10,26, 196, 260. Hopkins, H., 75Hossbach Memorandum, 49 n. Housing problems: Poland, 248; Cz., 254 f., 258; su also under Refugees. Hubertusberg, Treaty of, 23. Hugenberg, A ., 195. Huguenots, 183, 200 f. Hungary, Hungarians, 3, 4, 40, 49, 51 n., 99,207,258; Hungarian minor­ ity in C z., 101, 229, 231; Germans, transfer of, from, h i , 114, 124, 140, 143, >55. 181; economic relations with Poland and Cz., 263 f., 269,294. Industrial triangle, su Silesia, Upper. Industry: Development of, 293, 295; W . Ger­ many, 156, 158, 173, 177, 201-2, 212; Poland, 210 ff., 222,227, 236, 240 f., 243, 247, 259; C z., 253 f., 259.

IN D E X

Industry (could.): Nationalization of: Cz., 103, 123, 251 ff.; Poland, 114, 236 f., 243. See also wider Refugees. Inkmen Action (Aktion Inkousti), 256. Insterburg, see Chemiakhovsk. Iron and steel industry, 262 ff.; Poland, 240 f., 243 ff., 247 f., 263 ff.; Cz., 251 ff., 256 ff.; see also Krivoi Rog. Italy: policy on Upper Silesia, 29; labour, 163, 25g. Jablonec (Gablonz), 159-61, 282, 285. Jachymov (Joachimsthal), 252, 285. Jagidlon dynasty, 272. Jaksch, W ., 63-69, 105, 142, 165, 281. Jaworzno power station, 264. Jews, 3; Polish, 49, 56, 89, 115, 139; Czechoslovak, 52, 123, 130, 251. Joachimsthal, ree Jachymov. John Casimir, King of Poland, 8. Joseph I, Emperor, 23. , ungdeutschepartei (Poland), 42, 44. Junkers, East Elbian, 17, 35-36, 172, 214 m, 272. Kaeckenbeeck, G ., 30. Kaiser, J., 198. Kaliningrad, see Königsberg. Kameradschaftsbund, 199. Kamiennagóra (Landeshut), 274. Kant, I., 186 f. Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), 128, 230 n., «34. 279» 283. Karski, Jan, 89 n. Karvinnä, 38, 250, 262, 264. Kather, L., 180,183 n., 192,194 f., 206. Katowice (Kattowitz, Stalinogród), 27, 30» 31» 95» 96, 218, 244, 250, 266 n., 271. Katyn, 72, 74. Kaufbeuren, 159 f. Kedzierzyn (Heydebreck), 247, 265. Kennard, Sir H., 43. Kennemann, H., 13. Keyser, Prof., 187. Kielce, 55, 223. Kiesewetter, Prof. B., 267. Kladno, 37, 255, 263. Klaipeda, see Memel. Klodzko, see Glatz. Koch, E., 55, 193 n. Koch, Prof. Hans, 189. Kohlfurt, n 6 f. Kolberg, 71, 109, 137, 293. Kombinat, 265-8. Komotau, see Chomutov. Konarski, T ., 115. Koniev, Marshal, 100.

