A recent article by R.M. Douglas examines the expulsion of between 12 and 14 million Germans from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland after the Second World War. He argues that at least 500,000 of these refugees, predominantly women, children, and old people, died under horrid conditions purposefully created by the Allies. Douglas argues that the Allies' policy of “reparations in kind” and the large number of Germans who died along the way implies ethnic cleansing. Yet I believe that we must understand the perpetrators’ motivations before we label the Allies as bloodthirsty criminals.
To do this, we must operate within the context of World War II. With the exception of Yugoslavia, the Red Army occupied each of the countries which expelled Germans, as well as the concentration camps Auschwitz I and Thereisenstadt. Douglas forgets to mention that the western Allies also kept German concentration camps open because they faced immense logistical problems in returning millions of survivors to their homes throughout Europe.1 He does not clarify whether Sir John Coville referred to these camps or the Soviet-run slave labor camps.
Further, the Red Army implemented different policies when capturing occupied territories than the western Allies, as Stalin wanted to see to it that Germany would not start another war. The expulsion of Germans from these lands can be seen as a continuation of this policy as Hitler had claimed that ethnic Germans in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland needed to be incorporated into Germany proper at the beginning of the war in order to expand his empire. The expulsion of ethnic Germans from other lands as brutally as possible would ensure that Germany neither want nor 'need' to expand its borders in the future. Although this may be considered an ‘ethnic cleansing’ of sorts, the Soviets presumably saw it as revenge and 'future protection.'
While Douglas’s article brings up the important issue of addressing the integrity of Allied actions throughout World War II, it is essential to remember the historical context involved. It seems unlikely that the Soviets would have treated ethnic Germans so viciously had Germany never invaded the Soviet Union, let alone killed 27 million Russians. We can easily moralize over events that happened nearly 70 years ago, yet it is essential to take the entire situation into account before we label any group en masse as 'war criminals.'
1) See William Hitchcock’s The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe for more information.
In this blog post, Reed responds to an article by R.M. Douglas about the expulsion of Germans from central European countries after World War Two, which resulted in the deaths of at least 500,000 Germans. Reed contends that, before we denounce the Allies as criminals for these actions, we must consider the context under which the deportations occurred. Many of the concentration camps that remained open were, in fact, full of Jews that the Allies could not send home. Further, Nazis used the existence of Germans in other countries as a pretense for invasion, which gave the Allies a reason to push for their migration. Finally, Reed points out that, as the Nazis killed 27 million Russians during the war, the Soviets were disinclined towards sympathy.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Reed’s point that understanding the context under which these deportations took place, much of which Douglas omitted, is important. I would also add that, with the exception of the United States, none of the Allies were in what could be considered an economically stable position when the war ended. That is to say, even if the Soviets had wished to treat the Germans that they were deporting with the utmost care, they likely did not have the resources to do so.
It seems to me, however, that there is a lot of similarity in the Soviet logic concerning the German populations of their occupied territories and the Nazi logic concerning Jews and other undesirables. While the Allies saw brutal treatment of Germans, as described by both Reed and Douglas, as a kind of “reparations,” anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany was largely predicated upon the idea that the Jewish population was responsible for the nation’s losses in World War One and the subsequent harsh conditions that it faced. The notable difference between these two instances is that, whereas it would be pretty difficult to prove that German Jews played a pivotal role in the nation’s defeat in World War One, Nazis actually were responsible for the deaths of millions of Soviets. The similarity in the logic of these two violent actions, however, illustrates that the drive to find a scapegoat as pivotal to genocide.