Crimes and Mercies (39 page)

23
The prisoners returned in the period numbered as follows:

1.4 million from the Americans (Report on Estimated Strength of DEF/POWs, October 1945–June 1946), inclusive, in HQ, USFET, G1, Weekly PW and DEF reports and inserted at 2 November 1945, Modern Military Records, NARS Washington, plus 375,000 in camps in USA;

0.2 million from small eastern countries (Maschke,
Die
deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges
, op. cit.);

0.8 million from the British (Maschke, op. cit);

0.9 million from the French (Buisson,
Historique du service des
prisonniers de guerre de l’Axe
, Appendix IV. He says the French had about 0.85 million at the end of 1945, but as has been demonstrated in Bacque,
Other Losses
, Buisson under-reported the intake of prisoners by at least 100,000 and over-reported the number the French returned to the Americans);

1.5 million from the Soviets (Kashirin,
Spravka
, op. cit.; and Galitski,
German POWs and the NKVD
, op. cit.), as follows: 2.7 million total capture, 800,000 released in 1945, 400,000 dead to 1 Jan 1946.

24
Monthly Report of the Control Commission (British Element), June 1947. In RG 25, Volume 3809, Dossier 8380-c-40 seq, NAC.

25
Ambassador Murphy, CFM Prep. papers, 1947, HIA.

26
The source for this is the Murphy Papers, including the Council of Foreign Ministers papers at Stanford. Many authorities in Germany and elsewhere have written about the expellees, but there is no record at the HIA of any scholar having published these figures of Murphy’s before. This lack of a publication record may mean little, because a scholar may in fact have used some of these figures without notifying Hoover. Courtesy of Ron Bulatoff, HIA, October 1994. These papers were declassified in several bunches, beginning in 1988. Others were declassified in 1991 by the State Department.

These papers include documents prepared for and presented at the Council of Foreign Ministers meetings in Moscow and elsewhere, from 1947 to 1949. They are based on statistics gathered by the ruling interzonal agency operating in Germany at the time, the Allied Control Council, under the aegis of the several Military Governments. Murphy states in April 1947 (CFM Papers, 9 April 1947, Statement by US Delegate, Box 61, Murphy Papers, HIA) that 5–6 million refugees had arrived.

Since all other population figures in these papers are based on the census of October 1946, we can be sure that this figure is also for that date. The French delegate in the Moscow meeting said on 17 March 1947 that only 4.5 million had arrived. Murphy’s assistant Brad Patterson stated on 18 May 1949 that 12 million had arrived (Murphy Papers, Box 67, file 67–6). The figure usually accepted by all authorities for the total arrivals in 1950 is 12 million. (The effect on the death estimates in this book of
accepting the 12 million figure for May 1949 as valid for the final total of deaths in 1950 is nil.) This means that according to the Americans, between 6 and 7 million expellees arrived between October 1946 and May 1949. Since arrivals of 6 million are conservative in the sense of implying the fewest deaths, this is the figure I use in this book. If the French start figure is accepted, then some 500,000 to 1,500,000
more
Germans arrived in the period October 1946–September 1950. This would increase deaths by the amounts shown. The American figure is largely confirmed by figures obtained from the Polish government by the Canadian Chargé d’Affaires in Warsaw in January 1949, showing that only 289,000 Germans remained in the new Polish territories, of the original 7,400,000. I have accepted only the most authoritative papers, the US State Department CFM collection, and from them, the number of arrivals demonstrating the fewest possible deaths. Therefore for the purposes of this book, the expellee arrivals in 1946–50 totalled 6 million. The British author Malcolm Proudfoot said that at July 1946, some 7.4 million expellees had arrived, leaving some 5 million still to come of the 12.4 million which he says arrived by 1950.

Allowing arrivals of 1 million from July to October 1946, we see that Proudfoot was estimating in this (census) 1946–50 period an influx of some 4 million expellees. Proudfoot was writing long before the authoritative CFM papers were available to authors, so the sources on which he depended were not the best. For instance, in presenting population figures for 1946 in Table 40, Proudfoot does not refer to the census of October 1946. It appears that the figures in this census were not known to him, although the 1950 census was. For the crucial figure of expellee arrivals in January 1946 in his Table 40, he relies on an estimate made by a German author, Kornrumpf, without so specifying.

