Crimes and Mercies (18 page)

Approximately 37,000 people were enslaved at Potulitz between 1945 and 1949. In Barracks 17, which held at various times between 132 and 238 people, 744 people died in twenty months. The two populations produce death rates between 176 and 318 per cent per year.
³⁹
These rates are both much more than 100 times the ambient Polish death rate. At Graudenz, 62 per cent of the slaves died in a single year, 1945. Overall at Potulitz, about 12,000 persons died among a total pass-through of 37,000
in fifty-three months, approximately six times the ambient Polish civilian death rate in the same years 1945–50.
⁴⁰

Dr Kent, an American citizen now living in Arizona, suffers the reticence of all the survivors. She, her mother, younger brother and sister, were sent to Potulitz from captivity in Busckowo. Her grandmother was separated from the family in 1948, and they never saw her again. Her father, older brother and sisters were scattered to other concentration camps, where they endured torture, beatings, and enslavement. Some prisoners were shot.

In 1948, the German children were joined by a new group of healthy-looking girls who, to judge from their shining skin and plump cheeks, had only recently entered Polish captivity. Each of them wore a strange yellow device sewn on to her trouser-leg. Young Martha Schulz, aged eight, whispered to her mother through the barbed wire, ‘Who are they?’ Her mother replied with a word that Martha did not understand, but thought meant some special work group. Not until many years later, in North America, when she saw her first pictures of the Jews victimized by Hitler, did she realize the girls were Jews. ‘It was as if the Poles had learned only one thing from the Holocaust: to sew the Star of David on to the legs as if to say, “You see, we’re not like the Nazis.”’

After Dr Kent was released, and had emigrated with some other survivors, first to Canada and then to the USA, she found that people refused to believe any stories about atrocities against Germans by the Allies. Once, when she was a student at university in the US, she approached a group of students conversing with a professor. When Kent joined in, the professor said, ‘Here’s our little Nazi.
Sieg Heil
.’ Her younger sister once spoke of her family’s sufferings in camp to some American students. ‘What did you do to deserve that?’ someone asked. She answered that she had nursed at her mother’s breast. At the end of the war, her sister was one year old, Dr Kent was five.

Dr Kent is only one part of the wave of new evidence now entering the historical record which will probably change the estimates of German deaths in the years 1945–50. Alfred de Zayas has recently added to his pioneering work with his book
A
Terrible Revenge
; the American writer John Sack in his book
An
Eye for an Eye
has told an appalling story of Jewish vengeance against Germans in Polish concentration camps; and the German writer Hugo Rasmus’s book,
Schattenjahre in Potulitz
tells in detail the story of one concentration camp run by Poles. So far, most historians have assumed that about 2.1 million of the 16.6 million dispossessed Germans died during expulsion, about 12 million arrived alive in shrunken Germany, and the rest, some 2.5 million, somehow evaded expulsion to survive. It now appears that if many of these evaded expulsion, it was only by dying.

In every tragedy of this sort, there are many people who do not lose their heads, but act from normal courtesy and kindness. So there are moments of relief in these sad chronicles. The priests who reported these incidents were quick to see the hand of God, or of the church, but religious teaching had nothing to do with the kindness that appeared constantly among the pagan Bolsheviks. Many times one reads of a kind-hearted Russian officer who winked at oppressive rules, or who allowed starving refugees some food from his own stores, originally looted from the Germans. Two Jewish girls from Breslau who had been sheltered during the war by a German family in Maifritzdorf at the risk of their lives, went straight to the Soviet commander when he arrived in the village of Maifritzdorf, to tell their story. They were believed and the kindness of the Germans became the kindness of the Jews which then spread to the Russians. The Soviet commander went so far as to give to Chaplain G. of the village a document with the hammer and sickle seal which protected the villagers from abuses which had formerly been inflicted on them.
⁴¹
Among Protestants and Catholics whom I interviewed in France because they had saved so many refugees during the war, I encountered a strange resistance to my inquiries which amounted to hostility. I could not understand this at first, and then it was explained to me by a woman in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. I had been expressing admiration and praise for the actions of these villagers who had saved thousands of refugees at the risk of their lives. She made me see it had been nothing like what I imagined.
‘What we did was normal,’ she said. ‘It was the Nazis who were extraordinary.’ She was very matter-of-fact about having risked her life for others. This was the banality of good.

