Ok, this episode is gonna be quite heavy.
Europe looked a lot different by the 1950s
than it did before the Second World War. And
not just because of the redrawn borders. The
war was full of the mass movement of refugees
across the continent, and it caused a lot
of chaos, suffering, and many many deaths.
Today, we’re going back a little bit in
our chronology to look specifically at the
experiences of ethnic Germans, and the mass
movement of them to what would become East
and West Germany. I’m your host David and
this is...The Cold War.
To begin, we’re going to need to understand
that the idea of ‘nations’ is always going
to be a tough thing in central and eastern
Europe. Before the wars of German unification,
it looked like this mess of small states,
principalities, and the like. This meant that
once Germany claimed this area after unification,
it was a stew of various ethnicities blended
together in now a big pot. It wasn’t always
sunshine and flowers, but these ethnicities
interacted more or less with each other all
the time.
But then somewhere along the way nationalism
became a much bigger thing. Ethnicities decided
that intermixing with others was no longer
a good idea, as they were hopped up on ethnic
supremacy and making territorial claims. So
what’s a young German Empire to do? Well,
to keep the fighting down, they decided to
take different ethnicities and put them in
different regions. This was the first big
project of mass movements of people. It was
about as messy as you’d expect.
Then after The First World War, several new
states were carved onto the map through the
Versailles Treaties. New countries, such as
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia
appeared. In spite of attempts to draw borders
along ethinic lines, the region was still
very diverse. So these new nations contained
many ethnicities, including many ethnic Germans.
And of course, we cannot forget about the
many ethnic Germans that had been living further
East in what was now the Soviet Union.
In the rise of Nazi Germany, a hyper-nationalist
state, the government in Berlin used these
German ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe
as an excuse to begin a path of conquest across
Europe. During that occupation, some ethnic
Germans used this nationalist government to
climb to positions of power in their occupied
countries. As the Nazis began to lose the
war, many of these countries decided to expel
all the ethnic germans they could from their
borders.
As the Red Army began to push the Germans
back in eastern Europe, Germans in Eastern
Europe began to get nervous. Rumours had already
gotten to them on how Soviet troops dealt
with German civilians. They heard stories
of rape, murder, and pillaging, which the
Nazi government spread to bolster support
for the war effort.
Now, even though some planning occured to
evacuate Germans in the path of the advancing
Red Army, it never really happened. In fact,
the Nazi order of no retreat likely put more
people in danger. Germans had to leave eastern
Europe of their own accord, eventually resulting
in entire communities organizing exoduses…
exodi? Whatever the plural of exodus is. These
would result in lines of refugees which would
span for kilometres as Germans took everything
they owned and began to flee for Germany.
A site which would be seen a lot of in the
years to come. Some of these people on the
Baltic coast got on boats and wound up in
Denmark, where they’d stay in internment
camps.
After the war, many Germans in central and
eastern Europe were now under Soviet occupation.
In the Potsdam agreement, the allied powers
agreed to receive ethnic Germans as Czechoslovakia,
Hungary and Poland planned to expel every
single one of them from their borders. If
you recall from our early episodes on the
Potsdam Agreement, the border of the Soviet
Union had moved West into Polish territory
and the western border of Poland had been
moved further West as compensation. This meant
that Germans who had been living in Germany,
now found themselves living in Poland and
then being forced to leave.
Yugoslavia put their Germans in internment
camps, where tens of thousands of them died
in brutal conditions. In all countries, they
lost most of their personal belongings and
created a massive refugee crisis. This also
occurred in some western European countries
like the Netherlands, which expelled over
20,000 of their ethnic German population as
well. In Poland, the USSR deported many Germans,
but not towards the West but to the east,
to the Soviet Union to work in forced labour
camps as a form of reparation. Few in Poland
had much sympathy because the German empire
had expelled tonnes of ethnic Poles. Atrocities
piled up on atrocities, which I guess is part
and parcel for the Second World War. Of those
sent to the labour camps, nearly half of them
died.
