A TERRIBLE
REVENGE
The Ethnic
Cleansing of the
East European
Germans,
1944-1950
Alfred-Maurice
de Zayas A TERRIBLE
REVENGE Also by Alfted-Maurice de Zayas
NEMESIS AT POTSDAM
THE~HRMACHTWARCruMESBUruMU A TERRIBLE
REVENGE
The Ethnic Cleansing of the East
European Germans, 1944-1950
Alfred-Maurice de Zayas
St. Martin's Press
New York CONTENTS
Official Map of the American Delegation to the Yalta Conference . Vi
Foreword-Charles M. Barber . . ix
Acknowledgments X1l1
Introduction xv
Illustrations xix
1. The Germans of East Central Europe . 1
2. The Expulsion Prehistory: Interbellum Years and World War II . 13
3. War and Flight. . . . . . . . . . 33
4. Allied Decisions on Resettlement 77
5. Expulsion and Deportation ... 85
6. The Expellees in Germany-Yesterday and Today. . . 125
Epilogue . . 145
Appendix. . 151
Notes .... . .153
Bibliography . . 163
Index. . . . . .173 GERMANY - POLAND PROPOSED
2, 104, 553 100
721,512 100
• Prllhl!
I e Z E C Ii
PROPOSED CESSION OF
TERRITORY BY GERMANY
Territory east of Line D
Territory edded by Line C
Total east of Line C
Territory edded by Line B
Tolol east of Line B
Territory added by Line A
Tole l east of Line A
NOTE , The former Free Cily of Danzig
lables.
)05575 0 - 55( Face p. Zll) TERRITORIAL CHANGES
LITHUANIA
S S R
EASTERN POLAND
Population Area in
1931 census SCI. mi
10.640.000 70.049
o
AREA IN POPULATION
SQ. MILES 1939 CENSUS
4.015.613 18.032
11.812 835.884
PROPOSED ANNEXATIONS AREA IN POPULATION
24.844 4.851.497
BY POLAND SQ. MILES 1939 CENSUS
(Cumulative Totals)
10.473 2. 104.553
East al Line D 14.766 3.406.613
35.317 6.956.050
East al Une C 21. 578 4.242.497
2.721.512 East 01 8.106 Line B 32.051 6.347.050
43.423 9.677.562 Eoat al Une A 40.157 9.068.562
is nol included in lhe obove NOTE' Tables include Danzig and eJlclude East Pwssia narth af
daffed line (probable minimum anneJlafi()(l by USSR).
URlaINAI. t:I.A8RIPICATIOS "SECRET". OERMA.N RERIER, MAP M. FOREWORD
any Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), who formerly lived between the M
Bohemian Forest and the Urals, the White and the Black seas, and who
now inhabit contemporary Germany, Great Britain, and the Americas, are
experts in what we call "ethnic cleansing." They obtained their specialized
knowledge as victims of the ferocious reaction known as the Expulsion, which
followed upon Adolf Hider's genocidal imperialism. Because their mother
tongue was German and adopted fatherland was Germany, it has been
difficult for those who fought or suffered under the Nazis to grant them much
sympathy. Moreover, some among the Volksdeutschewere hell-bent to become
junior partners in the Aryan master race and did all they could to deliver their
communities as a fifth column for the Nazis.
Most of them, however, were indifferent to politics-farmers in East Prussia
and the Romanian Banat, coal miners in Silesia. They were like ordinary people
anywhere: not the actors, but the acted upon. As our neighbors and as citizens
today, they share the opportunity to shape their destiny in free elections. In the
1930s, in Hungary or Poland, for example, their options were far more limited.
The failure of the French, British, and Americans to support constitutional
regimes in Spain in 1936 and in Czechoslovakia in 1938 left the political field
open to communism and some form of fascism. This ultimately meant that the
choice for anyone with an average amount of courage living in East-Central
Europe was between Hider and Stalin.
Contemporary Americans, safely and smugly hidden behind a Bill of Rights
and a superpower military, might think that a choice between Hider and Stalin
was no choice at all. But that is because we have not been forced to make such
choices. Not yet. For Danube Swabians in the Yugoslavian Batschka or Ger
man-Russians in the Ukraine, the choice usually came down to whom they
hated more, Stalin or Hider; which doctrine repulsed them more, communism
or Nazism. Women and children, of course, were not consulted. The choices
were made for them.
In most circumstances, any people who suffered the devastating casualties
described by Dr. Alfred de Zayas in this volume and in his other works would x A TERRIBLE REVENGE
logically be labeled as victims. Even if one were so bitter as to demand that the
Germans should have provided their share of innocent victims, this condition
was well met by the 15 million displaced and 2 million killed. To see none of
the latter as innocent is to pose a concept of collective blood guilt that augurs
poorly for the future. Yet such innocence has rarely been discussed outside of
German-speaking countries. The taint of Nazism has been so severe that the
German expellees have been victimized by both journalists and historians.
Sinister motives for this phenomenon are unlikely. There has been not so much
a concerted conspiracy to withhold the truth, as an embarrassed reluctance to
tell it. The passions and confusions of World War II and the Cold War
discouraged writers and politicians from defending a group of people who were
as powerless as they were despised. The German Expellees: Victims in War and
Peace should go a long way in righting this wrong.
Dr. de Zayas is well equipped, both professionally and academically, to
remove the German expellees from the ranks of villains and place them among
the victims; one might even say the last large group of Hitler's victims. Alfred
de Zayas has been a human rights activist and has worked as a human rights
expert for the past two decades, specializing in the rights of refugees and
minorities. He has been sent on fact-finding missions to many countries and
has examined in /oco the human rights situation in numerous crisis areas.
There are dangers, of course, in a historian being as close to history in the
making as de Zayas is. As respite from his legal work in Geneva he has been
offered the dubious opportunity of viewing contemporary horrors firsthand.
Such proximity to unfolding events brings the temptation to reach backward
through history, to attempt to explain the past in terms of the present, instead
of the other way around. Readers of The German Expellees need not worry.
Alfred de Zayas's legal training at Harvard and his historical training at
Gottingen (and Tiibingen, where he was a Fulbright Graduate Fellow) have
helped him to avoid the trap of understanding backward while forgetting that
our predecessors could only live forward. His Nemesis at Potsdam systematically
analyzed the Allied responsibility for the decisions to expel the Germans. His
Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 has established beyond a reasonable
doubt that a war crime is a war crime is a war crime, whether committed by
German, Soviet, British, or American forces.
The German Expellees is a departure from Alfred de Zayas's other work
only in its emphasis, not in its scholarly thoroughness or remarkable objec
tiviry. What emerges here is a picture of who the German expellees were and
where and when they settled in central and eastern Europe. We find among
them poets and philosophers, farmers and businessmen; people whose talents
were not only valued in German culture but were sought after by the