HOMEPAGE | DONATIONS | ARCHIVE-GERMAN| ARCHIVE-ENGLISH | GERMAN LOSSES | GERMAN HISTORY | THE MAILBOX
|
Mass Expulsions:
"Tragedy on a Prodigious Scale" This article ran as "Suppose the Tables were Reversed' in the October 7, 1945 issue of the Catholic publication Our Sunday Visitor. Writing from Europe at the time, Bishop A.J. Muench of Fargo, North Dakota (official liaison between the German Catholic hierarchy and the U.S. military government in Germany) called the forced migrations of millions of people "The greatest crime of this age. There is nothing in all history to equal it." Yet it remains a silent tragedy, never mentioned in the history books, never presented in television documentaries, and certainly never memorialized by a "museum" on the Mall in Washington or anywhere else. According to the 1940 census, Vermont has 359,231 people, New Hampshire 491,528, Rhode Island 713,346, Maine 847,226, Connecticut 1,709,242 and Massachusetts has 4,316,721. The total for all New England therefore is 8,437,294, roughly eight and a half million men, women and children. If some hostile Big Three, having
the largest armies in the world and the atomic bomb, were to
tell all these New England people to get out, to get out
fast, to leave their homes and cattle behind, to take
nothing with them but what they can push or carry, to get
out across the borders of their homelands fast and on foot,
then the world would see these New Englanders suffer
"tragedy on a prodigious scale." This is the kind of tragedy to which Winston Churchill is referring. He means the millions of German fathers and mothers and children that are being expelled from the German provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen and Silesia which, in spite of the Atlantic Charter pledge to make "no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned," are being partitioned away from Germany. These provinces, and cities like Königsberg and Breslau, are as anciently and essentially German as the New England states and Boston are American. Of this partitioning of Germany among Russia and Poland, Churchill said in the House of Commons (Aug. 16, 1945): I must put on record my own opinion that the provisional western frontier agreed upon for Poland, comprising as it does one quarter of the arable land of Germany, is not a good augury for the future of Europe. (Time, Aug. 27, 1945.) But even more appalling is the ruthless expulsion of the millions of people who have had their homes there, and whose fathers and grandfathers for 600 years before them have had their homes in these provinces. This mass expulsion Time magazine describes as follows: In what was once eastern Germany, an anguished tide of humanity, one of the greatest mass movements of Germans in history, flowed toward the borders of the shrunken Reich. At least 10,000,000 hungry Germans were being uprooted from their old homes in East Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, and the Sudetenland by the new Polish, Czech and Russian owners. This is the mass expulsion to which
Churchill alludes as "tragedy on a prodigious scale." He is
indeed right. There has never before in history, not even in
the worst of pagan times, been such a million-fold uprooting
of human beings. Former transfers and expulsion of people,
such as Hitler's transfer of Austrian mountaineers from
Italy to Austria and the British expulsion of Acadians from
Nova Scotia to Louisiana, involved thousands and hundreds of
thousands, but never millions. I am particularly concerned at this moment with reports reaching us of conditions under which the expulsion and exodus of Germans from new Poland have been carried out. Between 8,000,000 and 9,000,000 persons dwelt in these regions before the war . . . Enormous numbers were unaccounted for. Where have they gone and what is their fate? A similar condition may reproduce itself in modified form in numbers of expulsions of Sudetens and other Germans from Czechoslovakia. (Quoted from the Brooklyn Tablet, Aug. 25, 1945.) Mr. Churchill asks, "Where have they gone and what is their fate?" An interview of the Most Rev. Clemens August Count von Galen, as reported by Dr. Max Jordan for N.C.W.C. News Service, throws some light on what their fate is. The bishop, referring to "the forced evacuation of Germans," indicated to Dr. Jordan "that some 12,000,000 people are affected, about half of whom are Catholics." Dr. Jordan's interview continues: They were sent over the borders penniless to try to make their way into the Reich, but with the intense food scarcity prevailing everywhere and with no shelter available in cities, towns and even villages, all of which are overcrowded with refugees and evacuees, most of them remain stranded on the roads, thousands actually starving to death. This tragic starvation crawl of eight to 10 million peoples, whose only crime was that they lived and labored in lands where their forefathers before them lived and labored since the Middle Ages, moved Mr. Churchill to say