war governments, the German-speaking communities of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic region and the western Soviet Union were doomed and they knew it.
In the event, they were given no choice. As early as 1942 the British had privately acceded to Czech requests for a post-war removal of the Sudeten German population, and the Russians and Americans fell into line the following year. On May 19th 1945, President Edouard Benes of Czechoslovakia decreed that ‘ we have decided to eliminate the German problem in our republic once and for all’.[6] Germans (as well as Hungarians and other ‘traitors’) were to have their property placed under state control. In June 1945 their land was expropriated and on August 2nd of that year they lost their Czechoslovak citizenship. Nearly three million Germans, most of them from the Czech Sudetenland, were then expelled into Germany in the course of the following eighteen months. Approximately 267,000 died in the course of the expulsions. Whereas Germans had comprised 29 percent of the population of Bohemia and Moravia in 1930, by the census of 1950 they were just 1.8 percent.
From Hungary a further 623,000 Germans were expelled, from Romania 786,000, from Yugoslavia about half a million and from Poland 1.3 million. But by far the greatest number of German refugees came from the former eastern lands of Germany itself: Silesia, East Prussia, eastern Pomerania and eastern Brandenburg. At the Potsdam meeting of the US, Britain and the USSR (July 17th-August 2nd 1945) it was agreed, in the words of Article XIII of the subsequent agreement, that the three governments ‘recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken.’ In part this merely recognized what had already taken place, but it also represented a formal acknowledgement of the implications of shifting Poland’s frontiers westwards. Some seven million Germans would now find themselves in Poland, and the Polish authorities (and the occupying Soviet forces) wanted them removed—in part so that Poles and others who lost land in the eastern regions now absorbed into the USSR could in their turn be resettled in the new lands to the west.
The upshot was
History has exacted no such retribution. Indeed, the 13 million expellees were settled and integrated into West German society with remarkable success, though memories remain and in Bavaria (where many of them went) the subject can still provoke intense feeling. To contemporary ears it is perhaps a little jarring to hear the German expulsions described as a ‘crime against humanity’ a few months after the revelation of crimes on an altogether different scale committed in the name of those same Germans. But then the Germans were alive and present, whereas their victims—Jews above all—were mostly dead and gone. In the words of Telford Taylor, the US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leadership, writing many decades later: there was a crucial difference between the post-war expulsions and the wartime population clearances, ‘when the expellers accompany the expelled to ensure that they are kept in ghettos and then either kill them or use them as forced labor.’
At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place.[7] After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one major exception boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead. There was a feeling among Western policymakers that the League of Nations, and the minority clauses in the Versailles Treaties, had failed and that it would be a mistake even to try and resurrect them. For this reason they acquiesced readily enough in the population transfers. If the surviving minorities of central and eastern Europe could not be afforded effective international protection, then it was as well that they be dispatched to more accommodating locations. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ did not yet exist, but the reality surely did—and it was far from arousing wholesale disapproval or embarrassment.
The exception, as so often, was Poland. The geographical re-arrangement of Poland—losing 69,000 square miles of its eastern borderlands to the Soviet Union and being compensated with 40,000 square miles of rather better land from German territories east of the Oder-Neisse rivers—was dramatic and consequential for Poles, Ukrainians and Germans in the affected lands. But in the circumstances of 1945 it was unusual, and should rather be understood as part of the general territorial adjustment that Stalin imposed all along the western rim of his empire: recovering Bessarabia from Romania, seizing the Bukovina and Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia from Romania and Czechoslovakia respectively, absorbing the Baltic states into the Soviet Union and retaining the Karelian peninsula, seized from Finland during the war.
West of the new Soviet frontiers there was little change. Bulgaria recovered a sliver of land from Romania in the Dobrudja region; the Czechoslovaks obtained from Hungary (a defeated Axis power and thus unable to object) three villages on the right bank of the Danube opposite Bratislava; Tito was able to hold on to part of the formerly Italian territory around Trieste and in Venezia Giulia that his forces occupied at the end of the war. Otherwise land seized by force between 1938 and 1945 was returned and the
With certain exceptions, the outcome was a Europe of nation states more ethnically homogenous than ever before. The Soviet Union of course remained a multi-national empire. Yugoslavia lost none of its ethnic complexity, despite bloody inter-communal fighting during the war. Romania still had a sizeable Hungarian minority in Transylvania and uncounted numbers—millions—of gypsies. But Poland, whose population was just 68 percent Polish in 1938, was overwhelmingly populated by Poles in 1946. Germany was nearly all German (not counting temporary refugees and displaced persons); Czechoslovakia, whose population before Munich was 22 percent German, 5 percent Hungarian, 3 percent Carpathian Ukrainians and 1.5 percent Jewish, was now almost exclusively Czech and Slovak: of the 55,000 Czechoslovak Jews who survived the war, all but 16,000 would leave by 1950. The ancient diasporas of Europe—Greeks and Turks in the south Balkans and around the Black Sea, Italians in Dalmatia, Hungarians in Transylvania and the north Balkans, Poles in Volhynia (Ukraine), Lithuania and the Bukovina, Germans from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from the Rhine to the Volga, and Jews everywhere— shriveled and disappeared. A new, ‘tidier’ Europe was being born.
Most of the initial management of the displaced persons and refugees—gathering them up, establishing camps for them and providing food, clothing and medical help was undertaken by the Allied armies occupying Germany, the US Army especially. There was no other authority in Germany but also in Austria and in northern Italy, the other areas in which refugees congregated. Only the army had the resources and the organizational capacity to administer the demographic equivalent of a medium-sized country. This was an unprecedented charge for a huge military machine that, just a few weeks before, had been devoted almost exclusively to the business of fighting the Wehrmacht. As General Dwight D. Eisenhower (the Supreme Allied Commander) expressed it, reporting to President Harry Truman on October 8th 1945 in response to criticisms directed at the military’s handling of refugees and concentration camp survivors: ‘In certain instances we have fallen below standard, but I should like to point out that a whole army has been faced with the intricate problem of adjusting from combat to mass repatriation and then to the present static phase with its unique welfare problems.’
Once the system of camps had been set in place, however, responsibility for the care and eventual repatriation or resettlement of the displaced millions fell increasingly on the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. UNRRA was founded in November 9th 1943 at a Washington meeting of representatives from 44 future UN members, held in anticipation of likely post-war needs, and went on to play a vital role in the post-war emergency. The agency spent $10 billion between July 1945 and June 1947, almost all of it furnished by the governments of the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom. A lot of that aid went directly to former allies in eastern Europe—Poland, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia—and to the Soviet Union, as well as to the administration of displaced persons in Germany and elsewhere. Of the former Axis countries only Hungary received UNRRA assistance, and not very much at that.
In late 1945 UNRRA was operating 227 camps and relief centers for displaced persons and refugees in
