Forced Repatriation in Eastern Europe

Complicit in Evil

We have been reading one of those books which is more a duty than a pleasure.  Written by R. M. Douglas, it's title is Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).  It concerns the forced exile of Germans (mainly women and children) from countries surrounding Germany back to their (alleged) homeland within Germany.  Much much later similar atrocities were dubbed with a new name: ethnic cleansing.

[One reviewer (Benjamin Schwarz, The Atlantic) actually made this connection. He writes that the book is "the most thorough study available of the largest expulsion of a people in human history and by fr the most horrific instance in post-war Europe of what is now called ethnic cleansing."]

The key protagonists were Czechoslovakia and Poland.  It was supported by the Soviet Union, the US, and the UK.  The vast majority of those afflicted were females and children--in other words, non-combatants.  Plans were laid during the early forties by governments-in-exile; as the Third Reich crumbled in the east, the expulsion and relocation of ethnic German non-combatants began in earnest. 

The tale is long, sordid, and horrific.
  The following quotation is indicative of the crimes involved. 

Early in June, as a "test" some 1,300 Germans were rounded up by the Czechoslovak Army units from the vicinity of the town of Decin, transported to the border, and successfully ejected into the Soviet Zone despite the attempts of town police to impede the deportation by occupying the railway station.  Thereafter the removals accelerated rapidly. 

On June 20, for example, soldiers participated in a combined operation with local security corps to march several thousand Germans from the border town of Krnov . . . to Poland.  . . . . As the number of expulsions increased, the pattern became stereotyped.  Sudetendeutsch expellees would be rounded up, normally at an hour's notice; permitted to gather together some hand baggage; searched for contraband; and then marched on foot either to the border or to a holding camp.  Some of these forced processions were conducted at a ferocious pace, with groups being hustled along the roads by their armed escorts at a rate of twenty-five miles per day for a week or more; made to sleep in factories or barns; and receiving no food or water other than what they could beg from the inhabitants of the villages through which they passed en route.  When the passage of these disheveled columns into Germany was refused by the occupying forces, as often happened, the expellees were in many cases returned by the same means to their starting points. 

Marches of this kind resulted in particularly high numbers of deaths among young children, whose lower physical stamina was unequal to the stresses placed upon them, and especially among babies whose mothers, after several days of extreme physical effort without nutrition were unable to produce milk.  [Ibid., p.100f.]

The title, Orderly and Humane is, of course, sarcastic.  Why should we read books like this?  Because those of us in the West need to know about our recent, sordid history.  In the case of those from the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand such evils were conceived and carried out on our watch, and with our approval and support.  We suspect that media largely ignored or covered up the evil policies.