Many of the priests of the eastern regions, including a high number of resisters against Nazism, were murdered by Poles and Russians in the spring and summer of 1945. In Upper Silesia, some forty-five priests were murdered because they remained with their flocks to the bitter end. In Birkenau, four priests shared the fate of earlier victims of the Nazis’ nearby concentration camp.
⁴²

The great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel prize, who has contributed enormously to the destruction of the Soviet regime, wrote a rigorously honest poem about the Red Army conquest of Prussia in 1945. He was soon arrested and imprisoned for the anti-Soviet views he expressed. Solzhenitsyn wrote in one stanza of the poem:

Zweiundzwanzig, Horingstrasse.

It’s not been burned, just looted, rifled.

A moaning, by the walls half-muffled:

The mother’s wounded, still alive.

The little daughter’s on the mattress, Dead. How many have been on it?

A platoon? A company perhaps?

A girl’s been turned into a woman, A woman turned into a corpse.

It’s all come down to simple phrases:

Do not forget. Do not forgive!
*

Blood for blood. A tooth for a tooth!

The mother begs, ‘Kill me, soldier!’
⁴³

*
Much remains to be revealed in Polish archives and among Polish witnesses, who are invited to write to the author.

*
The italics are a quote from Russian propaganda inciting the soldiers to vengeance. The first line refers to the address of the house where the women lay. In the last lines of the poem (not shown), Solzhenitsyn confesses that he too took advantage of a captive woman.

VI
D
EATH AND
T
RANSFIGURATION

Various statistics published by the US Army, the US Military Governor, the State Department, the German and French governments, and by several writers such as Alfred de Zayas, Konrad Adenauer, Heinz Guderian, Gustav Stolper and the American authors of the booklet
The Land of the Dead
display a very wide range of opinion about total deaths in Germany in 1946–50. In other European countries at the time, there is no such variety of opinion on census statistics. Whatever caused the strange variations in Germany in the years 1945–50, the Allies were all agreed on one notion: most of the dead had never died. The proof that well over a million prisoners of war and civilians were missing many years after 1945 elicited a simple response: ask the other guys, not us. The prisoners were missing, not dead.

To demystify these strange transfigurations of the dead and their statistics, it is essential to remember that Germany for nearly all of 1945–50 was one great prison. Germans were not permitted to emigrate until 1949 except for a handful of people valuable to the Allies. Here is yet another example of how the Allied policies were not intended only to prevent Germany from making war, but also to wreak vengeance. Many Germans wanted to emigrate right after the war but were refused. Emigration
would certainly have achieved the allied purpose of weakening Germany, but the people were forced to remain behind in starvation conditions. Mass immigration was controlled and enforced by the Allies. The statistics were all under the control of the Allies. Everything of consequence in the country was controlled by the Allies. When assessing the validity of the figures now being issued by the German government, one must remember that there was no independent German government in those days. All of the figures for 1945–50 were gathered under strict Allied control. Even the German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, when writing his memoirs of the period, relied on Allied figures for the number of expellees.
¹

There were three main locales for death for Germans after the surrender. The first was in the POW camps, the second among the expellees at home or on the road from their former homes to occupied Germany, the third among residents of occupied Germany.
*

The lowest death rate for residents including expellees already arrived (i.e. not including deaths en route) is offered by the Military Governor of the US zone, who said that in the US zone in 1947, the death rate of 12.1 per year per thousand among civilians was only slightly higher than before the war.
²

The next lowest are the figures of the German government (from the official agency Statistisches Bundesamt, Wiesbaden, henceforth ‘the German government’) which show that some 2.1 million expellees died between 1945 and 1950. They also report death rates among residents based on Allied occupation army reports. For 1947, the rate reported today by the German government is 12.1 per thousand per year among the resident population.
³

In the middle range are the several writers, among them Adenauer, Heinz Guderian and Gustav Stolper, who say that six million people died among the expellees alone. The expellees numbered around 14/15 million total between 1945 and 1950.

The highest numbers are from the French government, which implied that close to 7.5 million died among the expellees only. We shall deal with the two extremes first, and end with a discussion of the middle range figures.