SOS

Königsberg (Kaliningrad), town and region, 16, 136, 189; under Soviet nue, 2, 93, 121, 287-92; war-time discussions about, 74-76, 82, 8311., 85; Potsdam Conference and, 109, 292; Germans expelled from, 119, 187; University, 185 f., 189; port, 261. Königshütte, 24. Korfanty, W ojdech, 27 f., 32, 38 n., 187, 273. Kolice programme, 100-3, 133> 251. Köslin (Koszalin), 71, 109, 219, 221, 224, 271, 293. Kraft, W ., 191 n., 192 f., 195 f., 198. Kraków, su Cracow. Kraus, Prof. H., 188 f. Kreibich, Karl, 62, 281. Krivoi Rog, 245, 256, 261 f., 266, 269. Kultura, 208. Kulturkampf, 10 f., 26. Labour shortage: W . Germany, 163, 165; Cz., 254 f. Land settlement and colonization: German refugee farmers in W. Ger­ many, 166-9. Germans in E. Germany and Prussian Poland, 12-14, 17, 19; Volks­ deutsche in Poland (1939), 55; Germans in Protectorate, 59. Czechs in frontier regions (1945-54), 228-36. Poles in recovered territories (194554), 211-13, 214-19, 221-8. Landeshut, su Kamiennagóra. Landsberg (Gorzów), 92 n., 95 n., 240. Landsmannschaften, 180 ff., 191 f., 198, 204, 206 f., 270, 293. Lastenausgleich, 150 f., 168. League of Nations, 15, 18, 29, 32, 35, 206. Lemberg, Prof. E., 190, 201, 204. Lenin works, su Skoda works. Leobschütz, 26, 28, 132. Libérée (Reichenberg), 159, 232, 282, 285. Lidice, 66. Lignite: C z., 105,251,255,279; Poland, 240, 243, 247, 249, 267, 279. Linhard, R ., 284. Link Action, 120. Linke-Hoffmann factory (Pafawag), 240, 243. Lithuania, Lithuanians, 15 ,5 4 ,7 7,119 , 272, 287, 289; Germans in, 272, 289. Lobe, Paul, 207. Lodgman von Auen, D r., 180,183,197, 208. *9»44» 55» 271*

306

IN D E X

Lublin, 54 f., 223; Lublin Gonunittee, 79,82,83 n., 84» 212; see also Poland, Provisional Government. Lukaschek, Dr. H ., 150, 180, 183 n., 194, 196 f., 206. Lüneburg, 164. Lusatia, 131 f. Lu2a, R ., 128, 130. Lwôw, 75, 77, 82, 216, 271; University of, 97. Marburg Lahn, 187 f., 267. Marienburg, 15, 186. Marienwerder, 16 n. Marshall, Gen. G ., 138, 179, 269; Marshall Aid, 147, 151 f., 155, 158, *73» *79» 254» 269. Masaryk, Jan, 104. Masaryk, T . G ., 62, 112, 279. Masuria, Masurians, 15 f., 9 6 ,118 ,12 1, 217, 219, 221 n., 223, 266, 274. Masurian Lakes, 36, 223. Mehnert, Dr. Klaus, 189. Meldestelle der Ost-Universitäten, 186. Memel (Klaipeda), town and Territory, 15, 42, 88, 91, 119, 186, 287. Miechowice, power plant at, 264. Mikolajczyk, S.: premiership of, 73,81; and future frontiers, 77 f., 83 n., 84, 211; in Moscow (1944), 79; VicePremier, 108 n., 1 12, 213; and land reform, 213-14. M ilitary service: Cz., 254, 285; Poland, 277. Miners: former E. Germany, 24-26; Cz., 126, 251, 254 f., 285; Polish in France, 131; in W . Germany, 157; German in Poland, 277. Minorities Treaties (1919): 4; Polish, 18, 31 ff. M itteldeutschland,

1.

Molotov, V ., 73, 76, 79, 134 f., 138. Moravska Ostrava, 37, 132, 255, 279. Moscow: meeting on Poland (Oct. *944)» 79» 81, 83 n.; Foreign Minis­ ters* Conference (1947), 118, 135, *37 f-> 269. Most (Brüx), 123, 251, 253, 279, 282. Müller, R ., 285. Müller, Dr. Valentin, 162, 187. Munich, Conference and Agreement (*938), 5» 5*-53» 63, 65, 113, 198; Poland and, 38, 40; Czech reactions, 51-53, 134, 280 f.; British repudia­ tion of, 66, 11311. Nahm, Dr., 141 n., 200. Naumann, Dr., 194, 205 n. Nazis: punishment of, 92 f., 95, 133; neo-Nazis, 188, 195.

Nebenerwerbsstellen, 169 n., 173.

