The Ethnic Cleansing of German Minorities after the War
/Die Heimatsvertriebene: PART I
The Ethnic Cleansing of German Minorities After the War
During the early morning hours of March 6, 1945, Father Gerhard Fittkau heard the “queer scratching and clinking noises as of wire and chain” which signified that the door of the box car he occupied had been secured and that his journey along with his fellow prisoners to Vorkuta, the Soviet labor camp north of the Arctic Circle which would be his own personal hell for the next year, had begun.[1]
Fittkau was a native of Ermland in East Prussia. On September 8, 1944, he became pastor of the Catholic parish in Suessenberg, a village where German Catholics had been living for centuries. By the time Fittkau became pastor, he and his fellow priests had been subjected to “years of harassment by the Nazi Party and the Gestapo.”[2] Before his assignment as pastor in Suessenberg, Fittkau assisted the bishop in “counteracting the crippling messages” which the Nazi regime had imposed on the Catholic Church after Germany’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels denounced it as an enemy of the state in a “callous speech” in Koenigsberg.[3] As the tide of the war on the eastern front turned against Germany, Fittkau realized that his time as pastor at Suessenberg was nothing more than a brief hiatus separating one form of persecution from another. At the very moment when the Nazi persecution of the Catholic Church was ebbing as the eastern front collapsed, Fittkau and his fellow priests “knew that only a thin edge of time and circumstance separated them from a Soviet domination which they realized would be merciless.”[4] During one of the local bishop’s absences from the diocese, the Gestapo had raided his residence, instilling “fear and a feeling of helplessness” in diocesan employees. Three days after the raid, Fittkau was taken to Gestapo headquarters and subjected to a grueling three-hour interview as an “enemy of the state.”[5] The meeting ended with Fittkau receiving a written warning followed by the confiscation of his typewriter, which the Gestapo identified as the source of what they were characterizing as interference in state affairs that they claimed had been prohibited by the Concordat, which regularized the relationship between the Third Reich and the Catholic Church.
Having suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Fittkau was now going to suffer at the hands of his Soviet liberators, who began arriving toward the end of winter 1945. The avant-garde of the Soviet invasion was the prelude to worse things to come. The first wave of Soviet soldiers still had the rudiments of military discipline. They wore uniforms and when a group of them began brutally beating German civilians, they were interrupted by an officer, who:
nodded smilingly toward the family as though to assure them that they need not worry. Then he found a common language to express himself. He stood in front of a picture of the Holy Family, made a triple sign of the cross in the Eastern fashion and pointed to the figures in the picture, saying, “Jesus, Maria, Josef.” Then he took from his pocket the small metal cross Eastern Christians receive at baptism and held it out for them to see. He smiled and nodded again, wheeled out of the door and was gone.[6]
The units which followed as the front advanced westward were another matter. It was only after the military units had begun to include “partisans,” whose only uniform was “an army jacket over civilian clothes,” that Fittkau and his flock were faced with “real danger.”[7] The partisans, who “had probably been freed from a German farm or from a labor camp” followed the regular army raping and pillaging in its wake. “They were,” in Fittkau’s view, “totally irresponsible and might pull the trigger wantonly at any second.”[8] They weren’t even good at looting. The only thing they were good at was reducing the culture which the German Catholics had created over the centuries to “a heap of rubbish,” whose “biggest pile was crowned with the broken and twisted instruments of the parish band.”[9]
Hot on the heels of the partisans came three commissars, “pressed together on the front seat of a stolen auto.” Their job was to see that the looting and pillaging conformed to the communist party line. “Their bloated and twisted faces looked horrible,” Fittkau wrote. “They were written all over with the drinking and raping that had gone on through the night.”[10]
After the commissars arrived, Father Fittkau found himself once again under interrogation, this time at the hands of his Soviet liberators, who found the manuscript of his doctoral dissertation suspicious even though they had not read it, and even though, more ironically, its publication had been forbidden by the Nazis.[11] Fittkau soon learned that his previous Nazi interrogators shared the same atheistic ideology as his new Communist interrogators, who informed him that the vocation of priest had no place in the workers’ paradise that was going to arise phoenix-like from the ruins of the Third Reich. Fittkau’s conversation with the commissar reminded him of his sessions with the Gestapo. “Nothing could have made more clear to me the basic similarity between National Socialism and Communism.”[12]
