Exorcising Hitler (15 page)

Potsdam had been the residence of the Prussian kings and later of those Prussian kings who were also German emperors – its relation to Berlin was rather as Versailles is to Paris. It contained many grand and beautiful buildings, including Frederick the Great’s pleasure dome, Sans-Souci. However, it had not survived the war totally unscathed. In one of the last major air attacks of the war, on the night of 14–15 April 1945, 500 Lancasters of RAF Bomber Command, supposedly targeting troop concentrations and the railway station, had devastated the previously untouched historic town centre. They also killed, by the most reliable estimates, almost 1,800 civilians.
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Less than two weeks later, Potsdam was captured by the Red Army. A further 1,200 deaths and large amounts of artillery damage further wrecked the fabric of the town. Except for the Babelsberg villas, near the film studio, and the Crown Prince’s palace. The palace was modern and comfortable – a 176-room mock-Tudor mansion built between 1913 and 1917, supposedly modelled on a large English country house near Liverpool. The Crown Prince and his wife, the former Princess Cecilie of Mecklenburg, after whom the house was named, had lived there until February 1945. The Cecilienhof remained more or less as they had left it.

It was there, on 17 July, that the leaders of the three victorious nations (France was not invited) settled around a large round table supplied by the state-owned Lux furniture concern of Moscow, to dot the i’s and cross the t’s on the post-war settlement.

President Truman and Prime Minister Churchill had driven to the Cecilienhof through Berlin’s ruins, which in the past weeks had been festooned by the Soviets with propaganda hoardings, including huge billboard posters of Marx, Engels, Lenin – and, of course, Stalin. The thoroughfares were swarming with Soviet soldiery. Although detachments of British and American troops had belatedly been permitted to take up their quarters in the capital ten days or so earlier, as had been agreed at Yalta, there could be no doubt who was in charge in Berlin.

What was decided here, over the following sixteen days, was not good news for Germany in general, and it was even worse news for those Germans still clinging on to their homes in the country’s eastern provinces. The leaders agreed on the ‘Five Ds’ (demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation, decentralisation and decartelisation), which would, it was planned, for ever divest Germany of her potential for aggressive war. They agreed on the destruction of German war industries. They agreed, too, on reparations, including, in recognition of Russia’s special suffering at German hands, the considerable percentages of plant and production that the Soviet Union was to receive from both its own zone
and
the zones controlled by the Western Allies. But above all, from the point of view of the German expellees, they discussed the formalisation of Germany’s loss of around 25 per cent of its territory – from which its millions of long-established inhabitants would be forcibly evicted.

Churchill had begun the negotiations insisting that these ancient German areas should not be given to the Poles. His own British people, he insisted, would be ‘shocked’ by such a huge movement of population, which was ‘more than I could defend’:

Compensation should bear some relation to loss. It would do Poland no good to acquire so much extra territory. If the Germans had run away from it they should be allowed to go back. The Poles had no right to risk a catastrophe in feeding Germany. We did not want to be left with a vast German population who were cut off from their sources of food. The Ruhr was in our zone, and if enough food could not be found for the inhabitants, we would have conditions like the German concentration camps.
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Perhaps inevitably, Churchill’s words proved empty. Within days, the Conservative Party was officially declared the loser in the British general election and Churchill was forced to break off the conference and fly home to present his resignation. His successor, Labour leader Clement Attlee, and his new Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, took Churchill’s and Eden’s places on 28 July, but had little time to make their presence felt.

The Western Allies, and especially America, should perhaps have been able to get more of their way at Potsdam than they did. On 25 July, the day before Churchill left the conference, President Truman had informed Stalin of the USA’s possession of a ‘new weapon of unusually destructive force’ – the atomic bomb. Stalin reacted with cool indifference (he already knew about it from his spies).

The fact was, however, that on the last day of the month the Americans, though at first they had supported Churchill’s view, eventually settled for a border on the western Neisse, meaning that Breslau would go to Poland. The British, beset by other pressing concerns, including defending their position in the Ruhr, did not contest this at the time.
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The expulsion of the Germans who lived in the areas given over to ‘Polish administration’, like the other ‘transfers of population’, was to happen, in theory, over a period up to August 1946, ‘in a humane and orderly fashion’.
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Since vanishingly little about the occupation of what had been eastern Germany had so far been ‘humane and orderly’, few would have trusted that matters would be any different in future. And they would have been right.

In the end, almost ten million Germans were forced to leave the territories assigned to Poland under the Potsdam Agreement. A huge, seemingly endless wave of terrified refugees – mostly women, children and the elderly – had been on the move along the highways of eastern Germany since midwinter. They carried their bundles of precious heirlooms and belongings in their hands or on their backs. If they were lucky they had a handcart, or, if they were among the most fortunate, a horse-drawn vehicle. At no time were they safe, at least not until they reached the areas of central and western Germany occupied by the Western Allies. They risked being caught up with the advancing Soviet spearheads, wandering into battles, or falling victim to Allied bombing raids.

An unknown number of westbound refugees certainly died in the bombing of Dresden in mid-February. In another notorious but less well-known case, on 12 March 1945, thousands of refugees from eastern Pomerania and East Prussia, queuing in the open for the ferry to cross the river at Swinemünde, found themselves trapped beneath a rain of American bombs. The raid, requested by the Soviets, had been intended to destroy the German naval ships concentrated in the town’s harbour. At one time, civilian casualties were estimated at up to 23,000, causing the attack to be dubbed the ‘Dresden of the North’. The true figure is now thought to be between four and five thousand, but it remains a ghastly illustration of how exposed these defenceless refugees were to the vagaries of modern total war.
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By the spring, the refugee tide had turned into a vast, uncontrollable torrent of misery – and the coming of peace did nothing to halt it, for now the formerly oppressed peoples of Central Europe had their opportunity for revenge. To many among them peace was not an end to violence but a beginning.