The lowest estimates

The figures reported in the US Military Governor reports have done a lot to determine our view of the history of the period. Widely disseminated, they have been widely accepted. They are at the basis of the belief today throughout Germany and the West generally, that in the west of Germany in 1945–50 no very large number of people died among either the expellees or among the resident, non-expelled Germans of the three Western zones.

The US Military Governor, Lucius Clay, gave the death rate for 1947 in a report dated December 1947. It is 12.1 per thousand per year. This death rate, says the governor, compares ‘favorably’ with the pre-war rate of 11.9 per thousand per year.
⁴
If we take this literally, it can only mean the governor favours a rise in the death rate for Germany. If it is not to be taken literally, it would have to be followed by ‘in the circumstances’, an easy enough phrase to put in. This is a minor example of the sloppy and evasive expression permeating the Military Governor reports on the subject of the health and Allied treatment of the Germans.
*
The accuracy of the death figure may be judged from the fact that General Clay’s own diplomatic advisor, Robert Murphy, had reported independently to Washington just a few months earlier that the death rate in Germany was so high that, in effect, it must exceed the birth rate by two million people in the few years during which the expellees and prisoners were to return. The birth rate in 1947 in Germany was about 14%%.
⁵
And, as we shall see below (p. 119), Clay’s own US Army Medical Officer was at that
very moment reporting
in secret
a death rate of over 21.5%% as at May 1946.

A bigger flaw was in the reporting of the condition of prisoners of war. The first Military Governor (Eisenhower) reported that in August 1945 4,772,837 prisoners were on hand, or had been transferred or discharged, without mentioning that the original capture total was 5,224,310. The governor therefore was failing to account for 451,473 people. Recent research has shown why: these prisoners had died in camps commanded by the same governor.
⁶

Governor Clay himself inadvertently revealed the deceptiveness of his own figures when he wrote about the death rate in the Soviet zone. Clay wrote of the Soviet zone in 1945 that, ‘This low food ration is already having its effect. The death rate in many places has increased several-fold and infant mortality is approaching 65 per cent in many places. By the spring of 1946, German observers expect that epidemics and malnutrition will claim 2.5 to 3 million victims between the Oder and the Elbe.’
⁷
Clay must have had stars and stripes in his eyes when he wrote that, because he did not mention the death rate in the west although he knew the food situation was just as bad in the British and American zones. He himself had to reduce the ration to 1,275 cpd, then it fell even further, to 1,000 for a while. A group of German doctors reported in 1947 that the actual rations issued for three months in the Ruhr section of the British zone for average people amounted to only 800 calories per day.
⁸
Gustav Stolper reported that the ration in both British and American zones for ‘a long time in 1946 and 1947 dropped to between 700 and 1,200 calories per day’.
⁹
The ration that Clay said was predicted
to kill so many millions of people in the Soviet zone was 1,150 calories
per day
. But Clay makes no reference to millions of corpses disfiguring the western landscape under his command.
¹⁰

The kind of reporting we have seen from Eisenhower and Clay has led people to believe that the German death rate in 1947 was 12.1 per thousand per year,
¹¹
lower than it was for two years (12.2)
in the prosperous 1960s
. This notion is reported without comment
by the otherwise serious
International Historical Statistics
, edited by B. R. Mitchell. Professor Mitchell does not clearly cite his source, but he has said in correspondence that ‘it looks quite probable that [one] is right to disbelieve the official death rate’.
¹²
The Allied Control Council supervised all the general statistics gathering, including the census in Germany, through the Military Governments. The inheritor of that information is the Statistisches Bundesamt, which today may report 12.2 or 12.1. Which one it believes is hard to say.
¹³
That the expert Mitchell could not clearly cite his sources for Germany in 1945–50 is symptomatic of the difficulties met by researchers attempting to determine vital statistics in Germany when it was under Allied rule. So the conditions which in the east sent the death rate soaring ‘several-fold’ according to Clay are reported to have had absolutely no effect in the west. Perhaps he did not notice – or care – because he was still in the grip of his wartime animus against the Germans. Normally a correct if autocratic man, Clay was still meting out harsh treatment to the starving Germans in late November 1945, when he was asked to permit two large shipments of Red Cross food destined for German civilians to enter the country. Clay refused, with the words ‘Let the Germans suffer.’
¹⁴