Thinking that his interrogation had ended, Fittkau stood up to leave when the “interpreter suddenly wheeled and pounced on me like an animal catching his prey by surprise. ‘We know you were a member of the Nazi Party. We know you had connections all the time with the SS. They sent you out of Germany with special orders to spy for the Nazi government.’”[13] Thrusting his clenched fist into the air in the Communist salute, Fittkau’s interrogator shouted, “The great Red Army has destroyed Hitler’s swine! Now it will go on to wipe out all priests and all other pigs!”[14]
Eventually Fittkau ended up in the same state prison which housed the previous batch of Catholic priests from Ermland, who “had served their sentences in the tender hands of Hitler’s ‘justice.’”[15] As the Third Reich collapsed around them, Nazi party members were determined to blame the victim for the collapse of Hitler’s dream. After a Prussian state forester yelled out, “We know whom to blame for this dirty mess we’re in. It’s the Pope and the Jews!”[16] Fittkau felt the need to respond: “If you still don’t know who led us into this mess, you’d do better to keep your mouth shut. You better thank your Fuehrer for having brought on you and on himself exactly what he had planned to do and what he has already done to the Jews and to the Christians as well.”[17] To Fittkau’s surprise, several prisoners applauded his speech.[18] United by their hatred of God, both the Nazis and the communists were determined to make life miserable for the Catholic Volksdeutsche. Like Father Lenz in Dachau, Father Fittkau now had to explain “the mysterious ways of providence”[19] to his bewildered flock:
I repeated words I had spoken to them before. Our parish was being led along its Way of the Cross to Calvary, a place that has only darkness to offer human understanding. There is no human consolation to seek; none to be found, Christ alone will give to us the answer to these days. Our way of walking now is to look up to Him and suffer in dark faith. In His grace we will learn to unite ourselves to His sufferings, to offer our pains in expiation not only for the sins of these drunken and enslaved soldiers, but also for all the sins ever committed by ourselves and our own people.[20]
When Fittkau finished his sermon, the 40 members of his new congregation all received Holy Communion, which would be their viaticum on the way of the cross that God had prepared for them. As it was for France after the French Revolution, the Russian army was the scourge of God, sent to teach the wayward Germans who had strayed into atheism the strong medicine of God’s mercy. The Germans from East Prussia were learning the same message that their Austrian co-religionists had learned in Dachau:
We could understand, however vaguely, that suffering has an end within itself and that end is mature faith. Where we suffer for God, no suffering from elsewhere can reach us, and to suffer for God is joy, peace and consolation. It even brings a renewal of natural courage and natural strength.[21]
The Ermlanders were learning “a lesson in the mysterious ways of providence” that transcended confessional boundaries. As they awaited their deportation to the frozen wastes of the Kola Peninsula north of Murmansk, the Ermlanders gathered together for an ecumenical service in which Rev. Ebel, a Lutheran minister from Roessel, tried to make sense of their suffering by asking, “Did the Russians have to come and teach us how to pray together after all these centuries?”[22] Rev. Ebel indicated that they were suffering, not just the consequences of modern German atheism, as preached by Friedrich Nietzsche, but also from the consequences of the Reformation, which had divided Germany centuries before. According to “the mysterious ways of providence,”[23] suffering had brought the separated brethren together in a way that prosperity had not. “Letting us suffer together,” Rev. Ebel continued, “is perhaps His way of teaching us what we have not learned even by common action against a common foe. It seems that God is using even the powers of hell to show us the way.”[24]
Fortified by the “untroubled serenity” of his demeanor and the dignity of Rev. Ebel’s words, the German Catholics from Suessenberg were now equipped to face the Calvary that awaited them. Germany had been deprived of “the bright rich dress [which] was a symbol of the glory in which Hitler had promised to clothe Germany. It was now a torn rag in which the maiden Germany could not hide her shame and stood exposed to the ridicule of all who looked on her.”[25]
Potsdam
Fittkau’s journey to Vorkuta was the prelude to the greater suffering he and the Germans of East Prussia were to endure during the “humane and orderly” expulsions, which came about as a result of the meeting of the three victors in Potsdam in June of 1945.
During the summer of 1945, the Allied heads of state met in a suburb of Berlin to re-write the map of Europe based on the might of their respective armies and a shared faith in ethnic cleansing and social engineering. Of the three rulers, Roosevelt would die before the year was out, leaving Churchill alone in his attempt to rein in the real victor, namely, Josef Stalin, whose three-million-man army was ready to march westward at a moment’s notice.