This figure first appears on p. 371, properly identified as an estimate, then re-appears in the Table without being identified as an estimate. In the Table, it is cited beside the census figures of 1950, as if they are of equal authority. This implied equality of authority is clearly in error. The effect of accepting Proudfoot’s estimates would be to reduce the estimated deaths of residents by 2 million, viz from 5.9 million to 3.9 million.

27
Total 2,643,525 rounded to 2,600,000 as follows:

For the Americans, 333,525, as follows: Disarmament and Disbandment of the German Armed Forces, Office of the Chief Historian, European Command, Frankfurt/Main, Germany, 1947, in Center for Military History, U.S. Army, Washington.

Courtesy of Dr Ernest F. Fisher. (The figure of 250 prisoners held in the USA that appears in this document has been augmented by the author to 50,000 from information in the Patterson Papers, LC, showing that President Truman ordered that this number be held in the USA to help with the 1946 harvest. This harvest was still in progress in September when the prisoners would have had to have been on board ship home to have been included in the October census. Should further research reveal that some or all of these 50,000 had been liberated before October, 1956, their number should be subtracted from the eventual death total of German civilians shown in this book.

For the Soviets, Statement of Soviet Delegate to CFM Conference that in March 1947 there were 890,000 Germans still imprisoned in the USSR. CFM Papers, Hoover. The present author estimates that there were 1,100,000 on hand October 1946 less author's estimate of deaths before release 1946-50, based on Kashirin,
Spravka
and the Kruglov Report, July 1, 1945, in CSSA, and Bulanov Report, 28 April, 1956, Central State Special Archive, Moscow.

For the French, 657,000 (November, 1946) less 57,000 estimated deaths 1946-1950; in Buisson,
Historique du Service des
Prisonniers de Guerre de l'Axe
, typescript, Nanterre Library, Universite de Nanterre, Paris.

For the British, 510,000; from UK Delegate to the CFM meeting, March 1947, plus Griffith to McCahon, September, 1946 et seq, US State Department Central Decimal File F11.62114/12-145 to-3146. The total on hand at March 1947 was 435,000 to which must be added those repatriated from October 1946 to March 1947. This total was 75,000, because repatriations had been running at the rate of 15,000 per month for five months.

See also
London Times
, August 22, 1946, and Hansard, 16 July, 1946, p. 180 for total of prisoners on hand at June 30, 1946 (518,000).

Plus 200,000 prisoners On Hand in Yugoslavia, Poland, Benelux, being 235,000 On Hand less estimated 35,000 deaths.

From Maschke op cit.

It has been disputed that all the arriving prisoners should be added to the potential population as of the 1950 census. See Appendix Eight.

28
Deaths and emigrants from Statistisches Bundesamt, Wiesbaden.

The emigration figures (
c
. 600,000) given by the West German government are incredibly high. For nearly all the relevant period, emigration was forbidden. When it did begin, the destination countries put Germans at the bottom of the list of accepta-bles. There are strong conflicts between the figures given out by Wiesbaden and the figures for two of the most popular destinations for German émigrés, Canada and the US. For 1946–50, the arrivals in Canada according to the West German government were 86,900, but according to the authoritative book
The
German–Canadian Mosaic Today and Yesterday
by Gerhard Bassler, only some 24,000 Germans arrived in Canada. Similarly American government figures show arrivals of 219,742 (Historical Statistics of the US, Washington, 1975) whereas the German government says émigrés totalled 401,700. This is still another example of the fact that statistics issued by the German government on subjects connected to Allied atrocities usually err, and the error usually masks the atrocity.

If it is true that the West German government figures are far too high, to reduce them to the correct level would increase the number of deaths in 1946–50. In order to err on the side of caution, I have used but do not believe the figure of 600,000 emigrants given by the German government.

29
Murphy Papers, op. cit. The American authority making most decisions affecting interpretation of these statistics was the US State Department, which in effect meant Robert Murphy.

