Abstract
The protocol which provided the legal basis for both the greatest catastrophe of Germany and the greatest forcible dislocation of persons in European history was concluded on August 2, 1945, almost immediately after the final defeat of the Third Reich. The setting was Potsdam, once proud — formerly the seat of Frederic the Great and in 1933 the place where Hitler’s realm was officially launched — but at this point of time vanquished and war-battered.’ The signatories of this accord were the representatives of the Big Three powers at that time, President Truman for the United States, Prime Minister Attlee for the United Kingdom, and Generalissimo Stalin for the USSR.
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In this connection one should recall the unification of Germany in 1871, which was proclaimed, quite provocatively, at the erstwhile royal seat of the vanquished enemy, Versailles.
Article XII of the Protocol of Proceedings of the Berlin Conference, July 17–Aug. 2, 1945, reads as follows: The three governments having considered the question in all its aspects, recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner. “Since the influx of a large number of Germans into Germany would increase the burden already resting on the occupying authorities, they consider that the Allied Control Council in Germany should in the first instance examine the problem with special regard to the question of the equitable distribution of these Germans among the several zones of occupation. They are accordingly instructing their respective representatives on the Control Council to report to their governments as soon as possible the extent to which such persons have already entered Germany from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, and to submit an estimate of the time and rate at which further transfers could he carried out, having regard to the present situation in Germany. ”The Czechoslovak Government, the Polish Provisional Government and the Control Council in Hungary are at the same time being informed of the above, and are being requested meanwhile to suspend further expulsions pending the examination by the governments concerned of the report from their representatives on the Control Council.“
The reader is reminded that the Munich Agreement which was responsible for the destruction of Czechoslovakia was signed and sanctioned not only by Germany and Italy but also by England and France. In the context of the expulsion of the Germans in 1945 it seems worthwhile to recall that Moscow regarded that agreement as the opening of the gateway of the East for Hitler, a dangerous and hostile act towards the Soviet Union in which the two western powers were equally guilty.
The viewpoint that the strongly Germanophobe American President did not need too much encouragement for such a plan from Benês or any other source is supported by Eugene Davidson in the following: “In 1943, before Secretary of State Hull went to Moscow, Roosevelt spoke of the need for splitting up Germany and moving out the dangerous elements of the population from East Prussia, which would go to Poland, and he voiced his opposition to any plan for a soft peace. At Yalta, after he had seen the destruction the Germans had brought to the Crimea, he said he was in a more bloodthirsty mood than before.” “The men around the President – Sumner Welles, Hopkins, Hull – were mostly of the same opinion as Roosevelt.” The American State Department’s briefing of Mr. Roosevelt, while it did not favor the mass exodus of so many people into a shrunken Germany, said the point was not worth making a stand on, and this was Roosevelt’s position.“ Eugene Davidson, The Death and Life of Germany, An Account of the American Occupation, New York: Alford A. Knopf, 1961, p. 6, 40.
Referring to the Polish acquisition of the Oder-Neisse lands on September 1, 194E, Polish Minister of Industry, Hilary Minc declared: “History shows only two ways of territorial aggrandisement of the state = colonization of foreign territories or the seizure of foreign lands with their foreign and hostile populations. Our aggrandisement in the West was made by a third, hitherto unknown method, the easiest and most favorable of them all. We acquired territory with ready highroads, railway lines and waterways, with towns waiting for settlers to corne, with industry which can be put into service, with mines, and at the same time with remnants of German population which we have the moral and international right to liquidate in such time and by such means as we shall deem proper.” Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move, War and Population Changes, rpr7–1947,New York: Columbia University Press, 1948, p. 289.
This was later confirmed in the Stalin-Benês treaty of December, 1943.
It was mainly for this reason (security risk) that the Soviets already at the start of World War II had evacuated large numbers of German minorities from the Black Sea, Volga and Caucasus area and deported them mainly to the North Eastern, sub-Arctic regions of the USSR. For other developments in the anti-state activities of a part of the German minorities see G. C. Paikert, “Hungary’s National Minority Policies, 1920–1945,” in: The American Slavic and East European Review,Vol. XII, pp. 201–218.
