I.
БАШТИНА НА ВОЈНАТА
The Legacy of War
“This
was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanized world – other civilizations
rolled and crumbled down, the European civilization was, as it were, blown up.”
H. G. Wells, War in the Air (1908)
“The
human problem the war will leave behind it has not yet be imagined, much less
faced by anybody. There has never been such destruction, such disintegration of
the structure of life.”
Anne O’Hare McCormick
“Everywhere
there is a craving for miracles and cures. The war has pushed the Napolitans
back into the Middle Ages.”
Norman Lewis, Naples 1944
Europe in the aftermath of the
Second World War offered a prospect of utter misery and desolation. Photographs
and documentary films of the time show a pitiful streams of helpless civilians
trekking through a blasted landscape of broken cities and barren fields.
Orphaned children wander forlornly past groups of worn out women picking over
heaps of masonry. Shaven-headed deportees and concentration camps inmates in
striped pyjamas stare listlessly at the camera, starving and diseased. Even the
trams, propelled uncertainly along damaged tracks by intermittently available
electric current, appeared shell-shocked. Everyone and everything – with a
notable exception of well-fed Allied occupation forces – seemed worn out,
without resources, exhausted.
…
Stalin had
continued his pre-war practice of transferring whole peoples across the Soviet
empire. Well over a million people were deported east from soviet-occupied Poland and the western Ukraine and Baltic Lands
between 1939-1941. In the same years the Nazis too expelled 750,000 Polish
peasants eastwards from western Poland, offering the vacated land to the Volksdeutshe, ethnic Germans from
occupied eastern Europe who were invited to ’come home’ to the newly expanded
Reich. This offer attracted some 120,000 Baltic Germans, a further 136,000 from
Soviet occupied Poland,
200,000 from Romania
and others besides – all of whom would in their turn be expelled a few years
later. Hitler’s policy of racial transfers and genocide in Germany’s
conquered eastern lands must thus be understood in direct relation to the
Nazi’s project of returning to the Reich (and setting in the newly-cleared
property of their victims) all the far-flung settlements dating back to
Medieval times. The Germans removed Slavs, exterminated Jews and imported slave
workers from west and east alike.
Between them
Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some
30 million people in the years 1939-43. With the retreat of the Axis armies,
the process was reversed. Newly resettled Germans joined millions of
established German communities through eastern Europe in headlong flight from
the Red Army. Those who made it safely in Germany were joined there by a
pullulating throng of other displaces persons. William Byford-Jones, an officer
by the British army, described the situation in 1945 thus:
“Flotsam and
jetsam! Women who had lost husbands and children, men who had lost their wives;
men and women who had lost their home and children; families who had lost vast
farms and estates, shops, distilleries, factories, flour-mills, mansions. There
were also little children who were alone, carrying some small bundle, with a
pathetic label attached to them. They had somehow got detached from their
mothers, or their mothers have died and been buried by other displaced persons
somewhere along the wayside.”
From the east
came Balts, Poles, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Hungarians, Romanians and others: some
were just fleeing the horrors of war, other escaping West to avoid being caught
under Communist rule. A New York Times
reporter described a column of 24,000 Cossack soldiers and families moving
through southern Austria,
‘no different in any major detail from what an artist might have painted in the
Napoleonic wars’.
From the Balkans
came not just ethnic Germans but more than 100,000 Croats from the fallen
wartime fascist regime of Ante Pavelic, fleeing the wrath of Tito’s partisans.
[фуснота:
They had good ground for fear. The British Army in Austria would later hand them over
to the Yugoslav authorities (under an Allied agreement to return such prisoners
to the government against whom they had fought) and at lest 40,000 of them were
killed.]
In Germany and
Austria, in addition of to the millions of Wehrmacht soldiers held by the
Allies and newly released Allied soldiers from German POW camps, there were
many non-Germans who had fought against the Allies alongside the Germans or
under the German command: the Russian, Ukrainian and other soldiers of General
Andrei Vlasov’s anti-soviet Army; volunteers from the Waffen-SS from Norway,
the Netherlands, Belgium and France; and auxiliary German fighters,
concentration camp staff and others liberally recruited in Latvia, Ukraine,
Croatia and elsewhere. All had good reason to seek refugee from Soviet
retribution.
Then there were
the newly-released men and women who had been recruited by the Nazis to work in
Germany.
Brought into German farms and factories from all across the continent, they
numbered many millions, spread across Germany proper and its annexed
territories, constituting the largest single group of Nazi-displaced persons in
1045. Involuntary economic migration
was thus the primary social experience of World War Two for many European
civilians, including 280,000 Italians forcibly removed to Germany by their former ally after Italy’s
capitulation to the Allies in September 1943.
Most of Germany’s
foreign workers had been brought there against their will – but not all. Some
foreign workers caught in a slipstream of German defeat in May 1945 had come of
their own free will – like those unemployed Dutchmen who accepted offers of
work in Nazi Germany before 1939 and stayed on. Even at the derisory wages paid
by wartime German employers, men and women from eastern Europe, Balkans, France
and Benelux countries were better off there
than staying at home. And Soviet laborers (of whom there were upwards of two
million in Germany by September 1944), even if they had been brought to Germany
by force, were not necessarily sorry to be there – as one of them, Elena
Skrjabena, recalled after the war: “None of them complain about how Germans had
sent them to work in German industry. For all of them that was the only
possibility of getting out of the Soviet union.