Murphy’s major concern, as it was for all the Allies, was to analyze the effect of the population changes in Germany. He was especially interested in the ratio of agricultural land to numbers of people. However, Murphy appears to give two slightly different population figures for Germany at October 1946 which differ by 200,000, or 0.3 per cent. They are 65,200,000 and 65,000,000. The ACC census itself, as reproduced in the Military Governor’s Reports for March 1947 (OMGUS Papers, NARS), shows that the total population was 65,911,180. There were two sub-totals: the German civil authorities reported a total of 64,778,202 German civilians, and the Allies reported a
further 1,132,978 people under their direct control including three categories – Prisoners of War in camps in Germany; nonGerman Displaced Persons in UNRRA camps (non-German but provisioned there) and German civilian internees. The non-German DPs numbered about 700,000 (UNRRA Situation Report, 31 October 1946, cited in Murphy). These he subtracted from the 65,900,000 (rounded) saying there were then left ‘65,200,000 inhabitants’. But when he took a base figure for population in order to calculate future changes including additions of returning POWs, he assumed there were 65,000,000. Why did Murphy subtract an additional 200,000 unspecified people? It is reasonable to assume that these 200,000 people were the German POWs and civil internees known to be present in Germany in Allied hands (and therefore in the Allied part of the census total), who were destined to return to the population in the next three years. Since Murphy was already including them in his calculations as new additions soon to come to the population, he did not include them as part of the original population.

He was being careful to avoid double counting. This accounts for 900,000 of the 1,132,978 people shown under the category ‘Population Registered by Occupation Authorities’. Neither the census nor Murphy says who those 232,978 people were.

However, Murphy did not regard them as German, so they may have been Allied soldiers and civilians in the Military Government, who were counted alongside Germans, because they were being provisioned from German sources.

30
Statistisches Bundesamt, op. cit., p. 33. With thanks to Annette Roser. Also Mitchell,
International Historical Statistics
, op. cit., pp. 102, 109.

31
Statistisches Bundesamt, op. cit., and Mitchell, op. cit. The UN
Yearbook
1956 reports that for the period of the four calendar years 1947 through to 1950, total deaths recorded in all zones were
c
. 3,297,194.

32
See
Bundesamt für Auswanderung, Tätigkeitsbericht der
Bundesstelle für das Auswanderungswesen
, Bremen, 1951.

33
UN
Yearbook
1956. The census for the eastern zone was taken under Soviet supervision at 31 August 1950 and the census for the west under British, French and American supervision at 13 September 1950. Both 1946 and 1950 totals exclude the Saar.
Proudfoot says 68,794,000, but may include some non-German DPs.

34
The delegates to the various CFM meetings sometimes disagree with each other as to the number of arrivals at various dates between 1946 and 1950, but they all agree with each other that the total of arrivals was around 12 million in August–September 1950, which has become the figure accepted by the West German government. See de Zayas, Proudfoot and others.

35
Report of Town of Brilon, 24 April 1946. In MG 31 B 51, Friesen, GA-1945/46, NAC.

36
See Appendix 5 for details of Marktoberdorf.

37
Press release by HQ US Forces in Austria, 15 April 1946, re:

Clark’s interview with Hoover. General Clark believed that in the US zone, health standards remained above the standard in Vienna. But he also warned that ‘the supplies turned over to UNRRA are estimated to maintain the existing 1,200 calorie ration scale throughout all of Austria until about 1 June 1946’, when it would be necessary for the Austrians to feed themselves, except for what UNRRA could bring in. He estimated the indigenous sources at 450 calories per day. In FEC Papers, Box 16, HIA.

38
Report on Economic Conditions in Germany especially the Bizone, for 1948, by Dr W. Tomberg. In RG 25, Vol 3807, NAC.

39
Gabriele Stüber,
Der Kampf gegen den Hunger, 1945–1950
, p. 810.

40
Chief Medical Officer of the Allied Expeditionary Force/Chief Surgeon of the ETO: Report, entitled ‘The Disease Potential in Germany’, p. 21. FEC Papers, Box 4, HIA.

41
See Hoover,
The President’s Economic Mission to Germany and
Austria
.

42
Murphy to State, 20 February 1947, Memorandum No. 90, re:

Polish Administered German Area, in Council of Foreign Ministers preparatory papers for CFM meeting, April 1947, Box 61, Murphy Papers.

43
See Appendix 1.