Prof. G. Rhode (Mainz) believes that quite an articulate motive of the Soviets was the ancient Russian formula of “vyvod” and/or “razvod” (respectively to lead away, and to spread out). The essence of this practice, which began with Ivan III (1462–1505) and which is traceable throughout the entire Russian history was something like this: To forestall all possible resistance by the newly incorporated areas, the leading elements of the indigenous population were transferred either into the middle of the old principality or to remote frontiers for defense purposes. In replacement, loyal subjects of the tsars were brought from Moscow or other parts of the old country. This was a tested means of assimilation through which the State organization in Moscow was able to integrate alien elements into itself. Bereft of its own autochthonous leading circles, the local population soon began to look to Moscow for leadership and tended to accept Moscow as center. “… What makes these moves” (i.e., forcible population transfers) “so unhealthy is the co-operation of the Russian razvod formula with the (West) European nation-state idea; contradictory as they seem they still complement each other.” Gotthold Rhode, “Zwangsumsiedelungen in der Geschichte,” in: Jahrbuch der Albertus-Universität zu Königsberg/Preussen,1954, Vol. IV, pp. 110–116. For developments in this field see also S. F. Plantonov, Ivan Groznyj,Leningrad: 1923, p. 101.
For some interesting observations on this particular aspect compare: Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace, The Potsdam Conference,Princeton University Press, 1960, pp. 269 ff.; H. G. Sasse, “Die Vorgeschichte von Austreibungen and Oder-Neisse-Linie,” in: Das Östliche Deutschland,Würzburg: Holzner, 1959, pp. 531 ff.; and Wolfgang Wagner, The Genesis of the Oder-Neisse Line,Stuttgart: Brentano Verlag, 1957, p. 147 ff.
Supporting the Stalinite thesis, the Dec. 18, 1946, issue of Izvestija (Moscow) characterizes the colonization process in East Prussia as follows: “Slays are again settling on this ancestral Slavic soil. Kolkozians from Bielorussia, Smolensk, Pskov and Vladimir transport their livestock, poultry, farce implements and seeds.” Kulischer, op. cit.,p. 400. This seems to be in sharp contradiction with the thesis of Prof. Hans Kohn of New York who in his remarkable paper on “The Impact of PanSlavism on Central Europe” (Annual Session of the Conference Group for Central European Historians, New York, December 28, 1960) asserts that the concept of panslavism had little effect on Russian foreign policy and that even today Russia dominates the Slav world not through a Slav ideology but through Marxist theory. Prof. Kohn’s opinion is not quite shared by this writer. Granted that the panslavic traits of yesterday’s Russia were often blurred and those of Communist Russia mostly inarticulate, I believe that the aforesaid domination is based neither on Slav ideology nor on Marxist theory alone, but on the union of both. Panslavism is, of course, never overtly stressed (as it cannot be) by Russia’s Communist leadership.
Representative of the Polish position pertaining to the westward emigration of the Germans (Ostflucht) are the following excerpts issued in the July 1957 copy of the Zachodnia Agencija Prasowa,an English language publication of the Western Press Agency, Warsaw: “The depopulation process in the German ‘eastern territories,’ whose last stage was the flight and evacuation of the population in the years 1944/45 resulted in a 2.5 million loss of population in the ‘German East’ during 7 years (till 1939). The ’human wall’ along the Polish frontier between the two World Wars was thin and weak: in 1939 the density of population on the Polish side was between 20 and 30 per cent higher than on the German side. The natural increase of population on the German side was approximately half that on the Polish side, despite the fact that native Polish population living on the German side showed comparatively high natural increase. ”The demographic tension in the frontier area was thus growing with every passing year, making unavoidable the taking over of these territories by Poland. German scientists were well aware of this. The ‘eastern complex’ of the German community was thus developing and growing in intensity. The efforts of the state which took the form of a special ’Ostpolitik’ with ’Osthilfe’ as its economic expression were without avail. “Such were the demographic elements of the historic process whose conclusion was speeded up by the Second World War and which was brought to an end in 1945 by the re-integration of the lands on the Odra and on the Baltic with the Polish state.” For some well documented information on this matter, see also Zoltan Michael Szâz, Germany’s Eastern Frontiers,Chicago: Regnery, 1960.