Another group of
displaced persons, the survivors of concentration camps, felt rather
differently. Their ‘crimes’ had been various – political or religious
opposition to Nazism or Fascism, armed resistance, collective punishment for
attacks on Wermacht soldiers or installations, minor transgressions of
Occupation regulations, real or invented criminal activities, falling foul of
Nazi racial laws. They survived camps which by the end were piled high with
dead bodies and where disease of every kind were endemic: dysentery, TB,
diphtheria, typhoid, typhus, bronco-pneumonia, gastro-enteritis, gangrene and
much else. But even these survivors were better off than the Jews, since they
had not been systematically and collectively scheduled for extermination.
Few Jews
remained. Of those who were liberated 4 out of 10 died within a few weeks of
the arrival of the Allied armies – their condition was beyond the experience of
Western medicine. But the surviving Jews, like most of the Europe’s other
homeless millions, found their way into Germany. Germany was where the Allied
agencies and camps were to be situated – and anyway, eastern Europe was still
not safe for Jews. After a series of post-war pogroms in Poland many of surviving Jews left for good:
63,387 Jews arrived in Germany
from Poland
between July and September 1946.
What was taking
place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an
unprecedented exercise of ethnic cleansing and population transfer. In part
this was the outcome of ‘voluntary’ ethnic separation: Jewish survivors leaving
a Poland
where they had been unsafe and unwanted for example, or Italians departing the
Istrian peninsula rather than live under Yugoslav rule. Many ethnic minorities
who had collaborated with occupying forces (Italians in Yugoslavia, Hungarians in Hungarian-occupied northern
Transylvania, now returned to Romanian rule, Ukrainians in the western Soviet union, etc.) fled with the retreating Wehrmacht to
avoid retribution from the local majority or the advancing Red Army, and never
retuned. Their departure may not have been legally mandated or enforced by
local authorities, but they had little option.
Elsewhere,
however, official policy was at work before the war ended. The Germans of
course began this, with the removal and genocide of Jews, and the mass
expulsions of Poles and other Slav nations. Under German aegis between 1939 and
1943 Romanians and Hungarians shunted back and forth across new frontier lines in
disputed Transylvania. The Soviet authorities
in their turn engineered a series of forced population exchanges between
Ukraine and Poland; one million Poles fled or were expelled from their homes in
what was now western Ukraine, while half a million Ukrainian left Poland for
the Soviet union between October 1944 and June 1946. In the course of few
months what had once been an inter-mixed region of different faiths, languages
and communities became two distinct, mono-ethnic territories.
Bulgaria transferred
160,000 Turks to Turkey; Czechoslovakia, under a February 1946 Agreement
with Hungary, exchanged the
120,000 Slovaks living in Hungary
for an equivalent number of Hungarians from communities north of the Danube, in
Slovakia.
Other transfers of this kind took place between Poland
and Lithuania and between Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union; 400,000 people
from southern Yugoslavia
were moved to land in the north to take place of 600,000 departed Germans and
Italians. Here as elsewhere, the population concerned were not consulted. But
the largest affected group was the Germans.
The Germans of
eastern Europe would probably have fled west in any case: by 1945 they were not
wanted in the countries where their families had been settled for many hundreds
of years. Between a genuine popular desire to punish local Germans for ravages
of war and occupation, and the exploitation of this mood by post-war
governments, the German-speaking communities of Yugoslavia, Hungary,
Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic region and the western Soviet Union were
doomed and they knew it.
In the event,
they were given no choice. As early 1942 the British had privately acceded to
Czech request for a post-war removal of the Sudeten German population, and the
Russians and Americans fell into the line the following year. On May 19th,
President Edouard Benes of Czechoslovakia
decreed that “we have decided to eliminate German problem once and for all”.
Germans (as well as Hungarians and other ‘traitors’) were to have their
property placed under state control. In June 1945 their land was expropriated
and on August 2th that year they lost their Czechoslovak citizenship. Nearly
three million Germans, most of them of Czech Sudetenland, were than expelled
into Germany
in the course of the following 18 months. Approximately 267,000 died in the
course of the expulsion. Whereas Germans had comprised 29 percent of the
population of Bohemia and Moravia in 1930, by the census of 1950 they
were just 1,8%.
From Hungary a further 623,000 Germans were expelled,
from Romania 786,000, from Yugoslavia about half a million and from Poland
1,3 million. But by far the greatest number of German refugees came from the
former eastern lands of Germany
itself: Silesia, East
Prussia, eastern Pomerania and eastern Brandenburg. At the Potsdam meeting of the
US, Britain and the USSR (July 17th – August 2th 1945) it was
agreed, in the words of Article XIII of the subsequent agreement, that the
three governments ‘recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations,
or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have
to be undertaken’. In part this merely recognized what had already taken place,
but it also represented a formal acknowledgement of the implications of
shifting Poland’s
frontiers westwards. Some 7 million Germans would find themselves in Poland, and the Polish authorities (and the
occupying Soviet forces) wanted them removed – in part so that Poles and others
who lost land in the eastern regions now absorbed into the USSR could in their turn be
resettled in the new lands to the west.
The upshot was de jure recognition of a new reality.
…
(Tony Judt: POSTWAR - A History of Europe since
1945; The Penguin press, New York
2005)
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