Neisse (Nysa): town, 169 n., 173; river, see Oder-Neisse line. N eue Ackermann, der, 190. Neugablonz, 159-61, 190. Neurath, K . von, 60. Neustadt, 28. Nicholson, Col., 125. Nimptsch, Dr. R ., 163. Noel-Buxton, Lord, 87. Nordostdeutsche Akademie, 188. North Rhine-Westphalia, 141, 153-5, 204; universities of, 188. Nosek, 101, 104, 106. Nowa Huta, 244 f., 247. Nuremberg Trials, 133. Nysa, see Neisse. Oberländer, Prof. T ., 193,208; Minister for Refugees, 152-3, 196-7; Bundes­ tag speech (23 Sept. 1954), 157 n., 162, 166, 168 n. Oder-Danube Canal, 265. Oder-Neisse line, 2,6; origin of, 71-86; choice of E. or W . Neisse, 76, 84, 85 n., 108, 239, 294; establishment o f Polish authority m, 98; Potsdam Conference and, 107-11; German attitude to, 112, 197, 208, 212; Ger­ man estimate o f loss of manpower, 120-2; Great Powers* attitudes to, 134-8; effect on Prussia, 136; Vatican and, 139-40; effects on German food supply, 169-79; Poles and, 180, 2 1112; German policy on, 206, 208-9; Zgorzelec Agreement (G.D .R.— Po­ land, 1950), 249, 267, 273; British policy and, see Bevin; Churchill; Eden. Oder-Vistula Canal, 265 n. Odsun, see Sudeten Germans, expulsion of. Oliva, Treaty of, 8. Olsztyn, 221, 223 n., 225, 238, 266, 274 n.; voivodeship under-populated, 219, 223; state farms, 224 n.; see also Allenstein. Oppeln (Opole), town, province, voi­ vodeship, 26 n., 27, 43, 90, 118, 221, 260, 274; and Polish boundary, 75 f., 85, 238; ‘Autochtoni’ in, 217 f.; cement works, 247, 265. Osóbka-Morawski, 79 n., 94. Osteuropa Institut^ 185, 188. Osteuropäische Wirtschaft, Institut fur, *85, 193. Ostforschung, 190!. Ostmarken Verein, 13. Ostrava, see Moravska Ostrava.

INDEX Pafawag concern, 243. Pankow régime, see German Demo* cratic Republic. Pant, Senator, 34. Pekaï, 280. Peters, Gustav, 125, 285. Petschek family, 123. Pfitzner, J., 123, 189 n. Piast dynasty, 272. Pieck, W ., 118, 273, 280. Pillau (Baltisk), 180, 288, 290. Pilsudski, Marshal, 14, 21, 32 f., 38. Pius X II, Pope, 139-40. Pless, Prince Henry of, 25, 31 f. Podmokly (Bodenbach), 253. Poland: Army: Home, 78 f.; Anders's, 137. Birth-rate, 11 f., 225, 243; over­ population, 20, 209, 244. Corridor (Pomerellen), 34,36,40-42, 52, 82, 96. Cz., relations with, 38, 52; during war, 68, 71 ff.; new frontier, 71, 131-3; economic co-operation, 203-70. Frontiers, see Curzon line; O derNeisse line; Teschen. Government in Exile, 60, 68, 76 ff., 80 f., 85. Militia, 89, 95, 96. National councils, 221, 277, 278 n. National League (1848-51), 10. Peasant Party, 38, 77, 213. Peasants: from E. o f Curzon line, 216-19, 272; and Communism, 224, 227, 286. Political developments (1945-54)» 219, 219-20, 221. Provisional Government, 82 ff., 134, 213. Risings: (1830), 9; (1863), 10, 12. Six-Year Plan, 219 f., 222, 230, 243-8. Southern (W. Galicia), 94, 215 f. Three-Year Plan, 213,214 n., 218 ff., 241-3. W ar (1939-45): casualties, 122; material destruction, 210, 215. See also wider Agrarian reform; Ger­ many; and other headings. Polish minority in Germany (1929-39), a i, 31.