It is impossible to quote even fairly accurate figures on this matter since most of the (very inadequate) records perished during the war. According to Kulischer:.. more than 30 million Europeans were transplanted, deported or dispersed between the outbreak of the war and the beginning of 1943…“ In the USSR alone.. the total number of those who fled or were evacuated from German-occupied areas to inner and Asiatic Russia can be estimated at 12 million, including more than 1,500,000 transferred or deported from eastern Poland, the Baltic countries, northern Bukovina, and Bessarabia.” (Kulischer, op. cit. pp. 260–264). The deportations of millions of civilian populations from the German-held countries (the high mark, 8 million was reached in 1944), implemented by the Nazis for forced labor purposes in the Reich, are omitted from this study, because these dislocations, arbitrary uprootings as they were, cannot be classified as expulsions intended to be permanent. Probably the most authoritative study on the Nazi “Ostpolitik” in general and the German-executed population transfers in the USSR in particular is Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945,London: Macmillan, 1957.
Hitler, characteristically, chose to term these people “Untermenschen,” i.e., “subhumans.” Under the title “Der Untermensch” a typically abusive pamphlet was edited and distributed by the SS in Berlin, in 1942.
Up to the end of World War II the following number of Volksdeutsche were resettled in Germany and in the so-called “Incorporated Provinces” (i.e. the western part of vanquished Poland, the part annexed to the Reich in 1939) 128,700 from the Baltic States; 136,500 from Volhynia and East Galicia; 93,500 from Bessarabia; 95,700 from Bukovina; 15,400 from Dobrudsa; 350,000 from East Volhynia and the Black Sea Territory; 32,900 from Cholm Territory; 2,000 from Bulgaria; 36,300 from Yugoslavia; 80,000 from (Italian) South Tyrol. These repatriations occurred under bilateral agreements concluded in 1939 between the Soviet Union and Germany, and between Italy and Germany. To make room for those Volksdeutsche who were channelled to the “Incorporated Provinces,” German authorities in occupied Poland had already in October, 1939, ordered and executed the expulsion and deportation of Poles from that region to the “General Government” (i.e., the eastern part of German-held Poland). Kulischer: “About 1,500,000 persons were deported, 1,200,000 of them Poles, and 300,000 Jews. But after that expulsion of Poles from western Poland ceased. It had soon become clear that further expulsions would depopulate the country and frustrate all projects of economic exploitation,” op. cit.,p. 256.
G. Rhode, op. cit.,p. 116.
A noteworthy German evaluation of this aspect appeared in the April 1960 issue (p. 9) of the German News,Munich. It reads: “The expulsion of more than 3 million Sudeten Germans and murder of 300,000 innocent people was a human tragedy on a prodigious scale. But it was also a typical example of Communist strategy. At the time of the expulsion Czechoslovakia was not yet a Communist satellite. Dr. Benês was in power and so were his Cabinet ministers of the National (Benês) Party, the Social Democratic and the People’s Party. The representatives of these three Czech non-Communist parties believed that they could restore Czech democracy by collaborating with the Communists and by competing with them in expelling the Sudeten Germans. ”Three years later most of them became refugees themselves. The Communist leaders knew that they had to get rid of the Sudeten Germans first, in order to become the only rulers of Czecho-Slovakia. The expulsion of the Sudeten population was the first, and perhaps the most decisive step towards complete Communist rule. Many Czech and Slovak exiles, now living in Britain, the United States, Germany and other western countries, finally realize that the expulsion of the Sudeten population was a crime against humanity and a political blunder of the first degree.“
Churchill’s program for the London Poles (January, 1944) called for the “expulsion of the German population from territories east of the Oder annexed by Poland.” (Szâz, op. cit.,pp. 109–110). Also in his speech in the House of Commons on December 15, 1944, he vigorously advocated the expulsion, asserting that as far as he could judge, this seemed to him the most satisfactory and efficient solution. However, it was the same Churchill who only a few months later in July 1945, while in Potsdam, tried to mitigate the terms of the expulsion and again on August 16 after the first reports on the expulsion reached him found it fit to describe this procedure in Parliament as “a tragedy of unimaginable scale.” Roosevelt, as cited earlier, was also committed in this respect to both the Czechs and the Poles. He proposed the removal of the Germans as early as at the Teheran Conference in 1943. Wagner, op. cit. p. 60; Feis, op. cit. p. 287.
