The European Atrocity You Never Heard About (committed by the Allies post-WW2)

[Neue Regel]

http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You/132123/

(added emphases are mine)

Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies' cynical formulation, "reparations in kind&quot in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill's private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946, it was clear that "concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany." Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed "deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population" under the heading of "crimes against humanity."

By any measure, the postwar expulsions were a manmade disaster and one of the most significant examples of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Yet although they occurred within living memory, in time of peace, and in the middle of the world's most densely populated continent, they remain all but unknown outside Germany itself. On the rare occasions that they rate more than a footnote in European-history textbooks, they are commonly depicted as justified retribution for Nazi Germany's wartime atrocities or a painful but necessary expedient to ensure the future peace of Europe. As the historian Richard J. Evans asserted in In Hitler's Shadow (1989) the decision to purge the continent of its German-speaking minorities remains "defensible" in light of the Holocaust and has shown itself to be a successful experiment in "defusing ethnic antagonisms through the mass transfer of populations."

Even at the time, not everyone agreed. George Orwell, an outspoken opponent of the expulsions, pointed out in his essay "Politics and the English Language" that the expression "transfer of population" was one of a number of euphemisms whose purpose was "largely the defense of the indefensible." The philosopher Bertrand Russell acidly inquired: "Are mass deportations crimes when committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?" A still more uncomfortable observation was made by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, who reasoned that "if every German was indeed responsible for what happened at Belsen, then we, as members of a democratic country and not a fascist one with no free press or parliament, were responsible individually as well as collectively" for what was being done to noncombatants in the Allies' name.





More at the link...what a disturbing article. I will admit that this is the first time I've ever heard of this "transfer of population".

[elleng]

1. The author also wrote The Labour Party, Nationalism and Internationalism, 1939-1951.

Summarized:

'The Second World War was a watershed moment in foreign policy for the Labour Party in Britain. Before the war, British socialists had held that nationalism was becoming obsolete and that humanity was steadily evolving towards the ideal of a single world government. The collapse of the League of Nations destroyed this optimistic vision, compelling Labour to undertake a fundamental review of its entire approach to foreign affairs during a period of unprecedented global crisis.

This book traces the controversy that ensued, as the British democratic left set about the task of defining the principles of a radically new international system for the postwar world. The schemes proposed by Labour policymakers during these years encompassed a wide variety of political institutions aiming at the restraint or supersession of the sovereign nation-state. What they shared in common, however, was a reconceptualization of British identity, in which the hyper-patriotism of the wartime period blended with the left's traditional internationalism. This new 'muscular' internationalism was to have a major impact upon the evolution of entities as diverse as the United Nations Organizations, the British Commonwealth and the accelerating campaign in favor of European unity after Labour assumed the reins of government in 1945.

Breaking with the traditional accounts that place Cold War tensions at the centre of the Attlee government's activities in the immediate postwar years, R.M. Douglas's book provides an entirely new framework for reassessing British foreign policy and left-wing concepts of national identity during the most turbulent moment of Britain's modern history.'

http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Labour_Party_Nationalism_and_Interna.html?id=x1M1B69dtasC

[Egalitarian Thug]

5. You were not a criminal defense lawyer, were you? n/t

[Xipe Totec]

2. Horrifying nt

[Swede]

3. Stalin made Prussia disappear. That's what mass murderers do.

nt

[burrowowl]

4. Kick!

[RZM]

6. After WWI, it was the borders that were moved around. After WWII it was the people

Though this was presaged by two major prior incidents of ethnic cleansing that accompanied the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The first was of course the Armenian genocide. The second was the expulsion of Greeks from Anatolia during and the after the Greco-Turkish war, which occurred in the early 1920s. The Greek expulsions were also accompanied by expulsions of Muslims from Greece, though the bulk of the of cleansed (about 1.5 million) were Anatolian Greeks. These were people whose roots went back to classical times and before. Interestingly, this process was also endorsed by the international community at the Lausanne Conference in 1924, though by that time, most of the expulsions had already taken place.

You had all sorts of borders move around after WWI. But, with some exceptions, the people pretty much stayed where they were. Minority issues caused all sorts of problems in the interwar years, notably the status of German minorities in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, though virtually every state in Central/Eastern Europe had serious minority issues (Ukrainians in Poland, Hungarians in Romania, etc.).

The status of German minorities abroad was a major aspect of Hitler's grand plans and one of the reasons he launched the war. This, combined with anger at the Germans for their aggression and horrendous occupation regimes, contributed to the consensus for expulsion. Not only were Germans being punished for the war, but they were also being moved to prevent future conflict.

But another major reason for it was actually the Nazi-Soviet pact. Stalin had never wavered from his position that after the Germans were defeated, the Soviet Union would return to 1941 borders (including the Baltic states, Eastern Poland, and a couple smaller regions seized from Romania). Stalin insisted that the Soviets would get to keep what they had taken in collusion with Hitler. With a large chunk of interwar Poland now belonging to the Soviet Union, the Poles were to be compensated with German territory. This was one of the reasons the number of expelled was so high, since much of the territory that was cleansed had already been German before the war (and Prussian since the middle ages).