Pomereuen, 96. Pomorze, see Prussia: West. Potsdam, 2, 106-13, 115, 134-5, 137-8, 212 n., 292. Pötzl, J., 285. Poznania, see Prussia. Prague, 123,282; German minority, 51, 54,128; Hitler’s entry into, 53,113 n.;

307

Czech students, 57; rising (1945), 99-100; German university, 189,193. Prchala, Gen., 207. Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 5, 58, 5i , 66, 9&-IOO, ii4 n . Prussia, 69; liquidation of, 1-2, 136; policy towards Poles, 7-14; threeclass franchise, 11, 26; West (Po­ morze), 3, 8, 15, 72, 197. Rakovnik, 255. Raschhofer, Prof., 182 n., 190. Ratibor, 132. Red Army, 6-7; advance of, into Poland and Germany, 88-94, 310, 211 n.; into Cz., 99, 102 f. Refugees in W . Germany: Attitude of, 144-5, 197-200, 202-5, 207-8. Confessional questions, 141-2, 196, 200-1. Effects of integration of, 200-2. Emigration overseas, 156. Employment of, 146-7, 147-9, >53, >55, >57-8, 162-3, >69 n., 174; public servants, 147-8; in profes­ sions, 158, 184-5; *» business and industry, 158-61. Federal Republic: action taken by, *49- 53, >55, *9°; policy as to E. frontiers, 205 ff. Financial help for, 147-9,150-2,158. Housing, 141, 147, 164-6. Intermarriage with ‘natives', 161-2. Organizations, 179-81, 184; aca­ demic bodies, 184-91. Peasant farmers, 166-9, >73 fPolitical activities, 149, 191-7. Press and publications, 184 ff. Reception of, 140-2. Resettlement of, 152-5. V ital statistics: proportion of, to 'natives', 142-3; classified by ori­ gin, 143; sex and age ratio, 145-6, 161, 179; total number, 155. See also Charter of German Exiles. Reichenberg, see Libérée. Reparations, 69, 108, 124. Rhineland, 11, 107, 136, 140, 162, 170. Rhineland-Palatinate, 168. Ribbentrop, J. von, 40, 41. Riga, 4. Ripka, H ., 62, 104. Rokossowsky, 220. Römer, 79 f., n o . Roosevelt, F. D , 67, 8911., 93; and Polish frontiers, 71 f., 74, 76, 78 f., 81, 8a f., 108, 2 11. Rote Halstuch, Das, 280. Rothfels, H ., 190.

308

INDEX

Rügen, island of, 72. Ruhr, i i , 2 4,10 7,135-6,140 ,152,170 , 238, 261. Rumburk (Rumburg), 270, 282. Russia, Imperial: and Slavs, 3; and Poles, 9, 14, 272; and Germany, 9-10, 261; see also U.S.S.R. Ruthenia, 3, 40 f., 49, 99, 207, 228. Rzeszów, 223, 244. Saar, 1,2,135-6; Agreement (1954). *96. Saaz, see Za tec. San river, 59. Sandomierz, 40, 210. Saxony, 1 ,24g; Lower, German refugees in,....................... 14öS., 147, 149. 154-5. 162, 164ff., 170. Schangotsch family, 31, 157 n. Schieder, Prof., 190. Schlenger, Prof., 187. Schleswig-Holstein, German immigrants in, 140 ff., 147, 149, 154-5. *63. *66. 170. 195; elections in (1950), 192-3. Schools: Polish, in Prussia, 10, 13, 21, 26; German, in inter-war Poland, 20-21,31 ; Czech, in Protectorate, 57; German— in post-war Cz., 65, 102, 28^-4; — in Poland, 275 f., 278, 286; — m Kaliningrad, 288-9, 29 ** Schömer, Marshal, 100. Schreiber, Dr. O ., 180, 194. Schumacher, K ., 68, 192, 197. Schütz, Hans, 142. Seebohm, Dr. Hans, 198-9. Seeckt, Gen., 3, 261. Sciboth, F., 199, 208. Seraphim, Dr. P. H., 173, 187, 189, 227, 249 n., 264 n., 267, 269 n. Settlement, see Land settlement. Sikorski, Gen. W ., 38, 70 ff., 73, 79 n.,

293.