to Parliament: "Guarded accounts of what has happened, what is happening, had filtered through, but it is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is imposing itself behind the iron curtain which at present divides Europe in twain. I should welcome any statement which the prime minister can make which will relieve us or inform us on this very anxious and grievous matter." So far no one of the Big Three or their representatives made any statements that could bring any relief to a Christian-minded person. Only aggravating reports. Most of all, not one of the great statesmen, so bent on punishing Axis crimes, has arisen to condemn or even to question this whole ghastly business of ruthlessly uprooting peoples from their age-old homes. Here and there a small voice is added to Churchill's that the expulsion should be carried out in a less brutal manner. But of the great victors, who once were so idealistic in the Atlantic Charter, none has arisen to condemn such expulsions as wrong in principle. From Vatican City, however, there does come a clear voice condemning in principle such expulsions of peoples. In an article entitled "International Orientation," the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano declares: It is contrary to the law of nature to remove millions and millions of persons from their homes, their churches and cemeteries, from the earth cultivated by the work of their fathers. It was unjust yesterday and it is also unjust and ungenerous today. The Osservatore Romano explains that as far back as his Christmas Message of 1941,[1] while German arms were still winning, The pope had spoken of the rights of minorities and the need of protecting them. Without believing the rumors of deportations, which, however, do not appear to be unreliable, it is only in keeping with objective reality to recognize that the Potsdam Conference sanctions the principle of transferment, that is, of the elimination of minorities. And such transferment, such
expulsion, the article calls "contrary to the law of
nature." Nor do honest and just people need elaborate proof
that it is. What American, if it were done to him and his
family, if because his country lost, he were thrown out of
his state and It must be emphasized that these people are not only thrown out of their homelands, but are also ruthlessly robbed of all their belongings. A Tass (Soviet News Service) dispatch of June 26, for example, declares that "President [Eduard] Benes [of Czechoslovakia] had issued a decree confiscating the land of all Hungarians and Germans," even though these had owned it and lived there since Columbus discovered America. All this is a horrible betrayal of the idealism of the Atlantic Charter. But more than that, it is even a betrayal of the early betrayers of that charter. It was Mr. Churchill who, on February 7, 1945, first boldly asked that the Atlantic Charter be violated so as to compensate Poland with East Prussia for Russia's demand of Polish territory, and who with regard to the East Prussian people hinted "steps far more drastic and effective than those which followed the last war." Yet now his "drastic steps" have become so prodigiously barbarous that he himself recoils, but the other Allied leaders unfortunately keep enlarging his first lapse from principle. How far leaders and public have sunk morally from their Atlantic Charter idealism to permit this mass expulsion and robbery of 10 million people can best be seen by comparing our own Sumner Welles' early timid suggestion for violating the charter with the monstrous violations now sanctioned. In his Time for Decision, published only a year ago, in 1944, he suggested that "The only solution . . . is to give Poland the province of East Prussia." But he feared that this "would constitute a flagrant violation of the assurance contained within the Atlantic Charter relative to the right of self-determination of all peoples," as indeed it is. Then he painfully developed an ingenious rationalization for getting around the Atlantic Charter in this matter. He argued that if one gave a German province to Poland or Russia but did not force the Germans there to become Russian or Polish and instead allowed them to emigrate into shrunken Germany if they wished, then one could rob a territory without really violating the charter. He added strongly, however, that every one "obliged to migrate be compensated in full for the losses he may incur by such removal." The significant paragraph in full is as follows: In the adjustment proposed with regard to East Prussia there is no suggestion that the peoples be transferred, like cattle, from one sovereignty to another. On the contrary, it is specifically recommended that every individual who desires to retain his former nationality be given full right to do so, and that any individual who, for that reason, is obliged to migrate be compensated in full for the losses he may incur by such removal. (Omnibook Abridgment, Nov. 1944, p. 102.) The territorial