The ethnic cleansing in Breslau had actually begun with the so-called ‘wild’ expulsions of early July 1945, well before the victors had signed on the line and regularised the Polish administration there.
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However, after the formal ceding of the city to Poland, the cleansing began to move apace. As the summer went on, thousands of Poles forced to leave the formerly Polish territories seized by Stalin began arriving in the former German lands. These new arrivals, angry and bewildered, brutalised by a savage interlude of Soviet rule, followed by German occupation, were mostly not city dwellers but farmers and country people. Not only did they not want to be in this German city, but they did not actually know
how
to live in such a place.

There was a period of months when the half-ruined city of Breslau was seriously overcrowded, with Germans often being thrown out of their apartments to make room for newcomers, so that German families were often crammed two or three to a formerly single-family dwelling. In conscious emulation of the Nazis’ stigmatisation of Jews, it was reported that remaining Germans were seen wearing armbands bearing the letter ‘N’ (for ‘
Niemiec
’, or ‘German’ in Polish). Germans were allowed only one-third to one-half of the general ration, and their children were charged 100 zloty (at a punitive rate against the Reich mark) for inoculation shots against typhus, diphtheria and other diseases of overcrowding and deprivation that now became rife (Poles were immunised for free).
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When asked to show pity, Russians and Poles could, and did, point to the starvation rations and murderous neglect practised during the German occupation of their countries earlier in the war.

So, after the first wave of German refugees who fled before the Red Army, there followed, as the first post-war summer progressed, a new wave. This one was made up of those who had stayed behind but were now forced to leave.

At the end of 1945, 33,297 Poles were registered in Breslau (henceforth Wrocław), against more than 160,000 Germans. By the following autumn, the city contained 152,898 registered Poles, against only 28,274 Germans.
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The atrocities in such eastern German cities were bad enough. In the Sudetenland – the border areas of Czechoslovakia settled for hundreds of years by Germans, part of the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, for twenty years part of the Czech and Slovak state, then for seven short years incorporated into the Greater German Reich – they were unspeakable.

Unlike in the case of Breslau, Königsberg or Stettin, the Germans here had been only briefly ‘Reich Germans’. Czechs of the western part of the country, where most Germans had always lived, had coexisted side by side with them, sometimes amicably but often uneasily, as linguistic components of a cosmopolitan post-feudal monarchy, for centuries past.

Now, after six years of brutal Nazi oppression, many, perhaps most, Czechs loathed their German compatriots and wanted merely to be rid of them.

‘We hated them,’ declared one Czech woman, unrepentant more than half a century later. ‘People who had survived the concentration camps were returning and they were describing what happened to them there. The fact is that people hated the Germans, genuinely hated them so much that there was a spontaneous reaction, and the feeling was that if they liked the Third Reich so much, they could go there.’
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But first there was revenge to be taken, as one Czech eyewitness – himself a member of one of the makeshift militias that sprang into life along with the liberation – reported:

As I was marching with my unit of the revolutionary guard, I experienced something terrible. In one town, civilians dragged a German out into the middle of a crossroads and set alight to him. I am haunted by this experience to this day. I could do nothing, because if I had said something, I should have been attacked in my turn. The crowd was fanatical. The person burned for a half an hour. Then a soldier of the Red Army came and shot him. He gave him the
coup de grâce
.
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Cynics also pointed out that some of the most violent and apparently vengeful ‘resistance’ fighters who took part in such atrocities had dark pasts to hide. One member of the Czech National Council at the time of the liberation explained, ‘Some wanted to hide the fact that they had previously collaborated with the Gestapo. They just pinned red stars on and set the tone of the outrages that followed.’
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It also seems to have been true that the majority of the most violent acts against Sudeten Germans were not committed by those Czechs who had lived in the area with them but by outsiders, who had entered the Sudeten areas in the wake of the Soviet and American armies.
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Just weeks after the end of the war, an armaments depot in the mainly German industrial town of Aussig (Czech name Usti nad Labem), one of the many places where Sudeten Germans had been retained as forced labourers preparatory to their planned expulsion, was blown apart by a massive explosion. Twenty-seven workers died. In the aftermath, rumours spread that this was an act of sabotage by a German
Werwolf
gang. Up to a hundred Sudeten Germans – easily identifiable by the white armbands they were reportedly forced to wear – were subsequently killed by an angry Czech mob. Most were beaten and bayoneted, with others being tossed off the bridge in the town centre into the River Elbe or drowned in a fire pond.
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After conducting an ‘inquiry’ into the explosion, Czech Defence Minister Ludvík Svoboda declared:

It is necessary that we deal with the fifth column once and for all, and we can take the Soviet Union as our exemplar, as the only country that dealt with this problem in a secure fashion: As an example I present the case of the German Volga Republic [in the Soviet Union], where one night dozens of German paratroops were dropped. When they were concealed by the Germans there and not handed over when urgently demanded by the Red Army, it came to pass that, 48 hours after the final ultimatum, this German Volga Republic ceased to exist and will never again exist.
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