Silesia: History before 1918, 22-27. Lower, 94,135,172,216,218,239 fT., 243; see also Breslau; Walbrzych; Stettin; Szczecin. Upper, 24-33; industrial triangle, 11, 24-25, 260-70; risings and plebis­ cite (1919-21), 27-29; Geneva Convention, 29, 30, 32 ff.; Mixed Commission, 30-33; future of Ger­ man part, 73, 76; see also O derNeisse line; Wasser-Polacken. Sirokÿ, 234. Skoda works, 251, 255 n. Slovakia: relations with Czechs, 229; land settlement and agrarian reform, 229-32, 235-6; industrialization, 253-4. 255. 257-9; birth-rate, 235, 253*

Social Democrats: German, in C z., 63 f., 66-68, 105; Czech, 105-6; o f Germany, 149, 167, 192 f., 195, 197. Socialists, see Social Democrats and wider Sudeten Germans. Soforthilfe, 150-1. Sonne Report, 155-6, 163. Sosnkowski, Gen., 72 n. South Tyrolese, 6, 54. Sovetsk, see Tilsit. Soviet zone: refugees in, 98, 107, 110, 114, n 6 n ., 1 17 ff., 124, 126, 137 n., 143; refugees from to W. Germany, *43. *55. *66 n., 179, 184; see also German Democratic Republic. S.S. and Gestapo, 44, 46-47, 54, 87, 99-100, 115, 192. Stalin, J ., 81 n., go, 92 f., 201, 272, 27611., 287; and Polish frontiers, 74-79, 81 n., 83-86, 107; at Pots­ dam, 107-9. Stalinogród, see Katowice. Standard o f living: W . Germany, 177-8; Poland, 227-8; C z., 258. State farms: Prussia before 1919, 14, 214; Poland, 214,216-17,219,222-7, 271; C z., 230-2, 235; Kaliningrad, 288 f., 291. Steel, see Iron and steel. Stettin, 71-83, 108-9; m ota Szczecin. Stettinius, E. R ., 82, 84. Stokes, R . R ., 86, 123. Stresemann, G ., 18. Sudeten Germans: before 2nd world war, 5, 39-40, 48-51; land given to, 59; exiles* plans during war, 62-70; expulsion of, 62, 99, 100-6, 122-31; refugees in W. Germany, 140, 142, 144-5, *46. *58, 180, 182, 197-200; — contribution to W. German in­ dustry, 158-61, 162; — publications, 190; wealth of, 257; see also German minorities, post-war Cz. Sudeten mountains, 5 n. Svoboda, Gen., 99, 102. Swallow, Operation, 116-18. Sweden, 254; Polish trade with, 240, 242, 248, 256, 268. Swinoujscie (Swinemünde), 241, 243, 249 n. Szczecin, city and voivodeship, 224, 225, 227 m, 276-8, 293; port, 241, 243, 249, 255, 286; — Czech dock, 249* Tam owitz (Tamowskie Góry), 25. Teheran Conference, 74 ff., 108 ff., 287. Teschen (CÜeszyn, Täfln), 32, 38, 43, 49» 52> *3 * r >25°. «6*. 279*