transfer Sumner Welles proposed was a flagrant violation of the Atlantic Charter and of all Wilsonian principles - but nevertheless, what a gulf between his plan for robbing one province only and the present Potsdam-planned robbery of one-fourth of the arable land of Germany, as Churchill puts it. And what a gulf between his giving the inhabitants a choice to stay or leave and paying them fully for their losses if they left, and the present Potsdam-enforced wholesale expulsion of 10 million people - the forced, ruthless expulsion of everybody and the complete robbery of their homes, their farms, their cattle, their household goods, of everything which they cannot carry in their enforced foot exodus. This is what a war can do to the moral sensibilities of leaders and peoples, even peoples who start with an Atlantic Charter signed by the Big Three and 30 other United Nations. Osservatore Romano calls this robbery and uprooting of millions "contrary to the law of nature." This horrible enforced transfer of minorities which is "contrary to the law of nature" is now being elevated to a United Nations principle. Incidentally, it does not only affect 10 million Germans; it also affects hundreds of thousands of Hungarians and perhaps several millions of Poles who lived in that part of Poland which the Big Three at Yalta gave to Russia. [2] Someday - for God's mills of justice grind slow but sure - if we do not quickly reverse this truly savage principle, it may affect us, or our children. The mightiest nations have been known eventually to lose a war. Cannot each of us write a letter to President Truman and another to each of our senators begging them not to make the United States a partner to the greatest mass atrocity so far recorded in history? Calling it the greatest mass atrocity so far recorded in history is not rhetoric. It is not ignorance of history. It is sober truth. To slice three or four ancient provinces from a country, then loot and plunder nine million people of their houses, farms, cattle, furniture and even clothes, and then "forcibly and cruelly," as the German bishops in a pastoral charged, to expel them "from the land they have inhabited for 700 years" with no distinction "between the innocent and the guilty" (NC, Frankfurt: Dubuque Witness, May 23, 1946), to drive them like unwanted beasts on foot to far-off provinces, unprotected, shelterless, and starving is an atrocity so vast that history records none vaster. Time magazine, describing the mass expulsion "of at least nine million Germans from East Prussia, Danzig, Silesia, Pomerania and the Sudetenland" exclaims, "It is a tale of horror, old men starving on the roads, young girls raped in boxcars." (Oct. 2, 1945, p. 27.) Truly this is the most staggering atrocity in all history. It is deliberate, it is brutal, it is enormous - and it is an Allied crime. It is an American, British, Russian, Morgenthau, Potsdam crime. [3] Nine million people torn from their homeland, looted of all their possessions, driven away like cattle, starved and frozen on the way - and to make the largest atrocity in history also the foulest one - the girls and mothers raped! Writes a priest in a letter smuggled from Breslau, September 3, 1945, "In unending succession were girls, women and nuns violated. . . Not merely in secret, in hidden corners, but in the sight of everybody, even in churches, in the streets and in public places were nuns, women and even eight-year-old girls attacked again and again. Mothers were violated before the eyes of their children; girls in the presence of their brothers; nuns in the sight of pupils - they were outraged again and again to their death and as corpses." ("In Den Haenden Unserer Russischen Allierten," Der Wanderer, April 11, 1946.) An American pastor confirms this. Sylvester C. Michelfelder, of the World Council of Churches, recently returning from Germany, writes, "The women and girls are violated in sight of everyone. They are stripped of their clothes." (See Senator Langer's Famine in Germany, p. 37.) The mass robbery and expulsion and abuse of nine million Germans is so vast and horrible a crime that before it all real and alleged German (or Nazi) crimes grow small. After that, Germans still have much to feel guilty of before God. But they have nothing to feel guilty of before the Big Three. Any German who still feels guilty before the Allies is a fool. Any American who thinks he should is a scoundrel. References: The late Austin J. App, Ph.D., was associate professor at La Salle College in Philadelphia. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Catholic University in Washington, DC. He spent five summers in Europe, 1926, 1931, 1932, 1934 and 1940. In addition to many pamphlets and articles, Dr. App was the author of History's Most Terrifying Peace (1946). He was an expert on wartime atrocities, alleged and real.
|
robbed
of his home and belongings and forced to go on foot to
another country, would not consider it a vile crime against
nature?