Two things should be noted in this connection. First, the 1945 government of Czechoslovakia ignored the joint decision of the Big Three, which agreed to population transfers but insisted on a standstill until preparations for an “orderly and humane” transfer had been made (§ 3 of Article XII). In spite of this suspension request mass deportations of Sudeten Germans were carried out all through August 1945. Second, expulsions were carried out by the Czechoslovak authorities even before the Berlin Conference; which is another proof that the signatories of the Protocol merely legalized an already existing situation. It seems, especially in the light of the Stalin-Benës Treaty of December 1943, that Moscow had given its full approval to the pre-Potsdam expulsions.
Note that the State Department of the United States took exception to Article XII of the Berlin Protocol in 1952 and again in 1956 by pointing out the impossibility of undoing the illegal mass expulsions of Germans after May 1945 or of assisting the affected Germans in any way whatsoever. The Assistant Secretary of State of the United States, in a report to the American representative at the United Nations, stated: “In view of the mass expulsions as an accomplished fact, and the Soviet refusal to take action in any way whatsoever, the United States concurred in the text of Article XIII of the Potsdam Protocol. The United States did not do so because it approved of mass expulsions but solely in an effort to arrive at an orderly and humane procedure and to open occupied Germany to those who otherwise would have had to reckon with deportation to remote, sub-Arctic regions of the Soviet Union.” From: Dr. Kurt Rabl, “Mass Expulsions and International Law,” in: German News,Munich, Vol. 4, no. 12, September 1960, pp. 5–6.
(The) “account shows President Truman and Winston Churchill trying in vain to block the grab of German territory. At every turn, they ran into concessions already made to the Russians by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference a few months earlier. Time and again, Stalin fell back on Yalta to justify his acts.” U.S. News and World Report,May 15, 1961, p. 96.
“The Potsdam Conference,” “was the high point of Russian power, the low point of British. Churchill had to depart in the middle of the Conference, cheerful but defeated in the British general election, to be replaced in the negotiations by Clement Attlee. That left only the Russians with the full complement of the men who had been present at Teheran and Yalta. Byrnes and Truman were new to these discussions.” Davidson, op. cit.,p. 60. Truman while by no means so anti-German as Roosevelt continued at the time of Potsdam “to share his predecessor’s high opinion of Marshal Stalin” and “carried with him Roosevelt’s dismemberment plan.” ibid.,p. 60. “Looking back, some historians are now calling Potsdam the Conference that was lost by the West before it even began.” U.S. News and World Report,May 15, 1961, p. 96.
It may be also inserted that another by no means insignificant factor most probably influencing the overall attitude of all the three great powers was the fact that the defeated Third Reich of Hitler happened to be the successor of the Kaiser’s second one, the politico-economic arch-rival of the very same Big Three which gathered in Potsdam in 1945.
The staggering Jewish transfers and losses are not treated here, because the problem lies beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say here that “… up the end of the war, more than 5 million Jews were deported to extermination camps in Poland and elsewhere. Almost all perished.” Kulischer, op. cit.,p. 264.
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Paikert, G.C. (1962). The Legal Basis of the Expulsion the Potsdam Agreement. In: The German exodus. Publications of the Research Group for European Migration Problems, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-0957-2_3
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