INDEX Textile workers: German in Cz., 126-9, 256; refugees in W. Germany, 157, 158. Tiedmann, H. von, 13. Tilsit (Sovetsk), 288, 290. Tkaczow, 213. Tfincc, 255. Truman, H., 107. Tumwald, Dr. W ., 67 n., 68, 101, 190. Uhlke, K ., 285. Ukraine, Ukrainians, 3, 262, 267-6, 272; in inter-war Poland, 39-40, 49, 77» *39; in Slovakia, 232; see aim Ruthenia. Ulitz, Dr., 21. Unemployment: agrarian, in inter-war Poland, 209,211 ; — in Slovakia, 235, 253; see also under Refugees. United Kingdom: and transfer of Ger­ mans— from C z., 67, 110 -11 ; — from Poland, 75, 82-66, n o -1 1 ; see also Bevin; Churchill; Eden. United States: and transfer of Germans — from Cz., 67, n o -1 1 ; — from Poland, 73 f.,*8i, 83-66,110 -11; and frontiers o f Poland, 70-86; see also Byrnes; Marshall; Roosevelt. Unrra, 215, 252. Upper Silesia, see Silesia, Upper. Uranium mines, 252. U .S.S.R., 5, 7; and German Demo­ cratic Republic, I , 273-4, 286-7. relations with Germany, 16, 18 292-3; — agreement (Sept., 1939) 54; and Czechoslovakia, 53, 67, 73 102, 228, 252 n., 278-80, 286-7 292-3; and Poland, 54, 214, 248 292-3; — frontier questions, 70-86 109, 210 ff.; — Polish attitude, 3; 134,272-3,286-7; Marshall aid, 13I 254; Upper Silesian industrial tri angle, 260-70; policy towards Ger mans in E. Europe, 273-6; see also Communism; Königsberg; Molotov: Oder-Neisse line; Red Army; Ru­ thenia. Usti (Aussig), 104, 122, 231, 252, 279, 283. Vamsdorf (Wamsdorf), 129, 279. Vatican, 139-40. Verband der Landsmannschaften (V.d.L.), 183-4, *88. Vereinigte Ostdeutsche Landsmann­ schaften (V .O .L.), 181.

309

Versailles, Treaty cd*, 2 -3 ,15 ,18 ,3 7,7 3 . Vienna, 131. Vilna, 15, 77, 216. Vistula, 41, 88, 197, 241, 265. Vitkovice, 132, 250, 255. Volksdeutsche, 54 f., 58 f., 87, 94, 99, 143. Volz, Prof., 17, 35, 172, 201. Wagner, W ., 187. Walbrzych (Waldenburg), 119, 239, 247, 263, 271, 277, 294. Warmia (Ermeland), 16, 118. Warsaw, 55-56, 96, 219; rising (1944), 56 n., 79, 99, 210, 212; conference (M ay 1955), 267. Wartheland, 55, 58, 90. Wasser Polachen, 95, 118-19, 121, 217, 266, 271. Wasserpolnisch, 26. Weimar Republic, 36, 69, 172. Weizsäcker, W ., 190. Welles, Sumner, 71, 72, 74. Wirth, Dr. Joseph, 30. Wirtschaftsforscnung, Deutsches In­ stitut für, 188, 267. Witos, W ., 32, 38, 213. Wittiko Bund, 199, 208. Wizöw, 247. Wroclaw, town and voivodeship, 111, n 6 n ., 216, 221, 22411., 277 ft; Polish settlement, 218, 223; industry, 243,247; post-war G om an minority, 271,275,278; congresses, 272; see also Breslau. Würmeling, D r., 179. Wyszynsld, Archbishop, 139. Yalta, Conference at, 82-86,90,92,94, 108, 211. Zabrze (Hindenburg), 265. Zacléf (Schatzlar), 282, 284. Zambrowski, 220. Zâpotockÿ, 234. Zatec (Saaz), 102, 231. Zeitschriftf i t Ostforschung, 187, 189 n. Zentralverband der Vertriebenen Deutschen (Z.V.D.), 180 ff. Zgorzelec, see Görlitz. Zielona Gòra (Grünberg), 221, 223, 226 n., 247. Zittau, 240. Zugewanderte, 143 ft, *45“ ., 156, 159, 162.