So why would they do what would basically
be one of the most extensive programmes of
ethnic cleansing in history? Well, there were
several reasons they gave for such a brutal
expulsion of people. The first reason we already
mentioned, nationalism. One might think the
world would have gotten over the idea after
the Second World War. Still, instead of going
away like eugenics into the dustbin of bad
ideas, it stuck around. It evolved into the
nation-state. The Nation-state being the concept
that every state should contain one homogenous
ethnic group. Instead of acknowledging that
Central and Eastern Europe were diverse places,
they decided it was better forcibly move people
into whatever border was drawn on the map
for people that look and talk like them. Even
in the Communist world where nationalism was
supposed to be a thing of the past, they discussed
moving Poles and Ukrainians into their ‘correct’
borders. Stalin liked the idea of German expulsion
because the anger generated in Germany might
make the new communist satellite states in
eastern Europe stay close with the USSR in
fear of reprisal.
The second reason was that many countries
saw Germans as a potential threat, which could
undermine their country from within, a supposed
fifth column. They suspected Germans wouldn’t
be loyal to these new nation-states, and that
they’d possibly help cause yet another world
war.
Feeding on both ideas, many allies in the
West justified this mass expulsion of Germans
as necessary for stability. They thought ethnic-based
violence would break out if they kept German
minorities in central and eastern Europe.
Some also saw this as a perfectly justifiable
collective punishment for Germany starting
the Second World War. The brutality of the
German occupations of Europe, the war crimes,
the holocaust, the horrors we should not subtract
from of the Nazi regime gave many animus to
want to expel every last person of German
heritage.
As these refugees arrived in Germany, no one
was prepared to handle the sheer load of so
many people. In a seeming case of deja vu,
trains arrived filled with corpses and extremely
ill or starving people, Germans this time.
Many had been brutally beaten, raped, or murdered
as part of their voyage out of their respective
countries under Soviet occupation. Families
were scattered, and many had already spent
significant time in internment camps before
being sent to refugee camps in Germany.
And it’s not like Germany was in such a
great position itself. It had been devastated
by the war, the economy would be ruined for
several years, and there was a critical shortage
of housing, a shortage which would last until
the 1960s. The French, who you will recall
had been given a zone of occupation, but didn’t
sign the Potsdam Agreement, refused to help
the refugees who wound up in their zone at
all. Though the French absorbed many of those
refugees, who were interned in Denmark, where
they were dying at a shockingly high rate.
The Soviets who were facilitating most of
the expulsions, offered little in aid to those
who arrived in Germany, forcing the British
and US occupation zones to pick up the slack.
Immediately there were supply issues. Most
of the allies were economically depleted themselves,
the result of just fighting the Second World
War. The importation of mass amounts of supplies
like food and coal was an expensive endeavour
if there was even food to buy.
Overall, the process of expulsion and the
refugee crisis resulted in the deaths of about
2 to 3 million people. That’s about 4% of
the entire losses of the Second World War.
The expulsions also left many children orphaned
in various corners of Europe. In some places,
they lived as homeless kids sometimes resorting
to scratching a living in the forests. In
the former East Prussia, stories of these
‘wolf children’ wouldn’t become public
until the end of communism in Lithuania.
As many as 14 million Germans were displaced
by this period of post-war history. It’s
the single largest movement of any ethnic
group in the history of Europe, but still
only part of the 30 million people displaced
in the larger European theatre of the war.
Many international laws put in place since
the end of the war, especially those relating
to ethnic cleansing, would make such an event
today illegal.
But yet, we still see mass expulsions occur
and a collective failure to help the victims
of them. As Europe experienced a refugee crisis
only a few years ago, Germany stood out as
a stout defender of the rights of the refugee.
Maybe this story will give you a little clue
as to why.
Mass expulsions and forced movements of people
are not as neutral and bloodless as they sound.
These are brutal events. Throughout history,
you might hear of ‘removing’ people or
‘forced migration’, and their stories
are nearly always a dark one. So, when you
listen to stories in the world of mass movements
of people, desperate, going to extreme lengths
to escape war, famine, crime, or ethnic cleansing,
please think of this story of the refugee.
We hope you may have taken something away
from today’s topic. My thanks to Tristan
from StepBack History for tackling the research
and writing for a very difficult topic. We
do plan on a future episode covering some
of the other ethnic explosions that occurred
in the wake of the Second World War so in
order not to miss this and more, please make
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