Within three years of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin had become a fervent supporter of ethnic cleansing, beginning with the “forced removals” he orchestrated as Commissar for Nationalities. In 1920, Stalin “assisted his fellow Georgian, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, to clear out the Terek Cossacks from the northern Caucasus. During the 1930s, the systematic deportation of other ethnic groups “reached unprecedented levels” as Poles, Germans, Finns, Estonians, Latvians, Koreans, Chinese, Kurds, and Iranians were all subjected to ethnic cleansing:[26]
Most of these movements were connected to the Soviet leader’s paranoia over “spies” and “wreckers” within the country. In 1937, for example, 11,868 ethnic Germans living in the USSR were arrested as suspected Nazi agents; the following year no fewer than 27,432 were detained on similar charges. The number of Soviet Poles held for espionage was greater still. The majority of these detainees were executed; the peoples to which they belonged were internally exiled by police and NKVD units. During the years of Stalin’s “Great Terror,” a total of approximately 800,000 members of national minorities were victims of execution, arrest, or deportation—generally to the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, which began to rival Siberia as convenient dumping grounds for peoples the government viewed with disfavor.[27]
Convinced that ethnic cleansing was the proper approach to the nationalities question in the Soviet Union, Stalin demanded that the Allies fall in line with his plan to impose it on conquered Germany. America, represented by its dying president, and England, which was in no position to object, caved in completely to Stalin’s demands. England had been ruined financially by the war it had recklessly started with Germany 30 years earlier[28] and was now hopelessly in debt to the feckless Americans whose president was the thrall of his Jewish neighbor, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and therefore sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s territorial claims. Churchill desperately needed the support of Jewish bankers to keep his bankrupt country afloat. Stalin wanted Poland’s eastern provinces, and to placate him and the Poles, Churchill not only robbed Germany of its eastern provinces, he also agreed to expel the ethnic Germans from territories which they had occupied for centuries as compensation for Polish losses. Churchill later justified the forced expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans by saying that “It would be a great pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of German food that it died of indigestion.”[29]
The dominoes began to fall in the autumn of 1944 when:
more than two million Poles living east of the river Bug were removed, in the brutal and chaotic manner which had by now become a hallmark of both Stalin and Hitler’s style of rule and deposited in the devastated and freshly reconquered former General gouvemement. The prospect of having them remain there, an alienated, rootless and dangerous population, would provide more than sufficient incentive for the [Polish] Lublin regime to press for the shifting of Poland’s boundary with Germany as far as possible to the west, regardless of the difficulties involved.[30]
The unquestioned materialistic assumption shared by the Big Three was that human beings were interchangeable parts with no roots to their native soil and that they could be moved from one place to another on the geopolitical chess board without any consideration for the soil which nourished them. The culture which grew out of that soil was going to be replaced after the war by a vast machine whose operating system on both sides of the Iron Curtain was social engineering.
Churchill understood the suffering Stalin’s plan would entail for the ethnic Germans in the eastern territories, but he made it clear that the maintenance of the alliance with the USSR was an overriding priority. That meant that:
paying off the Poles with German territories was the only means he had left to avoid exposing himself to the charge that the ostensible reason Britain had entered the Second World War – the defense of Poland’s territorial integrity from external aggression – had not been and never would be achieved. Thus, it was “understood,” Churchill reported to Roosevelt after the conference, “that Germans in [the] said regions shall be repatriated to Germany ....” While the prime minister was neither unaware of nor indifferent to the problems that a big population transfer might cause, those were of less importance than preventing the rise of a new antagonism between East and West.[31]
Stalin similarly dismissed the problem of transferring six million Germans from East Prussia and Silesia to the ruins of the rump German state out of hand by claiming that the problem was solving itself because “when our troops come in the Germans run away and no Germans are left.”[32]
On August 2, 1945, the Allies attending the Potsdam Conference announced that “The three Governments recognize that the transfer to Germany of German populations remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary will have to be undertaken. They agree that any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner.”[33] The same protocol extended Poland’s border 150 miles westward to a boundary marked by the Oder and Neisse rivers deep inside German territory, and in doing so it put into motion “the greatest ethnic displacement or involuntary migration—of human beings in modern times, and perhaps even in the history of the human race.”[34]
Figures vary for the total number of Germans who were forcibly displaced from their homelands in eastern and central Europe at the end of the war and afterward. German statistics give the figure of 17,700,000 (or four times the population of Switzerland in 1945) as the total of Germans living in the areas in which the displacements took place following the ethnic cleansing of Germany’s seven-hundred-year-old homelands in the eastern provinces of the Reich (East Prussia, Pomerania, eastern Brandenburg and Silesia), the Hanseatic cities of Danzig and Memel, the Bohemian Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia German settlements throughout eastern Europe (especially Poland, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Rumania). It was estimated that 1,100,000 of these people were killed during the war, leaving 16,600,000 as the total number of people displaced.[35]
Shortly after the war’s end, Germany, whose manufacturing, transportation and agricultural sectors had been demolished by Allied bombing, was told that “there would be 6,650,000 more mouths to feed when ethnic Germans living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia were expelled to occupied Germany at the rate of a quarter of a million a month.”[36] The staggering numbers involved in the expulsion are difficult to comprehend:
During the last months of the war, 2.8 million Germans soldiers surrendered to the Americans, and 3.3 million were captured by the Soviet army, giving a grand total of 6.1 million men. If the total of German displaced people is added to the millions of German prisoners of war then it would seem that during the first two years after the end of the war 23 million ethnic Germans—or a little less than half the population of West Germany today—were at one time or another displaced from their homeland.[37]
The numbers are so staggering that they have been ignored:
The mass exodus of the Teutonic race has left little trace in the history books outside of West Germany itself. The fact that over two million Germans lost their lives during the course of this exodus is also largely ignored and even disbelieved. In that melancholy catalogue of modern massacre and genocide. Gil Eliot’s Twentieth-Century Book of the Dead, there is no mention of it, though its nearest equivalent—the expulsion and massacre of a million Armenians by the Turks in 1914—is included. The expulsion of nearly fourteen million German civilians from their hereditary homelands was carried out amid so much cruelty and suffering that it must be seen as no less a crime against humanity than those for which the Nazi leaders were at that very time being tried in Nuremberg; and the death of two million of those Germans was as much a premeditated act of genocide, if a less systematic one, as the German extermination of the Jews. Almost as many German civilians died as a result of the hardship and brutality they experienced during their flight or expulsion from their homes in eastern and central Europe after the war as the total of Japanese dead for the whole of the Second World War, or twice as many as the total dead on all sides in the Korean war, or four times as many as died in the Spanish Civil War.[38]
By the time the Big Three concluded their deliberations at Yalta, “spectacularly overloaded trains from the German territories under Polish administration were disgorging cargoes of the dead, the dying, the diseased, and the destitute onto the platforms of Berlin’s main line railway stations.”[39] The intransigence of Polish demands for German territory, which they saw as compensation for the loss of eastern Poland to the Soviet Union, after the Potsdam Conference, had created “a catastrophe in the feeding of Germany” which was “a thousand times greater” than the conditions which had existed in the German concentration camps.[40] …
[…] This is just an excerpt from the March 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Articles:
Culture of Death Watch
Murder in West Cork by Geraldine Comiskey
Features
The Triumph of Walter Lüftl by John Beaumont
The Ethnic Cleansing of German Minorities after the War by Dr. E. Michael Jones
Reviews
Tough Crowd: How I Made and Lost a Career in Comedy by Sean Naughton
(Endnotes Available by Request)
[1] Gerhard A. Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 1958), p. 101.
[2] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. xv.
[3] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. xvi.
[4] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year.
[5] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. xvii.
[6] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 31.
[7] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 36.
[8] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 37.
[9] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 48.
[10] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 50.
[11] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 74.
[12] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 74.
[13] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 89.
[14] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 88.
[15] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 95.
[16] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 100.
[17] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 100.
[18] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 100.
[19] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 79.
[20] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 45.
[21] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 63.
[22] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 79.
[23] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 79.
[24] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 79.
[25] Fittkau, My Thirty-Third Year, p. 81.
[26] R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 40.
[27] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 40.
[28] Cf. Patrick J. Buchanan, “Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War’: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World,” Amazon description, https://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/0307405168
[29] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 88.
[30] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p.84.
[31] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 84.
[32] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 88.
[33] Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich: Germany 1945-1949 (New York: Crown Publishing, Inc., 1985), p. 181.
[34] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 179.
[35] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 179.
[36] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 138.
[37] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 179.
[38] Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich, p. 180.
[39] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 89.
[40] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 89.
[41] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 66.
[42] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 82-3.
[43] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 257.
[44] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 355.
[45] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 92.
[46] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Vol. II, Second Edition (South Bend, IN: Fidelity Press, 2020), p. 13.
[47] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 68.
[48] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 76.
[49] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 125.
[50] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 128.
[51] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 25.
[52] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 42.
[53] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 42.
[54] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 44.
[55] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 44.
[56] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 129.
[57] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 93.
[58] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 94.
[59] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 95.
[60] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 97.
[61] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 97.
[62] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 107.
[63] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 114.
[64] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 132.
[65] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 132.
[66] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 141.
[67] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 134.
[68] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 141.
[69] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 150.
[70] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 109.
[71] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 109.
[72] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 109.
[73] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 109.
[74] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 110.
[75] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 141.
[76] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 140.
[77] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 140.
[78] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 155-6.
[79] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 347.
[80] Douglas, Orderly and Humane, p. 347.