Here are some more works on this for those who are interested:

http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Aegean-Appraisal-Compulsory-Population/dp/1571815627/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1340002397&sr=8-1&keywords=CROSSING+THE+AEGEAN

http://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Revenge-Cleansing-European-Germans/dp/0312121598

http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Sweep-Cleansing-1945-1960-Rochester/dp/1580462383/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340002473&sr=1-1&keywords=A+CLEAN+SWEEP%3F+POLAND

http://www.amazon.com/Redrawing-Nations-Cleansing-East-Central-1944-1948/dp/0742510948/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340002499&sr=1-1&keywords=REDRAWING+NATIONS

http://www.amazon.com/Fires-Hatred-Ethnic-Cleansing-Twentieth-Century/dp/0674009940/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340002515&sr=1-1&keywords=Fires+of+Hatred

[gopiscrap]

7. My mom told me about this

she was born in Frankfurt, Germany in 1933 and lived through all the stuff that went down!

[Major Nikon]

8. This author is more than a bit disingenuous

The author makes it sound as if all of the allies conspired to commit attrocities on German speaking refugees, and this is very far afield from reality.

The refugees from the soon to be iron curtain countries migrated for two basic reasons. The first reason was because they had already seen and heard what was happening to the German speaking peoples as the Soviet army was making it's way towards Berlin. The second reason is because Stalin expelled the remaining German speaking populace from these countries after those countries fell to Russia in order to increase his stranglehold on the region. The allies addressed this issue during the Potsdam agreement only for the intent of trying to mitigate the attrocity. Stalin was already going to deport those people. The only question was how. Had the allies not secured Stalin's agreement to slow the deportations, undoubtedly hundreds of thousands, if not millions more would have died.

The author convieniently omits Stalins exclusive responsibility for the attrocities while simultaneously omitting the rest of the allies' efforts to stem the tide of suffering and death.

[RZM]

9. It was actually the local populations and governments that carried out most of the expulsions

And not the Soviets. It is true that many Germans fled during the war ahead of the Red Army (or were pushed out by the Red Army). But overall they comprised a relatively small percentage of final total of expelled.

In most cases it was the locals who carried all of this out. And part of the reason was that they were seething with rage over living under brutal German occupation. Another was that postwar Communist governments (backed by the Soviets, but staffed by the locals) lacked legitimacy and were eager to redistribute all of this German property to a destitute population that was not particularly keen on them. In some cases you had RW nationalists cooperating with the Communists in the expulsion process because they were both on the same page about getting rid of the Germans. And many leftover figures from interwar governments had no problem with any of this.

But Czechoslovakia, for instance, didn't even have a Communist government until 1948, when they came to power in a coup and joined the Soviet bloc. The time right after the end of the war has been dubbed the 'wild' period of expulsions, where Czechs showed very little mercy to the local German population, and made a point to get even not only through expulsions, but through mob violence as well. One of the ironies here is that wartime occupation was actually less brutal in Czechoslovkia than in Poland, but the Czechs tended to be rougher than the Poles in the expulsion process. This was not carried out at the behest of the Soviets nor with their assistance. It was a Czech thing.

Despite the Red Army's conduct at the end of the war, after it was over, in some places Germans began to see the Red Army garrison troops as more sympathetic to them than the enraged local populations.

[Major Nikon]

11. These things are true with most wars

Cycles of oppression, revenge, and ethnic cleansing are inevitable. That's why most wars create refugees. The only question is to what extent the allies themselves were responsible. Stalin most certainly had a policy of forced expulsion. Huge numbers of refugees came from areas the Soviets annexed and also from areas they had direct control, like Hungary where Soviet generals themselves ordered expulsions. Many of the other areas, like Czechoslovkia experienced growing Soviet influence which started before the war had even ended. All of this was part of Stalin's plan. It's a lot easier to control countries that are ethnically less diverse. The author suggests that the allies were equally culpable and I just can't go along with that.

[YellowRubberDuckie]

12. Carried out most likely to save who they could...

...because Stalin was not known for his value of human life...

[newthinking]

10. I don't believe it's quite so simple... war is brutal.. this was part of the war (effect)

I know we have our own version of history in the US, but what happened in WW2 is extremely difficult to box into our cold war mentality. Certainly Stalin agitated things by keeping the territories, but the USSR had lost more than 20 MILLION people to the German war machine.

Not making excuses for the Russians (or the other many European peoples who also extracted revenge and atrocities against expat german civilians), but I think it is beyond imagining for most in this country to understand what it means for a foreign entity to extract the kind of toll that the german army did in Russia. I am not convinced, at that time in history, we would have necessarily acted that much differerent.

I am not saying it was right, but there was dangerous animosity toward German speaking people throughout that part of the world, including in the other allied countries. The primary problem was the anger of millions whose lives and countries were destroyed by the Reich, not Stalin, and not even the border designations. It was the aftermath of a brutal war.

I would, however argue, it's difficult to see how the allies could have done any different, especially given that they were all rebuilding their own countries and already had their resources tasked taking care of their own people?

Seems to me that it would be better to see the lesson of the brutality even in the aftermath of war. Maybe someday the world will learn that and it's citizenry will fight harder to make peace and human rights a higher priority.

[Odin2005]

13. My mom's side originally came from East Prussia.

From near Koenigsberg, home of Immanuel Kant. The area was German for centuries.

[hrmjustin]

14. War sucks! The after effects of war sucks! n/t